RBOCareer (and also Captcha and Candy)

• Why is captcha so obsessed with finding motorcycles?
• I had a flyout with a school that would be best described as a “fixer-upper.”
• There are a lot of reasons not to take that position if offered.  But the one thing that really stuck out isn’t the department’s fault at all.
• There’s a part of the country that votes Blue but isn’t actually Blue at all.  I thought I had a good handle on all the different regions of the US but turns out I was wrong!
• I learned the term “PWI” on a tour of the campus.  (“What is PWI?” I asked, after the tour guide mentioned they were one. “Primarily White Institution,” she said, adding, “most of the black students choose to go to the HBC in our system.”)
• The Uber driver on the way back also said that integration never works because minorities always choose to self-segregate.  I said maybe, but how much of it is choice and are they getting the same quality of education?  If it is a choice and the education quality is the same, then it isn’t.  But that’s a big if.
• I went to a talk on segregation academies the other week.  They still exist and they’re still… PWI.
• Also got asked to interview for the deanlet position.
• One of my friends (in another department) basically told me not to do a long list of unprofessional things when at the interview.  I was both amused an insulted.
• My department head has, in the past, told me I should interrupt older white men less.  (I don’t interrupt junior faculty or minority faculty or women or basically anybody who doesn’t do repetitive multi-minute monologues.)  I told said head that I’d done a cost-benefit analysis.  Nobody has brought it up since I became middle aged.
• Someone from the dean’s office has started putting a large bucket of monster sized candy bars and bags of chips in the break room every Friday morning, courtesy of the dean.  Including payday which I really like.  I HATE this.  I end up spending my entire morning thinking about them and losing willpower and if I do indulge then I keep thinking about going back and getting more.  I should not be eating candy at ALL (insulin problems) and I’m also at the age where I don’t need empty calories.  Other people do obviously eat the junk food because its gone by the end of the day.  I need to work from home on Fridays, I guess, but I can’t entirely because I have office hours.
• Nobody else really likes Payday because when I went in around lunch (3 hours after I’d eaten my own lunch trying to avoid getting junk food), there were still three Paydays and a small bag of spicy chips left.
• I took a Payday. I may have to start refilling my water elsewhere on Fridays.
• When I went back 3 hours after that, the bowl was empty.   So if I wait long enough someone will eat everything I like.

RBOChores and money

• Reminder:  if you haven’t in a while, now is a good time to clean out your dryer vents.  We just did and all of a sudden it’s only taking one cycle for things to get dry again.
• Second year of a big tax refund from me only getting half pay for half the year. It will be better to be making more money, but it is also nice not writing out a check to the IRS.
• Refund went straight to 529 plans.
• Do not put frozen pizza on a heated pizza stone.  (We recently bought a new pizza stone after shattering the old one.)
• DH recently bought a brush cleaning attachment for his drill.  It is AMAZING.
• DC1 has spent $0 on non-necessities.  No eating out.  No concerts.  No travel. No clothing (though we would pay for clothing).  No tchotchkies. The only things on the credit card bill so far are textbooks!  I spent about $1K a year on the above when I was in college, not adjusted for inflation (to be fair, plane tickets to see DH cost about the same then as they do now!).
• Update:  Hir friend took hir to a thrift store and zie bought a scarf and a jacket ($8).  Very exciting!  DC1 says zie needs to practice buying things and also it’s scary to use a credit card and zie doesn’t know how to buy stuff.  (When I was that age I was doing the family grocery shopping when I was home from school.)
• My friend with a kid at an Ivy spends a lot, though he’s also been making a ton of money.  And he’s got a really nice job lined up this coming summer as a rising junior.  (He applied to 250 places, got one interview and one offer.)
• We ran out of check registers for the first time ever.  I had to buy some(!). We write so few checks but I still have to record checking transactions.
• We don’t write zero checks because the music teachers both take check.  Occasionally we’ll have to write one for another reason though those are getting fewer and fewer.
• I would really like to move someplace nice for part of the summer but we’d need to be able to take the cats (or leave them with my sister but that’s a big ask and I’m not sure nice kitty could handle it since boy kitty is a bully).  And it would need to be somewhere cheap.  I’m guessing we could find a place that’s cheap in a college town up north, but the cats are kind of a non starter. It also sounds like effort.
• Maybe the weather won’t be as bad this summer.  SIGH.
• a lot still depends on what DC1 ends up doing.
• Prices for Spain over Christmas went way up once we got the kids’ winter schedules.  Then they went up even more.  So I suspect we will spend next Christmas in the midwest again.  It’s probably for the best.

RBOC

• Over spring break DC1 watched the last episode of each season of riverdale starting with season 3.  The series is nuts!  But that’s probably a good way to watch it, especially with the season review right before.
• it does weird me out that jughead is smart in this one.
• I’d thought having DC1 back for a week would help us eat down a bit, but no, it turns out I bought all hir favorite treats in anticipation and DH baked up a storm and we also ate out a few times.  When zie left, our fridge and freezer were even fuller than usual.  Zie didn’t even touch the second pint of cookies and cream ice cream (I got two different brands… along with 3 other flavors…).
• We sent hir back with a big bag of snacks and a full loaf of DH-made banana bread.
• DC1 made it back to college after spring break all on hir own– no phone calls to help figure out where to find the shuttle.
• Sad about Kate Middleton– cancer was the worst of the potential options.
• I’m not sure about the shoe inserts.  I do think they help the left foot itch, but since wearing them my right hip has been out of joint and my lower back has hurt more than usual.  I tried my other tennis shoes and things went back to normal pretty quickly.  I will do some more tests.
• DC2 is at the age where zie gains newfound appreciation for hir parents just because we’re not emotionally abusive. I guess middle school is when kids start talking to their friends about their bad homelives.  :(
• I know they both have read tons of books where the main character didn’t have a great home life but I guess it doesn’t seem real until a friend tells them.
• After wearing my old tennis shoes with the inserts for a few weeks, I wore a hole in the back of one of them (stuffing started coming out) so I ended up buying a new pair and putting the inserts in those.  These have a higher heel so I’m not wearing anything down and they just seem better all around.  Yay new shoes!
• DC1 had worn a hole in the toe so we replaced hir shoes over break too.  DC2 had worn the heels down, so those got replaced as well.  I really liked the shoes DC2 picked and had a hard time not getting myself an exact copy, but we’re both currently the same shoe size and we both leave our shoes all over the house, so probably not a great idea.
• Since DC1 was my shoe size I’ve been buying kids tennis shoes instead of adult’s.
• Currently both of our children talk most about friends who have the same name.  It’s easy to remember!  (Though in DC1’s case it’s “the friend with the dad who is a famous CEO” (probably not anyone you’ve heard of) and in DC2’s case it’s “the friend who likes planes.”)

RBOCreativity

OK, so this is weird.  This post has gotten bumped a few times for more time pressing/less depressing/etc. posts… and now I’m in a situation at work where I have a lengthy R&R, a couple new projects, and prior to that I had picked up two of the unfinished work projects and have meetings with people about them and I’m back to having too much to think about to worry about creativity!  On the plus side, I did finish my major committee responsibility for the year last week, so hopefully I haven’t actually overcommitted at this point.  But I still want your thoughts on creativity!  And the blog is now down to 54(!) unfinished drafts.

• We are down to 68 drafts in the blog folder.  It will be less once we package up abandoned posts from 2014– we still need to decide which we’re going to completely abandon and which we are going to finish.  I’m not sure what we’ll do when we’re completely out.
• I am down to four unfinished work projects for which the data are complete but they need to be written up or rewritten or re-figured out.  One has been rejected like 7 times so now I’m trying to figure out what to do with that.  One is a bit underpowered so maybe I should abandon it, I dunno.  One the results didn’t turn out like our pre-registration plan had assumed so I’ve got to figure out how to deal with that and where to send it (my two co-PI are both deans now so… it’s just me).  One is almost done– we’re still rewriting, so that’s what I’ve been focusing on but I can’t touch the restricted data.  After that’s done… I need to actually get to work on the pre-registered one because in a couple years that will no longer be interesting.
• I have a grant proposal under review.  I don’t have high hopes for it, but you never know.
• I don’t have any new big ideas that I’m working on.  For years I’ve had more than I had time for.  But once the big project in bullet 2 is done, I won’t really have anything to present places.  It is unsettling.
• Many of the ideas I’d had but didn’t have time to work on have since been done by other people.  They were good ideas, but I was busy doing other stuff.
• A couple years ago I was giving grad students advice on where to get ideas and now…
• I do have a couple projects where I’m like 4th author out of 7, but I’m not in charge of those.  I do stuff when asked.
• I think what I need to do is just spend some time reading.  I have 463 emails of abstracts of lists of working papers and published journals in a “to-read” folder.  I used to read them weekly and keep up with what was going on, but I got really really busy.  And then it just got easy to move stuff into that folder and forget about it.  But I also think that had a detriment to being up on what the profession is finding interesting.  I still go to conferences and seminars, but…
• And I’m back to doing a ton of service.  My department head is overwhelmed with some changes that have been being made and has asked one of the committees I’m on to help out.  But just kind of vague disorganized help I don’t know where to start.  So my other track head counterpart and I got together and we’re like, how do we frame this problem, what information do we need to know… and it’s just a big mess that includes a ton of moving parts.  So that may be where a lot of my organizing etc. mental power is going.  This is another one of those cases where we don’t HAVE to be putting in the work we’re putting in, but if we don’t then the whole thing is going to be a disaster because we’ve tried not putting in the work and things exploded (or just didn’t happen).
• (Aside:  we actually have 3 track heads, but the other one is overwhelmed with other service.)
• I’m thinking of applying for a mini-dean position (like dean of X, not dean of a college).  Don’t want to be department chair, but could possibly be a mini-dean.  I dunno.  People drain me but if I’m not getting a raise and I can’t leave the state…  It’s the unnecessary meetings that kill me.
• Am I becoming less creative?
• Am I just jettisoning bad ideas before putting time in them so I’m more selective?  Am I too scared to work on the good ideas that I have because they might not be efficient?
• I feel like it’s easier to work on out-there stuff if you also have like a simple and clean RD project (or DD, though that’s a bit less fashionable) going on at the same time.
• Am I too busy with other stuff?  I feel like I was busier when I had small children, so maybe it seemed like I was getting more done in the time I had available?

How do you stay creative?  

RBOC

• DH has been making more YouTube foods.  One good one was been a pickle fried in a cheese crust.
• One of my juniors is going up for full this year and she’s learning the truth of what I texted her when I was going up for full– do not put this off because the longer you put it off the more stuff you will have to enter into these horrific forms.  Also the longer you put it off, the more information they will want from pre-tenure that they didn’t want when you went up for tenure.  Just go up when your cv is ready and do not put it off for anyone.
• Surprisingly, for the first time I got a student who cheated for whom it wasn’t their first offense reported to the honor council.  They’d copied directly off Chegg and hadn’t even deleted the name of the professor or the number of the class from what they copied.  I didn’t realize they would tell me it wasn’t a first offense!  Also there’s real consequences at the university level after the first reported offense.  (And after a certain number of reports, the student gets expelled(!))
• Another donors choose project with diverse books got cancelled, this one in Texas.  I gave money to schools in Connecticut instead with that money.  :/
• TIL that Ariana Grande got married.  And then cheated on her husband with a married man who was in Spongebob on Broadway.  He had married his high school sweetheart and had a baby.  He does not sound worth it.
• Also I learned that people are going crazy that Kate Middleton has gone MIA after an abdominal surgery recovery took longer than expected.  I guess now I’m mildly curious about that?  More though I’m curious about what the palace feels the need to hide vs. announce.  Like I don’t understand why this is important, but also I wonder what is going on that the palace can’t make some kind of announcement after all this bizarre outcry.  I hope everything is ok and she’s not dying of cancer.  Divorce seems like a healthier alternative.
• One theory that makes a lot of sense and isn’t actually worrying is just that she looks bad because part of her recovery process includes steroids which are making her puffy.  What is worrying is that her handlers would rather have people believe her husband has having an affair/she’s a corpse/etc. than to suggest she looks anything other than beautiful.  Figurehead is a really dumb job.  I mean, I guess it’s better than forcing the prime minister to do all that stuff, but still.
• Apparently King Charles has cancer.  Who knew?!  That seems like a lot.
• DC1 has been deciding what task to work on next over spring break via a random number generator.  I should do that…
• I wonder if we’ve made the wrong trade offs between traveling and college savings.  I’m glad we were able to send DC1 to the college of hir choice but I wonder if there would have been value to the fancy vacations other bloggers take while the kids were younger.  We’re only now at an income where something like that makes sense, but schedules are hard and we’re still not full up on the 529s given that DC1 chose the expensive option.
• Public school makes them tagging along during conferences untenable.  So we only have time when flights are expensive and then we usually visit family in the Midwest.
• We had been thinking about Spain for this coming winter break because my friend went last winter break and loved it but the prices are high now (they were low when I checked before but they’ve gone up).

RBOMoney/career/etc

• Being on a trimester system means that the third college tuition bill comes pretty fast in the Spring.
• DH bought 2 of these luxurious towels for himself (I am happy with our regular JC Penny’s towels that MIL got us) and, like the fancy bamboo towels that preceded them, they take a really long time to dry.
• DH lost a lot of weight, slowly and deliberately via calorie counting and a lot of weighing out of foods.  Right now he is smack dab in the middle of the recommended weight distribution for his height and delightfully muscular.  He’s at the point now where he wants to replace most of his clothing because even his undershirts that he sleeps in and uses for workouts are too loose.  (Personally I prefer loose t-shirts for sleeping and exercising, but each to their own.)  He’s shopping slowly and deliberately with a lot of internet research.  He went to a tailor in town and got measured and then ordered a custom made shirt from Proper Cloth (not sponsored).  After he decides if he likes it he’s going to get a few more business casual things and then he’s going to start looking at his t-shirts.  (Also next time he’s at Target he plans to pick up a pack of smaller undershirts.)
• I’m applying for a deanlet position.  It’s one that is mostly paperwork, though apparently there are about 6 hours of meetings per week.  But it comes with a 0/0 teaching load and no departmental service.  I talked to the person who currently has it, and even though it sounds like a lot of work… it actually sounds like *less* people-facing than I currently have.  And there’s some putting out fires, but those fires are at predictable times of the year (hiring, P&T etc.), unlike now where I am constantly preventing them by going hey, don’t we need information X before this meeting… do the people know that we need X from them?  surely we should let them know so we don’t have to reschedule the impossible to schedule meeting and then miss all the deadlines.  And apparently the dean comes by just to chat like 4x/day, but in my current situation, the pro-gun anti-vaxxer whose office is next door to mine does the same thing, so…
• 6 hours of meetings is less than 6 hours of teaching + 2 hours of office hours.  (Plus all the other meetings I do.)
• The person currently in this position published two books in the last four years, so it sounds like it’s possible to keep up a research agenda.
• And there’s a guaranteed full pay, full year sabbatical after stepping down from the position.
• Many people would really like me to have this position, but my department head really would not.
• Having struck out on the market 3 years in a row, this seems to be the easiest way to get out from under the crushing service load in my department caused by me being the only person who notices things before they become problems.  (Things apparently went to heck while I was on faculty development leave in ways that have already caused more service for me this semester.)  On the one hand I feel a little guilty but on the other hand, I was gone for a year and nobody stepped in — no one person should *ever* be instrumental to the running of a department.  People need to step up.
• (To be fair, there are two other people like me who are also heads of their sub-fields, but they’re both associate professors and they’re much more last minute than I am.  They are also out there fighting last minute fires, but only really think about fire prevention when I bring it up.  They do 100% back me up on the fire prevention and go with me to meet with the department head about preventing upcoming fires.)
• (One of the things we have repeatedly told the department head is that they either need to get an associate head or a director of graduate studies because WE ARE BURNING OUT and the head cannot handle everything.  So far, nothing.  Though I did get a course release.)
• Also I would have my own secretary and not only is she really good, she already organizes things in the way I have been slowly organizing things in my department as I move through different leadership positions.  I think we will work well together if I get the position.
• Of course, I’m not the only person applying for this position, though I am the only person from my department, and my department is also the only one that does not currently have any deanling representation.  (Technically the current dean is from our department, but he was an outside hire and is not planning on ever actually being in my department as a faculty member and he’s stepping down next year.)
• I do not EVER want to be department head.  That is way too much people.  I am really good at paperwork but very bad at people.  Since I got back from leave a lot of people have been coming to me instead of the department head for things that are not my purview.  And the department secretary asks me for stuff because the head isn’t available and I have a long institutional memory.
• I am a people pleaser and very very bad at protecting myself, particularly in the moment.  I *want* to be helpful.  I’ve tried not mentioning looming disasters and I just cannot.  And I’m not compensated for this (other than the brand new teaching release)– my department head continues to nominate a specific other person for ALL the money-attached awards that we are both eligible for, plus she’s allowed to teach statistics online (which is the easiest class to teach online because all of the lectures are canned and all the grading is automatic) and live in another state and do zero service except inviting one high profile speaker in her field in each year.  Our research output continues to diverge as I’m put into the mommy track and she’s put into a highly compensated research-only track.
• In theory, as a deanlet, I’d be compensated for service.
• DC1 wants to stay at Carleton for the summer if zie can get a job.  We may spend some extended time in Minnesota if that happens.  We’ll see.  It does look like they have a summer meal plan, so I’m not as worried about DC1 getting malnourished.

RBOC

cw:  doctor talking about weightloss (unasked)

• DH has started making food from youtube shorts (also from longer youtubers).  One big winner is an egg that has been fried, then batter dipped, then deep fried.  EXTREMELY good.
• DC2 has started going through old writing and old art and crumpling them up and saying they’re awful and embarrassing.  #2 does this too– I believe the phrase “monkeys eating my brain” is used while crumpling/deleting.  #1 never did… I sort of feel like all of my old work was either *brilliant* or it was part of a learning experience, so I’m not generally embarrassed by it.  Even my stuff from when I was in 2nd grade was pretty cool for a 2nd grader.  IMO.  I dunno, I like reading my old blogposts.  Maybe I peaked early.
• My next door office colleague came in with Covid.  He asked me to help him with a computer thing and didn’t mention he was sick until I’d finished.  Why would you go in for work when you know you’re sick?  He said he’d taught his classes virtually, but one of his students came in and said no, he’d actually gone in after teaching some of it virtually.
• One of my work friends got Covid a couple days later (sick Saturday but negative home test, positive blood test on Tuesday).  I spent that Saturday unusually tired and sleeping half the day and then felt fine after getting out of bed.  I keep being exposed and I think fighting it off?  Yay vaccines?
• One of my colleagues doesn’t have a car.  They just uber everywhere, including to work and back.
• We continue to have too much food with DC1 gone, DH stress baking, and DC2 boredom baking.  It’s like we fully cook two full meals from scratch and then maybe have small prepared food from the freezer/pantry/eating out the rest of the week and then we still have too much food.  I guess we should go back to cookbooks that have recipes for fewer people or we’re going to have to start using our freezer more intelligently.  We’ve been a family of 3 before, and a family of 2 for even longer than that.  I’m not sure why it’s so hard to adjust back!  (DH has been stress baking most of our marriage!  But I guess with a kid there’s that need for vegetables on top of cookies…)
• When we switched from an electric stovetop to gas, all of a sudden DH’s moka pot coffee went from being chocolatey rich to decidedly sour.  He tried *everything*– changing beans, grinds, amount, etc. etc. etc.  It turns out what he needed to change was the heat– it wasn’t getting as hot as the electric would.
• In case you’re worried about us with the gas stove, the health suggestion is to turn the vent on before you turn on the stove, which is what we do.  It took a little bit of practice for me, but it’s become automatic.  (Previously I would turn on the vent second.)
• I got a zoom interview for a place I applied to but then messed up the time zones and missed it.  After looking into it, it didn’t look like it was going to be a good fit because it’s one of those places where the only good high school option is a school you have to lottery into.  If the main reason for me leaving is to help DC2, then moving to a place where the schools are rated 3/10 and don’t have BC Calc is not going to help.
• Went to the doctor for an annual checkup.  I’ve been having a foot problem where when I wake up in the morning it’s insanely itchy.  The internet suggests it’s either athletes foot or a nerve problem (possibly diabetes related…) or about 7 other things.  I did a full round of an OTC athlete’s foot thing and it didn’t help at all.  The doctor’s suggestion was to put lotion on it.  Lotion has NEVER HELPED me ever.  Or rather, if it did help, it would have helped already because whenever something is dry I do tend to put lotion on it.  I gave up and made an appointment with a podiatrist for a month from now.
• My ears are still flaking (the outer ear, but sort of inside it) and years of doctors telling me to put lotion on them has not helped at all.
• The doctor was also like, since you haven’t been able to lose weight even though you’re exercising and trying to lose weight, should I check your thyroid even though it was ok last year?  I’m like… ok, I HAVE been exercising but I HAVEN’T been trying to lose weight.  And my thyroid is always ok and if I *were* trying to lose weight and unable to, then I would go on Metformin because I have PCOS.  So she put me on Metformin.  But it was such an afterthought that I’m wondering if I should go on it or not.  It seemed like I knew more about it than she did and my knowledge is 12 years old and I know there’s a lot of new knowledge about insulin-sensitizing medications.  When I went to the good Gyn who is insanely difficult to get an appointment with 4 years ago, she didn’t recommend Metformin based on my blood sugar numbers (though she did think I should lose weight, and I was 20lb lighter then!).  Also I was 3lb heavier on their scale than my own this time around but she said my scale was probably wrong and it had nothing to do with me being in full winter gear with my huge thing of keychains because that couldn’t possibly be more than a pound.  She also said I weighed less than at last year’s appointment, so now I’m very confused about why she said I was trying and failing to lose weight and also she didn’t bring it up last year.  Also she’s like, your periods are regular, and I said, as I have said every time I go to the doctor, my periods have never been regular, I have PCOS.  It was such a frustrating experience because I thought she was taking notes last year but didn’t bring up anything from last year (lipomas, tiredness, headaches) just basically was like should I test your thyroid since you’ve been unable to lose weight.
• I wonder how many pounds of me are lipomas these days.  Every time I bump into something and bruise myself, which happens a LOT, I end up getting a new little permanent ball under my skin.  (I assume they’re lipomas because the first ones I noticed were scanned and diagnosed as such.)
• Exercise DOES NOT cause weight loss.  It can cause weight to go into different places, but muscle weighs more than fat.  Not losing weight with exercise is normal!
• My blood numbers are all out of the pre-diabetes range (not surprising since I eat pretty well, with DH’s baking being the glaring exception, though even then if it’s too sweet I don’t eat it).  That suggests I shouldn’t do metformin?
• The pharmacy keeps calling to tell me to pick it up.

RBOFood

• Went through the pantry and took out everything that had expired in 2023 and put it on the kitchen island.  The kitchen island is pretty crowded, including graham crackers that I swear we bought a few months ago.  No wonder they were on sale.
• I overbuy because of money insecurity problems growing up and I like having a full pantry.
• Last night I dreamed that a huge number of people came over and I had to feed them from what we had on hand, and I was able to!  And thinking on it, it was with food we actually have on hand IRL.
• I think we have a couple of weeks where we’re just going to eat expired pantry food (plus whatever it takes to turn said food into meals– ex. NOT-expired pasta/rice/chicken/mixed veggies).
• I often forget we have pantry sauces and tend to go to the freezer first when we need a quick weeknight meal that we didn’t buy the ingredients for that week.
• I don’t have a problem with expired pantry food– it’s always been still good and everything online says that it’s the “best buy” date, not the “dangerous to eat” date.  Generally it’s still fine, though the store-brand fizzy water in the large containers does go flat if we don’t drink it soon enough.  (Other fizzy water– still fizzy!)  I’m much more cautious about refrigerator food.  But I try to rotate it out– there’s no point in it taking up space for years at a time.
• Sometimes we get stuff we don’t want or can’t eat (red dye, yeast extract, etc.) and I try to donate those before they go bad.  But I don’t always succeed.  That makes me feel guilty.  I really should just leave stuff for students to take (and did that with a flat of premium cat food that our cat didn’t like), but I don’t want to do that after said food has expired.
• DH is still calorie counting, DC1 is off to college, and DC2 is between growth spurts.  So we’re just not eating much.  It is really hard to adjust to DC1 being gone, especially when nobody else is taking up the slack.  I need to get used to either planning fewer meals or making less at each meal.  Or going back to using the freezer, but lately the freezer has been stuffed so we would need to eat it down first.
• At the same time, we’re trying to eat more fruits and vegetables.  This is difficult because fruits and vegetables go bad or take up freezer space!  #richpeopleproblems

How do you deal with expired food?  Do you stockpile?  What kinds of things do you do during the new year?

RBOC

• I like getting annual Christmas letters.  But also I didn’t need to know that one of our regular letter writers has decided to stop shaving her legs, patriarchy or not.  Or at least not within the annual Christmas letter.  I prefer the other regular letter we get which is just like DC1 is captain of her sports team and DC2 took up trombone.  That’s the level I crave with an annual mass mailing.
• I do see the irony here though wherein… this blog… don’t you (where “you” is “I”) randomly tell the world about your innermost hair-related thoughts?  And uh… yeah, I guess I do.  But somehow it being anonymous makes it seem less weird?  Or maybe it being posted and people choose to come rather than it being in someone’s mailbox.  I dunno.  Possibly it’s TMI no matter the context, or possibly the opposite and I should not be so stuck-up.
• I also hate shaving and hate the patriarchy and if I could get away with not doing it without any repercussions I totally would.  But alas, there are repercussions and my hair is darker than it once was.  Stupid patriarchy.
• Sister got back from honeymoon.  Her first text to us was that boy kitty (the one she kept) needs dental cleaning.  After some discussion about that, she mentions that boy kitty is playing with toys by himself now that the other cat (I need to come up with a blog name for her– the cat formerly known as mean kitty is misleading because she is super sweet) is gone.  I asked DH if we should ask if the other cat (sister kitty?  since she’s my sister’s cat AND the sister of our cat?) is ours now, but he said he’s happy being in a state of not knowing.  I pointed out it would be nice to have her vet records if she’s ours now.  But I didn’t ask.
• Sister Kitty and Nice Kitty don’t really get along, which is a shame because they were best friends before Sister Kitty went off to my sister’s.  They don’t actually hurt each other, but there’s still occasional hissing (and much less occasional spitting), usually around doorways, and sometimes Nice Kitty will be perched on a high spot and growl if Sister Kitty gets too close.  But sometimes they’ll both be on the couch.  And there was a really promising bit where Sister Kitty sniffed Nice Kitty’s back area and then offered her own tail for sniffing, which Nice Kitty did, but that detente did not last for long.  Ah, how I long for when they would curl up on top of each other or groom each other.
• Sister Kitty is sort of my cat now in the way that Nice Kitty is DH’s cat.  When it’s cold, Nice Kitty will sleep on DH’s legs and Sister Kitty will kind of flop sideways on mine.  Also DH took Sister Kitty into the vet and she’s been a little more skittish around them ever since.
• She’s a really sweet cat, and I feel a little guilty about Nice Kitty, and I wish there was less pee protesting going on.  But overall things seem fine with two cats.
• Covering the couch cushions with pleather covers from Amazon really seems to have made it much easier to clean up Nice Kitty’s pee protests.  We suspect Sister kitty is the one peeing on the guest bathroom bathmat– it doesn’t smell as bad and we used to keep a litterbox in that spot when they were all kittens.  DH has dug an additional litterbox out of the shed to put there.  So we’ll have 4 litterboxes in the house and one on the patio.
• We just got two Feliway diffusers and put them in the living room.  Maybe they’re working?  It hasn’t been long, but there wasn’t any hissing/growling in there after we put them in.  We’ll see if this keeps up.

RBOC

• Got my eyes checked–  apparently my near-sightedness has been getting better(!) but it seems like it’s been getting worse in that I’m needing to wear my glasses more.  So I dunno.  She did say that it’s common for near-sighted people to become less near-sighted but also to become worse at reading things up close.  I dunno, I’m still fine with reading.
• DC2 complained of not being able to see as well and also is a little nearsighted with a little bit of astigmatism, so zie is getting glasses.  One expensive pair from Lenscrafters and a couple of cheaper pairs from zenni-optical.  The way they measure pupil distance at lenscrafters has changed.
• They guy selling me the frames was like if you’re a professor at the university, why don’t you have the vision insurance.  And I was like.. it’s not actually insurance, it’s just pre-paying for glasses.  There’s like a cap on how much they will pay out, so it didn’t really seem worth it.  Looking at it now, I would have saved $40 on the check-up (BC/BS has a $50 copay), and it would have cost $90/year for the insurance.  It looks like I probably would have saved the remaining $50 and some more on the cost of glasses themselves, but not if we just bought online glasses.  So probably we would have come out ahead, but I’d have to remember to cancel it and to have it on when I know I’m going to be getting an exam etc.  I’m too lazy to optimize.
• zenni-optical (not sponsored) continues to be awesome for extra pairs of glasses.  This time around I got me a pair of prescription sunglasses.  (Woo.)
• PG&E is about to start throwing out regular dividends again.  The price of the stock is still low compared to its pre-latest-bankruptcy highs, and their website is having technical glitches after sending a letter telling me to update my deposit information (must be done by Dec 19th, letter got here Dec 18th), and its not like dividends are a tax savvy way to get earnings.  That said… we got $875 in dividends from the 5% preferred stock in 2023, and I really like dividends.  I like just getting money for doing nothing but being a capitalist pig.  (All my other dividends are set to DRIP, but this one I take in cash.)  [I am in favor of guaranteed income for everyone– spread that capitalist wealth around.  Tax the rich!]
• After I noted the technical glitch, PG&E sent a passive-aggressive response email which just copied the direct deposit instructions they’d sent in the letter as if it was my mistake and not theirs.  That said, the technical glitches had been solved when I tried again after getting back from DH’s family.
• SIL said no gifts to MIL too (not just to DH and BIL).  Too many toys too many books.  So MIL gave them tickets to a monster truck show.  But also gave them each lots of toys on top of that.  And noise cancelling headphones for everyone.  I’m glad we respected SIL’s wishes, though maybe MIL added extra to make up for what the rest of us aren’t giving.  It sure seemed like a lot.
• The two older nephews have both grown their hair long, but in very different styles.  In that one of them has a style and the other has just let a short style grow out.
• My kids have also just changed their hairstyle length for the first time in their lives.
• Long nails also seem to be in with boys— a lot of my students have them.  They look so much more healthy and impressive than mine.
• Some of our friends went to Spain over Christmas because flights were insanely cheap, under $600/ticket to Madrid/Barcelona.
• DH is thinking about not doing Christmas with his family next year.  It’s so stressful and expensive and when we came home our living room was soaking in cat pee.  I’m concerned they will blame me if we don’t go.  A compromise might be only going for a couple of days, though that limits our AirBnB options, and I don’t think the problem is actually the day on either end with just DH’s parents before/after driving to BIL’s town.
• It was a bit more stressful this year than last year.  I’m not sure why– though I think part of it is that we usually have some time separately with each set of cousins and this year we didn’t– it was all 8 cousins together at once each evening and the two three year olds are not as angelic as they were as two year olds last year.  Presumably they’ll be back to being angelic four year olds next year.  And it was raining so we didn’t spend any time outside for energy to get run off.  Also I wasn’t much help this time around– I was exhausted and anemic from what I suspect are peri-menopause symptoms and was about as helpful as SIL’s husband, which is to say I mostly sat on a couch away from the kids.  (DC1 also didn’t interact much, though DC2 had a great time talking hobbies and shows with hir same-aged cousin.)  DH and the kids were supposed to do an escape room with BIL and his kids, but they backed out at the last minute (one got sick and the other didn’t want to anymore), but DH and DC1 enjoyed it (DC2 didn’t like it).
• We did watch a bunch of Disney + at the AirBNB.  Turning Red, the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special, and the new Dr. Who special with David Tennet (I do not understand why this is last on Disney, but :shrug:).
• It’s crazy to me how each generation of students is unable to do things that previous generations had no problem with.  Like, I have to spend a lot of time explaining to new RAs how to respond to an assignment to make it clear both what the assignment is, what they did, and what the names of the files etc. are.  It now takes like 30 minutes of training and lots of practice going back and forth the first day of work.  I’ve tried making the instructions clearer and more detailed but I think that has actually made it worse since they don’t read the entire thing anymore.  How did they make it through lockdown when everything was virtual?