Enough of this year

Our lives continue to be rich and full, here in Enough-ville.  

The pandemic deserves its own little paragraph of enough-ness, of course.  A-child tested positive about two weeks ago, and so Kinder-ling and her family went into quarantine, celebrating Xmas via texts and zoom instead of with in-person visits.  A-child recovered quickly and with considerable energy, and the family has just reemerged from their isolation.  About that same time, I made the tricky decision not to go to the big math meetings in January (cancelling my registration, plane tickets, hotel reservations, and all my talks), only to hear three days later that the Math Society came to the same decision, and cancelled/postponed the whole shebang anyway.   My city has a record number of hospitalizations, and my College just announced that our first two weeks of the spring semester will be held remotely -- this, despite our vaccine/booster mandate and mandatory masking policies, since it's clear even those can't quite ensure the safety of our students and staff.  Yeesh.

Having said that, the end of 2021 brought us lots of family time, and we have many updates from various Snoughlings.  In age order, Gos-ling, my oldest, came to visit me and my dog (leaving her dogs at home).  The paperwork on her divorce came through, and she's doing some rearranging of finances and of furniture, and being kind enough to ask me for tidbits of advice, thereby making me feel gratifyingly relevant and useful. 

Ink-ling, the next in line, has had a very merry, and not only because she has the outfits to go with the season.   She's gotten a couple of nifty knitting-themed shirts (work clothes!), and has had travels with me (to my dad's home) and with OfSnough (to NY).  Temptations!  Hadestown! Life is good.

Christmas Day

Walking across a bridge; guess where?

Sizz-ling is being a good big sister in a very, very cold place.   This image she texted makes me shiver, just to look at it.  

Kinder-ling and family, although stuck at home for the holidays, made quite a home of it.  I love how magical these pictures are.

Jason has been in minimal touch by text; he's moved to a new place and gave me his address, so I mailed him a few things.   

Nelson is braving the cold with his big Sizz, and he's gotten some warm-weather gear to help out. 

He tells me that Sizz took him to an endocrinologist, who got him on a new glucose monitor -- one that doesn't require that I hit him with a wooden spoon (too bad!).  He's also on a new med whose name sounds to me like the Wizard of Oz; he said it made him feel lazy the day after he took it, and so I'm guessing that must be what my dog takes all the time.  I love talking to Nelson on the phone; he's such a happy person. 

Cow cookies, instead of gingerbread cookies.

My guy, OfSnough, got to have some father/daughter bonding time with Gos when his knee swelled up, and she took him to the orthopedist to get fluid drained from the joint.  It was like Old Home Time there, with the receptionists, nurses, and docs all greeting him:  OfSnough!  We haven't seen you in forever!  Gos's new boyfriend asked her if it is a family tradition that someone needs to go to the hospital or urgent care for the holidays around here.  

As for me, I'm enjoying my time with family, and also enjoying the chance to catch up on memo-writing and other deanly things, but at a more leisurely pace.   I'm hecka good at revising memos these days.

And that's the news from our family this 2021 year.  Wishing you all the best in 2022!

Handbook revisions in color [nerdiness alert]

One of my very exciting [ <-- sarcasm] tasks in my newish job is to revise a section of the faculty handbook.  The section I'm working on is about a dozen pages long, and it's been the bane of the previous two Associate Deans in my position, so this thing is, what?, eight or ten years overdue for an overhaul.  

Even if the Faculty [hang-me-now] Handbook is not a thrill a minute, I do love to organize stuff, so there are parts of the task that I actually really get into.  Here is one such mini-happiness: adding color. 

For context, usually when we revise the FH, we parade the whole shebang before the assembled faculty with old text in strikethrough and new text in bold.  This format, I think, is not particularly easy to read, especially if it goes on for a while.  To wit, imagine reading pages of this:

Give us this day our daily bread.  And forgive us our debts trespasses, as we also have forgiven our debtors forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from eagles evil. 

That gives me headaches; ugh.

What I've been doing instead is preparing side-by-side versions:  before and after.  The text I remove is in pink (think "red stoplight"), and the text I insert is in green ("let's go!").  So the before/after reads like this.

Sometimes, if I just move a sentence from one place to another, I highlight it both places in yellow.  As I work my way through the revisions, I get these multicolored documents that are kind of fun to look at.  

I was worried that I would be the only one who'd like this format, so I ran a draft by a very nerdy and legalistic group of professors who excel in being nitpicky. Would they think this looked too much like Kindergarten play time?  Would they make me go back to strikethrough bold?  But they unanimously told me they find this format easier to read than the normal way, so I'm plunging forward in full color. Whoop!

So, that's my little bit of sunshine and rainbows, in the midst of words and rules and words about rules and rules about words.  

My Pedestrian Life

 49:  The number of times I have been in my car this year (that is, the year 2021).  

There are lots of advantages to living in a small city, especially one that can brag about being named among the "most walkable" in the nation.  I take advantage of the advantages, so to speak.   It's a delight to get to walk through the various neighborhoods: exploring the architecture, meeting up unexpectedly with other friends on foot, not having to scrape the ice off of windshields or stop at a gas station, but rather just put on my shoes (and sometimes, hook up the dog leash).  I love being out in the weather.  

2106:  The number of miles I've driven this year (including being in the car when my husband drives).  

We're still limping along with our very crumply 2001 Prius.  It's starting to get annoyingly loud, though; the mechanic says that it's safe but noisy (safe and sound?), but it's loud enough that I'm contemplating getting a new-to-us vehicle.  However, given how seldom I actually use the car, I have the luxury of having lots of time.  Long trips are the most annoying (so a-noise-ing!), and we fortunately don't have any long trips in our near future.   Eh, we'll manage.  I'm pretty sure it's not an exaggeration right now to say that our collection of bicycles are worth more than the car, and I think that's a funny enough comparison that it's worth hanging onto that for a while.

50%:  The fraction of my adult children without a driver's license.  

Two of my 'snoughlings have physical reasons why they're delaying (indefinitely?) their licenses, although I'm sure they'd both prefer the chance to get behind a wheel if they could.  A third is license-less by choice.  She remarks to me that she continues to find it odd that people offer to give her a lift while she's out walking.  My other three kids, though, are happily licentious.

I'm well aware that I'm a bit on the fringe for living my life this way, all the more so because I do it by choice.  I want to live this way; other people don't want to live this way; that's the way things go. 

This past few weeks, though, I've been bumping up against all sorts of reasons to be extra happy for designing my life in this way.   I live a low-car life by choice; others live a much-car life by choice; and then others . . . well, this past month I've been around a lot of people who are living low-car lives under duress.  And THAT is just not fun.

My dad and his wife, for example, can't drive after dark any more.  In my dad's case, this is a recent development.   He lives in a gorgeous place, but it's a place not friendly to car-less people:  hilly, no sidewalks, narrow roads which are either packed with neighbors' cars (in the immediate area) or are shoulder-less major thoroughfares with 50 mph traffic; he lives probably 4 miles from the nearest shopping center, and 40 or 50 miles from the nearest theater and performing center.  My dad loves getting exercise, but the neighborhood isn't a great place for an 80-plus-year-old person with balance problems to go for a stroll, so he has to drive (in the daytime) to a gym to walk on treadmills with handrails.   They love going to theater and to recitals, but since they can't drive in the evenings, their theater/recital opportunities are closing off to them.  For these reasons and others, the walls of my dad's life are closing in around him.  I'd say it sucks getting old, but I can't help but thinking that much of the suckiness would be less so if he'd chosen to live in a walkable neighborhood nearer the things he actually liked doing.  

Ditto for another family friend my sister and I visited:  limited mobility (in her case because of tremors); illness and disability that is made worse by a series of choices that have boxed her into sedentary activities.   

It's hard not to sound preachy here.  (Heck, it's hard not to BE preachy in my own head, so I'm sure that there's a bunch of look-at-me! leaking out here).  I'll just say, I'm TRYING not to be too judge-y [fail, fail, fail].  At the same time, I can't help but being grateful for my largely pedestrian life and for all the freedom it's given me.  Bop into the office to pick up something I forgot?  It's a 10-minute walk away.  Take the dog to the vet?  Half-a-block down the road.  Go to the theater with my kids?  15-minute walk downtown, and I can hold hands with my husband en route.  Fish for dinner?  Take the pyrex container to the fishmonger just up the road, just past the coffee house. It's almost like magic, it's so nice.