A few months ago, we had no plans for Winter (aka Spring) Break. I had suggested to Annette (who is the one who manages the finances in our household, and for good reason) that maybe it’d be nice to at least get out of town for a long weekend to someplace warmer. Wisely, Annette pointed out that we just bought a new house and we are going on a big trip to Europe this summer, so no, we don’t have the money. Okay, fine.
Then we got a check from the IRS for $2500 because (we think) it turns out we were eligible for COVID relief money from the feds we never claimed. Thanks, Biden. “C’mon, found money!” I said and Annette could not disagree.
We considered a couple options, but we landed on Cancún for two reasons. First, we’ve talked for years about checking out an “all-inclusive” resort option. We’ve been on four cruises now, and I for one am undecided about them: there’s stuff I like, there’s stuff I don’t like. But we talked about how an all-inclusive resort might be interesting to try because we imagined it to be like a cruise that didn’t go anywhere. Second, while Annette visited Cancún a couple of times in the late 80s and early 90s, I’ve never been anywhere in Mexico, so what the heck?
Would I do it again? Well, like cruises, there are good things and not good things, so I don’t know.
This past year was A LOT for me and the rest of my family. So so SO much happened, so much of it horrible and still difficult to comprehend, so much of it fantastic and beautiful. I suppose this “the worst of times/the best of times” sentiment is always kinda true, but I can’t think of another year where there was just so so much and in such extremes.
It’s been a lot. It’s been way too much for one year.
January
We were already well underway with one of the big ticket items of this year, which is building/buying/selling houses and moving for the first time in over 25 years.
On January 7, I started taking Zepbound, which is one of these weight loss drugs in the category of what everyone has heard of, Ozempic (though, as I wrote about during the year, it’s more complicated than that.)
My niece Emily got married in a huge and very Catholic ceremony in Kansas City. This was the first of the nieces/nephews (or cousins or grandchildren, depending on your perspective) to get married, so a big deal for the Krauses. Remarkably, there were no hitches with the weather or anything else.
The idea of moving started to get a lot more real when we were able to do a walk-through of the house right after they did the inspection for stuff they need to do before they put up drywall.
Of course, we (mostly me) have been driving by the construction site since November to see the progress, but walking around in what would become (in the order of these pictures) the upstairs/Steve loft area, stairs descending in the living room/main room and kitchen area was pretty cool. The Zepbound adventures continued (I was down about 7 pounds by the end of the month) as did the all first year writing semester.
March
We started getting real about selling the old house and preparing the move to the new one, and because we lived in our previous house in Normal Park for 25 years, it was stressful. I mean, we had decades worth of stuff to sort through– pack, sell, toss– and there was all the decluttering and the nervousness of would it sell and would we get what we were asking and all that. It’s kind of funny because everyone we talked to about this stuff– including my parents and in-laws– had all moved at least once (and usually twice) in the 25 years we hadn’t thought of it at all.
It’s funny to think about too because Annette grew up as an Air Force brat and her father was in for over 20 years, meaning she moved more than a dozen times before she was 15. I didn’t move that much as a kid, but we did move a couple of times, and in college and through my MFA program, I moved almost every year. So we used to know how to move.
April was the beginning of the “A LOT,” the far too much of the year. We had two open houses on the first Sunday of the month, and then on April 8, Annette and I cleared out to make room for potential buyers to come take a second look while we went to the eclipse. We met our friends Steve and Michelle and their daughter down in Whitehouse, Ohio (just outside of Toledo), which seemed like the easiest place to get to for the totality while avoiding bumper-to-bumper traffic into the “totality zone” in northern Ohio.
As I wrote on Instagram, being there for the totality was intense. I probably won’t be able to see another total eclipse in my lifetime; then again, a cruise in August 2027 in the Mediterranean is not impossible.
We had a second open house, which was nerve-wracking. Remember, we had not had anything to do with selling and buying a house in forever and everyone told us we’d get an offer immediately, so when that didn’t happen, we started contemplating scenarios about how we can swing paying for the new house without money from the sale of the old house and all of that. Well, another open house and we got an offer and everything worked out– eventually.
And the end of April was when Bill died, suddenly and just a few days after a group of us got together for dinner. That’s at the top of my list for of horrible and difficult to comprehend. It still doesn’t feel real to me, and I think about Bill almost every day.
May
MSU had a quite large memorial for Bill in early May we were able to attend– Will flew back too. There had to be at least 500 people at it, and it was as celebratory about a remarkable life as it could be. I wrote about some of this in early May here, though this is as much about my own thoughts of mortality than anything else. Like I said, this year has been a lot, and this was the horrible part.
And in mid-May, we closed on both houses and pretty much on the same day. We went to a Title office in Ann Arbor and met the guy who bought our house for the first time, and without going into a lot of details, I feel pretty confident that that he and his partner (who was there via Facetime) are a great fit, ready for the adventures and challenges of fixing up the place and making it their own. That was the selling part. The buying part of the new house we were able to do electronically, and weirdly and quite literally while we were running errands after the closing where we were selling, we received a number of emails to electronically sign some forms and boom, we bought the new house too.
It was and still is kind of bitter-sweet, leaving the old place and the old neighborhood. It was time to move on and the longer we are in the new place, the fewer regrets I have. Still, when you live someplace for 25 years, that place becomes more than just housing, and that is especially true when it is in such a great neighborhood. I still drive through the old neighborhood and the old house about once a week on my way to or from EMU.
A lot of the last part of May and the first part of June was a complete daze of moving. We decided that the way we’d move is to start taking stuff over a carload at a time (and I did most of the heavy lifting, mostly because Annette was teaching a summer class) and then hiring movers for the big stuff later. I remember talking with my father about this approach to moving, and his joke was it’s sort of like getting hit in the nuts fairly gently every day for a month, or getting hit once really hard. When we move again (no idea when that will be), I think the smarter move would be to do it all at once, but I don’t think there’s any escaping what Annette and I had erased from our memories after staying put so long: moving sucks.
Also in June: we celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. Well, sort of. Before we started getting serious about buying a new house, the original plan was go go on a big European adventure that sort of retraced the trip we took for our honeymoon, but we decided to give each other a house instead. The 31sth wedding anniversary trip to Europe is coming this spring instead.
As part of the house closing deal, we were able to be in the old house through the first weekend in June and we had one last Normal Park hurrah by selling lots and lots of stuff in the annual neighborhood big yard sale event. I went once last time on June 10 to mow the lawn, double-check to make sure everything was cleaned up, and to do one last terror selfie.
July
The new house– the cost of it of course, but also just settling into it and all– meant we didn’t travel anyplace this summer in I don’t know how many years. I missed going up north, and we might not be able to do that again this coming year either. And we watched the shitshow that was the presidential election tick by. But there was golf, there was more AI stuff, hanging out with friends, going to art fairs in Plymouth and Ann Arbor, seeing movies and hanging out. Annette went to visit her side of things in late July, leaving me to fly solo for a few days, and her parents came back with her to stay in the new place for a while, our first house guests.
August
The in-laws visited, we went for a lovely little overnight stay in Detroit. played some golf, started getting ready for teaching, and I wrote a fair amount about AI here and in a Substack space I switched to in August. The switching back happened later. Started feeling optimistic about Kamala’s chances….Oh, and my son defended his dissertation and is now Dr. William Steven Wannamaker Krause (but still Will to me).
September
By September 5, when I wrote this post about both weight loss and Johann Hari’s book about Ozempic called Magic Pill, I was down about 35 pounds from Zepbound. The semester was underway with a lot of AI things in all three classes. There was a touch of Covid– Annette tested positive, I don’t think I ever did, but I felt not great. My parents visited in the end of September, and of course they too liked the new house.
October
The month started with a joint 60th birthday for Annette and our friend Steve Benninghoff– they both turned 60 a few months apart. It was the first big party we had here at the new house. During EMU’s new tradition of a “Fall break,” we went to New York City. We let up with Will and his girlfriend and went to the Natural History Museum (pretty cool), went with them to see the very funny and silly Oh, Mary! Annette and I also went to see the excellent play Stereophonic and met up with old friends Troy and Lisa, and also Annette at an old school Italian restaurant that apparently Frank Sinatra used to like a lot. Rachel and Colin came by for dinner when they were in town too. And of course school/work, too.
November
We started by going to see Steve Martin and Martin Short at the Fox Theater in Detroit— great and fun show. Then, of course, there was the fucking election, another bit of horrible for the year. More Substack writing about AI and just being busy with work– the travels and events of October really put me behind with school, and I felt like I spent the last 6 or so weeks of the semester just barely caught up on it all. Will and his girlfriend came out here before Thanksgiving and she flew back home to be with her family. Meanwhile we made our annual trip to Iowa for Thanksgiving/Christmas. A good time that featured some taco pizza the day after the turkey, and happily, very very little discussion of politics.
I ended up switching back to blogging but not quite giving up on Substack, as I talked about in this post. One of my goals for winter 2025 is to start a more focused Substack newsletter on my next (and likely last) academic research project on the history of AI, Computer Aided Instruction, and early uses of wordpressors in writing pedagogy from the late 70s until the early 90s. Stay tuned for that.
Oh, and the niece I had who was the first of the cousins to get married? Also the first to have a baby in early December– thus the first great-grandchild in the family.
There was much baking (in November too), and some decorating and some foggy pictures of the woods. Will and his girlfriend returned (I think Will has been back here more in the last couple of months than he has been in quite a while) and we took a trip to the Detroit Institute of Art before they left to California to see her family. Will came back here, we made the annual trip to Naples, Florida to see the in-laws, and now here we are.
Like I said, it’s been a lot, and a whole lot of it is bad. I worry about Trump. I miss Bill terribly. He touched a lot of people in his life and so I know I’m not alone on that one.
But I’m also oddly hopeful for what’s to come next. The more we are in the new house, the more it is home. The Zepbound adventure continues (I’m down about 40 pounds from last January), I’m hopeful for Will as he starts a new gig as a post-doc researcher, I’m looking forward to the new term, and I’m looking forward to all that is coming in the new year.
This morning, after Trump has won decisively, I am surprised but I’m not shocked. Harris seemed to be finishing strong and Trump seemed to be imploding, but I still knew Trump might win. Though it’s disturbing that the vote was this decisive.
There are lots of reasons why Trump won— immigration, Biden should have never run for a second term, the US is still not ready for a woman president, etc. I think it’s mostly about money though. As I heard Geoff Bennett early last night on the PBS Newshour (I’m paraphrasing here), perhaps it is a luxury for people to be concerned about the ideal of Democracy when they can’t afford groceries. After all, a surprisingly large percentage of Americans would struggle paying a $500 emergency expense. As I was driving around this morning, I heard (yes, on public radio because I am that kind of educated liberal elite) someone pointing out that in times of high inflation, incumbents lose— Ford, Carter, and now Biden/Harris. And let’s not forget that Clinton beat Bush I because “it’s the economy, stupid.”
So people poorer than me who couldn’t pay off a surprise $500 car repair bill (let alone something like a devastating medical bill) are so mad and desperate they’re willing to pick someone we know will be an agent of chaos both because that’s how he governed when he was president four years ago and that’s what he’s told us he would do in the campaign. They’ve been taken into the cult that is Trump. But rich people— I mean very very rich people, but also upper-middle class people like me who have plenty of money and safety nets to pay surprise bills, who have good jobs, who have retirement plans that have swollen thanks to a robust stock market, the kind of people who don’t pay attention to how much a loaf of bread costs— also voted for Trump because, duh, the economy, stupid. Money money money.
Let us also not forget the appeal of the strong man.
Back in spring 2019, my wife and son and I went on a guided tour/vacation to China. One of the many MANY striking things about that trip for me was seeing an authoritarian regime up close and personal on a day-to-day basis. There were cameras and checkpoints and heavily armed soldiers everywhere, especially in Beijing. My face was scanned by security guards dozens of times. Access to the western version of the Internet was blocked, and we had to use VPN software to get around it with mixed results. Most of the programming available on television (at least in the hotels where we stayed) were state broadcasts with a bit of clearly censored news from CNN and BBC. It wasn’t as bad as I imagine it was on Soviet-era Eastern Europe or it is now in North Korea, but it was pretty bad.
But here’s the thing: as far as I could tell, most Chinese people were okay with this arrangement. As long as the great leader and the state enabled the poorest citizens to have food and shelter and for the elites to shop for western goods (I saw stores for every luxury good product that you can think of, along with almost every American fast food chain), everyone was happy— or at least satisfied. Political polls in authoritarian regimes are always sketchy, but the government in places like China and Russia are popular.
What’s clear from this election is a lot of Americans seem eager to give this fascism thing a try. Because while I strongly disagree with the results, it was a fair and square vote where more people opted for the wannabe strong man. This obviously makes me worry about mindset of the majority of voters in this country right now.
I think we all know that the next four years are going be a chaotic shitshow filled with scandals and protests and insane policy proposals and all the rest. Trump might be more able to do more damage, sure, but we also know a lot more about how to try to resist and fight back. I don’t know if this will be the beginning of the end of democracy as we know it, but I know it ain’t going to be good and the minority of us who didn’t vote for this are going to have to find ways to resist and fight.
But to speak selfishly here for a moment, at least I live in a very blue dot community. Just over 70% of voters in my county (Washtenaw) voted for Harris, so a very blue community in a left-leaning region (67% of Wayne county/Detroit and just over half of Oakland county voters picked Harris) and in a still purple state. We didn’t move here for politics— we moved here to work at EMU— but we’re liable to stay for politics.
And now it’s time to mourn a bit and then to join the resistance once again.
A break from AI & academia to talk politics
When I got up this morning and before I started writing in my journal, I looked back to the entries I wrote just before and after the 2016 election. FWIW, I write in a journal— I will not verb that into “journaling”— every morning and I have been doing so very consistently for about the last 15 years. Eight years ago, my journal entries in October/November 2016 were more brief than they’ve been lately, and I didn’t write much about the election between Hillary and Trump before election day. I think that’s because like everyone else, I thought Hillary had it in the bag. The shock of the day on November 9, 2016 (the day after the election) comes off the page, and I kept writing about the surrealness of the results for quite some time after that.
This morning, after Trump has won decisively, I am surprised but I’m not shocked. Harris seemed to be finishing strong and Trump seemed to be imploding, but I still knew Trump might win. Though it’s disturbing that the vote was this decisive.
There are lots of reasons why Trump won— immigration, Biden should have never run for a second term, the US is still not ready for a woman president, etc. I think it’s mostly about money though. As I heard Geoff Bennett early last night on the PBS Newshour (I’m paraphrasing here), perhaps it is a luxury for people to be concerned about the ideal of Democracy when they can’t afford groceries. After all, a surprisingly large percentage of Americans would struggle paying a $500 emergency expense. As I was driving around this morning, I heard (yes, on public radio because I am that kind of educated liberal elite) someone pointing out that in times of high inflation, incumbents lose— Ford, Carter, and now Biden/Harris. And let’s not forget that Clinton beat Bush I because “it’s the economy, stupid.”
So people poorer than me who couldn’t pay off a surprise $500 car repair bill (let alone something like a devastating medical bill) are so mad and desperate they’re willing to pick someone we know will be an agent of chaos both because that’s how he governed when he was president four years ago and that’s what he’s told us he would do in the campaign. They’ve been taken into the cult that is Trump. But rich people— I mean very very rich people, but also upper-middle class people like me who have plenty of money and safety nets to pay surprise bills, who have good jobs, who have retirement plans that have swollen thanks to a robust stock market, the kind of people who don’t pay attention to how much a loaf of bread costs— also voted for Trump because, duh, the economy, stupid. Money money money.
Let us also not forget the appeal of the strong man.
Back in spring 2019, my wife and son and I went on a guided tour/vacation to China. One of the many MANY striking things about that trip for me was seeing an authoritarian regime up close and personal on a day-to-day basis. There were cameras and checkpoints and heavily armed soldiers everywhere, especially in Beijing. My face was scanned by security guards dozens of times. Access to the western version of the Internet was blocked, and we had to use VPN software to get around it with mixed results. Most of the programming available on television (at least in the hotels where we stayed) were state broadcasts with a bit of clearly censored news from CNN and BBC. It wasn’t as bad as I imagine it was on Soviet-era Eastern Europe or it is now in North Korea, but it was pretty bad.
But here’s the thing: as far as I could tell, most Chinese people were okay with this arrangement. As long as the great leader and the state enabled the poorest citizens to have food and shelter and for the elites to shop for western goods (I saw stores for every luxury good product that you can think of, along with almost every American fast food chain), everyone was happy— or at least satisfied. Political polls in authoritarian regimes are always sketchy, but the government in places like China and Russia are popular.
What’s clear from this election is a lot of Americans seem eager to give this fascism thing a try. Because while I strongly disagree with the results, it was a fair and square vote where more people opted for the wannabe strong man. This obviously makes me worry about mindset of the majority of voters in this country right now.
I think we all know that the next four years are going be a chaotic shitshow filled with scandals and protests and insane policy proposals and all the rest. Trump might be more able to do more damage, sure, but we also know a lot more about how to try to resist and fight back. I don’t know if this will be the beginning of the end of democracy as we know it, but I know it ain’t going to be good and the minority of us who didn’t vote for this are going to have to find ways to resist and fight.
But to speak selfishly here for a moment, at least I live in a very blue dot community. Just over 70% of voters in my county (Washtenaw) voted for Harris, so a very blue community in a left-leaning region (67% of Wayne county/Detroit and just over half of Oakland county voters picked Harris) and in a still purple state. We didn’t move here for politics— we moved here to work at EMU— but we’re liable to stay for politics.
And now it’s time to mourn a bit and then to join the resistance once again.
As I’ve mentioned before, I started the weight loss drug Zepbound on January 7. As I’ve also mentioned, I’ve had some ups and downs, and also some things to say about Oprah. Now and about 20 weeks later, I’ve lost just over 20 pounds. Here are some thoughts on all that:
If you had asked me last May if Annette and I were moving this year, I would have probably shrugged and said “I don’t think so, but we’ll move eventually.” I certainly didn’t think “eventually” would be now. And I also didn’t think we’d be moving out of a house built in the 1950s in a long established, funky, and all around lovely neighborhood to a newly built house in a brand new suburban subdivision blank slate of not quite yet a neighborhood. I’m as surprised as anyone about this.
We have lived in this house in Normal Park for 25 years. When we bought it in 1999, it was a two bedroom/one bathroom house built in 1953 with a full attic which had never been finished. We thought we’d stay here until it was time for Will to go to grade school, in part because we fantasized about the perfect place in Ann Arbor, maybe in Burns Park or within walking distance of downtown. Well, we couldn’t afford anything like that, and after living here for five years, we liked the neighborhood. So we remodeled things. We redid the attic, adding a main bedroom, a full bathroom, and a loft space I use as an office area. We eventually also remodeled the kitchen and the bathrooms, along with fixing up a ton of other things. But we still thought about moving a few times, once when Will made the transition to middle school, and again six or seven years ago when Will was almost done with college. We even went to look at a house that was in Ann Arbor (albeit not close to downtown) and it was more or less in our budget. But as we talked about it, both of us felt like it just wasn’t worth the hassle of moving out of a house that we still loved. Plus we had paid off the mortgage, so why give that up?
In other words, we have been thinking about moving since we moved here, actually, but things got real this summer for basically two reasons. First, it’s a hot “seller’s market” around here, and that is especially true for this neighborhood. But second and more important, we’re getting kind of old– I turned 58 this past March and Annette will turn 60 this coming November. Our parents came to visit us at different times last summer, and while they’re all fairly mobile for folks in their late 70s and early 80s, they had some challenges navigating just the stairs in and out of the house– never mind about trying to go to the second floor or the basement. That’s not a problem for us now, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see a future when it will be, and that’s especially true when doing things like hauling laundry up two flights from the basement. Besides, if we don’t take the plunge to do this now, our next move will be to “the home.”
So we started looking and thinking about moving more seriously, and, long story a bit shorter, we landed on new construction in a subdivision of similar homes sort of in suburban no man’s land. It is still an Ypsilanti address but in Pittsfield Township near where Michigan Avenue and US 23 meet. The only usual places we go around town that will be further away from where we are right now is EMU, which means we won’t be able to walk to work anymore. This sub is a far cry from those fantasies of living in a more tony Ann Arbor neighborhood, but that’s just not realistic or as important as it once was for us. Besides the fact that we simply cannot afford to live in anything bigger than a two bedroom condo within walking distances of downtown, we’d still have to drive around a lot no matter where we lived. And after living here for 25 years, now we want to live more in-between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti because there’s a lot of cool stuff in Ypsi too.
The new house is gonna be great. It lacks a lot of the charm and character of this house, sure, but one of the nice things about a new house is everything is, well, new. There’s a connected two car garage, a big “open concept” kitchen/dining area/living room, the laundry and the main bedroom are on the ground floor, we’ll each of a home office space, and a really nice deck off the back door. I’m really looking forward to it.
But I am going to miss this neighborhood.
I never got involved in any of the neighborhood association things and I recognize my neighbors but I don’t know them. We don’t really “hang out” with any of our neighbors. But there’s a nice mix of people here, older folks (like us now!) who have been here for decades and people with little kids just starting out, far from all white people, lots of teachers, nurses, librarians, and EMU and UM professors and staff.
We live– or soon once lived– on Wallace Boulevard, which is one of the main streets through the neighborhood. Our new house is on a cul de sac that backs up to some woods, and that will be nice but in a very different way. Here there’s a steady stream of people of all sorts entertaining me as I look out the kitchen window while doing dishes or whatever– lots of people just walking or pushing strollers or riding bikes, but there’s always something new. Just the other day, I saw a group of four or five people each carrying a part of what looked like a full dining room set. A while back, I saw a grown man driving a fully motorized and adult-sized “Big Wheel” style bike/trike down the street, I presume some kind of DIY project.
I’ll miss what Halloween is like around here. People take Halloween decorating serious around here, and we got hundreds of trick or treaters every year, more than that when the weather was nice. I typically bought three or four giant bags of candy from Costco, and we went through all of it most years. It was a walking party for a lot of folks, young parents drinking beers while watching their kids, and the neighborhood also welcomes lots and lots of kids and parents from all over town, especially folks from apartments or neighborhoods where there aren’t a lot of other trick or treating opportunities.
And then there’s the big neighborhood yard sale, which this year is going to be June 1. It’s dozens and dozens of yard sales, some big and some small, some of them happen every year. It’s another good chance to get out and walk around the neighborhood, find some bargains, sell some old things, etc. By the way, one of the reasons why we’re staying here until the second weekend in June is so we can participate in this year’s sale– we’ve got a lot of stuff to sell!
We’re not going to have any of that in this new subdivision, at least not for a while. Then again, who knows what will happen in the time we’re there and beyond. The other day on the Normal Park Facebook Group, someone posted this image of when this neighborhood was a blank slate, farmland being turned into a subdivision:
I think this house is about where it says 22 on this map. And tickets to the World’s Fair, too!
So farewell, though not really goodbye. I’ll still come by once in a while to see how things are going.
My friend Bill Hart Davidson died suddenly on April 23, 2024 of a heart attack while on a run after work. He was 53. Here’s a link to the obituary.
Annette and I (along with Steve Benninghoff– unfortunately, his wife was out of town) went up to The Compound for a dinner party the Saturday before. We’ve gotten together like this many times for the last 20 years, and often, there is some kind of activity or game. This time, Bill and Leslie asked us all to put together powerpoint presentations that are funny, interesting, and/or entertaining. Mine was about our new house. It was pretty lame because I was too busy trying to finish the grading for the winter semester. Annette, similarly busy but with her book, did a presentation about why The Big Lebowski is a perfect movie (totally agree). Benninghoff talked about some genealogy research he’s been doing about his family and some lost history going back to the Civil War, a presentation that ended with a sampling of scotch. Leslie and Bill were much more prepared. Leslie had a great talk about Betty Crocker (I think she’s doing some research for another cookbook sort of project), and Bill’s bit, complete with his bass for demonstration purposes, was about the similarities and differences between beat and rhythm. He won the prize for “most likely to do a TED talk.”
A good time was had by one and all, we talked about how Annette and I will have to host the next one of these get-togethers this summer once we move into our new place, and we all went home. Then we get a call from Benninghoff Monday night; he had gotten a call from Leslie that Bill had collapsed while on a run, and he was pronounced dead the next day.
It’s a lot to process, and so this is definitely very rambling and more personal I suppose than most of what I post here, and ultimately less about Bill than it is about memory and death and friendship. FWIW.
Before I get to Oprah (and I intended that headline be sung to the tune of “Oh-oh-oh, Ozempic!”): my second month on Zepbound has been disappointing. In the first month, I lost a little over seven pounds on the “starter” dose of 2.5 mg weekly. Like all the other similar weight loss injectables on the market, the dose increases (with Zepbound, every month) until you reach the maximum dose (in this case 15 mg). So given that I lost about seven pounds with the lowest dose of this stuff, I assumed I’d continue to lose at about the same rate.
Well, not so much; instead, I stalled. My weight jumped around a bit so that at one point this past month, I was down another two pounds (for a total of nine), then I ended up gaining a pound or two, then losing again, etc. A month later, I’m where I was after month one. This is a bummer, especially since there are are lots of people in Reddit forums and the like posting about losing 20 pounds in the first month or two. Of course, besides the fact that the anonymous posts in discussion boards aren’t exactly peer reviewed, it seems like a lot of the people claiming these huge losses also have a lot more weight to lose.
But there is some good news. For one thing, I’ve got a long ways to go to get to the maximum dose– or whatever dose I land on as being the right dose. In the discussions, a lot of people talk about staying on a lower dose than longer, and that’s especially true for folks who have had a hard time with the side effects. Plus I’ve stalled but not bounced back up to where I started, which was what usually happens when I try to just “diet and exercise.” So I’m looking forward to see what happens when I ramp up from 5 mg to 7.5 mg.
Anyway, about Oprah:
As was reported in numerous sources the other day, O and Weight Watchers have decided to part ways. The New York Times (like this story) and similar outlets reported this was an “amicable” split. “‘Her decision was not the result of any disagreement with the company on any matter relating to the company’s operations, policies or practices,’ WeightWatchers said in the filing.” Also, she’s not profiting from selling her stock: “The company said in the statement that Ms. Winfrey would donate the value of her holdings in WeightWatchers to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington in part to ‘eliminate any perceived conflict of interest around her taking weight loss medications.'” In other words, the story that both Oprah and Weight Watchers want to tell is this is just one of those things, we’re all happy about this, let’s let bygones be bygones, etc.
This could all very well be true. But it doesn’t take much picking at this to make me think this isn’t the whole story.
I have some personal experience with Weight Watchers, believe it or not. I can’t remember exactly when this was (maybe the late 2000s? the early 2010s?), but for about three or four years, I was a dues-paying member. I joined up with Annette, who, maybe 35 years ago and before we met, was on Weight Watchers and successfully reached her goal weight– which is to say it did work for her, at least at one point. The whole premise and purpose of Weight Watchers back then was quite straight-forward: eat less and maybe kinda/sorta exercise. The support meetings were mostly people talking about the challenges of dieting, along with celebrating the successes that some folks had, and perhaps a little shaming for the folks who weren’t as successful. For me, it didn’t work because success on Weight Watchers (at least back then) hinged on fastidiously keeping track of everything you ate with a system of points, and I’m just too lazy to do that. I’m pretty sure that when I stopped going to meetings, I was at the same weight as when I started.
Like I said, I don’t remember exactly when this was, but I do know it was before 2015. That’s when Oprah bought a 10% stake in what was already becoming a less profitable company. Her investment got her a seat on the board, and she became the primary public face/spokesperson for the company. That’s also when Weight Watchers started to rebrand itself as the more abstract WW. Instead of being all in on limiting calories, WW tried to pivot become a more “body positivity/acceptance” and healthy lifestyle kind of enterprise. They focused a lot more on exercise, a new line of WW cook books and new recipes (remember cauliflower crust pizza?) and food products, and more emphasis on apps for tracking food and online discussions, and a lot less emphasis on f2f meetings. For a while, this seemed to help the company. According to this May 2018 article in Money, Oprah’s $43.5 million investment ballooned quickly to more than $400 million. Sometime in 2018, she sold $110 million worth of her stock, and she also donated to her charitable foundation another $22.6 million from stock.
There’s nothing wrong with someone making a lot of money from what turned out to be a smart investment, so kudos to Oprah, at least back in 2018. But after reaching a high price mark of $101 a share in June 2018, the stock fell to $17.70 a share in April 2019. WW shares bounced up and down like a yo-yo dieter for a few years until falling even further by 2022. The day after Oprah announced she and WW were parting ways, the stock was $3.30 a share. In other words, that donation to eliminate any “perceived conflict of interest around her taking weight loss medications” is just a tax write-off.
Oprah has also significantly changed her story about weight loss medications. Back in September 2023, Oprah hosted a panel discussion for Oprah Daily (which is a subscription-based website of all things O) called “The Life You Want Class: The State of Weight.” It featured Oprah and a panel of experts on obesity and weight loss, and for the most part, the emphasis was on characterizing obesity as a disease, not about “willpower” per say, and also on body acceptance. But as People reported back then, when the discussion turned to Ozempic and similar drugs, Oprah was resistant:
“Shouldn’t we all just be more accepting of whatever body you choose to be in? That should be your choice,” Winfrey said during the panel. “Even when I first started hearing about the weight loss drugs, at the same time I was going through knee surgery, and I felt, ‘I’ve got to do this on my own.’ Because if I take the drug, that’s the easy way out.'”
In the same discussion, Oprah went on to explain that when she had surgery on both of her knees, she specifically decided against using any weight loss drugs, instead sticking to diet and a lot of hiking as exercise. It’s worth noting that as soon as Oprah said the drugs were the “easy way out,” the other panel members jumped in to emphasize that we need to think of obesity as a disease, it’s not about willpower, and so forth.
Still, the “mixed messages” from Oprah was problematic, particularly in terms of Weight Watchers’ (oops, I mean WW’s) efforts to get into the semaglutide and tirzepatide business themselves. As this little video snippet from Yahoo! finance makes clear, the only positive moment in Weight Watcher’s stock price in the previous year was the announcement that they were going to start offering these meds along with diet, exercise, and lifestyle. So for the company’s most famous stake holder, board member, spokesperson, and (for many WW customers) most inspirational persona to be skeptical of these new drugs was not the company line.
The other thing is Oprah was pretty explicit at this event that she had not herself taken Ozempic or similar drugs. As recent as early November, the “secret” to Oprah’s latest weight loss was being reported as being about following the WW diet and exercise. But by December, Oprah admitted she had been using these meds, but she still has not said what drug she’s been taking and when she started taking these drugs, and she describes the meds as weight “management” (rather than a weight loss) tool.
I have no doubt that Oprah did lose a lot of weight with the dieting and exercise she did after her knee surgeries a couple years ago. But I also have to think that she started whatever drug she’s on earlier than November– maybe even while she was claiming that taking a drug was the easy way out. In the stories back in December— when she first revealed she had been taking meds– she spoke about how she had “released the shame about it.” I suppose that means the shame of being overweight in the first place, but I also wonder if she was “releasing shame” about lying about being on these drugs.
I suppose Oprah had to bail on WW in part because of the story of her own weight gains and losses– an aspect of her celebrity image she’s cultivated for decades. After resisting them, Oprah seems to now recognize that these drugs do make a difference that simply cannot be matched by diet and exercise alone. That’s a pretty big shift from the story she’s been selling with WW as the weight loss plan where you can eat what you want and not being on a diet, including eating lots of bread.
But ultimately, business is business. Oprah cashed out of WW a long time ago, and at this stage, she’s leaving a sinking ship.
A while back, a Facebook “friend” (which is to say not so much a friend friend, but someone I know well enough from the academic world that I’ll talk with when I see him in person at a conference or something every few years) posted that he needed to lose 40 pounds and he was looking for suggestions. A lot of folks posted a lot of ideas, some of whom were also “friends” from academia who are very fit and athletic, competing in marathons and the like. All the advice boiled down to diet and exercise.
I wrote “Here’s what will be an unpopular suggestion: try drugs.” Which is what I’m currently doing.
Let me back up a bit:
I’m fat. I am not so fat that I need the seat belt expander on an airplane or I need to go to a special store to buy clothes, but I’m right on the edge of that level of fat. I should lose more than 40 pounds. To the extent that a Body Mass Index number matters, mine is in the high 30s. This puts me in the category of not just “obese” but on the edge of “morbidlyobese.” It’s been like this for a long time.
I have of course tried many different diets and approaches, including Weight Watchers for a few years, but nothing has worked for long. For quite a while now, I’ve been completely locked into the same weight, plus or minus about 5 pounds: I’ll try something new and lose a bit, then plateau, and then gain it back. This has happened again and again and again.
So I gave up, and instead I try my best to be the healthiest fat person I can be. I go to the gym a few times a week, I try to eat mostly healthy foods (though I often fail), I stay on top of my various numbers with regular doctor visits, and I live with it. And for the most part, I’m at peace with that: I’ve been at least “overweight” since I was a kid so it’s not that big of a deal.
Still, I know I need to lose weight. After all, it is called morbidobesity.
The drugs mimic a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1, which stimulates insulin production and suppresses the production of glucagon, which raises blood sugar. The body naturally releases GLP-1 after a meal, and the hormone travels to the brain, triggering the feeling of fullness. GLP-1 drugs effectively inject that sense of satiety, and also slow the rate at which food empties out of the stomach; patients generally report a freedom from cravings and an inability to overeat without becoming ill. “I’m convinced that this basically replaced a signal my body has been missing my whole life,” a commenter in a Reddit group for people using semaglutide wrote recently. “All I can say,” a member of an online group called Lose the Fat wrote, “is that it is no wonder that skinny people think heavy people have no willpower. Their brains actually do tell them to stop eating. I had no idea.”
This really really hit home for me. I remember talking about constantly feeling hungry in Weight Watcher meetings, but the only solution offered was willpower. For me, that works for a day or two, tops– thus my being stuck at my current weight for over a decade.
So when I went to see my doctor for a check-up and routine tests last spring, I said I’d like to give one of these Ozemspic-like drugs a try. Here I need to acknowledge the privilege and good luck I have in this situation. First, my doctor, who had never brought up weight loss in previous visits, said that she thought I’d be a good candidate for one of these drugs. When you look at the discussion forums about weight loss drugs, it’s easy to find someone talking about having a doctor who refused to prescribe anything. Second, I have very good health insurance through my employer that covers these drugs, with a $25 a month co-pay. There’s no way I’d pay out of pocket for this stuff because it costs around $1000 a month.
She put me on Saxenda, which is less effective than Wegovy and some of the other drugs out last year, but she said it was more available at pharmacies. Ozemspic was not an option because I’m not diabetic and she wasn’t willing to do that kind of off-label prescription– plus Ozemspic was (and I believe still is) in short supply. So after a couple of months of unfortunate events and delays (it’s a long story), I started Saxenda in late July. I was on it for about five weeks and I lost about six pounds– and then the supply dried up.
I went back to my doctor who was apologetic about the shortages, which are largely the result of the drug companies not being prepared for the enormous demand. She said that I must be disappointed, but actually, not really. Oh sure, I wish I could have continued on the meds because it was clearly working. I lost weight because I wasn’t hungry all the time, and thus I did not need to eat as much to feel full.
So for me, that experience on Saxenda was proof of concept. This shit might work for me– eventually, once the supply came back.
All through the fall and into December, I kept trying to find either Saxenda or Wegovy with no luck. Meanwhile in the fall/early winter, another one of these medications was approved by the FDA for weight loss, Zepbound. This one, which (IMO) has the best name, is similar to Eli Lilly’s diabetes drug Mounjaro, and the research I’ve seen so far suggests it’s the most effective weight loss drug like this on the market so far. On average, people on this stuff lose around 22% of their body weight within 16 months. Do the math on your weight– that’s a lot. This perhaps explains why Zepbound is being projected to be the best selling prescription drug of all time.
Anyway, I happened to be in Costco in early January and I asked at the pharmacy if they had Wegovy or Zepbound in stock. I didn’t think they would (and they didn’t have Wegovy), but it turned out they were having no problems getting Zepbound. So I started it on January 7, and, without going into all of the details (maybe I’ll get into that in the future), so far, so good. I’m at the end of week 4 and I’ve lost about seven and a half pounds– not bad for about 30 days. I just do not feel hungry and I also don’t need to eat as much to feel full. Plus I have now already secured another two months supply, which means I have enough to (hopefully) see some significant results.
One of the folks on that Facebook post I mentioned responded to my comment about “try drugs” by saying something like “Sure, but then you have to stay on those drugs the rest of your life.” First off, check back with me in a year or two on that. The likelihood of regaining weight is somewhat debatable, and there are maintenance levels of these drugs as well. Second, we’re just at the beginning of these medications. There are a dozen similar meds being developed, and that’s going to eventually bring down the costs and make them easier to take (potentially not as an injectable, for example). And third, the same is also true with the meds I take (along with zillions of other people, of course) for cholesterol and blood pressure– or meds for diabetes, which I am trying to avoid. The first thing my doctors told me before I started meds for blood pressure and cholesterol was “diet and exercise,” but they still prescribed drugs. And of course taking Zepbound might mean that I’ll eventually be able to get off of the other meds.
Annette and I have done a lot of traveling this summer– a get away to Glen Arbor, individual travel to conferences on the west coast (mine was Computers and Writing in Davis), and then a vacation/tour to Croatia, Slavonia, and Venice. Judging from my social media feeds, just about everyone I know was doing something similar. It was great! Though I will admit I could have done without the Covid we picked up at the tail end of our trip to Europe, but that’s a slightly different topic.
Shortly before we left on this latest trip, I read in The New Yorker Agnes Collard’s essay “The Case Agains Travel.” At first, I thought I might have been reading it wrong because travel is so popular– or at least people very commonly describe travel (along with activities like reading and walking on the beach) as something they “love” to do But no, Collard is quite earnest, though in an intentionally contrarian tone. This passage made me feel seen:
If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call traveling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.
(My apologies to my tens of social media devotees who have had to endure weeks of Instgram posts from me chronicling my journeys, though as far as I can tell, y’all have been basically posting similar pictures and stories from wherever it is you went too).
She does make one point in both her essay and interview which I do agree with thoroughly: travel does not in and of itself make one “virtuous,” much in the same way that an education does not in and of itself make one “smarter.” I mean, both travel and education can help each of us become better and more virtuous people, but I’ve seen enough “ugly American” style travelers (both domestically and abroad) and also enough half-assed students to know that the benefits of travel and education depend entirely on how each of us individually process and apply those experiences.
Further, travel (and education too) is undeniably a mark of privilege in that both require time and money. Obviously, different kinds of travel require different amounts of time and money, and the tourism I’m able to do now is at least more elaborate (if not better) than what I was able to do when I was in my twenties. There’s a reason why so many people wait to go on those big European vacations until they are closer to retirement.
But mainly, I think Collard is wrong in two crucial ways.
First, she makes no distinction between the different types of travel, which for me is very problematic. In both the essay and the interview, Collard uses her own experiences of a trip to Abu Dhabi and a visit to an animal hospital caring for falcons as evidence to the empty miserableness of travel. But as she makes clear in the interview, Collard travelled to Abu Dhabi not “for fun” but for a conference– that is, for work (she’s a Philosophy professor) and not exclusively for pleasure– and she went to the falcon hospital despite the fact that she describes herself as someone who “does not like animals.” So you sign up to go to a falcon hospital? This just doesn’t make sense.
The reasons for travel define the traveler’s role. When Annette and I visit our extended families, we are not tourists, even though these trips require many hours of car or air travel and usually hotel stays and a lot of eating out. I very much enjoy spending time with parents and sisters and in-laws and the like, and I’m looking forward to upcoming trips at Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, too. But these trips are not vacations for fun; these trips are obligations.
My work travel is probably similar to Collard’s in that it doesn’t happen that often and I can usually get some more personal pleasures out of the experience– as I did recently when I went to California. But these carved out personal times are also not the same as a vacation, and for people who have to travel a lot for work, I have to think that the distinction between different types of travel are even more stark.
In contrast, the vacation Annette and I just went on was entirely for our own pleasure and amusement. It’s different from going someplace you don’t really want to go for work (even if you do find free time to look at falcons), and it’s different from seeing your siblings and parents and the like. You’re making the trip not as a part of any responsibility or obligation; you’re making the trip because you thought it’d be fun.
Second, Collard is setting the bar way too high. Collard borrows the definition of tourist from an academic book which describes a tourist as someone “away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” That strikes me more how I hear a lot of people who prefer describe themselves as “travelers.” For example, while tourists wait in line and pay a lot to ride in a gondola for 15 minutes; travelers watch and scoff. Tourists take pictures of all the major sites as proof they were there; travelers take pictures that are less identifying and more suitable for framing.
Personally, I’m a tourist. While overseas, I don’t think I have a choice since no one in any other country is going to mistake me for anything other than a dopey white American dude. I can’t pretend that I’m just hanging out in Dubrovnik at a cafe table under a giant umbrella like the locals, especially since all the locals from surrounding areas are the ones actually working in this cafe (and working in the gift shops and the Game of Thrones tours and hauling in all of the cases of wine and soft drinks and hauling away all of the empty bottles and cans).
But again, Collard wants too much from tourism. As a tourist, I do want to see and experience different things, real, (re)constructed, or even sometimes completely contrived (in the form of things like roadside tourist trap attractions), but I don’t necessarily want to change. For me, a lot of the experiences of tourism (restaurants, tours, museums, architecture, vistas, sounds, etc.) are similar to the experiences of media. I certainly have been changed as a person in small and large ways by specific books or movies or songs, but that’s not something I demand or expect every time. “That was pretty good” or “That was fun” is usually enough; even “That was weird” or “Let’s not do that again” can usually be enough. And really, it’s the broader experience with tourism (or media) and not a specific trip (or book) that changes my perspectives and experiences in the world.
Ultimately, as Collard points out in the interview, travel is fun, and (she says) she doesn’t want to talk people out of doing it. I think she just wants people to be, I don’t know, a little less smug about it. That’s cool.
If 2020 was horrible and 2021 was, I don’t know, what?, then I think the best description of 2022 was “shows improvement.”
My first prediction of what was to come in 2022 (I made in that last post of 2021) turned out to be wrong: we did not go to the MLA convention in Washington, D.C. because Covid numbers (oh hi, Omicron!) were through the roof. MLA’s approach to dealing with Covid was remarkably reasonable. As I understand it (from what my wife said since she was the one participating), the conference organizers told folks if they still wanted to present f2f they could (because it was too late for MLA to cancel the whole thing), but if people wanted to present electronically and via synchronous conferencing software, then they could do that instead. All the panel chairs/organizers had to do was give the MLA a link to how they were going to do it. In my opinion, that was a smart way to schedule and adjust a conference during Covid: let presenters figure out their own synchronous conferencing software instead of putting all the presentations and materials in a junky content management system behind a firewall. I wish my field’s conferences had taken this approach. Anyway, Annette did her presentation via Zoom with a typical conference audience; D.C. would have to come later.
January was the start of Annette’s and my own faculty research fellowships, and for me, that meant doing a whole lot of interviews of folks who had earlier participated in my “Online Teaching and the ‘New Normal'” survey, which is about the experiences of teaching online during Covid. I ended up doing around 37 or so of these interviews, and I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to analyze the pile of transcripts I’ve got. The sun rose and I took a picture. Travel included Annette going on a trip with friends to Puerto Rico and about at the same time, I went down to Orange Beach, Alabama where I met up with my parents and my sisters to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday. Movies included the kind of forgettable Midnight Alley and the rest of The Beatles documentary Get Back!
February was work stuff– interviews and also some other writing, but also working off and on on my CCCCs presentation. I had been very much looking forward to going to the f2f conference in Chicago in March 2022, but that was (prematurely and wrongly, IMO) cancelled. I continued to make bread. Did more interviews. Saw (among many other things) Licorice Pizza and The Big Lebowski for about the 90th time.
March was the CCCs Online, which was, um, unpleasant. I think this post from Mike Edwards (where he does quote me, actually) sums up things fairly well. Here’s also a link to my first and second posts about the conference. I won’t be attending this year because (for like the fifth time in a row) the theme for the conference has nothing to do with the kind of research and scholarship I do. But that’s okay. Maybe I’ll go again someday, maybe I won’t.
March also took us on the road to the Charleston, South Carolina area to do something that got us out of the too cold for at least a while. We stopped in Charleston, West Virginia on the way (gross) and then spent a night in Durham, North Carolina to catch up with Rachel and Collin and a lovely meal out at a French restaurant they like. Then we spent a week at a condo on Seabrook Island. It was a pretty good get-away: we got some work done (we both did a lot of reading and writing things), went into Charleston a couple times (meh, it was nice I guess), went on a cool plantation tour, I attended (via Zoom) a department meeting while walking on the beach one nice day, and we did have some good food here and there too. It was all nice enough and I don’t rule out going again, but it wasn’t quite our thing, I don’t think. I started working on this Computers and Composition Online article based on my online teaching survey (more on that later too). Among other things, watched Painting With John on HBO, another season of Survivor, rewatched The French Dispatch.
April and more interviewing, more working on the CCO piece, and starting to work on the Computers and Writing Conference session. I was originally going to go to that (it was in Greenville, NC), but life/home plans got in the way. So once again I was online, and also once again, it was “on demand,” which is to say that I also ended up presenting to the online equivalent of an empty room– not the first time I’ve done that, but still, a group like computers and writing should do better. I posted my “talk” here. I’m afraid I will probably not be able to be there face to face for the 2023 CWCON at UC-Irvine; that trip is still TBA, though those organizers seem more committed to hosting a viable online experience. In April, I saw probably the best movie I’ve seen this year, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and listened to (or started listening to) a book by Johann Hari called Stolen Focus which I’m going to assign in WRTG 121 this coming winter term. Started doing yard stuff, Annette got a kayak, I baked still more bread. Oh, also saw a movie called Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway that was bonkers.
May and more interviewing, more working o the CCO piece, the CWCON 22 happened (I wasn’t as involved as much as I should have been, but I did poke around at some other “on demand” materials that were interesting), started planting stuff in the garden, started golfing some, ate a fair amount of asparagus, etc. And then at the end of the month, we went up north to stay at a fantastic house on Big Glen Lake. We were planning on going back there in 2023, but after a series of events I don’t understand (was the house sold? is there a problem with the rental company? something else?), we’re staying someplace different. Stay tuned for early June 2023. Among other things, we watched Gog.
By June, I started having some “interesting” discussions with the editors of the CCO about my article. Let’s just say that the reviewer involved in the process was “problematic” and leave it at that. Eventually, I think the editors were able to give me some good direction that helped me make this into a good piece (IMO), but it wasn’t easy. More interviews, but that was the last of them. There was more gardening, more going out for lunch while Will was visiting, more of “the work,” seeing movies, etc.
July was a lot of travel. We went to D.C.– I suppose because the trip in January was scrubbed– and then to New Haven to see Will, then to New York City via train for a couple of nights (saw our friend Annette, a kind of off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors, and went walking on the high line park and to the Whitney museum), then to Portland, Maine (only for a night– I’d go back for sure), and then to Bar Harbor and Arcadia National Park. It was a really lovely trip. I think I am more fond of the grand “road trip” than Annette is, but she played along. After the cruise (see below), I believe I have two states left on my “having at least passed through” list: Rhode Island (which I figure we can tick off the next time we go out to visit Will) and North Dakota, which might require a more purposeful trip. Among other things this month, watched at least one Vincent Price movie.
August was more travel– and getting ready to teach too. We went to Iowa to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday party, and then (of all things!) we went on a cruise to Alaska. Among the lessons learned from that trip are if you are going to take a cruise for Alaska, you need to go for longer than just the 5 nights we went. Highlights include actually touching ground in Ketchikan, Alaska (briefly) and a stop in the delightful town of Victoria, British Columbia. Then back here and getting ready for teaching again– for the first time in eight months.
September and EMU started up again– at least for about a week. Then the faculty went on strike, which was the first time that’d happened around here since 2006. I blogged about some of this back here. It was interesting being one of the old hands around here this time around. I got here in 1998, and by 2006, I think we had been on strike or close to it twice before, and the 2006 strike was “the big one.” So 16 years between strikes was a long time. It was disruptive and chaotic and frustrating, but also necessary and probably the most justifiable strike I’ve experienced, and we did end up getting a better deal than we would have otherwise. Oh, and I need to note this here (since I will someday look back at this post and go “oh yeah, that’s right!”): One of the things that really seemed to make the administration want to settle things up is that Michael Tew, who was a vice provost and one of the four or five people who run stuff at EMU, was busted for masturbating while he was driving around naked in Dearborn with all of the doors and the roof off of his Jeep. Classy. Anyway, there was teaching on either side of the few days we had off on striking, and it was kind of a rough start of the term for me. I have said and written this elsewhere: it was like getting back on a bike after having not ridden one in a long time in that I remembered how to do it, but I wasn’t quite sure how to go too fast or to turn too quickly or whatever. My students in my f2f class (first year writing) seemed to feel mostly the same way. Among other things, we watched Shakes the Clown.
A word about Covid here: by the end of the first month or so of the semester, and after a summer of travel that included a LOT of potentially infectious places like crowded museums, restaurants, planes, trains, and a cruise ship, and I still haven’t had Covid– or if I have had it, I never knew it (and that’s perhaps most likely). I’m not saying it is “over” or it’s nothing at all to worry about, and I’m fully vaxxed up (and I got a flu shot too). But for the most part, it feels like Covid is mostly over.
October was more work stuff with a trip up north in the middle of the month. It was both nice and not: “nice” because it’s always good to get-away, we caught up with friends who live up there, saw some pretty leaves, had a Chubby Mary, etc., but “not” because the hot tub at the place we rented didn’t work (and look, that was the point of renting that place) and it was cold and rainy and even snowy. And as is so often the case in Michigan, it was stunningly beautiful weather for like 10 days after our trip, both up there and down here. Also in a note of not being over with Covid but just not worrying about it a lot anymore: Halloween was back to full-on trick or treating– no delivery tubes, for example.
November started off with politics, and that turned out great in Michigan, pretty okay everywhere else. Yeah, the Republicans didn’t do as well as they should have, but they still control the House– well, they have more votes. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of “control” in the next year or so. Lots of teaching stuff and work stuff, some pie making, and then to Iowa for the Krause Thanksgiving-Christmas get-together.
