Monday and Tuesday, In The Record Books Again...

Home waiting for dinner. Got my feet up. Can barely stay awake. I suspect that this is the night that I get some adequate sleep. It will be nice for a change. On the other hand, it might be fun to watch a movie or something. I have had my first of two evaluations for the year. I think that I am done with formal observations for the time being, and I am glad of it.

Tomorrow we will sit down and discuss one of our Christmas traditions and how to plan it for this year. Thursday is laundry day, and Friday we will head to Bethel with the dogs for their annual vet appointment. That is my exciting week! I like the way it is shaping up.

Holidays are approaching, and I am grinning at the idea of Christmas songs playing in my head. I am getting excited.

Minus 4...

If this keeps up, it is reasonable to hope that the river will be frozen in the near future. Maybe we will be liberated from our watery isolation soon. All that I know for certain is that it has gotten very cold in the past 24 hours or so. Of course, in another month, these temperatures may very well feel quite springlike...

OK. That's Over...

Today we paid the price for all of the time off lately: seven hours of working in my classroom. Kind of a drag, but the days off were worth the exchange. And good news: only three weeks from Wednesday, we are on a plane out of here. Now I can begin brooding about the weather complications. I know how to keep myself unhappy.

Over And Back Again...

The problem was solved, and we got to Bethel, but not without incident. The company with which we had chartered seemed to be having a hell of a time of it actually flying over and picking us up, so we ended up going over with another company. However, flying was the only viable way into Bethel today, which meant that there were an immense number of flights coming into the airport, and which meant that we took 15-20 minutes to complete a five minute flight. What seemed like endless circles over the tundra made me think mostly about how anyone finds their way around out here. I found even more respect for the locals making a living out of such a challenging environment.

Unfortunately, while we were circling, my two rather more motion-sensitive companions were becoming rather queasy. For my part, I thought the flight was pretty smooth, but I have spent a fair amount of happy time on boats without sea sickness. Finally, one of us had gone through one too many orbits, and was forced to use a backpack as an improvised airsickness bag.

We landed without further incident, and got on with the complex business of Saturday Market, a delicious sushi lunch at VIP restaurant, and a grocery shopping expedition designed to stock me up for my bride's departure for Fairbanks in a week, among other things.

On the whole, the day was a success despite a rocky start, and a quick nap finds us perched by our DVD player, ready to watch Lawrence of Arabia. The thermometer has fallen sharply as the day has gone on, and winter appears to have returned in earnest. Tomorrow, we will be off to school to work, as we are unable to put it off any longer. Three full weeks to go...

Waiting...

Word is that our charter is running about 45 minutes late. Three of us are going to hop over to Bethel for Saturday market and lunch and groceries. Saturday Market is a craft sale at the cultural center, which I wrote about and pictured last year. Then, of course, we were able to get over on snowmachines, which made for an exciting ride over a couple of big pipes. This year, the river is pretty much shot to hell, to the extent that there was a flood watch for the river yesterday, which may still be in effect. Apparently four days of rain and melting in the upper river basin have produced breakup conditions in the area. I just checked, and the watch remains in effect through this afternoon. We had snow and cooler temps yesterday, but the afternoon brought higher temperatures and rain. It is colder again this morning. Stay tuned for further information...

The holiday was warm and cheerful, and dinner was nice, if entirely too caloric. Yesterday was the day that we pledged to work and prepare mightily. We were going to do home visits. We were going to...we stayed at home in our jammies. Truth be known, burnout is probably rearing its head. Busy is a calm day out here, and I suspect that a four day weekend was too good to pass up. It won't be a four day weekend anyway. The seniors did put on a movie yesterday, and that called for a couple of hours at school.

My eval is this week, and after that, it is the rush to the holiday. I should care about the eval, but I don't. Shame on me. One too many observations, I suspect. I would like to do well, but I doubt that any one thing that I do know is going to make a difference all by itself. I either have a body of work that says that I am progressing, or I do not. One hour's observation (read: dog and pony show) will not save me if I suck.

Our flight seems to be on hold indefinitely now, unless it is not. The air service is waiting for a call from the agent concerning runway conditions. Confusion reigns. We were supposed to be gone at 9 am. We are not even sure if we are going anywhere at this point. This reminds me of the all purpose response for all questions in the Delta: "It varies." Or, if you prefer, "It depends."

Kind Of A Cliche,But A Good One...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Getting There...

I haven't gotten as much sleep as I had planned on thus far, but I think that it will work out just fine. There are several relaxing days ahead, more or less, and some things to do that should keep them interesting.

Tomorrow we have a big Thanksgiving feast to which parents and other members of the village are all invited. It should be a big kick-it was a lot of fun last year, and I see no reason to expect differently this year. After we clean up, we are off for Thanksgiving break. Time for nap number one tomorrow afternoon.

Of course, Thanksgiving day itself would be nothing without another nap.

Friday looks as if it is going to be our work day of the weekend. I need to do lesson planning, and a couple of other things as well. We are going to make some home visits in the afternoon.

On Saturday, there is some loose talk about chartering a plane and going across to Bethel for Saturday market, and some dinner as well.

On Sunday, we will rest and get ready for the new week. I may be getting ready for a new role around here as well. That remains to be seen.

Lots to do, and I think that I will start it off with a nice snooze in the near future...

Wet Fun...

No, not that kind...it has been raining here fairly steadily since Friday night. The intensity of the rain actually increased this afternoon. I put the picture up here because, flowers aside, that is what the area resembles. Everything is swimming in water. There is water everywhere. Needless to say, the condition of the river has been shot straight to hell. It is difficult to say when we are going to have enough cold weather to salvage travel conditions on the Kusko. Folks that were commuting to work from Bethel are stuck back there again. A number of people that went up on Friday or Saturday on snowmachine ended up leaving their equipment there and flying home.

Wet, wet, wet...and then we got the phone call. On Saturday, when it became clear that we were not going to Bethel for groceries, my beloved placed an order at the AC store. It was not going to get here until Monday, and today it seemed very unlikely that anyone was going to fly. We got some shipments in, but our orders did not arrive. Or so we thought.

At about 8:00, we got a call from Earl, who is the pilot for the troopers out here. He had landed recently out at the airport and saw a stack of boxes sitting in the rain. We were lucky that he decided to check out the shipping labels on them. Off we went to grab a couple of dollies from the school, and then we walked as rapidly to the airstrip as we knew how, both of us cursing Yute Air all the way. Sure enough, they had delivered our groceries, including several frozen items, and simply left them there without bothering to notify anyone. What the situation would have been by morning is anyone's guess, but the options that I can think of would not have been especially lovely. We also picked up another package that had been left for a friend of ours and brought it home to keep it out of the rain. Great service from an organization that is famous around the delta for it. There are nice people who work there, to be sure. But sometimes the lack of follow-up can be appalling.

The important thing is that we got it taken care of, and we did it together, and we had a laugh about it. The other important thing is that the groceries were not ruined. We now have our supplies for Thanksgiving, and we can celebrate the holiday properly. Who our guests may be shall eventually be revealed, and we can be thankful for home, and hearth, and puppy dogs.

And after all was said and done, we shared another strange little part of life out here on the big river. Now it is time for hot chocolate, and cookies, and eventually, good night.

What Once Seemed Short Now Seems Neverending...

Five More MONDAYS to go...I have to keep reminding myself that this is a short week. (I nearly typed in that it was going to be a shit week, which is too creepy.)

For reasons that are not at all clear, my brain is in panic mode, much like the bad times last year. I am not sure what to do with this mess. 3 A.M. wake-up mode has set back in, and I am pondering a return to melatonin to at least assure me some sleep. I quit the stuff a while back, because I wasn't sure that its long term use was a brilliant idea. But something has to give here, and I don't want that to be me. All that I can think to do is to hold on and wait for the break. There is no alternative that I can see.

Happy To Be The Support Team...

I think that my bride worries herself when I am restless here, which is often the case. Well, I know that she does. I am often very impatient with the bureaucracy and the endless cliches, and the incessant demands, and the lack of meaningful support, at least on the local level. Hell, I am worse than impatient. It drives me crazy. We are talked down to with an endless stream of buzzwords that could have come straight out of some corporate consultant's wet dream. In fact, I believe that they have precisely that origin. I spent a lot of years dealing with supposedly impenetrable language, and I think that this has that beat. The more that I think about it, the more that the phrase "load of crap" comes to mind.

But what she does out here is important to her and to her students. She needed a helper and a support team, and I am proud to try to be that. I am just sorry that she has to put up with my moods in exchange. I hope that the trade is worth it.

Well, That Was Energetic...

I never did make it out of my hoodie and pajama pants today. I liked it that way, if you must know the truth. We have a short week because of the holiday, and something tells me that I am going to focus on sleep for a good part of the next seven days. I feel as if I need it, perhaps due to the number of nights that I find myself in insomnia land.

The weather has warmed up and stayed there since Friday night. The search and rescue people along the river are warning people off of the ice. The trail to Bethel from here, which was opened last Saturday, has now been closed. We are isolated again, at least as far as ground travel is concerned, and there is certainly no way to travel by boat. I am tempted to put the snowmachine back into storage, but most of the snow has already melted today.

I am definitely saddened by these developments. We were going to go out to dinner on Saturday night, but that got put on hold with the weather. Maybe for Christmas. On the positive side, we did get some work done yesterday, and that allowed us to relax today. We were originally supposed to have spent all weekend in training exercises in Bethel. I am not too sad about having missed out on that. I am thinking that I am about trained out for the calendar year 2010. I sincerely hope that we are mostly done with that nonsense until January. Of course, I am aware of the fabulous AKT2 webinar which will be coming up sometime in December, but that is only one wasted hour out of my life.

A gloomy day nears its end, and the dog wants to go out. Regardless of whatever drama transpires in my life, there is always the constant, the pedestrian, the dog that wants to pee on the porch post. I like him a lot.

We Stayed Home And Worked...Eventually

The weather trend started warm last night and stayed that way through this morning. It was still raining when we took the dogs out. Not a situation that boded well for running up the river on skis. Still, we were thinking about what to do when our union president called to make sure that we had made it home safely the night before, and to tell us to stay home, which we were grateful to do.

It still took us a number of hours to summon the ambition to go over to school and do some work, but we did get in four solid hours of planning and copying and filing. I need to tweak lesson plans a little bit, and grade some writing papers, but tomorrow should be relaxing on the whole.

The weather does not sound promising for our staff members looking to get back into the village. There are a number who went off on various missions in the past several days. Rain, fog, and snow seem to be the dominant themes, and ceilings look to stay low. It will be interesting to see who is back in place on Monday morning.

My bride is down at Michelle's house playing with wedding cakes. One month from Monday, we will head back to the Midwest. I need to keep on top of my gradebook, and my records as the weeks fly by toward the end of the semester.

Flung Into The Air...

Well, she is at it again...that is right, my wife is yet again trying to kill me with a snowmachine...first, she tried to run us into a gigantic pipe, then she followed the directions of a mysterious character and jumped into a large ice ridge, depositing both of us on to the ice in abrupt fashion. This, of course, after a certain someone criticized my driving earlier in the evening, which only resulted in our safe, dry arrival in Bethel, despite my having to leap enormous watery fissures in the ice surface.

OK, now for the truth, which is pretty close to that. We did get dumped, and I did get us there in one piece. The river road was pretty good, for the most part. There were a couple of interesting parts, but nothing horrible. I did request that my wife drive the home route, because she knows the back ways around Bethel better, and I do not see as well in the dark.

As for the evening in question, I think that Joe had the wiser idea, when he went to the high school to watch his son wrestle. I wish that it were not so. We did a lot of the groupthink exercises that we inflict upon our students in the name of "best practices." It is an education union, but really...I question the utility/necessity of tying up a bunch of busy people for the entire weekend for this. I could be dealing with my more immediate reality and doing lesson plans.

It is late and we are both weary, but we did get up and back, and we might again tomorrow. But the weather is warming, and it was raining when we left Bethel. What conditions are like in the morning remain to be seen. A good night's sleep sounds like the thing that I would like most in the world right now.

Back Home Again...

Well, that was hectic...two days of the speech competition, followed by a teen dance, and a flight back across the river this morning, so that I could teach school. We managed to get the laundry done and even got the snowmachine out of storage and tooled along down by the river. There is some overflow, which is inevitable, but it looks pretty good overall. Joe B. told us tonight that he had taken the main river trail to Bethel and back again, and that it was fine. I had heard a rumor to that effect this morning while I was at the district office, and was glad to hear it confirmed. We need to run back and forth Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this weekend, and the main river trail is much easier to deal with than the back way from Oscarville, as I understand it. Life is good.

It seemed as if getting the "car" out of the garage had a salutary effect on our energy levels, and we were kind of euphoric tonight. There are murmurings about a "night out" in Bethel after our training on Saturday evening. It was during all of this that I realized how confining it gets here before freezeup. Maybe my wife is correct, and we really could use a boat, instead of the second sno-go.

The fellas seemed to have a lot of fun at the speech contest, and one of them won first prize in one of the categories. We seemed to enjoy one another's company. When I walked into the classroom today, I was met with applause and cheers. It took a minute for the kids to realize that they were not being cool and for some of them to start booing. It was still nice to get back. Now all that I have to do is clean up, and I think that that is what I will spend part of the day doing tomorrow. We have other things to do, but they shouldn't take all day.

I am thankful for my wife, and my friends, and my home. That is for starters...

Speech!

I am sitting here in the lobby at the Bethel Regional High School, waiting to see the results of today's first two rounds of speech competition. Silly, giggly, giddy kids are everywhere. Running, jumping, playing "ninja." Playing Rubik's cube, for God's sake. I haven't seen a Rubik's cube since Carter (Reagan? the first Bush?) was president. Some friendly teachers milling about.

We have been doing some version of this or another for most of the day, and we will do it all day tomorrow, before the big pizza party/awards ceremony/dance tomorrow night. As I write, kids are getting judging results from another series of speeches. Mostly they seem to just be having fun. I don't see a whole lot of trauma in the expressions in the room. There is some disappointment, but it doesn't seem to represent the end of the world.

At the risk of sounding dopey, this is the sort of little break that I could use about now. Different people, people enjoying themselves, positive attitudes. A nice change of pace. I am grateful for it. Thankful, even. It is that time of year.

9 Degrees...And It Feels Like It...

There is a real bite in the air tonight. Of course, I am sure that it has nothing to do with my proclivity to walking around without a coat if I am making short trips or taking the dog out quickly. And I am well aware that in a short time it will be much colder than this, much, much colder. But it is now, and I find it to be rather chilly for now.

We are off, I believe, in the morning, and on our way to Bethel. Me and two high school boys and the speech competition. Two days of peace, love, and forensics. My poor bride is probably blanching at my lack of sufficient reverence. It should be fun, and I will get to sleep on a classroom floor for two nights.

Monday is done-five left to go before Christmas. We just keep rolling along, and the school year along with it. I am looking forward to seeing people that we have not seen since August. I actually am just looking forward to seeing some different people. Variety is what I am talking about. I like the people here just fine. They have been great to me, and have taken us in with open arms. But I want to see my family for the holidays. It has been a rough year for many of them, and I would just like to see them with my own eyes. It is nearly time.

Minimal Reportage...

The laundry did get done, and so did some work. There was pie at the Jungs' house, and a little football, at least the kind that you can get on the computer. We tried to remember the last time that we had anything that could purely be called fun, without any aspect of work thrown in. August came most immediately to mind. Some fun will be nice to have...

OOOOOOOH, that was nice...

What a wonderfully lazy day. I did get some domestic chores attended to, and I am currently awaiting the outcome of some Saturday night laundry, but the day was wonderfully unfocused. We did not even get out of bed until 9:30 this morning. It feels just like what the doctor ordered. I will work tomorrow, but this one was well worth it...

A Nice Friday...

And the mellow evening is a nice cap to the day. I am happy to see that my kids are reading, especially the new graphic novels that the boss bought for the library. The students actually seem excited about getting their noses into a book, and that is far different from last year's situation. A couple of my girls are reading Out Of The Dust, which we read last year. I was just doing some selections of it as a read-aloud, and they asked me if it would be OK if they just read the whole thing. Needless to say, I was more than happy to oblige. I have another student who got his hands on a prose compilation of Greek stories, including versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I have a modern translation of the Iliad that I would like to share with him. I have been reading about some different things to do for reading, and I am thinking about doing a Friday poetry slam, where people could share favorite poems in front of the class.

We had a staff family night at the school, and we went for volleyball and pizza. My bride is still over watching what appears to be developing into a slumber party at the school with the kids from Fairbanks and some of ours. It was a week with lots of points of tension, but a lot of things that went well, too. On the balance, I would have to rate it positively overall. Maybe I will stick around a while, now that I think of it.

This place needs some love and vacuuming tomorrow, and I have lots of school things to get done as well. But I don't have to get up to an alarm clock tomorrow, and that is great as far as I am concerned...

Another Thursday...

A busy one, and pleasant. I have washed our new flannel sheets, and if I get this done quickly enough, I will slip them onto the bed tonight. If not, there is always tomorrow.

My bride is off steaming with her pals and the visiting teacher from Fairbanks. We already took her students to a birthday feast and to the church, where Father Vasily was kind enough to give a little tour and some explanations to our visitors.

Now I am just hanging around waiting for her to return. I am excited that tomorrow is Friday. I am going to have to get some work done this weekend, because next week is the real speech tournament, and I am really going. Later in the week, I will be going to Bethel for LKNEA rep training. And then, at last, we will have Thanksgiving. Ah, blessed rest-for a few days at least.

Sleep...

Sort of, and sometimes. I feel tired a lot, but I don't seem to sleep especially well out here. I find myself visiting with screen and keyboard in the quiet, private hours in the middle of the night. I also find myself so mentally exhausted upon arriving home that other things that ask for attention often are neglected. I should be doing more, but the energy is not there. I did get in my first spinning session in a while yesterday. This congestion that we have been passing around the building has made me able to get through the day, and little more. I hope that a little break will refresh my reserves.

Contradictions...

OK, contradiction, anyway. One of my darlings was kinda hateful yesterday, and signed off with a question about why I come to school anyway. Her dad apparently called later to say that the teachers must have been setting her off. I was kind of confused, because for a number of reasons I probably to treat her with some kind of gloves, if not kid gloves. I think that my reasoning on this line is defensible.

She had in-school suspension today, and I took some work down for her to do. She smiled sweetly (she is very capable), and handed me a letter apologizing for being disrespectful, for being disruptive, and for asking me why I come to school. Very nice. She settled down to a fairly productive day, and was even working in after school with me before she went over to do Yup'ik dancing with some kids in the gym, including our visitors from Fairbanks. We will see which version shows up tomorrow. She is a very nice kid who just happens to be in a rough patch in her life right now. It is nice to work with her when she is happy.

I suspect that more observations are in store for me as the season fast approaches for the Site Administrator review. I am tired of being goggled at and just want to go on Thanksgiving break. It is close, so close that I can nearly smell the turkey, and I hate turkey. So close....

The Hump Day Cometh...

Another one in the books. We did a webinar for AKT2 this afternoon, which was plagued by technical difficulties on my end of things that kept me frantically trying to get on line for nearly fifteen minutes. Gosh. For reasons that I have not heard explained, our internet service has been glacial lately, especially during the day. I am glad to have the access in the evenings and weekends to keep in touch with my family and friends, but I do think generally that the idea behind the whole thing is to provide educational access during the school day. I tried to access our online service associated with our science curriculum, and that was glacial as well. Both of these things happened while I was plugged in with an Ethernet cable, not surfing off an airport. It is kind of weird.

Our webinar convo was about assessment, a subject that I have heard discussed a lot this year. We had a presentation on formative assessment at my second-year inservice, followed shortly thereafter by the same presentation at a district-wide inservice. I recognize the value of the conversation, but this one has been done to death this year. It was nice to hear from some of my comrades, though. It is good to hear from the folks that I went through training with.

Tomorrow is the good old hump day of the week. I am hopeful that this one will not be memorable. I tend to prefer it that way. Of course, I guess that it could be memorable in a good way, which would be really cool. I am just not that comfortable with the downside risk, I guess. There is always something interesting to do or to try, so that does keep my old brain chugging along...

I Am More Delicate Than Some People Realize...

It must have been the stylish way that I survived the car crash thing, but some people around this house apparently think that I am invincible. All that I can say in response is "ouch." This reinforces the notion that I had after last year that I should not ordinarily engage in the stick pull contest with teenage boys, unless they happen to be in junior high. One more time-ouch. I hope to be on the road to recovery soon.

On the more positive side of the athletic coin, a group of four old, out-of shape staff members managed to beat a team of young, athletic junior high kids at volleyball today. It must have been because they outnumbered us. They were awfully good at mouthing off when they scored a point. The rest of the time, they were mostly awful. Not a lot of team play there. There was a lot of finger-pointing and blaming, however. Aw, shucks.

Monday was otherwise pretty much Monday. Real flaky. And that was me. Don't even ask about the kids...on the other hand, it is over, and there are only six more to go before we get a break.

The visitors from Fairbanks managed to get across the river, and the visit is in full swing. I am not going to the speech competition in Bethel, as it is apparently not happening until next week. I will be going then. That will make next week really interesting, as we have no students on Friday. We get another inservice instead.

Doesn't matter-we are getting close to Thanksgiving, and that is what counts. That may be all that counts at this point. I do have to say, however, that this year is going along much better and easier than last year, and I am hopeful that I may actually make it in this business eventually.

Monday!

Six more to go after this one is done-let's get busy!

Awake...

This is getting old. At least it's familiar...

Ice Fog...

The reason that they closed the airport in Bethel tonight, at least for awhile. The kids from Fairbanks, fortunately, were able to find some available hotel rooms over there. There aren't many, and it can be a real challenge if anything is going on over there. They will be in, perhaps, in the morning.

We were waiting over at the school, and gave up and cleaned up and went home. As we were walking the dogs shortly thereafter, we could see the lights of an airplane as it flew by in the darkness...

Cleaning House..

OK, it was about time for some serious effort along those lines. We have been trading off some sort of respiratory crud for the past couple of weeks now, and neither of us has had an abundance of energy. So things sort of piled up. A lot.

The good and bad thing about a small living space is that it cleans up and clutters up fast. The lasting problem is that there is no place to put stuff. We live in a duplex designed for one. There is a second bedroom, but it is full of dog kennels and totes. Thank heaven for the Alaska suitcase. Of course, as winter approaches, it is necessary to keep the winter clothing tote open and reasonably close at hand. You never know what you might need to grab on the spur of the moment.

Today will be a busier day-we spent yesterday cleaning and relaxing. Lesson plans must, of course, be completed, and my desk needs some tender attention. We have a group of exchange students coming in from Fairbanks this evening, so we need to prepare for that as well. I will go to Bethel on Tuesday, weather permitting, with two of our students that are competing in the district speech competition. I need to do sub plans as well...

Ironically Enough...

What do we do on a long Friday afternoon? Fill time, mostly. And that is mostly what we did. And we did. And we did. I know that it is important to review one's practice. But the endless, cyclical navel-gazing that we have engaged in this year has been, in my humble opinion, mostly a waste of time. It seems to me that the process never stops, but I am at a loss to identify its function outside of the creation of yet more busywork. All we ever do around here is talk about school, for god's sake. It is pretty much all we talk about even when we are not in school. Enough, already. But, of course, it will never be enough. We can never talk about it enough. We can never stop reflecting and making up yet another dumb document to fill out, email somewhere, and never see again.

There was a name for this kind of process, once upon a time. It was called the circle jerk. And so, it comes again and again and again. Sisyphus, anyone?

Sleepy...

A long day, fun in parts. The tapping count game in math class, for instance. Being able to work one-on-one with a student for an extended period of time. Reading with a couple of kids. Doing a pizza delivery fund raiser with my sweetie and the seniors. Those were the fun parts. Giving a hug to the little girls who ran up to me in the cold, yelling "Mr. Hicok, we love you!" It makes some of the less fun parts more tolerable.

There are plenty of those, but not enough to ultimately matter. I realized clearly tonight, sitting in the school taking pizza orders, that I love these kids, and not just the ones who make my life easy.

There is little enough of that in some of their lives, and it is not my place to decide who is to blame or who should be condemned. It doesn't matter. The important thing is to be there and to try, again and again if necessary. It is not always fulfilling. There is not necessarily a happy movie ending, as a wise teacher of my acquaintance puts it. If they can live happy and some kind of normal lives, and if I can have any thing to do with it, even in the smallest way, that is enough.

I am still periodically congested, and I get really cough-prone at night, but I suspect that I will survive. And seven weeks from tonight, I get to take a little break and see some dear family and friends for a while. I look forward to the chance.

Snotty..

My nose, and our attitudes. The day after Halloween was not a lot different than might have been expected. There were apparently a plethora of behavior issues in the school generally. It was a day to get through, so we did. My cold is back, which is not much of a surprise, given the fact that we all hang around each other and give this stuff back and forth. Lots of crankiness generally today. I hope that it proves to be a one-day event.

I have been in contact with my homeowner's insurance company, and hope to have some response on the question of what they will offer to settle the claim in the next day or two. The adjuster said that they have been getting a lot of theft claims recently. Kind of a commentary on the times in which we are living, I suppose. A lot of people seem to be getting pushed against the wall, and aren't responding as we might hope that they would.

Most of what I read these days suggests a prevailing mood of despair, or at least depression. Out here, things have been tough for years. I do not sense the same kind of reaction to failed expectations. I don't get the sense that the expectations were the same at all. Maybe there is a sense of entitlement elsewhere that does not exist in the same way out here. It is hard to tell for sure.