Four Things

Social Media  

For as long as there has been Facebook and as long as there has been Twitter - and more recently as long as there's been Instagram there has been a tension between being accessible to students and preserving both their own and my own privacy.  My Twitter is unlocked.  When a student friends me on Facebook I typically accept.  Generally I don't accept requests from summer students as they are somewhat younger.  But my regular year students are adults and it has been my STOP to accept those requests.  My Instagram is open.  As a weird hybrid between Facebook and Twitter I really can't wrap my head around who I should be following and who should be following me.  For a little while last Spring access to the Frosh common Instagram account became a cause of sorts with my finally getting access after the Critical Path project.  I am apparently locked out again, but I don't have the oomph to follow up.  Yesterday was a lousy day to have access to students on Facebook.  It is often a really good backdoor into student discourse.  In this particular case I probably would have been better off without.  No way of knowing if it was directed to me personally, but I was part of a "they" called ignorant and insensitive among other things.  I should meter my reading better.

We Just Don't Know

There's a lot of angst in the community about what things are going to be like in the Fall.  On top of that there's a significant amount of anxiety around what the Spring is going to be like at the school.  The truth of the matter is that we really just don't know.  The situation in terms of information is nearly identical between the student body and the faculty.  That information vacuum is filling with speculation and misinformation.  Much of that comes with accompanying attribution of intent that is just science fiction.  I have my own ideas about why things are going one way and not the other, but I am doing my darndest to keep those thoughts between Mrs. TANBI and myself.  You won't be reading them here.  We just don't know and we're just not going to know for quite some time.  Based on what I've observed to date even if we did know something today we might not know again tomorrow, and then again the day after that.  Today there was discussion of a Spring production calendar and I had the thought that there ought to be an announcement that the next Spring production calendar would not be released until mid-October.  At least that would let some of the air out of the balloon as folks wouldn't think there was a calendar and we were just keeping it a secret.  When we know something we say something.  We just don't know.

Books

We're trying like crazy to get out of the storage unit we rented when we redid the basement last Spring (like Spring of 2019).  A not insignificant percentage of the volume involved are moving boxes full of books.  Carton after carton of scifi and fantasy books of mine and a far more diverse range of titles that are my wife's.  In the old house there were a lot of book shelves and so all of these books had a home (although some of them actually made the trip here from my folks house in Chicago).  When we moved into the new house we decided we weren't going to make bookshelves a prominent decorating feature, deferring the decision of what to do with them until we solved the basement.  Now that the basement solution is in process there doesn't appear to be a significant amount of space for books.  So now we need to figure out what to do with all these books.  Due to the new normal the library hasn't been taking donations, and anyway, like so many things, this volume was a significant investment at purchase.  It feels like we ought to be able to recoup something at liquidation.  A long time ago I brought four cartons of books to a Half Price Books and left with $6, so that doesn't seem fruitful.  I've been thinking about a sidewalk book sale: $1 per paperback, 3 for $2 & $2 per hardcover, 3 for $4.  Mrs. TANBI thinks that's a wasted effort.  One of the local churches does an annual book sale.  I'll have to look into their donation rules.  Anyone want a bunch of books?

Where is the Soup?

For a very, very long time now I have been on a 5:2 fast diet that limits my calories two days a week to 600 overall.  Also for a very long time a staple of my getting through this limitation has been Progresso Chicken Tortilla soup.  A can of this soup is 200 calories, so the soup with a handful of saltines fits into 300 calories which is the meal allowance I am working with.  For more than a year my dinner twice a week was a can of this soup.  But now I have a problem: the world is out of soup.  The tortilla soup is not available to begin with at the local grocery chain.  I reup at Target.  But for the last, pretty much as long as I can remember now, neither of the Targets that are close has had it on the shelf.  I actually just looked and it says it is there at the SLiberty store - but truth be told I have seen it on the app and then gotten to the store and had it not be there.  Canned soup is apparently a staple of everyone's pandemic planning, and the Chicken Tortilla is apparently pretty good soup to more people than just me.  I've expanded the plan to cover more varieties.  The governing principle is that the whole can needs to be less than 300 calories.  There are multiple Progresso varieties that meet the need as well as a few Campbell's Chunky soups.  But even with a broader list results on a given trip to the store are hit & miss.  I have questions...  Why can't stores keep up with demand?  Why can't I order a case?  The Target app won't ship to my location.  Amazon has soup by the case, but a case is $30, for 6 cans; in the store that  would be closer to $12.  That's a healthy markup.  Gonna have to look for more options I guess.