This would be my attitude.

Apparently, I am in perfect health, a veritable Greek god, perfect in every way. Except…I had to point out to my doctor that I have these terrible flare-ups of joint problems. Just the week before my physical, I had been painfully crippled by inflammation of my Achilles tendon — suddenly, with no warning or precipitating injury, my ankle was swelling up in all kinds of strange lumps and bulges, and I was scarcely able to walk.

This hits me fairly often, I can count on being incapacitated at least once a semester with this nonsense (note that, as a professor, “incapacitated” means still having to hobble in and teach, no matter how much physical agony I’m experiencing.)

This was not a good thing. It’s not what I would call healthy at all.

I complain every time I visit the doctor, but it’s one of those things that will fade away with equal suddenness, so it’s hard to treat. At this last physical, I pushed a little harder, and the doctor decided that we need to do more to get a diagnosis. I went into the blood lab and yielded a quart or two so they can carry out more extensive tests.

All week now, new test results have dribbled into my mailbox. All the usual stuff, like blood pressure, cholesterol levels, a full metabolism panel, etc., etc., etc. are in the perfect range. Uric acid, serum creatine, etc., all good. Thyroid hormones, 5×5. Because I’ve been out in the wilderness more during the summers, they tested for Lyme disease, West Nile, and a whole suite of exotic tick-borne antigens…nope.

If you just go by the numbers, I am like unto Apollo, beautiful and flawless. I don’t think anyone will be sculpting my form, though, and I’m going to remember this when the field season starts up again and my knee swells up like a balloon, again.

(I’ve got it good, though, compared to my daughter Skatje who dislocated her knee on a skiing trip a few weeks ago. Her imminent fate is “Left knee MPFL reconstruction and tibial tubercle osteotomy, open reduction internal fixation of osteochondral fragment from patella dislocation,” in doctorese. It could be worse.)

There were two tragic deaths in Fresno a few days ago.

Jason Phillips, the other half of the Proud Boys associated January 6th Capitol rioter duo called Oreo Express, is dead after drinking and driving for Saint Patrick’s Day and crashing a Tesla. He and his passenger, who also died, weren’t wearing seatbelts.

The details from the news:

Two Fresno men who died in a crash involving a Tesla were identified Tuesday by the Fresno County Corner’s Office.

Jason Phillips, 24, who officers said they believed to have been the driver, and Chase McCutcheon, 32, were in a Tesla Model 3 about 1:45 a.m. Monday when the vehicle collided with more than one guardrail, the coroner’s office said.

The California Highway Patrol said the fatal crash happened on Copper Avenue as the Tesla headed west approaching a shift in the road near Willow Avenue.

The driver failed to traverse the shifting road at “a high rate of speed” and hit the curb, a guardrail and a street sign before the Tesla overturned, CHP said.

The car continued into another curb and guardrail, CHP said.
Neither Phillips nor McCutcheon were wearing seatbelts and were ejected during the crash, CHP said. Both were pronounced dead at the scene.

Let’s see…driving drunk at excessive speed with no seatbelts? I don’t believe in karma, but I do believe that humans can be incredibly stupid.

Apparently, the Tesla did not catch fire.

Spring break is over. I’m heading back to the classroom this morning.

What makes it all sting a little more than usual is that my restful week off was really just a brief interruption in the middle of the semester. I’m only half way through! I should be glad of the reprieve, but today I have to deal with the stress of resuming where I left off.

Oh well. I also spent the last couple of days setting up all of my classes. I’m all ready to go with a lecture on endocrine disruptors, specifically DES and BPA, which at least are interesting. I’ve got so much material here that I’m going to be talking about endocrine disruptors for the next two weeks.

One of the great questions of the Internet Age is, “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” It has never been satisfactorily resolved, but Talia Levin boldly submitted the question to a battery of academics. You know what the result had to be, but you might as well read it just to witness the chaos for yourself.

The one answer I liked was from Mark Crimmins, a professor of philosophy at Stanford.

Any well-defended answer to that would take many pages and encompass so many (great, interesting) issues about language. Still, I’d like to offer something to your reader. If you think what counts as a “sandwich” is unclear or somewhat arbitrary, then you had better examine in that light whatever principles you take to be important about sandwiches. Similarly for “baby,” “woman,” “conscious,” “intelligent.” Are you sure that the (perhaps unclear) applicability of these ordinary-language terms marks what is crucial to the distinctions carved by your prized principles?

Categorical mushiness, that’s what I like. All the definitions are fine, the only mistake you can make is expecting simplicity from complexity.

Today is my 44th anniversary, but I’m not making a big noise about it. You never know, I worry that I might mention the big number, and she’ll look at me with dawning awareness and say, “Well, that’s about enough of that then. Time for me to be moving on!”

I figure if I let her situation slowly ease in, then maybe at some time I’ll mention the years, and she’ll be resigned to it and say, “Might as well stay then, if I’ve been here that long.” Maybe if I hang on to the big 5-O I’ll be safe. You gotta go slow, you don’t want to startle them, or they might just dart away.

You better not mention Hans Kristian Graebener on Twitter — Elon Musk doesn’t like it when you expose one of his favorite Nazis.

Twitter is nuking every single post that mentions the name Hans Kristian Graebener, even in quotes. Everyone that posts it is getting hit. I’ve never seen sitewide censorship like this done specifically on behalf of a neo nazi.

Gosh. He’ll suspend his support for free speech to help conceal a notorious creep? Maybe his support isn’t that deep.

Have they tried calling him Gräbener? It might sneak past some of the automated blocking.

You may have heard of the Upper Midwestern tradition in some towns* of rolling an old car out onto the surface of a frozen lake, and then taking bets on the date that it breaks through the ice in the spring. If nothing else, you might have encountered the practice in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods**.

Sadly, we have had such a tepidly warm winter that the practice was discontinued this year. No klunkers this pathetic winter! I don’t know if there’s even been much ice fishing this year — Lake Minnewaska, which usually has a thriving metropolis on its surface every winter, has been strangely barren. Maybe the fish have been enjoying the reprieve?

*Not every town can do this. The lakes in the immediate neighborhood of Morris are rather shallow — we live in the prairie pothole region, where mostly what we’ve got are shallow wetlands. If we did this, the lakes would be dotted with car roofs rising above the water.

**If you’ve read the book, you’d know it’s for the best, since we also don’t have murdered girls in the trunks of the klunkers.

And that means I have to go into work — a bit later than usual, but that’s my only benefit. I have to go in and feed the animals, autoclave a bunch of fly bottles, and also, because we had a safety audit last week, I have to rearrange some boxes cluttering up the place to provide better access to the fire extinguisher and first aid kit. Today’s the day for doing mundane stuff that I put off because my teaching obligations come first.

The rest of this “vacation” week I plan to use getting one step ahead of lecture prep. It’s not so much a vacation as it is a temporary reprieve.

The photo is not an accurate representation of what spring break looks like in Minnesota. We have no snow, but we do have brisk temperatures and wind. I’ll leave my bikini at home when I walk over to the lab.