Yesterday, we traveled to Minneapolis. It was the day after a big snowstorm, and the only thing worse would be if we arrived a day earlier. Sidewalks haven’t been cleared, roads are covered with slush, and we tried walking around town. It wasn’t fun. Two foot tall piles of snow on the path made it more of a mountain climbing adventure.

One positive, though: I’m still suffering with this nasty deep-seated cold, erupting occasionally into hoarse coughing and snotty horrible sneezes. I found a cure! It’s only temporary, though, but it is good for a few hours relief. We went to an Indian restaurant and I ordered a vindaloo with a couple of volcanoes worth of hotness. It worked! My sinuses were thoroughly cleared out, I could breath unimpeded, and my throat was quivering in terror — if it coughed one more time, I was going to order another raund.

I am sorry to report, though, that around 2am the slime had oozed back and repopulated every cranial cavity. I may have to do it again.

The disease afflicting our house has now descended into the quiet hush phase. Our throats are sore, it hurts to talk; my wife waved good morning to me, we haven’t said a single word yet. It’s a bit eerie.

Don’t bother to visit, it’s like popping into a monastery where all the monks have taken vows of silence. You will get only gestures, and you will be turned away.

It’s a Masque of the Red Death scenario. I’ve been happily free of infectious disease for the last few years, thanks to social distancing/masking and excessive caution. No colds! No sniffles! No lying abed with the blinds closed all day! It’s been nice. All that has changed.

Earlier this week, my daughter and granddaughter came to visit and brought back memories of when our kids would bring home all kinds of crud from school every day. Mary has been hit hardest with snot and phlegm and goo and sore throat and muscle aches, and has been laid flat for a few days. I got a sniffle. This is an unusual situation — usually I’m the one lying in bed crying and weeping, and she has to take care of me.

She’s starting to feel better now, she says, and of course we’d be happy to have the cheerful little plague rat come back again. Even if she was beating me at checkers all the time. She didn’t even know how to play the game until I taught it to her!

She was probably oozing brain-eating viruses the whole visit, and that’s the only reason she could win.

Hey! What are you talking about, “Bring back personal blogging”? We never went away. But OK, I agree with the general sentiment.

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.

I want to go back there.

You’re all still here! You didn’t go away, neither did we.

People were way more connected to each other. There wasn’t a whole lot of anonymity because anyone could look up your WHOIS information and see who a blog actually belonged to. Trolls were simply banned from your comment section, never to be heard from again.

When Twitter came along, it started as a “microblogging” platform where people would go to put out short, frequent missives as opposed to the longer, personal pieces we put on our blogs. It, too, evolved, as these things do, and now it is the hellscape we at once loathe but can’t leave alone.

There’s some fancy rose-colored glasses there. People may have been way more connected, but there were far fewer people involved. Just the fact that the author is taking it for granted that users would know about WHOIS is revealing — there’s an assumption that everyone knew how to use a command-line tool.

Twitter was an improvement for the majority. You didn’t need to know anything, you were required to keep everything short and pithy, so you didn’t even need to really know how to write. You just had to blurt. Blogs require a bit more engagement and a longer attention span.

The best blogs gave us a glimpse into the life of someone we “knew” online. Good storytelling, coupled with a lively discussion afterward, kept us coming back for more day after day.

Twitter threads just don’t do the trick — and neither will Elon’s alleged plan for allowing 4,000-character tweets (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an immediate block).

Personal stories on personal blogs are historical documents when you think about it. They are primary sources in the annals of history, and when people look back to see what happened during this time in our lives, do you want The New York Times or Washington Post telling your story, or do you want the story told in your own words?

The optimistic perspective might be that as Twitter fades, all those people who had grown accustomed to communicating online will shift back, to some degree, to blogs. Which are still here and have been here all along.

My daughter and granddaughter went back home the day before yesterday, my wife caught the kiddie crud from them (I’m a little sniffly myself), and today I have to start prepping to teach genetics again. How’s your year starting out?

She’s wearing us out. Yesterday we tried feeding the granddaughter to the triceratops in the science building.

Unfortunately, we didn’t take into account that the triceratops is a plant-eater, so she easily escaped. We don’t have a T. rex in the building.

Also, it’s a fossil cast lacking in digestive fluids or masticating muscles.

I am supposed to be allowed to spoil my grandchild. It is a time-honored privilege that I have been denied.

I went on a walk with the granddaughter and ended up at the coffeeshop, where I had promised to buy her a cookie. She picked one out — chocolate chip, of course — and we sat down, and she said, “I have to athk my mom if I can have a treat.” And she didn’t eat it! We had to bag it up and bring it home, where her mom did say she could have it.

It’s the Marshmallow Test on steroids! I am totally foiled in my cunning plan to totally spoil the child before she goes home.

Also, what a weird kid. I’m beginning to question my grandpaternity.

Our daughter and granddaughter are here, and the little one is in control. She has plans. Yesterday we played veterinarian for hours. Last night, before she went to bed, she wrote down her agenda for today: she wants to build a castle, and put name decals on her scooter, and feed some spiders, and ride her scooter (I helped with the last one, because she was using the list to procrastinate bedtime.) She put checkmark boxes next to her plans.

We’re in trouble. She’s a little girl with a clipboard, and an agenda, and she gives orders. I’m hastily scribbling this in our bedroom before she wakes up. I fear the daylight.

This could be trouble. Three of my favorite girls in the whole world — Mary, Skatje, and Iliana — are converging on my house this afternoon for a little holiday get-together. I hope they don’t ask me which one is my favorite, because I don’t have a good comeback at hand, and I’d rather not have an unfortunate encounter with Philoctetes.

I got my present the other day, shipped to me by my niece, Rachael.

Are you dazzled? I know, let’s get real: if I tried to sell that at a garage sale, I might get $5 for it, and that would be entirely for the frame (it is a nice frame). It’s worth a lot more to me, though, and it’s entirely because of its history. It was passed on to me after my brother’s death, and he had in turn inherited it after my father’s death, and he had rescued it from my grandmother’s house after her death. Grandma had several paintings by this artist hanging in her home, proudly displayed in good frames, and I remember them from my childhood. They were the most prominent pieces of art in her home.

The artist was my father.

He had painted these watercolors when he was a teenager, which would date them to the mid-1950s, when he was pretty much a stereotype of the classic 50s teenage troublemaker — hair slicked back with Brylcreem, on the football team, letterman’s jacket, tinkering with cars or playing hooky to go fishing, all of that. But also…he wanted to be an artist. That was the dream. He painted, he sketched, he had standards. Unfortunately, his family was dirt poor — his father had died when he was very young, and he and his 5 siblings were raised by their widowed mother, who worked picking fruit in season, and at a cannery in town out of season. They lived in a shambles of a house (but I loved that house!) right next to the railroad tracks, and apparently on the wrong side of those tracks.

I don’t think he ever even considered the possibility of art training. Once he graduated from high school, he went straight into the work force. He worked on the railroad, as a logger, as a mechanic and gas station attendant, as a water meter reader, as a custodian, as anything he could do between stints at Boeing — Boeing was, of course, the big kahuna in Seattle, with the best pay and benefits, but they were also a fickle lord, with regular waves of layoffs. It was a tough struggle to raise a family as a blue collar worker in an unpredictable economy, and he was sometimes reduced to working two jobs to make ends meet. Art? It doesn’t pay the bills. There was little free time, either. He’d get home at some odd hour and flop his aching back down in bed, to try and get a little rest before going off for another shift of hard labor.

Sometimes he’d ask me to read the comics to him while he rested, but he was picky. Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant or Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan, that was the good stuff, although he also liked Turok, Son of Stone. It had to have good art, none of that talking animal stuff. Some evenings the whole family would just sit at the table and draw, while he showed us how to sketch people and do perspective. My brother continued that practice for years after he moved out and started his own family.

He never did get any professional training in art, and had little opportunity to practice it, but I think it made a difference to his family. We grew up with a working class appreciation of the arts and an aspiration to do more than just work for a living, since we could see how the demands of labor had deprived our father of his dream. We never fell into the trap of anti-intellectualism or turned into Fox News zombies — I’ve got a remarkably progressive and open-minded family, and never had those uncomfortable holiday get-togethers I’ve read about. I credit that to a father and mother who were reasonable people who never fell victim to the irrational fears and paranoia that has poisoned so many American minds. We could just look at the walls in Grandma’s house and see that there were greater depths, depths that they were deprived of exploring, in our family of poors and manual laborers and struggling lower class workers.

That’s what the painting means to me. Don’t saddle people with your biases about what their class should be like, because they’re human beings who might surprise you with their hopes and ambitions. Also, damn, but the demands we impose on working people and our own biases have deprived the world of great potential.

Have a good Christmas this weekend, and remember that the best gifts you can give are mostly intangible.