Yesterday dawned bright and beautiful; skies were clear, the sun was shining, it was warm, it felt like the start of a fine spring day. Then Mary drove away to help take care of our little granddaughter for a few weeks to a few months, and immediately the gray skies rolled in, the temperature dropped, the winds were howling, and the rain drizzled in. It got cold again. The mice have moved back into the house (the cat is a totally useless mouser, I’m afraid.) And now it’s Monday.

I think I’m going to have to be really mad at Iliana. It’s all her fault.

Oh no! The cuteness defense! I am helpless!

I was talking to a student from the Middle East yesterday — we are eyeballs deep in academic advising, I’m already booked up solid today with more student meetings — and she said she was very excited to be moving to the Midwest in the fall, and getting to experience seasons. Yeah, she’ll get that here. She’ll also get to experience that “oh my god will it never end” feeling.

Now to crawl back into my zoom-hole, from which I will not emerge until 6pm this evening.

“oh my god will it never end,” again.

I do not have any tattoos. I’ve admired many, and have thought of some it would be nice to have, but I always overthink them. The classic “Mary + PZ” on a heart-shaped background appealed to me, once upon a time, but it was a little trite, and I feared that once I put it in indelible words on my skin, that’s when she would leave me. And now, after 40+ years, it’s both trite and redundant.

I also love the art of the Coast Salish peoples, and have a particular salmon design in mind that I wouldn’t mind making permanent, but…I’m white as they come, belonging to the ethnic group that displaced and killed those people. It would be appropriation in the truest sense, so no, I have held off.

So I don’t think it’s going to happen now.

I can console myself with the thought that at least I’m not one of those people who gets stupid drunk and has something ridiculous inked on. Or worse, someone who puts deep thought into a tattoo that is supremely idiotic, like this one.

(Warning: below the fold in case you’re a sensitive classics teacher who cries at abuse of your discipline.)

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Facebook is probably worse than YouTube, since that’s where people gather to overthrow the government and tell each other racist things, but at least it does have the Red Skull Core. That’s a Facebook group where they make memes by putting Jordan Peterson’s actual words into word balloons coming out of the mouth of that Nazi arch-villain, the Red Skull. It’s amazing how well they work when put into that context. Those guys are always complaining about being taken out of context, right?

Second vaccine injection…received. Now I wait a few weeks before I can start grabbing passers-by and kissing them.

(Yuck, you know I’d never do that. Never did it before there was a pandemic, either.)

Prince Philip is dead. I’m sure someone somewhere is sad about it, is the best thing I can say right now.

As many of you know, I live with an evil cat who demands my obedience. But she’s also a weird cat (all cats are weird) who has some predictable behaviors.

Every morning is like Christmas when I get up. She knows I’ll use the bathroom first thing, so she rushes in there, finds a good vantage point, and watches patiently while I pee. Then she runs up and down the hallway because her patience has expired, and while I do pointless things like comb my hair and brush my teeth and put on a shirt, she has to gallop back and forth waiting for me to finish, because the real point of my rising is to give her her morning wet food.

I walk to the kitchen with this annoying beast darting about underfoot, I don’t know why — she could make me trip and fall and break my neck and provide a big mess of meat to gnaw on, but she’s very picky: her cat food has to be fish flavored, and she won’t even touch chicken or beef or long pig (I haven’t tried the latter, though, maybe she has an appetite for it). Once I get to the kitchen, she starts yowling and making strange sounds, as if she’s trying to tell me to hurry up in Human. She’s uncontrollably eager, until I arrive at her plate with an open can of food. Then she goes silent and sits and waits.

I plop a big lump of fishy brown stuff on her plate. She looks at me nonchalantly — she seems to be saying, “What? For me? You shouldn’t have.” She walks a little closer, stops, sticks her neck out and sniffs cautiously. “Really? I don’t know if I should.” She looks at me again. “I’ll think about it. You may go now.” Once I turn my back on her, only then will she charge in and snarf it all down.

She puts on this little act twice a day, because I feed her when I get up in the morning and when I fix dinner for us humans. I haven’t told her yet that I’m not fooled, because if she thought her secret was out she might decide to silence me.