A month away, more or less

Took a little unplanned vacation from blogging lately. No particularly reason. Just happened that way.

What happened while I was gone? Nothing earth-shattering. Let's see, some highlights...

We got five new windows and a new back door. I love my new back door. It has nine little panes of glass. We also painted our den, and I made a little floor mat for underneath my office chair out of four square of marmoleum. It all pleases me.

Along those same lines, we installed a programmable thermostat, and have been talking seriously about what it would take to reduce our carbon emissions by 80%, the change generally considered necessary on everyone's part to avert total planetary climate disaster. So now we can keep our house 10 degrees cooler at night. I wake up in the middle of the night and I feel like I'm on a camping trip! All bundled up, with a very cold nose. It feels right.

I decided finally to ditch the PC and buy a Mac. So I drove to the Apple store...and it had closed, that very day, for 10 days. For remodeling. Is this a sign from the universe?

I recovered a stolen car for a local car dealership. The big monstrosity (a GMC Yukon) had been parked across from our house for a couple of weeks, which was weird because the house across the street was, you know, torched in an arson fire. So finally Enrico and I went over there and peered into the windows, and Enrico pointed out that there were still plastic covers over everything that said "REMOVE BY DEALER ONLY." And the only other items in the car were a hacksaw and a set of bolt-cutters. Hmmmm. So I called the dealer and indeed, it had been stolen. Why would you steal a $40,000 car and then abandon it across town in front of my house? I don't understand the criminal mind.

I start teaching a class on Monday, on social activism. I'm looking forward to it, I like to teach. We're going to start with homeostasis and Martin Luther King and Saul Alinsky and Bill Moyer's theory of social movements. Big fun.