It's Wednesday...

Wednesday is not normally a happy day, because I have all the work of Thursday ahead of me, plus more teaching on Friday. But tonight I am happy because I have finished my first real grading marathon and I survived. Many of my students are unhappy with me, but that's the teaching life. I think I was pretty fair, as fair as I could possibly be.

Tomorrow I will get up early, get the boos off to school, and work all day on class prep -- but I will not have to grade. The next thing I have to grade comes in on Friday afternoon, so I will have another terrible weekend. But tomorrow should be a nice day.

I haven't been posting any pictures on the blog recently -- mostly because I haven't been taking any! Must work on that. I love having our years recorded with photos, and I mustn't miss a month.  But so far this September I have only taken a couple of photos, of Rocket Boy's birthday party, and those didn't turn out well. The only one with people in it is blurry, but I'll post it anyway.

Do you see all the vegetables on the table, over to the left? Rocket Boy and the twins went on a school field trip to a farm where they picked a whole lot of vegetables: carrots, onions, beets, peppers, corn, potatoes, eggplant... all these heavy fall vegetables. This is only a few of them. Honestly, if it had been left to me, most of these would have ended up in the compost bin, because I'm just not cooking much these days. But Rocket Boy very sweetly cut up a whole lot of them, which I then agreed to turn into a vegetable soup. And he's made all sorts of things himself: sauteed carrots with garlic and beet greens, mashed potatoes, French onion soup. He's quite a good cook when he tries.

Back to the birthday party: Rocket Boy hates his birthday and this was a particularly bad one for him, so we didn't do much. However, he got several cards, and of course it's not a birthday without a cake, so the twins and I picked out a nice little chocolate number, which we covered with candles (see blaze in photo above). Here's the cake up close:

There are at least 30 candles on that thing! The heat was intense, and many of the "letter" candles fell apart quickly.

A week later we decided that one chocolate cake had not been enough, so we got another (but I didn't photograph it). For that cake, the twins chose a candle shaped like a question mark, since neither Rocket Boy nor I have been willing to tell them how old he is. Let them live in ignorance a little longer.

I have been thinking a lot about age recently, as I'm spending so much time with eighteen-year-olds. They are so young, and yet they can vote (not that they will, necessarily). They are also busy doing a lot of other things, such as ingesting illegal substances (pot's not legal till you're 21), fornicating, and staring at their smart phones. I can't criticize them -- my life at 18 was not much different (except for the phones). But I'm still weirded out by the whole idea of these young children doing whatever they want to do. Adulthood comes so quickly, really.

On my way to one of my classes I walk past the swimming pool that the university recently put in. Sometimes there are people sitting around it in revealing swim attire; always there is music playing. For some reason, the music is almost always from the late 70s or early 80s. One day last week the song was "Jane" by Jefferson Starship, which came out in 1979, when I was either a freshman at UC Davis (January-June) or a sophomore at UC Berkeley (September-December). I mentioned to my class that if there had been 35-year-old music playing around the pool that I used to swim in back in 1979, it would have been from 1944, i.e., World War II era songs. Bing Crosby. The Andrews Sisters.

The students didn't understand.

I think of a piece my Uncle Bob wrote once, about age. I think it was the infamous "I Slept with a 90-year-old Woman" story, but I can't find it right now, so I can't quote from it. He talked about how his wife, who was 90, could remember her grandfather quite well, who had been born.... hmm, I don't know when, since I can't find my copy, but it might have been during the Civil War? (Barbara, you find your copy and tell me.) (OK, Barbara got back to me and the piece was actually called "Connections." My aunt's grandfather was born in 1847 and he died when she was 28, so she knew him very well. She herself died in 2009 at the age of 95. And of course we all knew her very well.) I've also been thinking about my own grandfather, who fought in the Spanish-American War back in 1898, because I've watched a bit of the PBS Ken Burns film about the Roosevelts. I learned quite a lot about Teddy Roosevelt and the Spanish-American War one night. But that was 116 years ago, and yet my grandfather was involved. My grandfather, who I vaguely remember.

I just googled 1944 popular music and learned that the song "Mairzy Doats" was a big hit that year. My mother used to sing that to us. "Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey," etc. Once in a while I sing it to the twins.

A few days ago it occurred to me that if all goes well, Kid A and Kid B will be starting college in exactly 12 years. At which point my current students will be 30. And completely out of date.