Friday Fragments

Blog: Confessions of a Community College Dean

Last week we lost power for 3 1/2 periods. It was frustrating in all of the little spaces that power outages are forestalling: unexpectedly laundry wasn’t policy options, the lavatory necessitated a flashlight, and indoor cooking was impossible. We got lucky that our neighbors, who have a whole-house generator, made pity on us and ran an extension cord over so we could plug in the fridge; they didn’t is therefore necessary to do that. But even with the fridge range , nothing else was.

Charging electronics speedily became an issue. I was able to keep working at first, working the hotspot on my phone and the battery on the laptop, but you’d be surprised how quickly Zoom calls eat up battery life. I wound up going to the office to get toil done and to blame stuff.

A day or two after the supremacy “re coming back” on, I read an article online about how electric cars are the curve of the future, and they’ll work wonders on climate change. And I imagined, hmm. In a capability outage of several days, an electric car becomes a really expensive paperweight.

Fix the grid, and we can talk about electric cars. With the grid we have? I don’t think so.

—

While on the subject of cars, I recently discovered “Regular Car Reviews” on YouTube. The person who does them is a former grad student in English literature, and it evidences. What starts as a review of a particular car instantly shifts off into digressions about brand-new historicism or his various unresolved editions from high school. It’s a wild assortment of 12-year-old boy humor, gearhead spout, and “I coulda been a professor” philosophizing. I sort of hum through the mechanical duties( “and 250 pound-feet of torque”) to get to the rest of it.

His range is impressive: he has done reviews of food trucks( as trucks ), motorcycles, a Model T, and a Swedish army freight, among others. The Gen X’ers out there may enjoy the reviews of the Ford Fairmont, the AMC Gremlin (!), and the Plymouth Reliant K. In the K car review, he demo in real epoch how long it takes the car to go from zero to sixty. It’s oddly suspenseful.

Still, my nominee for the funniest one is of the 1972 AMC Ambassador Brougham sedan.( “If Dad-get-up-noise was a car.” “It’s like if a multitude of Marlboros achieved self-expression.”) If “youve had” ten minutes to kill and you’re able to crank up the magnitude, it’s worth it. Behold the liberal arts in action.

—

The Boy managers back to Charlottesville in a few days, and we decided we had to at least try to have one summer-vacation-ish day before just leave. So on Saturday we drove up to Cornwall-on-Hudson , northward of New York City, to hike and kayak.

It was glorious. For a good part of a daylight, things actually felt almost normal. We clambered up Storm King Mountain, so appointed because it’s high enough that hurricanes coming up the Hudson get blocked by it, or so we were told. We had lunch in a diner — yes, inside an actual diner — for the first time since at least February. And we kayaked the Hudson with a leader who was the illegitimate child of Bill and Ted.

The sunscreen use, everyone was on good behavior, and everyone even to be maintained with the physical challenges of everything there is. For a era, it almost didn’t feel like 2020.

I didn’t know how much I needed that.

Show on Jobs site: Disable left side circular ?: Is this diversity newsletter ?: Is this Profession Advice newsletter ?: Advice Newsletter publication dates: Thursday, August 13, 2020 Diversity Newsletter publication date: Thursday, August 13, 2020 Trending:

Read more: insidehighered.com