Blog

I’m bumping up the version of Hugo from 0.92.0 to 0.101.0 and specifying nodejs 14.x instead of 11.x at Netlify, so I’m moving my content to a new structure from the older version. Please let me know if things are broken.

We went to Massachusetts at the end of July for the first long trip since the pandemic started. It was for a memorial for my wife’s mother who had died of Covid-19 in May 2020 at age 89. She caught the disease in a New Jersey nursing home, and by the time she was admitted to a hospital there didn’t seem to be much they could do to help. Arrangements were made to transport her remains to where her long time home had been in the Berkshires where she was interred with no one to witness, which seemed a great lack. The church was unable to allow a memorial service until just now because the small group we invited, a few dozen family members and friends, could receive vaccines. My wife and I spent four days there, two days around Boston where we flew in and the rest at the western end of the state a few hours away.

It’s been years since I have worked at a place where I’ve had an office of my own. In fact, only two of the eight jobs I’ve had since finishing schools have featured this

My first job teaching physics at a college was the only one where I had an actual room with bookshelves and a desk and a phone of my own. I also had a lab with benches and cupboards and could ask the departmental secretary and the departmental machinist for help. From time to time I would be supervising a student or two on research, never as a teaching assistant, unfortunately, since the grading load turned out to be more than I liked, and I served on my share of faculty committees as well. Of course I didn’t really know what I was doing, not for a long time. I had office hours where students could come around for help, though of course few did.

I’m starting this personal blog as a successor to my previous blogs:

• Heavy Heavy Water
• Poor Poor Thing
• Frabjous Times
• evilHow
• Worlds in the Upper Right Hand Corner

I have some ideas of stashing some of my tech work here, links to my creative stuff, pointers to things I’ve found on the web, and other miscellaneous items. I have been on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and Linkedin for a while now, but it seems like social media has mostly resisted the idea of sharing content outside of their walled gardens. It sure makes it hard to find the things I have shared in the past without heroic efforts. So someplace where I can put up whatever items come to mind and control on my own is attractive.