Matching Tracksuits

Dinner

Wednesday 31 July 2024 |

The Girl has decided she needs to be cooking more, to learn how to cook more than mac and cheese and quesadillas. She’s done chicken alfredo a couple of times, but when K asked L to cook dinner tonight and suggested she just make the tried-and-true chicken alfredo, the Girl demurred. She wanted to try something new. Something different.

Something Asian.

Long, long ago, when K and I were dating, she wanted to do the same thing — try something new, something different. She decided on something decidedly non-Polish, something from southern Europe. She chose lasagna.

Mother and daughter both chose pasta. They both had similar issues with the pasta. And in both cases, those they cooked for ate the dish with enthusiasm.

Signs 3

Tuesday 30 July 2024 |

During our three trips to Florida this summer, I noticed a lot of interesting billboards. I also saw a sign on the the trailer of several semi trucks.

I’m not sure what that image is supposed to evoke. There are hints of Uncle Sam draft posters in the overall design, but the wording would have been something like “I want you to pray.” Additionally, given the right’s strong feelings about the necessity for clear gender boundaries, this person seems unexpectedly androgynous. Finally, there’s the feeling of aggression inherent in the shadows and pointing finger. It’s like it’s daring you not to pray.

Christian Virtue Signals

Monday 29 July 2024 |

The bruhaha about the opening ceremony in Paris offers an instructive insight into the minds of fundamentalist Christians. It was everywhere. On friends’ feeds:

Post A

Post B

It was on public figures’ streams:

Post C

Post D

It was on Polish streams:

Post E

Even the parish K attends got into the action:

And those public figures not posting about it were commenting to the media.

Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop with a large online platform, said,

France felt evidently as it’s trying to put its best cultural foot forward, that the right thing to do is to mock this very central moment in Christianity where Jesus at his last supper gives his body and blood in anticipation of the cross.

It’s presented through this gross or flippant mockery. France which used to be called the oldest daughter of the church. […]

France has sent Catholic visionaries all over the world. France whose culture and I mean the honouring of the individual, in human rights and of freedom is grounded very much in Christianity. […]

What’s interesting here is this deeply secularist, post-modern society knows who its enemy is, they’re naming them, and we should believe them, because this is who they are.

But furthermore we Christians, Catholics, should not be sheepish. We should resist, we should make our voices heard.’ 

Daily Mail

Trust me, Mr. Barron, your voices are heard. Some of us are just a little bemused at the ignorance behind it all.

What makes more sense? That the organizers would choose to satirize a Renaissance painting or portray something distinctly Greek, specifically the Feast of Dyonisus?

Whatever their intent, the

[o]rganizers of the Paris Olympics have apologized for any offense caused by a skit in the games’ opening ceremony Friday that featured drag stars in what many viewers saw as a parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous “The Last Supper” masterpiece, a similarity that drew the ire of Catholic leaders and conservatives like Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.

Forbes

They also pointed out that

[r]ecreations of “Last Supper” are not uncommon and have not often been met with the same kind of backlash as what followed the Olympic opening ceremony. Popular TV shows like “Lost,” “House,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons,” among others, have posed their actors in similar photos, and art with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Freddie Mercury and Bill Murray portraying Jesus are readily available online.

Forbes

Heck, the MAGA people who are so upset were decidedly less upset about a different recreation of the painting:

At its heart, though, I can’t help but see this as an example of Christian fundamentalist ignorance and hypocrisy. They are all “America first!” in everything else, but here they’re willing to refuse to support American athletes who had nothing to do with the planning of the opening ceremony because in their ignorance they’ve confused the Feast of Dyonisus and a Renaissance painting which isn’t even part of any religious canon at all. Davinci’s painting was itself a derivative and unrealistic interpretation.

Birthday Surprise

Sunday 28 July 2024 |

After Polish mass today, the women of the choir (which K more or less leads) had a birthday surprise for her.

“I’ve never had so many flowers,” she said when she got back home..

Saturday

Saturday 27 July 2024 |

K spoils us — she really does. We all get up to freshly made racuchy topped with homemade blueberry preserves. Why? Because we asked for it? No — because K just wanted to do something nice for us.

In return, L trimmed some of the hedges at the side of the house. To be honest, it wasn’t really in return: K asked her, and L obliged. I’m not even sure she had any of the racuchy because got up late and ended up going out for lunch with her friend.

“But I’ll gobble them up later,” she assured me.

They’re still in the fridge.

Still, the Girl did the trimming, and even put aside her teenager I-know-everything-why-in-the-world-are-you-explaining-this-ness and let K walk her through what she wanted.

In the afteroon, Ciocia M came for a visit (her girls — L’s and E’s cousins for all intents and purposes — are still in Polska) and we went for a walk in our favorite park.

A lovely day, in other words.

In the evening, we watch some replays of Olympic events — beach volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, the individual time trial, and some tennis.

Friday Insanity

Friday 26 July 2024 |

I’ve had the matchingtracksuits.com domain registered through the same company for as long as the website has existed, which is around 19 years or so. I’ve had the actual website hosted at a few different providers, but for the last few years, I’ve used Host Gator because their cloud VPS hosting is a good value for all I do online. I also have my school site hosted here (ourenglishclass.net) as well as a Moodle installation for class content (no URL provided because only students have access). I decided it’s about time to move the domains to the same company that provides the hosting (it made sense to keep everything consolidated), so a week ago, I began the process of changing domain registrars for two of the three domains we have (kingary.net being the third). It finally went through today, and much to my surprise, it broke the two websites. Completely. And totally.

So I spent most of the day going through using phpMyAdmin to move all the necessary records from one MySQL database to another. One of the tables has 519,000 rows. Another table has a more modest 49,736. But the catch is this: I had to do massive search-and-replace operations on every table to make sure it would continue working when moved everything to the new database that now runs this site.

The upshot is this: while the site might not look all that different than it did 24 hours ago, what’s going on under the hood is completely different. It still uses WordPress, to be sure, but it’s a totally different installation in a totally different directory with a totally different database.

That was the day portion of Friday.

The evening was so much better. We took K out for her birthday dinner: she chose pho, which we all love. When we came back home, we played a family game, something we’ve never played before: a Polish game called Pytaki.It’s likely made with younger children in mind, but the premise is as simple as can be: there’s a bag of questions from which you choose a random question and then talk about it. They’re questions that show you how well you know the other people (one for K was, “What is the best way to make the person on your right happy?” she answered immediately: “Cigar and whiskey.”) or give you a chance to share a little about yourself (“What’s your favorite movie.”) Some where about family history, like “How did your parents meet?” A lovely game that we played for an hour and led to a lot of much-needed laughs.

K’s Birthday

Thursday 25 July 2024 |

Today is K’s birthday. She is more beautiful than the day I married her, forever youthful and filled with smiles and grace.

We’ll be having a celebratory dinner tomorrow — she wants pho — but today, we went to Furman for an informal concert as part of their Music by the Lake summer series. Since today’s performance included Rhapsody in Blue (?!?!), it was held indoors: a piano wouldn’t handle South Carolina humidity very well at all.

Working on the Room and the Trail

Wednesday 24 July 2024 |

The Boy and I spent a little time working on my classroom. I head back in a week; the kids go back in two.

I was toying with the idea of changing things up in my room, but everything has been as it is for about the last six years and it works — so why change it?

Sequence

Tuesday 23 July 2024 |

“Let’s play a family board game tonight!” the Boy declared. The Girl was at track practice, and the three of us were going to head out for a mountain biking adventure before it began raining. But the Boy still wanted to do something together.

He wanted Monopoly (as always); we agreed to play Sequence.

It’s a game we’ve played a lot over the years, and somewhere, I have a picture (and a post) of us playing it with Nana and Papa.

Perhaps this will be a game we play together when the kids come back home for a visit…

Elderberries

Saturday 20 July 2024 |

We dedicated today to our elderberries. I clipped the clusters from the bush in the late morning, and K spent a lot of time pulling the small black pearls from their clusters as I worked and after I finished when I joined her.

And when I say we dedicated today to the elderberries, I mean the whole day. As I type (and work on my safety videos for school), K is finishing up, filling jars with fresh elderberry preserves.

We ended up with something like who-knows-how-many kilos of berries (was it four? five? I can’t recall) which will make who-knows-how-many pints of preserves.

The other task for the evening was helping the Boy get his room straightened up, a Sisyphean task if ever there be one. We ended up throwing out quite a bit of stuff, an act that initially stressed and frustrated the Boy a great deal.

Surrendering even the smallest trinket is difficult for someone as sentimental as E. I can understand that, though I hope eventually to grow out of it myself.

Signs 2

Thursday 18 July 2024 |

During our trips to Florida this summer, I noticed several interesting billboards. Many of them were theological; one was political:

Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences

This notion is perhaps the most loaded statement I’ve read in recent memory. It’s certainly the most terrifying.

From the perspective of those who financed the billboard it is a statement about the 2020 election and the ever-persistent myth that somehow the Democrats committed election fraud. The complete lack of evidence for this is no matter: those who hold this view simply acknowledge non-facts as evidence. Those of us firmly grounded in reality are simply and willfully ignorant.

But just what are those catastrophic consequences? Again, from their perspective, it’s multifaceted. First, there’s simply the idea that an unelected individual is currently holding the nation’s highest office. Were that true, it would be catastrophic. But there’s a second notion hiding in that statement: what are people who believe this — in their own eyes, good and God-fearing patriots, one and all — to do about it? A recent article in Newsweek points out that there are renewed calls from the far right for civil war:

[Trump’s post on Truth Social] warning that 2024 will be the new 1776 is in line with other threats of looming civil wars in the U.S. made by Trump supporters following the New York jury verdict on Thursday which found the former president guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money trial.

Newsweek

In Boston University’s BU Today, staff members write,

A recent Washington Post headline says: “In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war.” The story references, among others, Stanford University historian Victor Davis Hanson, who asked in a National Review essay last summer: “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Another Washington Post story reports how Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King recently posted a meme warning that red states have “8 trillion bullets” in the event of a civil war. And a poll conducted last June by Rasmussen Reports found that 31 percent of probable US voters surveyed believe “it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years.”

BU Today

The billboard, then, suggests to informed drivers that a civil war might be the necessary outcome of such Democratic duplicity.

The attempted assassination of Trump will only add to this.

What politicians need to be doing now is talking us back from this brink. Biden and the Democrats seem to be doing this. What will Trump do? Will he try to quell this anger or will he stoke it? I don’t think there’s any doubt about how the man will react.

Those of us who warned friends and family around us who supported Trump in 2016 that he is a dangerous man continually feel more vindicated, but right now, I’d rather be proved wrong.

Semi-Lost and Found

Wednesday 17 July 2024 |

It was like finding cash in a coat pocket, but better: old pictures I’d never posted here. These are from 2014 when we spent the week at Deep Creek.

E is now twice the age L was during this vacation.

Our Children

Monday 15 July 2024 |

Where did these kids go? How could the relationships between us grow so relatively complicated?

It’s my common theme, though I don’t always express here why I’m thinking about it…

Sunday

Sunday 14 July 2024 |

A beautiful morning

Gives way to a lovely afternoon with blueberry pierogi

Summer eating at its Polish best.

Return

Saturday 13 July 2024 |

The Boy is back from camp.

“What do you want to eat?” we ask.

“Anything — it’s all better than camp food.”

Especially K’s homemade blueberry preserves.

Przetlumacz »