Matching Tracksuits

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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…

Horse and Snow

Monday 22 July 2024

Taken with Nikon FM, 28mm, on Ilford 25 ISO film

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.

Signs

Thursday 11 July 2024

We’ve been traveling back-and-forth to Florida quite a bit lately, which means we drive through almost the entirety of South Carolina each trip. Along the way, I’ve noticed yellow and red billboards along the highway with one of two messages. when simply says, “Jesus, save me.” That’s a fairly straightforward. Evangelical sentiment were used to seeing signs like that in the audiences of football games though many of them are simply the John 3.16 signs, which reference the Bible verse proclaiming that God sent his son to save us. there are certain logical issues I have with such a sentimental sense. God and the sun are supposed to be the same being thanks to the doctrine of the Trinity, and the person doing the condemning from which we need to be saved is God. This means that God sent himself to save us from a consequence that he himself was going to implement. In short, God sent himself to save us from himself, which makes absolutely no logical sense. But that’s not the most interesting sign. The most interesting sign is this one.

Critics of prayer often say that many prayers amount to nothing sentimentality: “Bless this food” does nothing to the food. It’s just a nice sentiment.

With Catholic prayers, some of them have a feeling of being nothing more than magic words. This is especially true of the prayers that the priest will say during communion, prayers which allegedly transform a bit of unsavory bread and overly sweet wine into the body and blood of Jesus, I used to think that price of prayers didn’t really have this magical word sense, but this sign makes me wonder.

Yet here with this particular formulation, we see real magic words. If this sign is to be relieved, all one has to do is say these words and salvation is a done deal.there’s nothing on the sign to indicate you actually have to mean it. There’s nothing on the sign that indicates that you have to hold this belief for any particular period of time. There’s nothing on this side that suggest you have to do anything or change anything. All you have to do is say the magic words.

No, I understand that the individuals who sponsored this sign don’t really think that it’s just a matter of saying these words. And the same font with the same color scheme there are science that simply say repent usually a few miles after the sign. Of course, repent in this case usually means For them to take a conservative point of view regarding LGBTQ issues, physical issues, death penalty abortion, and all the other right wing issues. Repent for them basically means become a republican, and a far right Republican and usually at that.

However, you can’t get all of that on a sign. What’s most important is to get them to say the words and maybe just maybe they’ll actually mean it. Or if they don’t mean it now perhaps mean it later.

There was an article in the Charleston Post and Courier about this which the AP picked up and carried. Apparently at least one of the individuals sponsoring the billboards spends 50% of his salary on them. He suggested it’s money well spent if it keeps even more in person out of hell. I find it strangely ironic though that Jesus in the Bible seems to suggest a different way ofspending one’s money: to sell all and give what give all the proceeds to the poor as he told the rich young man in one of the gospels.

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Jacksonville Meet, Day 1

Tuesday 9 July 2024

Today, we were back in Florida, less than a week after we left it last. It was a quick trip, though: the Girl and I drove down yesterday afternoon (hence the nearly-non-post of yesterday), arriving at close to ten in the evening and going to bed shortly afterward. We were up at six to make it to the meet by a touch after seven for L’s first event: javelin.

Her total was simple: finish in the top eight to qualify for nationals at the beginning of next month. Sadly, she missed the mark, finishing ninth.

It was disappointing, but in some ways, not completely unexpected: she hasn’t thrown in three weeks, and she used her shoulder a lot on a daily basis a couple of weeks ago at volleyball nationals, so it was a bit sensitive today. By the time she was heading up for her second throw, she was already massaging that shoulder.

We head back to Jacksonville Thursday afternoon for her second event on Friday morning, the high jump. We’ll see how that goes, but she already went started preparing, heading out for jumping practice right after we got back from Jacksonville this afternoon.

Camp Departure 2024

Sunday 7 July 2024

The Boy left for camp today. He’ll be gone until next Saturday. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Typical parental concerns: on the one hand, I love seeing him grow up, seeing him not only willing but excited about a week away from us. Not that he’s excited about being away from us, per se, but rather that he’s excited to be going to camp and the prospect of being away from us for a week doesn’t worry him or dampen that excitement.

On the other hand, I know how situations like that can stress him out. Or could stress him out. Perhaps he’s growing out of it, but I’m not: I’m still stressed about him being gone. Not about him being gone, but not being in the near vicinity to keep an eye on things.

“You can’t be there for them all the time. You have to let go.” That’s the common wisdom. The common parental expectation.

But that doesn’t always allay the worries…