Here's a video of the Boy's spring band concert.
Camping as a Teen
Supporters
Before Biden bowed out, a meme was going around among Trump supporters.
I'm not going to label his followers as this meme does, but anyone who can look at Trump and not see how completely unhinged he is almost all of the time, how uneducated he appears to be, how incapable of critical thought he seems to be -- I just don't understand.
I freely admitted that Biden was showing some mental deterioration. I never worshipped the man: I was only support him to do a job. Many Trump supporters, however, seem almost to worship the man. He literally can do no wrong.
And even if he does wrong they overlook it.
Nationals
Today, the Girl competed in AAU Nationals in high jump for the first time in her life, but it's the fourth or fifth time she's competed in AAU Nationals in general. It's just that before today, it had always been in volleyball.
Unlike volleyball, though, these nationals did not take place a day's drive away. Instead, they were a mere three hours away.
It was also by far the biggest track meet she's ever participated in: three high jump mats with over 50 girls participating.
How did she do? She'd say "Meh" if you asked her that question.
But she placed twelfth out of fifty-one girls.
And of course, no matter how it ended, we're all proud of her and her accomplishments this year.
Dinner
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
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
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
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
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
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.