Hospice

I went shopping in Mansfield last night. It was like visiting a cancer ward.

One stop was Office Max, for school supplies. There were four customers and two employees in the store. The woman ahead of us in line was buying a laptop computer, and I guess I should be pleased (after all, it was probably the only one they would sell this week), but it did take a while. The cashier seemed to still have her training wheels on. Apparently they just weren't used to selling anything that expensive.

Forward to Macy's to get an umbrella. Two customers were in the men's department (and the other obviously wasn't serious), so I had the undivided attention of the sales lady, who spent a good fifteen minutes showing me the finer points of the merchandise.

Forward to dinner. Jared wanted Chinese, and I wasn't too keen on that idea, so a food court seemed like it would work. Nope. The Richland Mall Food Court only has two eateries left: Chuckie Cheese Pizza and a forlorn Chinese booth (at least Jared got what he wanted). The food had obviously been prepared a long time ago, and there were only two things to choose from.

It was all really depressing. I feel as if I should take a tax deduction on everything I spent there for "charitable contribution."

Start of Semester

Things actually went very smoothly on the first day. At Akron, I found a parking space after only half an hour of looking (pretty typical for the start of the fall semester). Everything works (in terms of computers and so forth). I did lose an adapter for my Apple laptop, which meant an emergency trip to the Apple store in Cleveland, but that wasn't really a big deal.

Altogether, things look pretty fine.

Except for football.

At Ashland, football is the engine that drives the entire campus. It's easily the most important thing going on, both in terms of capital investment and numbers of people involved. And, like most schools, Ashland has a policy that varsity athletes get an excused absence when the team is on the road. So I got an e-mail recently with the list of players leaving next Wednesday. Sixty-five players, listed in random order, three across, first name before last name. And I'm supposed to compare this list with my forty-five students. I complained, and found out that they are not in random order. They are listed according to jersey number! Now that is helpful.

Not.

BOGO

My current nomination for "Irritating Coined Word of the Year" is BOGO.

Usage: On signs outside businesses we see "Widgets! BOGO Free!" It stands for "Buy One, Get One." It's been around long enough that we now see signs that just say, "Lipstick BOGO."

I never really did understand why they can't price that as 50% off, but it guess they do it to move old inventory. I mainly see BOGO on signs outside drugstores that are trying to unload cheap cosmetics.

Sort-of Church Dinner

Sigh!

We've got another of those bring-your-own-food church dinner things tonight. I'm always tempted to just stay home, and I usually give in to the temptation. Yes, they solve a lot of problems:

• Our church potlucks never had enough food. If a family of four brought a side dish, they would bring exactly four servings, then load their plates liberally from all the serving dishes. And there were always freeloaders who brought nothing.
• Conservative churches are very big on food-fad people. One cannot eat any sugar. Another only can live on mangosteen juice. Yet another is convinced that the chiropractor's list of forbidden foods is gospel. So the BYOF (Bring Your Own Food) approach works for them.
• And since this church cannot possibly organize anything complex, the BYOF approach means that (at most) someone is going to have to organize paper plates, weak coffee, weak lemonade mix, and a clean-up crew.

It's sad, though. Any sharing of food is strictly ruled out. If someone shows up and has misunderstood the BYOF rule, he is welcome to drive to Taco Bell and get something to bring back. That's incredibly dreary. Incredibly unwelcoming. And it all makes me wonder why I don't just have my own food at home, then show up for the program.

End of Blackadder

I've always enjoyed the Blackadder series on YouTube. It's Rowan Atkinson being a whole lot more intellectual than ever was as Mr. Bean—lots of quick, scathing wit. If you're not familiar with the series, the basic idea is that Atkinson's character (Blackadder) begins as a member of the minor nobility during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. His descendants (and the descendants of his idiot companions) keep reappearing down through history.

Anyhow, the series was enough fun on YouTube that I got a copy of a DVD from the public library. It's apparently a pretty popular series, because the only one I could find was the very last one, set during WWI. Great fun. Blackadder kills (and eats) a carrier pigeon that was bringing orders to attack—and learns that the pigeon was the general's only boyhood friend (thus getting himself sentenced to death by firing squad, only to slip out of that one at the last second).

In fact, that's the whole point of the series. Through unlikely turns of events, Blackadder is always finding himself at the point of disaster, only to escape at the last possible second. He's the only thinking person on the screen; his manservant Baldrick is the walking definition of "numb" and his lieutenant is the kind of idiot who keeps writing war plans to an uncle in Berlin.

All was great fun until the final episode. The soldiers are ordered to go over the top, and Blackadder's attempts to wiggle out keep misfiring. Long-time fans keep expecting a last-second solution to his problem, but then things go all pear-shaped. The men begin talking about how their sunny hopes for a quick end to the war have been destroyed. Almost everyone they know or care about has been killed. (Historical fact: something like one in every eight men in WWI survived uninjured. In most units, over half of the men were killed.) Out of options, they finally go over the top into no-man's land, armed with rifles and handguns, and the final credits show a field of poppies in a field in Flanders.

Lost the House

I guess the sale of Mom's house has hit me harder than I expected it to. The deal finally closed Tuesday, and I've been in kind of a funk ever since. Yes, I did get a lot of the miscellaneous small stuff from the house—a green chair, a mirror, and some plants. No, I didn't particularly like the way Mom decorated things. She tended to be a hybrid of 1950's chic (she really did like aluminum drinking glasses) and Better Homes & Gardens antique collector. But dammit, the place was my home base for my entire adult life. It was a tasteless split-level in a suburb that pretty much defined the Washington sprawl, but it was also a place of natural beauty, of enormous silences, and of long memories. The spare room of Mom's new apartment just isn't the same, even with furniture from the old place.