We had rain yesterday. We also had a tornado warning, and while my lovely bride grabbed one of the cats and took shelter in the basement, I looked for the other cat. I kept an eye on the radar, an eye on the windows and a third eye looking for the cat, which explains why I couldn’t find her. She came out promptly when the worst of it passed. And the worst of it was atmospheric rotation. And a lot of rain. The three nearest weather stations recorded totals of 4.49, 5.31, and 7.11 inches. Whatever amount we had it was enough to show you where water can come in. And so Monday we’ll have some people out for quotes on how to keep the rain outside, rather than inside. (We have a slight chimney problem. We also have a slight backwash problem in the basement. Having fixed one of those already I know that one will be easier to correct.)
I watched a garbage can float down the road. Someone up the hill hadn’t retrieved theirs for the day and so the thing, lid open, just drifted down the hill on the water. It lost its balance right near the bottom, and fell onto its side in the road. By the time I went to the window to look at it again it was deep into the neighbors’ driveway.
Someone’s going to miss that in a few days.
I had an abstract due today. OK, it is was due Monday, but we’re in that time of year where you are still trying to be ahead of things. So I wrote a 300 word abstract. This takes more time than you’d imagine, but isn’t overly difficult. The problem, as ever, is anticipating what your audience needs and wants, and figuring out where they can make an inferential leap. If your finished paper is 8,000 words and you have to sum it up and tease it in 300, you’re necessarily leaving some things out. It takes a few drafts, is all. And that takes a little time.
Also, there were emails to navigate. Next week email navigation will turn into email negotiation. Then there’s plea bargaining, desperation, and ‘Won’t you please just leave me alone?’ But, if you stay on top of it, you can avoid that for the most part. I stay on top of it by treating my inbox like a To Do list. If I don’t want to To Do it right now it just To Sits There. Or, sometimes, if I don’t want to To Do it I put a particular email in a To Folder, where it will no doubt sit long past its usefulness or my recollection.
I send more emails to my inbox than anyone else does. It’s littered with links to something that might be useful in this class or that class. My recent innovation has been to sort them all into folders for a given class. Now, when I need a new AI example, or an anecdote about, say, stadium operations, I just have to go into that folder. The problem is my innovation isn’t innovative enough to let me sort the emails in the folder accordingly. There they sit, chronologically, waiting for me to sift through them, often trying to guess the subject matter by URL. Perhaps next summer’s innovation will be organized email folders.
Should I start a list of next summer’s projects already? Should I even have a list of summer projects?
Anyway, there is a lot to do. Now, not just next summer. I did a little of it today. My classes are prepared for next week, I think. (One more pass on Monday, the hustle begins on Tuesday. The hustle actually begins Monday. I have to write my opening note to the online class. I have to print out rosters. I have to make sure everything is squared away for the week. I have to settle into the new weekly schedule I’ve sketched out. Basically, Monday I’ll be an entirely different person.)
Try explaining this to the cats, who just want their weekly feature — the site’s most popular feature — and also pets, and treats. Phoebe has an idea about those treats.
And here she is, in the new tunnel, thinking tunnel thoughts, I’m sure. We have lots of places where the purpose seems to be I hide here but it is never clear on what we’re hiding from. I’m sure it is instinct, and who are any of us to argue with instinct.
Just look at how handsome this face is. If Poseidon put as much effort into not being a jerk as he can put into being charming … well, we wouldn’t think he has personality issues.
He can be very sweet. Very demonstratively sweet and peaceful, which makes his random outbursts seem all the more rude. Also, he’s a big fan of this book. I’m not sure if he’s a fan of my reading it, however.
Here he was, laying on it last week. A book on a lap might be a highlight for a cat. Who are any of us to argue with instinct?
Speaking of that book, we return now to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It’s excellent. Highly recommended.
There are reasons some of the disquieting stories from the Northwest Territory don’t make it into school books. You couldn’t tell the story of Fort Sackville and think there are any good guys at all in the Revolution. Good grief.
Another one of those stories would be the Sullivan Expedition against four British-allied tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. Congress told our man George Wahsington to do something about it and he, who had fought indigenous people before, had ideas on how to do this. He also was probably ready to go on the offensive after having spent so much of the war dodging and daring the British. So in the summer of 1979 he sent Gen. John Sullivan on a particularly grim task.
Sullivan started late and perhaps didn’t fulfill his objectives to the utmost, but was nevertheless effective. The Haudenosaunee, allied with the British, had raided some white settlements in upstate New York. A few doen people were killed in one such raid, some 300 are estimated to have died in another, at the Battle of Wyoming Valley, and late in 1778 some 30 people were killed in a horrific manner at Cherry Valley. and this was in retaliation for that. It had become clear that offense was what was needed on the frontier. In all, funds were appropriated, orders were given, men were mustered, Sullivan (eventually) stepped off with about 4,000 men. When it was over some months later, his force had razed some 40 villages, with thousands of people trying to survive as refugees and no crops to feed themselves. The estimates suggest that a few hundred natives were killed during what we would today call combat operations, but perhaps several thousand more would perish from disease or starvation.
And now historians debate the thing. Was it genocide? Some, but not all, have said as much.
There are monuments to the Sullivan expedition, dozens of them along the route Sullivan’s men marched. There was a stamp issued 140 years later. By the bicentennial, in 1979, things had become more subdued. There are also reenactments.
You can read some of these details here. But you should also rush out and get Atkinson’s book. It’s terrific.
