Greetings, friends. Tomorrow brings that long-awaited and/or widely-detested American spectacle, the Super Bowl. I wrote a bit about American football a couple weeks ago, but, as usual, I have more to say.

The sport, like those other two uniquely American sports, baseball and basketball, dates back to the mid-late 19th Century. Its origins are rooted in rugby, and the sport didn’t really take on its modern recognizable form until the adoption of the forward pass in 1906. The sport’s premier professional association, the National Football League, was founded in 1920.

The modern rules of American football are famously Byzantine, and have been constantly in flux. The core of the current NFL rule book is 88 pages long, and with appendices and revision history included, the whole thing weighs in at a staggering 245 pages. All televised games have a special rules analyst to interpret the game’s finer points for the folks watching at home, whenever an uncommon situation or a disputed referee call occurs. Fans like to complain about the sheer inconsistency of refereeing in NFL games, and not without reason, but with a rule book like that, can you hardly blame the refs?

As an aside, American football is not the only type of gridiron football played professionally. The most notable is Canadian football, which like most things Canadian, is recognizably similar to its American counterpart, but stubbornly different in specific particulars. Examples include the field extending to 110 yards, yielding two 50 yard lines; offenses having three downs to gain ten yards instead of four; offenses being able to have two players in motion downfield at the snap; and a one-point scoring play from scrimmage that I still don’t understand. The overall effect, if you are an American watching a Canadian game, is as if you are looking through a funhouse lens at a football game being played in Bizarroland. The game is the same but somehow uncannily, disturbingly different.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about bereavement, and grief.

I’m writing this on a flight to Oakland, where I have a number of things I’m hoping to do this weekend. The first is that I’m planning to go to Temple Israel in Alameda, a synagogue I have never been to, in order to attend Friday evening Shabbat services and say Kaddish for my mother.

Kaddish is one of our more ancient and ubiquitous prayers. It is recited multiple times in every organized Jewish prayer service, in a number of different forms. The final time it is said in most services, it is known as the Kaddish Yatom, the Mourners’ Kaddish.

The word Kaddish itself, comes from the Semitic root קדש, *qds, where it means “holy” or “sanctified”. The prayer’s origins stretch back almost two millennia, and unlike most modern Jewish prayers, it is written (mostly) in Aramaic.

Greetings, friends. There’s been some traumatic news for a number of my friends in different circles, so I want to take a moment and express my love and sympathy for all of you who are struggling right now. I send you hugs.

Not to change the subject, but today I want to keep my journal entry light. I was originally going to talk about beef jerky. I absolutely love the stuff. I think I like any kind of shaved beef steak. Actually, if I had to pick a favorite food item, it would be a classic Philly cheesesteak, white American, with onions and hots, on an Amoroso’s Italian roll. I have a lot to say about cheesesteaks, but I digress.

What’s not to love about beef jerky? Aside from the entire American livestock factory farming industry, that is. But I sort of made my peace with that evil compromise about 15 or so years ago, when I gave up on a dozen years of ethical vegetarianism.

Beef jerky. Savory, salty, umami, compact, long shelf life, high protein. That last is especially important to me now that I’m borderline diabetic and closely watching my glucose levels in the hopes of having the full use of my extremities in my old age. But more about that later.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about something that went right last weekend!

Besha and I are planning a trip to Ireland for her birthday in April, a place to which neither of us have been. Ireland has particularly been at the top of her bucket list for some time, because Besha is an avid genealogist, and she has maternal ancestors who hailed from County Clare.

So our vacation plan, currently, is to visit Dublin for a few days, and then rent a vehicle and spend the rest of the trip exploring Ireland by car and on foot, with special attention paid to Clare and the Burren.

As it happens, I also have ancestors from Ireland. My paternal grandfather’s mother was a lass named Mae Mullen, or so I thought, and she was born in Ireland, or so I thought.

Greetings, friends. Well, I finally did it: After 23 entries, I took my thumb off the page and duplicated an entry number. Had to go back into Substack and retitle yesterday’s post. And edit the slug, because it annoyed me. I also definitely dragged my heels on writing this post today. Hmmm.

Well, yesterday, as I said, I failed to get up bright and early, so after breakfast I finally “got my mukluks on” as my mother used to say. Except that, actually, step one was taking my moccasins off, because said mukluks are what Besha thoughtfully got me for house shoes a few weeks ago. What I actually put on were the steel toed work boots I got in order to protect myself when I drop hot steel on my toe, as I inevitably will.

As you will recall, your correspondent had set out to make a set of hanging bookshelf brackets.

On Saturday evening, I foolishly took on a modest side project, merely by way of confirming that the ergonomics of the forge and anvil were good in the place I intended to affix the concrete anchors in Besha’s carport.

Greetings, friends. Today was a sequence of catastrophes in miniature. I confess that almost didn’t write a journal entry, but I don’t want to burn a streak freeze. Please excuse the cheese sandwich nature of this post. It is almost 23:30 and I wish I were already in bed.

That’s partly because I woke up at 05:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. At one point I actually got up and went and turned on the kettle because I figured it just wasn’t happening. Next thing I know it’s 09:00 and I’ve just had a set of absolutely terrible dreams.

This was mildly frustrating, because, having accomplished so little on the bookshelf brackets yesterday, I wanted to get up early today in the hopes of making some progress on them.

I started deep in the aforementioned yak shave, though. Remember, I just wanted some bookshelves to hang on my wall, so that I could finally finish unpacking the books. Then I decided I wanted to make my own bookshelves, and then my own wall brackets.

Greetings, friends. You ever have one of those days that just felt off for some reason? Today has been one of those days.

I did however get to discover the marvel that is the North Portland Tool Library. Hosted in an old firehouse in Kenton, it’s… a basement full of tools. Hand tools, power tools, you name it. You just need to be a resident of North Portland to sign up for a borrower’s account. “North Portland,” says the website, “Not NE, not NW.”

Their hours are strictly limited to 10am to 2pm on Saturday. You pick out the tools you want to borrow until next Saturday. They note down on your account the four-digit codes that have been marked on the tools in paint pen. And… that’s it.

Today Besha and I borrowed two hammer drills, a post hole digger, and a bench grinder. Yeah, a bench grinder. That was by far not the most exotic tool they had to lend.

Greetings, friends. I forgot to wish everyone a Happy Groundhog’s Day. It was my mother’s favorite secular holiday — probably because the doldrums of February are the best time to throw a house party in between the winter holidays and spring break.

Yesterday, I shared a screencap of a Twitter post that swam across my Facebook feed, and got a stupid comment in reply.

The meme simply read:

Greetings, friends. Blessed Imbolc to those of you who celebrate, and happy Black History Month.

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia on re-entry from orbit after a 15 day mission of scientific research. All seven crew were lost in the disaster. Their names were David Brown, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon.

Amazingly, this portrait of the crew was developed from film recovered after the crash.

Greetings, friends. Those of you who pay close attention will note that I missed a day of journaling.

I blame “Andor” for being so good. Jeanne and I went out for dinner, and, after we got back to her place, I decided we should watch one episode of the TV show, and I would have a shot of bourbon over ice. What actually happened was we watched three episodes back-to-back, and I had at least as many bourbons. Angel’s Rest is good stuff.

So is Andor. I haven’t seen the entirety of the first season yet, but I am firmly convinced that it is the best thing to come out of the Star Wars franchise since, well, at least “Return of the Jedi”. The Galactic Empire as seen in “Andor” embodies the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt observed Nazi Germany — evil manifested through staff meetings and dehumanizing bureaucracy. Evil in the name of law and order. And Cassian Andor’s journey to rebellion is equally tortuous. No sudden off-screen Han-Solo-esque change-of-heart suddenly turning this guy into a Byronic hero. No. Diego Luna is so damn good. I can’t wait to see the rest of the series.

All of which is to say I got carried away last night, and, by the time we got through three episodes, and I realized just how of that delicious port-cask-finished stuff I had put away, I was not good for much.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about habits in the context of learning languages.

Also, today I am going to try to be super disciplined about my time investment. I’m visiting Suzy and this journal entry is the only thing keeping us from spending the evening playing couch-coop Diablo III.

You probably know that I studied linguistics in university. In fact, I changed majors four times and this was the only topic that held my interest long enough to get a degree in it.

You tell people you studied linguistics and the first thing they want to know is how many languages you speak. To my perpetual shame, the answer was one: English.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about habits.

But, first: How about that NFC championship game. Not at all what I was hoping for. The hand of Fate is fickle even to those lately graced by it. Maybe next year. I’m not mad. The Super Bowl ought to be pretty fun this year. Go Birds!

Habits. What are yours? I’m thinking about this today because, to be honest, after watching two football games and day-drinking all afternoon, I don’t super feel like writing! But I also told myself I would plan to take breaks from writing, rather than spontaneously taking a break out of laziness.

I tell my reports I want two weeks notice before they take time off from work, but when one of them comes to me saying her family arrives tomorrow, and can she take an extra day off to spend with them, sure, of course I say yes. I’m not a monster. She works hard. and time with family is more important than work anyway. But it’s still time off planned ahead of time, even if it’s the day beforehand. I owe myself the same diligence.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about American football, or, as we call it in America, football.

The reason I am writing this journal entry today is that the 2022 NFC championship game is tomorrow, and I can’t decide whom to root for.

Uh, Schuyler, I can already hear you saying, your redneck is showing.

Yes, yes, but maybe not in the way that you think. I hope you will permit me to dissect my relationship to this uniquely American spectacle.

As I mentioned elsewhere, tomorrow’s 2022 NFC Championship game is not the first time that Jalen Hurts and Brock Purdy will oppose each other in a dramatic football matchup.

The first time was on November 9, 2019. Hurts was a “senior” and starting quarterback for the University of Oklahoma Sooners, when they hosted the Iowa State Cyclones, featuring the sophomore Brock Purdy under center.

I think it’s funny when football people talk about a “quarterback duel”. In point of fact, the “dueling” quarterbacks are never on the field at the same time, except to give each other manly hugs afterwards. They are dueling only in the same sense that solo figure skaters “duel” in competitions.

So I know almost nothing about college football, but Oklahoma and Iowa State are both in the Big-12 conference and are pretty regular rivals. Coming into the game, Oklahoma, who had started the season ranked seventh nationally, were heavy favorites over the unranked Cyclones.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about my Grandpa Mark Sohn.

Technically, Mark was my mother’s grandfather, and then, technically, her mother’s adoptive father. I never met the guy, but he appears in many family stories, always and exclusively as Grandpa Mark.

This past week Adah and I found a cache of family documents, probably passed to our mother from her mother, that illuminates what a larger-than-life character he was for his time. My family, especially those who knew him, are guaranteed to jump on this journal entry with all manner of factual corrections, which I will be forced to print by way of retraction in a future journal entry. Such are the joys of family. I love them.

Anyway. My great-grandmother Adele Aronowsky was born in Bialystok, Poland, and emigrated to the United States as a child. She married a Bernard Meller, and they had a daughter, Lenore, my mother’s mother. It is to Grandpa Ben Meller that I likely owe my male pattern baldness.

Greetings, friends. Emily’s post reminded me that last night was Burns Night. I wish a happy one to all who celebrated. Burns Night, as you are doubtless aware, celebrates the birthday of Robert Burns, or “Rabbie” to his pals, that treasured bard of Scotland.

Burns, as in sick ones, are also what the poet was best known for. He famously excoriated the signers of the 1707 Act of Union with the Kingdom of England:

O would, ere I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay,
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!

But pith and power, till my last hour,
I'll mak this declaration;
We're bought and sold for English gold-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Greetings, friends. I keep forgetting to wish you all a Happy Lunar New Year. In spite of the violence that tarnishes our humanity, or maybe because of it, I hope that those of you who celebrate the season have a fortunate and prosperous year.

I’ll have more to say about the violence, I’m afraid. I still have to answer danbri and my Uncle Pat wants to know why I end all my entries aping Cato.

I did another training run today, two miles on an absolutely abysmal 15:00 pace. Do I need to convert for folks who live in the real world? That’s 3.2 km at 9:23 per klick. Please write and let me know if you would like me to report on my training in metric. My cheeks burn in shame, as I feel Hal frowning sadly at me, while his app accords me “94% compliance” with my training plan for all my efforts. Or maybe the burning sensation is just that I’m overheated and possibly dehydrated.

The truth is I hate running; I merely love having run. As mentioned in a previous episode, your correspondent is not fond of deeply physical labor, or of repetitive tasks, and running is nothing if not both. I have to keep my mind occupied, or I find myself glancing at my watch every 1/20th of a mile to discover that I have traversed only another 1/20th of a mile. (That’s about 1/12th of a kilometer for those of you who have national healthcare.)

Greetings, friends. It is late and I am tired. But the day still has yet to come when I am ready to take a day off from writing. I would like to plan it ahead of time rather than giving up because I was feeling too lazy or exhausted. 15 minutes or 750 words, that’s all I ask. It’s 11:40pm, so I still have time.

Today our realtor came to look at our mother’s house. Actually, she is not our realtor yet, but her agency has an office right up on the highway, not a mile from the house. In New Hampshire, you turn to your family first, and then your neighbors before anyone else. It is how things work here. The realtor was affiliated with Adah’s Girl Scout troop. Her daughter went to school with Adah. Of course we called her first. That’s what you do here.

So I shoveled out the driveway again, and then left to get my celebratory latte. The realtor arrived shortly after I got back.

The realtor was all sun and smiles, as you would expect, and very understanding. She took one look at the place and said we would be putting it on the market “as-seen, as-is” which is to say, it’s a fixer-upper, buddy. She recommended that Adah and I refrain from making capital investments prior to putting it on the market — just fix the things that need fixing, for safety’s sake, make the necessary disclosures, and let the future owners worry about, say, the water supply. Okay then.

Greetings, friends. Everyone talks about the weather, and finally we are doing something about it.

That’s a play on an old, old joke, and I wish it were actually funny. It actually makes me want to crawl under the covers and sob.

I’ve lived on the West Coast for 15 years over the course of my life, most of it in the City and County of San Francisco. Naturally, with the Bay Area’s distinctive climate, the subject of the weather comes up a lot in conversation, especially when you work exclusively over Zoom with people all over the country.

Especially when it comes to snow, or San Francisco’s utter lack thereof. In the twelve years I lived in San Francisco, it never snowed once. But I grew up in Philadelphia, and I’m well acquainted with snow. I loved snow as a child. School got canceled for the day, you could go out and play in it, go sledding, build snow figures, make snow angels, throw snowballs, the works.

Greetings, friends. Today feels like it has been an immensely long day, even though I have barely been up for twelve hours. I have been staying at my mother’s in New Hampshire, where there was a foot of snow on the ground when I flew in on Friday, and another foot of snow is falling as I write this.

I slept in this morning, because I badly needed it, and got out of bed just in time for Adah to come over with coffee, bless her, so that we could dig back into the, shall we say, situation, that is our late mother’s house.

Yesterday, she and I went through the house and dug out every piece of historical re-enacting kit and loose fabric we could find, while Keith bagged up my mother’s old lady wardrobe for good will. We are expecting a number of her historical re-enacting friends to come over Wednesday to help us begin to filter through it.

That was yesterday. Today, we decided to pivot to the somewhat more sedate task of sorting through our mother’s papers and mementos. We threw away a lot of unopened and outdated mail, and then got to the good stuff. Some of it was delightful and some of it was heartbreaking.