People always speak of the suburbs as being quiet. Ha ha ha ha ha. I bet if I walked around my neighborhood with a decibel meter, I’d easily come away with higher numbers than I would in downtown Detroit. There, you have traffic and occasional honking, but overall, it’s far less jarring than a typical day around here.

(You’ve heard these beefs before, yes. Feel free to check out if you like.)

After a week of the usual clamor — lawn services, some heavy equipment from a digging job in the next block — Saturday began with one of our adjacent neighbors turning on his gas blower at 7:50 a.m. He ran it for about five minutes, then shut it down before getting in his car and blasting out the driveway. I’d love to know what bugged him so much that he had to clean it up before leaving. But really, I don’t.

Those neighbors who don’t have lawn services handle their own yard work on the weekends (which includes us), so there were more mowers, more power edgers — which are almost put-a-pillow-over-your-head-and-scream, nails-on-a-blackboard irritating all weekend long. More gas blowers, too, as this is late spring and trees are shedding things like oak flowers and maple whirligigs and other seeds. All of this must be banished from walks and driveways, loudly.

The bluetooth speaker era is upon us, and we are treated, sometimes, to competing soundtracks. We have neighbors who are very nice, but the husband likes to sit in his driveway and play the same record over and over. They seem to change with the year; for a couple summers it was Mumford & Sons, then Dire Straits, and he’s been on a country kick this year. Short playlist, the same five songs or so over and over and over. And over. And over. He’s had it on for a half hour just now, and we’ve heard Aaron Lewis’ “Story of My Life” twice.

The gas blower guy behind us does the same thing, only with head banging stuff Kate refers to as “butt rock,” although he went on a summer-long Wu-Tang Clan kick. “Enter the Wu-Tang,” specifically, which is not an album I’d turn off if it came on the radio (I own it, in fact), but after a few weeks of hearing it at cocktail hour? Not so much.

In short, in the suburbs, every tool is loud, no one listens to jazz and honestly, just hearing some children play would be a treat. There’s a block nearby full of kids who all seem around the same age and play outdoors the way I remember playing with my friends as a child. The other day they’d duct-taped a lawn chair to two skateboard and were pushing one another up and down the sidewalk. It was great.

And that was the weekend, such as it was. Had an outdoor get-together with my colleagues Friday, did the usual stuff Saturday, and spent Sunday laying in groceries and reading a few more Hemingway short stories. Yes, yes, I picked the book off the basement shelf after the PBS thing, obviously. I’ve read a few, but not all. I don’t know how “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” evaded me until now, however. Short review: I’m enjoying them, although there is some very un-P.C. racial language in a few, and as always, his attitude toward many of his female characters is…not good.

And now, Monday is so, so close. I hope it’s quiet at midnight.

Following up on comments yesterday:

I know “gypped” is considered a slur, but I didn’t know “gypsy” was, too. I know it’s a casual term for Romany people, but getting back to first principles, i.e. clarity, I’ll continue to use it as a synonym for “nomadic,” in various forms. But as I rarely write about Romany people, I doubt it’ll come up there.

Speaking of nomadic populations that are often associated with grifting, what about Irish travelers? Every summer in Fort Wayne there’d be a warning story from the police about traveler scams, usually involving home repairs; a couple of men would find a house in need of painting, quote an insanely low price, and the paint would come off the first time it rained. Or, in measuring the house for another job, one would gain entry somehow — “we need inside measurements as well” was usually the excuse offered — and then “head to Lowe’s to pick up supplies.” They’d never return, and the homeowner would find one or more small valuables missing.

I think the women busied themselves with shoplifting and returning goods for cash.

Haven’t heard much about those folks since we moved to Michigan. Must not be on the route.

Here’s an interesting story about the traveler community in South Carolina. As so often is the case, the members of the group claim it comes down to discrimination. And some other factors:

History teaches us that to survive all cultures must evolve with an ever-changing world. For some, change comes slowly and often at great sacrifice requiring the loss of old-world traditions in favor of acceptance. Irish-American Travellers because of their reluctance to change have become people at odds with society. We are a people that belong more in the past than in the present. Arranged marriages, the need to find safety within our small community, and refusal to accept change all bring into question our longevity.

Wise words, those.

OK then. We’re sliding into the weekend, again, and I’m thinking about devoting at least some time this weekend to serious meal prep for the week ahead. I was down to having only four pandemic pounds to lose and am now back to 10, and it’s going to be in the high 80s today. This can’t go on, so I’m gonna stop it. Or at least try.

Enjoy your own, wherever it may be.

I was thinking the other day about some new language we’re all suddenly using. Not new words, but particular phrases. Make space for. And sit with that. And do better. There are a few others that will come to me later, but I ran across a couple of them in a single short piece the other day, and it reminded me how much they bug me.

There’s an undertone of nursey preschool teacher to do better, scolding mommy to sit with that (in your timeout chair), and while I despise the term “virtue signaling,” there’s an undeniable tone of it in make space for. Here’s a wonderful thing that a person who is better than you has made space for. Sit with that a minute (along with your lazy badness). See if you can’t do better, going forward.

I used the word “crazy” in a headline and got a finger in my face about it from a reader, who included a link on why no one is supposed to say crazy anymore, but honestly, “mentally ill idea” doesn’t really express what I was trying to say. Also, “slaves” has been replaced by “enslaved people,” which comes from the same idea that changed “schizophrenic” to “person with schizophrenia” and “manic-depressive” to “person with bipolar disorder.” It emphasizes humanity, but honestly, if it makes that big of a difference to you, maybe your problem was you not fully understanding slavery to begin with. I’m informed that “slave” is a nonhuman noun, but I never saw it that way, except when a photographer showed me his lighting system, which uses the term to describe a particular type of flash.

Twelve Years an Enslaved Person. Person Enslaved to the Rhythm. Doesn’t quite work.

Don’t get me started on the linguistic minefields around transgenderism. I keep my mouth shut. I check my privilege. I sit with that. I make space for the idea that it is better to confuse readers by saying, for instance, “actor Elliot Page has come out as transgender” than to spend even a single phrase explaining that Elliot was once known as E****, because one must never, ever use a deadname. You have to figure it out from the paragraph that says Elliot starred in “Juno” and a couple other films you may or may not have seen. Kate effortlessly uses “they” and “them” to describe nonbinary folks, and I’m never not confused by this, and asking “who else are we talking about?”

I try to have empathy for every member of the human family, but as a writer, my aim is clarity. This doesn’t help.

When Ross Perot was running for president, he addressed an NAACP chapter. He was talking about why NAFTA was bad for working-class people, who are disproportionately not-white, and he said, “Who gets hurt by these trade agreements? You people!” This led to a blizzard of think pieces about the term “you people,” how condescending it is, etc. etc. A colleague said, “He should have said ‘people of you,'” and I cannot deny it: I laughed, even though I fully understand why colored people is bad, and people of color is not. If Perot had said “you guys” or “you folks,” no one would have said a word, but oh my — you people. Very bad.

I read something yesterday that announced, in an editor’s note at the top, that a particular racial slur used by the subject of the story (describing an incident where the slur had been used to attack her, not by her) had been excised. I got to the part with the slur, and it had been asterisk’d out. So…OK, I get it, that was a good call. But why announce it first? Just do it. It’s talking down to readers, which is a reflection of so much of what we do with each other these days. It’s a writer announcing “I heard the bad word, but I am sparing you, because I’m trying to do better,” even though everybody probably knows the word in question.

Anyway, welcome seems to do the work of make space for. Think about it works for sit with that. Do better is probably something we have to live with, until it’s replaced by something worse. I leave you with this, which I found in the NYT’s Social Q’s column:

Weekends are too damn short, I must say. One minute it’s Friday afternoon and wooooo it’s time to shut the laptop and have some fun, baby, and the next it’s Sunday night and the sun is setting and all you have to show for it is…a long bike ride, a shorter bike ride, dinner out with friends, dinner in on your anniversary and a very clean kitchen. So I guess it’s better than nothing. I just hate to have to cram all my me-life into two days and work gets the remaining five.

I guess it doesn’t have to. That’s why after-work socializing was invented, but who has the energy for that anymore? On the other hand, it’s amazing anyone has the energy for anything, these days.

I did go shopping Saturday, too. Wore a mask. I will continue to do so, for all the reasons you’ve already heard. I may return to the gym, though, at extreme off-peak hours and preferably with the doors cracked open. I’ve kept my membership going, to support the place — might as well get something for it.

Something else I did this weekend: Caught the first couple episodes of “Halston.” I am in full agreement with Tom & Lorenzo in their essential disappointment. I actually went to a fashion show in his famous Fifth Avenue “aerie,” as it was inevitably called. Liza was there. The clothes were great, but he was past his prime a bit by then. I was enough of a hippie that I found Ultrasuede kinda gross; it violated my principles that clothing materials should be natural, dammit, and I never understood the appeal of the famous Ultrasuede coat dress, although I don’t have much of an eye, admittedly. The ’70s are, in my mind, a pastiche of polyester and Pucci and knock-offs of Pucci and, yes, Halston.

Anyway, I guess the upshot of the weekend was, I’m glad to be less-masked, for now. Don’t have much more to offer, other than this photo of the weekend:

And this is why more women should be in charge of things.

📸 Mark Gormus, @AP pic.twitter.com/JvCE3M4NoM

— Lisa Kirbie (@lisakirbie) May 15, 2021

Week ahead, let’s get to it.

The boat launch went fine, thanks for asking. It was freezing — mid-40s — but ah well. The marina is under new ownership, and have deprived the main guy who handles this, Pete, of his assistant, so I had to be there. But no major mishaps.

While Pete and I were pulling the mast this way and that so Alan could attach the shrouds, we talked a little bit about this phase of life. (We’re all the same age, give or take.) He said he and his wife had unloaded a big house on a very nice street, and were now living aboard their boat at the same marina, and liking it more than they ever thought they would.

A big part of it, he emphasized, was “getting rid of all our shit.”

I thought of this while some of you were talking in comments about your own shit, or your parental shit, or all the other shit that gets dumped on you as you age. Pete said nothing felt as good as personal shit-liquidation, selling all the furniture and gewgaws and collectibles and other stuff that once seemed so important. Watching it go out of the house during the estate sale, he said, was liberating. “You don’t know how tied down you are until you get rid of it,” he said.

Caitlin Flanagan, a writer I often find myself at odds with, watched “Nomadland” recently and came up with this observation:

The make-or-break moment for the viewer is right at the top; if you’re the kind of brute who doesn’t enjoy watching a woman in late middle age poke around her storage unit, you should take your leave. Personally, I could have watched an entire movie on that subject alone. You spend your whole life accumulating things, and then they end up in a storage unit, slowly losing their charge of sentiment and memory and transforming into a bunch of junk. Fern is there to pick out what she will bring with her on the journey. In the end, she chooses the least practical thing of all: a box of china, white with a pattern of red leaves on the rim. That’s not the last of that china I’ll be seeing, I thought to myself, and I was spot-on.

Since Alan stopped working, I’ve been on my own smaller-scale shit-liquidation purge, and I’m making progress. Last week I dragged pretty much all my Fort Wayne ephemera to the curb, including all my newspaper clips and, comically, my journalism awards. I saved some photographs, but will probably go through those and pitch a lot of them, too.

But some things cry not yet. The doll bed I played with as a child and Kate, not so much — I can’t get rid of it yet. Some of her crib bedding, ditto. A couple of her favorite stuffed animals.

And god, so many books. Books are one of those things you’re supposed to be happy to purge, but after I cleaned up the basement enough to make it my pandemic gym, I shelved and dusted all the books down there and thought: Can’t get rid of these. I love many of them too much. But on the same shelf are many 78 RPM records from Alan’s dad’s collection, and god knows why we still have those.

For the next move, I guess we’ll grapple with all of this. For now, I’ll settle for slimming down.

Speaking of female writers I often find myself at odds with, do you know how much it pains me to say, “Mona Charen is right?” A lot. And yet:

Today, we stand on the precipice of the House Republican conference ratifying this attempt to subvert American democracy. They are poised to punish Liz Cheney for saying this simple truth: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.” In her place, they will elevate Iago in heels, Elise Stefanik, whose claim to leadership consists entirely of her operatic Trump followership.

Let’s be clear: The substitution of Stefanik for Cheney is a tocsin, signaling that the Republican party will no longer be bound by law or custom. In 2020, many Republican office holders, including the otherwise invertebrate Pence, held the line. They did not submit false slates of electors. They did not decertify votes. They did not “find” phantom fraud. But the party has been schooled since then. It has learned that the base—which is deluded by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin—believes the lies and demands that Republicans fight. As my colleague Amanda Carpenter put it, the 2024 mantra is going to be “Steal It Back.”

If Cheney must be axed because she will not lie, then what will happen if Republicans take control of Congress in 2022 and are called upon to certify the Electoral College in 2024? How many Raffenspergers will there be? How many will insist, as Pence did, that they must do what the Constitution demands? How many will preserve any semblance of the rule of law and the primacy of truth?

Well, if we have to flee, I hope Canada will take us. If not, Mexico is warmer and has livelier food. And there’s always Europe, although I don’t think they can accommodate that many refugees. Maybe we’ll stay here and be the resistance. Works for me.

Happy Wednesday. A pic in parting, as another boating season begins:

When I was toiling for a Knight-Ridder newspaper, the executive editors of each paper wrote a monthly memo to HQ, bringing the boss and peers up to date about what they’d been up to for the last calendar page. Personnel changes, great moments, etc. Mild stuff that got passed around.

They varied in readability, but the best one by far was from the Philadelphia Daily News, i.e., the tabloid, i.e., the one that didn’t take itself as seriously as the other. That editor, Zack Stalberg, sprinkled his with short, blackly comic items from the police blotter, each one subtitled, “It’s a tough town.”

I thought of that when someone sent me the website for Philadelphia DA candidate Charles Peruto. The About Me page specifically, past the blather about his career bio and to the subheading “The girl in my bathtub.” The dead girl, specifically:

In 2013, I was dating a girl for about 6 weeks, and didn’t really know her. I learned more about her after she died by reading an investigative article done by Philadelphia Magazine, written by Lisa DePaulo, which opened my eyes.

In short, the best way to start with this is the Medical Examiner’s report. Her BAC was .45. The cause of death was alcohol intoxication, but because she was found in my tub, everyone, including myself, assumed she drowned. So many empty vodka bottles were found, it looked like there was a party in my house, but inspection of the security video of people entering and leaving showed only her.

Whoa, really? What a tough town. Of course, as in any story involving…anyone, really, it’s wise to seek out alternative versions, especially when the girl in the bathtub isn’t even named. In this case, the Daily Beast filled in some blanks. The girl in the bathtub was Julia Law, and:

The 26-year-old had been a paralegal in Peruto’s law office, where they struck up a romantic relationship. This was something of a pattern for the 66-year-old lawyer. As news of Law’s death broke, Peruto received a series of angry calls from a woman named Genna Squadroni. She was “his 25-year-old recent ex-girlfriend of three years,” Philadelphia Magazine reported, who had also worked in Peruto’s office—she had hired Law herself.

Also, the six weeks of dating and how he “didn’t really know her?” Hmm:

The description clashes somewhat with the message Peruto shared on Facebook shortly after Law’s death. “It’s very hard to find someone who really matches you on all eight cylinders,” he wrote at the time, in a post cited by NBC 10. “I found my soulmate hippy, and can never replace her. We worked and played, and never got enough life…Earth lost the best one ever. Happy birthday baby.”

Philadelphia isn’t my town, and I’m staying out of this one, but you know what I hear? That it’s a tough town.

So, a little more bloggage:

I don’t think Melinda Gates and I would ever be friends, but it’s refreshing to see one person immediately had the correct reaction to Jeffrey Epstein and acted on it, also immediately.

And how the second Civil War will start. With an election, of course:

The Big Lie that Trump really won the election is now canon among a majority of Republican voters. Any Republicans who refuses to toe the line is branded a heretic, and elections officials who dared to certify Biden’s win are being censured or stripped of their power. Arizona Republicans have sponsored a bogus “audit” of the election full of crackpot conspiracy theories, and Republican legislatures have been busy taking control of both running and certifying elections out of the hands of county official in Democratic-run cities and counties. The context of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was the attempt by Congressional Republicans to refuse to certify the Electoral College tally, in the hopes of sending the election back to gerrymandered Republican state legislatures and handing Trump a win as part of a anti-democratic coup. It was a physical coup attempt designed to intimidate Congress into enforcing a legislative coup. Republicans who refused to back the latter are facing steep primary challenges.

It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this is, and what its consequences might entail in the very near future. As Greg Sargent notes, the “GOP appears to be plunging headlong into a level of full-blown hostility to democracy that has deeply unsettling future ramifications.”

Monday we put the boat into the water, an act that is rarely easy but hasn’t led to disaster so far. Of course Mother’s Day at our location was rainy and dreary and cold, and only the rain and dreary will be gone tomorrow. But we’ll see. Wish us luck.

Boxing is a dying sport (but MMA is thriving, go figure) and there may come a day soon when it will no longer exist, but what will we do with all the language it’s given us?

Throw in the towel, hit the canvas, come out swinging, neutral corner, down for the count — if I had a day to think of all the common expressions that come out of the squared circle, I probably wouldn’t get them all. Sailing is another sport hardly anyone practices, and yet just today I sent a peevish-sounding text to my colleagues, after changing “jive” to “jibe” in a long-published story. To jibe with something is to be in agreement: His story doesn’t jibe with what we already know, etc. And if I had a dollar for every time I saw “tact” where the writer should have used “tack” (it’s a point of sail, and refers to the zigzag pattern you have to make to go into the wind; you “take another tack” when you have to adjust your direction to get closer to where you’re headed), well, I’d be in France right now, not in a few months.

Don’t get me started on fox hunting. There are a few from there, too. I will instead go to ground.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this. Probably because I saw someone write “here, here” and I snapped.

And another week limps into port. I spent a couple hours this morning listening to Naomi Wolf, D-Crazytown, testify to the Michigan legislature on vaccine passports, which no one’s yet proposed but the leg wants to pass a bill preemptively banning. I’m trying to work out my thoughts on this for a column, but right now all I can come up with is: That chick crazy.

Are you ready for this week to end? I am. So let’s do it.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: When long-running marriages fall apart, it’s often useful to remember what marriage was, once, as a cultural institution: A way to establish paternity for offspring, so that wealth can be handed down and protected within a family. A business partnership, basically. Only in recent years have we spoken of love matches and marrying your best friend and all that. Also remember that people didn’t live nearly as long, once upon a time.

So when people like Al and Tipper Gore, or Bill and Melinda Gates, call it quits, I don’t think we should speak of their marriage “failing.” Rather, they outgrew it. The Gores had four children, the Gateses three, all of whom were/are adults when their parents split up. That is not a failure. That is a partnership that worked as intended. It provided stability and structure for offspring, and presumably for both the people who signed the marriage license. Now they move on to the next thing, separately.

If you think that’s cold-hearted, I offer Exhibit A: The marriage of Donald and Melania Trump, which is about as business-focused as it’s possible to be, right down to the renegotiated prenup post-2016 election. Melania, it was said, was interested in protecting the interests of her son, who she feared would be pushed out of the family wealth pile by his older, craftier siblings, once Fatass went to his reward. After all, they learned from the master of inheritance-grubbing.

So don’t waste any time worrying about the Gateses. I don’t know what Melinda is like, personally, but she can’t be worse than her husband. (OK, maybe she can.) They’ll be fine. Their children will be fine. I find it interesting that they appear to have already worked out the property split, and she declines spousal support, “despite no prenup,” as People magazine gasps. Good for them.

All that said, I am grossed out — no, I’m offended — by some of the social-media commentary, about how much of “his” money Melinda Gates will get. It’s not his money. It’s their money. True, Microsoft existed as a world-straddling force before they married, but she is absolutely part of his success, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.

Tangentially I’m also reminded of a hilarious seminar we had when I was fellowshipping in Ann Arbor, by a legendary law-school professor. He said we err when we refer to life being “cheap” in poor or undeveloped countries, because the opposite is true. Life is cheap in the U.S., and that’s what’s good about it. If you lose a finger in a work accident, you don’t have to extract a finger from the factory owner in return; you collect the insurance payout. And if you dissolve your marriage, there’s no need for honor killings or death feuds over a dowry. It’s a financial settlement.

I just googled the professor. Here’s the description of one of his books:

Njals saga, the greatest of the sagas of the Icelanders, was written around 1280. It tells the story of a complex feud that starts innocently enough–in a tiff over seating arrangement at a local feast–and expands over the course of 20 years to engulf half the country, in which both sides are effectively exterminated, Njal and his family burned to death in their farmhouse, the other faction picked off over the entire course of the feud. Law and feud feature centrally in the saga, Njal, its hero, being the greatest lawyer of his generation. No reading of the saga can do it justice unless it takes its law, its feuding strategies, as well as the author’s stunning manipulation and saga conventions. In ‘Why is Your Axe Bloody?’ W.I. Miller offers a lively, entertaining, and completely orignal personal reading of this lengthy saga.

He was one of the last speakers of the year, or I totally would have audited his class on blood feuds.

Njal. What a great name.

OK, then. The first part of the week is over, I’ve actually accomplished something, and more work awaits in the middle and end parts. But for now, we confront: Wednesday. I hope yours isn’t too…confrontational.

I see Jeff already spilled the beans about my Daylight Saving Time column. Let the debate begin.

I guess my befuddlement comes from all the “solutions” offered to settle this issue. Solutions imply problems, and honestly, I don’t see what the problem is. For my entire life, we’ve slipped back and forth between standard and daylight time with little more than yawning and grouchiness. Suddenly, it’s a “problem.” (And amusingly, it became a problem right about the time clocks started basically setting themselves.)

And I concede that not everyone adjusts easily. But to disrupt the very idea of standard time — standard in the generic sense — on a state-by-state basis just seems insane. There are lot of things that set my teeth on edge, but I am not advocating policy solutions for them.

Maybe more people need to spend a year in Iceland. That’s on my travel bucket list, and admittedly a long shot, because it’s kind of pointless, but I’d love to spend a winter month there. See how life is lived in near-darkness. I expect fairly happily. We could learn from that.

OK, since it’s Sunday, and a Sunday that truly lives up to its name — 81 degrees and extremely sunny — let’s be less-serious this late afternoon/early evening. (Which is still very SUNNY, because DST!)

“The Handmaid’s Tale” kicked off its fourth season this past week, and I for one am…unimpressed so far. Margaret Atwood’s original idea has been built out to the point it’s now collapsing on itself, and I fear the show runners are going to try to rescue it with slow-motion photography. Every time Elisabeth Moss walks purposely, she does so in slo-mo. Also: Moody lighting. Also: Torture, which I am totally not here for. (I’ve seen two Kathryn Bigelow movies, and I do not need to see any more.) They need to figure out how to get this story into port very soon, or I’m jumping overboard and swimming to a less torture-y beach.

This happened today:

That is, an impromptu lunch at a Mexican dive bar across from the notorious Zug Island, the scariest looking now-shut steel plant you ever saw. I gave up my menudo virginity and can report: Meh on menudo. A nice spicy broth, but the tripe left me cold. I kept thinking: I am eating stomach. I am putting stomach in my stomach. But as I said before, the day was glorious and breezy, and it was a fine day to see people outdoors and eat tacos (and menudo).

Those are my tragic arms, yes. I swear, there is muscle tone underneath all that slack flesh, but evidently this is how my stupid body has chosen to show its age. Sigh. But as we often say: Consider the alternative.

Into the week, then! Hope yours is great.

And another week draws to a close. Cold rain all day Thursday, and I don’t believe I left the house even once. In fact, in a while someone will expect me to put a couple of sausages on the grill outdoors, and I’m not even into that. But I will, because it’s what I do. Or, as a hashtag our local school district tried to get going a while back, #ThisIsWhatWeDoHere.

(Wow, so edgy!)

Lately, the district is having a teacher sickout, because they changed the criteria for mandatory Covid quarantine, because it was sending too many kids out and threatening F2F education, and mercy me I had to count my blessings on that one. Our blessings during this pandemic have been too numerous to count, but the biggest one has to be: I don’t have a child in school — any school — right now. I honestly don’t know how parents of younger kids are keeping it together, and likewise for college students, many of whom are remote learning from very expensive off-campus apartments right now. Why not at home? Because deposits were put down months ago and no landlord is refunding anything right now. (My doctor’s daughter, showing a great deal of her parents’ smarts, took the term off and is hiking the Appalachian Trail, which strikes me as a fantastic idea.)

And here sit the Derringers, planning a trip to France. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Right now, we’re thinking two weeks in Paris, two weeks in Aix en Provence, but that is very tentative and only a starting place. But what a great starting place.

Today, I banged out a screed on Daylight Saving Time that, when it finally drops, will be very familiar to you Hoosiers. I’ll post when it does. A bill is advancing in the state legislature — it won’t get much further, though — to do what Indiana did for decades, i.e., stop changing time twice a year and fix the state permanently on Daylight Saving Time. Spoiler alert: This is a bad idea. But you wait; I’ll have it when it’s done.

I didn’t watch the president last night. For four years, I’ve been longing for the day when a president could give a major speech, I could read about it the following day, and I wouldn’t fear for the future of my country. So I enjoyed it. Sounds as though he laid out a plan, but everything, and I do mean everything, will rest on the midterms at this point. So don’t let up. It’s important.

God, I am falling into the weekend’s embrace like greeting an old lover. Which I guess every weekend is.