Month: November 2023

I was in Kentucky for most of the last week as I opted to go to my parents instead of having them come to me. Deer season was still open in Kentucky and so going to my parents meant I’d get the opportunity to hunt. I took a small buck, one of two deer we harvested on Friday and one of four for my family this season. It only took two hunts for me to tag out and my brother took only one, a stark contrast from our childhoods and a testament to all of the work that’s taken place over the years on the reclaimed strip mine we call the farm.

I ate the Thanksgiving meal with my immediate family and some of my extended family. The best part might have been the surprise on the little ones’ faces when they walked into the living room and saw that more people than just their mamaw and papaw were there. I was sure to pick them up when they ran to greet me. From what they would tell me while we ate, school is going well. The oldest is at an age that was not much fun for me so that was good to hear. Their brother wasn’t any more interested in me than he was the last time I saw him but I’m not going to give up that easily. We’re going to be buddies.

The rest of the weekend passed in relative ease. I floated several possible trips for 2024 but didn’t receive much interest from anyone, not that that will stop me from acting on any of my ideas. I’ll also have a new batch of ideas by the time we convene for Christmas, but there will be a few adventures between now and then.

I subscribed to ESPN+ a few months ago so that I could watch some sports that I’d been missing out on after some of the recent account sharing crackdowns that have taken place this year in the streaming world. This has created opportunities for me to watch a few sporting events that are relatively obscure in the United States.

Over the past month or so, the cricket world cup took place in India. These games started at 4:30 AM (3:30 after daylight savings time) and lasted through the morning. That meant that I had something to watch when I couldn’t fall back asleep. I ended up watching parts of several games through the tournament.

The final was on Sunday. India, playing at home in front of over 100,000 fans in a packed stadium, came up against Australia. India was favored. India was undefeated. Australia won. It wasn’t Brazil 1-7 Germany, but it was still painful to watch as a neutral. We don’t have anything quite like that in the United States, no sporting event where the collectively expectations of our entire nation rests on the shoulders of those on the field. Sometimes I think we’d be better off if we did as that would at least give us a single thing to rally around as a country.

I have spent most of the last week going from my bed to my chair and back and not doing much else. It didn’t impede our work as I haven’t had very much in recent weeks but that offered only limited solace given the way I felt. COVID has now taken over five weeks of my life directly, not to mention its many other effects on my life. It is certainly one acronym I wish I had never learned.

The worst part of this round of COVID is that I definitely got at least one other person sick during the period when I thought my symptoms were allergies and sinus issues after the temperatures dropped over forty degrees in under forty eight hours. My offer to purchase groceries was ignored, but I will be picking up the tab the next couple of times we go out for dinner. That still won’t help me feel any better about what happened.

The second worst part of this time was that I had to cancel all of my plans. I’ve worked to pack my fall calendar full of opportunities to do things and meet people and this sort of setback, even if temporary, doesn’t help. Everything this year has taken longer than expected and this was just one more example. I’m ready for that to change in the new year and accelerate some of the positive aspects I’m working to build in my life.

In any event, my symptoms have now cleared and I’ve resumed regularly scheduled activities. Now it’s time to throw myself into some activities before the holidays force me to hit pause again.

I attended my ten year college reunion last weekend. In some ways it feels like I only left a few days ago and in others it feels like I’ve lived lifetimes since then. Given the small size of my alma mater there weren’t activities specific to my class, just areas within larger events for various classes all reconvening in some form. That felt about right. Alumni relations aren’t a strong suit.

I didn’t feel compelled to speak with too many people. It was nice to hear how a few people are doing, but I wasn’t interested in hearing any braggarts. That was one of the reasons I opted out of social media. I will admit to making a few snap judgments looking at people. On that score, I’ve taken decent care of myself through the years. It was also odd that there were several people I spoke with where there really wasn’t anything to talk about. These were people with whom I’d spent many hours in college but we’d drifted apart. I haven’t had such a concentration of those encounters before so that was new.

This was also the first time I’d been on campus in several years. There were new buildings everywhere: dorms, academic buildings, athletic facilities. The basketball arena looked very nice, a stark contrast to the old bleachers that would sway under your weight if you jumped up and down on them. Part of me still loves an old basketball gym though. There is something magical about those places when they are really rocking. That said, if I get invited to speak as part of any prelaw event on campus I would like to see a basketball game in the new arena.

As part of my journey to make my home here, I did something almost every evening last week. Mondays are reserved for curling but there was also an e-commerce happy hour/meetup event on Wednesday, a series of short talks on Thursday, and a comedy open mic on Friday. I met a couple of people on Wednesday but I’m hardly a social butterfly. Thursday was a wash. This post, though, is about the open mic on Friday.

I also wrote about the last open mic I attended this summer. That one was in a dedicated comedy venue in what has become the hottest city in America for standup and some of those acts are now headlining comedy clubs around the country. That wasn’t the case this time. This was in the brightly lit barrel room of a brewery with an industrial fan running on low the whole time. The acts were a mix of decent-to-good, vulgar, and downright awful. There was even a ventriloquist for some reason. It was a much more typical open mic than what I witnessed in Austin.

I went to the event knowing that the performances would be hit-and-miss. That’s what you sign up for as an open mic attendee. Even the misses are part of the fun; there is a perverse satisfaction in watching someone else fail even if most people don’t like to admit it. I enjoy watching standup comedy and even though I’ve never had the urge to perform standup myself I have great respect for those who genuinely pursue the craft. Trying, learning, and building in public is hard. Most crafts don’t permit such public exposure. The closest I come is publishing this every week but my writing craft is hardly improved through the manner in which this column is written and edited most of the time.