Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

The willow is too close to the house.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

This blog will pay for itself.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Where Were You? (Open Thread)

Where Were You? (Open Thread)

by | 138 Comments

This post is in: 

I may do one of these posts every so often as we head toward the 20th anniversary of Balloon Juice in January.  I asked for some random numbers in an open thread the other night to provide some starting points for where to go in the wayback machine.

Saturday Open Thread: Uncertainty Is Hard Edition

Here’s all the Balloon Juice news that was fit to print on May 16, 2013:

John Cole posted “I’m a Loser” about bingeing Arrested Development.

Anne Laurie posted about ‘Douchecanoes’ in the Republican party.

Zandar (!) writes about a made-up FOX “news” crisis, titled *WKRAP in Cincinnati”.  (I miss Zandar!)

We have mistermix writing about the New Yorkers new secure system (Strongbox) for sources to submit documents to them.  (I wonder if that made a difference to all those women who came forward to talk to Ronan Farrow.)

Mistermix wonders whether Chris Kluwe was cut from the Vikings because of LBGTQ support.

We have more mistermix with an Open Thread and an invitation to ‘discuss the culture of corruption in Obama’s White House’.

DougJ writes about Michael Kinsley and austerity.  (Was that his 15 minutes of fame?)

And DougJ with a music thread.

Anne Laurie with a post about hedgehogs and Dave Weigel predicting a Hillary Clinton loss in 2016 because of Benghazi.

We had DougJ with a Megan McArdle reference and a Kinsley beat down on twitter.  (I have no memory of who that is.)

We have John Cole with a treatise on “The Manly Men of the Right”.

And a second Cole post with a “Manly Men Update”.

We have Anne Laurie with a post about writers dragging themselves through message boards at dawn looking for a troll to fight.

And a classic Cole Tunch post: Hands Down, the Worst 200 Bucks I Have Ever Spent

And Cole with another post about why the NHL isn’t more popular than it is.

It’s interesting to look at those posts, a little snapshot in time.   Barack Obama had just started his second term.  We had republicans to battle, but we still had high hopes.  It was a time of partisan politics, and plenty of bullshit, but we weren’t living with an existential threat that weighed on us pretty much every single day.

I am, of course, referring to the Republicans, not to the pandemic.  But there’s that, too.

⭐️

On May 16 of 2013, I was worrying that my (formerly) beautiful redbud tree was dying, deciding to have it cut down, taking pictures of flowers, and arranging to have my beautiful new fence built – blissfully unaware that in just 15 days my new fence would be installed, my huge silver maple would fall on my house and the fence that was just 7-hours old, and that life as I knew it would be totally disrupted for 6 months until mid-November when I was finally able to move back into the house.

Where were you and what were you doing in May of 2013?

 

Reader Interactions

138Comments

  2. 2.

    Another Scott

    Silver Maples are bad news.  I’m sorry that you had a very bad experience with one.  :-(  We had a giant one near a corner of our deck – a family of squirrels lived in a hole in the trunk.  Once it dropped a big branch (maybe 10″ diameter?) on the deck – hit the chimney on the way down.  Fortunately, no huge damage (dent in a gutter), but we did develop a roof leak a few months later that I’m sure was related to it.  We had it taken down a few months later.

    Google Photos tells me that we were at home in May 2013, getting ready for our July vacation to Yellowstone and Grand Teton.  Exciting!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  4. 4.

    Kent

    I was finishing up my 5th year of HS teaching in Waco TX and training to get ready to bike down the Pacific Coast from Astoria OR to San Francisco on a tandem with my then 10-year old daughter and 75-year old father on his recumbent bike.  The daughter is a freshman at University of Washington now.  I photo-blogged the entire trip at http://www.kentalind.blogspot.com if anyone is curious.  It is posted in reverse chronological order so you need to use the sidebars to read in correct order.

  5. 5.

    Omnes Omnibus

    I was here.  I had just started a new job.  I loved it.  Then state budget cuts eliminated it.  Thanks for the reminder.

  6. 6.

    David C

    I was deeply involved in an FDA Advisory Committee Meeting (very successful and led to two approved sBLAs). That was at the beginning of the month – took the rest of the month to unwind. Son also graduated from college.

  7. 7.

    Strypgia

    Just came back from my 2nd Afghanistan deployment, attached to MARSOT 8232 and TF Bellau Wood. That was my 5th tour overall, out of 9 I eventually did, mostly in Iraq.

  11. 11.

    cain

    Well.. every since I was bitten by a radioactive spider, I’ve been reading a lot of Tarzan comics back then. I’m recovering finally.

  12. 12.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    I was probably waiting for the school year to wrap up. And probably lurking on BJ when I was bored during class

  15. 15.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Too bad that Scott Walker recall didn’t succeed. I’m not a Wisconsite, but he was an odious little toad.

    Have heard news that Foxconn is entering into some kind of partnership with Lordstown Motors

  18. 18.

    Ohio Mom

    Recovering from my mastectomy, going to PT for my newly presenting lymphedema. Very nice group of PTs, enjoyed them.

    Re: Dave Weigel predicting Hillary’s loss. Does he get credit for an accurate prediction for the wrong reason? I like to base my faith in a prognosticator on their past performance.

  20. 20.

    Old School

    @zhena gogolia:

    I wasn’t waking up at 3 AM in terror.

    I was.  Well, maybe not terror.  Just frustration.  Why won’t that kid let me sleep through the night!?!?

  25. 25.

    Baud

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I am actually a little jealous.  I could have used a place like Balloon Juice when I was growing up and feeling politically isolated.  Also it was much harder to get access to porn in those days.  But mostly jealous about BJ.

  26. 26.

    Kelly

    2013? Reading EVERY Dick Mahew post on Obamacare. Thanks David for an incredibly usual run of posts!

  29. 29.

    Yutsano

    May 2013? I was still living in my nice tiny condo in Seattle. Pretty broke. I think we met up with Suzanne and spouse not too long after that but someone is free to correct me there.

  30. 30.

    guachi

    May 2013? Still stationed at Fort Meade and waiting to transfer to Georgia where is finally get to be stronger with my wife after 2.5 years stationed apart (consecutive. It was 7 years total at that point).

    Also had just returned from a vacation to southern England in April where the weather was uncommonly cold and rainy.

  32. 32.

    Eunicecycle

    Pretty sure I was lurking here then. I was starting a 3 month job filling in for a maternity leave that turned into 5 years. And going through a family crisis that ended with a family member going to federal prison. So a rather stressful time.

  33. 33.

    Old School

    We had DougJ with a Megan McArdle reference and a Kinsley beat down on twitter.  (I have no memory of who that is.)

    Who is “Who that is” referring to?  DougJ, Megan McArdle, or Michael Kinsley?

  35. 35.

    Lapassionara

    @Ohio Mom: Benghazi led to the multiple investigations which led to the discovery that Clinton used her own email server. And the rest was “butter emails.”

  36. 36.

    lowtechcyclist

    Raising a 5 year old together with my wife, coping with a reorg at work that we’ve still not entirely recovered from. I’d ruptured my Achilles tendon in January, but I was fully recovered by then. Kinda boring to talk about, really.

    ETA: I was definitely here then (I remember Cole’s original ‘tire rims and anthrax’ post), but I didn’t comment much back then.

  37. 37.

    mali muso

    May 2013…I was working on my doctoral degree in addition to my full-time job.  I ran a 10k that month, and I was also in the best physical shape of my life.  Pretty depressing for my current sedentary self to remember.  sigh.

  38. 38.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The Walker recall was a bad idea.  It would have been better to have saved up that rage and simply directed it at the next election.  I was a skeptic at the time.  However, once it was a thing, I, of course, voted to get rid of him.

  40. 40.

    montanareddog

    @guachi:

     

    May 2013? Still stationed at Fort Meade and waiting to transfer to Georgia where is finally get to be stronger with my wife after 2.5 years stationed apart (consecutive. It was 7 years total at that point).

    “His Grace returned from the wars this morning and pleasured me twice in his top-boots” – The 1st Duchess of Marlborough

    Also had just returned from a vacation to southern England in April where the weather was uncommonly cold and rainy.

    Sarcasm, right?

  41. 41.

    Peale

    @Lapassionara: Leading to months of enraged Democrats screaming “If I had done what she did at my company, I would have been fired.” And “If only she’d just hand them over, we’d be done with this.”

  43. 43.

    JPL

    Around that time that I saw “Enough Said” because I think Gandolfini was still alive. The reason I remember is because of the angry old white men in the theatre. One involved a man and his wife (I think) who was struggling walking because of a disability. She was not moving fast enough. Another was a man who got into an argument with someone about having their cell phone out. In the first case, the friend and I both felt guilty because we should have followed them out, and got the person’s license plate. If there is abuse in a theatre, there is abuse at home.
    It was a sign of what was to come.

  45. 45.

    dnfree

    Probably still in rehab from my heart attack in January 2013. I felt fine, but I felt fine before the heart attack, too.  Still feel fine, and also lucky.

    ETA woohoo, 42!  Still lucky!

    ETA but in moderation.

  48. 48.

    Immanentize

    Ha! I was on my second year as a Vice Provost at the University. By then, I had already weathered two Provosts and the President had just announced he was leaving in June of 2014. By the time I “retired back to the faculty” in 2016, I worked under three Provosts and Four Presidents. I am definitely not change adverse. But it ends up I am chaos adverse.

  49. 49.

    Peale

    May 2013 – Looks like I had just gotten back from a trip to Prague and Dresden. Was definitely still in my graffiti photographing stage. Looks like I had hung a painting I had bought from an street artist that month. Talented man who has since left us behind. On May 12 I went to the 9/11 memorial for the first time. I don’t think I was posting under Peale here yet. I was probably still suffernace.

  51. 51.

    Burnspbesq

    Somewhere, doing something. Getting ready to drive the kid back up to Seattle for his second year at Cornish.

    BTW, ICYMI, last evening the U.S. District Court in Austin put SB8 on hold. Needless to say, the state appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which will likely do something stupid and unprincipled.

  52. 52.

    Strypgia

    @WaterGirl: Pays the bills?
    Enlisted, did 3 in Iraq (1 yr, 1 1/3 yr, 1 yr). Left active duty, came back as a contractor. Same thing, less Privates. Did 2x Afghanistan (6 mo, 8 mo), 6 months of Kuwait, then Iraq again for 1yr, then 6 months. Probably still be going back again, except, well… nothing to go back to.

    Pretty sure there were points between 2003 and 2020 where I was spending more time deployed than home.

    @cain: If I didn’t have my wife to keep me grounded, I’d probably have come out a bitter, angry lunatic. Fortunately, her dad was Army too. She knows the game.

  53. 53.

    WaterGirl

    I hope you guys all know what you did to get into moderation!  Because I do not.  Now that everyone is free, let’s see if the (moderation) ship will right itself.

  55. 55.

    FlyingToaster

    Then-Warrior Girl was finishing her last month of Suzuki Pre-K (running up to graduation in June).  We’d just paid for the first semester of private school (Kindergarten) and were suffering from sticker shock.

    And when I woke up coughing because of my allergies, I wasn’t freaking the fuck out that I might be infected with a pandemic virus.

  59. 59.

    H.E.Wolf

    I’m wow’ed by the variety and interest of everyone’s activities. (I’m about to drop off the internet for an hour or two; will come back and read later postings afterwards.)

    May 2013, per my datebook from that year:
    – many appointments with various bookkeeping clients.
    – a big co-presentation with a great colleague, at the request of the local romance writers’ annual conference, on stage-combat fight styles in 7 different weapon forms. I wrote the choreography, including a full-length swashbuckling sword fight adapted from a scene in an adventure novel, and annotated the scene to clarify how that author had made effective writing choices.
    – a weekly stage combat class, co-taught with a disastrous colleague.
    – a bunch of dance and exercise classes, as a student.
    – a 3-day trip to see 2 longtime friends whom I’ve known since we were 11.

    I had more energy 8 years ago. :)

  63. 63.

    Nelle

    The week that included May 16, 2013, I was in Wellington, New Zealand while my husband had a series of meetings.  I was free to wander.  We stayed in the Booklovers B and B, as we usually did when we were there.  I had a traditional walk, which was up the hill through Victoria Park, past an area where part of The Lord of the Rings was filmed.  Then down a steep hill, via a long staircase with a lot of end of season nasturtiums in a riot of reds, oranges, and yellows  (remember, it was mid-autumn in May there).  Down to the waterfront of the bay.  I walked along there to Te Papa, the national museum of art and culture.  I looked at several paintings and then saw a perfect compostion of a bench of quiet high school girls, all in their uniform blazers, looking at a painting, with light falling on them.  From the back, it was as good as any painting.

    There was a table with paper and pencils.  On the wall, an invitation to post a response to the question “What would you say to a loved one on your final walk together?”   One response:  Right here/ Right now/This moment/is all.

    On the way out, I stopped to look at an old cannon.  It was from James Cook, one of six thrown overboard to lighten the load when they were stuck on a coral reef (Great Barrier Reef) and gifted to NZ by Australia.

    The autumn wind had built to a typical Wellington gale.  I took the tram up to the Botanical Gardens.  The intensity of blue hydrangeas had faded.  Only a few brilliant red leaves still flipped around on the grey branches of the Japanese maples.

    I came out of the gardens, down the hill and through the cemetery.  As usual, I stopped to pay respects at the Duff family marker.  In Sacred Memory of Hannah Duff, Dec. 21, 1876, 1 yr, 9 months.  Agnes W Duff, Dec 22, 1876, 8 yrs, 4 months.  Margaret M Duff, De. 28, 1876, 10 yrs, 3 months.  John Duff, Dec. 31, 1876, 10 yrs, 3 months.  Edith Duff, Jan. 1, 1877, 6 yrs.      John Duff, father of the above, Sept 9, 1899, 66 years.  Sarah Duff, wife and mother of the above.  Born Aug 28, 1839, died April 10, 1912.

    Yes, I kept a journal of my life.

  67. 67.

    Steeplejack

    On May 16, 2013, I was about to go to Baltimore the next day on a road trip with my brother. In one of the night threads I asked for dining recommendations in Little Italy, got one response (from Omnes). I’m pretty sure we ended up eating at Amicci’s, which was excellent. Can’t remember what I had, but I was also lusting over my brother’s pasta with pancetta and peas.

  68. 68.

    Redshift

    I was in the middle of the longest period of unemployment of my life. (Age discrimination is a thing, even in high-demand tech fields, grrr!) According to my photos, which is the only way I remember what I was doing, I was about a week out from seeing Obama speak at a high school gym.

  69. 69.

    Bill

    @WaterGirl: ​
     

    Kinsley was a bigtime pundit in the 80s and 90s at places like New Republic and Slate. He sort of disappeared from being on TV all the time after he got Parkinson’s disease.

  71. 71.

    Scout211

    This is a fun thread to read.

    My husband retired in May of 2013 and carted home to our house (what seemed like to me)  millions of papers and books and other stuff from his 42 years of teaching at the university.  Our house looked like a storage unit that was fully stuffed.  He calls himself a packrat but I think hoarder seems a bit more on point.  I spent the next 6 months slowing sorting through the papers and books, donating, filing, recycling and (while he was out of the house) throwing stuff into the trash. It was the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.

  73. 73.

    Martin

    I was here, being me. Doing more dad stuff back then, when the kids weren’t yet adults. Didn’t need medication to function.

    In current news, rained twice this week, and supposed to rain again tomorrow. We’ll take all we can get. Doesn’t smell like oil today, which is nice. The superbowl of esports started today – TI10. So that’s my next 2 weeks entertainment.

  74. 74.

    Jager

    Wrapped up 46 years in radio by selling our company’s last three FM stations, the 3rd station sale I had facilitated in 10 years. Fell into depression even after putting a healthy check in the bank. Tough going from being part of the generation who put rock on FM to watching the big money guys destroy the business. The first of our stations I sold, we’d paid 1.1 million for in 1971, the company sold it for just south of 70 million in 1996. Those of us who built and ran it shared .001 of the net sales price. After that, the sale prices went up and the payouts dropped.

  75. 75.

    Scout211

    @JPL:

    Are you still sorting through stuff?

    Funny you should mention this . . .  The stuff keeps coming for some reason. I don’t really know how that happens . . .  So yeah, I am still sorting.   :)

  78. 78.

    The Dangerman

    May, 2013? A large part of it would be spent in Eureka, CA, beginning the process of becoming my Uncle’s court appointed conservator (long term Parkinson’s, nothing like Britney). I spent a LOT of time on the North Coast over the next few years, hanging out in the Redwoods and looking for Bigfoot. If I didn’t love the Central Coast do much, the North Coast would be home.

  79. 79.

    montanareddog

    Just checked Google Photos to see May 2013. The week of the 16th I was in Zurich for work (and, maybe of interest to former big booming gun specialist Omnes, the following week I was in Vienna and, one evening after work, I went to photograph the giant Nazi flak towers that are still standing.)

  80. 80.

    daize

    Was working retail after being canned from dreadful, stressful job.  I agree with Redshift about age discrimination; took a few years to find something that paid better.  Not May 16th, but on May 20th 2013 I took the photo of beloved kitty Oyster (since passed away) that I send for the BJ calendar each year.

  84. 84.

    TheQuietOne

    I was lurking here daily and looking at my picture roll it appears  we were enjoying LOTS of beer with friends. Grandpa, that’s me, took a funny pix of our 3 year old grand daughter smiling down at a flight in a local brew house. Bad grandpa!!!!

  85. 85.

    brendancalling

    I just looked back at my Gmail from that time.
    I was working at what wound up being my last grant-writing job. I will never ever do that shit work again, unless it’s for a grant for ME.

    I was playing shows with my former old-time band, the Dill Pickles Old Time Orchestra. I had just gotten off tour with Woody Pines. I had just gotten back from housesitting for three weeks in Los Angeles, and was about to make my first “do I want to move here?” foray to Nashville (I did, and moved 3 years later to the month). And, I was learning how to edit video at Scrapple TV (although I didn’t edit this one, it is my favorite).

  86. 86.

    opiejeanne

    @mrmoshpotato: No, the fire inspector couldn’t tell what had happened. He just said he hoped it was because the melting snow on the roof had somehow gotten into the heater where it was sitting on the dry gravel, and not because someone really disliked us.

    We have been a little chicken about hooking up the electricity again, but the wiring was still there and it’s going to be in the 30s in a few days, so mr opiejeanne installed a new junction box and a new GFI, and the heater is currently sitting on a metal bench and away from any leaks. We are trying to give a bunch of peppers and tomatoes some more time to finish ripening, or at least to come close, and then the heater will be put into storage for the winter. We need to seal the joint at the crown the length  of the greenhouse.

  87. 87.

    The Dangerman

    Kent, would love to see the pics but there was an issue with the link. There are so many rail to trail treks on my TBD list. CHOAB unite!

  88. 88.

    Steeplejack

    Speaking of reaching back into the past . . .

    Ron Filipkowski: Newsmax is reporting tonight that Trump will invoke executive privilege in an attempt to block all the subpoenas for former members of his WH staff issued by the bipartisan Select Committee on J6.

    The Hoarse Whisperer: In a related story, I am invoking my Student Discount from back when I was in college.

  90. 90.

    WaterGirl

    @Steeplejack: Yeah, we found a few of those during the transition.  If it wasn’t there before, it’s not there now. I don’t think it’s a wider problem.  But I appreciate your bringing it up!

  91. 91.

    JPL

    @Steeplejack: That might be the only way to tie it up in courts until the republicans retake the house.   The plan is to shut it all down.

    bah humbug

    Imm if you are stil around, talk me off the cliff.

  93. 93.

    Ruckus

    I had just started my new job after the Not So Great Recession took care of my then business.

    Nothing like losing pretty much everything and without the kindness of a friend being homeless for a year.

    Eight yrs later I’ve retired. Never thought I’d be working into my eighth decade, even if only for a couple of years.

  98. 98.

    gvg

    Unfortunately, I was getting diagnosed with cancer, healing from surgery and getting ready to start chemo. My parents cancelled their Russia trip to look after me and later our relations with Russia got bad enough they never went. The only trip in decades they had bothered to get trip insurance for and the insurance actually paid out.
    Recently talked with an old family friend who mentioned how afraid my mother had been. Mom vented to her friend and didn’t let me see much. I delt by ignoring and NOT researching odds. Just kept going forward. And sleeping a lot. My parents are great. Its getting into the years when I have to help them now. Most of the next 9 months are a blur for me and I did not watch the news a lot then.

  102. 102.

    Kent

    @The Dangerman: It works for me.   It is a regular google blogspot site, nothing nefarious.  I’m not sure why some browsers give you a security alert.   Maybe just because it is old.

  103. 103.

    Nelle

    @eclare: I think it was diptheria.   It increases my contempt for people who refuse vaccines and medical advice.  Public health.  Weird concept, eh?

  104. 104.

    Kent

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yeah.  I’m not sure where the security warning is coming from.  It’s the old google blogspot site, unchanged since I originally blogged the trip 8.5 years ago.  Maybe the original certificate is just old and that is what is doing it.  There is nothing nefarious there, just ordinary blog posts and photos.  Maybe if you try a different browser.

    I tried it on several different browsers and it works but chrome threw up a warning.  Bizarre.  Blogspot is a google-owned site so they should have their act together.  Perhaps google just left the certificates slide or something.

  105. 105.

    StringOnAStick

    @eclare:  Probably some infectious childhood disease, how sad that it took all their children one by one in such a short time. The parents lived many years after with that history to haunt them. That this doesn’t happen now ( in western counties at least) is thanks to vaccination against childhood diseases, at least so far anyway.

  107. 107.

    Eunicecycle

    @Kent: I was a grant writer at one time, and always wished I could be on the other side. Then I worked at a foundation as a program officer and found out that has its own difficulties.

  108. 108.

    Kent

    @Eunicecycle: When I worked for NOAA I got assigned to review Saltonstall-Kennedy grant submissions every year on top of my regular fisheries management duties. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/grant/saltonstall-kennedy-grant-competition

    Sorting through the BS was really exhausting and tedious.   All the most polished grant applications were made by deep-pocketed seafood industry types who wanted to “experiment” with various different things and get the government to foot the bill for their ordinary R&D that they should have been paying for themselves.  I was always more favorable towards grant proposals from academia.  But the review criteria didn’t really allow me to make those sorts of distinctions even though I wanted to.   It was basically long weekends of pulling extra duty on top of my regular job.

  109. 109.

    Ruckus

    @WaterGirl:

    I spent nearly 4 yrs being alternately told that I very likely had Parkinson’s and then being told I didn’t. A year ago I got a new doc at the VA and he specifically showed me that I didn’t.

    But you are correct, even the concept of possibly having Parkinson’s can be worrying. And there are other diseases that have some of the same problems for a person but most of them are very rare.

  110. 110.

    Matt McIrvin

    Based on old blog entries: I had JUST finished the long, long procedure for getting a dental implant installed, and was very happy about it. I was also busy doing some recreational mathematics in my spare time, messing around with prime-number tests from Fibonacci-like sequences. Right around then, I made my one and only actual discovery in pure mathematics, which was too trivial to be worthy of a published paper but ended up in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences:

    https://oeis.org/A225984

    https://oeis.org/A225876

    A few weeks earlier, we’d made the surreal trip back to a Boston that was locked down while police hunted down the Marathon bombers–the bombing had happened while we were visiting New York. There was a lot of argument here about whether the willingness of people to lock down was a sign of excessive fealty to cops/sheeplike fear of terrorism.

  112. 112.

    Eunicecycle

    @Kent: Since I was a former bs-er myself, I could spot it quickly! But the grant review committee liked the bs generally. It was my job to cut through it.

  113. 113.

    Tony Jay

    May 2013? I was on holiday in North Wales, clean shaven, and gazing in mystified awe at the cute little person who had grown so much in just four and a bit months.

    Also I was here, watching you people do what you do.

  116. 116.

    Old School

    @WaterGirl: I had to re-edit a comment the other day to put back in the punctuation.  No idea if the site did it or if I accidentally deleted it myself.

    Edit: When I edited this comment, typing this part deleted the period at the end of the first paragraph.

  120. 120.

    H.E.Wolf

    @stinger:
    @H.E.Wolf:
    a weekly stage combat class, co-taught with a disastrous colleague.

    I would like to know more about this! (all of it)
    ​

     

    About the disastrous colleague? Handsy with the female students, competitive with the male students, abusive to me. (That photo of Kavanaugh during the Senate hearings, his face suffused with entitled rage? I saw that facial expression a lot.)

    The great colleague? Collaborative, intelligent, thoughtful, humorous, and “can do”. A complete professional and a delight to team up with, on numerous projects over the years.

    The swashbuckling fight? The writers at the conference wanted to know: “How do we write a believable fight; and what do different types of historical weapons look like in use?” We demo’d 4-5 moves each of 7 different weapon types, then showed them a complete fight from a novel.

    I based it on the culminating sword fight in Heinlein’s “Glory Road”, because Heinlein wrote the first half of the fight without specifying any individual moves, and wrote the second half in precise detail. Two options for writers = A+ choice!

    As choreographer, my task was to choose appropriate moves for the first half, and adapt the very specific moves in the second half for a theatrical performance.

    We gave the writers a copy of the passage from the novel, then ran the sequence for them once at performance speed, and again in super slo-mo with a step-by-step explanation about what we were doing; why/how; and where in the text each move was indicated.

    It was fun. One of the characters in the novel switches sword hands during the fight. My colleague and I made a bargain: I’d fight both right- and left-handed, and she’d do the fancy-pants triple envelopment maneuver at the end, and win the fight. :)

  122. 122.

    raven

    A lot happened that month but here’s a fun one. REM’s guitar tech got married and the rumor was that the band was going to play. There was another band playing and the guys walked in, picked up their instruments and played 7 songs. The place was a tiny bowling alley and the room was even smaller.  

    I had just bought a digital camera and I recorded it. A couple of weeks ago I asked their manager if I could post them after all these years and, after review, he said they were not of the quality they would like so they just sit on my computer,\.

  124. 124.

    Morzer

    I was in Somerville, probably playing one of the Total War games. Although I might have been teaching Gandhi some lessons in nuclear non-proliferation.

  125. 125.

    H.E.Wolf

    @WaterGirl: @H.E.Wolf: I think we all want to know whether you slayed the disastrous colleague with a withering glance or with an actual weapon.​

     Alas, neither. He outranked me, and the VIPs in the professional organization were sympathetic to (and/or likewise engaged in) those same behaviors.

    Instead I retired.

    My hope is that the many students I had the pleasure of teaching, and the actors for whom I provided fight direction over the years, have some useful skills and some good memories of my work with them.

    And rather than continuing to grieve for my lost vocation, I’m happily involved in making the political landscape a bit better. Thriving is an under-rated form of revenge. :)

  126. 126.

    stinger

    @H.E.Wolf: Thanks for the fascinating description! (Also, what WaterGirl said.)  Especially appreciate your final comment, about revenge.

  128. 128.

    Matt McIrvin

    @WaterGirl: Thanks!

    Yes, it seems like what happens is that if you edit a comment after posting it, sometimes the final character (usually punctuation) in one of the earlier paragraphs gets stripped off.

  129. 129.

    WaterGirl

    @H.E.Wolf:

    He outranked me, and the VIPs in the professional organization were sympathetic to (and/or likewise engaged in) those same behaviors.

    Lovely.  Living well really is the best revenge.

  130. 130.

    BRyan

    Seeing a long-time dear friend through late-stage COPD.  He made it to mid-2014, which was nothing short of amazing given six years at 20% lung function.  Miss him still.  And still have an instinctive desire to reach for a two-by-four with which to smack any smokers I encounter.  (They do say there’s nothing worse than a reformed smoker).  Ghastly disease.

  132. 132.

    Kirk Spencer

    Ah, mid-May of 2013. I’m in the 6th of what turns out to be 7 years of unemployment – or rather, taking any odd job I can. I had my last physical therapy for recovery of the shattered ankle the previous week. Mom’s just been moved to a different area of the home because not only does she have dementia it turns out she now bites when she doesn’t get her way. Dad’s barely 6 months from dying, not that we know it yet.

    Balloon juice, and in particular a few members of it (you know who you are) play a significant part in keeping me sane during this time.

  136. 136.

    sab

    Very late to this thread, which I hope is dead.

    Mom died in March 2012. They had been married 60 years. Dad was bereft. She was a good wife. He barely knew how to make a sandwich.

    We had an amazing nurse’s aide/ housekeeper/whatever else we needed.

    I moved in with Dad to not overwhelm her.

    Also too I had a full time job with a very long commute.

    I also had a husband. Good guy. Fuck him. He will survive years of neglect ( amazingly, he did.)

    Absolutely worst five years of my life. Then we put dad in a nursing home. You cannot do this forever by yourself. You just can’t.

  137. 137.

    sab

    @sab: Also too I didn’t do it by myself. Housekeeper/ nurses aide did about 90 % of it

    ETA and only doing 10% I was overwhelmed. Imagine nurse’s aide doing 90%.

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