Dear everyone,

This has been the week of broken toys. I mentioned Nicola’s computer malfunction in my last letter. When I went to pick it up, the software wouldn’t start up. The repairers denied having done anything to the software (although it was fine prior to delivery), but they would do a complete start-up for $125. I was pretty pissed off! I took the computer to my office and it spent the afternoon rebooting to factory specs. Luckily, Nicola had saved all of her data to an external hard drive before taking it to the shop, so her computer eventually returned to normal operation.

Next, the propane tank on our 12 year old barbeque needed to be refilled. When I brought it into the store, they shook their heads. My tank out of date, and would need a 5 year recertification done somewhere in Wheaton. Of course, I could buy a new tank, but the coupling on the old grill was for the old style tank (switched in 2005), so I would need to buy hardware to jigger up the connection. We actually tried to do this, but it was very hard to figure out what to get to match a new tank with the old coupling. I gave in, and bought a new grill (which I’m now trying to use to slow cook a brisket.)

Our cable/DVR box from Comcast wasn’t working correctly, so Cindy called, and they sent us out a new box (in the meanwhile, of course, the old box started to work). After hooking up the new box, it only took five separate calls to get the new one to work. First, although we had activated the new box, they hadn’t deactivated the old one. Then the remote didn’t work properly. Then the On Demand service didn’t work properly…..

This is not to mention the variety of plumbing problems of an old house, or the haunted electrical system in Cindy’s Sierra minivan.

Presently, Lucas is with some friends studying for his honors physics 1st semester midterm. Last week they had to build a trebuchet and were graded based on how accurate it performed. Cindy just got back from Jasper’s first swim meet of the fall. He improved some times, but others worsened.

Yesterday Cindy and I went to parents’ weekend / Humanities day at University of Chicago. We saw three lectures. The first was excellent, given by Lawrence McEnerney. McEnerney is the head of the writing program (the Little Red Schoolhouse) at U of C. Most of his time is spent with graduate students or professors. Experts often have a problem with their writing because they think while they write, and the end result is an autobiographical mess that is incomprehensible to anyone but the author. Professor McEnerney is a rhetoritician, and he takes the expert’s writing, and helps them put in contextual cues to allow the reader to follow the story. Then we went over the Gettysburg Address, and he showed us how Lincoln used a variety of cues to help people follow the speech: The speech is centered in time (past-present-future), space (from the continent to Nation to Gettysburg, to a portion of the field), in intent (Lincoln uses the word ‘dedicate’ a lot); in problem solving, etc. It was an excellent talk.

The second lecture was rather mediocre, with David Bevington, a famous Shakespeare scholar rambling on about a dozen or so film treatments of Hamlet, and how they had different takes on the story. It was okay, but it was a lecture on vignettes rather than a comprehensive story.

The last Lecture was God-awful, by Armando Maggi. It was supposed to be about the history of fairy tales, their uses in the present and the future. It was totally incoherent. He definitely needed some help from Dr. McEnerney! None of us walked out of his talk understanding a thing he said, other than feeling that he contradicted himself somewhere, and that his thesis might have been incorrect. Afterwards, we took Nicola to the Curry House on 9th and S. Plymouth Court for a pretty good Indian dinner. Nicola seems happy with her class choices and her housemates.

Now the Bears have won, the Steelers are winning, and it is time to take my brisket off the grill.

Love

H