Little Profits Part 2
One of my New Year’s Projects from 2020 was to memorize a poem each month; I wrote about this around halfway thru and wanted to get an update on the record.
It went fine! I abandoned one poem because I just couldn’t get it to stick, but otherwise I memorized these and really enjoyed the process.
I’ve been using them as little mental exercises when I have downtime, and also they have become a really effective way to get to sleep. I’m afraid that part is so effective that I might
By the time of my last post I had memorized:
- January: Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson
- February: God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins
- March: The Sun says Yes, Adrian Mitchell
- April: The Second Coming, Yeats
- May: The Country, Billy Collins
And then in the second half I’ve added:
- June: Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’ve always loved this weird poem. I named my wifi network after it long ago, much to the chagrin of my family. I love now having the whole poem at my fingertips. It really does feel like a low-key drug trip.
- July: A passage from Moby Dick (from ch 7, The Chapel), that I may have failed at. I tried, and kind of gave up.! Then switched to an easier set of two short poems: This Be the Verse, Philip Larkin AND Rebuttal by Adrian Mitchell
- August: If-, Rudyard Kipling, which is a little singsongy in the way Kipling is, but goshdarn it I love the manly bluster of Kipling, no matter how unfashionable it is. You’ll be a man, my son!
- September: Back to Moby-Dick the Chapel, tried to pick this up again.
- October: This month was a real failure, I started Scott Cairn’s Embalming, but just couldn’t get it to lock in. SO I jumped ahead to Noember’s poem to get a start on it:
- November: St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. This is one of the poems that I was gearing up for - to have this ready by the actual St Crispins Day.
- December: Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, anon. I love this weird old Christmas hymn and always wanted to have it nailed down. Is a song cheating? Maybe.
My goal in 2021 is to just keep these. Keep trying to remember them and practice when I can. Memorization is so hard!
(Little Profits?) The title of this note comes from the first line of of Ulysses, the poem I started this exercise with: It little profits that an idle king…
FOUND 2020
Every year as a family we pick up coins we find on the ground, and add them to a dedicated jar for that year. The rules are simple: ‘found’ money has to be found outside our house/yard, we can’t know who the owner is, and we can never spend it. The jar is documented and saved; here’s our haul from 2020:
The final count was $37.90, which is almost our largest total amount. But it is by FAR our largest total count.
(Of course I have a spreadsheet.)
We’re getting better every year on this, but 2020, our (first?) year of quarantine, we went on a TON of walks. We found a lot there, and but the biggest was a huge haul we found in an alley, where it looked like someone’s Big Gulp of change spilled out. We found something like eighteen bucks that day.
As usual, this jar of change is archived and saved, destined one day for the Erika Kirkland Museum of Found Objects.
2020 Recap
I’m bad at remembering things so it’s helpful to write stuff down. Thus: a recap post for 2020.
2020 was a surprising year! For everybody, of course, and we’ve said around here that so far we have had the best possible pandemic. But let’s recap!
January
- We got a fish!
- F & I went to a KU bbball game
- T played on a rec basketball team
- BNB EOY dinner at BonBon
- BNB Seattle Trip
- Allen Fieldhouse Tour with DNA
- January 30: my first saved screenshot re: coronavirus in China.
February
- I used my ‘rona worry to stock up on emergency supplies. I feel SO smart about this.
- BNB played with clay at Muddy Waters
March
- Kirklands went to AZ. Covid hit the fan during that week, it was weird and I was legit worried about not being able to fly home. Last plane trip of 2020.
- School shut down (for a few weeks, they said)
- BNB went all-remote (for a couple of weeks, we said)
- Church went to zoom (for a couple of weeks, we said)
- Soccer shut down (for a couple of weeks, they said)
- Gym shut down (for a couple of weeks, they said)
- Pandemic shutdown in full swing. We stopped eating out, went for a lot of walks, started sewing masks.
April
- launch of v1 of Neumz, which got a ton of press
- School went ‘remote’, which was extremely half-assed. We tried to supplement with some other requirements
- started regular zoom calls with college friends
- started movie/pizza Friday nights with kids, because what else?
- gym passed out equipment and I got a rowing machine at home!
- F soccer officially end for the season
- E got laid off officially from her job, starts part-time job of just trying to get unemployment
May
- the spring was beautiful, and we spent many, many hours on the porch and going for evening walks.
- TK and I discover geocaching
- Cheesey Day News starts (I think?)
- We taught the kids to play Spades, and really doubled down on our board games.
June
- FK started baking bread, in true pandemic style
- We didn’t got to Maine as planned
July
- gym reopened, with lots of restrictions
- the summer was mild, which was a relief because there was nowhere else to go
- EK didn’t go to Poland as planned
August
- started homeschooling (The Studio Kirkland Center for Ongoing Virally-Induced Development)
- Dad called to tell me about a UFO, which we figured out was a Google Project Loon balloon
- FK soccer restarted. He got to guest play on the next team up, so we had more soccer than usual all fall (and spring 2021)
- I started teaching a lecture course at KU - ADS300. Zoom lectures for that many people were rrrough at first.
- I think we visited STL this month? It felt like we were putting my folks at risk.
September
- Kansas road trip to the Little Jerusalem Badlands, newest state park. I got chased by a tarantula hawk wasp.
- EK started residential carpentry class at local tech school
- FK took an online architecture class
- I took my first COVID test (randomly selected for KU, despite teaching all-remote course)
October
- an early snow!
- low key Halloween, sort of. We made some costumes but didn’t go trick or treating. I walked Kuel around his neighborhood and we saw many covid ‘candy chutes’
November
- BNB went to visit an alpaca farm
- crazy Presidential election, I took a week of screenshots showing electoral maps
- Zoom pie night, which was sad but I enjoyed our pies.
- lovely at-home Thanksgiving. EK made a beautiful meal, and we had a whole ham all to ourselves.
- No chicago trip.
- I started growing a pandemic mustache, finally
- BNB finally gave up the lease to our (empty) office
December
- EK demo’d TK’s room down to the cinderblock, and the interior walls to studs. Rebuild commenced in 2021, I think.
- I stepped down as Trustee at church
- Nice quiet Christmas at home, then drove to STL on xmas morning to see fam. Still felt weird to be in person!
All in All
I feel like the highlights here are negative, but it was actually a beautiful, positive year for us. E and I say it feels like we stole and extra year with the kids, and we loved spending so much time together, free from our obligations and activities. We ate every meal at home for a better part of a year. It felt like we moved out to the countryside. And nobody got the ‘rona. Yet.
The Cheesey Day News Weather Report
One of our homeschool/pandemic projects, mostly spearheaded by Editor-in-Chief Trudy, was The Cheesey Day News, a local paper that the kids produced. We’ve done 8 issues so far? They write stories, fill it up with games and puzzles, and have even taken some ad dollars.
I had only a very small part of it, but I got to make a weather report for each issue, which I very much enjoyed.
Knockoff Sculpture
Look, copying from master craftsmen is a perfectly acceptable practice, right? So I saw and adored this series of concrete sculptures from David Umemoto, and wanted to make my own. What better pandemic pasttime?
Here’s the original sculpture I wanted to try to copy:
Figuring out how to make an inverted version of this, the negative space that I could pour concrete around, pretty much broke my brain. There were a lot of spreads in my sketchbook that looked like this:
First I realized that I could build myself a set of negative shapes, so I got a bunch of stock wood and started making myself building blocks. These involved a lot of cutting and sanding, and at the end of the day I had a bunch of wooden blocks.
Then it was just a matter of building the reverse version, and putting it in a mold. It went… OK? I had a few attempts that failed miserably because I didn’t build in sufficient wiggle room to get the wooden blocks out, and then destroyed the concrete trying to get out all the molded parts. I applied generous sprays of Pam cooking spray, but who knows if that helped.
I suppose the original artist must use nylon pieces or something, but at the end of the day I had a draft I was happy enough to keep:
Lots of room for improvement, primarily getting a smoother finish on the concrete, and getting much sharper edges and corners. Also finding a better way to get it all the negative mold shapes out cleanly. Maybe coating the individual pieces of block in some kind of wax?
