Weekend Notes

A pretty chill weekend, with not a lot to share. Most activities revolved around making final preparations to move C to IU this Wednesday. A final trip to Target. A final order (or three) on Amazon. Many loads of laundry. A lot of organizing of our bonus room, which is the staging area. There are whole sections of the floor in there I haven’t seen since June that are exposed again as S worked hard to get things jammed into boxes and containers and bags. I’m hoping we can get everything in one car but that’s probably overly optimistic and we’ll be taking two.

In somewhat related news, M’s new house in Cincy has kind of been a disaster so far. As the other roommates moved in, more problems kept presenting themselves. The biggest is that their electrical circuits aren’t large enough to handle all the girls running window air conditioning units, so they keep tripping. Fortunately for M her room is not affected by this. But the poor girls upstairs have really been suffering.

There have been a variety of other fairly significant issues. The girls keep turning them into the property management company, some are resolved, some are not. One parent got fed up and sent a really nasty email to the company, threatening them with legal action if they don’t get the issues resolved quickly. Yikes!

M’s plan was to stay in this house her final two years of school. S and I are going to give it a couple weeks, but if things don’t get better, we are probably going to tell her to find a different place for her senior year. The only saving grace is that she’ll be overseas from January through May, so if the house remains a disaster, she only has about five months in it.

Knocking on wood things get a little better and she can get through the first semester.

I must admit, though, I keep wanting to tell her, “Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I expected to happen when you moved into a 124-year-old house that has been primarily used by college students for who knows how long.” I’m keeping that to myself for now.

Oh, S and I (mostly S) wallpapered our laundry room. It took six hours over two nights, and we still have some finishing work to do pending obtaining another roll of paper. I wasn’t convinced this was the greatest idea. If you know my wife, though, you know that once she gets a project in her head she has to knock it out. I was wiped out and pissed off and I did very little of the work. I’m not sure how she kept her cool. Although she did admit when we were done she probably would not do that ever again.

This project was delayed several weeks because the place we ordered the paper from made a huge mistake. Rather than sending us what S ordered, our initial shipment contained four rolls of Lion King decals. We did not order anything that was in any way related to the Lion King. And we ordered full rolls of wallpaper, not decals that were to be placed over painted walls. When they arrived I thought she had ordered them for some of the exam rooms at her office.

S sent in a request for replacement with pictures of the incorrect product. For some reason it took the company like two weeks to process it. First they asked for confirmation that all four items we received we incorrect. I guess we didn’t make that clear on our form. Then they told us multiple times they were “working hard to see how this happened.” S had to send multiple follow-up messages.

Here’s a customer service hint: just ship the right fucking replacement product! We don’t care how this happened, or why. We just want what we ordered.

When we finally received the correct wallpaper last week, we laughed that there were stamps all over the packaging noting it was a next-day air delivery and the paperwork inside noted that it was a “HOT” shipment and to ensure proper items were packed.

Big Money For KU

There had been rumors for a while that KU was having trouble scrounging up enough money for phase two of the football stadium renovation project. There were also rumors that donors had been reluctant/unable to pour money into NIL because they had been asked to give so much for phase one of the project.

All those concerns got wiped off the board Wednesday when alum David Booth committed to giving $350 million to the school, one of the biggest individual gifts ever made to a college. A healthy chunk of that will be used for the football stadium. It already had his name on it; makes sense that he wants it finished. The rest will go into a fund that should fund KU’s “athlete reimbursement fund” for at least 20 years. I used that euphemism because I still don’t completely understand how the new system of revenue sharing and NIL work together, and I don’t know if this money can be shoveled into both of those buckets or just one.

Regardless, it puts KU in a fantastic position budget-wise. That $20 million/year that can be allocated to student athletes is taken care of for the time being. It frees up money for other projects. That financial security should make KU even more attractive when the next round of conference realignment comes around.[1]

I’m not sure that if you are able to give this kind of money, dumping it all into college athletics is the best way to spend it. But who am I to tell someone like David Booth what to do with his money. I wish I had to worry about what people think about me because I threw tons of money into sports rather than academics, infrastructure, or some other aspect of a school that, you know, helps its actual mission.

Somewhat related, Bill Self had a press conference on Thursday. He seemed pretty normal, certainly more normal that he was a couple weeks after his heart attack in 2022. He hinted at, but said he would not share details about, having “complications” after the ’22 event. Hopefully his docs and his body are being honest with him and he genuinely is healthy enough to deal with freshmen who make dumb mistakes, referees who make bad calls, and all the other pressures of the job.

Stupid Weather

After two months that were very hot yet also had at least one good downpour per week, our rain has dried up over the past two weeks. And with it our lawn. The grass started getting crispy so I hauled out the sprinklers a couple nights last week.

Saturday evening after dinner I looked at the forecast and saw zero percent chance of rain, so I watered for a couple hours. S and I sat down to watch a show. Around 9:30 I got an alert on my phone that storms were approaching. I get these all the time this time of year and it’s some little, pop up storm that scoots by us. I pulled up the radar. Waves of bright yellow and red headed right towards us. What the hell???? We ran out and put all the pool furniture cushions away as lightning lit up the sky.

We indeed had borderline severe storms with heavy rain for over an hour, then continued showers overnight and into Sunday morning. It took about 90 minutes for the pool pump to get all the water off the cover once the skies cleared. In other words, I watered the lawn for no reason.

Put this high on the list of dumb things I get irrationally angry about.