I always – OK, not always but for the past 2 years for sure – wanted to have my own trees. Before that, I detested everything that had to do with nature and thought there was nothing better in the world than concrete.

And here are the trees that come with The Hedgehogs:

And here:

I wouldn’t mind owning these beautiful trees. There is a problem, though. The house inspector just found damage to the roof, and knowing our seller (who is a professor of Engineering, of all things), we fear he will not be amenable to taking care of the damage.

I’m not hugely optimistic right now about the future of this sale. >

The inspection of the house revealed that what I thought were bullet holes are bore holes from carpenter bees.

Maybe I’m not ready to live in a house after all.

In Lugansk, a city in Ukraine where I was born, a (not very populous) pro-Russian protest holds posters saying, “Ukraine is Russia, Europe is Sodom and Gomorrah.”

If somebody still hasn’t understood the central issue in the conflict, here it is spelled out clearly.
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Some people are so good at self-care that they end up at the ER just to have an excuse to stay in bed all day long. These same people (and I’m not pointing any fingers because it’s uncomfortable to point a finger at oneself) need really hard-core self-care. So this is this week’s check-list:

2 special meals

3 mid-day naps

4 hour-long walks

5 beauty related activities

6 hours of doing absolutely nothing

7 meditation sessions

I have no idea what Obama is doing any longer.

He can organize endless lavish lunches and go out of his way to make billionaire teenagers feel important but they will never support his party. All this is achieving is alienating the Democratic base.

I mean, read the linked article and tell me if you feel happy and eager to vote for the Dems in November as a result. Or do you think, instead, “Vomit, vomit, vomit. These politicians are all the same and all have their tongues stuck deep into the billionaires’ anuses”?

I had no idea I was such a victim but then I took the privilege test and discovered:

Let’s start a competition, folks! Let’s see who is the least privileged of all of us. In the meanwhile, excuse me for a moment, I need to go feel sorry for myself.

This small, ugly and horribly located house in Vancouver sold for $643,000, which is $43,000 MORE than the asking price. This is considered the cheapest house in Vancouver and people were in a bidding war to buy it.

 

And this is their backyard:

The wooden planks are the extent of the backyard. Outside the deck, there is a public alley filled with trash cans.

On my recent visit to Montreal, I noticed that there was too much money in the city for the situation to be healthy. The word “bubble” was coming to mind every two minutes. Now I’m seeing that it isn’t just Quebec. Other Canadian provinces have lost all sense of what money is worth.

Tomorrow we are having the inspectors visit The Hedgehogs. As you probably realize, The Hedgehogs’ price is nowhere near what was paid for this ugly little tool shed in Vancouver. The Hedgehogs are cheap even for our area, and they have real nature, not a fake wooden-plank backyard. Prepare, people, if the inspections tell us all is good, I will persecute you with photos.

I just observed in a musical competition on Russian TV a popular singer in his twenties react with a tantrum and a bout of weeping to the kindest, gentlest, most respectful criticism of his performance by the judges.

“But I tried so hard!” he bawled and ran off the stage.

“Was it something I said?” fussed a 60-year-old judge. “Why is he so upset? I need to go apologize.”

My students are like that, too. Not all but quite a few. And if diplomacy today isn’t working, imagine it being placed in the hands of ultra-sensitive, perennially aggrieved and generationally wounded Millenials.

I just discovered that somebody called Piketty wrote a huge volume that is being universally lauded as the biggest recent achievement in political economy and which proves that
“there is no inherent drive in markets toward income equality.”

This tells me I totally need to patent my breakthrough discovery that now is April.

Every obituary dedicated to him mentions that Garcia Marquez is a universal writer. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean when said about a writer who made his career out of exoticizing Colombia and selling the “oh, Lordy, these Colombians surely are freaky and weird” idea to the world.

Garcia Marquez is read around the world precisely because nobody can identify with his characters. He is a great master of the fantasy genre, maybe the best the world has ever known. Unless we count the need to escape to an imaginary world populated not with people but with leprechauns as universal, I have no idea how his work can fit that description.