My parents were here for the last two weeks and they left this morning. They couldn’t help me with Klara because she won’t stay with people she doesn’t know well even for a minute. But it was good to have them trailing after me wherever I went with Klara. Taking care of a small child is very isolating. 

I don’t use my phone when I’m around Klara (she’s a very active toddler, I need to have her in my field of vision all the time at this age), so I don’t get any adult conversation for hours. I now started trying to strike conversations with people on the playground for my sake and not for Klara’s, because even for a deeply unsociable person like me it gets too isolating. I have this new colleague who always comes to my office to chat. Before, I wouldn’t have liked it but now I’m extremely grateful for his existence because I now like small talk. 

So it was nice to have grandparents around to talk to. 

What I wonder is if N was the primary caretaker, would that make him need people to interact with? Right now, he doesn’t understand the point of interacting with any adult but me. I’d really love to see whether his sociability would be awakened. 

Tomorrow will be 26 degrees colder than today. Right before people will go trick or treating. Darn. 

OK, what?

To encourage dissemination of your article online, authors may also
provide a tweetable abstract (maximum of 140 characters) which will
be sent out from the Bulletin’s Twitter account @SpanishBulletin.
Authors should also include details of their own/their department’s/their
university’s Twitter handle so that the Bulletin can tag and follow you via
Twitter.

There is no escaping the darn Twitter anywhere.

“Before the war, the world was wide and attractive. During the war, however, it was cruel.” 

“The best way to let air into the house is to open the windows.” 

God, people, this novel almost killed my brain. It’s like an endless Facebook page of a very pompous person where inconsequential, boring stories alternate with Paulo Coelho-type wisdoms like the ones I quoted above. 

The novel is very popular, so I guess there are enough people who have the ADHD brains that like the narrative which goes something like this: “Once, I was in Sweden and a guy told me he had a neighbor who told him a story about flowers. Flowers are beautiful. Beauty is important. Knowledge is also important.  There is an article I once read about the importance of knowledge. I read it on a trip to Estonia where we discussed birds. I like birds. They remind me of sandwiches. There was a lot of hunger during the war and people didn’t have sandwiches. Or even bread. It’s sad when people are hungry. Once we went to the movies and ate pop corn. I like popcorn. Hunger, though, I don’t like.”

It was almost physically painful. 

By the way, those who are reading Hillary’s What Happened, how does she explain keeping around that perv Huma? Why was the campaign sacrificed to Huma’s diseased sexual preferences? This was the most mystifying part of the whole sorry mess. 

How can these people run for office if they can’t even make simple hiring decisions without crapping all over themselves? Hillary placed the wife of a notorious and very public pedophile at the center of her campaign. Bernie, as we are discovering, was advised by Putin’s employee. Trump. . . well, I don’t have to tell you. 

“A high-level adviser and operative for the Bernie Sanders campaign” has gone back to Russia to participate in a disgusting political show organized by Putin to sustain his staying in power for several years more. 

I have no words. That’s what we need right now. A Putin scandal attached to Bernie Sanders and Obama. Why the Democrats are so convinced that they need to keep all this Russian trash so close by at all times is a mystery. 

In a campaign where Putin was so openly rooting for Trump, what kind of a bizarre decision is it to place Putin’s employee in the position of your adviser? Isn’t it obvious that all he’ll do is sabotage?
These people. Seriously.

Rauner has announced he’s running for reelection. Folks, this guy is such a clown. Get this: he ditched his famous flannel shirts and posed for his first campaign video in a biker jacket. What a transparent loser. 

If you know people in Illinois, please talk to them or direct them to my blog. I will be covering this election extensively. I get my information from very good sources, and you all know that I’ve always been right on what I shared with you about Illinois politics. 

This committee is slaughtering me, folks. The chair of the committee says, “Please interview person X at such and such time in Building ABC, room #123.” 

So I’m sitting in front of room #123 at the appointed time but person X is not there. The chair of the committee passes by and asks, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m interviewing person X, remember?” I say. 

“He’s not here. He told me later he was going to be at [an entirely different place].”

And she failed to tell me about it because it clearly makes no sense to inform the person doing the interview about the interview.

And it’s all like this, all of the time.

Klara loves describing her actions in complete sentences. She sees a box of Kleenex, takes one and says, “I clean nose.” She cleans her nose and says, “I putting back.” Then she puts the Kleenex back into the box. The nose doesn’t need cleaning. She simply loves to be able to identify actions.