Thursday morning things.

Yesterday was not a good day.

First off, there was the ski breaking, with its attendant, "What do I do NOW" and having to search around for replacements (and spend money on them)

Then, there was a Campus Alert. We now have an automated system that calls our office phones, our home phones, our cell phones, and e-mails us, if there's some emergency. I guess they have it set up by "where is the threat at" because I didn't (thank goodness) get the call at home, but when I came in yesterday morning, it was there waiting for me on my office voicemail.

Apparently there had been a "series" of armed home-invasion robberies near campus; it was thought that students were "involved."

And a digression: it's really kind of interesting to see how the news outlets went with this. The original alert did give a rough description of the perpetrators (how they were dressed and what race they were). It said, as I said, students were "involved," which could equally well mean "Students were the victims," "students were the perpetrators," or both. Two local news outlets seemed to assume that "involved" means "perpetrators" and I'm wondering, just wondering, if the fact that the description of the perpetrators listed them as being of a different race than most of the townsfolk lead people to make that assumption. (And one of the news sites - shame on them, although later they took it down - briefly had the logo of our campus' athletic department as the header-logo for the story. I suppose that could have been simple laziness: "Hey, it happened near campus, what's the first thing I can find that has a campus logo on it?" but also seeing that there was a problem a couple years in the past with a couple of our football players....well, again I wonder if assumptions were made.)

So I was nervous - I didn't know WHERE the robberies were happening, how close to campus was "close" (I live perhaps 3/4 of a mile from the southernmost extent of campus). So I decided: okay, if they continue, I just will beg off evening meetings and events for a while. (I didn't know when they happened, other than "at night" - turns out it was between 1 and 6 am, which, I wouldn't be opening my door at those hours anyway unless I knew dang well it was the police and there was a good reason)

But then, last night, on the 9 pm news, they had a follow-up: "The story may have been a hoax."

Really? Really? (We had a hoax "armed robbery" a few years ago; they even sent around an 'artist's rendition' of the perpetrator; he looked not unlike Mario from Super Mario Brothers)

This morning, they're saying it was a very-bad-idea April Fool's Day prank.

Wait, wait, I think I have an image that works here:

Yeah. "prank." Let me 'splain what is and is not a prank, college kids:

A prank is covering your buddy's car with Post-It notes.
A prank is sneaking into your buddy's office and wrapping everything, including the monitor and keyboard, in aluminum foil.
A prank is going into your roommate's bedroom when she's not home and hanging up pictures of Nick Cage everywhere (or Rebecca Black, or One Direction, or whatever pop-culture icon she is most irritated by)
A prank is making a "marble cake" for someone that is actually a thin shell of cake packed full of marbles.

Pranks like those are dumb and pretty harmless - your buddy might be annoyed, but he'll get over it.

Something that involves the police, the ER, a government agency: that is not a prank. Things that scare people not involved in the prank: that is not a prank. Things involve a campus or agency wasting money and wasting the first-responders' time: not a prank.

I admit, I kind of hope there's some kind of codicil in the student handbook that says someone caught doing something like this gets thrown out of school....at least for a while.

And yeah, I get that the definition of "stupid" is "being 20 years old" sometimes, but still: their mommas should have taught them better.

(Of course, it's also possible the whole thing is a giant cover-up, but I don't think TPTB at my campus would be foolish enough to try to cover up actual armed robberies this way. Then again, I'm not sure how an armed robbery actually turns into a prank. It's a giant clustermess and it leaves me unsettled)

The other thing that got to me were more global issues - the whole North Korea thing. Most of the news media seem to treat North Korea like that crazy Yosemite Sam type neighbor who keeps threatening "I'll git mah gun!!!" but never actually does. But I suspect that Kim Jong Un is sufficiently detached from reality that he might actually do something really scary to the rest of the world (if he has the capacity, which is a big question). (Part of my nervousness may be related to having grown up at the tail end of the Cold War, and remembering Gordon Sumner speculating about whether Russians loved their children too....)

So anyway. One of those nights where a little self-comfort felt in order. So, even though I have far too many projects going already, I started another one.  I'm not going to give too much away about it other than to say that when it's done, it should be pretty "wub"able.

I also wound up watching (most of) the Sir Laurence Olivier version of Henry V that was on TCM last night - and wound up going and getting my copy to follow along. (They cut out large parts of the text, there were even omissions from a couple of the "iconic" speeches). (So I didn't get as much done on the new project, because I kept picking up my Folger's Library copy to look stuff up).

Two other things, that I guess fall into the "better" column:

1. A while back I was lamenting that someone needed to come up with another vegetable I could eat. Well, maybe I've found one. Over spring break, my mom made cauliflower with dinner one night. (SOP in our household: if you really hated something as a child, there's no pressure to eat it as an adult). I decided to try a little - she had put a cheese sauce on it. I admit, it smells distressing while it's cooking (I think that's one reason I had never tried it), but apparently most of the sulfurous stuff steams out of it and it's fairly mild and bland once cooked. Last night I tried it with a vinaigrette sauce, which I thought I might like better (also vinaigrette is quicker to make). It was pretty good. (I did use *fresh* cauliflower, my mom remarked that the frozen kind is not nearly as good. I have about 3/4 of the head - it was a small one - left. I might make soup with some of it this weekend, I have several good-sounding cauliflower soup recipes).

I don't know if my sense of taste is changing or if my rejection of cauliflower as a child was a "texture" thing (there are a lot of things I eat now that I wouldn't or couldn't eat as a child, because of the texture they were - cooked dry beans being one of them)

2. I tried the Gilad workout (well, that's how I'm thinking of it - it's two back-to-back programs, one is called Bodies in Motion but I forget what the other one is called) this morning. It's actually a pretty good workout, despite the fact that they have commercial breaks. (You can keep doing whatever move you were doing during them, though I used a couple of them to go grab some water). The aerobic/cardio portion of the workout (about 10 minutes) is actually pretty challenging; he worked in some boxing-type moves in this episode. (For example: you sort of bounced on the balls of your feet and punched the air in front of you, and you also mimicked jumping rope, without an actual rope (I am usually insufficiently coordinated to actually jump rope these days))

I think I will like this better than many of the types of workout shows - Gilad doesn't spend excessive amounts of time on "chatter" - instead of cajoling or berating the people to work harder, he mostly would count down repetitions, or else he would explain what your muscles were supposed to be doing at a certain point, or go over the finer points of form. I like that better; I don't need someone talking at me when I work out. (And I don't need slogans. One of the episodes today - they are all repeats, some as many as 10 years old - had Jack LaLanne on it. And I know, he was the Great Fitness Guru but I could really do without some of his patter: "Don't exceed the feed limit" Ugh. I know he didn't mean it as such but I hear it as "you're too stupid to know how to take care of yourself so I will use clever slogans to tell you to." I don't know if being nagged at or cajoled about taking care of myself makes me more irritated, but they both irritate me.) I will say Gilad occasionally says "good job!" or things like that (yeah, how do you KNOW I'm doing a good job?) but that's okay.

I think it was a pretty good workout. I did the first half-hour show's worth and about 15 minutes of the second show (doing the whole second show would be cutting it close with my usual schedule for getting cleaned up and ready). I was perspiring pretty heavily by the end, and some of my muscles felt shaky. I guess I'll see how sore I am this evening/tomorrow morning. I'm thinking, maybe a couple days a week it would be good to substitute this in even after I get the cross-country skiier fixed, because it obviously works different muscles. And it's a change.

I think Gilad will work for me because he's not gimmicky or cutesy - I don't like "cutesy" when I'm trying to exercise. (Richard Simmons, God bless him, I know he's helped a lot of people, but I just can't deal with his chipperness, especially so early in the morning - they run an infomercial for one of his programs right before Gilad). I also admit I feel a little intimidated by some of the shows with super-fit women leading the program - I wind up focusing on how my body is different from hers and it just doesn't work as well for me. Having a guy lead the workout keeps me from doing unfortunate comparisons. (The fact that he's not a bad-looking guy helps also)