What is the best thing I received in the mail in a past month? You know, I received a card from my goddaughter who is really good about sending Father's Day cards and stuff like that, and was just one of those out of the blue cards, you know, hope-you're-feeling-well, thinking-about-you card. We communicate with electronic means often enough but I find that just getting a card in the mail or something unexpected like that is really a treat. I hope that the postal service will be able to do whatever they need to survive. It's an institution and you know, in times like this when sometimes maybe some people who aren't computer savvy or what have you, that might be the only means of communication. I find that I even enjoy getting the junk mail, which is unusual, at least somebody cares enough to send their very best.

I ordered a kit, a radio related soldering kit. It's called a Morserino. It allows you to practice your Morse Code sending. It will allow you to interface with the radio that doesn't have the proper interface for a paddle sending device, which is instead of a straight key, which you see in all the movies, there's two others and a computer a microchip dictates the length of each character, and so you have to -- it'll physically make the sound, and it’s a little easier for you, but not all radios have that circuitry, so you can use this. The main thing is though that you can connect it to the internet, and it will allow you to talk to other people through Morse Code through the internet, which is pretty cool.

Now that we're restarting school, my week has been quite crazy because I am preparing to go back to University in person with a lot of restrictions and regulations and changes. So I'm trying to figure out how pedagogically to manage that. Greeting a new group of students with a lot of unusual things in place, doing a lot with keeping students live streaming into the classroom, making sure we have a really active online presence, which makes a lot of sense considering we might, we just don't know what's going to happen. And in the meantime, I'm also managing getting my kids, my own kids, ready for the next school year, which is entailing at this point three weeks of virtual learning. So their teachers are kind of, of course scrambling to try and get their classrooms ready online and then disseminate that information to us, which is a lot to go through.

What does what sets Michigan apart from its neighbors, Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio?  Since I live in the U.P. and I live in one of the counties that border on Wisconsin. The U.P., you know, we have a distinctive identity, I guess among ourselves and probably among the state of Michigan as Yoopers. We're traditionally kind of used to taking care of ourselves here.  What sets us apart from our neighbors? Actually, we don't, up here where we are. We're a lot like Wisconsin or maybe I should say Wisconsin is a lot like us. You know, we're in the Upper Midwest, the Lake Superior region, we’re a lot like Minnesota in some ways. We're probably more alike than anything else. I think Michigan and the Midwest are -- are different from other parts of the country and the fact that we -- We are like, maybe not all other people aren't, but we are salt-of-the-earth people type thing we're used to doing again, just like the Yoopers, we’re used to doing stuff on our own. We're -- we're kind of just, you know buckle down and get it done by people. Not that other people aren't, just that apparently that seems to be our -- our Thing. I don't know.

So now my father passed away, now coming up on three years ago, and my mother is still quite independent at the age of 89. She likes to go to Florida in the winter and I like to go with her and allow that to happen. She is not really comfortable being down there on her own, but that's fine with me because I am still working and can work from whatever location I might be in remotely. So again, that's a blessing that I feel so fortunate to have a number one a job, and number two to be able to do it from anywhere in the US. Let's see what else, so my mom and I were actually in Florida in the beginning of the year when things started heating up about covid-19. And at that point the news just kept getting worse and worse and scarier and scarier and she did not really feel safe being down in Florida away from her doctors and my other sisters who are also in the vicinity of Michigan where we live near Ann Arbor, and she wanted to go home.  So we were supposed to fly home at the end of April but Plan B became renting a car and driving back to Michigan. And of course, my mother doesn't drive, the responsibility for getting her home safely was on my shoulders. I got the rental car, cleaned it all out, let it sit in the sun for a couple of days. Make sure there were no germs in it before she got in, and then made the drive without an overnight stop. We had food packed, so we wouldn't have to go to any restaurants. I stopped to nap a couple of times, but it was pretty much a straight twenty-four-hour run from Fort Myers, Florida up to Ann Arbor, Michigan to get my mom home. And I will say that drive was a bit surreal. You know people were just starting to wear masks at that point. I used gloves when I had just stopped to fill up the car. Some people were not, I felt strange putting on a rubber glove to touch the gas pump, and use the touch screen and that was also really scary. We used restrooms, public restrooms and you know every surface we touched we wiped before we touched it. We had…