Holding Down The Fort

Joshua is preparing for his exams, which will begin next week, and I am holding down the fort, taking care of all household tasks and duties (of which there are not many, truth to tell).

Josh’s exam period will occupy an entire two-week span.

I am sure he will perform splendidly. Josh has been exceedingly diligent about his studies all year, and he need maintain focus and concentration only for two more weeks in order to survive the exam period in style.

The first year of law school is the hard part. The final two years are a cakewalk.

There has been no news on the home fronts. Nothing of note has happened in Minnesota or Oklahoma in recent weeks.

Josh and I will be in Oklahoma over Memorial Day weekend in order to attend the high school graduation of Josh’s brother. We will be in Oklahoma from Friday night until Monday afternoon of the holiday weekend.

Josh and I will be in Minnesota for six weeks this summer. We will spend the month of July and the first half of the month of August in Minnesota. We will interrupt our Minnesota sojourn to travel in Germany and Austria with Josh’s family for eleven days at the end of July and the beginning of August. The trip is a graduation gift for Josh’s brother, and we intend to enjoy lots of Alpine scenery on the trip. We are looking forward to Germany and Austria very much.

It is possible that Josh and I will receive visitors during the month of June. We have invited Josh’s brother and sister to Boston. They may take us up on our invitation, but they will not make their decisions until their school terms have ended. Neither has been to Boston, and neither is particularly enthused about the prospect of visiting Boston—yet they know, if they want to visit Boston free of charge, that they will only have a three-year window in which to do so.

Josh will be free from obligations from Friday, May 15, through the end of summer. He plans to spend the summer relaxing and catching up on his reading.

It is amazing—and gratifying—how quickly our first year in Boston has passed. It seems as if we have been here only a few weeks, and yet the calendar tells us that we have been in Boston for eight months.

I am relieved that we will be able to leave Boston for half of the summer. Although we will be away only for six weeks, it will seem to us as if our entire summer will be spent in more congenial surroundings, far away from this decaying and depressing and dying city. Boston is a frightful dump, and we want to spend as little time here as possible.

Despite its proliferation of educational institutions, Boston is purely a blue-collar town, a relic of a distant past. The citizenry possesses a blue-collar mentality and lives a blue-collar lifestyle. Boston is the very embodiment of a poor city, with hoards of uneducated and unsophisticated persons, and it is only going to get worse over the next fifty years. I’ve never seen anything like it in the United States. Boston is a third-world city, a Western Hemisphere version of Leeds or Liverpool.

It is all very unpleasant.

New England has become the new Appalachia—and it is only going to deteriorate further over coming decades.