Spring semester grades are in!

Yours truly hanging 'round the office at home today after tallying and submitting final grades with some classic jazz numbers playing on the ol' computer. Ain't YouTube a great thing?

Final grades for the spring semester are in, and I'm enjoying that delightful lazy feeling that arrives shortly afterwards at the close of yet another university term. Being able to do all of this online (instead of with the old-fashioned paper final grade forms) certainly helps.

The attire in today's photograph is pretty typical around here between the end of April and the end of August. The weather needs to be warmer before I break out the Madras shirts though. The Land's End cotton knit shirt dates from the spring of 1998 when I was still attending grad school in Madison, Wisconsin. It has actually made a few different visits to Norway with me through the intervening years now that I think about it. The shorts and dock-siders are more recent vintage though.

These are the kinds of items that the men in my extended family have worn during the evenings, weekends, and vacations each late spring and summer for many decades, and, to some extent, they still do. . . unless mowing the grass or working in the vegetable garden. Even my Welsh professor stepfather has climbed aboard and lives in these sorts of clothes at my parents' home in the Yucatan (Mexico) whenever they are there. It's simply too warm and humid much of the year for anything else unless you happen to be in the swimming pool, in an air-conditioned bedroom, or an El Norte blows in cooler, dryer air.

While clothes like these, strangely, have their detractors, they are nevertheless relaxed, comfortable gear that looks equally presentable at home, for a quick trip to the nearby corner convenience store for that forgotten container of milk, or for strolling along the beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina during a breezy summer's evening. If you are looking to take your casual warm weather style to another level, I urge you to give this kind of attire a try.

-- Heinz-Ulrich

Up North Style. . .

Bad Dad makes a friend. YMP and Bad Dad on the shores of Lake Michigan. Or was that Crystal Lake? The Grand Duchess takes a selfie in her kayak. How NOT to impress the girls sunning themselves along the river. YMP and Bad Dad kayaking on the Platte River headed toward Loon Lake. J ust back from a week in Northern Michigan in a charming and spacious house on the banks of the Betsie River outside of Thompsonville. A largely pleasant seven days despite some challenging episodes with the Young Master, who has picked up some very questionable habits and language from his friends in the 8th Grade during the school year just ended. But otherwise, we enjoyed ourselves and contemplated remaining for a few days longer since the house was available. In the end, we decided to return home as planned originally since neither my wife, nor I wanted to spend the remaining days chained to our computers in Zoom meetings from our vacation destination. I actually managed to leave the laptop and ip

Mid-June Thursday Style. . .

A nother pretty typical variation on the theme for late spring, summer, and very early fall. I'm a huge fan of Madras and have several such shirts in the seasonal rotation. Lightweight, exceedingly comfortable, and even dressy when pressed and tucked in, which is the usual way of things here at Totleigh in the Wold. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd still rather be skiing the trails in the upper half of "The Mitten" (of Michigan), in the Upper Peninsula, or Ontario. But summers ain't so bad either, and I'd look pretty funny walking around in cross-country ski attire during June. -- Heinz-Ulrich

A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode. However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific. I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 1970s, aka The Stone Age. As it is, my sister and

Classic Style

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