Weeknotes: 05/09/26-05/15/26

This Week:

• It’s finals week at Hartwick. My collections management students wanted to hear about NAGPRA, so I did a brief How-to lecture on the nuts and bolts of the topic. We also did the usual group de-briefing about the class, and I had my students to their final grade assessment meetings, which I continue to use as part of teaching the class Un-graded.
• Thursday, Dominic turned 13. I love him so much and I’m so proud of all the amazing things he does, says, and is.
• We had a collections committee meeting at the Museum. We voted to accept a number of wonderful objects for our collection, and to de-accession some material to help us respond to a NAGPRA claim.
• Good Things:
  • I read “The Conditional”, a short, dark and hopeful poem by Ada Limon

    Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
    Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
    Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
    Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
    Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
    Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
    Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
    Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
    Say we never get to see it: bright
    future, stuck like a bum star, never
    coming close, never dazzling.
    Say we never meet her. Never him.
    Say we spend our last moments staring
    at each other, hands knotted together,
    clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
    Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
    enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
    right here, feeling lucky.