This past year, I particularly enjoyed the Daughter being home for the holiday. I attribute this to two primary factors. One was that she was away for an extended period last year, from early February to mid-June, while studying at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
The other is that, in part because she had gone abroad, she had a different perspective. For instance, we were having a conversation about genericization, as one does. She noted that in South Africa, when one refers to toothpaste, they usually say Colgate. It’s like Americans say “Kleenex” for tissue paper, “Band-Aid” for bandages, or “Xerox” for a copier.
Famous quote
For some reason, my daughter said, “That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do.” I assumed she was referring to the 1995 movie Babe, spoken by taciturn farmer Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) after the title porcine does what it does.
But no! She was referring to dialogue in the animated series Gravity Falls (2012-2016) by Dipper (Jason Ritter) after the pig Waddles saves him from embarrassment.
Television/video
The Daughter has been a big fan of Crash Course, a YouTube series hosted by Hank and John Green. I recall she used several videos about the French Revolution when she was in high school. But she also checked out videos about geology.
She turned me onto Big History, which is “the history of everything. We’re going to start with the Big Bang, take you right through all of history (recorded and otherwise).”
On her own, she tends to watch some television which she knows I think are trash. And she doesn’t disagree, but she finds them sociologically interesting.
This fall, I was watching long enough that she asked me to guess the title. “TikTok Moms?” Based on the show’s history, it was not a bad guess. It was actually the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. This got my wife to watch it briefly because two of the Wives were on Dancing With The Stars this season, which she watches devotedly.
Cooking
There is a lot more food in our refrigerator when the Daughter is home. Part of it has to do with her being a pescatarian, which means she makes her own meals a lot.
The other is that she likes to bake, usually with her good friend Kay. She wasn’t always great at cleaning up, as the cutting board above shows.
It was nice to have her home.
Some of my online professors have used Crash Course to teach us various things! The episodes we have watched were interesting.