Old School > (is less than) Old Hat > (is less than) Passe.
But the bald truth about this place right here where your eyes landed is greater than the sum of all of those. It equals —it is — pretty close to useless. There might have been a brief shining moment about ten years ago (about the time I wrote the first post on this site as a matter of fact) , when we weren’t sure what a blog was actually for, but now we know.
It’s all about selling, of course! How could we not have seen this?
So just to cut to the chase: there’s nothing to see here, just move along.
Friends tell me there’s a Facebook group devoted to the cares and frettings of women to the north of 40 —What Would Virginia Woolf Do? — and this is my cohort, for all that I’ve deactivated Facebook and can’t read it.
What would Virginia Woolf do?
My guess — she would either be scanning the ground for more and better stones with which to weigh down her pockets, or, and this is a pretty big or, it would be the inverse of that, and she would be seeing the commonplace, the everyday, fringed with—radiating — joy.
At least, my Virginia Woolf would.
So here I sit. The past few weeks, the offspring I once called Elder Girleen has been trying to absorb a year’s worth of Pre-Calculus. (Online, of course.) The lecturer’s voice is so sonorous, she might deserve an A just for staying awake. Using sines and cosines and such, she’s learning how to figure out how far a cruise ship is from a jetty (I think; I’m two rooms away.)
The trajectory I’m trying to calculate is othewise: from the skinned knees of one’s children to the long-term care insurance (or lack thereof) of one’s parents.
Nobody’ll pay you for that one.
Katherine L. Hester 
Hello, Kathy. I was thinking the other day that you hadn’t posting anything in a long time. I hope all is well with your family. One of our nieces has been living with us for three years now & shows no sign of moving out. My mother (92) is still living on her own but is very frail & has some dementia. I spend every afternoon at her apartment, with only 3 or 4 days off in the past year. Barbara is retiring in nine days, so changes of some sort are coming. I have been trying to read more “serious literature” before it is too late: Bloch, Mann, Musil, Joyce. I’ve read all the Knausgaard that has been translated, though that may be more like junk food. I would love to hear from you from time to time.