Sunday: walk, party planning

I did a one mile walk by myself. I was supposed to go with M., but she wound up having conflicting plans. Which is fine!

T. came back pretty late from a party last night (also fine!). It was a birthday party for a friend he initially met in CASE, but they’ve stayed in touch, which is really nice. We run into them at least a couple times a year, usually. They’ll be coming to his birthday party in August, which is great.

T. has been closely monitoring the RSVPs for his birthday party. We’re going to have it at the Horseshoe (we’ve done that before, too), and gave them a range of how many people to expect. T. is trying to figure out how to count RSVPs. I never assume all the yeses will attend. The number of noes who change their mind is rarely enough to make it so you can add yeses to maybes and get the correct number (and never higher, in my experience). Usually the final number is the number of yeses, but not the actual people in the yes column — to within a manageable number of people. This is super tough if you are catering by the plate (sit down wedding dinner calculations) but dead easy if you are at a restaurant and have some or all of a room to yourself and are ordering off the regular menu. As we are talking this out, I am remembering how many years it took me to _figure_ all of this out, and thinking, wow, how nice it would have been to have had a parent like myself. I know I’m a problem, and also, so many things my parents either did not know how to do (like this) or actively thwarted my efforts to learn (laundry).

I’m reading _Easy Money_ by Ben Mckenzie, and so far it is a lot like the Odd Lots interview of the author:

https://youtu.be/fzmi1yY9OzM

I didn’t watch it, and you can also listen to it on the Odd Lots podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

ETA:

It has been a very quiet day. R. watched some Tour and is mowing the lawn. A. has been in her room playing Genshin Impact but is now doing an online playdate / cross-country gaming. T. went to go see Oppenheimer. M. said that was good, but confusing and she didn’t much care for the sexual content. It’s always a little puzzling to figure out what she means when she refers to that type of movie content/theming, because if anyone else said what she said, they’d mean something super different. I called Verizon, because I decided that what I was trying to do online was definitely NOT working. And sure enough, it was not. I now know what to watch for, and if I don’t see it by this time tomorrow, I’ll call them back.

About ten years ago, give or take, T. had a bunch of stuff he wanted — a class ring (when you graduate!), a pocket knife (when you are older than this!) etc. I noticed that when I was looking at a planning binder that I mostly ignore. But! He has acquired some new requests. He wants a car. We have 3 cars and 3 drivers, and he is allowed to drive 2 of the vehicles. But he really wants to have a car to drive out to summer camp next year when he hoping to be a camp counselor and wants to have a car of his very own. And I’m like, oddly, R. and I were talking about you maybe driving out _this_ year, but we didn’t want to give up use of the van for 2 weeks and we were not sure about you getting the i3 charged while out there. So I am now busy learning about all kinds of PHEV, EVs, etc. He started with a Chevy Equinox, electric, not out until this fall, and is exploring other options as well. He seems to want an SUV or a minivan, but not the Pacifica. *shrug*

Accidentally Learning Things about Borders

When one travels, one learns new things. This is generally presented as being a positive and desirable aspect of travel, altho in my experience, many of the new things learned when traveling (or even just planning travel) are actually quite painful. But sometimes, they are painful to _other people_, and sometimes, that is absolutely hilarious. Sort of, pratfall, slapstick comedy, but IRL and involving governments.

In the course of planning some travel I hope to engage in eventually, I was reading some of the rules about what you can and cannot bring with you when you travel to certain places from certain other places. Vague enough! Specifically, like, if you bring apples or a salami sandwich, or cheese and crackers or whatever on the plane, do you have to put them in the trash before going through customs or potentially wind up with your bag searched. I mean, we’ve all been there, right? It’s always surprisingly difficult to answer what ought to be a very simple question: do I have to bin it before customs or not.

Anyway. As I was poking through Ireland’s rules, I ran across some other stuff, that led me to read these two wikipedia articles. And I hope you read them, too! They are hilarious! I had commented, as Brexit was occurring, that I didn’t really think it would happen, and of course it didn’t by the “date certain”, and the only real reason it ever happened is because the pandemic reduced governmental capacity to keep kicking the can down the road so the UK was permitted to … get what it wanted. Sort of.

One of the sticking points was always the border between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (part of the EU) and specifically, a very old, painfully attained agreement not to have a hard border between the two of them, ever. In the minds of Certain People in the UK, that meant, free movement of goods would continue even after the end of the UK’s Special membership in the EU.

What _actually_ wound up happening was that goods moved freely right up to where Northern Ireland had an edge with the rest of the UK, and at that point, they could go _into_ the rest of the UK, but not the other way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_Protocol

Just so we are clear. The effect of Brexit was that there was a EU required border _within the UK_. I mean, there just isn’t anything funnier than that, from a sovereignty perspective.

Apparently a few months ago, Sunak, current leader of the UK, and against the preferences of the two previous leaders of the UK, agreed to some modifications of this state of affairs. You can read about them in this wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Framework

Roughly, this gives the Northern Ireland Assembly a veto power on EU regulations within Northern Ireland. Of course, post-Brexit, EU regulations _don’t apply_ within the UK, and Northern Ireland is part of the UK, NOT part of the EU. So, that’s kind of hilarious! Sure, veto things … that don’t apply to you anyway. Whatever!

And also, the framework puts in place some additional detail on how that border _within the UK_ but _required by the EU_ will be run.

All of this is _extra_ hilarious, because the Assembly can’t do anything at all anyway, so basically this agreement gives a body the right to do a veto that they will never get it together enough to use, over some rules that don’t really apply to them anyway. And the UK has now fully signed onto that internal-to-the-UK border required by the EU — which it was in such a hurry to separate itself from via Brexit.

I hope y’all found that as funny as I did. I will also note that this really seems to make Northern Ireland, somewhat inadvertently, a free trade zone. One wonders how that will develop!