Mission Accomplished: First CDSN Summer Institute Rocked!

 Yesterday concluded the first Canadian Defence and Security Network's Summer Institute.  The idea was to bring together people from across the defence/security community for a week's worth of professional development and networking.  This was one of the key ideas in our grant efforts, and it was great to see it realized after having to cancel last year's.  

We spent much time working on translating the event to being online for this summer's edition, and we are pretty pleased with how it turned out.  Instead of being in a conference room for many hours a day punctuated by meals and receptions and a tour or two, we met online for a few sessions a day.  The sessions ranged from traditional roundtables to breakout sessions to small group exercises to happy hours.  

The roundtables and breakout sessions focused on some of the threats facing Canada (climate change, extremism, and pandemics); public affairs and civil-military relations; personnel issues; a strategic foresight exercise; alliance politics; operations in Canada, north and not so north; figuring out what security means for different actors; thinking about data; and bridging the gap.  

Our presenters ranged from CDSN co-directors to academics elsewhere to government officials/practioners.  We had some media folks involved, but they could not attend due to the election.  We also had to shuffle things around a bit as some of the people who were supposed to speak were government officials with responsibilities including ...  Afghanistan.  The replacements were fantastic, providing very valuable perspectives.  The whole week was a Chatham House Rule event--no attribution of whatever was said--so the speakers felt comfortable being pretty open about stuff.  

The participants were mostly emerging scholars (PhD students, assistant professors), relatively junior military officers, and relatively junior policy officers with some folks who were less easy to categorize.  We had some folks from outside of Canada--US, UK, and Morocco.  Not sure that would have happened if we were doing things in person.  They were all very engaged and provided perspectives that taught me and other presenters a few things--when done right, learning is in two directions.

To facilitate networking, we had the participants split into the same small groups all week long and had them work on some creative thinking projects:

• 
  assigned a party, what would they write as that party's platform.  We had five groups, so five platforms.  And they were far more realistic than a certain one or two I have seen from the actual parties.
• develop a DND/CAF media strategy.  This was pretty wide open, and they took it in very interesting directions

• 

  Three research agendas
  

  assigned a historically excluded community, each group was to develop strategies to make DND/CAF include that group better.
• what should the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and/or DND's Mobilizing Insights in Security Defence programs set as their next funding priorities.

The small group exercises worked far better than we had hoped, as they did foster some connections within the groups AND generate some really sharp thinking.  

We had two happy hours.  We did a speed dating kind of thing where each person would meet several others and exchange a bit of info--their favorite defence/security issue, their favorite hobby, a pandemic survival strategy.  We didn't set up the zoom breakout rooms quite right so it didn't work as smoothly as we liked, but it generally allowed folks to meet others and get a better sense of the other folks in the community.  The second happy hour involved geoguessr (h/t to Lama for the suggestion), a game that plops a group somewhere in the world in googlestreetview, and you have to figure out what country you are in.  It was silly, serving as a good icebreaker.  I met a few people in my zoom room that I hadn't had a chance to speak with, so I chalk that up as a win.  

This event was very inspired by stuff I had seen at Bridging the Gap's weeklong summer seminars where I was a presenter a couple of times and also by stuff I had heard about SWAMOS and other similar enterprises.  I am very grateful to the CDSN HQ team who did so much of the work this summer to get this ready, to the presenters who did great with my vague instructions and were willing to stick around after the designated time (pretty much every session went long, which I took as a good sign), and to the participants for bringing it every day.  

One of the goals of the CDSN in general and this event in particular is to foster a sense of community for those who are in this defence/security enterprise.  I am pretty sure it worked, but only time will tell.  We will try to do things down the road to bring these people back together and to reinforce the bonds that were created.  And if we can do this in person, we will add more topics, including more speakers from beyond DND/CAF.

And now I can go back to preparing to teach the next batch of classes as, alas, summer is ending. 

Why Talk About Afghanistan

 Someone asked me today why I am talking to the media about Afghanistan: aren't there better people to talk about this stuff, especially Afghan women?  The answer is: essentially, yes, there are other voices that need to be heard.  So, I have started asking the media to ask those folks, and a TV thing I am doing tomorrow already has someone else on the panel who is covering that perspective.  For all of these other hits?  Why do I say yes?

I have been feeling uncomfortable for a few reasons:

1. I wrote a lot about Afghanistan, but not recently.  I have not been studying the country closely as my work shifted to other topics.
2. What I did write was on the outsiders--on NATO and on Canada--not domestic dynamics.  
3. Many of the questions focus on what is going on right now at the airport in Kabul, and, well, damned if anyone in Canada can speak to that except the intel and ops folks in the CAF, and they aren't going to be doing any media anytime soon.

So, why do I talk anyway?  Primarily because many of the questions are about the big context--why are we there, what did we try to do, why did it fail, what does it mean for now and the future?  Those are questions I can try to answer.   This podcast for one of my better outings.  

Baseball advanced analytics came up with a measure to value players--VORP--value over replacement player.  The idea is how much more valuable is a player than the average one that could fill that spot.  The question when it comes to speaking to the media is whether I have a positive or negative VORP--value over replacement pundit. 

When the sexual misconduct/abuse of power crisis became a media story this winter, I sent the media to the women I know who study this stuff--Megan McKenzie, Maya Eichler, Charlotte Duval-Lantoine, Stéfanie von Hlatky, CDSN Post-doc Linna Tam-Seto, and others.  When the story shifted to focusing more on the civil-military relations aspects--what is parliament doing, why isn't the Minister of Defence doing his job (what is his job), I agreed to do the media hits because that is what I have been studying lately.  My VORP when it comes to sexual misconduct is negative--there are plenty of folks who can talk about that stuff far better than I.  My VORP when it comes to civ-mil is positive, in my not so humble opinion.  I can provide a comparative perspective, informed by research around the world including in Canada, for Canadian civilian-military dynamics.  

For Afghanistan, it really depends on the questions that are asked and how well I can dance towards once I can answer.  The challenge is that the questions I am told they will ask (if they tell me) are often not ones that the anchor/host actually ask.  I have gotten better as the week has gone along to asking them what they want to talk about and declining if it is out of my range.  Should they be talking about the situation facing the women of Afghanistan?  Yes.  Should I be the one answering that?  No.  Should they be talking about the other stuff?  Yes, and I can speak to some of it.  

I also feel obligated--that the grants I have applied for usually include "knowledge dissemination plans" of some kind.  So, if I get public money to study stuff, I should engage the public on that stuff.  The media's attention to these issues is episodic at best, so when the media finds an issue I have spent much public money studying, I tend to agree to talk.  Because the media will focus somewhere else soon enough.  So, in one sense, I am trying to make the governments' (and other grant agencies) money worthwhile beyond the academic enterprise.

But yeah, none of this feels good, mostly because we are talking about defeat and the consequences of losing. 

The Fall of the Afghan Government: The Big Questions

 There already has been and already will be much discussion of what all of this means.  Since I rode my bike yesterday and the podcast ran out, I have thoughts.  It is, of course, premature, but this is the place for half-baked ideas--the semi in the spew.  

The first question is: did social science waste its time and money?  Stathis Kalyvas asked this question today

Can’t help but wonder about the implications of the Afghan debacle for the social science of counterinsurgency: dozens of generously funded studies in Afghanistan, tens of cutting-edge articles using Afghan data published in top journals, amounting exactly to what?

— Stathis Kalyvas (@SKalyvas) August 14, 2021

I responded to him by noting several things

• Failure was overdetermined so even if there was good social science that caused someone (the US govt?) to do stuff better, it might not have made a difference
• that what we learn here could work better elsewhere
• that folks may have learned stuff, developed policy implications, but that those implications did not produce policies that politicians wanted to follow.  When some economists said austerity was good for economic growth, that hit a group of pols in the sweet spot--hey, let's spend less on the poors.  But academics often recommend policies that are costly in the short run and the benefits only accrue in the long run (climate change!), and politicians live in the short term.

There is an irony here--that Kalyvas led a movement in the comparative politics of civil war, arguing that the local dynamics and the national dynamics were different, that the master narrative was often deceptive.  Well, the social science stuff done on the war may have been good at grasping elements of the local dynamics, but it turned out the master narrative mattered, too.  That the Taliban was able to take the local stuff--fights over property, groups being left out of the spoils, etc--and use that to undermine a weakly institutionalized and very divided Afghan govt and society.  A recurring theme--easier to break than to build. 

The next question is: was it worth it?  Depends on the it one is referring to.  The goal was a self-sustaining Afghan government, and, that effort clearly failed.  If the it was more about meeting alliance obligations, which is why most of the non-American countries showed up and which is how I define the "it" in my book on Canada's experience, then it is a matter of what were the benefits of meeting an alliance obligation versus the costs of opting out.  Opting out of Afghanistan would have been costlier than opting out of Iraq, but were those costs worth over 160 Canadian lives lost and many more wounded?  

A different way to think about "worth it" is did the effort make either a significant difference in the 20 years that it was worth it or if there is stuff that will endure beyond the Taliban's victory today?  There is no doubt that life got better for Afghans after the Taliban was ejected--the measures in terms of infant mortality and women surviving childbirth are clear.  The folks who were immunized due to a polio vaccination campaign will not get polio, so that is perhaps the most enduring contribution by the outsiders.  So, there is a generation of Afghans who live now thanks to the intervention.  But is that worth the 3500 lives lost by the allies and the tens of thousands of lives lost by Afghans who got caught in the middle?  How many would the Taliban have capriciously killed in the past 20 years if they still governed?

Is Afghanistan better off today than Libya or Syria?  Those are places where the US intervention was more modest.  I am not sure--part of this depends on what happens next.  But, ultimately, given that Afghanistan in 2022 is probably going to look a lot like Afghanistan 2000, it is really hard to say it was worth it. Maybe Rumsfeld was right in his original intention--that breaking the Taliban and then running would have been better, although, again, Libya suggests maybe not.  

So I don't really have a good answer.

What can we learn? 

•  Much humility about the use of force.  We could not kill our way to victory.  Despite 20 years and a lot of resources, the effort failed.  It is simply much harder to build governance than it is to break a regime.  Obama learned that lesson and thus was reluctant to intervene in Libya, but was pushed into it by France and UK.  He tried to stay out of Syria, and well, that showed doing little or nothing is problematic, too.
• I read a pretty persuasive thread about the US military maybe not preparing for the end because they wanted to force Biden's hand.  Obama was very concerned about the military boxing him in, and, I think Biden learned that lesson.  The end here was very, very fast, but there seems to have been no plan.  Isn't the military supposed to be planning contingencies all the time?  The two wars revealed that civilian control of the US military is not what it should be.  Part of this is that militaries are trained to be can-do outfits, and they are often relentlessly optimistic, which then creates credibility gaps. 
• To stop using the graveyard of empires.  Afghanistan will not sink the American empire.  The greatest threats to American power are domestic.  Some will argue that the forever wars led to Trump and that may be true to a degree, but the polarization of American politics and the rise of the bad faith crowd in the GOP preceded 9/11.  But that is an argument for a different day. 
• Our allies will learn ... what they want to learn.  No, our allies will not think the US is unreliable for leaving after 20 years.  After all, most of them were there and left before the US (hey, Canada!).  Just like our allies didn't give up on NATO and other allies after Vietnam, they won't after this.  Partly because there is no other game in town and partly because they all know that they are not Afghanistan.  Indeed, the lesson from Vietnam was: hey, if the US is willing fight for more than a decade, lose thousands of soldiers, and spend billions of dollars for a place it does not really care about, then we are ok. And that same less applies here since the US stuck around in a place that it really didn't care about for 20 years, trillion dollars, a couple thousand lives, and so on.
  

Who is responsible?  Everyone.  The US made big mistakes at the outset---relying on warlords, having too small of a footprint, sponsoring a constitution that was a very bad fit, distracted by Iraq--and other mistakes along the way--cycling generals and strategies, for example.  Obama made mistakes, Trump didn't help.  Biden's team has handled this endgame poorly. The allies could have done better (see our book for some reasons why they didn't).  Pakistan did so much to undermine the effort, and Iran and eventually Russia did some damage. The Afghans were served poorly by their own politicians.  

It is a land of bad policy alternatives, so I have a hard time articulating what should have been done in 2001-2002.  It is easy to note what should not have been done.  I think the key thing to remember is that the enemy has a vote, as they say, that the Taliban had agency.  So, one cannot read into the current dynamics too much about US mistakes without considering how the Taliban would have changed its behavior.  Again, it is easier to destroy than to create--we demonstrated that in 2001, the Taliban has demonstrated that ever since.  I don't know if the Taliban will manage to control the entire country, but they did succeed in denying control by the Afghan government and its allies.  What's next?  More heartbreak.

I am very sad for the Afghan people, who were poorly governed by their own, and let down by the international community.  I also feel bad for those in the various militaries and governments who sacrificed much and who continue to pay a price for what they tried to do, as they watch twenty years of effort reversed in a few weeks.  

 

 

Thinking and Talking About Afghanistan

 It feels strange for me to be doing so much media this week on Afghanistan, as I haven't been following the conflict or the country closely since I finished the two books on NATO's experience and Canada's.  The caveat I usually offer is that I studied the outsiders and their politics, not the politics of Afghanistan itself.  Yet, I have spent this week far more focused, in part because of the media's questions and in part because of the dynamics of this year, on Afghanistan's politics.  

The big questions involve why the Afghan National Army [ANA] has broken and what would have happened if Biden had broken the deal that Trump had signed and kept a magical 2,500 troops in country.

• I think the breaking of the ANA says less about the training and more about politics.  Yes, the US and its allies built the ANA so that it was perhaps not best suited for situations where logistics would be difficult and transport would be hard.  The departure of outside enablers made a difference.  BUT the ANA fought hard for years, paying a huge price over time.  What made it not sustainable was ... politics and governance.  That any army can't fight forever if it is not getting the political support it requires.  The stories this week of units running out of food, water, ammo are telling.  Plus we must remember, wars like these are not just about who can kill but who can either govern or undermine governance.  The enduring lesson of the past 20 years is that it is easy to break shit but not so easy to build stuff.  I wonder how well the Taliban, good at breaking stuff, will be at building a functional government.
• Did Biden cause this to happen by pulling out the last remaining troops?  Yes and no.  Yes, in that it confirmed what people had long knew and expected--that the US was leaving--and there was not so much clarity about the US providing air support.  But the idea Biden reneging on Trump's deal to get out in 2021 would have stopped this suggests that the Taliban would have just gone along with it.  The Taliban had been working on this for quite some time, they have managed to upset efforts to build governance, and they may have made side deals with key actors (I am wondering about Karzai's clan....).  So, I don't think keeping 2,500 trainers in Kabul would have stopped the semi- or un-governed provincial districts from falling or Herat and Kandahar from falling.  I do think it is in part about expectations and anticipation--why keep fighting if you know you are going to lose?  The US moves may have altered expectations somewhat, but people have been raising questions for years about how sustainable the pace of operations was for the ANA.

Since no one in the US and its allies has the desire to send another 100,000 troops to re-fight the war, the focus must be on helping as many people get out and find a home as possible.  

Will a Taliban-ruled (not so much governed) Afghanistan be a threat?  I am not so sure.  ISIS proved you can inspire terrorism with or without a territorial base.  The Taliban may have also learned that hosting international terrorist organizations may be more trouble than its worth.  Sure, they may be coming back into power, but spending 20 years on the run may not have been so much fun for them.  Of course, folks often don't learn, which means the US may end up using air strikes and special ops to disrupt terrorist organizations if they start making Afghanistan a home.  We have learned a lot about what can be done from a distance, and I think there will be more willingness now than in 1998 to use force against potential terrorist groups.  

None of this is good, but much of it was inevitable.  I am reading a book about Afghanistan right now called Unwinnable by Theo Farrell, and it is pretty convincing.  At the end of the day, the key thing is this: counter-insurgency is really hard and third party counter-insurgency is harder still.  It tends to be easier to disrupt governance efforts than to govern (as the anti-maskers in the US are proving).  If a government needs help to fight an insurgency, well, it is going to be very, very hard.  And when those governing have competing interests, like grabbing every dollar they can find for themselves, the effort may just be doomed to fail.

So, the keys now are to do whatever we can to help those who helped us, to help the rest of the refugees, and to learn as much as we can, including developing greater skepticism about the utility of force and about the ability of outsiders to defeat insurgencies.  

 

Prof-ing For the First Time: Some Semi-Solicited Suggestions

 Yesterday, I saw a new prof ask for any tips or resources about how to start teaching graduate classes, so, of course, I have a variety of ideas on that topic and also other getting started stuff.

To start with, the aim for the first year of teaching at any level is just to be clear and organized.  Set the expectations low for yourself--don't try to flip a classroom if you have never done it, don't build in elaborate simulations unless you have done it before or can borrow from those for whom you have TA'ed, don't aim to be wildly funny or entertaining.  The first year means lots of new course preparations, which involve a lot of work.  Get them right and you have the foundation for teaching for, um, much of the rest of your career.  Sure, you will teach new classes and teach the old ones in different ways, but the frameworks you set up will be useful far down the road.  

A fundamental rule, unless one has TA's and one does not usually have a teaching assistant for a grad class, is that whatever you assign, you have to do--read or grade or whatever.  

Borrow what you can--use the syllabi of classes you took as inspiration--either to do or to avoid depending on what you thought of the class.  I was lucky to TA for the same class three times in my second year in grad school--it was taught well, it was taught poorly, and it was taught ... experimentally (the Cold War was ending).  So, I borrowed heavily from the former, a bit from the latter, and avoided what the less good prof did.  

Figure out what the norms are of your department--what are normal office hours, how much reading is generally assigned, what is the normal kind of assignment load.  You want to be somewhere near the department norms as much for student expectations as for fitting in.  Over time, you can deviate, but best not to shake things up at the start.  

Why such a conservative start?  Because the first year is really hard as you will be doing not one new job but several--teaching new classes to new students, researching beyond the dissertation, doing much service to the department/university/profession, public engagement, mentoring, etc.  It is a lot, and it can be very stressful when combined to living in a new place, figuring out who you can trust in your new situation, and all the rest.  

Some other random bits of advice for the person starting out:

• Be kind to staff--many faculty are not.  But they work harder and don't have the freedom that profs have to control what they do.  
• Figure out your rhythm--when you write better, when you read better--and build your office hours and other obligations around your rhythm so that you can try to be productive.  It is really hard to work on one's research during one's first year of teaching, so don't expect too much, but build your schedule as best as you can to facilitate it.  That might mean carving out mornings or carving out one or two days a week.  Whatever works for you.
• Get a sense of the culture--does everybody come in every day or do folks stay home on non-teaching days (this is mostly a post-pandemic question)?  Do people eat lunch together?
  
• Ask your chair about service expectations and see if there is a culture for protecting junior faculty from doing too much service (there should be).  Beware that if you are not a straight white guy, you may be asked to do more service to represent those who have been historically excluded, and that is a real problem since the few get hit with a lot of work, making it hard to progress.  
  

Which leads to the big bit of advice.  It is ok to say no.  Not to everything, not all the time, but be strategic and say no to the things that are huge time sucks that don't advance your career.  Few folks get new jobs or tenure due to great service.  You should contribute to the greater good, but do so in ways that inform you about your new place and don't involve too much work.  This means identifying some people in the department who can be straight with you about what is and is not onerous.  

It has been a long, long time since I started prof-ing.  I have forgotten much, so any suggestions by others would be most welcome.  The good news is that my big day one mistake is one you are unlikely to make: I forgot to bring the copies of the syllabus to the first class on my first day .. and then to my second class on my first day ... and then to my third class on my first day.  These days, that stuff is all online.  So, enjoy whatever your first mistake is--you will remember it, but damn few others will unless you blog about it repeatedly.

Ten Years Off the Market And I Feel Fine

I saw a tweet yesterday about how wrong it is for academics to accept that they can't choose where they live.  For me, I never had more than a binary choice, starting with move for a temp job or ?  and then move to Texas or leave the profession and then move to a foreign country or stay in Lubbock and then move to Ottawa or stay in Montreal.  Not quite a wide range of choices at any stage.  And that was after managing to get a job offer, and it all reminded me that sometime this week will be the tenth anniversary of a strange email that put me on the path of ... chill?  

In the spring of 2011, I applied for a job for which I had no real shot and I knew that going in.  But I was looking for practice and networking, and then something strange happened: I got a different job.  In August of 2011, I contacted a friend I had at NPSIA and I asked whether they could tell me what I had done well and what I had done poorly so that I could improve for the next round of job applications.  That friend said, no, wait, we have a new Dean who will call you soon.  The next week, I got the call and the offer.  Which meant many things including that I was not going on the job market in the fall of 2011.  I had been looking to move on for about four or five years, and that was pretty much my normal state for most of my career--my last year of grad school, my two years as a temp at UVM, pretty much my entire time at TTU, and then the second half of my time at McG--about 3/4s of my career until I got the Carleton job.

Over the course of my career, I applied to hundreds of jobs, got about 20 interviews, and got three offers--TTU, McG, Carleton--and had to explain the job market to those outside academia again and again.  This thread puts some of this into perspective for the current day.  In my experience, being on the market was a constant source of stress, a significant hunk of time, very distracting, and, yes, a significant source of stress (deserves mentioning at least twice).  I did meet some great people along the way, even at job talks where I failed and flailed.  Looking back, I see how each step helped me get to the next step.

And now, what is the next step?  Keeping on keeping on, as I am quite happy where I am at, and I am through running competing for a new job.  I forget how stressed I was for much of my career, but junior folks sharing their experiences on twitter remind me of the bumps along the way.  Losing to none of the above, forgetting a key hunk of my argument, invoking a really bad example that served to distract rather than inform, being delayed so that I arrive unfed just before the plane leaves only to have that plane diverted and then miss my connection home so that I had to sleep at the gate at DFW, ....

I am really grateful for all of the help I received along the way and for all of the solace I received from my family including the dog that accompanied us from grad school through to the first three jobs.  And I am really grateful I don't have to compete for another job ever again.  Now the questions are not about when and where I will move to next but when I will retire.  The answer: not soon.  I really like what I do, who I do it with, and where I do it.  Each step was an improvement along the way, and I am, COVID aside, happier than I have ever been.  

Much sympathy to those on the market in this most difficult time.  Good luck!

The Real End to the Quarantine: Seeing a Heap of Family and Eating Way Too Much

 For the eighteen months or so, my monthly email from google maps told me that my furthest trips were to the edges of Ottawa and not much beyond.  And for that same period, I had not seen any family, other than Mrs. Spew, in person at all.  Both of those trends ended this past week, as we drove to Philly to spend a week with almost all of the family on my side (we still haven't seen my wife's family since December 2019).  Facebook memories has been reminding me all week long about all the other trips over the years as this time of year has been Saideman-fest--on the beaches of the east coast, Lake George, a cruise to Alaska (the last trip with my father for his 90th birthday), and Disney/San Diego way back when.  The last few have been in Philly--because my mother can't travel.  

So, what did I do and learn while hanging out in my hometown?  I learned that my favorite place for a steak sandwich, milkshake, and fries is still on top of its game as I met up with friends from high school.

The giant's skeleton
was featured inside where
we were not allowed
to take pics

I learned that there is a museum I had never heard of--the Mütter--which is a medical museum featuring heaps of really gross specimens of body parts and skeletons.  It also had a 1918 flu exhibition that was planned before the current pandemic with notes tying the two together--the name of this exhibition was "Spit Spreads Death" using the slogan and visuals of the time.  And, yes, Philly handed the 1918 flu worse than damn near every place else.  This time?  They handed the vaccinations over at first to some 23 year old with no experience.  Oy.  Now, the city is pretty well vaccinated and doing ok.  Mask wearing was mixed although better than what we observed in upper state NY on the way down and back.  Rural vs. urban remains the most salient divide on pretty much everything these days.

 

 

Some of us went to the Philly Art Museum, which remains as huge as ever.  I walked around a bit before folks got there, and a guy took a few pics of me with Rocky.  We spent most of our time in the American art section--1700s and 1800s--and the modern art sections.  And the cafeteria there had great food.  The last time I was here, I hung out with Brooke Shields.... ok, I was a valet and parked cars for a big event where she walked near me.

 

 

 

Speaking of great food, we aimed to eat outdoors as much as we could--my mother loves to make reservations--but we also had more meals at my mom's place than usual to minimize our exposure to folks.  

 

 

 

 

My brother demonstrated his prowess as a professionally trained chef.

 

I had to rely on my year of skill development to compete. Which meant I got to cook one night, focusing on Nigella and King Arthur--chicken shawarma, pitas, chocolate chip cookie dough pots (in a muffin pan), and veggies.  The oven had a glitch halfway through the pita making process, which scared me--I didn't think we would end up with everything getting cooked.  But it worked out.  My sister's curse (she has had repeated crises on Thanksgiving--broken oven, power failure, plumbing issues) hit me, I guess.  Anyhow, the folks liked it and ate it up, so my job was done. 

Heaps of pita, Chicken Shawarma, two sauces,
some falafel from the Market for those who don't
eat chicken, two veggie dishes, red onions and also
sauteed onions and peppers to top the pitas.

 

Our last breakfast together with everyone was a bagel picnic.   

Perhaps the second biggest highlight of the trip was meeting up with my cousin and his family at the Jersey shore.  His kids are young and cute and full of energy, so they dragged me repeatedly in to the cold water, and chased their own bad throws as we played frisbee in the sand.  The only downside is that the combo of not stretching, running in the sand, and plunging into the cold water did not help rehab my calf strain.  I may be able to play next week, but it will be a risk. 

The highlight?  Seeing my daughter in person for the first time in a long, long time.  She is now an amazing adult with a cool new job. I can't wait to go to the west coast to meet her cat and see new apartment and meet roommates and all that.  Some day... as travel across the border is easier but not easy.

We had to spend $ to get a fast set of tests, we had to download and fill out the ArriveCan app (should be CanArrive), sweep our own nostrils at the border, and so on.  All good, but lots of uncertainty remain about flying.  

It was definitely strange to move from seeing no one and traveling nowhere to a few small meetups to a massive gathering and heaps of travel and much going out.  We were careful most of the time with our indoors eating in large but uncrowded places like the Reading Terminal Market.  It was very much worth it.  And I sure as hell hope it won't be so long until I see these folks again.  Indeed, our Thanksgiving planning has already started.