Yesterday was a day of end-of-semester meetings, cleaning up pending assignments, and putting out the online final exam for the students. All grades for all of my classes are done (sans the one final, but the spreadsheet is setup so I can just plug in that last score and all the grades will be recalculated). I will be submitting grades Wednesday evening.

Tomorrow I have a couple of appointments — I’m getting an MRI of both knees, and I have a pre-op visit to clear me for surgery. The surgery itself is two weeks from today, and should be relatively quick, with a couple of days recovering at home, and several weeks of physical therapy.

So what about today? I have nothing scheduled for today. The semester is essentially over, the doctors are poking me tomorrow, but today…nada. The calendar square is blank. All obligations have ceased. I am free.

So today is all fluff. My first act is to lift a curse that has rested lightly on my house for over a decade.

Many years ago, my two sons had moved out and moved on, leaving only my daughter still living at home with us, and that caused a minor problem. You see, my wife is a female, my daughter is a female, even our cat is a female — I was outnumbered. There are certain stereotypically female habits that were therefore amplified, in particular, greater demands for hair care. I was discovering that every morning, when I got up and wanted to quickly brush away my bed head, our hairbrush had gone wandering away from the bathroom. My first solution was to buy a second hairbrush for the bathroom, easy. But then both would vanish every morning. My wife has a habit of absent-mindedly taking things and walking off with them and putting them down wherever she is when she’s done with them.

Don’t even ask about coffee cups. Before I do the dishes I have to search through the house and gather up all the coffee cups. Yesterday I found ten of them scattered haphazardly about, most of them half full of whatever Mary was drinking out of them.

I knew I was on a rising exponential curve with the hairbrush thing, so rather than buying a third, a fourth, an eleventh, etc., and filling the whole house with hairbrushes, I came up with a simpler solution. I used a sharpie to draw a skull and crossbones on one, along with a short declaration that this was a cursed hairbrush that must never be removed from the bathroom, or a dire but unspecified fate will befall the thief.

It worked!

That’s what magic and curses are all about — creating reminders about what behaviors should be followed, shaping customs, flagging what is prohibited and what is allowed. They work even if there is no power behind them.

Well, today I declare the curse is lifted. My daughter has moved on, and I’m still outnumbered by the females in the house, but the cat doesn’t use the hairbrush anyway. The sharpie marks have faded, and the bristles in the hairbrush have been falling out, so the animus haunting the brush has disappeared. Even curses can die.

Although…maybe I should transfer it to some coffee cups.