The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

This weekend I actually Got Things Done. On Saturday I made another batch of vegetarian tikka masala, and did laundry. Yesterday I went out and got my hairs trimmed, and dashed through the bookstore since there wasn't a block-long line, and did the grocery shopping, and went to the pet store and utterly failed to buy a higher-sided litterbox because they didn't have any. But I did buy more catnip mice. And I went to CVS and bought Kleenex and a Command hook for my printer and scanner cables so I can keep the connectors off the floor and stop worrying about running my chair over them. And I ordered a new litterbox from Chewy when I got home.

Today proved it was Monday right off the bat, because Lily woke me up by standing on my chest and sneezing in my eye. And then I opened my email and found yet another externship letter request and yet another conference registration request, and a couple of "acting like a helpless idiot so I'll do all the work for them" requests. The excuse this time is they're in a hurry and don't have time to format their references, and aren't any good at it anyway, so I can do it for them. Well, yes, I could, but it shouldn't be my problem. And then they have the gall to write back to my boss, who wants to know where it's at, and say they're "working with me" on it.

I wrote to the Computer Loft and asked them if they'd sell me a dead keyboard, because I am so done with Lily perching on the laptop and clicking on things. Even if I never hear back from them, at least I tried. And I hope they get a laugh out of the email.

I need a vacation. I want a vacation somewhere that gets three sunny days in a row. I need to decide if I'm going to sign up for the $2400 all-female dive trip to Costa Rica in mid-January 2022, which I would have to pay for in August. Right now I can't even think as far as August; my brain stops at "when I get vaccinated."

If you told me in October that I would stay up way the hell past my bedtime in January watching Congress certifying electoral votes, I would have told you to lay off the magic mushrooms. But I did. I gave up when they got to Pennsylvania, because I wasn't being paid to listen to two hours of bloviating after midnight. But I started watching because I wanted to see how the process is supposed to work. It's supposed to be repetitive and over in a couple of hours.

And nobody will ever be held accountable for the fact that yesterday it wasn't. Trump should die in prison, having been convicted of sedition and every financial and abuse of power crime they can charge him with, but he won't. The police who took selfies with insurrectionists should be fired if not prosecuted, but they won't be. The insurrectionists who were arrested should be tried and convicted, but they won't be. Or if they're convicted of anything it will probably be misdemeanor trespassing or something equally toothless.

If I had my way about it, Jimmy Carter could refuse to attend Trump's funeral. Statistics are unfortunately against me there, though.

Lily and Quirk met on purpose this morning. Lily's been going crazy wanting to climb over the gate in the office door since Tuesday (she can't, she's not tall enough), and Quirk wanted out this morning, so I took down the gate (partly because I'm almost not tall enough to climb over it either, and I'm tired of trying to do it with coffee in hand) and let them get together. There was some hissing and some meowing and eventually Lily went out again. An hour or so later Quirk went out, and Lily chased her (silently) back in here and she went into the back of the closet again. Lily kept going into the closet and meowing and hissing at her some more in between periods of hanging around on my desk and getting in my way. Quirk came out from the back of the closet eventually, and Lily went off for her afternoon nap.

I assume all the hissing and whatnot is because we need to know precisely who's in charge here. Surprise, it's me; I can call Lily off. But I don't unless there are signs of actual violence or unless Quirk can't get away, because they've got to figure it out themselves to a certain extent. Some of me wishes I could have taken the gate down and gone somewhere else for the next eight or so hours and let them sort it all out now that they're inclined to sort things out. But (a) pandemic, (b) great big snowstorm, and (c) Thursday.

Speaking of Thursday, it really should have been Friday yesterday. The student who can't write is now at the point of submitting the article for publication, and yesterday I sent her off to read the submission instructions for the European Journal of Dental Education, and she wrote me back and said she doesn't understand them and can I walk her through them, and walk her through reformatting the references, on Zoom? ARGH. No, I couldn't do it yesterday, because I was trying to proofread two sets of surveys and come up with ten years of admissions data and exam grades before tomorrow. And I don't want to do it today, because today I had to submit an article to the JDE (upon which email from my boss saying oh, by the way, I wanted these six people suggested as reviewers, and here are their names with no email addresses. But I can't suggest reviewers without withdrawing and resubmitting the whole article, and I can't even do that right now because it hasn't been seen by an actual human yet), and fill out and submit the six CODA site visitor annual forms (that were due in October sometime, of course, but my boss never did them, so she sent them to me to do ASAP please), and and and...suffice it to say I have no patience for any handholding, but if I don't do it today or tomorrow it's not going to go away, and will be hanging over me when we get back on January 4. I already have at least two recommendation letters for a student who's applying to MBA programs hanging over me and due January 5, which means I have to write them tomorrow. SNARL.

I have nothing against the MBA applicant. He's very nice. But I am completely sick of doing things other people should be doing, particularly at the last minute. And some of the data I needed yesterday had to come from the Drama Llama, and ye gods, the WHINING. I know that a lot of the problem with all of these things right now is me, in the "meet assholes all day and you're the asshole" vein. But I hate every single one of these tasks and pretty much every single one of the people who palmed them off on me. So there.

Apollo 13 is one of my most favorite movies, and two different lines from it are chasing my brain around. One is Gene Kranz hollering "I don't WANT another ESTIMATE!" and the other is one of Nixon's advisors to one of the NASA guys: "OK, but I'm asking you, when will we KNOW?" I want to know before the weekend (well, depending on who you believe, we know now, but nobody's being official about it yet, and that's annoying). At least it's looking rather more like the alcohol of choice should be Zombie Killer instead of Blithering Idiot. But dammit, I want it over with.

I almost got Snip to stop tromping over, and sitting on, the keyboard, by reminding her that the thing on the floor in here is the cat bed that used to be in the bedroom. Once she got all four feet in it chasing the laser pointer dot, she remembered what it was. So now she stomps in here in the afternoon and goes to sleep in the cat bed, instead of stomping in here and getting in my face. Last week I'd had it with that and hissed at her. I hiss at one cat or the other about twice a year, when they decide that personal space is a Communist plot and don't take the hint that I'm not in the mood. I felt guilty about it almost instantly, though, because Snip cringed so hard (which is why I don't do it often). All was forgiven at dinnertime as usual. And she stays off the desk before about 4:30 these days.

I'm not logging on for work after Tuesday next week, and my goodness, do I ever need that. I hope the weather stays nice for at least Wednesday.

Oh, I could write SUCH an email right now, but I won't. It would begin with "Just because you want this, doesn't make it possible" and go on through "You've been talking down to me for seven years now and I'm through taking it" and "I have tried to give you what you want when you want it, but the world doesn't work that way right now" and "If you ever contact me directly again I will ignore it. Get your course director, who sees me as a human being, to do it for you."

This is the faculty member who makes September my least favorite month every year, and is starting early this year. Unfortunately "running over the staff in hobnailed boots for a month every year" isn't grounds for finding somebody else to teach head and neck anatomy, I guess.

And now my stomach is all annoyed with me because I was eating lunch when I got this peach of an email.

I had Trader Joe's instant miso ramen for breakfast because it was the most breakfastlike thing in the house. I still haven't gone grocery shopping, although I should have done it yesterday in the nice weather. But yesterday I was too worn out by the end of the day. This afternoon I have at least two, possibly three, meetings, so not holding out a lot of hope for having after-work energy today either. But I must go to the pet store and get some wet food suitable for hiding gabapentin in, so I can finally give Snip a manicure and she'll stop getting her feet stuck in the rugs.

Yesterday I got worn out at a Zoom "HR Teatime" meeting that was a waste of a perfectly good hour between 3:00 and 4:00, and I actually like our main HR person; it's just that she's been doing too many online seminars and has too many online-seminar-based "warm and fuzzy self-care in the time of pandemic" ideas at the moment. What I got from the meeting is that staff are way down on the list of priorities; students and faculty first, patients second, staff whenever they get around to us. Which is probably as it should be, because after all we are a dental school, but I also got emails that the new dean wants to meet with all the students by class year in his first week. I wonder if he'll ever want to meet with staff?

Well, never mind, at least the HR meeting didn't even mention furloughs or layoffs, only early retirement, and I don't qualify for that.

The Dachau transcription project has led me into doing research occasionally, and I discovered that it wasn't entirely out of left field for the Nazis to want porcelain painters, because one of the subcamps of Dachau was a porcelain factory. (Also, the earlier the date on the card, the more likely the person's listed occupation is to be something other than worker, assistant worker, or farm worker.) I do still want to know why some of the cards say Lodz and some say Litzmannstadt; Germany renamed a lot of places in Poland and the Baltic states and used those names most of the time, even though Litzmannstadt takes longer to write. They also misspelled a lot of Russian place names, but that may be a consequence of having different alphabets. Or maybe it's a consequence of thinking that Poles and Russians were subhuman. Or maybe some of both.

On a cheerier note, my cousin who would have no luck whatsoever if not for bad luck is now in complete remission from myeloma. When he was diagnosed they gave him five years to live, and then he went into a clinical trial for a new drug, and now he's in remission. Score one for the good guys, because he is pretty much one of the good guys.

If there's anything to be happy about today, I can't find it. Except maybe the fact that it isn't shoot-me-now humid yet. Harvard is virtue-signaling its little heart out and the university (but not the dental school) has given us Juneteenth as a paid holiday. I bet if we weren't all working from home anyway and Juneteenth had fallen on a Tuesday instead of a Friday, it would be business as usual.

OK, the half-cat (front half) and half-shark (hind half) plush toy I ordered through Kickstarter is a thing to be happy about, even though I won't get it until next March. This is the same person who did the "mostly mythological creatures in the Cone of Shame" pins, which amused me so much I now have T Rex, dragon and Cerberus pins. Cerberus, of course, has three cones.

I think I'll go to my haircut on Saturday, because I am a split-end factory and anything I can do to feel better about myself (main themes lately being "fat and useless") is probably a good idea, but I don't really want to sit there for however long it takes to do color. So I'll have grey roots down to my ears, so what.

David Epstein's weather report this morning pretty much nailed what's annoying me most about this whole quarantine thing: "January and February were like March, and March was like March, and now April is like March." So it's been March for three and a half months and every day has been pretty much the same for a month and a half, with minor variations in the length of the grocery list and the number of hours I'm required to be online for.

The postdoc CODA reports came back to me yesterday, unsigned, because there were too many typos in them. This after I said when I sent them, "Please contact the program directors, whose names and emails are on the first pages, with questions about these reports." So I sent them back to the program directors, after an hour of grumpily trying to figure out if it would be faster to fix them myself. Fortunately my boss doesn't care so much about the postdoc reports and told me not to do them myself. I also haven't heard from her about the CODA report webinar she did yesterday afternoon, so I assume we don't have to scrap the predoc report and start over. We will probably have to write one for the class of 2021, though, because the last one was for the class of 2020.

Lily has been massively clingy since Sunday, when I came home three times with grocery bags that did not contain any rotisserie chickens. Every time I go into the kitchen, she has to come make sure I'm not hiding chicken scraps in anything. No chicken until next week at the earliest, because I'm tired of it and there are other proteins in the world. It might be time for bean soup, to use up the frozen bacon ends. It's certainly still cold enough for bean soup.

I'm mad at Gronk for going back to playing football. He's going to be permanently retired when somebody hits him in the back at just the wrong spot or just the wrong angle.

On Sunday I was kicking ass and taking names. Monday wasn't particularly wonderful, and yesterday I was done with this week after I spent the first half hour of the day failing to order flowers online because the Place Order button wouldn't work, and then spent the next half hour on the phone trying to order flowers and having to repeat myself three or four times every time the customer service person wanted a piece of information. And then the Curriculum Committee meeting happened and somebody who said he was coming, didn't, because he forgot he had said he would even though I saw him write it down, and I got yelled at for not confirming him. And then the flowers, which were supposed to arrive today, arrived yesterday at 4:15.

Unfortunately the week isn't done with me, so I had cupcakes for dinner last night despite that being a terrible idea (and unsatisfactory besides, because the frosting had slid off by the time I got them home. I love Georgetown Cupcakes, but they must be kept absolutely horizontal in transit.).

Today at least the sun is out, which hasn't happened since sometime last week.

It's bad enough that Harvard requires 2-factor authentication through my personal phone in order to do anything, but now the app has started nagging me about iOS being one version behind and how that's a security risk. GO AWAY. Only I can't make it go away, because without the app I can't get into things like time entry and PCard reconciliations and reserving rooms. So ARGH, that's all.

But the sun is out.

Responsible Adulthood continues to be a pain in the neck. If I had gotten all the legal documents done in October, I would be done with all the financial stuff now. But the credit union updated all its systems software in November, and now instead of transferring my existing accounts, I have to close them and reopen them as a trust. And I can't do anything with the CDs at all. GRR.

So that was Saturday morning. Then I wandered off to the Coop and bought a couple of books, and then wandered off to Saloniki in the Smith Center and had salad and hummus for lunch, which was nice because I needed some vegetables. Then I went home and figured out how to exchange heavy stuff for other heavy stuff: I went out with an empty kitty litter jug and a full container of change, and turned the change into paper money and subsequently into V8 and seltzer and kitty litter. And a new cat bed, because the cheap ones don't provide any padding between Lily and the floor, and she is an official teenager, and the floor is cold. So, new cat bed has a lot more padding between Lily and the floor. She sleeps in that bed all evening and Snip sleeps in it all day.

Unfortunately I waited for the T for 25 minutes on the way home with the heavy stuff. I hate it when it does that. I really hate it when it's cold and windy and I'm thirsty and it does that. So I came home and drank quite a lot of seltzer and decided to spend most of the rest of the day reading books. The Librarian of Auschwitz wasn't quite what I wanted in terms of character development. I bought it because it's a translation, and I didn't find any blatant translatorese in it, which was a bit of a surprise. The latest No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book for a couple of months now, and it turned out to be just about exactly what was required. (It occurs to me that one of the things I like about that series is there are absolutely no cell phones in it.)

Yesterday I went out for more (different) seltzer and more vegetables, because I wanted to make Smitten Kitchen's pizza beans yesterday, and LTMB and vegetable soup this week (I made the LTMBs last weekend and froze them). So I came home with a case of seltzer, and a cabbage and some carrots and some tomatoes and a bag of frozen spinach. I made an extremely quick and dirty version of pizza beans, because I used three cans of beans and a jar of marinara sauce, and a pound of thawed drained frozen spinach. If I had made my own sauce, it would have been better, but it worked for hot food last night and it will work for lunch this week.

Unfortunately this week got off on a very cold, soggy and grumpy foot. Missing the 7:50 bus was my fault, because I didn't get out the door until 7:48. But the fact that the 8:00 and 8:10 buses never showed up at all meant the 8:20 was a sardine can, and even though at that point I had been standing in the rain for half an hour, I was absolutely not in the mood for a sardine can. So I went down to the Cambridge St bus stop, because it has a roof over it, and stood there for another ten minutes and got an actual seat on the 8:30. Which was a sardine can by the time it got to Comm Ave. I got to work at 9:00 or so with soaking wet feet and a massive case of Don't Wanna. If I hadn't used up all my personal days for the year already, I would have taken one today. At least the Drama Llama decided to be sick today, so I didn't have to listen to him whine when I finally did get here.

I need to go to REI tonight and invest in some more socks. I cleaned out the sock drawer last spring, and now I get to about Thursday and it looks pathetic in there.