The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

I don't know why I'm bothering to re-reformat this article, because if the JDE and CEDR both didn't want it, no way is BMC Med Ed going to want it either.  And then I'll have to re-re-reformat it and send it somewhere else.

And it's hot, and HUMID, and I would rather be up to the neck in the ocean, where I might as well be anyway, than glued to the computer all day.  And I don't even have any ice cream in the house.  Which is probably good in the long run, but if I'm going to be glued to the computer (which puts off heat) in my uncomfortable chair (which was fine before I sat in it eight hours a day for over a year) while it's 95 and humid, I want some sort of reward for it.  At least the fact that the laptop puts off heat is keeping Lily from wanting to plant herself on it.  Actually, I ended up playing Where the HELL is the CAT, because she was in the back of the closet.  I wish I could let them out in the stairwell, because it's noticeably cooler on the first floor and massively cooler in the basement.  They'd like that. 

Oh yay, on Thursday I can come in through the door closer to my actual office, instead of going into the REB, up half a flight of stairs, through another door, down two flights, through a third door, through the basement, through a fourth door, up three flights, and through a fifth and sixth door.  (Imagine how much fun that is if you're carrying anything heavy, or anything that requires more than one hand.)  Now that the Main lobby entrance is open, it's just up one flight of stairs and through two doors.  Hopefully on Thursday the weather will be a bit less like living in a hot washcloth, too.

Just for the record, it is Friday, April 16 and it's snowing. I object. But if the marathon had been happening this year, it would have been on Monday the 19th, so I guess it's still technically not snowing on the marathon.

I need to go buy heavyish stuff, and I was going to go out and get some of it after 5:00 today, but the snow (which is now sticking, dammit) is putting me off that idea. I don't want to do it all tomorrow, but Grammie's 99th birthday Zoom is on Sunday afternoon and I'd like to get it done before that.

Harvard has decided we get four-day weekends for Memorial Day and July 4 (Cambridge still thinks everybody's coming back in August, but HSDM is coming back July 1), and I forgot that as of last year Juneteenth is a Harvard holiday. But Juneteenth this year is a Saturday, so I wonder if we'll get the Friday off.

HUHS is supposed to call me sometime next week to schedule my second shot. I suppose not having the second shot scheduled when I got the first one is appropriate penance for getting on the list in the first place, when I probably shouldn't have been on it. But I want to get the Battle of Second Moderna over with, so I can talk myself into leaving the house for fun once in a while.

Lily passed the Chicken Test just now. Last month when I brought home a rotisserie chicken, she wanted to be interested, but her heart (or her pancreas) just wasn't in it and she made a sort of half effort.

Tonight she practically climbed into the grocery bag when I put it down, and then since she knew there was a chicken in the house, she stared at me until I got up and disassembled it. While I was doing that, she was practically crawling up my pant leg until she got the cutting board, and then she cleaned it off thoroughly. That's passing the Chicken Test, all right.

Back to the grind...I was a good kid and didn't even sniff at my work email for the three days I was off. So today I merely had 10 things added to my list from those three days: three meetings requiring invitations with Zoom links; one article to submit to the JDE, one to format for the JDE and one to proofread for the JMDS; one clinical faculty survey to proofread and test for functionality; one request for the current curriculum map; one request to order AV equipment from Amazon; and one request to advertise two seminars coming up at the end of the month. That'll do.

Too bad going through my email pretty much harshed all the mellow I had built up over the three days off. I really needed at least a week and the weekends at both ends of it, in retrospect, but there just isn't a good week for that until after Memorial Day. So at least I got my three days.

I also got my new mattress yesterday. Delivering the new one and removing the old one took about 20 minutes, and I was mightily impressed. Granted the delivery men were both 20 years younger and a foot taller than I am. The new mattress is very flat, compared to the old one that had a trench in the middle, but I slept just fine last night. Quirk is confused, because the old mattress and box spring were up on end in the bedroom to make room for the new ones, and the new ones don't feel like the old ones, so she isn't sleeping on the bed. I'm glad she didn't take advantage of the fact that she had a straight shot outdoors for a couple of minutes. I had shut her in here, but then opened the door to get cash to tip the delivery men, and didn't remember that the apartment door and the building front door were both still open. Fortunately she headed for the kitchen and stayed there.

The vet's office mailed some buprenorphine for Lily, for just in case, on March 31. It sat in the Natick post office for two days and then went to Nashua, NH, and came back to Brighton yesterday. Good thing it's only for just in case, because if I had needed it last week I would have been very upset. I have to go to the actual post office and sign for it. I went yesterday after the mattress delivery, but so did everybody else in Brighton, so I stood in an unmoving (but growing) line for 20 minutes and then decided to come back today instead. Hopefully everybody will have gotten their need for the post office out of their system today.

I went to H Mart today when it decided to stop actually raining. Apparently I'm still not ready to wait in underground T stations for ten minutes (did that on the way there and found out it wasn't my best thing), so I walked back to Harvard from Central Square to take the bus home. Which was fine; I got exercise and didn't get rained on. And then when I got home I could hang around and read and eat miscellaneous Korean pancakes for late lunch. That was today's definition of unwinding, because I've been a pretty crispy critter ever since the week of March 8, which should have been a vacation week. The routine since about March 1 has been "see new email, shriek 'NO, GO AWAY' either mentally or vocally, get up, walk one lap of apartment, sigh heavily, sit down again, and deal with whatever it is that whoever it is wants THIS time." No email for three work days will be a good start.

Arm was still good and sore all day yesterday, and it happens to be the arm I sleep on top of, so I threw some Advil at it last night at bedtime. It's hardly sore today. Mom and Dad got their second Pfizer shots yesterday, and as of today my grandmother is officially fully vaccinated, because her second shot was two weeks ago.

I moved the pet steps into the living room when Lily had stopped eating much, because it's more important to me that she have easy access to her food on the cat tree than easy access to me in bed in the morning. Apparently it's important to Lily to jump up on the bed, too, since she hasn't stopped. I was considering buying another set of steps until I remembered that the new mattress and box spring, which arrive on Monday, will be at least three inches lower. Which means I won't need deep pocket sheets. Which means I can go buy flannel sheets in the fall if I want to. What an unusual idea.

It is really absurdly windy out. Or maybe it's just loud because I opened some storm windows to let some of the semi-springlike air in when we had some, and didn't shut them again. All the windows need washing, but I don't think we have enough ladder to do them from outdoors and I'm not going to start with gymnastics from indoors.

I hope Lily's renewed interest in food persists when the pain shot wears off this afternoon. Yesterday she got interested in Quirk's crunchies at breakfast (so she got some of her own and ate half of them over the course of the day) and raced me down the hall to be waiting on the cat tree for dinner. I forget when she stopped doing that, but it was nice to see her do it again. She does like the Royal Canin food, though.

There is precisely one person who's allowed to make me cross things off their task list for them, and it is not the person who tried to make me do it just now. And the person who's allowed to do it has been doing it a lot lately and I wish she wouldn't. Just as well I'm taking Thursday, Friday, and Monday off.

Speaking of time off, I'm sorely tempted to take tomorrow afternoon off too, since my vaccine appointment is at 2:20 and I have to get to Cambridge and back by bus. And I want to stick my head in the Coop and the Harvard Bookstore and see if I can find the sequel to Foundryside, which I read yesterday and enjoyed. I think Robert Bennett has read Patrick Rothfuss, because the way magic works is pretty derivative, but Bennett put it in a bag with "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and medieval Venice, and shook it up vigorously.

Yesterday was Quirk's third birthday. I hope it was better than the previous two. At least she got a little bit of celebratory sour cream (her favorite human food so far).

So, vet day happened on Tuesday, because Quirk needed a booster for her distemper vaccine and we wanted to see if Lily had gained any weight. She had in fact lost some and is back in "cat skeleton with fur on it" territory, and Quirk had gained some (which of course is the exact opposite of what we wanted), and Dr. P was worried enough to draw blood from Lily. I was convinced it was going to say "dying of kidney failure", but it didn't. Her kidney values are fine for being almost 15 years old. She's slightly anemic and rather neutrophilic, which Dr. P says is infection, inflammation, or possible early stage bone marrow cancer. Ultrasound and antibiotic injection tomorrow. There goes another $800. Sigh. But she's started eating a useful amount again, at least. And she's acting more like herself since yesterday than she has since she got goopy eyes last month.

In human medical news, I am getting a Covid vaccine on Tuesday through HSDM. Yes, it's jumping the line, but not badly enough to make me feel horribly guilty and "weight off my mind" doesn't even begin to describe it. All of my planning for anything in the future outside my apartment stopped at "when I'm vaccinated" and now I can put a date to when that actually is.

And now I have to go try to corral my brain into being productive, when all it wants to do is yell "WHEE!" and bounce off the walls.

Lily is not eating very much, but she's not ready to let go yet. She has two bad teeth that refuse to give up and fall out, and I wish they would, because I think that's the problem (or at the very least not helping). Having them pulled would mean putting an almost-15-year-old cat with kidney problems under general anesthesia, and Dr. P is good with my not wanting to do that.

Got my $1400 stimulus check, and am taking the BC Easter vacation (Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Monday off), so I guess I can go mattress shopping. Hooray? Mattress shopping feels like used-car shopping to me. I think I know what I want, though, and it's a matter of going down to Mattress Firm in Coolidge Corner, which is where they sell what I want, and persuading them that that's all I want. The regiment could probably invest in a new futon mattress someday too, but that's at the end of the "not now" list after new office rug and new quilt. Quirk isn't doing the quilt any favors either.

And I really need a plasterer to fix the office wall, and a plumber and a tile guy to at least replace the tub/shower faucets and replace that square foot of tiles in the middle of the wall, and if I won the lottery I'd have the entire bathroom re-tiled. I'm probably going to have to win the lottery for the plasterer anyway. AND I'm not sure how long it would take to fix the wall, and I don't think it would be a good idea to try to be doing my WFH job while the wall's being fixed. So I'm in about three minds on the subject.

From 3:00 to 4:30 yesterday, I left my laptop sulking at home and went out. I couldn't waste a 70-degree day in March. So I went to the Computer Loft, and they outright gave me a dead MacBook Air (I offered to buy it) for Lily to sit on. I was there for probably 20 minutes and most of it was trading cat-on-laptop pictures with the tech. His cat has a whole laptop to himself, and the screen works but the keyboard doesn't, so it plays fish videos and occupies the cat while the tech gets things done. Lily was most interested in sniffing her dead laptop, but so far would still rather sit on mine.

But the weather was glorious. I almost didn't want to be wearing a sweatshirt.

This morning Massachusetts rolled out a pre-registration system for mass vaccination sites, and it seems to actually work. Basically it puts you on the list, and then sends you possible appointments when it's your turn. So at least I'm on the list. I hope it sends me to Hynes (it will be Hynes instead of Fenway by the time it gets around to me) rather than to Gillette. But if it's Gillette, that's what personal days are for. I'm really hoping for Thanksgiving in Noank on Memorial Day weekend.

The regiment is considering investing in the second brand-new mattress it's ever bought. The last one was a college-furniture-store double bed mattress, which got upgraded to my sister's queen-size guest bed when she got married. I noticed this past summer when I rotated it that it's developed a bit of a trench in the middle, and Lily has been sharpening her claws on the box spring for years, so it's probably time to replace both. I just wish mattress shopping didn't feel quite so much like used-car shopping. I don't want to spend $2000 on a mattress and I don't want memory foam or cooling gel or any of that jazz. Just sell me what I want and take the old one away when you bring the new one. And no, I don't care if you come over the balcony instead of up the stairs.

Good stuff, because I ought to remember the good stuff:

- The higher-sided litterbox appears to be just what I needed. It came in a box a third again as large as it was, though, and the box took up an amazing amount of real estate even when folded up, because it wouldn't stay folded up gracefully. It is now sulking in the recycling bin.

- My Kickstarter Purrmaid arrived on the same day as the high-sided litterbox. I have no idea how they got a two-foot stuffed animal into a one-foot plastic bag without doing either one permanent damage, but they did. The contrast between that and the litterbox packaging amused me, rather.

- The sun is out today and is strong enough to feel like spring, even though the temperature is somewhere in the mid-30s. And it's not dark at 5:00 these days.

- Quirk has discovered that sleeping on my bed during the day is perfectly fine. I took a picture of her doing it that should be captioned "Never trust a smiling cat."

- Lily has been eating most of two cans of Royal Canin a day for a couple of weeks or so now, and her spine doesn't stick out so much. She ain't done yet. Thank goodness. She does make a bit of a mess when she eats, but she can't help that. It's a combination of lack of teeth, and the fact that the soy sauce dish she eats from is a tad bit too small for an entire can.

- The new coffee grinder has made a tremendous difference in the end product. I made rocket fuel the first time I used the new grinder because when the coffee is ground evenly, you get a lot more of the good stuff out of it. I suppose I could grind less coffee, but it's slightly easier to add more water.