The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

I wish there were a way to send tweets without joining Twitter. The MBTA seems to be most responsive to tweets, and I want to know why it's so hard to go south from Harvard Square after 8:00. It took me an hour and a quarter last night, 9:30 - 10:45. I hate that, and I hate that it's not only possible but apparently normal. But joining Twitter is like swimming in a sewer, and I won't do it. End rant.

At least now it's Thursday, and I feel sorry for the temp who's on his second day of sitting around doing not much because he can't get an eCommons login yet. Which, of course, he needs for everything else. If Harvard had managed to send me his ID number before 4:00 on Tuesday, we might not have had this problem. But that's what you get when you have to ask Cambridge for things related to Longwood.

And at least I got to fall asleep with both cats on the bed last night. Which isn't a huge thing, really, but I wanted to be wanted, and it was nice to have our whole little colony all together, with two thirds of it purring and one third being large and warm and happy to be purred at and dispense scritches. At least for now, anyway. We'll see what they think on Tuesday night.

They've finally run out of other sections of the Monastery/Washington intersection to tear up, and tore up the bus stop yesterday. I wonder if we'll get a new bus stop for Christmas?

My left shoulder is still screaming at me, because I went and bought kitty litter on Sunday. It was only one jug, but I wanted to buy it before I needed it, and it turned out to be a bad idea because the shoulder that had been getting better stopped getting better. Back to ibuprofen again, and on Sunday I go get it sorted via massage.

I did, however, invest in another laser pointer that came with spare batteries. So I put the spare batteries in the existing laser pointer, and now I have two working laser pointers. Lily still thinks that little red laser pointer dots Must Die, and Snip will occasionally go after one.

I'm not proud of it, but I slipped Snip a mickey on Sunday morning so I could finally give her the manicure she desperately needed. I got tired of her getting stuck in the rugs and the bedclothes and the couch and anything else made of fabric, so I gave her the contents of a gabapentin capsule in her breakfast, and two hours later she didn't care quite so much. I did have to wait ten minutes between the first and second foot, and she did still try to bite me four times, but she didn't really mean it. And then she went back to sleep and was perfectly fine by dinnertime.

Before the weekend, I went whale watching on Friday, despite Thursday probably being the better day for it. It wasn't the best overall experience I've ever had (cold, cloudy, and five whales in four hours), but it was the closest I've ever been to a whale. One decided he wanted to investigate us, so he came within 20 feet of the boat. That was after he'd spent ten minutes lying on his back, slapping his flippers on the surface, and occasionally rolling upright to breathe. So that was good. And I went on the 10:00 boat, so I was back on land by 2:30. Which was nice, because if I'd been inclined to do anything else that day, I would have had time to. But I wasn't, so I didn't.

I re-read the entire Harry Potter series over the course of about a week and a half, and they're still enjoyable. Now I'm reading a book that's mostly about the Congressional investigations into the sinking of the Titanic. Everyone knows it sank, but I hadn't known much about the investigations except that they produced more lifeboats on what cruise ships were still running afterward. I hadn't thought about the fact that WWI started two years later, so most of Europe was looking for excuses to be offended by any and every other country they dealt with. Interesting stuff, so far.

Finally used up the caramelized-onion cheese, which of course there were two of, by making a casserole with them. Hamburger and tomatoes and elbow noodles and cheese and sour cream and panko. Hopefully the weather won't go right back up to 90 right away, because it's a very stick-to-the-ribs sort of casserole and that doesn't go with 90 degrees. It was 68 when I made it yesterday and I was wearing a sweatshirt and slippers. After which I shut all the windows so I wouldn't wake up cold this morning. I'm not ready for fall quite yet.

Good thing I'm on vacation starting the week after next, because I feel like every day this week started with hearing (even if I wasn't actively listening for) the Drama Llama whining for 20 minutes. I'm very much done with that. It may be time to start my day with half an hour of music or a Great Gildersleeve episode or something, at least next week. The alternative is being fired for trying to strangle him.

Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing, but I swear the cats were grumpy this week too, after Wednesday when it stopped being hot as balls outdoors. Lily's gotten over it, assuming she ever had it in the first place, and Snip perked up almost immediately when she realized there was provolone for the first time in several months. She still wasn't entirely herself until around lunchtime today, though. I figured she was back to OK when I got my nose washed.

Now that it's August, and I have vacation coming up, I should figure out when I want to go whale watching. I think I can call that a tradition at this point, since I've been doing it for about five years now. By August the whales are there, so even though being on the water at all is nice, there's a point to it. And whales are nifty.

Speaking of being on the water, I caved and ordered a full-length rash guard for under my wetsuit. I'm tired of the struggle to put it on over a bathing suit, although it does get easier if I start with the wetsuit inside out. Still not fun, though, and the rash guard is supposed to help. And even if it doesn't, I can go swimming in it if I want to, so I'll have an emergency backup bathing suit.

I went and did most of the major grocery shopping, but I need to go out again if I want to buy milk. I shouldn't, because if there's milk in the house, I drink it, and I don't need the calories. But I've been enjoying it quite a lot. Decisions, decisions.

My washing machine needs a new pump, which of course is a special order and will take two weeks. But the $300 I'll have spent on diagnosis and parts and labor and a trip to the laundromat sometime in those two weeks is still less than a new washing machine.

I borrowed the first-floor machine last night and re-washed the laundry from Saturday which was in danger of becoming sentient (and was still wet, UGH), and washed the junk towels that got wet on Tuesday night (the disconnected drain hose missed the bucket, because that's how it always goes), and the shirts and socks and underwear I was going to wash after the first Saturday load. So I should be all set until at least the middle of next week, and I feel considerably better not thinking about what all could be growing in the wet laundry.

While I was doing first-floor laundry anyway and since K is away until tomorrow night, I let the Hairy Beasts out in the stairwells. Snip decided that going up the back stairs was too much work, having gone down them, and kept hollering at me every time I came down to swap laundry around until I finally carried her back up to the second floor landing. Then she figured out where she was, and went home. Lily contented herself with the front stairs and came home after about half an hour.

I put the "T rex in the cone of shame" pin on my work bag and have been quietly happy about it ever since. I think Cerberus is going on my best dive bag, if I can figure out where to stick him that won't make the bag less waterproof.

It's supposed to be getting quieter around here since it's after commencement, but I guess it will have to wait until after next week. Speaking of which, I still haven't figured out what to do with a four-day weekend. I usually go whale watching in August, but maybe I'll do it in July this year. Problem is, so will everybody else who has a four-day weekend. I'd like to do something that doesn't revolve around spending a lot of money in a restaurant, though.

Ah, hell, it's fire drill season again. I HATE the fire alarm in this building because it's grating in addition to being loud and obnoxious, whereas the alarm in the new building is merely loud and obnoxious. Besides, we can't have a fire drill, because it almost always happens in the middle of a largish lunch meeting and there aren't any more on site until September. It's no fun if they can't make it as disruptive as possible for everyone except the clinic.

WET. And windy. And I wish I had stayed indoors, or failing that, I wish it was the same weather we had over the weekend. It was actually spring, and when I wasn't out running around in it, I was home with the windows open.

I can has dry scuba gear storage, but the under-bed bin I bought to put under the rack is the wrong size. Just because it has a label that says 18.75" wide, doesn't mean it is; it's 16" wide. And the rack is 18" wide, so that didn't work at all. GROWF. But the dry storage, consisting of a stand-alone closet with cover and two shelves, and eight S hooks I added for hanging things up on the frame, works beautifully. I just have to find some way of containing and/or absorbing water under it. I suppose I could put the old bathmat under it, but I'd really rather have something waterproof just in case.

Also, I can has diving on Friday nights in April, because the pool is doing maintenance on weekends. Unfortunately, I can't usually predict how tired I'm going to be by the end of a Friday.

Since Saturday was gorgeous, I went out running around all over hell's half acre. Coolidge Corner for olive oil store and bookstore (Midnight in Chernobyl, which was interesting and infuriating and heartbreaking), and Harvard Square to get my watchband replaced (I actually almost tore it while assembling the gear rack, which is impressive because it's a Skagen metal mesh band), and beer, and Star Market for V8 and the pet store for kitty litter, and then I decided not to go to Trader Joe's because my feet hurt. I think I need new sneakers; my feet shouldn't be that sore after a mere three or so miles (I took the bus to and from Harvard Square).

Sunday was also gorgeous, but I had two loads of laundry to stay home and do, and they turned into three loads of laundry when Snip yarfed up a largish hairball on the quilt at 8 AM. So I had to get up and wash the quilt, praying for the washing machine all the while, and then it took two hours in the dryer. And Lily yarfed up her breakfast on the living room rug, so both cats got renamed I Ain't Speakin' To You for the day. I did get all the laundry done, though. And finished reading Midnight in Chernobyl. The worst part of that was the "you died in one minute three weeks ago; it just took three weeks for your body to stop working" part of radiation exposure.

And on that note, I have to go be useful in my nice safe office job for a while.

Harvard has a massive case of craniorectal inversion today. 10" of heavy wet snow, arrived at the bus stop to find the 7:40 bus had slid into a light pole, roads not plowed, and I arrived at work to four emails from various offices about how Harvard is not closed. I am one of three people in the office, and since I'm the senior person in the office, I said we were ordering lunch if the roads were good enough not to get a food delivery person into an accident by 11:30. (Apparently they are, but we can't decide what's for lunch.)

This weekend I sat down and got some serious embroidery done. About damn time. This pattern is gorgeous, but sometimes I want a big chunk of one color instead of six stitches of each of 10 colors umpteen times. I got to page 14 and had to do a big chunk of one color in order to figure out where the six stitches of each of 10 colors umpteen times part goes. It was very satisfying.

After two weeks, I think I can safely say I can add "donate the Trader Joe's tuna wet food somewhere" to the Friday list. Lily doesn't want quite as much Tiki Cat as she's getting, but she is eating half-to-most of it depending on the day, and Snip has been hoovering up the salmon like a small furry vacuum cleaner, and it doesn't seem to have screwed up anybody's digestion. Now I have to figure out if I really need to spend $130 per month on cat food.

I recorded Free Solo last night (National Geographic channel ran it with no ads) without watching it, because I was busy embroidering and I want to actually watch it without doing anything else at the same time. It deserves at least that much. I did seek out one spoiler when it first came out, before deciding I wanted to watch it, though.

Last March we got four nor'easters back to back. I hope this year we can be satisfied with one largish snowstorm and a week of polar vortex and then it will be spring. (File under "Keep dreaming", probably.)

This is Day 1 of the New Feline Diet Experiment. Lily is not getting crunchies, because she only really eats them on New Crunchies Day anyway, and Dr. P wants her eating as much protein as possible and less phosphorus. So she got some Tiki Cat salmon glop this morning as a substitute for salmon and sweet potato crunchies, and ate some of it instantly. She'll get chicken glop for dinner.

Snip, meanwhile, is still getting crunchies, but is probably not so far behind in the kidney races, and the Trader Joe's tuna has lots of phosphorus in it. So I'm going to see if she'll eat Tiki Cat tilapia glop instead. I figure she probably will, because I hate the way it smells, and that's pet ownership for you. The worse you hate it, the more they like it.

If I can find one flavor that each cat likes, I can start ordering it from Chewy. And then I have to figure out what to do with 47 cans of Trader Joe's tuna.

Yesterday I figured what the hell, I'm sick of the update notices, so I finally installed Mojave on my laptop. Relatively painless, except for ten minutes after the upgrade when it wanted another upgrade to version 3, so that was another half an hour. And I can still play Civ 5 on it. I'm still getting update notices on my work computer, but that's because the HSDM philosophy is "Don't need it? Don't do it", so I haven't done it yet.

One of these days isn't it supposed to be spring? Then why was it sunny and windy and snowing this morning? Because it's New England, that's why.

On Friday, I turned the box of coffee table parts into a coffee table. There was a short pause while I figured out that one of the end pieces had a hole 1/8" off center, and the preinstalled peg in the side piece was never going to go in. So I fixed it by sawing off the peg. Unfortunately, for want of a saw, I sawed it off with a box cutter. It worked and I didn't cut myself, but now I need to invest in new box cutter blades and a hacksaw. I also did the grocery shopping, and went out to buy kitty litter, but got as far as the top of Union St and said "Know what? I don't have to do this today, and I'm sore and tired and I really don't wanna", and went home again. I had a massage on Friday night, which was nice until the end. My neck did not like whatever happened to it.

Saturday, I bought kitty litter, and made beef stew, and spent a lot of the day after that having an occipital headache that made everything between my left eyebrow and the knot in the top of my left shoulder very unhappy. It laughed at Advil, too. GRUMP. Went to sleep with it and woke up with it on Sunday, and had it for most of Sunday until about halftime of the Patriots game.

On Sunday I didn't do anything much, partly on account of headache and partly on account of weather. Our new snow-removal guy shoveled once when it was snow, but didn't do anything after that, so there's a solid sheet of textured ice on the driveway and the sidewalk. Because it's textured ice, it's walkable, or at least it was this morning.

The Patriots tried to kill me again, but they won, so I'm happy. Mahomes may be the next Brady, but the original Brady ain't done yet (and on a purely esthetic level, Mahomes does nothing for me). And the Saints got robbed, but I'm glad the Patriots don't have to deal with Kamara and Griffin.

Yesterday I managed not to have a headache. I read a fair bit of the Vietnam book yesterday; so far I'm up to 1965 and shaking my head at what passed for foreign policy, because we seem not to have learned very much since then (see Afghanistan). I wasn't about to go outdoors in the single-digit temperatures if I didn't have to, and I didn't.

This morning I woke up at 5:30 with a different, and thankfully less intense, headache (back of head and top of forehead), which Advil did work on. Or maybe it was coffee, because I applied both at once. Anyway, I don't have a headache at the moment, just residual odd sore spots from having headaches for three of the last four days.

I don't keep my phone in the bedroom, but I wish I'd had it for the morning this weekend when I woke up and found the cats asleep in a half-orange, half-tortoiseshell circle at the end of the bed with the tops of their heads together. Of course, taking a picture of them would have woken them up, but it was very cute anyway.

Two days ago I went to the dive shop, and spent a lot of money on gear in the hopes that having my own gear that fits me properly and having all winter to play with it will help with the certification in April. Properly proportioned 7mm wetsuit, hood without vest, and gloves that are actually glove liners, but that means they don't turn my fingers into sausages. And I shouldn't need really thick gloves anyway, because the rest of me will be covered with thicker neoprene. So say all the instructors who love those glove liners, anyway. And I got to play with the shop's dog for ten minutes.

Then I went to Target, and got rained on for most of the way up there. Fortunately one of the things I was at Target for was a boot tray (to be used for snow boots and wet neoprene), so even though I didn't have an umbrella with me, I held the boot tray over my head between the bus stop and home while it rained hard.

Yesterday I went to HSDM and got my flu shot, and only managed to encounter two of my officemates while I was standing in line for half an hour. Got shot full of flu and then decided, as a reward, to go to Harvard Square and buy the book I hadn't bought two weeks ago (The Battle of Arnhem by Antony Beevor, who's one of my favorite WWII historians even if he is British and slightly biased. At least he admits Monty was an ass). I missed the M2 by about a minute, so I decided to walk up to Coolidge Corner and get on the 66. Right around the Riverway, it started raining again, so I got rained on all the way up to Coolidge Corner when it stopped. But I got on the bus and managed to obtain the book and some lunch and stopped at TJ's on the way back. And then I started feeling geriatric, and eventually fell asleep in the bathtub at 9:00 because I was trying not to do it at 8:30. I don't know if that was the flu shot or if my brain has finally realized I'm on vacation.

Today I had to go buy kitty litter, because guess what it's going to do on Saturday? Yep. Rain. All damn day. So I did that, and didn't get rained on, but did get blown all over everywhere. Shoulda put my hair up. But now I have enough kitty litter for at least two weeks. If I had remembered to bring the book with me, I might have parked myself in Peet's or somewhere for a while and had coffee and read some, kitty litter be damned. The small granny cart still takes up less space than some of the massive strollers people bring into coffee shops. But I didn't. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow, without the granny cart.

Lily does not have a kidney or bladder infection, which I found out on Tuesday. That's good. Now I have to wait for Dr. D at Angell to get back to me. I'm hoping if I end up with a radioactive cat, it will be over with before Christmas. I'd like to end up with a radioactive cat, because she's getting skinny again and Dr. P thinks the sooner we get the thyroid treated, the better.

Snip's on The List, because she yarfed on my current favorite quilt, and I can't wash it because she has also shredded one corner so much that it won't survive a washing machine. So I'm out a favorite quilt, HARUMPF. She's lucky she's cute. And that's what I get for ordering a quilt I knew was not entirely indestructible.

K has a new dog, who I met this morning. Supposedly half cocker spaniel and half Bichon Frise, and has the curly white coat, but also has black spots. Name of Carly. She didn't like me coming home with the kitty litter; she barked a fair amount, but at least she has somewhat of an indoor voice. She seems to be a happy dog in general, though, so here's to another 5-7 years of happy (she's 10, but doesn't know that). I'm glad I was right about it being a new dog, because based on the thumping noises from upstairs, it was either a dog scratching or several mice in steel-toed combat boots.

ARGH, calendars.

July 24-27: vacation
July 27: sign up for scuba classes
August 3: concert
August 5: concert (Monadnock Music Festival)
August 6: new student orientation
August 7: Lily consultation appointment/approval of MMSc literature review syllabus
August 16: HRC committee meeting
August 17: eye appointment
August 24: teeth cleaning

Somewhere in there I'm supposed to make a mammogram appointment (according to the mammogram people, not my actual doctor). However, given that they didn't find anything last year, I think it can wait until next year.

Somewhere after Aug 7, Lily may be gone for two weeks. I've arrived at the conclusion that I'll have to board her for the full time because I can't guarantee Snip will stay away from her and I don't want two radioactive cats.

Last night was absolutely wonderful sleeping weather. It was so nice that Snip gave me a serious hairy eyeball when I got up this morning, because she wasn't finished sleeping yet. I told her I wasn't either, but somebody has to go make some money. Hopefully tonight will be just as nice, because on Tuesday night I got home hungry and tired and grumpy, and damp. Lack of hungry and damp would be quite nice even if I can't avoid tired and grumpy.

I should hunt up Faure's Requiem one of these days since I know we're going to be singing that in the fall. I hope there's at least one fun part in it.