The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

On Thursday night I did manage to finally mend the pants that sprung a seam sometime around the end of January. It was an easy repair, but I suck at tying knots in sewing thread, so I kept putting it off. No more, though, and now I have another pair of work-appropriate pants.

I also messed around with the sink stopper enough to determine that the problem is probably lack of motion in the connecting rod, rather than the connecting rod being in the wrong hole of the piece it connects to. Hopefully I can fix that by loosening the nut around the connecting rod, and then I won't have to stand there rinsing toothpaste out of the sink for ages every morning.

Yesterday was pretty much called on account of rain. There were things I could have gone out and done if it hadn't been raining, but I didn't want to go out in the rain. And then Snip parked herself in my lap and any remaining desire to go out in the rain and get things done went away completely.

Today started with a headache, mostly on account of lack of caffeine yesterday. It's also very windy out, and tomorrow is supposed to be gorgeous, so I almost talked myself into not going out today either. But there was nothing in the house that I felt like eating by dinnertime yesterday, and the situation had not improved as of this morning. So, grocery shopping ensued. I sort of figured that once I got going, it would build on itself and I'd keep going, and I was right. After the grocery shopping I came home and started the laundry, and changed the sheets, and made vegetable and barley soup with the frozen chicken broth. And ordered two new fitted sheets, because I forgot I had two other sheet sets with frapped-out fitted sheets. So I cleaned out the linen closet and will take the frapped-out fitted sheets and one flat sheet that Snip shredded to the MSPCA on Friday.

Come to think of it, nobody said I couldn't put bacon in the vegetable soup as an afterthought, and I do want to clean out the freezer some more. Hmm. Maybe it will be vegetable and barley and bacon soup.

I wasn't planning to get anything today, but I did. I ended the Great Sneakers Quest (very light blue, which is going to be dirty instantly, but at least it isn't pink or purple) and then went grocery shopping by way of breaking in the sneakers, and came home and vacuumed. But I have to say I slept better last night than I had all week.

When I vacuumed the living room, the detritus was yellower than usual and it took me longer than it should have to figure out that it's pine pollen. It may be a mast year for pine trees, if such a thing exists. Google thinks a mast year is mostly for oak trees.

The symposium went swimmingly, but it was long and I was DONE with it by the end of Tuesday. My own personal laptop got used at least once a day on account of people who wanted to show up and do their thing and go away again, up to and including people who emailed me their slides in the evening for their talk the next morning. Using my own laptop was the easiest way, and I am all about that nowadays.

The Harvard Hero extravaganza was pretty extravagant all right. Harvard does know how to throw a party, I'll give them that. I was mildly annoyed that the five-sentence citation Drew Faust read for me had four puns about teeth in it; three would have been fine, and nobody else got more than three. Apparently she felt the same way about the puns, because she made a point of coming to find me at the reception and basically telling me she read them, but she didn't write them. I thought that was nice of her.

After the reception I went and bought the third book of the Unhewn Throne. I think I may end up keeping all three of them. The story is going places I didn't even think of.

I think Snip had a bad dream just now. She was twitching and making noises and woke up suddenly, at which point she marched into my lap and curled up there, and went back to sleep. I must be doing something right if she thinks my lap is a safe place.

This week wasn't as productive as last week, partly by design and partly because it was public school vacation week and slightly harder to get things done with everybody and their kids also trying to get things done.

What I did do, though:

- Went to Blue Man Group in the pouring rain (fun, but needed more drumming)
- Washed the door curtains
- Bent my left thumbnail the wrong way so badly the top outside corner is now sore and purple (door curtain rod fell on me and I tried to catch it)
- Read the first two books of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy and decided not to read the third
- Played some more Civ 5
- Did some more embroidery
- Spent Thursday worrying about Snip, who had such a bad cold she wouldn't eat (she's getting better)
- Went to the chorus committee meeting, and figured out one of the reasons I stopped going to rehearsals (now I have to figure out what to do about it)
- Made cornmeal pancakes and only burned half of them (this is progress; usually I burn most of them)
- Went out for coffee three times just for a walk with coffee in the middle of it

I'm debating making bread tomorrow. It's supposed to be good bread weather. Today isn't bad, but a little chilly so I'd have to shut the windows again, and I don't wanna just yet. Fresh air is good for you and open window weather is still rare around here.

This morning I lost the AirPod case somewhere either on the bus or on Brookline or Longwood Ave. It was in my bag when I put the AirPods in, on the bus, and then it wasn't there when I got to work. So I got on the phone and made a Genius Bar appointment for 7:20 and it cost me $73 for a new case (and apparently the AirPods know which case they belong to, so if you lose the case you have to re-associate everything). I really wanted to go home tonight and embroider in the lack of humidity, which is absolutely lovely, but the AirPods make me unconditionally happy and I need that very much until after the 12th.

Now that the weather is behaving better, I can stop worrying about Snip's internal thermostat. On Monday night, she was hot. Still eating and drinking and acting like herself, but her ears and her chin were hot enough to worry me. Especially because Lily's weren't that hot, and Lily's usually hotter. So I turned the bedroom fan on and Snip practically stuck her face in it, and I wiped her ears with a wet washcloth, and an hour later she was much better and stayed that way. I declared her cooled off when she glared at me and the washcloth.

I need to make a massage appointment for the Friday after CODA. I'm taking a personal day that day and planning to spend it taking out a lot of mental trash, however I need to. While I'm sorting out my brain, I might as well get my back sorted out too.

Just because that's how life is, this semester's sectionals for chorus are in the morning on Oct 14. I am not going. I'm not going to my cousin's wedding in Falmouth on the 15th, either. I might not be getting out of bed on the 14th, even. (I will be, because I only stay in bed all day if I've got stomach flu. But I'm going to be sore in a lot of very interesting places because I need a 90-minute massage.)

Yesterday I came home and discovered that Snip had yarfed up breakfast and didn't want dinner at all. This is the cat who wanted dinner after swallowing an embroidery needle. Besides which, she wasn't really acting like herself either (lethargic, and staring off into space instead of going to sleep). I decided that if she didn't want breakfast, we were going to Angell in the morning.

This morning she woke me up demanding breakfast and company while she ate it, and has kept it down and is acting much more like herself. Thank goodness. But what did I want cats for, again?

This morning I also woke up with a thundering headache. I'd had it since at least 4:00, when I woke up for no apparent reason and then went back to sleep at 5:30. I don't know if it's post-stress (Standard 2 got released into the wild yesterday at lunchtime), or weather (it rained) or something else (my neck is sore, so it might be the end result of a muscle spasm). Fortunately, three Advil and a pint of oolong tea got rid of most of it.

It seems to be trying to get brighter out and the sidewalks are drying off, which I approve of, and I am going to the gospel concert tonight if I have to take the Advil bottle with me. And, on the bright side of things, I didn't look at which pair of jeans I put on this morning and was pleasantly surprised that it was the smaller pair. That means it's not time to stop eating cheese entirely. It is time to stop buying butter and pasta for a while, though, because I combine entirely too much of both when I have them around.

The short version is, oof. That's all. Just oof.

The long version is, Standard 2 is now 300 pages long and has an introduction and tables and diagrams. And I have rewritten bits of the introduction and at least six of the 40 sections, and reformatted at least 32 of the 40 sections, and I still have a lot of stuff to stick in there (some of which is data I have more of than I actually want, so I have to prune it, and some of which is data I won't get until after graduation next week, and some of which is data I have, but it won't fit in the table allotted for it, so I have to figure out how to include it all and make it legible at the same time).

When I'm not doing that, I'm working on data for Table 2, which is Institutional Outcomes Assessment and has nothing to do with Standard 2. Table 2 is now 20 pages long. Fortunately I'm not responsible for all of it, but what I am responsible for is looking through six years of surveys and writing down results from certain questions, and then taking the average and hoping it comes out better than the benchmark from seven years ago.

When I'm not doing anything related to accreditation, I'm making a curriculum map for a six-year combined MD/DMD program, which is actually kind of fun. And I get the Dimly Aware award for looking at the narrative that turned into the map and saying "Wait a minute, this says they'll be going straight from second-year foundational dental courses to seeing dental patients two years later after a lot of medical school rotations. They can't see dental patients without at least taking Diagnosis and Treatment Planning and Treatment of Active Disease, can they?" No, they can't, so now they have to. I feel better. (I do feel sorry for the student who got her DMD in 2015 and is now finishing her first year of medical school, though. It's going to take her eight years to get both degrees.)

When I'm not doing any of the above, I'm messing around with journal articles. If I had known the deadline for the third set of revisions to the JDE article was in July, I wouldn't have been so worried about it. Oh well, it's off my conscience now anyway and I really hope the reviewers are done picking nits, because ain't nobody got time for a fourth round of revisions. The other article, for Innovations in Teaching and Training International, needs to be reformatted (why can't we all agree on one format for citations, and why do I always have to change the one we started with to something else?) before I can submit it.

It got HOT and the cats are, as usual, convinced it was my idea and would like me to take it back. It will be better tomorrow; I just want to know if we're really going to have a thunderstorm (I hope so), and if so, when. Hopefully sometime when I'm indoors, and preferably after Snip has eaten her dinner. If not, either I have to wait until half an hour after the thunder is done with, or I have to sit in the bathroom with her and play London Bridge so she can hide under my legs while she eats.

I'm glad tomorrow is Friday. I wish I didn't have two separate accreditation-related meetings at 10:00 and noon tomorrow, though. It's going to be a long morning, and I'm still sick and tired of meeting-food sandwiches. I could get around that by bringing my own sandwich, I suppose.

The Boston Music Intelligencer reviewed our concert, and said "More diction." In Sanders, you can't be on the stage and hear what the audience hears (or doesn't). I suggested we should circulate a few people per section through the house when we rehearse in there, so "more diction" will actually mean something to more of us, as opposed to being something the conductor says five or six times per rehearsal all semester, so we stop listening when he says it.

I have had it up to the eyebrows with responsible adulthood, and it's only Wednesday. This week the Gainful Employment subdivision of Responsible Adulthood needs to be good for more things than providing food, shelter, and payments for utilities, so I'm running off to the movies (Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2) tonight, rather than going home and doing the rest of the laundry.

Speaking of washing, I've ruined one of my favorite things about having a cat who hunts. These days Lily won't go into the bathroom voluntarily unless I'm in the bathtub (in which case there's no chance that the vet will descend upon her), so she won't come hunt grillonpedes in the tub. And I am damn well not getting into the tub myself if there's a grillionpede in it. Which, this morning, there was, and it was very large. And I had to flush it down the drain myself. Harumpf.

I have to make an appointment for Lily to have blood drawn sometime next month. She seems to be doing OK in all the observable-by-owner categories (eating, using the litterbox, sleeping, reminding Snip who's in charge, generally acting like herself), but I have no way of knowing what her internal chemistry is up to.

Snip got a claw stuck in the masking tape around my embroidery last night, and even that didn't convince her she needs a manicure. She does, desperately, but she's rather like Granny Weatherwax in terms of things she can't be having with.

I had a conversation with a coworker that led me into looking up whether there's a French translation of The Phantom Tollbooth. There is, and now I want to read it to find out if it's any good.

While I was cleaning out my bookshelves in the decluttering process, I discovered the copy of L'Oiseau Bleu that I kept because I wanted to try translating it. I kept it again, because I still want to take a crack at it some day.

This train of thought came about because I'm trying to wrap my brain around revising 38 pages of the accreditation self-study. It's rather like wading through peanut butter because (among other reasons) it was written by one person who doesn't write all that well and another person who doesn't type all that well. I have to figure out what they're trying to say, whether they actually said it, make it say that if not, and then elaborate on it. At least there's something there to build on. (There had better be; this thing goes to the printer in July and if we had only just started it now, nobody would be going home until then.)

OK, several years later, I think I'm making progress. Everything I don't know enough to write about is a thing I'm not supposed to know about.

Wish I had a feline/English dictionary, part N+1: Last night Snip was absolutely adamant that I come keep her company while she had her before-bed snack, and after that she was absolutely adamant that any part of me she could reach while she was standing on the bed and I was lying in it had to be headbutted and rubbed on. I have no idea what that was about. But I guess it means she's still speaking to me.

I did almost absolutely nothing this weekend, and that bothers me. It means I really need to take some time off. Usually I'm happy going charging around on weekends getting non-weekday stuff done, but lately I just sit around at home messing around online or playing Civ or embroidering in front of the TV. Everything that I really should be doing doesn't appeal at all. That's "tired of", whereas charging around doing things makes me "tired from". I've got to get all the running around for this weekend done on Saturday, though, because I'm going to Noank for the day on Sunday.

Maybe next week I'll be Not At Work for a while. This week is the last week of the oral surgery course, which means that on Friday morning I will be handed the handwritten exam that needs typing for Friday afternoon. I know how this course director works, and I can plead all I want, but I won't get the exam before Friday morning. It's not really worth taking Tuesday-Thursday off and coming back again on Friday, so I'm at work this week.

Speaking of exams, in order to get SPSS software (which I'm not sure I want, but which my boss wants me to have for future data manipulation) for less than several thousand dollars, I have to pretend to be a faculty member. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that.

Speaking of comfortable, I splurged on an hour and a half of massage on Friday, and OW. My right hip was so sore when worked on that I started wondering whether it would have hurt more to actually cut into that muscle. It got to the point where in the post-massage period when nothing actually hurt (yet), I was worried about how much it was going to hurt. It wasn't quite as bad as I thought, but it did decide to be sore right where the waistband of my jeans hit it. I'd like to say that was part of why I didn't do anything on Saturday, but the fact is I was just being a slug. At least yesterday I cleaned the bathroom and did the laundry and cleaned out the fridge and took out the trash on the way to being outdoors for an hour.

Snip decided that 5:00 this morning was a good time to kill her puffball. I didn't feel like waking up enough to take my night guard out so I could whistle for her. She did wake me up when she finally landed on the end of the bed, though, and I forgave her because she immediately fell over and made very cute mrrp? noises. Silly beast. Apparently tortoiseshell cats are famous for attitude, and apparently I'm lucky that Snip is merely eccentric and opinionated. But so am I, so what other kind of cat should I have?

This weekend I did considerably less than I should have, but I did make soup. Soup is one of the things I'm good at. So I made a cross between sausage soup (which usually has sausage, tomatoes, spinach and elbow noodles in it) and Italian chicken soup (chicken, spinach, meatballs and eggs). Mine has chicken, meatballs, tomatoes, spinach and navy beans in it. I really wanted the meatballs; everything else is an excuse to make soup because I'm good at soup.

Everything from the middle of my ribcage up feels "out" somehow. It's muscular, not chiropractic, but it's sore and I wish it wouldn't. The weekend being damp didn't help my shoulders, either. I can deal with a fair amount of muscular discomfort, but I don't like tendon pain and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it. Grump. I think part of the problem with my back is Snip, who starts the night very nicely at the side of the bed and slowly migrates to the middle and crams me into one side of the mattress. Her life is about to get less pleasant, though, because I have to make an appointment for both cats to get shots.

The other thing of note that happened this weekend is that the cracked pane in my office window went to get replaced. It's been cracked for two years now, and I wasn't home when it happened, so I can't decide whether it was the hailstorm two summers ago or a bird flying into it that cracked it. The crack had gotten fairly extensive, though, so it was time for something to be done about it. Theoretically it will be done on Thursday and I'll have a whole window again this weekend. It would be nice to have a storm window before we have a storm.

I might have cooked up a Devious Plot for the long weekend, involving a trip to Noank and a Viking longship. (And yes, I'm serious about both.) But we'll see if I can actually make it work.