The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Harvard continues virtue-signaling its little heart out; yesterday I got forwarded a request from Cambridge to tell them where in our curriculum we address "race and racial justice". We're a DENTAL SCHOOL. I suppose I can see why we might, in the context of being a health care profession, and there are definitely racial disparities in health care, which we do touch on in the context of global health. But we have enough trouble trying to cram everything we need to teach in order to produce competent general dentists according to CODA into four years as it is. I wonder where the engineering school addresses racial justice in its curriculum? The whole thing reminds me of the MASH episode where they end up building a fountain out of bedpans because some rear-echelon colonel wanted the camp beautified. The fountain gets run over by an ambulance almost immediately.

It didn't help that yesterday I was in a meeting in which the rising second year students were frustrated about what the medical school doesn't tell them, and it turns out HMS and Cambridge both tend to forget about the HSDM Dean when they have all-Deans meetings. So we're all being left out.

This morning I thought I was going to have to go somewhere completely else for my 11:15 meeting, because it's trash day and there was a lot of jackhammering going on around here somewhere besides. Fortunately that seems to have stopped by about 9:15. I can't decide if it was Snow St or Nantasket St. I suppose I could wander down there and find out, if it didn't look like it was going to rain any instant now.

I think my righthandedness is catching up with me, since I haven't had a massage since November. My right shoulder has knots in at least two places, one of which is practically in my armpit, and I can't find a way to stretch against it. I wish it would let go and be an inflammatory issue, so Advil would work. I don't have any muscle relaxants.

Went to my eye doctor appointment today, and I'm likely to keep having correctable eyeballs for the foreseeable future. By the time I got home I could almost have seen lumps in a lump factory, because I had to walk all the way for want of buses, and it was a couple of miles. I stopped at Whole Foods for cherries, because 'tis the season and I eat a stupid amount of cherries when I can get them, since the season is so short. And I bought butter, despite the fact that I really shouldn't, because I have a pound and a half of apricots to turn into crumble, and I can't make good crumble topping without butter.

I did, however, get home before it rained. So much for "scattered showers if it rains at all", because we got a fairly torrential downpour for at least half an hour. And I got to be smug sitting indoors eating lunch and watching it rain hard. Lily used to be smug about rain, too, once she figured out that it didn't come indoors. These days she only cares if it rains in through the window with the cat tree in it.

I hadn't been on a bus since mid-March. The front third was blocked off and there were three other people on the bus with me by the time I got to the doctor's office (one, of course, wearing a mask around her neck and talking on the phone the whole time). I can't imagine how commuting by bus would work at this point, but I don't have to, yet. I have no idea what the buses will be like by the time I have to start commuting again, but I could walk it if I had to. Even though I don't want that much exercise before breakfast. They're tearing up Rte 9 between Harvard Ave and Brookline Ave quite some, and I can't quite tell what they're doing. When I could see, I noticed they've taken out the island between the outbound Pearl St bus stop and Rte 9, and I wonder what they're going to do with that.

The extension cord for the air conditioner arrived yesterday, and I fished it from the outlet, behind the bookshelf and the storage tubs, under the (open) closet door, behind the other storage tub, into the window. Now all I need is the air conditioner to plug it into, and that's supposed to arrive tomorrow. Just as well I didn't have to get the box off the porch in the pouring rain today.

Yeast shortage. Flour shortage. Pasta shortage. What I really want is a Trump shortage.

As of yesterday, I'm working from home until the end of August (by which I bet they mean after Labor Day), so I don't have any choice, I need an air conditioner in here if I'm going to be able to do anything productive when it's 90 and humid out. HSDM reserved the right to keep us home until after Christmas, but didn't come out and say "don't come back until January" yesterday.

Yesterday I made the spinach and artichoke stuff, which ended up being unstuffed shells (the shells weren't big enough to stuff, but the spinach and artichoke and ricotta combination would have made good shell stuffing). Pretty tasty, and I got it done before the weather got too humid to have the oven on. I did, however, discover that the oven is now running 50 degrees cool if an oven thermometer can be believed. I definitely need a repair service.

This weekend I also need a trip to the hardware store for a 15-foot extension cord, before the air conditioner gets up here (I'm borrowing one). I really wish I had outlets in exterior walls, but the only one I have in an exterior wall is in the kitchen, and that's only because two exterior walls come together on that side of the building. If I owned the place, and won the lottery...

Harvard graduated yesterday. Apparently we're one of very few dental schools that graduated everybody on time with all of their licensure exams taken and passed the first time (licensure exams aren't a graduation requirement, but they usually happen before graduation anyway, so nobody had to worry about them being canceled). At least the only thing our class of 2020 has to deal with is when their residency programs will let them start.

So now we only have three classes to worry about. The rising fourth year and rising third year want to know when they need to be back to start clinic/preclinic. We don't know, because the state and the university haven't told us yet. So we keep having meetings that amount to "we don't know", and everybody is getting frustrated, the students because they need to get back here and self-quarantine for two weeks before they can start, and us because we don't know when to tell them to plan for coming back by.

We redesigned the rising second year curriculum in an hour and a half on Tuesday, except we forgot about the five weeks in March and April that turned into three weeks in November and December, so what do we do with the extra two weeks? We can worry about that on Monday.

It's supposed to be less humid by Sunday. That would be nice. I love the 75-80 degree weather, but the 75-80% humidity is a bit much. If it's going to be like this all summer and I'm working from home all summer, I'm going to have to invest in an air conditioner for the office. I can sleep without one, but I can't sit in here all day and swelter and be productive at the same time.

Four hours of spring cleaning:

- Cleaned the stove, including the burner grates
- Cleaned the butcher block
- Cleaned the kitchen table
- Scrubbed the teakettle
- Cleaned the kitchen sink
- Vacuumed the living room rug
- Flipped the futon mattress over
- Vacuumed the office rug
- Vacuumed the bedroom rugs
- Cleaned the bedroom doorway where the cats have been rubbing on it
- Cleaned the living room doorway
- Cleaned the bathroom doorway
- Cleaned the office doorway
- Cleaned the desk leg Snip rubs on
- Swept the kitchen floor
- Swept the pantry
- Swept the bathroom
- Swiffered the kitchen
- Swiffered the bathroom
- Swiffered the bedroom
- Swiffered the living room
- Vacuumed the pantry
- Vacuumed the hallway
- Washed the pantry floor with Lysol on account of the litterbox
- Steam mopped the pantry
- Steam mopped the bathroom
- Washed the bathtub
- Washed the kitchen sink, again
- Washed the steam mop pads
- Took out the trash and the recycling

That'll do for today, I think.

Grammie's 98th birthday is tomorrow and we're trying to get most of the family on Zoom for it. This is going to be interesting, because the family ranges from "I have a landline" to "I live in Zoom, just send me a link." So far I've gotten roughly 35 emails and no link, because all of my aunts and uncles just hit Reply All about projecting Grammie's laptop through her TV. I wonder if anybody will remember to send out the link.

The grocery list is back to nearly as long as my arm, and I can't go shopping tomorrow because it will take too long and I don't want to Zoom by phone in the grocery store. I don't know why I even put flour on the list, because there ain't any. I have about four cups of flour left, which normally would be enough for what I use it for (mostly dredging meat before I stew it), but if I want to make any kind of bread, I need more flour. I do not want to make cookies, because I don't need cookies around here and my oven heat is too uneven for them to come out well anyway.

I do know why I put TP on the list. I'll need it by mid-May, so I might as well start looking now.

Amazon says my litter locker liners were delivered on Wednesday. I know they weren't delivered before 5:00 on Wednesday, and there was nothing on the porch at 3:00 or 5:30 yesterday either. So either Amazon is confused, or porch pirates got the box. We don't tend to get porch pirates in this neighborhood and the scanner and the cat food were fine last week, so I'm choosing to believe Amazon is confused. If I don't get anything today, I'll believe it was porch pirates, and I hope they were massively disappointed.

SSI thinks I'm an official Specialty Diver, with an official virtual card and everything. I think I won't bother getting the actual card for that. I'm going to wait for the Advanced Open Water card, which means something to most people. I need two more classes and ten more dives for AOW. One of the classes is going to be navigation, and the other should probably be diver stress and rescue, both of which will have to wait until we can congregate again. The navigation I had to do for the Open Water certification consisted of "put a towel over your head and walk 15 steps away from the instructor and come back, via compass course." I'd like a little more than that, because I know that if I hadn't been with a group in Bonaire, I would have had to surface to find the boat again. I don't want to have to do that.

The postdoc programs' CODA reports are about to be my problem. I think I need some lunch before I let them do that.

Not going to chorus tonight, because as of yesterday I have a sinus cold. I knew that when I woke myself up snoring in the wee hours of Tuesday morning; I don't snore (that I know of) unless I have unhappy sinuses. And no, it's not coronavirus. It's a cold. It's probably because JP Licks was crammed to the gills with preschoolers last weekend. But I guess some extra Vitamin C wouldn't hurt. *PHWOONK*

Despite the sandpapered sinuses, yesterday I arranged for my new bureau to be delivered on Saturday sometime, which half of the day TBD. And it's going up the back stairs, because the bedroom is in the back and the back stairwell is slightly wider than the front, AND that skips the porch stairs. I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with the old bureau, because they won't take it away. I wonder if I can get them to at least take it downstairs. Actually, come to think, ain't no rule says I can't take it apart myself and haul it downstairs in pieces...assuming it comes apart. If Dad rebuilt anything other than some of the drawers, it ain't comin' apart. Oh well. I do have a pry bar and a hacksaw and a noticeable backlog of frustrations to take out on something.

After 3:45 on Friday I wrote three more externship letters. Of course.

On Saturday I went out twice, once for kitty litter and once for laundry soap and 24 LED bulbs. And then I did a lot of high but not terribly wobbly fooling around, in that I replaced all of the light bulbs in the apartment over the course of Saturday and Sunday. That's how I found out that (a) there are three bulbs in the kitchen light fixture, (b) one of them had been burned out for at least the last several years, and (c) the fixture itself is held together by three hooks and gravity. The glass is only held up by the fact that it's bigger than the rim it sits in, so when you unhook the rim, the glass tries to fall out. And when you try to hook it back up again, it's not stable until you get all three hooks in. I hate that thing. At least the bedroom light fixture has a screw at the bottom that holds the glass in, and you can replace the bulbs without taking down the glass. The bathroom light fixture is the same as the hallway (the glass screws in and I'm always afraid I'll drop it or the screw won't thread properly), but in worse shape on account of the humidity, so it shed grit in my eye.

Anyway, now the only non-LED light in the place is in the pantry, because I don't use the pantry light all that much. And I didn't fall off the ladder or drop anything breakable. So there. And it's very bright in the kitchen with the lights on now; I can actually see what I'm cooking. For some reason the light in the bathroom is yellower than everywhere else; same bulbs and everything. But the mirror bulbs are naked, so that may be why. Doesn't matter all that much, it's just something I observed. And my finicky floor lamp is back to being finicky again; two of its five sockets have decided not to work with LED bulbs. Harumpf. Especially when it's supposed to be a 2/3/5/off lamp and now it's a 1/2/3/off lamp.

On Sunday I finished the laundry and then wandered off to a bring-your-own-craft-project afternoon in Roslindale. Which was lovely, except that the T sucks on Sundays (in that all the buses that would have been convenient don't run on Sundays), so I had to go to Forest Hills and then walk a couple of miles. Add the half mile I had to walk each way to get to and from the B line and that's three miles, and my ankle decided it had had Enough by the time I got home on Sunday night, and wasn't terribly thrilled yesterday morning.

Unfortunately I had to go grocery shopping yesterday (man cannot live by cheese alone, as much as I might like cheese) and walked another mile and a half or so, and was whimpering by the time I got home, and spent the rest of the day staying off my ankle. It's less unhappy this morning, but I'm not walking home on it. Not that I would anyway, but it's the principle of the thing.

Last week before chorus I wandered through the Harvard Book Store and picked up The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang. Interesting premise, but overall it's been done, and I think Brian Staveley did it better in The Emperor's Blades. But I did pick up the second Kuang book (The Dragon Republic) yesterday, because I want to see if there's any actual character development given the end of The Poppy War. I think both books are going to the HSDM book swap shelf, though.

It really would be nice if the sun would be out for two consecutive days. Yesterday was lovely and today it's solid overcast again.

Monday again already? Well, at least it's a short week.

I didn't do any running around on Saturday, although I should have. But I went to bed at 9:30 on Friday night and slept right through to 8:30 Saturday morning, so I needed the sleep, and then I made friends with the Hairy Beasts again (and finally documented Snip, kneading the top corner of the quilt, with her puffball in her mouth, purring like a fiend. That's only the second time I've caught her doing it, even though I know she does it a lot because the quilt is all torn up.). And at roughly 4:00 I went off to catch an earlyish 86 bus and nearly missed it when it showed up 30 seconds early. Glad I caught it, though, because the next one would have been in another hour and I would have been almost late for the 6:15 concert call.

The concert went pretty well. The Handel definitely went better than its original performance, because this is what the notes in the score had to say about it: "Archbishop Wake's notes suggest that the music did not go smoothly. Apart from the possibility that the Chapel Royal choir may not have been of a particularly high standard, there are two plausible reasons: confusion between the rival orders of service and poor communication between the performers. They were disposed on two specially-erected galleries, with sight-lines interrupted by the altar...it may well have proved difficult to control the large forces in such a position....The canto (soprano) part would normally have been sung by boys. But there was a shortage: 5 of the 10 Chapel Royal boys had left with broken voices in June....it is clear that there were significantly more players than singers."

I personally made more mistakes than usual, including mistakes I don't usually make, but I more or less knew it was going to be one of those days. I couldn't quite get my mind in the right place. Partly, I think, because you can't fit 128 singers into 50 singers' worth of green room space. I did mention that to the Powers That Be, now that I'm not one of the Powers That Be (and very happily not).

Post-concert, C and I went out for dinner, so I ended up getting home at about half past midnight. Which meant I completely failed to notice the new front porch railings courtesy of one of my uncles. I noticed them this morning, though, and hooray, the porch railings aren't falling apart any more! The porch ceiling is on my "if I owned the place" list, though, because the paint has been peeling for years and if anyone but me ever looked up, they'd be aghast. The paint in my apartment is on the "if I owned the place and won the lottery" list, because they used incredibly thick paint, and the trim looks awful. But I don't own the place, and I don't have several tens of thousands of dollars to have everything stripped and redone properly, and it would probably be several hundred thousand dollars by the time all the plaster got replaced too. I really would like to be able to use a stud finder to hang pictures, someday...

Never mind. I got home on Saturday night before the weather got awful, but it was awful all day Sunday, so I didn't do any running around then either, which made Lily happy. I did get the laundry done and did dishes three or four times on account of getting tired of things always sitting in the sink. And I watched a couple of fairly ugly football games, one ugly because of penalties (Seahawks/Eagles) and one ugly because of weather (Patriots/Cowboys).

What I did not do was consume any caffeine, so I wasn't shocked when I woke up at 5:30 this morning with a headache. It turned out not to be a caffeine headache, though, because it persisted through lunchtime. At which point I went for the nuclear option and threw a coffee milkshake and ibuprofen at it. Caffeine and/or ibuprofen take care of most of my headaches these days, and for some reason sugar makes the ibuprofen work faster. Now I have a sore neck, but at least I don't have an actual headache.

I seem to be back to thinking "I want to go home" whenever I mean "I want not to be doing whatever I'm doing", because I do it when I'm at home. I wonder if going to Noank for Thanksgiving will fix that, or make it worse?

Everything does in fact fit in my silly tote bag, but of course I forgot to put my work ID in it, so I've got The Badge of Shame for today.

Saturday was a good day for serendipity. After I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom from ankle level upward, I went and bought all sorts of stuff I can't get at Trader Joe's (tonic water and toothpaste and button batteries and trash bags and dish soap and that sort of thing), and then went to the bookstore and found not only a calendar, which is what I was there for, but also a book I didn't know was out (The Warrior Moon) and a George and Martha omnibus. George and Martha are hippos, and I used to get those books out of the library when I was a little kid, so I bought the omnibus version. And then I went to Trader Joe's and loaded up on things like cheese and almonds and mochi rice nuggets (shame on me) and frozen entrees. And then I came home and did laundry and listened to my shoulders yelling at me.

Sunday I didn't do much of anything with, because I needed a day to do nothing. I wish I had known it was gorgeous out, because I spent entirely too much of the day indoors with the windows shut. I did finish reading The Warrior Moon, though, and it was OK, but it lagged a bit, and I should have re-read the second book because I had forgotten where some of the characters came from.

Yesterday I finally quit procrastinating and washed the floors. I'm not sure whether I washed the floors or whether I spread wetted kitty litter dust all over them, really, but I had at least swept and Swiffered them first. And I hauled everything out of the pantry and vacuumed it, and swept it, and Swiffered it, and then washed it. So hopefully the errant kitty litter problem has been stomped on for at least a week. I did get a little annoyed when I found myself trying to scrub the random marble pattern off the kitchen tiles under the impression it was dirt, though.

Of course after that I had to go buy kitty litter. And after I got home with the kitty litter, I opened the windows again and sat around listening to my shoulders yelling at me. At least it was a fairly productive weekend, and my shoulders were yelling at me for good reasons, but OW anyway.