The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Things are looking up slightly. I'm expecting a new T pass in the mail tomorrow or Friday, so I can stop doing the "dammit, where did I put the stupid paper ticket?" dance in the morning and walking home at night (except tonight on account of chorus rehearsal; I ain't walking home from that.) Walking home at night is actually faster and less annoying than waiting for the sardine can (aka the 65 bus) and then sharing the same square foot of space with three or four other people until Corey Rd.

I also got in touch with the resort in Australia and arranged to be picked up at the airport. I've decided that this trip is my 40th birthday present to myself, so I'm allowed to spend money on little luxuries like being picked up at (and delivered to) the airport in Cairns. (It occurs to me that there's no reason I can't spend money on being delivered to and from Logan, either, especially since Govt Center is still closed.)

On the less good side, water came through the kitchen ceiling on Sunday morning and woke me up earlier than I wanted to be up. I think it's an ice dam problem on the roof compounded by half of that side of the building being covered in ice. It's not so much icicles as it is sheet ice. Some of which probably melted, found a crack in the siding and meandered into my kitchen ceiling. Since it got Cold again, it hasn't dripped any more, but I'm not moving the mop bucket just yet. I'm hoping the sun (when we get any) is strong enough to take some of the ice off the building before it gets any other ideas. Supposedly yesterday somebody was going to come and take some of the ice off the roof, too. I should have gone up there myself a couple of snowstorms ago, but I didn't think of it. Given my luck, I'd probably have fallen off the roof anyway. (Although I'd have fallen into the probably-ten-foot snowdrifts in the back yard.)

I wish it were closer to Friday, but at least today isn't Monday and it isn't snowing again yet.

Well, here I am, not at work. But HSDM closed (thank goodness), so I'm not burning a personal day. It seems we have binary weather lately: 0 is "going to snow soon" and 1 is "snowing".

So what am I doing with my extra day? Besides shoveling snow, I'm roasting some turkey thighs and trying to decide whether I want to make oatmeal cookies or apple muffins. I got bitten by the baking bug at 10:00 last night, at which point I told it to shut up for now and I'd indulge it in the morning. I have ingredients for cookies or muffins, but not enough flour for both. I suppose I could make whole wheat apple muffins, but the last time I made whole wheat muffins I ended up with a batch of very tasty doorstops.

I've found where I want to go lie on a beach in Australia for a couple of weeks, but now I have to nail down precisely when. The chorus dress rehearsal schedule doesn't match up with the third year spring break, so I may end up doing a mid-week to mid-week vacation. But I need the IDP schedule first so I know what the third year students will be doing the week before the break. Hopefully nothing they'll need me for, but if I buy the tickets today I just KNOW I'll wish I hadn't. So I won't.

Oatmeal cookies it is, I think. Probably with dried tart cherries, since I don't have any raisins.

Four feet of snow is a bit excessive, if you ask me. And we're supposed to get more on Thursday and major more again on Monday. Somebody readjust the jet stream, willya?

Speaking of getting things, the regiment has invested in Bose QC20i noise-canceling headphones for plane trips. Next thing: talk to chorus management, find out how many dress rehearsals I can skip, and buy tickets for plane trip. (Somewhere further down the list: find out why one of the two USB ports on my laptop doesn't seem to want to work. Possibly because it's a seven-year-old laptop...) I have GOT to get out of Dodge for a bit, though. I have a major case of Tired Of, and it encompasses most of my life at the moment. I would take a personal day tomorrow if I didn't have to go to chorus rehearsal tomorrow night; it's quicker to get there from work than from home. But I really do need a day to have a cleaning fit of epic proportions and then bask in the satisfaction afterward.

My ankle is better overall, but every morning when I stand up after getting out of bed it goes "Hi there, still sprained!" just in case I forgot while I was asleep. Helpful. I suppose it was helpful that between having the ankle and having Snip asleep in my lap, I didn't leap up screaming when the Patriots won the Super Bowl. I'm sure Snip appreciated that, even though she doesn't know it.

I missed my chance to post it, but on New Year's Eve I did think about the Ogden Nash poem that ends "Hark, it's midnight, children dear:/Duck! Here comes another year!" But since I went to bed at 10:45ish on New Year's Eve, it didn't actually hit me.

So, here comes another year. 2015 doesn't have any choice about being better than the end of 2014 was. In consequence of which, I really ought to sit down one of these days and actually plan my trip to Australia. I got as far as "there's a lot more of the eastern coastline than I thought there was and do I really want to spend 29 hours on a bus?" before all sorts of stuff got in the way of my thinking about it. Now it's time to start thinking about it again. Think think think think think *POP* ow...

It's going to be an interesting year work-wise, too, and by "interesting" I mean "is it August yet?". That's when the new curriculum is supposed to start. It probably will, but there will probably be at least four or five major crises that nobody thought about in the process. Let's just get to them so we can get over them.

Never mind. My single resolution this year is to find the one good thing in any given day and appreciate its existence. So today the sun has been out and I haven't been at work, and I appreciate that. (And Lily just leaped up on the desk and yawned directly in my face, which maybe shouldn't count as good, but made me laugh.)

I wish the phone bill would show up. I've been waiting for it since two weeks ago and it hasn't appeared yet. Unfortunately, not receiving the bill is not an excuse for not paying it. I suppose I can pay this month's based on last month's, since the amount is pretty static, and if I happen to owe 40 cents next month, so be it. Memo to self: pay bills tomorrow. I'm still doing the "write checks, stick in envelopes and mail" form of paying bills, up until stamps cost 50 cents apiece. Besides, walking to the mailbox gets me out of the house.

Speaking of out of the house, Dad went for a walk today. He got unstapled on Tuesday, decided he didn't want the chair in the shower any more as of yesterday and is done with the oxygen machine. (Nifty machine; it somehow extracts oxygen from room air and either blows it out through a hose or refills portable oxygen tanks. But it also has a fairly loud one-way valve somewhere in its innards, so when it's on, it goes hsssTHOCK at irregular intervals several times a minute. Sleeping in the room above it was another reason I didn't sleep very well.) Yay, progress!

Apparently the other big news from Noank is that the sawed-up remains of the larch tree have finally been taken off the lawn, so I can stop saying that the tree removal company left my parents with the larch.

Wanna make a LONG week? Mess with Tuesday. When I had P&R on Tuesdays, it was always a long week. This week, having Tuesday off made it a long week (partly because that meant there were essentially two Mondays this week). I will admit that the second Monday was a much happier day than the first one. For one thing, I was feeling a lot less like I'd been hit by a steam roller. I think I might finally be pretty much done with the long version of the Insidious Grue I got two weeks ago, and the short version I had on Tuesday.

A lot of people who saw my embroidery in the OMOT exhibit tell me I have the hand skills to be a dentist, but personally I think the world is better off with my not being a dentist. I don't like other people's teeth that much. I do want to try the third year wax carving exercise, though, because last year I worked on a project trying to figure out if postdocs were worse graders than faculty members, and some of the grades equated to "This is supposed to be a tooth?". I don't know if I could do better than that, but I'd like to try it someday since the third year students have as much experience with wax carving at that point as I would, to wit: none.

Australia is looking like late April/early May, when the soon-to-be-third-year students are on break to take their first board exams. I'm suffering from a bit of choice paralysis, though; I know I want to go to both Sydney and Cairns, but I don't know where I want to go first. I guess I'll have to flip a coin in January sometime because the airfare is about the same for either place.

It's nice to have something to dream about that isn't related to the next huge thing at work. Right now I'm not even sure what the next huge thing at work is. There was the faculty development day in October, and the PD2 Oral Health Day on Monday, and now I think we're done with huge things like that until at least January. I hardly know what to do with myself.

I'm declaring a moratorium on reading the news for at least next week. I'm going to be on vacation, and all the news has been depressing for the last two weeks anyway.

Apparently it's harder to find sewing machine oil than I thought. One place recommended Triflow oil, which is for bike chains. So I thought that would be easy to find. It wasn't; REI was out of it (and of course that was the only kind they were out of), and EMS is supposed to have it but I haven't tried yet. Given the sort of luck I was having with everything else last night, EMS wouldn't have had it either.

The bad luck started out being my fault; I forgot until 5:10 and the Riverway intersection that I was supposed to collect some exams at 5:00. So went tearing back to work, collected the exams, decided to take the bus home and missed it by 30 seconds. I was pointed that way anyway, so I went up to REI for Triflow oil and missed another bus by about a minute. Since it was going to be half an hour before the next bus, I went to Staples for odds and ends and then decided to walk up to Kenmore. Bad idea, on account of the soccer game of which I had been unaware. I stood at the first bus stop outside Kenmore Square for about 10 minutes, among the madding crowds, and the bus driver saw me and decided not to stop. So then I got on the train, went to Whole Foods since it was Wednesday and got some cold noodles for dinner, and FINALLY got home at 7:00ish. The most maddening thing about the whole saga is that yesterday morning was the first time since early June or so that I didn't have burst blisters on my heels, and yesterday evening I gave myself yet another set of them.

On a more positive note, I think I'll let a duck tour drive me around for a little while next week. I've never been on a duck tour, and the prevailing opinion is that it's worth doing. I might also let a whale watch boat drive me around for a while sometime in the next two weeks, depending on the weather. I did that for the first time last year and enjoyed it quite some (I'm one of those people for whom salt water is good for the soul), and even saw parts of some whales.

Is there such a thing as a travel website that you can put a whole itinerary in and then ask it to find flights? It's looking like I want to leave Australia from a different airport than I arrive at.

Apparently I had some sort of 24-hour grue yesterday. I went to bed at 7:30 last night and woke up when the thunderstorm started at 5:00ish this morning feeling considerably better. Today I was actually enthusiastic about the idea of breakfast, too. I probably should have stayed home yesterday. I considered it, but since my boss was out all last week and I had things I needed to ask her, it wouldn't have been a good idea.

I enjoyed the thunderstorm; the Hairy Beasts of course did not. But Snip decided she could stay on the bed as long as she could bury her head in my ankle, so that's what she did. Lily headed for the bomb shelter somewhere, but came back when the storm was over (which was before the alarm went off, besides). I'm not sure whether that's progress on Snip's part; I guess we'll find out the next time there's a thunderstorm. It was nice of it to be over by the time I had to get in the shower, though. It's probably an urban legend and doesn't matter as long as your house is grounded properly, but I try not to be in the shower during a thunderstorm.

I made wontons on Sunday, but left them sitting in liquid for too long and they fell apart. Oops. Fortunately the recipe I used made so many wontons that half of them went in the freezer, so I can try making soup again eventually. I'm not positive the whole experience was worth it, because you have to mince all the filling ingredients and that takes forever if you don't have a mincing machine of some sort. I can't say "if I had storage space" about kitchen appliances any more, but I can (unfortunately) still say "if I had enough outlets". Fairly high on the if-I-owned-the-place list is "have it rewired". Which of course means "replace plaster with sheetrock". Which runs into money. Oh well. It's a theoretical list anyway, since I don't own the place (yet; that's the plan for someday, though). I guess I'd better start buying Powerball tickets.

Speaking of buying things, I really should decide if I'm buying train tickets for Portland while I'm on vacation. I can't quite decide whether it's going to be Portland or Providence or both, though. Could be both, since the only thing I know about Providence is where it is.

Amsterdam photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdeschenes/sets/72157642430159764/

I want to go back there someday, but I think I want to go to Montreal first. (Only because I haven't been to Montreal yet. If somebody offered me a ticket to Amsterdam tomorrow, I'd take it.) Memo to self, though: don't go through Philadelphia if you can avoid it. Or if you can't, don't do it with US Airways.

The Hairy Beasts weren't sure what was going on when I arrived home at 1:00 AM on Saturday, but decided to sleep on the bed anyway. They finally decided it was really me when I got out of the shower nine hours later and fed them breakfast (which they inhaled). It took me until Sunday afternoon to get myself caught up with Eastern Daylight Time, but I got caught up with the grocery shopping and laundry on Saturday (no choice; both needed doing). That was pretty much all I was capable of on Saturday, anyway.

And then there was work, which has been fairly quiet this week on account of most of the school being at a conference in San Antonio until yesterday. My boss is at another conference in Boston since yesterday, so I'm getting things done that I feel confident doing by myself. Next week I have to ask a zillion questions before I get going on the rest of the major stuff. Although some of it requires HMS to make up its collective mind first, so I can safely put it on the back burner for a couple of years or so.

I wish pseudoephedrine would work without making it hard for me to stay asleep. Not being the Congested Sinus Monster from the Black Lagoon is useful, but not getting enough sleep is a nasty thing to have to trade for it. It doesn't matter quite so much when I'm on vacation, at least, but I knew there was a reason I don't take cold medicine. Plain old Advil takes enough of the edge off, and I can sleep through that.

I'm supposed to be maintaining my current weight, but it keeps going down anyway. I meant to stop at -45 (which was actually -47), but I seem to be at -50 after about three weeks of "maintenance". I spent about four hours a day walking last week, and that may have had something to do with it, but I think I might have to add a couple of points per day if this keeps up. I already need to buy new pants for the third time and new foundation garments for the second time, and while it's a problem that's easily solved by throwing money at it, I'm getting a bit tired of throwing money at it.

Usually I avoid whatever the latest fad app is (Candy Crush, anyone? I've never even played it), but I seem to have been snared by 2048. It's the only math game I've ever gotten interested in. Hopefully it's not collecting all of my personal data on the sly or some horrible thing like that. I can't decide whether I should assume that any app is collecting all of my personal data and decide whether I care about any single one doing it (is Zynga worse than King, for instance?), or whether I'm overthinking things and should just have fun playing the game.

So, since I'm getting on a plane on Sunday, of course today I'm coming down with a cold. ARGH. On the other hand, that means that I could be over it by the time I get back. Last year I came back from Ireland last year with the Cold of Colds and then had it for weeks and weeks afterward. This time at least I wrote to the hotel and asked if I could check in early. Hanging around in Dublin for eight hours before I could check in and then forcing myself to stay awake until somewhere around a normal bedtime wasn't all that much fun. At least I'd only be hanging around in Amsterdam for five or six hours.

Listlets, since I seem incapable of doing much concrete travel-related stuff this week (work keeps getting in the way):

- Camera
- Plug adapters
- Phone charger
- Euro coins

- PASSPORT
- Itinerary

- Vacuum rugs
- Laundry
- Hallway floor
- Take out trash
- Collapse boxes in office

Most of the work that's getting in my way this week is collating the results of an x-ray reading exercise we gave to the third-year students in October. We weren't expecting them to do very well, and they didn't, but what we wanted to know was whether they did any better in small groups than by themselves. The answer as far as I can see is "not really", but the common errors they made all over the place are interesting. They kept seeing decay that wasn't there in teeth next to the ones that had it, and they couldn't see decay that was there in molars. We're going to give them the same exercise again at some point and see how much better they got.

A student came in earlier and said "I need something notarized", but what arrived in my brain was "I need some deodorant." Good thing he wasn't actually talking to me, because I would have asked him why he thought he could find deodorant in the Office for Dental Education. (He didn't find a notary, either, since we don't have one here. I wonder periodically whether it might be worth it to be one myself, but I haven't done anything about it.)

It really ought to be Friday, only it isn't. It REALLY ought to be next Friday, only it isn't. I would settle for it being today with weather I could walk home in without feeling like it's a penance, only that's not going to happen for at least another two and a half weeks. And people wonder why I hate the month of March?

Anyway, I'm taking a week off in two weeks, and the temptation to run off to somewhere warm is pretty strong. Unfortunately getting to anywhere south of the polar vortex seems to be more trouble than I'm willing to go through. Either you leave the night before and get there the next morning, or you spend a lot of money, or you leave ridiculously early in the morning, and so forth. I could stay in Boston and just not go to work for a week, but that's not quite as much fun as going somewhere. I suppose I could go to a travel agent, but that would require me to know where I want to go, and I'm not even that far along yet.

I have discovered skyr, which so far is the only nonfat yogurt-like substance that comes close to being what I want out of a nonfat yogurt-like substance. It's got the texture, without having a pantload of sugar (or artificial sugar, which is worse) and glue in it. Fortunately it's not one of those horrendous expensive things I get addicted to; it's nice to know it's there, but I don't have to keep buying it. It was on sale last week, which is why I was willing to try it. We won't mention the chocolate bars that were also on sale, but since they're good chocolate bars, I've been able to not eat a whole one in a single sitting. And I managed to make black bean soup that gets better when I put not-quite-enough pasta into not-quite-enough soup.

I haven't been able to write anything for several years now, but last weekend I ended up at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square (not really on purpose, but I had a serious case of the fidgets), and went on a used-DVD binge. One of the DVDs in question is the first Captain America movie, and the plot bunnies are starting to wake up. Nothing concrete yet, but at least it proved that the plot bunnies are still in there somewhere. I was sort of wondering about that. Now if they'd just let me finish the long CSI epic I was writing when they went into hibernation...but I'm still not sure that's ever going to happen.