The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

I have been so productive today, I almost wonder who took over my brain. After coffee this morning, I started a cleaning fit that ended an hour and a half later with me in the (newly cleaned) shower and everything I had been wearing in the washing machine. In an hour and a half, the following got done:

- Dishes done
- Tub, toilet and bathroom sink cleaned
- Stove cleaned
- Kitchen sink cleaned (twice, because I dumped out the pantry-floor-scrubbing bucket in it after the first time)
- Living room rug, cat tree, and office rug and underneath desk vacuumed
- Last week's sheets folded and put away
- One load of laundry washed, dried, folded and put away
- Pantry floor scrubbed
- Litterboxes cleaned
- Four large potatoes diced and parboiled

After that, I dissected two bundles of Swiss chard, and turned that, the potatoes, a can of chickpeas, a block of paneer, and a bottle of TJ's masala sauce into lunch for the coming week.

After that, I spent an hour on the family Zoom for Grammie's 99th birthday.

After THAT, I went out to Trader Joe's and CVS and got all the stuff I didn't get around to buying yesterday.

I think I might be allowed to lounge around all evening. Too bad I finished the latest book I hadn't read yet last night (The Aeronaut's Windlass, by Jim Butcher; supposed to be book 1 of a trilogy, but that was 2015, and book 2 isn't out yet.). I still want to sharpen knives and wash all the blinds and try vinegar on the stains in the shower and try tub cleaner on the refrigerator door, but given what I did get done, I think I can live with the remainder of the list.

I also think I'm going to stop giving Lily the joint supplement she gets every other day. On days when she gets it in the morning, she seems not to want very much dinner, and I want her to eat above all else. I'm not sure the joint supplement is helping any more anyway.

First Moderna shot: definite sore arm. I can't decide whether the stiff neck was a side effect, me thinking I ought to have a side effect, or merely me having a stiff neck, which has been known to happen. Anyway, this morning all I've got is a sore arm, and it's not sore enough for Advil. If I get distracted, I forget it's sore.

I did find the sequel to Foundryside, but it took me ages because the Harvard Book Store didn't have it and the Coop bookstore is in a different building while its usual one gets renovated. The scifi section is on the third floor of the Palmer St building, and though you can get up to the third floor via escalator, you can't get down except by elevator or stairs. And you have to go all the way back down to the first floor to pay for things. So that was a minor adventure, but I can has new book. And vaccine card, which I used as a bookmark so it wouldn't get mangled.

What I didn't get was a second-shot appointment, but they said they'd call me in about three weeks to set one up. They still don't know that far in advance how much vaccine they're going to have for any given week. I took myself off the state waiting list anyway, though.

I was going to go to H Mart on the way home, but I wasn't in the mood for it. Since I'm taking tomorrow and Friday (and Monday) off, I can go on Friday when it isn't raining, just to go there and not have anything else on the schedule.

Lily has kept eating since the pain shot wore off. She eats a little slower, but she's still a member of the Clean Plate Club. Good cat. She's also teaching Quirk how much enthusiasm is too much when Quirk wants to wrestle.

The vet bill was only $718, which is still a lot, but it was worth it because the ultrasound result is that Lily only has chronic pancreatitis that flared up. She got an antibiotic in case it's bacterial, and the three-day pain injection, but I can't give her NSAID anti-inflammatories due to her kidneys and steroidal anti-inflammatories have their own problems. The combination of gabapentin and buprenorphine made her hind end lurch around like a drunken sailor all evening (I compared her navigational abilities to the Ever Given, stuck in the Suez Canal). As of this morning she's back to being able to walk straight, and put a serious hurting on dinner last night and breakfast today.

She got the same medications Snip got and I keep comparing their reactions. There's a certain amount of staring into space, but it's penetrable, and Lily will get up and come sit on me and purr her fool head off for a while. And she noticed almost instantly that there was leftover ultrasound gel on her undercarriage, and didn't like that. Snip never noticed.

Today being a nice day, and I wanting to be out in the air, I ended up in the bookstore and grocery shopping in that order (which is backward, but nothing else is normal yet either). I bought two books I haven't read yet (Foundryside and A Court of Thorns and Roses), both of which are the first of a series. I didn't know Foundryside was going to be a trilogy, but two chapters in, I'm inclined to buy the next one when I'm done with this one, and the third one when it exists. (Speaking of books that don't exist, Pogo volume 8 comes out this fall. I'm making a note that I pre-ordered it now, so that when it gets postponed in October and I get email in January saying it's been shipped, I don't wonder what the hell that's about. That's what happened with volume 6.)

And then I came home and put the groceries away and put the laundry in the dryer, and crashed the vacuum cleaner into my left big toe while getting the leftover shaved fur from Lily's stomach off the rug. Ow. I didn't think the vacuum cleaner was that heavy. Oh well, that'll learn me.

I had been debating whether Quirk was merely young (she'll be 3 at the end of March) and enthusiastic, or not all that bright, but I've come down on the side of young and enthusiastic. I figured out this morning that she's been training me to come retrieve cat toys when she gets them stuck. She lets out a pathetic little meow and if I'm quick enough, she'll hang around where she thinks the toy went so I don't have to hunt all over the room (usually the kitchen, and the toy is usually under the cookbook shelf/birdbath viewing platform, or down the side of the washing machine). But now that I've figured out the game, it doesn't always work. And training goes both ways; I can call her by jingling the ball with the bell in it.

Quirk is mostly delightful, but every so often I still miss Snip fiercely.

I ordered an out-of-print book on December 23. It shipped from California on December 30, with an estimated delivery date of between January 15 and February 2 and no tracking available. I'm amusing myself imagining a tortoise with the book tied to it, crossing the Rockies and making its way through Kansas and so forth, because that's about the only thing slower than book rate mail.

I don't know why I bother making resolutions, especially this year, because who knows when and/or if I'll be able to do anything fun. But, just in case, I would really like to go diving again. Ideally I'd like to get my advanced open water certification, because I only need two more classes and 10 more dives. I would love to do that in Bonaire.

I waited too long and the quilt I was considering buying isn't available anymore. I don't really NEED a new quilt yet, anyway, but I'd like one for next winter. Maybe something I can live with will be on sale in the spring sometime.

I tried to sneak up on Quirk while she was napping and trim a couple of claws, but she foiled me by not napping for quite a while and then wondering what I wanted with that foot. At least she was bemused rather than annoyed. That's a baseline I can probably work with. And I discovered she'll wash every single molecule of butter off the end of my finger if offered it. Useful to know in case I ever have to hide medicine in something that isn't cat food. I haven't tried provolone on her yet.

It was nice not to have to be glued to the computer for a couple of weeks, but I did glue myself to it enough to find out that there was a new No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book out in November. So naturally I went and bought it, and read it in an afternoon, and it hit the spot. And there was actually an elephant in it. The last thing I had read was the third book in the Poppy War trilogy, which is dystopian, and I read it for closure's sake because I'm living in enough of a dystopia as it is. I know that Botswana isn't really like it is in the books, but if it were, I would very much like to go there.

I was supposed to go grocery shopping today, but I haven't even managed to get the laundry out of the dryer. I did cook a bag of dried chickpeas, so now I have six cups of cooked chickpeas in the freezer, but I really want chickpeas and greens and I didn't go out and buy any greens.

Giving a cat a toy that makes noise is almost as good an idea as giving a kid a toy that needs batteries. I gave Quirk a ball with a bell in it because I wanted her to have a non-catnip toy, and she's very fond of it.

In 2016 I got four hours of sleep on election night. This election night I refused to look at any results before I went to bed, so I actually slept, but I had a lot of weird dreams. I don't know why they were all weird HSDM-related dreams and had nothing to do with the election, though. (Osi Umenyiora was a Nigerian NFL player, not a white Oral Surgery resident. But just try telling my brain that. And also, the director of clinical research does not write manga as far as I know, despite being Japanese.)

I haven't bought any alcohol yet, mostly because it was 45 degrees and massively windy for the last two days and I didn't feel like blowing away in cold wind, and also it gets dark early now that the clocks have changed. I may just have to suck it up and do it today, though, because I want to stop thinking, because some minutes I'm fine and some minutes I'm terribly nervous about the election.

Last weekend I read Culture Warlords (it's short) and I appreciate that it wasn't yet another attempt at "Let's try to understand these people so we can all get along." It was "Here are these people who have decided to do horrible things, and there's nothing we can do to make them stop, so let's try to make it hard for them to get away with doing horrible things in public." Yes, let's.

It's October, and any other year I would say the minor unhappiness in my sinuses is my annual October cold, but since it's this year, of course it's COVID. (It isn't, but just try telling my brain that.) And some of my lunch tried to go down the wrong pipe and now my throat hurts too.

And I thought I was done with the data wrangling, but this morning they added another class to the massive spreadsheet and I had to go back into the admissions files again and hope I could find one student who had been off getting an MBA and another who had been off getting a PhD, and two others who had taken leaves of absence for other reasons. I did find all of them, finally, but I wasn't as happy about it as I was about getting the first five classes done and into the massive spreadsheet.

And I'm waiting to hear from the watch repair place about whether I can stop being one of those people who doesn't know what time it is without looking at their phone.

And as of last night, four tries later, I still don't know why the particular bit of embroidery I'm working on now isn't coming out lined up where it should line up.

But Lily seems to have decided that whatever's going on with her hind leg isn't going to keep her at floor level, thank you very much. I tried feeding her on the floor for a couple of days and she didn't quite know what to think about that, and didn't eat much, and as of yesterday she's leaping all over the place. She does seem to like the lower-sided litterbox, though.

And Brookline Booksmith has one of two books I'd like to read, so maybe the watch-collecting trip will involve a stop at the bookstore first. The one they've got is The World Beneath the Sands, which is about archaeology in Egypt between 1822 and 1922 (white men behaving badly, of course, but Egyptology is interesting) and the other one is Culture Warlords (more white men behaving badly, but on the internet this time, and the book is about how they got trolled). Culture Warlords is backordered. I suppose I could get the Kindle version, but I still like actual books much better.

Unglued-from-computer, day 1: pet store for kitty litter, home, Trader Joe's for groceries. Spent more than I really meant to on groceries, but hadn't been for a week and a half.

Also canceled haircut appointment in September because hairdresser has moved next door; next step, make appointment at place hairdresser went to (Brookline Arcade? Didn't know there was a hair salon in there. Apparently there are three of them.).

Got things done today so I can do only and precisely what I want to do tomorrow. Gotta buy cat crunchies on Wednesday, and if the weather cooperates, going whale watching on Thursday.

Day 2: Decided to get it over with and went and bought cat crunchies, and went to the bookstore and dropped $60 on books I had already read and donated, but felt like owning again (in paperback, because paperbacks take up less space). Bookstore atmosphere is still weird; one-way aisles and no browsing to speak of if you want to spend less than 15 minutes indoors.

Useful note: smoked salmon will practically raise both cats from the dead. They shouldn’t eat fish on account of the phosphorus and the elderly kidneys, and they got fish last month when I gave Snip a happy pill, but they didn’t get very much smoked salmon (despite their best efforts).

Day 3: Did only and precisely what I wanted, including embroidery (now I remember why I stopped where I did; there’s a mistake in there somewhere and I hadn’t found it) and watching movies on TV. I should have watched DVDs instead, because the usual trick of “watch one thing until a drug commercial comes on and then switch to something else” just leads to watching a drug commercial on the other channel.

Work intruded upon me to the extent of a text from the Drama Llama, who got stuck dealing with the faculty member who was giving me a hard time last week. No, I hadn’t gotten as far as ordering any supplies yet; I only got as far as who’s going to pay for them.

Talked myself out of whale watching on account of probable lack of social distance on the boat. Sigh.

Day 4: Spent lots of the day tearing out embroidery, because I was tired of faking it around the error. Tearing out takes longer than embroidering.

Accompanied the tearing out with Season 1 of Vikings, because I own the first three seasons and didn’t really get into it when it was on TV until partway through the first season. Still enjoyable, although the end of the season consists of “let’s kill off all the female characters we don’t know what to do with.” And Travis Fimmel and Clive Standen are perfectly acceptable eye candy.

Day 5: Another work intrusion; had to log onto a Zoom meeting and change the host so they could present slides.

Spent more of the day on the computer, in general, than I really wanted, but it got humid enough to notice when I tried to embroider. Pried myself loose for the purposes of reading an actual book for a while.

I haven’t bought new music in a dog’s age. I think the regiment is going to invest in some Wardruna.

It was a good weekend in that I managed to go to Target on Friday and get contact lens cleaner and cat food and deodorant, and make a shelf stocker very happy by asking for lens cleaner and not hand sanitizer (she actually said "I'm so glad you didn't say hand sanitizer!"). And I went to the pet store on Saturday and got kitty litter, and Trader Joe's and got lots of stuff including excellent blackberries. So now I feel considerably less like I'm living on odds and ends, and besides that, it was pretty nice out, so I got to be out in the nice weather.

I also finally got zip ties off the list, where they've been since last summer, because I'm slowly putting together a "save a dive" kit. I still need one of each screwdriver and an adjustable wrench and some wetsuit cement, at the very least. So far I've got zip ties and a spare mask strap and an extra BCD-to-regulator hose. But it's a start.

Since it was nice out, and since it's been relatively nice out for most of the winter, I forgot my annual February reading of The Grey Seas Under. Usually I read that in February when I'm sick and tired of standing outdoors in freezing cold waiting for buses, just to remind myself that it could be worse. I read it this weekend instead, and things could definitely be worse.

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.