The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

I didn't do anything worth writing about on Friday, except stay home and cook a mediumish Napa cabbage with a pound of ground pork and a bag of rice cakes so as to have lunches for the coming week.

On Saturday I went out and bought a paint scraper and some sandpaper to get the two or three windowsills that really need it ready to be repainted later this month, when there's leftover paint from the upstairs hallway. And I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and bought a box spring cover, which I hope will work because the new box spring is split (so is the old one, but it doesn't have a cover). I had to drop it in the washing machine immediately upon getting it home, because the store reeks of potpourri and the box spring cover reeked of industrial chemicals and I didn't want to deal with waiting for either of those to fade. And I went to Trader Joe's and discovered they've got baskets out again, so I can stop being so paranoid about putting more in a cart than I can carry home.

Today I had Easter lasagna in Noank. I was the least vaccinated person out of the six of us; everyone else has had their second shots already, even if it wasn't two weeks ago. So I kept a mask on except for eating, and we all hugged each other anyway because we all needed that. And I got to see what Dad has done with the shop (including, he says, sending literally 2.2 tons of stuff to the dump) and was duly impressed. And the lasagna and blueberry pie were both quite nice.

Tomorrow the new mattress arrives sometime between 2:15 and 4:15, so I can still do laundry and watch movies in the morning and enjoy my last very-long-weekend day.

I was trying not to start with a rant. But I just can't do any more "Can we have a Zoom session so you can do things for me that I should do myself? Send me a link" meetings. If the meeting is your idea, YOU set up the Zoom link. Especially if it's a session that's going to make me tear my hair out after about ten minutes. (MMSc student, who now wants a screen-sharing session so I can walk her through every single step of how to resubmit the article, which got unsubmitted because she sent in a version with track changes still on.)

I want my saucepans, dammit. I suppose I could boil cut-up potatoes in a sufficiently deep frying pan, but it's the wrong tool for the job, and the lack of the right tool annoys me. Especially since the right tools have been sitting in Warwick, RI since Saturday.

Right. Breathing. And watching Quirk play with her catnip mouse. The ball with the bell in it has disappeared someplace, which is OK with me for right now. I'll find it after the Tuesday meetings are over with. The disappearance of cat toys seems to bother me more than it bothers the cats. They'd be bothered if the food dishes or the furniture disappeared, though.

I ordered new saucepans even though I need new underwear somewhat more, on the theory that lack of new underwear isn't going to poison me. Old flaking nonstick saucepans might eventually. No idea when they might arrive, of course, but at least I ordered them. (Farberware stainless steel with glass lids. I cook by sight a fair bit and overcooked vegetables aren't my best favorite thing.)

Quirk has discovered the kitchen, and spent most of Saturday standing on her hind legs watching food TV out the kitchen window. Yesterday she spent most of the day in one of the kitchen chairs (probably having tired her legs out), and I moved her litterbox from the office into the pantry because she already knew Lily's was there and they've been using each other's anyway. And I really wanted to vacuum the office rug, because she wants to dig through the litterbox down to the earth's core, and sweeping the rug wasn't adequate. But I couldn't vacuum with Quirk in the room. I also moved her crunchies dish into the kitchen. She seems to be willing to eat pretty much anything, fish or poultry or the crunchies she came with (Hill's, which I'm weaning her off of because they're too expensive to be corn-based) or Lily's crunchies, and seems to be taking it all in stride digestion-wise. Thank goodness.

Yesterday was also Annual Shredding Day, since Quirk wasn't in the office. I shredded the 2019 utility bills (I keep them for a year, ever since the one time Eversource undercharged me for four months and then sent a massive bill, and I couldn't do anything about it because I'd thrown away the bills after I paid them) and Snip's insurance and vaccination records. I shredded a very old rabies tag by accident because it was taped to a piece of folded-over paper, but the shredder dealt with it quite well. I suppose since it will shred credit cards, I shouldn't have been surprised; rabies tags are thinner even though they're aluminum. But I should have been paying more attention to what I was shredding in the first place.

It's pretty massively windy out, which explains why the gutter replacement isn't happening today. It's too damn windy for doing anything on top of a ladder, or on a flat roof three stories up. A pitched roof would be worse, but we don't got one.

I need to find somebody who can professionally remove about one square foot of tiles in my shower and put new tiles in once the faucets get replaced. I'd take a crack at it myself except it's right where the pipes are, and I don't want to do anything that might cause water to leak either through or behind the tiles. If it were the back end of the shower, no problem, I'd go watch some YouTube videos and have at it. But I don't want anything leaking through the wall, or down into the first floor. (Which, of course, it shouldn't because that would be a problem with the plumbing, not the tile. But I'm paranoid that way for some inexplicable reason.)

Yesterday I finally made stir-fried rice cakes and bok choy and smoked duck and mushrooms, with green onions and garlic and soy sauce. Good thing nobody but me will be eating it, because I seem to have left a lot of grit in the bok choy despite washing the hell out of it after I cut it up. I guess what I should have done is put it in the colander and put the colander in a great big bowl of water, and swished it around for ten minutes. That'll learn me. Anyway, the overall flavor is good, it's just grittier than it should be. It'll be gone by the weekend if I eat it for lunch all week.

Cannot wait for the election to be over, in general.

I walked about five and a half miles on Saturday, but I ended up with kitty litter and regulators (finally!) and two different lots of groceries, so it was worth being sore in all sorts of places all day on Sunday.

I made soup on Sunday, and it came out exactly the way I wanted. Chicken broth and tomatoes and corn and lima beans and okra, and four cloves of garlic and some smoked paprika and black pepper. When in doubt, put the okra in last and turn it off after ten minutes. It came out exactly the way I wanted and I have enough for lunch for the rest of the week.

Yesterday I went and got my flu shot, which hurt less to get than the HSDM ones do (different place in my arm, maybe?) but hurt more afterward. It seems to be about done hurting now, which is nice. And I can cross another Responsible Adulthood thing off the list. (Where the hell is my ballot, Massachusetts?)

Yesterday I also discovered that I now have two wristwatches with dead batteries and band clasps falling apart in various ways. Unfortunately I can't do anything about resurrecting them until Friday at the earliest, but I would like to have both of them resurrected.

I'm officially halfway through the embroidery pattern now, hooray. Getting that far took four and a half years, so now I have a time to beat for the second half. It wouldn't have taken so long if I hadn't given up in disgust for six months and if I hadn't had CODA take over my life for a year or so. I hope I'll be done by 2024, when CODA will take over my life again.

I have to write two more recommendation letters this week and have yet another meeting with the MMSc student who can't write. I'm running out of ways to say "Well, you did a thoroughly half-assed job with the last batch of corrections, so do them properly, and then I'll suggest some other things." I've been saying this since August and it hasn't sunk in yet, and I'm about done with it. But I have to keep having these meetings. Sigh.

Yesterday was much better, because the humidity backed off and I got enough sleep. I was able to do some prep work for the meeting I had rescheduled from Monday and it went pretty well.

After work yesterday I went out for gazpacho ingredients, and came home and promptly hauled out the blender. Pulverizing innocent vegetables that way would probably have sufficed when I wanted a set of dishes and a lump hammer to work out frustrations on earlier this month; keeping that in mind for next time. Anyway, it all went quite well up until I discovered my paprika jar was full of bugs. Fortunately the smoked paprika wasn't, and now I have gazpacho to last through the weekend. And almost enough of a list of spices I'm out of to justify ordering online from Penzey's and waiting two or three weeks while they catch up with their online orders.

On Monday night I finally hauled out some actual sheet music and discovered that yes, I can play the melody line on the keyboard. I'm still working on the harmony for the processional from the Play of Herod and I don't have sheet music for that in the first place, so I'm working out both parts by ear. Harmony is still fun, and the keyboard is the only way I can do it these days.

Today could be Friday and I really wouldn't mind. It feels sort of like Friday for some reason.

Serious as a...

My opposite number at work apparently had a heart attack and has been in the hospital since Tuesday. So now I get to figure out how to be him for a while. I wonder if this will finally get him to stop smoking?

Porch picnic with sister on Tuesday night went pretty well; two chairs six feet apart, two overturned-five-gallon-bucket tables, one 15-foot extension cord, and the tower fan from my bedroom. I really do need some doilies for the overturned buckets if I'm going to do it properly, though.

In retrospect I probably should have used up the last of the almost-good cherries in the apricot crumble I made out of almost-too-late apricots, but I didn't want to stand there pitting cherries for half an hour, so I didn't. Now I have apricot crumble and Greek yogurt to last until next week sometime. Good thing I did that today, and good thing it was less humid than yesterday, because turning the oven on yesterday would have been a terrible idea.

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.

I spent most of yesterday having a headache, which is threatening to come back today the more I read about last night. So instead of posting about that (which I do of course think about), I'll post about the time before the headache yesterday.

I went to Whole Foods and found cod on sale and looking pretty good, so last night I made roasted cod with zucchini and tomatoes and leftover green onions and oregano. It came out pretty well, although tomatoes aren't good yet, and since the cod fillet was a pound and a half, I'll be eating leftovers for lunch for the rest of the week. And since I'm working from home and the kitchen window is open, I could even microwave them if I wanted to. Not that I want to.

Next round of cooking is going to be some sort of spinach and artichoke and shell pasta casserole. And after that I have kielbasa and a cabbage and egg noodles to do something with. I should be set for leftovers through about July.

The weather having decided to shed about 20 degrees between Friday and yesterday, I was able to verify that my new non-Harvard sweatshirts are just what I wanted. Of course, they arrived on Friday when it was 80 and humid and I wanted nothing to do with them. I took the tags off them and tossed them in the laundry basket and Lily slept on them on Friday night. Orange hair all over. Washed them on Saturday and lived in one of them yesterday. It got warm in there on the way home from the grocery store with two full bags, but if I had just been out walking for an hour, it would have been fine. And it was cat-in-lap weather yesterday, so the sweatshirt has orange hair all over it again.

I need to go out walking for an hour most days, because my stamina is gone. I lost about 100 minutes of walking a week when I stopped commuting. And then I only went outdoors once every other week for a month, and now I'm going out about once a week, and I dislike how hard I'm panting by the time I get home with the load of stuff I went out for. Time to do something about that.

Yep, it's still March, despite it being late April. Today it's the raining and 45 variety. But at least it's Friday, and I don't have any meetings, so I can run the washing machine during business hours. Other than that, though, I'd really like to go back to bed until the weather catches up with the calendar, or runs ahead of the calendar and it's suddenly 80 on Memorial Day weekend.

Amazon has now admitted that my package is probably lost, although they still think it's the scanner that's lost, not the litter locker liners (although I may have just sorted that out, I hope, and Chewy has litter locker liners, so I could order from them). And the scanner still doesn't work, because I need a USB to Thunderbolt cable, or a USB cable with two male ends, and I have neither. I have a female USB to Thunderbolt adapter and no suitable cable to plug into it.

Yesterday I proved that I can actually make dalgona coffee at home, although I got the proportion of coffee foam to milk wrong and warmed milk would have been better, and I got coffee foam all over my front trying to knock it out of the whisk. And I overcaffeinated myself and bounced off the walls for a lot of the afternoon. However, it's fun to watch the stuff actually changing color and texture while you whisk. And the theory works, despite my failures of execution, and next time I'll just make 1 tbsp and warm up the milk. Or maybe I'll put vanilla ice cream on the list.

How can you be the HSDM registrar and not know when the DMD second year starts? (Why am I surprised? This is the same person who up and deleted the transition week between HMS and HSDM for the incoming second year students two years ago, and then it turned out there was stuff that had to happen that week and it was a fairly large mess, so of course she doesn't pay any attention to when the second year starts. Despite her being In Charge Of The Academic Calendar, Thank You Very Much. Sigh.)

In more cheerful news, yesterday HMS and HSDM announced that we will in fact have a new permanent Dean starting Sept 1. I didn't know how much the lack of one was still weighing on me, because pre-pandemic, every other sentence seemed to end with "when the new Dean comes" and I hadn't consciously thought about that for about five weeks. And, even better, the new Dean is not the internal candidate I really didn't want. I wasn't supposed to know he was a candidate, but it was common unspoken knowledge anyway. If he'd gotten the job, the office politics between him and the Office for Dental Education would have been a massive mine field. So, crisis averted, and now all I have to do is learn to spell the new Dean's last name, which I should be able to do before September.

Oh, right, it's Friday. I should go water my dormant (meaning it looks absolutely dead) cyclamen. If it doesn't wake up around mid-June, it's really dead, but until then I'm supposed to water it about once a week.