The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Just for the record, it is Friday, April 16 and it's snowing. I object. But if the marathon had been happening this year, it would have been on Monday the 19th, so I guess it's still technically not snowing on the marathon.

I need to go buy heavyish stuff, and I was going to go out and get some of it after 5:00 today, but the snow (which is now sticking, dammit) is putting me off that idea. I don't want to do it all tomorrow, but Grammie's 99th birthday Zoom is on Sunday afternoon and I'd like to get it done before that.

Harvard has decided we get four-day weekends for Memorial Day and July 4 (Cambridge still thinks everybody's coming back in August, but HSDM is coming back July 1), and I forgot that as of last year Juneteenth is a Harvard holiday. But Juneteenth this year is a Saturday, so I wonder if we'll get the Friday off.

HUHS is supposed to call me sometime next week to schedule my second shot. I suppose not having the second shot scheduled when I got the first one is appropriate penance for getting on the list in the first place, when I probably shouldn't have been on it. But I want to get the Battle of Second Moderna over with, so I can talk myself into leaving the house for fun once in a while.

I went to H Mart today when it decided to stop actually raining. Apparently I'm still not ready to wait in underground T stations for ten minutes (did that on the way there and found out it wasn't my best thing), so I walked back to Harvard from Central Square to take the bus home. Which was fine; I got exercise and didn't get rained on. And then when I got home I could hang around and read and eat miscellaneous Korean pancakes for late lunch. That was today's definition of unwinding, because I've been a pretty crispy critter ever since the week of March 8, which should have been a vacation week. The routine since about March 1 has been "see new email, shriek 'NO, GO AWAY' either mentally or vocally, get up, walk one lap of apartment, sigh heavily, sit down again, and deal with whatever it is that whoever it is wants THIS time." No email for three work days will be a good start.

Arm was still good and sore all day yesterday, and it happens to be the arm I sleep on top of, so I threw some Advil at it last night at bedtime. It's hardly sore today. Mom and Dad got their second Pfizer shots yesterday, and as of today my grandmother is officially fully vaccinated, because her second shot was two weeks ago.

I moved the pet steps into the living room when Lily had stopped eating much, because it's more important to me that she have easy access to her food on the cat tree than easy access to me in bed in the morning. Apparently it's important to Lily to jump up on the bed, too, since she hasn't stopped. I was considering buying another set of steps until I remembered that the new mattress and box spring, which arrive on Monday, will be at least three inches lower. Which means I won't need deep pocket sheets. Which means I can go buy flannel sheets in the fall if I want to. What an unusual idea.

It is really absurdly windy out. Or maybe it's just loud because I opened some storm windows to let some of the semi-springlike air in when we had some, and didn't shut them again. All the windows need washing, but I don't think we have enough ladder to do them from outdoors and I'm not going to start with gymnastics from indoors.

I hope Lily's renewed interest in food persists when the pain shot wears off this afternoon. Yesterday she got interested in Quirk's crunchies at breakfast (so she got some of her own and ate half of them over the course of the day) and raced me down the hall to be waiting on the cat tree for dinner. I forget when she stopped doing that, but it was nice to see her do it again. She does like the Royal Canin food, though.

There is precisely one person who's allowed to make me cross things off their task list for them, and it is not the person who tried to make me do it just now. And the person who's allowed to do it has been doing it a lot lately and I wish she wouldn't. Just as well I'm taking Thursday, Friday, and Monday off.

Speaking of time off, I'm sorely tempted to take tomorrow afternoon off too, since my vaccine appointment is at 2:20 and I have to get to Cambridge and back by bus. And I want to stick my head in the Coop and the Harvard Bookstore and see if I can find the sequel to Foundryside, which I read yesterday and enjoyed. I think Robert Bennett has read Patrick Rothfuss, because the way magic works is pretty derivative, but Bennett put it in a bag with "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and medieval Venice, and shook it up vigorously.

Yesterday was Quirk's third birthday. I hope it was better than the previous two. At least she got a little bit of celebratory sour cream (her favorite human food so far).

From 3:00 to 4:30 yesterday, I left my laptop sulking at home and went out. I couldn't waste a 70-degree day in March. So I went to the Computer Loft, and they outright gave me a dead MacBook Air (I offered to buy it) for Lily to sit on. I was there for probably 20 minutes and most of it was trading cat-on-laptop pictures with the tech. His cat has a whole laptop to himself, and the screen works but the keyboard doesn't, so it plays fish videos and occupies the cat while the tech gets things done. Lily was most interested in sniffing her dead laptop, but so far would still rather sit on mine.

But the weather was glorious. I almost didn't want to be wearing a sweatshirt.

This morning Massachusetts rolled out a pre-registration system for mass vaccination sites, and it seems to actually work. Basically it puts you on the list, and then sends you possible appointments when it's your turn. So at least I'm on the list. I hope it sends me to Hynes (it will be Hynes instead of Fenway by the time it gets around to me) rather than to Gillette. But if it's Gillette, that's what personal days are for. I'm really hoping for Thanksgiving in Noank on Memorial Day weekend.

The regiment is considering investing in the second brand-new mattress it's ever bought. The last one was a college-furniture-store double bed mattress, which got upgraded to my sister's queen-size guest bed when she got married. I noticed this past summer when I rotated it that it's developed a bit of a trench in the middle, and Lily has been sharpening her claws on the box spring for years, so it's probably time to replace both. I just wish mattress shopping didn't feel quite so much like used-car shopping. I don't want to spend $2000 on a mattress and I don't want memory foam or cooling gel or any of that jazz. Just sell me what I want and take the old one away when you bring the new one. And no, I don't care if you come over the balcony instead of up the stairs.

Quirk slept on my bed for at least some of last night. That's progress.

The latest round of CODA reports came back from Cambridge, signed. That's progress too, because it means they can come off my list entirely. I'm not responsible for sending them to CODA. And I have now, finally, set up webinars and advertising for the lunchtime lecture series for next week, which I was worried about, and can now quit worrying about. All I have to do is re-advertise it on Friday sometime and on Monday morning. (And, apparently, request biosketches from the three presenters. I want it to be somebody else's turn to be in charge of all this, next time.)

My parents had vaccine appointments at Mohegan Sun for the 11th, but managed to get Walgreens vaccine appointments for today. I heard a rumor that Harvard will be using the dental school as a pilot for getting an entire school vaccinated, but it's only a rumor and I probably still won't have a chance for vaccine before April. I'll be the last of the four people in my nuclear family to get it.

I elected not to go stand in the 20-degree wind yesterday and get a dead keyboard for Lily. I'll do it today when it's 40ish and calmer.

The Purrmaid plush toy (front half tiger, back half shark) I backed on Kickstarter in October or so is supposed to arrive today.

Cinnamon graham crackers are an OK short-term substitute for Cheerios for breakfast, but I really would rather have Cheerios.

Well, it's been vet day. Lily has a grade 2 luxating patella in the right rear, but she only has to have urinalysis and blood pressure checks once a year instead of every six months. Snip has an illness, which I think is her annual November viral URI, and she peed on me because she was already muzzled and burritoed and there was no other way she could express her opinion of being stuck with needles. She got blood drawn to make sure it isn't a bacterial illness. Lily has forgiven me, but is loopy with rabies shot, and Snip retreated to the bedroom and hasn't bothered trying to bite me when I go see if she's inclined to get up and eat. (Not yet. Loopy with rabies shot and sluggish with illness.)

So, a thousand dollars and a load of laundry later, it's been vet day. And it was a damp and grey and gloomy vet day, too. If we hadn't all gotten stressed out, I would probably have made a lot of popcorn and watched a lot of movies. I guess I can do that tomorrow. Or maybe I'll break into the horseradish chive potato chips I got from Trader Joe's. I admit I got them partly because I was so amused when Lily tried horseradish cheddar potato chips. I think she can't smell horseradish, but she could most certainly taste it and didn't like it at all. But I also got them because I like horseradish. And because if I have to stay home until Thanksgiving, I'm going to have some not entirely healthy snacks in the house, dammit.

I wish this had been another three-day weekend, and I do have personal days to use up, but it wouldn't have been a good idea on account of a meeting tomorrow that I would have needed today to prepare for. Except I don't, because powers higher than me scheduled a town hall meeting for exactly the same time, so my meeting is now canceled.

Grammie is in the hospital, expected home today. The hospital is offering all sorts of home help, but I don't know how much help it will actually be if she does get it, because after all she's 98. How much PT/OT does a 98-year-old need? She would like the human contact, though.

I finally decided to use the frozen rice cakes that have been hiding in the freezer for ages. They came out pretty well, although slightly overcooked, but I'm excusing that because this was the first time I'd ever used them. They need soaking first, and now I know they need soaking in hot water, because they sat in cold water for an hour and a half to no effect at all. The end product was stir-fry, with ground pork and mushrooms and half a Napa cabbage. I had better figure out what to do with the other half today, because it's sulking in the bottom shelf of the fridge and it's already wilted.

The ballot-tracking site says mine was finally mailed last Thursday. I'm hoping it doesn't take ten days to get across town, but even if it does, it doesn't matter because I'm not mailing it back; it's going to the Brighton library drop box.

I shoveled an inch of dead pine needles off the sidewalk on Saturday, because they were getting slippery. Last year must have been a good year for pine needles.

How is it not October until tomorrow? It's been September for six or eight months now. I think it's partly because of the two or three repetitions of "no, wait, still not opening schools until later in September" in the news, and now they've finally run out of September. Meanwhile the school I work for has been chugging along (albeit slowly) since July. But that's different. Next week we get to use a whole 20 chairs in the 40-chair teaching practice, instead of the 12 we've been chugging along with. And I still get to stay home until who knows when.

I want a 90-minute massage, which I can't get yet for public health reasons, and I need to do some foundation garment shopping, which budget-wise I can't do until December. I'm keeping an eye on the budget again because I'm supposed to be saving money to buy this place in a few years. September was cat food on credit card bill month, October is kneeling chair on credit card month and November is vet bill on credit card month. On the other hand, I've taken out the usual weekly walking-around money three times in six months, so I should be OK if I spend some hitherto unspent walking-around money on foundation garments in October. I do have to stop spending so much on groceries, though.

Today is St. Jerome's Day. St. Jerome is the patron saint of translators. I always at least notice St. Jerome's Day because I did so love translating, but I couldn't get to the point of making a living at it. Maybe if I'd had a previously unknown rich uncle when I graduated from Kent State I could have, but that's for another timeline, or a different universe, or something. (Been reading too much alternate-universe fiction lately.) I had to pay the bills, and eat, so I ended up working for Harvard. Not that working for Harvard isn't fun sometimes, but I don't love it the way I loved translating.

Yesterday I was supposed to have a cleaning fit, including washing the floors. But the floors got cold, and I ended up having a lapful of cat when I sat down, and I would rather have that than clean floors. So the floors never got washed.

Saturday was nice, and I had gotten an email on Friday from the dive shop saying my back-ordered regulator was in. So I wandered off down there, and my regulator is still back-ordered, and the email was a mistake. Not that I minded all that much, though, because they're still rearranging things now that the renovations are done, and I think the place is going to look amazing when it's sorted out. The Plan, such as it is, is for me to bring all the parts down there when the regulator really does show up, and have somebody who knows what they're doing watch me as I put them together.

Then I wandered off to the bookstore and Trader Joe's, and didn't buy any books because I find it hard to browse properly when all the aisles are one way the wrong way to get to the sections I want. I did, however, indulge in some broccoli cheddar soup from Trader Joe's and had it for rather late lunch when I got home. It promptly went on the "thou shalt not buy this more than once a month" list, along with mochi rice nuggets and and all the other things I would eat way too much of if I bought them regularly.

Then I sat down with the embroidery for a while, and got it far enough back to normal to feel good about it. Tearing out and redoing knitting is easier, especially because when I put in embroidery, I don't generally think about how I would go about tearing it out. And then I have to read the pattern I already crossed out so I can put it back in. Slow and frustrating, but at least I left myself a couple of good landmarks to start figuring it out from.

Yesterday I decided to have a slow morning (partly because I was flirting with having a headache), and took a very long bath, and then got going around noonish. And by "got going" I mean "got dressed and read email, and had lunch, and then sat down with the embroidery and a couple of football games and a lapful of cat". It was fun watching the Chargers and their rookie quarterback (who found out he was starting half an hour before the game) run all over the Chiefs, who couldn't defend run plays at all. But they won anyway. Sigh. I probably shouldn't hate the Chiefs, because I hate them for the same reason lots of people hated the Patriots: the incessant slobbering over the quarterback. But it's sports, not critical thinking, so I hate the Chiefs.

The embroidery is almost back to where it was before I started tearing it out. Thank goodness. That's what football season is for: football and embroidery and laundry (although Friday is laundry day these days, since I'm home anyway and I might as well get it over with while I have to be home.)

October is sneaking up on me. Usually October involves a pilgrimage to Lexington for cider donuts and Arlington for Penzey's. But last I heard, Penzey's is mail order only and about three weeks behind in their mail orders, and I don't really want to deal with social distancing at Wilson Farm. Yet another fun thing corona owes me, along with my birthday celebration and diving with harbor seals. And Bonaire; I would have gone back this winter. Bazzfazzmatazz.

The sink still drains, as it should, but it hasn't for so long that I'm still enjoying it (in a "my goodness, will you just look at how much toothpaste there isn't in the sink?" sort of way). It also still leaks, just a wee bit, and I should fix that. But I spent all day Monday being stiff in strange places on account of a couple of hours of under-sink gymnastics, and yesterday I had to glue myself to the computer again.

I really wish I didn't have to be glued to the computer so much. This chair is fine for playing Civ all weekend, but not so much for five days a week for six months. And I don't really want to go on the Great Computer Chair Quest again. It took me long enough to find this one. Maybe it's time to go on the Great Chair Cushions Quest, though.

I'm never going to be able to sort out what day of the week it is, this week. I thought yesterday was Prince Spaghetti Day, despite the fact that I know that today's Wednesday and Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day. Or so I'm told, anyway.