The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

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.

TGIF, with bells on. I'm glad it's a long weekend, because I'm done with this week in general and work in particular. I'm tired of being a responsible adult in a pandemic election year and worrying because I haven't gotten my mail-in ballot yet, and worrying about getting a flu shot, and worrying about my parents and COVID and Thanksgiving, and all the other things I either have to worry about doing or desperately wish I could do and can't bring myself to, these days. Like going to Marathon Sports for sneakers, or to the French bakery in Allston, which would be expanding the bubble of places I allow myself to go (so far, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Star Market, Petco, Brookline Booksmith, and the dive shop), and I shouldn't do that before Thanksgiving (see "parents and COVID"). ARGH.

HOWEVER. There are good things, to wit:

- My missing regulator has turned up, so I can go get it tomorrow. Mostly that means I can bring all the other parts back down there and ask somebody who knows what they're doing to watch while I put them all together.

- My favorite uncle had his 45th and last radiation treatment today and I sent him a silly congratulatory email, and got a silly response.

- I fell down an internet rabbit hole and discovered one of my favorite madrigals at the bottom, so now I know it's by Monteverdi and called Ecco mormorar l'onde.

- I'm halfway down page 18 of the embroidery pattern, because page 18 is only one column (roughly a thousand stitches, and most of them are black, which means I don't actually have to stitch them). The pattern is 36 pages, so after page 18 I'll be really halfway done, instead of perpetually almost halfway done.

- I've decided the pet insurance isn't worth $1200/year, so I have that much I'm not spending in October. And Lily is still firmly convinced that little red laser pointer dots Must Die, so if I can't keep her off my desk any other way, I can break out the laser pointer and she has to go kill it.

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.

I spent more of this weekend online than I probably should have, but I also got offline long enough to finally get off page 16 of the embroidery pattern. I've been on that page for at least six months, because I made a minor but persistent mistake in it somewhere. The fact that the mistake wouldn't go away and I had to keep adjusting for it made me massively frustrated, and I kept having to put down the whole thing until I forgot how frustrated it made me. But it's all done now, at least for the next six pages, and I'm having fun following the pattern as written again.

Since this past weekend wasn't a grocery weekend, the list is getting long enough for two trips to Star Market and a trip to Trader Joe's. And a trip to the pet store. When I think of something I'm running out of, I put it on the list, regardless of whether I'm going to be able to find it or not and regardless of whether I'm going to be able to carry everything on the list if I do find it all.

The last of the Bloodthirsty Jungle Demons is gone as of Saturday. Zoe was 18, which is a good run for a cat, and it was time. I'm sure the first thing she did when she met up with her siblings again was sit on Galileo. He fell down dead at the age of 12, and Bonnie was discovered to have complications of undiagnosed diabetes at 14. You never know, but I think I'll get Lily to 14 in June and Snip to 13 in September.

It is too nice a day outdoors to be indoors all day. Unfortunately, so was Saturday, and I went and gave myself three blisters on my left foot and two on my right foot, and the ones on both pinky toes burst before I got home. Those Tevas have got to go, and I ordered some of the throwback ones that never gave me blisters despite walking many miles in them. The straps get mushy as they break in.

When I came home I made pasta salad out of a pound of garlic elbows (Boston Public Market, after the office outing on Friday) and three small sauteed zucchinis and a package of Trader Joe's dried tomatoes in olive oil. It was pretty good when it was newish, so hopefully it will still be good for dinner tonight.

Anyway, yesterday it rained and I stayed home and went barefoot all day to harden up the burst blisters, and utterly failed to get any of the cleaning done aside from doing the dishes. My favorite aunt is coming next Saturday to ride the swan boats with me, and I'd like not to be living in a pit when she gets here. But I couldn't get excited about cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen and the floors, and so I kept putting it off until it was too dark out to do the floors anyway. I did get within one evening of finishing page 15 of the embroidery, though. And I found Snip's favorite ratty old green puffball that had been missing for a couple of weeks and had apparently been swatted behind the mirror in the bedroom. Snip didn't seem to be missing it, but I realized I hadn't stepped on it in quite a while and wondered where it had gone.

Tomorrow I go to the eye doctor and hopefully get my prescription sorted out and my left eye unblurred. After which I will hopefully be more cheerful in general, because not being able to see as well as I'm used to bothers me as background noise when I'm not paying attention to it and bothers me quite a lot when I am paying attention to it. If they tell me it's just my eyeballs getting old and there's nothing to be done about it, I'm going to be severely displeased.

This is a reminder that I should figure out what to be Up To on the weekend of July 4th.

So far, so good, in terms of calendar. Especially last night when the 6:30 - 10:00 dress rehearsal turned out to be 6:30 - 9:40, and call time for Friday moved from 6:00 to 6:30. I wonder if there's some rule about how late you can have high school students in organized activities? Granted it's not during the school year, but still, if we get out before 10:00 on Thursday, I'll be happy. And K solved the "what bus do I have to catch to get Lily to a 3:00 appointment" problem by offering to drive us there. Lily still won't like it, but at least we won't stop every other block besides.

I still should have gotten more sleep last night, but tonight I can go to bed earlyish, and probably will since it's disgustingly humid again (until Sunday), so it's not embroidery weather. I really would like to get off page 13, though. It feels like I've been working on that forever.

Last night the USAAF accident report I ordered was waiting for me when I got home. Apparently thou shalt keep the length of thy runway in mind when thou landest a B-25; it was pilot error and Pepere was merely the co-pilot. The USAAF seemed to think it was a minor incident, although the description of wrinkled nacelle, buckled panel and bent engine struts doesn't sound minor to me. I guess it was, in contrast to irreparable damage and/or loss of life, which is what was going on in Europe at the time.

My goodness, is what's going on right now ever an object lesson in how not to handle going on parental leave! It doesn't help that it's Restorative Dentistry, which is one of the more dysfunctional departments lately. I'm trying not to get dragged into the mess because it's not my job to sort out other departments unless they have no administrators. Restorative does; it's just that they didn't do any of what they were supposed to, and now that they haven't done it, it's biting them in the ass big time.

I didn't go to Noank for the parade yesterday, but I did spend some time yesterday thinking about my grandfathers, both of whom volunteered for WWII. Grandpa went to India, building bridges on the Ledo road with the Army engineers and somehow ended up running an ice cream factory, and Pepere ended up in Georgia (USA), teaching the Free French to fly airplanes. (Best story about that: Memere was on a bus with a couple of pilot trainees, who were speaking French to each other and didn't realize she could understand them. One of them was telling the other about how he almost killed Lt. Deschenes in whatever flying exercise they had been doing that day.) I would be miserable in the military, but I'm glad there are some people it works for.

My aunt with early onset Alzheimer's was finally evaluated by professionals last Tuesday and moved into a care facility in Wellesley last Thursday. She turned 56 at the end of April and she doesn't realize she's much younger than most of the people in the facility with her. With early onset, the earlier you get it, the faster you decline. They came to Noank for Easter and it was really hard to deal with the fact that my aunt still looks like herself, but everything that was her personality is gone. I can't imagine how hard it is for my uncle. He wants to get a dog, now that my aunt isn't living at home (she didn't like dogs), and I hope he does.

I'm finally making progress with the embroidery again. My right elbow seems to be the limiting factor these days. It's not that I'm tired of this pattern, and it's coming out gorgeous; it's just that I can't sit there and embroider all day like I used to. And with sweaty-hands weather coming, I should probably take any opportunity I can get.

The next project is the knitting pattern for Persian Dreams, but I'm trying to decide whether I want to do it as individual medallions or as a large repeating pattern. I don't think I want to do both. But I do think I want to do it on tan linen and do a red/orange/brown/green/yellow palette. (Memo to self: look up how many colors you actually need.)

It's snowing, which wouldn't be news except it started snowing four hours later than they said it would and hasn't stopped yet. Which meant I got on the bus in the snow. At least there was only half an inch of it then. Boston public schools are closed today, but of course Harvard doesn't close for anything less than blizzard conditions in rush hour and/or a foot of snow. Fortunately I wasn't standing around waiting for the bus for more than about two minutes.

I committed sacrilege yesterday. The Office for Diversity Inclusion sent out a survey about making common spaces more welcoming to a diverse student population, and I said Take down the 20 or so portraits of old white men in the Main lobby. They're mostly previous deans. I'm not saying turn them into a bonfire, but give them to the library or something and put up a picture of George Franklin Grant and/or any other interesting (by which I don't mean gave us a lot of money) alumni instead. Or at least develop some criteria by which you have to have done something more interesting than warming a chair in the dean's office for several years.

On the good side of things, I got nominated as a Harvard Hero. I probably won't make the final 12 from the medical area, because I'm in a pool of 46. And I have a long-standing tradition of not winning anything more exciting than a cake from the Noank School Fair cake walk. (OK, I take that back, winning admission to grad school was pretty damn exciting, but that's a little different.) Anyway, what it gets me if I win is bragging rights and a reception in Cambridge in June. Yay?

Also good, I finished page 12 of the embroidery pattern, so I'm a third of the way through. Once I get through page 13, I'll know where halfway down the pattern is, and then I can finally cut down the linen so I'm not dragging an extra foot or so around. The idea of cutting linen with a year's worth of embroidery on it gives me the fantods, but having all that extra fabric to collect cat hair is getting annoying. Very orange cat hair shows up like mad on black linen, shockingly enough. But I love my very orange cat.

I've been trying to remember what I did between Thursday, when I got back from Falmouth, and Monday. As far as I remember, on Thursday I didn't do very much, except I did take a nap in the afternoon on account of having slept in twin beds in Noank and Falmouth and not sleeping as well as usual because I kept finding the edges of the mattresses. I remember falling over and thinking "Big bed!" and stretching out, and being happy about it.

I have no idea what I did on Friday, so I suspect I didn't do anything important. That might have been the really excellent embroidery day, though, because I did do some embroidery sometime between Thursday and Monday.

On Saturday I gave up and called RCN, and was shocked to find that they would send a technician on Sunday. I don't remember what else I did on Saturday.

On Sunday I was embroidering again when the technician came at about 3:00, looked at what I had for equipment, looked at what I was supposed to have for internet service, asked me what I was paying, and was aghast at the answer. He said I should call the customer loyalty department and ask for more service and less bill, because the service I was supposed to have is so slow it isn't supported these days. And the price for more service is lower than the price I was paying. I know good advice when I hear it, so I called on Monday and got double the internet speed for $30 less.

On Monday I had fun stuff on the list. I did note that the light outdoors was weird on account of the eclipse, but I didn't bother trying to look at the eclipse itself; I contented myself with looking at the crescent-shaped holes in the shadows on the sidewalk. And I went off and bought myself a $350 Olds Ambassador trumpet, because damn it, why not? When I got it home I broke it out and managed to play a C, a G and a D very badly. I printed out a fingering chart, because I already know how to read music (at least in treble clef); I just need to know how to make the notes. My embouchure needs work, though.

Yesterday I had my GP appointment at 8:15, which of course meant I got there at 7:20 and the office doesn't open until 8:00. Under normal circumstances I would have gone in search of coffee, but I decided not to in case of fasting blood test. I didn't want to have to come back again for that. So, appointment (I need to lose weight, but I knew that) and blood draw, and prescription refill, and no shingles vaccine until I'm 60 but go get it pretty much the minute my insurance will cover it (I had a raging case of chicken pox at 16), and then I went off to breakfast at Cutty's and coffee at Caffe Nero in Brookline Village because I hadn't been to either place yet.

Cutty's was good, but too far out of my normal weekend range to make it a possible destination for breakfast. Caffe Nero was good too, and I will definitely keep it in mind because they're starting to be everywhere. Following that I went to Walgreens and Trader Joe's and home. When I got home I decided to be a good kid and schedule the mammogram so as to get it over with, so I did that and it turned out to be for this afternoon. Hooray, I still have Thursday to go whale watching (bought the ticket yesterday) before I go to the eye doctor on Friday morning.

The tape they put on the gauze in my elbow-pit after the blood draw gave me a really impressive set of red marks exactly where the tape was. I probably should have taken it off before I went to the drugstore, but I try not to leave biohazards in other people's trash cans, so I kept it on until I got home.

I should not have read my work email on Monday, but I was trying to keep ahead of all the junk mail and FYI-type messages that get overwhelming if I look at two weeks of them all at once. That's how I found out that CODA has added a subsection to 2-23e (control of pain and anxiety) regarding substance abuse and effective immediately, which means we have to add it to our self-study now. They couldn't have waited until after our site visit? Never mind, I'm on vacation, damn it.

I'm really sorely tempted to drop a towel over Snip and cut her front claws. In my imagination, it works a lot better than I suspect it will in reality. Most likely I would need another set of hands to keep her in the towel.

Lily has trained me to give her cat treats with her morning thyroid pill (sniff at pill pocket in dish, give me a "That's all?" sort of look, act disinterested until she hears the treat bag open, look interested again, dive in as soon as the treats hit the dish). I don't actually care if she won't eat the pill without treats, as long as she eats the pill. Heaven forbid I ever have to give Snip pills twice a day. She'll turn into a dirigible with legs if she gets that much cheese.

I am a shameless enabler. I just loaned a coworker $20 to buy cigarettes, because he ran out two days ago and I have to keep working with him for two more days this week, and I don't want to deal with him being grumpy on account of nicotine withdrawal. At least he knows he's getting grumpy on account of nicotine withdrawal and thought it was hilarious when I said that's why I'm giving him money. He swears up and down he'll pay me back on Friday, but I'll believe that when I see it.

I am also a paranoid pet parent. I've seen Snip was eating and drinking, but I was worried about lack of evidence in the litterbox. It turns out she's started actually burying it (after a mere eight years). And Lily is having teeth problems again, I think. I'll have Dr. G look at them when he comes next week.

Besides those, I threw myself on a grenade on Monday and it has just exploded, so I spent the morning comparing two versions of the Summative Assessment Guidebook (a mere 185 pages) and making sure that all the changes from one version joined all the changes in the other version. So now we have one version that makes sense, and I have to wait for three other people to make changes in their personal versions and then do the whole process again.

I wish it were embroidery weather, but it's just humid enough to make my hands start sweating after I've been holding the frame for five minutes. Doing this pattern in five-minute chunks isn't very satisfying, and I need to create something satisfying because I'm creating frustrating things at work.