The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

It's been a week since I posted anything, because I've deleted a couple of rants. I don't want this to become a journal of rants.

On Saturday night I got something jammed in the gum behind my last left-hand lower molar, and I think I got it out, but it was angry enough to require Advil Monday and yesterday. Today it seems to be annoyed rather than angry. I'll take that. Especially since I don't know when I could get it seen by anybody at HSDM.

It's not a trend yet, but Quirk is sleeping on top of the office cat tree, right out in the open, for the second day in a row. It's nice to have a cat hanging around in here with me, without feet on the laptop. And it's gratifying that Quirk has decided I'm non-threatening enough to be slept at.

As of February 4, my taxes are hanging around in the ether. I decided I didn't mind if they hung around for a week, and I wanted them to come off the "don't forget to do this" list. I should be getting my usual refunds, which is nice.

I've gotten fascinated with excavator videos on Youtube, drawn in by one that was on another site and captioned "Who do you call when your 22-ton excavator is sunk up to its cab in mud? This guy." When in doubt, go play in the dirt (or the mud) with heavy machinery. And the guy who extracted the 22-ton excavator is damn good at it, and I end up learning things about geology and physics and things like that. In one of the videos he says that his sitting there doing nothing while the state police are inspecting a dump truck he's supposed to be filling with rocks is costing the job $400 an hour. I wonder how one gets trained to run excavators? I could have a post-retirement career...

For now, though, I have to go make the university visiting committee happy, and make CODA happy, and make the Dean happy in terms of hoops I have to get the faculty search candidates to jump through. I'd rather go play in the mud with heavy machinery, though.

Ahh, vacation. Which meant that yesterday morning after I read email, I unglued myself from the computer and more or less stayed that way. Although, since I'm on vacation and now I have the time to do it, I did devote some time to persuading Quirk that I'm not awful. By way of sitting on the floor with a piece of smoked trout in hand, and waiting. She wouldn't come take it, but she was quite interested, and willing to eat bits off the floor an arm's length, half an arm's length, and six inches away from me.

This morning she was quite a bit more sociable. She stuck her whole head out of the tunnel on the cat tree at breakfast time (as opposed to one eyeball), and stayed out after breakfast and stared at me from six feet away and purred until I put my coffee mug down on the floor. She didn't want any coffee, but she did come sniff it. And then she chased the laser pointer all over the place, and then chased her catnip mouse all over the place and killed it thoroughly. I think we're getting to the two-week threshold where she's getting used to what life is like around here, and doesn't mind most of it. I was even able to scritch her behind the ears just now since she's used to me sitting next to the cat tree, and she took trout from my hand at arm's length. She and Lily do have some rules of engagement I haven't figured out yet, but they seem designed to avoid screaming or bleeding, so I'll take that. They did involve Quirk being chased out of the bedroom and Lily hissing at her sometime early this morning, though.

Tromping around doing all the non-food errands on Saturday (cat crunchies, kitty litter, TP, conditioner, etc.) and all the food-shopping errands on Sunday in sluck-stomping boots landed me with largish blisters on the undersides of both pinkie toes. There's still too much snow out there for sneakers, so I spent yesterday wearing socks and indoor slippers. Which is why I failed to take the recycling out yesterday, and today was trash day and I missed it. I wish I wouldn't do things like that.

On this date last year I'd had a sprained ankle for exactly a week, and was clomping around in the Iron Maiden and taking a lot of Advil and not taking the recycling out because I had enough trouble getting myself down the stairs without carrying anything. All in all I think I prefer the blisters.

Thanksgiving was soup (homemade) and pie (chocolate cream, storebought) and a short Zoom with the parental units and my favorite aunt and uncle. Not at all what I wanted, but all I was going to get. And then I got a headache on Thanksgiving night and had it all day yesterday besides.

Today, not much headache, but not much patience either (still no word from the shelter). I cooked the small turkey thigh and got 2.5 cups of cat treats out of it (skin and meat chopped up small). Lily approves quite some, to the point of making a pest of herself about scraps. But at least I know she still likes turkey.

I got my 15-year Harvard anniversary "order yourself a present" packet in the mail yesterday since my 15-year anniversary is December 1, and normally I wouldn't have bothered because I don't need any more junk. But they offered a set of luggage, and I've never particularly liked my last-minute TJ Maxx suitcase. And I'd like to think I'll be able to travel again some year. So I ordered the luggage, which will theoretically arrive in January sometime and hopefully won't fall apart if I look at it sideways.

The luggage may have fended off the Instant Gratification Monster, which is getting rather annoyed about the shelter situation even though it knows that nothing gets done on Thanksgiving week. The MSPCA would be easier, but the Boston location has barn cats and special needs cats at the moment, and I'm not looking for either of those. Well, mostly. I can cope with a missing eye or a missing limb, or even an identified allergy, but not with chronic systemic diseases.

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.

Woke up this morning feeling like me for the first time since Friday. Thank goodness. Also, all of my usual Tuesday meetings have been canceled on account of CPR training (which I don't have to do) and Promotions Committee (which I don't have to be at) happening today. I don't mind in the slightest. I had to log into one class session yesterday to make the course director the host, and never turned my camera on because I felt like I looked like five miles of bad road. I made myself go to bed at a reasonable hour last night and slept like a rock.

Yesterday I also finally emailed the purchasing manager at the dive shop about the missing regulator. Hopefully somebody knows something about it.

The regiment has invested in a kneeling chair, which arrived on Friday, and Lily was just a bit put out about that because it still doesn't provide her any lap space when I'm at my desk. So I've been kicking Lily (and Snip; they take turns) off the keyboard starting at about 2:30 every day since Friday. The chair is very well padded, which is nice, but there's more weight on my shins than I'd really like because there's more of me than there should be. I could do something about that if I stopped buying comfort food (notably cheese and pasta). Unfortunately I have very little other comfort these days.

I need new sneakers again. I keep wearing out the heels and on Sunday I got blisters. Harumpf.

After Getting Things Done on Saturday, I did a fair bit of not much yesterday except reading a couple hundred pages of a book I bought after grocery shopping, and watching a couple of football games (sometimes reading and watching games at the same time, in the case of boring football). It was too humid for embroidery.

I thought we were past "this web site won't work with your browser," but I had to call Jabra customer service and clear my cache and cookies in Firefox only to find out their online store doesn't work with Firefox anyway; it wants Chrome but will settle for Safari. And then I had to remember all my various logins in Firefox again. GRR. This was work-related, so I had to do what I had to do. But GRR, anyway.

Before that, and semi-work-related, I ordered myself a kneeling chair because I've had one before and liked it, and it was the short way to end the Great Chair or Chair Cushion Quest. I threw a little more money than I really wanted to at the problem, but it wasn't very much more than I spend on six weeks of prescription cat food, and the chair will last a lot longer than six weeks.

Lily's got some sort of intermittent gait issue with her left hind leg, possibly soft tissue injury or possibly arthritis or possibly just Aging Ain't For Sissies. I'll have to ask Dr. P about it on Cat Herding Day, which this year is November 12. Which gives me exactly 13 days afterward to isolate myself before Thanksgiving, so as not to possibly bring COVID down to Noank. I wish I didn't think about that so much. I wish I didn't have to think about that at all.

Memo to self: put "flu shot" on the list for mid-October.

Yesterday I put on my Data Wrangler hat again and went tracking down information all afternoon and putting it in the giant spreadsheet. Today I thought up a workaround for the information I couldn't find yesterday, and put that in a secondary spreadsheet and sent it off to the biostatistician. If he wants to get a headache extrapolating students' ages from the year they received their undergrad degrees, more power to him. At least there's only one class he has to do that for, out of the five I found all the other info for yesterday.

I had just sent that off and was congratulating myself when I got a request for updates to all the info we have on the MMSc program, for the new dean. So, brochure, application form, program guide, curriculum blueprints, checklists, current program personnel directory with biosketches/photos/primary interests, course syllabi, all like that there. Fortunately it's not required until next week, so I have a little while to assemble it all and make it pretty before I turn it into one giant PDF and bookmark it. And I suppose somewhere in there I ought to try to take a picture of myself that I don't hate, because I'm the only program staff member and it looks silly if I'm the only one with no photo. But I haven't seen a picture of myself that I didn't hate since two drivers' licenses ago. (Well, OK, the picture of me and everybody else in front of the lionfish burger stand in Bonaire wasn't awful. But it isn't suitable for work either.)

Lily took over Snip's bed in the sun this morning, and poor Snip got completely confused. She couldn't figure out that there was another bed, and so she came and stared at me and hollered for a while. I finally got the message and went into the living room and opened the window, which woke Lily up and got her out of Snip's bed to come be friendly. Then Lily realized the windowsill was available, and Snip got her bed back, and all's right with the world. And I got to have my second Zoom meeting without confused and hollering cat.

Online chorus tonight, to consist of a singalong to Vivaldi's Gloria. I'm not sure I want a third Zoom meeting today, though. Even if there is singing involved.

It turns out that Trader Joe's broccoli cheddar soup has gone on the "not to be eaten by person who no longer has a gall bladder" list, and the less said about that, the better.

Incredible as I find it, the externship letter demon is rearing its ugly head again. I've written six letters in the last week. I'm not interested enough to go look up whether I wrote some of these for the same students to go to the same places in January and am re-writing them now, but I suspect that might be the case. Sigh. At least it keeps me employed.

On Saturday, in addition to having Fun With Field Trips, I had Fun With Ceiling Fan at home. The living room ceiling fan ticked when it was on the highest setting, and the ticking drove me to distraction. The weather lately has meant the second-highest setting, though quiet, wasn't adequate. So I did what everybody does these days and went to Youtube and found DIY ceiling fan repair videos. Based on how the fan was moving, I thought the problem was either in the canopy over the junction box (which, it turns out, is merely over the wiring) or in the connection between the downrod and the motor housing. So I hauled out the ladder, and climbed up and took the canopy off. It was held on by two screws, and the second screw wasn't seated the way it should have been, I think. It took a lot of unscrewing and then fell out suddenly, and fell right into one of the slots in the motor housing. So there I was with the fan hanging onto the ceiling by the wires, with my arm under the fan blades holding it up, and a loose screw in the motor somewhere. And the downrod is only 6" long, and the screwdriver is 8" long, so I couldn't get the angle to take the motor housing apart and find the screw. I put the other screw back in, and climbed down, and called my father to find out how screwed (pun intended) I was likely to be. He said turn the fan on for a second and see what happens. So I did, and nothing untoward happened, and it had even stopped ticking (I wonder if it ticked because of the way the second screw wasn't in properly). I think I got away with something I shouldn't have. I did have to go back up the ladder and wash the dirty fingerprints off the ceiling, though.

After all that fun, I went off to the dive shop. I missed various buses and ended up walking from home to Fairbanks St and then from Coolidge Corner to Marion St and then from Brookline Village to the shop, in the heat, and was a rather disturbing shade of red by the time I got there (they have a mirror for mask fittings). Then I spent $840 in ten minutes buying regulators. Nick says they've been selling a lot of regulators lately, because people would like to know whose mouth it was in last. I bought the same ones I've been renting, because I don't need anything complicated for recreational dives, and I don't mind that they're expensive, because they're important. Then I missed various buses on the way home and ended up going to the Brookline Village liquor store for beer while I was waiting (limit 2 customers in the store at a time, and when I got there, there were 2 customers in the store and one of them was paying for a pack of cigarettes in pennies, ARGH, so I had to wait outside for several minutes), but caught a 65 bus afterwards and went to Whole Foods for seltzer and cherries.

Came home and drank about half a gallon of water and seltzer, and finally stopped feeling thirsty. I think I paid for the dehydration and nerves yesterday, though, because I spent most of yesterday with intestinal unhappiness. It got better by bedtime and I feel much better today, so I'm chalking it up to dehydration and nerves rather than corona-related GI issues. I did call off doing anything yesterday or going anywhere until about Wednesday, though. And I'm out of Cheerios, harumpf.

Last week I ordered the most urgent items from the "small improvements to staying at home all the time" list (and a DVD). I should get the USB adapters and the DVD today, and the keyboard stand on Friday. Hooray for credit card points, because a $80 order cost $14 in actual money. Now all I need is to take two or three days off to sit around and watch DVDs all day.

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.

Lily decided to put up with the blood draw, so Dr. P got a good blood sample, and the kidney results came back better than six months ago, slap in the middle of stage 2 disease instead of beginning stage 3. Since feline kidneys don't get better, Dr. P thinks the reading six months ago was probably because Lily hadn't tanked up on water at the time. Anyway, we get to keep doing what we've been doing. I'm going to need another prescription for feline happy pills before the appointment in November, though, because that's the "needle in the bladder for urine sample" appointment and Snip needs a happy pill to get a normal physical.

It was nice yesterday, when it got hot but there was still some breeze coming in. Less breeze today, and I turned the fans on, so it's still nice indoors. I feel like I should apologize to the garbage men, though, because I had to take the trash out yesterday for want of doing it at 6:30 this morning, and there was some badly freezer-burned shrimp and most of a half gallon of awful ice cream in it. I don't want to think about what was in the trash can this morning after it sat there overnight.

Awful ice cream, by the way, is Whole Foods store brand vanilla. It's cheap for a reason, and it's gummy and orange. It's orange because they were going for French vanilla, despite there being no eggs in it, and overdid the food coloring rather a lot. I do not want orange-colored vanilla ice cream. So I threw it out and bought some from Trader Joe's, which I haven't tried yet (I want to put dalgona coffee on it, but I have to figure out when. Possibly on a Friday night when I want to stay up for quite a while.). I do like TJ's coffee ice cream, though, so I have hope.

I have an eye appointment on June 11. I'm still not sure I want to go, although it's nothing I'd have to unmask for; it's that the T is still running the Saturday schedule and the 65 bus runs once an hour, which is a pain in the ass.