The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Today I spent $1329 of the $1400 stimulus check on a new mattress, box spring, mattress cover, and delivery including removal of the old ones. But the new mattress won't have a trench down the middle, and won't be so thick it requires deep pocket sheets. It arrives on Easter Monday.

Meanwhile, test results came back and Quirk has roundworms. Topical worm medicine is a beautiful thing (it was pills last time I had to do it), but it has to go on the back of the neck, and the minute you touch Quirk anywhere aft of her eyebrows, she sticks her chin toward the ceiling in bliss and the back of her neck disappears. But I tried, I really did. The medicine got on her, somewhere, and I hope it hit skin. The vet comes on Tuesday to give Quirk her distemper booster shot and get the blood she didn't get from Lily last time because I was so worried about other things. I suppose I could have admitted defeat and waited for her to hold Quirk while I put the dewormer on, but I feel like I don't deserve to own cats if I can't do things like that myself.

I think Lily's sense of smell is screwed up. She's quite interested in mealtime, but she doesn't acknowledge food unless she's looking at it, and she won't eat much even if she is looking at it. At least she was eating enough for the last three weeks or so to stop looking quite so skinny.

Gods, I need something to do other than work and sitting around obsessing about being a terrible pet parent. It's hard on the brain in several directions. I can't concentrate hard enough to embroider these days.

I ordered an air conditioner because the owner of the one I was going to borrow turns out to need it after all. Oh well. All I really need is something to take the edge off the humidity in one room for eight hours, so I ordered a pretty bare-minimum air conditioner and a 15-foot extension cord. The cord is supposed to get here tomorrow and the air conditioner is supposed to get here on the 16th. Stand by, sports fans.

While I was at it, I should have ordered the rest of the list of silly things that will improve being at home all the time. If I had a keyboard stand, I might actually be able to attempt to play the keyboard that's been sitting in my living room on top of the box it came in for years now (bought to help sort out chorus parts, but not useful without a stand). If I had more than one USB to Thunderbolt adapter, I could leave various devices plugged into the adapters and stop coping with only having one. My electric toothbrush can't count to 30 seconds reliably these days and I'd like one that can. I'd like an ice cream scoop that actually gets through the ice cream. Silly things like that. And a stove burner, and igniter, and oven thermostat, although I don't think those come from Target.

I got all excited yesterday when Brookline Booksmith's door was open. No dice, though; they were only taking advantage of the weather for curbside pickups. Sigh. I did indulge in peonies, because peonies make me happy (for certain values of happy these days), and brought them home and put them in a vase on the kitchen table, and nine hours later I walked into the kitchen and thought "Why does it smell like flowers in here?" Strong like ox, smart like tractor. At least I got the groceries and kitty litter all home by 3:00.

We had a smaller family Zoom at 3:00 with my favorite aunt and uncle, my parents, me and my sister, and my two cousins and their combined five sons under the age of 12, most of whom seem to be seriously into Legos, which is cool. My parents really need a better camera, because "potato quality" doesn't even begin to describe it. At least their audio is good, and we all seem to be putting one foot in front of the other.

I do not get political on Facebook because I don't want to get into Someone Is Wrong On The Internet fights. But yes, the systemic racism and inequality and police violence and militarization in this country have got to change. But I don't think the police problems can be solved at a federal level, and I don't think the racism and inequality problems can be solved by federal fiat (e.g., tell banks to cut it the hell out discriminating against POC or suffer actual consequences), not that the Trump government would even try anyway. And I don't think state and local governments have the will to change anything. I wish I thought the protests would wake up the state and local governments.

Working from home, HSDM Curriculum Coordinator version:

Spent large chunks of this morning working on a report for CODA about how we're conducting distance learning through secure sites and how we'll make up lost clinic time. The day CODA does anything that makes anybody's life any easier will be the day the universe ends.

Also trying to figure out if it's worth even having tutorial sessions for a course meeting online with students scattered all over the place. Pre-recorded lectures they can watch any time from anywhere are one thing, but real-time case discussions across four or so time zones are something else. Fortunately I don't have to answer that question myself, and it doesn't take effect until April 12 or so anyway.

I read something somewhere that said working from home works best if you pretend you're really going to work: get up at the usual time, do the usual things, leave the house for the length of time you would commute for. So I did that, and thought I'd go get coffee (which I knew would be takeout because you can't sit down in a restaurant until April 17 or so). Unfortunately the local small business coffee shop doesn't open until 9:00 in the current crisis. So I walked home again, and considered that a commute of 20 minutes, and had breakfast, and got online at 8:45 as usual. And had a video conference at 10:00, which was a mercy because I wanted to do a small one before the 39 members of the Curriculum Committee all tried to do one in April.

Last night I made Half Baked Harvest's chicken meatballs, sort of. The recipe as written didn't have any binder in it at all, so I added some bread crumbs, and some dill because they were supposed to be Greek meatballs and didn't call for any dill. Unheard of. They came out mostly OK, but the whole back of my apartment smells like fried oil, and I don't like the texture of ground chicken. It's extremely squishy and you end up with sticky blobs that don't even pretend to be meatballs until they're half cooked. They did brown up pretty nicely, though, and I had some with orzo into which I threw most of a container of Whole Foods feta salsa (feta and olives and scallions and parsley and oil and so forth), and that was perfectly adequate dinner.

I suppose I should be a good social distancer and not run out at lunchtime to buy more mangoes and more feta salsa and other silly things like that. I don't really NEED anything yet. I just want more mangoes, and blackberries, and seltzer, and I drank the last beer last night. I can live without all of the above until at least Friday, though, and grocery shopping once a week is normal. I could use a little more normality anyway.

I've read so much WWII history that I can't help drawing parallels. Yes, life is unsettled right now and everything anyone in authority says is unsettling. But we aren't rationing staple foods, and we're not all in physical fear for our lives every minute, and life won't be like this for six years. Mere weeks from now we'll either be back to the way things were in early February, or we'll have a new normal. The fact that nobody knows how many weeks is the unsettling part.

Monday again already? Well, at least it's a short week.

I didn't do any running around on Saturday, although I should have. But I went to bed at 9:30 on Friday night and slept right through to 8:30 Saturday morning, so I needed the sleep, and then I made friends with the Hairy Beasts again (and finally documented Snip, kneading the top corner of the quilt, with her puffball in her mouth, purring like a fiend. That's only the second time I've caught her doing it, even though I know she does it a lot because the quilt is all torn up.). And at roughly 4:00 I went off to catch an earlyish 86 bus and nearly missed it when it showed up 30 seconds early. Glad I caught it, though, because the next one would have been in another hour and I would have been almost late for the 6:15 concert call.

The concert went pretty well. The Handel definitely went better than its original performance, because this is what the notes in the score had to say about it: "Archbishop Wake's notes suggest that the music did not go smoothly. Apart from the possibility that the Chapel Royal choir may not have been of a particularly high standard, there are two plausible reasons: confusion between the rival orders of service and poor communication between the performers. They were disposed on two specially-erected galleries, with sight-lines interrupted by the altar...it may well have proved difficult to control the large forces in such a position....The canto (soprano) part would normally have been sung by boys. But there was a shortage: 5 of the 10 Chapel Royal boys had left with broken voices in June....it is clear that there were significantly more players than singers."

I personally made more mistakes than usual, including mistakes I don't usually make, but I more or less knew it was going to be one of those days. I couldn't quite get my mind in the right place. Partly, I think, because you can't fit 128 singers into 50 singers' worth of green room space. I did mention that to the Powers That Be, now that I'm not one of the Powers That Be (and very happily not).

Post-concert, C and I went out for dinner, so I ended up getting home at about half past midnight. Which meant I completely failed to notice the new front porch railings courtesy of one of my uncles. I noticed them this morning, though, and hooray, the porch railings aren't falling apart any more! The porch ceiling is on my "if I owned the place" list, though, because the paint has been peeling for years and if anyone but me ever looked up, they'd be aghast. The paint in my apartment is on the "if I owned the place and won the lottery" list, because they used incredibly thick paint, and the trim looks awful. But I don't own the place, and I don't have several tens of thousands of dollars to have everything stripped and redone properly, and it would probably be several hundred thousand dollars by the time all the plaster got replaced too. I really would like to be able to use a stud finder to hang pictures, someday...

Never mind. I got home on Saturday night before the weather got awful, but it was awful all day Sunday, so I didn't do any running around then either, which made Lily happy. I did get the laundry done and did dishes three or four times on account of getting tired of things always sitting in the sink. And I watched a couple of fairly ugly football games, one ugly because of penalties (Seahawks/Eagles) and one ugly because of weather (Patriots/Cowboys).

What I did not do was consume any caffeine, so I wasn't shocked when I woke up at 5:30 this morning with a headache. It turned out not to be a caffeine headache, though, because it persisted through lunchtime. At which point I went for the nuclear option and threw a coffee milkshake and ibuprofen at it. Caffeine and/or ibuprofen take care of most of my headaches these days, and for some reason sugar makes the ibuprofen work faster. Now I have a sore neck, but at least I don't have an actual headache.

I seem to be back to thinking "I want to go home" whenever I mean "I want not to be doing whatever I'm doing", because I do it when I'm at home. I wonder if going to Noank for Thanksgiving will fix that, or make it worse?

This week has been a week long already and it's only Wednesday.

My assistant, who fell off the face of the planet after last Tuesday and was revealed on Thursday to have been hospitalized, is still hospitalized, with legionella. Basically a nasty bacterial pneumonia, but apparently she also needed speech therapy, so I don't know what all else it does. Whatever it does, it sounds like it ought to be avoided.

When not involved with anything else (or when involved with something it doesn't like), my brain seems to default to "I want to go home." It does that when I'm at home, too, which leads me to believe it means "I want not to have to be a responsible adult for a while." Which is probably why it's so hard to get things done on weekends these days. Maybe I should just give up and go to Noank for a weekend, where I don't have to be a responsible adult very much.

In other news, Avenue Victor Hugo lives, on Fridays and Saturdays in Lee, NH. Where the hell is Lee, NH? And how do I get there by teleportation?

Bazzfazzmatazz.

I wish I'd had my act together more yesterday and had cleaned the kitchen then instead of having to do it tonight. But I didn't, because I actually slept late on Sunday (woke up at 9:00; unheard of lately, when I've been waking up at 6:45 on weekends for no discernible reason) and was feeling all smug about getting three loads of laundry done on Saturday. And on Sunday up until about mid-afternoon, the weather was conducive to Lily being friendly, and I succumbed to a case of "can't get up, elbow trapped under seven-pound cat." And after that the weather wasn't conducive to moving around a lot.

At least I got the bedroom and living room rugs vacuumed. And gave the vacuum cleaner a haircut. (Rug fuzz, no problem. Cat hair, no problem. My hair, the vacuum cleaner needs a haircut.) And it won't take that long to just wipe down the stove and the counters and scrub the kitchen and bathroom sinks and Swiffer the floors. (Keep telling yourself that, kid...) And I haven't packed yet, but that's easy. Especially with all the clean laundry from Saturday.

And at least I got the (censored) chorus committee minutes from June sent out. I have more things than I thought I would have going on this summer, and the chorus committee minutes are WAY at the bottom of the list. But because they know I'm taking minutes, nobody ever writes anything down for themselves (like the next meeting date, or the concert dates for next year). So then I get poked about the minutes. I'd like to resign as taker of minutes in general, but I should really wait until we get a new president, whenever that is. The current president keeps making noises about not being president forever, but she hasn't up and quit yet. If I resign before she does, she'll have a fit, because who's going to take the minutes?

I don't know. I'm just out of sorts today. It will all work out, and I'll get the place clean enough to come back and not say "Who lives here, the place is disgusting!", and I'll get to South Station on time for the bus, and on Friday I'll be back and whatever the next thing is will be the next thing.

If I were ever in a position to ask somebody who actually knows whether there's a god or not, I would ask "Are there gods?" instead. If the answer is yes, monotheistic religions are wrong. If the answer is no, there are no gods at all. (This line of thought brought to you by thinking about what the response to "Is there a god?" would mean. Mostly it would mean I'd have a follow-up question: "Which one?")

It was a major struggle to get myself going this morning, because I couldn't get going yesterday. Waking up with a headache will do that, even though I Advilled it into submission for breakfast. I got as far as cleaning out the fridge and opening the kitchen window for a couple of hours, but that was about all. I couldn't even get it together enough to embroider, and flipping the futon mattress over was Right Out. Besides, every time I thought about it, there was a sleeping cat holding it down.

On Saturday, on the other hand, I got a few things done, including buying kitty litter and doing laundry in the newly happy washing machine. The only thing is, having had the feet leveled, it doesn't go THUD THUD THUD when it starts spinning so I don't know when it's five minutes from the end of the cycle. Not that it's the end of the world if I don't know that. And I discovered that High Sierra doesn't play nice with Steam and/or Civ 5, so I can't waste time that way even if I want to. Harumpf.

On Saturday night I went to the BSO concert, because a chorus committee member had an extra ticket. I like Beethoven (8th Symphony) and Stravinsky (The Fairy's Kiss), but I do not like Ligeti's Violin Concerto at all as music. It's contemporary and it's very technically challenging, which I can appreciate, but musically the only way it might make sense is if I took a large amount of LSD beforehand. And it's half an hour long, so it gave me plenty of time to not like it (when they put a note in the program about how long a piece is, so you know when it's over, you're probably in for it). But it was a free ticket, and I would never have seen that piece live to appreciate the technical difficulty if I hadn't been there, so what am I complaining about? There was another contemporary piece that was supposedly a chamber opera (Powder Her Face by Thomas Adès, who was conducting it; also half an hour long, with a note in the program), which made more sense musically but kept reminding me of a poor man's version of George Gershwin and various other flourishes from various other musicals.

On the way home from the concert, my left ankle went out. Either because I was tired, or because I was wearing shoes I wasn't accustomed to, or both, but by the time I got home, it was definitely time to be off it. I stayed off it on Sunday on account of not getting my act together, and it seems to be mostly OK again. I really wish somebody would tell me why it does that. So far we know it isn't a bone issue (as of three or so years ago when I suddenly couldn't put weight on it, and went to the ER and got it x-rayed), and it isn't a sprain. My GP said it might be a nerve issue, but that's on the "well, maybe someday" list and it isn't someday yet.

My assistant is leaving at the end of next week, having found a greener pasture in Cambridge. Which means we're getting a temp until I get a new assistant. Whee?

Christmas was about as low-key as it's possible to be, which was nice. I brought two pounds of shrimp home because shrimp cocktail on Christmas Eve is as close as we get to the Feast of the Seven Fishes. And at this time of year I can get big shrimp for a semi-reasonable price from Whole Foods and they're usually tasty. Which they were this year, but they were very hard to peel when cooked. (Having discovered that, I peeled the other half before cooking, and they behaved much better.) I think maybe they'd just molted and were hanging onto their shells pretty tight. Anyway, we also had the traditional BLTs for Christmas lunch and the traditional rib roast for dinner, and that was all good. To the point where I would almost get a small rib roast myself for New Year's, because I don't feel like cleaning the oven after roasting a duck.

My mother encountered a knitting pattern for beer bottle cozies and decided I needed a couple, so I now have hand-knitted beer bottle cozies, one blue and one variegated. She said they only took a couple of hours apiece, but they go on four needles, which was somewhat of a pain in the neck to start. They double as cat hats, which was highly amusing for me and somewhat confusing for Snip when I got home. I couldn't get Lily to stay in one place with her head at the appropriate angle.

I also got a small contribution to the prescription scuba mask fund, assuming I'll need one (assuming I can't wear contact lenses under a regular one, which would be considerably more convenient; I don't know if they can grind a scuba mask to correct both nearsightedness and astigmatism). Guess I'd better start being religious about losing enough weight to make a wetsuit possible by May. I was going to do that anyway, because part of the mental sludge I'm cleaning out over the break is about remembering that just because it's food and it's available at work doesn't mean I have to eat it. This fall was just awful for that, for several reasons including impostor syndrome (which I still have) and accreditation.

Other mental sludge involves deciding whether I sing with the chorus this spring or not. I'm really inclined not to, because I looked up the music and I just Don't Wanna. I'll go to the committee meetings and take minutes next semester, but I don't want to go through the rehearsals and pleas for donations for a while. Having fun singing is more important to me than I thought, and chorus hasn't really been much fun for the last year or so. I guess that's a decision.

I wish Stumptown Coffee would put out coffee with cream but no sugar in it. The stuff with sugar in it has too damn much sugar in it. I somehow forgot that and bought it again anyway. That'll teach me to go shopping when thirsty and uncaffeinated...

I never did get around to busting out the vacuum cleaner on Saturday, but I did get the bed made and the bag of clutter filled up. There is no more pile in my bedroom, and all the pants and bras that got chucked in the closet as I changed sizes are sorted out and put away properly so I can find them again when/if I need them. (I don't plan to need the 42DD bras ever again, though, so I should probably get rid of them.) That means the kitchen, pantry, bedroom, and bathroom are DONE. The closet won't take much more doing, and the living room won't take much doing to begin with, and the office is down to just the bookshelves and some other bits and pieces.

Sunday was mostly good; I got to see my aunt and uncle who I haven't seen since last Easter or thereabouts, and I handed off my CD player/clock radio to my parents, whose CD player doesn't play reliably. And there was lasagna, which Mom said wasn't brilliant but I think was jes' fine.

Unfortunately there was also a lot of "Molly sits there feeling like a lump of Crisco while her sister shows off all sorts of pictures and video of static trapeze moves and everyone says 'Holy shit!'". I rather hate that. If I say anything about what I've been doing with myself, it looks like I'm competing for attention. I won't win that one, so I don't get into it. I just sit there feeling like a lump of Crisco. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter that I'm the "other kid" even though I'm the older kid, and in the grand scheme of things I know that, but it still bothers me when my nose gets rubbed in it.

I want cornmeal pancakes with molasses. If I buy cornmeal, I could do that for dinner (assuming I remember where the molasses got relocated to in the pantry).

I didn't go to the Boston women's march, because huge crowds are not my best thing. (Although I was OK with the Patriots game I went to. I think maybe it was because there were seats.) However, I have been thinking about what I can do/should do/want to do about the whole situation. I can't change the whole situation, but I can do something about part of it. The question I keep coming up against is which part. I believe that abortion and gay marriage should remain legal, but apparently my opinion doesn't count on gay marriage because I'm straight. I believe in the Golden Rule and that the Golden Rule should be colorblind, but apparently my opinion doesn't count because I'm white.

I would dearly love to tell one of my straight white relatives-by-marriage to haul his Catholic head out of his Libertarian ass for a minute and think about what happens if abortion is illegal and the country is awash in children their parents can't afford. He objects to abortion, and he's firmly in the "I get mine and I don't pay for anyone else's" camp, and that makes me incredibly angry. If he's going to insist that all children must be born, he damn well can't insist that he doesn't have to help pay for them. End rant.

I'm most of the way through The Pillars of the Earth, and wondering whether pigheadedness was an actual survival skill in 1100s England or whether it's just the way the author thinks. Pigheadedness seems to cross all classes, professions and sexes in the book. No wonder there was a civil war going on?

I bought some disinfectant/anesthetic gel for Lily, and she promptly washed it all off (it's safe for feline consumption). It seems she doesn't want any. Fortunately she seems not to really need it either. I just wish the fur would grow back, because its absence keeps reminding me that there's a hole in the side of my cat. Snip is, as usual, washing the living daylights out of Lily's head, but stopping there.

Remembering the Good Things, the weather on Saturday was a revelation. I feel like it hasn't been sunny on a weekend since before Christmas, so I went out grocery shopping (I had to do that anyway) and indulged myself shamelessly on the way home by going to both JP Licks and Union Square Donuts. And now I have satisfied my sugar craving for the next couple of months. I may have to do something about my chocolate craving eventually, though.

Then I came home and played a complete game of Civ 5 for the first time, and won it by cultural victory. I don't think I've ever won a game by cultural victory before; usually I win by building a spaceship first. Then again, I've never played as the Celts before either. I didn't really intend to spend five and a half hours doing that, but I didn't tweak enough settings to make it shorter, either. Next time I should see if I can tweak the shape of the land masses, because being stuck in the middle of a very long, very narrow continent was a pain in the ass. At least it meant everybody wanted open borders with each other. And I do have to admit it was fun clearing out barbarian axemen by sailing a destroyer up to their islands and going KABLAM.