The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Ten thousand curses on ransomware attacks. They got my parents, and Dad paid the ransom. Their computer is now somewhere "getting its sinuses reamed out". When Dad called last night, I went on a bit of an emotional roller coaster. Parents calling after dinner isn't good, but it was Dad so at least he's not in the hospital, but he led with "I did something stupid" and that's the phrase he uses when he's had a bad encounter with a tablesaw, but it wasn't that.

I am trying not to be annoyed with pretty much everything work-related today, but failing miserably so far because I'm caught in three separate email storms, most of which are trying to make things my problem that shouldn't be my problem.

OK. 24 emails in an hour seems to have exhausted everybody, and now maybe I can start sorting things out. Why isn't it Friday?

I finally figured out why some days it seems impossible for anybody to drive on this street in either direction during the daytime without blowing their horn. Turkeys, that's why. And the across-the-street neighbors have started blowing their horn whenever they back out of their driveway. I suspect their car is too old for a camera and they don't want to run over a turkey.

Today's definitely a Wardruna day. It's about one and a half steps up from an Easter Island day, so I don't want to run off to Easter Island without a forwarding address, but I don't want to be a useful and productive peon today either. At least when I'm working from home, I can listen to Wardruna without scaring anybody.

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.

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.

I am out of cereal, but supplied with kitty litter for at least the next three weeks. All in all I'd rather have the kitty litter. Guess I'd better decide what's for breakfast this week if it isn't cereal. If I had some ham, I could have some ham and eggs, if I had some eggs. I suppose I should make an actual grocery list for Friday, too.

I hope whatever foreign object has been in my right eye since Friday night has now been washed out. At least it stopped hurting. It didn't hurt as much as having an eyelash in my eye, just enough to remind me it was there. I suspect the object in question was a cat hair. They're not shedding seriously yet, but they both seem to delight in jumping on the desk and sticking their tails in my eye. At least somebody's delighting in something, these days.

Open window weather would help, but it's March. This is one of the reasons I dislike March. I want it to be warm, and it won't be warm until the middle of April at the earliest (discounting the 70 degrees we got on Friday, which was wonderful, and I want it back).

Hopefully I have now sorted out whatever problem Apple Music decided it had with music I bought right after grad school. By which I mean now it actually plays. Fortunately, because I was going to be very annoyed at how much of my Fruit & Bait list wasn't playing. I don't actually remember the last time I bought any online music, or CDs, come to think of it. The last time I bought sheet music was January.

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?

I went to the Boston Lyric Opera's Pagliacci on Saturday. They combined it with a circus, which both took some of the starch out of Going To The Opera (and caused an amusing exchange of text messages about what length of glove Downton Abbey characters would wear to the opera, combined with a circus, performed in an ice rink, and whether you can eat corn dogs in an opera gown without getting mustard on it) and extended the performance time. And the circus acts were good, too; aerial stuff and some juggling and contortionists. The opera itself was good, and I know how much work it is to sing like that. However, if I'm going to pick nits, I didn't like the translation (most of it was in English) and I wish Canio hadn't had such a thick Hispanic accent. He sounded like he was trying to be Caruso. Never mind. I'm glad I went, anyway.

Unfortunately I spent most of yesterday having a headache. Some day I will learn that when I start feeling like I'm going to have a headache, it's not going to go away, and I should go take some Advil immediately. If I wait until I actually have the headache, it laughs at Advil (and caffeine, and steam, and anything else). So I went to bed with the headache and thankfully woke up without it.

Partly because of the opera, and partly because of the headache, I declined to go to the Red Sox game yesterday even though I was offered a seat behind home plate. I probably should have gone, because they actually won it with a walk-off home run and that would have been exciting, and it was a good day for outdoor sports. It wouldn't have helped the headache, though.

Speaking of headaches, although this one is metaphorical, there's a hole in the side of my cat again. Lily's cyst started filling up and she decided she wasn't having it, and so she licked all the fur off and put a hole in the cyst. At least she seems to be leaving it alone now that it's done what she wanted. But the bald spot is really obvious and it looks like there's a hole in the side of my cat. And the antimicrobial spray bottle hisses, and she interprets that as Be Somewhere Else, Right Now, because that's what I mean when I hiss at her. I haven't figured out what to do about that yet, except maybe spray the stuff on a gauze pad in another room and go dab the raw spot with that.

I've gone from looking at my hair in the mirror and thinking "Ye gods, that's RED! But it's gorgeous" to "Ye gods, that's gorgeous! And it's red." Still not sure I want to re-do it in August, but we'll see. It's dark red, and it's coming off on my towels, but they're TJ Maxx towels, so I don't particularly care if they're still red after I wash them. I had to take my earrings out on Friday in order to get a panorex for the DTP OSCE exam, and never put them back in again afterward, so at least I didn't get my earrings dyed too.

I confused all the Year 2 students at the DTP OSCE by handing them a panorex that was actually me and had absolutely nothing wrong with it, when the story was that I had been hit in the chin with a soccer ball and couldn't open my mouth much, so they were looking for a TMJ disc displacement or edema. It was fun after the first group, though. And that was Friday, so I didn't have to go charging off to chorus again until Saturday.

The concert went pretty well, although it was long (6:15 call for 8:00 concert that ended at 10:45), and the music is still invading my brain at odd moments. But it's done with, and I'm done until September because while Dvorak's The Spectre's Bride might be fun, they're doing it in Czech, which is more effort than I want to put in twice a week for six weeks.

Speaking of which, I really have to get in touch with the dive shop and set up another couple of play sessions and a session with an instructor. Now that my major contribution to commencement (the graduation survey slides) is done, I should be able to think about non-Harvard things for a little while.

I need to have a fairly massive cleaning fit sometime this week, because I am tired of the tumbleweeds of cat hair and rug fuzz. Last week I didn't have the time or the energy to do anything about them, but that was last week. This week I should have considerably more energy.

I've been going through something of a saga with my watch. I have a Skagen watch I like very much, which came with a flexible metal mesh band. I nearly tore that band somehow in the process of putting up my scuba gear rack, so I went to the watch store in Harvard Square that claims to do Skagen repairs, and they replaced the original band with a stiffer one I didn't really like all that much. But it got the job done, so I lived with it, until last Wednesday when the clippy bit on the end fell off in a way I can't fix by myself, and I couldn't wear the watch at all. Not wearing a watch drives me crazy. The easiest way to fix that in short order was to buy a new watch, so I went to the Harvard Square store again on Saturday before the concert, and ended up with an Aristo watch with a Skagen band more like the one I had had on my Skagen watch to begin with.

What I really want is to take both watches somewhere and say "Please take the band off the Aristo and put it on the Skagen, and fix the band that is now on the Skagen and put it on the Aristo", but I've been through enough watch-related annoyance in the last month and right now I'm just glad I have one I can wear that works. And I'm not looking at my wrist nine times a day and saying "Oh yeah, no watch."

The new bedroom rugs arrived yesterday. For some reason, every time I get something heavy or awkward delivered, it usually arrives on a Wednesday, so I get home from chorus and have to haul something up the stairs and deal with it. The rugs were actually quite manageable, since they were rolled up together and stuck in a plastic bag. So I hauled them upstairs and spread them out with emergency backup rug pads under them, and they seem to be what I wanted. The cats haven't decided whether they're acceptable yet, but it hasn't even been 24 hours yet.

I broke one of my cardinal rules last night and spent $20 coming home from Cambridge in a cab. The bus app said 30 minutes for the next 66 and 28 minutes for the next 86, and it was 9:35, and my immediate reaction was "Well, fuck that right in the ear with something sharp", so I got in a cab. And got home at 9:50. I would write the T a nasty letter, but it wouldn't make a single iota of difference.

I think I have a plan for scuba certification. Three more pool sessions, one with an instructor, when the pool schedule goes back to Sundays, and then I go try for certification again in June. I presented this plan by email to the training director to see what he thought, but I haven't heard back yet. In any case, I'm not doing summer chorus this year because the only other bucket list piece I can think of right now is Mozart's Requiem, and they did that two years ago. I got started on diving late last summer because Carmina Burana got in the way, but now I can say I've sung Carmina Burana.

It's shedding season. The cats are shedding, I'm shedding, there's hair everywhere. I guess that means it's officially spring? I'm in favor of spring, but I do wish it would decide to be spring and stay that way. The whole "three days of sun and four days of solid overcast and cold rain every week" pattern is going to get old soon. I suppose rain is good for the green and growing things, but I am not green and growing (yet) and I'd like sunshine and 60s consistently. Add another item to the list for the Minister of Convenience.

I wish I could feel mentally good and physically good on the same day, for once. At least I’m sleeping better again; I was right, I started sleeping when Lily came home from the hospital. And I’m very happy she’s not so skinny any more. I have a reasonable expectation of finding a live cat when I get home; having her poorly medicated was bad enough, and then unmedicated was worse.

I really want to go to the Dunster House Messiah sing, but it starts at 8:00 and I’d be hauling my carcass home from Cambridge entirely too late, again. What I really want to do is leave work at 4:30, get on the M2, go to Harvard Square and buy a lot of chocolates from Burdick’s, go to Santouka Ramen, and THEN go to the Messiah sing. I never get to do fun stuff like that on an actual chorus night.

I also want quiet; I’m tired of hearing other people’s phone conversations even when I’m not listening to them.

Mostly I just want to stop being my boss for a while (she's out this week, and last week, and I'm her spare brain). And I need to have the conversation about responsibility and authority. I’m getting to the point where my responsibilities are outrunning my authority, and that makes me unhappy.

OK, now at least I’ve got quiet. And I can stop being my boss, at least for today, having talked to three DPH candidates about the MMSc in Dental Ed (wish I could have done it with all three together, but DPH isn’t that organized). I want a nap, but I’m not going to get one. What I am going to get is out of here at 4:30 in lieu of lunch, though. Because everybody else around here has semi-flexible schedules, so why can’t I for once?

I’d really like to take Fridays off from January through March. I’d REALLY like to take Fridays off until I run out of vacation days, but that would be late July, and going back to five-day weeks after seven months would suck.

I don’t need three or four SnorgTees, but I’m in the sort of mood that appreciates silly shirts and I’m considering inflicting them on the parental units. I can’t decide whether Dad needs “This is not a drill”, or “Schroedinger’s dog” or “Peter Cotton Ale”, and I don’t know what Mom needs. If I were buying silly shirts for myself, I’d get the astronaut sneeze or “I found this humerus”, or both. But I don’t really need silly shirts. What I need is work-appropriate sweaters.

Oh well. Never mind. I’m sure someday four accreditations from now, when I’m retired at 70 or so, I can wear all the silly shirts I want.

Four more days. This has been the longest two and a half weeks of my life as far as I can remember. At least these days I'm reasonably certain I'll open the door downstairs and find a live cat. I wasn't sure about that for a while there. Now she's eating a reasonable amount and stopped wanting second dinner, which means I've got 78 little cans of cat food and nobody to eat them. I wonder if the Gifford Cat Shelter would want them? If not, maybe I'll see if Dr. P wants them when she comes to do Lily's blood draw on Dec 20.

Dress rehearsal last night, which was equal parts annoying (no, the entire alto section was NOT singing flat all night; one alto was, and she was behind me) and balm for the soul, which is what I sing for. Unfortunately when rehearsal ended, it was pouring rain and blowing all over and generally nasty out and I didn't like it At All. Fortunately all the connections worked out for once, and I walked off the 66 right onto the train, so I got home at about 10:40 and got to hang out with Lily for a little while. I'll have to go to bed early tonight, though, because we have the second dress rehearsal tomorrow night.

I suppose one of the advantages to having rehearsal in Harvard Square is that the Coop bookstore is right there. Yesterday the NY Times had an interesting review of a book on the Vietnam War, about which I know practically nothing, and last night I strolled into the bookstore and bought the book. The review claims that the author comes at the subject as if the war was everybody's fault, which is one of the things I've found frustrating about what little I've read about it so far. Everybody wants to blame the Communists or the Vietnamese nationalists or the Americans sticking their noses where they didn't belong, but nobody I've read yet has wanted to blame all sides. (Still waiting for a book like that on Israel and Palestine, which is also everybody's fault as far as I can tell.)

However, having just finished Prairie Fires (destitute midwestern farmers, 1880-1940, with emphasis on Laura Ingalls Wilder) and The Battle of Arnhem (Monty and Browning, argh), I'm not sure I can stand any more historical clusterfucks just yet. Fortunately I have the latest No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book, in which things always work out in the end, and The Paper Menagerie to get through first.

Nice of NASA to land the Insight rover on Mars way the hell away from where Mark Watney could have gotten to it. If I were Andy Weir and had to keep answering questions about why he didn't use Insight, it would get really annoying (and I'm sure there are people out there who would go to author talks just to ask about that).

I have no idea where that last thought came from.