The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Minimal improvement is improvement nonetheless. This morning Snip thought food was interesting, but she didn't want to actually eat it. She's also actually sleeping, as opposed to curled up staring at nothing, and she used the litterbox overnight.

Over the course of today she rediscovered drinking enough water to make me happy without throwing it up ten minutes later (stupid me, I didn't think to offer her water because she's getting sub-q fluids), and at one point she uncurled a bit, scratched behind her ear, and then washed that foot. I hadn't seen her scratch, or yawn, or wash, since Tuesday or so. She still doesn't want to walk more than necessary, but she can; I saw her do it (litterbox, again). Which is better than this morning when I put her in my lap, and she half-fell back off and staggered back to bed.

Still don't know what's going to happen if she doesn't eat tomorrow, and what's going to happen when the pain med wears off on Tuesday. Cross that bridge when we get to it, I guess.

I was supposed to do a lot of chores at home yesterday, but I only got as far as replacing all the smoke detector batteries on the second floor, getting the crud off the tops of the kitchen cabinets while I had the ladder out anyway, Swiffering the bathroom and the hallway, and getting the cat hair off the top of the bathroom door. I still have to vacuum (ye gods, do I have to vacuum...) and clean the kitchen counters and the bathroom fixtures. And make beef and barley and mushroom something or other. And make a list of all the other esoteric things like flipping the futon mattress and finding something that will clean the refrigerator door (so far bleach, baking soda, Lysol kitchen cleaner and plain old elbow grease have all struck out).

Snip decided she had to help with the smoke detector batteries, and in the process of trying not to put the ladder down on top of her, I got tangled up with it and stubbed a couple of toes. Some kinds of help are the kinds of help we all can do without. But after I put the ladder away she came and sat in my lap and was a very good Faithful Catpanion for a while. And I have a reasonable expectation of not being awakened at 2 AM by a chirpy little bastard of a smoke detector this winter.

I haven't been doing a lot of productive gainful-employment work lately. But I thought about it some and decided that it's OK, because the Drama Llama got to pretty much avoid CODA while I worked my ass off for a year and a half. So now he's working his ass off for a while and I'm not, so much. It all comes around eventually.

Pretty good weekend. I got my watches back, bought three books I haven't read (The World Beneath the Sands, Culture Warlords, and Anansi Boys), went to H Mart on a field trip and got assorted pancakes and soy-marinated eggs and a bibimbap kit and some smoked duck and some more rice cakes and various other happy stuff like that, discovered what happens when Snip encounters a fish cake (has to figure out that it's fish, after which GIMME THAT), put out the last of the scented kitty litter, and gave myself permission to order unscented kitty litter online and get it delivered for once.

I wish I didn't have to have the litter delivered, but my ankle is alternately grumbling and hollering at me, from one of the specific places that hurt (after it healed enough to hurt in specific places) when I sprained it last December. I suspect that adding a half-mile walk with 40 lb of litter won't help it. So, delivery it is, at least this time.

As of yesterday, the hot water in the shower was dripping from the tub spout to an extent that wouldn't be good for the water bill long-term. So today the plumber came and repaired the hot water faucet, and told me that the fixtures are on their last legs on account of being 40 years old or so. (He also said the entire neighborhood has awful water pressure, which I didn't know because it seems fine to me.) I rather like having separate faucets for the hot and cold water, and if the plumber had his way he'd replace it with a single hot/cold/diverter unit. That would require replacing some of the tile, too, though. But at least the drip is down to occasional for now, and the faucet doesn't crank beyond horizontal to turn off, and the plumber doesn't think it's leaking behind the tile, which I worry about occasionally.

This morning a flatbed trailer parked on the street and disgorged a Bobcat, which I saw trundling around, and, apparently, an excavator, which had already gone where it was going by the time I saw the Bobcat. I happened to look out the window after the plumber had left, in time to see the excavator go back on the trailer and pull the ramps up after it, except it was about six inches too far forward, so it backed up and the ramps fell down flat. For no particular reason the whole process amused me.

Thankfully, the meeting I postponed last week went fairly well today. Especially since my boss had already told this person what she wanted to hear in the first place, so I didn't have to say I couldn't tell her that. There might be hope for this week after all.

I am coming to realize that one of the things that frustrates the living hell out of me is people who ask me something, and then when I either don't know the answer or don't understand the question, it turns into "Well, find an answer and then do this piece of my job for me once you have it." WRONG. I'll give you the answer and you can do your own damn job. ESPECIALLY if the answer, once I understand the question, is information anybody could find in about five seconds. (No, I am not going to fill out half of this online survey and submit it for you. I'll tell you what to put in it, but the survey was not originally sent to me and I refuse to take responsibility for submitting it.)

One and a half more weeks until I can stop being helpful for a week.

Snip is getting one of her right front toenails stuck in things. That was quick, but at least it's not the massive dagger on the right hind, again, which I trimmed as short as I dared with the help of happy pills. I'm out of happy pills, so I have to wait until she's very deeply asleep. Dreaming doesn't count; I've tried that before and it didn't work at all. If she understood English, I could explain, but I think we're all better off that she doesn't.

I had Trader Joe's instant miso ramen for breakfast because it was the most breakfastlike thing in the house. I still haven't gone grocery shopping, although I should have done it yesterday in the nice weather. But yesterday I was too worn out by the end of the day. This afternoon I have at least two, possibly three, meetings, so not holding out a lot of hope for having after-work energy today either. But I must go to the pet store and get some wet food suitable for hiding gabapentin in, so I can finally give Snip a manicure and she'll stop getting her feet stuck in the rugs.

Yesterday I got worn out at a Zoom "HR Teatime" meeting that was a waste of a perfectly good hour between 3:00 and 4:00, and I actually like our main HR person; it's just that she's been doing too many online seminars and has too many online-seminar-based "warm and fuzzy self-care in the time of pandemic" ideas at the moment. What I got from the meeting is that staff are way down on the list of priorities; students and faculty first, patients second, staff whenever they get around to us. Which is probably as it should be, because after all we are a dental school, but I also got emails that the new dean wants to meet with all the students by class year in his first week. I wonder if he'll ever want to meet with staff?

Well, never mind, at least the HR meeting didn't even mention furloughs or layoffs, only early retirement, and I don't qualify for that.

The Dachau transcription project has led me into doing research occasionally, and I discovered that it wasn't entirely out of left field for the Nazis to want porcelain painters, because one of the subcamps of Dachau was a porcelain factory. (Also, the earlier the date on the card, the more likely the person's listed occupation is to be something other than worker, assistant worker, or farm worker.) I do still want to know why some of the cards say Lodz and some say Litzmannstadt; Germany renamed a lot of places in Poland and the Baltic states and used those names most of the time, even though Litzmannstadt takes longer to write. They also misspelled a lot of Russian place names, but that may be a consequence of having different alphabets. Or maybe it's a consequence of thinking that Poles and Russians were subhuman. Or maybe some of both.

On a cheerier note, my cousin who would have no luck whatsoever if not for bad luck is now in complete remission from myeloma. When he was diagnosed they gave him five years to live, and then he went into a clinical trial for a new drug, and now he's in remission. Score one for the good guys, because he is pretty much one of the good guys.

I thought it was Friday today, but it isn't. Oh well.

There is hope for this week, however, in that I still can't sing (stupid sinuses), but at least I've stopped waking myself up snoring. More sleep is good. Now all I have to do is persuade Snip to stop sleeping directly on top of my legs and getting offended when I want to roll over.

There is also hope for this week in that I got a six-pack of Guinness from one of the students I wrote about eight externship letters for. When I said he owed me beer for the letter I wrote at 4:45 on a Friday a couple of weeks ago, I told him I was kidding, but he went and did it anyway. And so I accepted the beer, and it's sulking in my bottom file drawer until I take it home.

Speaking of sulking, we're probably going to have to close the faculty practice for a while because they're down to a week's worth of masks and can't order any more on account of coronavirus panic hoarding. We've got to keep the teaching practice open because that's the point of being a dental school, but they're rationing masks. I don't know who I'm more annoyed with: the media for fomenting panic, or the general public for being gullible.

I still have to do massive amounts of grocery and kitty litter shopping, which is going to take at least tomorrow night and Saturday. But it will be good to have food in the house and not feel like I'm living on odds and ends. And having kitty litter in the house is always good.

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 is me not staying in bed until Saturday. I did ignore the existence of Halloween last night, though, because HSDM went mildly overboard with it and I was DONE by 3:30.

Sometime earlier this week, the estate planning lawyer I had filled out a bunch of forms for last year called, because I had fallen off their radar and they'd like to get me off their list. So I talked to him again today, and I get to go sign my will and living will and pet trust on December 3, after I get done with my annual physical. I might as well get all the Responsible Adult stuff done at the same time, and it won't hurt to do it before I run off to Bonaire (although the legal documents are going to cost me another $1000. But what's another $1000 on top of pet insurance ($1100) and dive trip ($2600 so far, without gear rental) and vet bill ($whoknows) in October and November anyway?).

In light of the above expenditures, I managed not to buy $100 worth of cookbooks on Wednesday night. I really wanted to, though. I need inspiration if I'm going to stop eating noodles. I eat way too many noodles, because noodles are both cheap and uncomplicated. Memo to cookbook authors, however: cilantro is disgusting, so stop making it a major component of every other savory recipe in the book. I can cope with "garnish with cilantro" because then I just won't, but when the dish has three main flavors and cilantro is one of them, that pretty much ruins it, and I can't always use parsley instead (cucumber salad with sesame and parsley just sounds odd). If I ran the universe, things would be different, that's all.

I think Snip had a 36-hour internal complaint of some sort, which is better as of today. But for the last two days she didn't want to be touched aft of her ears, and she got up for meals and ate them, but wasn't as enthusiastic about them. As of this morning, she's much better; she woke me up at 6:00 to be scritched, and she was hollering for breakfast from the kitchen when I got out of the shower. Much better. Last night she got insistent about cheese, too, so she was probably starting to feel better then. And the sun has been out for most of the day, so hopefully she's charged up her solar cells and will be better until the next time we don't see the sun for a week.

I'm annoyed with myself for wasting a perfectly lovely day yesterday staying indoors all day, but on the other hand, putting on shoes was one step too many, and I can't go any further than the driveway without shoes on. So I stayed indoors and did laundry and watched football and wasted a lovely September day.

It was Snip's 12th birthday yesterday, though. I had bought her some birthday provolone on Saturday and broke it out yesterday and she was happy. After next September I'll be living with two official teenagers.

On Saturday I did the running around, and got caught in the downpour because I had just gotten to Washington Square when the dive shop called to tell me my computer had arrived. So I turned around and went back down there, and got rained on some on the way there, and got poured on going back to the bus stop. Fortunately the bus stop is somewhat sheltered and the computer in question doesn't even care where it is until it gets four feet underwater. Although it was in a box, so it didn't actually get wet anyway. I wish it had better instructions, either in the box or online, because I have yet to figure out how to set the date and time on it. Youtube to the rescue, I hope.

I also went out again after it quit raining, and cashed in my collection of quarters. I'd been trying to be patient and fill the whole container, but it was within 1/2" of the top and I couldn't stand it any more because I wanted to know how much it amounted to. So now I know; if using a Coinstar machine and its almost-not-worth-it 11.9% fee, the quarter collection container amounts to at least $130.

Where the Crawdads Sing is a reasonably good book. I borrowed it from a coworker who had borrowed it from another coworker, and read it on Saturday morning. I don't need to own it, but I'm not sorry I read it.

Silly, but gratifying, milestone: for the first time in my life, a comment I made on a NY Times article got selected by the staff as a "NY Times Pick" and, as a bonus, ended up being the second most recommended comment on the article. It was about the high school swimmer in Alaska who was stripped of a win because the referee didn't like the way her suit fit. All I said was that on the swim team I was on in high school, the first rule was no comments about how anybody looks in a bathing suit. And nobody made any as far as I know, probably partly because it was a kicked-off-the-team offense and partly because after the first week we stopped noticing anyway.

I asked my gin-snob coworker last week about what I wanted if I wanted a G&T, because Tanqueray wasn't quite it, and he said Seersucker. So I tried it, and he was right. It shouldn't be drunk neat because there's too much mint in it that way (and I don't like drinking neat gin in the first place), but as a G&T, it's lovely stuff. I don't even want lime in it. Which is good because I never seem to be able to find any limes that aren't rocks with lime rind on them.

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.