redbird | Recent Entries

Hi. This is an online substitute for a paper journal, as well as a place to talk to people, so a lot of what's here is quotidian stuff about my life and place. ~~These days, that's more exploring the Seattle area than what's in bloom right now in my corner of the world.~~ As of March 2016, "place" is the Boston area: we moved to Arlington, Mass., in March 2016, then Somerville a year and a half later. I'm now living in Boston with @cattitude and @adrian_turtle, still figuring out my way around Brighton and other parts of Boston, and how long it actually takes to get to my various medical and other appointments on the other side of the Charles. Some of the basics about me are in my userinfo; the userpic with this sticky post is a photo of me, taken in 2007, in case you're wondering whether I'm the redbird you know from elsewhere.

Long ago when the net was flat, I spent a bunch of time on Usenet, mostly rassef and alt.polyamory; I did some of my growing up in science fiction fandom, which in my case meant writing in/for a lot of apas. If you don't know why I subscribed to your journal, we probably have friends in common, and either one of them said "this person is cool" or you posted interesting comments, and I looked at your journal and found it interesting.

Anyone is welcome to read and comment on my journal (though I screen comments on some posts). I do post some things locked and/or filtered. I am more likely to give access to people I know, either previously (online or off) or from interactions here. If we know each other but I might not recognize your username, please leave a note here so I can make the connection.

If we don't already know each other, welcome, and please introduce yourself. I'm screening all comments to this post, so you can tell me "Hi, it's $old_friend" without other people seeing the connection between your username here and other names or handles you use. Or comment on other posts, and I'll get some feeling for what you're like.

There are a half-dozen access-locked posts in here, none recent, with nude photos of me (all tagged "nudes"). I grant access to most people who ask (and many who don't), and those aren't the posts I consider private.

I generally use a cut tag for details of exercise or (rarer) body size/shape posts, and I tend to avoid other people's discussion of weight and dieting. By request, I'll be cut-tagging discussions of covid masks. If there are other things you would like similar warnings about, let me know. (I am assuming the current level of cut-tagging on exercise is okay for everyone reading this journal; if not, let me know and I'll see what I can do to address that.) I also use cut tags for things that even I don't find very interesting, but may need to look up later: Dreamwidth as external memory.

I'm (still) posting about politics. I'm not cut-tagging those posts, but I am going to try to label the entries that are entirely or mostly about politics, rather than drop a paragraph about calling my senators in between discussions of out-of-town visitors and cucumbers, in case your self-care means you need to rake a break from reading about politics.

I'm also still posting about the coronavirus pandemic, how I'm dealing with the situation, etc. Most of those posts are tagged with "COVID-19," "life during covid-19," or "the new normal" (or "the new normal?") and some are also tagged "coronavirus"

[last updated July 17, 2024]

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via

oursin, something I found interesting: We still don't understand family resemblance, and some of what we thought we knew is mistaken, or might be.

This article describes research that used data from almost a million people: every Norwegian student who took a standardized test from 2007-2019.

Quoting the article: "The resemblance of twins cannot be reconciled with any model....The resemblance of adoptees cannot be reconciled with any model."

Adjusting a model to account better for twins makes it a poorer match of adoptive relationships, and vice versa. Any attempt to account for one of these moves the model away adopted siblings makes it fit twins less well, and vice versa.
( cut for length )

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links,
science

Cattitude, Adrian, and I are going to be in London for a week, starting Monday July 14th. This trip is partly so my brother and I can sort out my mother's things, including photos and papers, but we should have some free time to see people and/or do tourist things.

We'd like to get together with people. I realize this is somewhat last-minute as well as vague, since we don't know how much time we'll have available.

I have visited London several times, but that trip to see my mother in April was Adrian's first visit to England; Cattitude was three with me for a week in 2001.

We mask indoors, but it's July, so we're hoping for restaurants with outdoor seating.

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london

I went to the Brookline (Coolidge Corner) farmers market this afternoon. I bought the two things I was specifically looking for--lamb merguez sausages, from Stillman's, and raspberries. When I was buying the sausages, I told the vendor that I'd asked for this kind of sausage a couple of weeks ago, at a different farmers market, and thanked him (them) for making that specific flavor of sausage.

One small box of raspberries, because we've had bad luck this summer with over-buying berries, and not eating all of them before them spoiled. I also bought two small cucumbers, and a baguette, even though it's not good baguette weather, because we like Clear Flour bakery's "ancienne" baguettes.

I stopped at Burdick's and got a cup of dark hot chocolate to take out, because it's unseasonably cool and felt like good weather for sitting outside with a hot drink. I didn't buy anything else there, because the chocolate-covered citrus has suffered from shrinkflation: Burdicks is charging almost twice as much as they did a few years ago, for about half as much candy.

The Dean Road station on green line C station isn't far, but it's enough of a hill to be good exercise: I walk quickly on my way to the T unless I make an effort not to, and then the walk back is uphill all the way.

I realized, after posting this but before dinner, that I overdid things and was out of executive function.

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I talked to someone at Amalgamated Bank this morning, who told me what I would need to do to take my mother's name off a joint account, then suggested that I set up online banking and then transfer the money to my account at another bank. Setting up online banking on their website was straightforward, and then it popped up a verification step involving sending a text to a cell phone associated with the account. Entirely reasonable, but my phone number isn't on the account.

I called back, and talked to another helpful person. She told me how to add the number: send her an email with "attn: Cheryl" as the subject line, giving them my current phone number and attaching a copy of my ID. I did that, and got an "undeliverable" message from Postmaster@[bank], saying I wasn't authorized to relay messages through the server. So I called back, again, and spoke to someone who told me that oh, yes, it does that, but it does deliver the messages. I got her to check, and they had received my email, but Why?

This still feels like significantly less hassle than sending them a copy of my ID, and an original death certificate. That has to be done by paper mail, not email, because they want an "original" death certificate, which she promised they'd return. (At the moment, those originals are in either New Orleans or London, I'm in Boston, and my brother is on vacation in Ireland.)

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Sometime in the last couple of months, someone posted a link to a site that had interesting looking shirts made of linen, for lower prices than most places charge. I forgot to bookmark it. Can anyone point me to it? or to something else that fits that description, even if you didn't see it here?

Edited to add: A the shirts were less expensive than I expected, which is a large part of why I'm interested. Those may have been sale prices, I don't remember.

Also, the were made of either linen or a linen blend, not "line".

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Jay Kuo takes a break from chronicling the regime's crimes to share some honest hope for today, and the days and months ahead:

https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/celebrating-independence

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political

Boston's Orange Line, by Andrew Elder and Jeremy C. Fox. This is a collection of black-and-white photos, going back to the start of the old elevated orange line, with captions. This was for the "explore Boston history" square on the BPL summer reading bingo. If I'd noticed the "images of rail" series title, I wouldn't have borrowed this book. The captions are just about enough to confirm that there's more than enough to be said on the subject to make a book, but this isn't. This has a disjointed discussion of the lengthy "realigmnent" of the orange line to its current route, and a couple of paragraphs on the decision not to run an 8-lane interstate through the middle of Boston and Cambridge, and no suggestion that anything similar had happened elsewhere. Ah, well.

There are suggestions on the library website for some of the squares (including "with a green cover"), but not this one. Searching the catalog for "Boston histpry" got me this, along with, among other things, a book about the Big Dig, a book about the Great Molasses Flood (which is at least mentioned in this, with a picture of damage to the orange line), and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

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Today's trip to the farmers market was successful and satisfying.

I left the house as soon as I'd had my morning tea, and went to a market that opens at 10 on Sundays. I got there at about 10:20, before they'd sold out of anything I wanted, or might want.

What I particularly wanted was raspberries, and I bought two small boxes of those (totalling about a pint).

Busa Farms had a bin full of nice-looking shell peas, and I bought almost two pounds, because Cattitude is very fond of fresh peas. When I got home, he told me that he'd thought he had missed the local pea season this year. I also bought a bunch of red radishes, because they caught my eye while I was in line to pay for the peas. (Busa had both red and purple radishes, which somehow made them more appealing than if there'd only been one kind of radish.)

Hi-Rise Bakery was there, and I bought a small loaf of their concord bread, which is the right degree of crusty for the three of us. (They also have a thicker-crust "luce.")

The raspberries are from Kimball's, where I also bought a few diva cucumbers.

Stillman's Farm didn't have lamb sausages, but when I asked about it, the vendor said "probably next week" and asked what kind I liked. She is going to report back that they had a request for merguez sausages. I don't know whether we'll get to the same market next week, but it sounds like there will be lamb sausages at the other local farmers markets soon.

A lot of other things looked good, but I decided I didn't need lettuce (multiple varieties), cherry tomatoes, or fish.

Current Mood: satisfied

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I learned this morning that

acelightning has died. She was one of the people I only know online, but feel like friends because we have real conversations (in her case, here on Dreamwidth and previously on LJ).

One book finished in the past fortnight: Aftermarket Afterlife, by Seanan McGuire, the 14th volume in her InCryptid series of fantasy novels. I was disappointed by this one: there were too many ghosts and too few cryptids, and the ending seemed abrupt, even given that this is number 14 in a loose series. I'm not a big fan of ghosts, and the book is narrated by Aunt Mary, the Price family's ghost babysitter. The ebook also contains "Excerpt from Mourner's Waltz," about a bit of Verity's life, as the superintendent and only human resident of a Manhattan apartment building. The novel and short story both contain massive spoilers for at least the two previous books in the series.

I gave up on Twelve Trees (mentioned in the previous post) because the printing was hard on my eyes, and since it's a hardcover rather than an ebook, I can't change the font or print size, and I have to take it back to the library.

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books: fantasy

Cattitude took the cat in for her follow-up appointment, and the nurse said she's doing just fine, and cleared her to start eating crunchy things (which include her favorite cat treats). She hadn't been eating much in the previous few days, so they sent Cattitude home with two medications to improve her appetite. The cat has her appetite back, and headed right for the bowl of kibble, and ignored the bowl of wet food. She also informed us at dinner, when offered Greenies, that those were her proper treats, thank you very much. The other cat, Molly, is also pleased that we are once again giving them kibble and the familiar treats; there was no practical way to give Molly kibble and Kaja only wet food, so neither cat got anything crunchy for ten days.

We may be going to London last month, to sort through some of Mom's stuff, including papers and photos. (Mark needs to be there, and I want to, even though it will mean a lot of time masking, and probably a lot of takeout meals eaten in a hotel room. I emailed the cat sitter,

I checked this afternoon, and my inherited share of Mom's Vanguard account is in my account. Separately, there's a life insurance policy that seems to have asked for another form after my brother sent in what he thought was everything they wanted. In addition to the Vanguard account, there are some UK bank accounts, which Mark thinks will take several months to go through probate. All of this is a little weird, and I want my mother, not her life insurance.

Boston (along with much of the eastern United States and Canada) is in the middle of the sort of heat wave where they advise everyone to stay indoors if possible, not just people who are particularly sensitive to the heat. Both the NWS warning and the Boston heat emergency are only through this evening, but they're predicting that tomorrow will also be hotter than I find comfortable.

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We just had an unexpected visit: Adrian asked if I'd be willing to either mask or sit in the study with the door closed, so one of her comrades could sit in our air conditioned apartment for a little while. Adrian asked because Simcha is less heat-tolerant than I am, and at least as covid-cautious, so I said yes. It was good to talk to them; I'd met Simcha but only in passing, and Adrian hadn't met them at all, but Adrian talks about them, and Simcha is the person we recently gave our loveseat to.

That was fun, and now they have left and I have taken my mask and clothes off, and am drinking tea. I ended the visit when I started getting uncomfortably warm despite the AC, as well as it being time for me to have tea.

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life during covid-19

I went downtown to try on the sandals I'd bought and had delivered to the Clarks store. They didn't fit, so I returned them, which basically meant picking them up, bringing them to the counter, and telling the cashier I was returning the soes.

I stopped at the Copley Square farmers market on the way home and bought a loaf of bread, a few cucumbers, and a pint of strawberries. Part of why I did this today rather than tomorrow was so I could stop at the market.

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shoes

This year, they're giving away tote bags when people come in to get the printed bingo card. I got email on Friday saying the bags had arrived, so I went back to the Honan-Allston branch library this afternoon.

The bags are just like last year's, except printed in green instead of blue. I like last year's bag--it's the right size for me, and reasonably sturdy. I went to Lizzy's afterwards, bought pints, and put my insulated bag inside the library bag.

The prize for a bingo on the summer reading card is a sticker. I just printed a copy of the "more reading" bingo card, on which all the squares are for reading different kinds of books, and am filling in squares on both cards. So far, I haven't read anything that works for both bingo cards.

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summer reading bingo

Adrian made strawberry pancakes, blueberry pancakes, and raspberry pancakes, partly because we have all these strawberries to use up, and partly so I could try cooked strawberries, after the fresh ones made my lips itch on Friday.

I ate a bite of a strawberry pancake, and found it bland and uninteresting. I didn't react to the berry, but it was one small piece of strawberry, and I don't know whether a larger amount would have been a problem.

I may yet try something like a strawberry sauce over cake or ice cream. Adrian noted that raw and cooked strawberries are almost different fruits, but it also seems possible that a strawberry sauce will taste more like raw berries than like strawberries baked into pancakes.

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The three of us went out to the No Kings Yaas Queens combined Pride/NoKings demonstration today, despite my worries about my various joints. Or, at least, that was the plan. It didn't work out, but my knees, hips, and ankles are OK.

We got to Park Street and the Common, and found other people who were looking for the same event, a stage where someone was introducing the next speaker?performer?, and some tables and tents, but no focus. We wound up walking to the side of the Common next to the Public Garden, where we found the parade, smaller than we'd expected but with enough of a crowd I couldn't see much. So we went home, pausing moderately often to rest my joints and watch another bit of parade, which seems to have been heading for Government Center as originally planned, not the Common as we thought.

I'm both glad I went, and disappointed that I didn't actually make it to the first protest or rally I've felt physically capable of in too long.

I will probably update this tomorrow, to note how my joints are feeling. This afternoon, they've felt good enough for some PT exercises.

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I fear that I may have developed an allergy to strawberries.

Cattitude came home from the farmers market with two quarts of strawberries, so we sat down to eat strawberries this evening. Adrian washed a plateful of the berries, and we all started eating.

They're very good strawberries, but I realized after eating a few that my lips were starting to itch. They were tasty enough that I had four or five more before saying anything. When I did, Adrian suggested I go wash my face. I rinsed my lips with plenty of cool water, took a benadryl, complained about the situation, and got Adrian to make me herb tea. I hope I haven't developed an allergy to a fruit I like, after eating them without problems for more than fifty years.

ETA, after responding to people's comments:

It may not be just strawberries. Raw kiwi makes my mouth itch, and I think I remember having a problem with the kiwi on a mixed fruit tart. Possibly-underripe figs also made my mouth itch once, but cooked figs (fig Newton cookies) are OK, and a fig that was ripe enough to fall off the tree at my feet was fine. I think I need to do some reading.

Current Mood: unhappy

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I had telemedicine with the GI doctor this morning. ( mostly for my own reference )

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Cattitude and I got up at 5:45 so he could pill Kaja, preparatory to her dental surgery. Both the pilling and the medical care went well, and she is on soft food only for 10-14 days. Therefore Molly is too, and we have to give them different treats than the usual dental Greenies. (Kaja will also be getting anti-inflammatories for a couple of days, and gabapentin for five.)

I got email from my brother about Mom's estate. He has done the necessary formwork so Vanguard can give us the money from her account there, where we are co-beneficiaries. His share is already in his account existing account. I tried setting an account up online, which apparently failed at the last minute, so I called and got a helpful person to walk me through the process again, step by step. I had gotten far enough earlier to create security questions, including some that I can actually remember my answers to, and haven't used repeatedly elsewhere. Separately, I need to talk to someone at Amalgamated Bank about the account there, a joint account with both our names on it. I hope they'll let me, as co-owner, close the account and transfer the money elsewhere, rather than sending them a copy of the death certificate, getting the account just in my name, and then closing it.

Mark also said he's thinking of going to London next month to sort through Mom's belongings, photos, and paperwork. So he wants to know whether I'm going as well, and if so, what dates worth for me. (Putting this here so I'm less likely to forget to talk to Cattitude and Adrian and then write back to Mark.)

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Last week:

*Cattitude read Blue Moose, by Daniel Pinkwater, aloud to us, because it's one of his favorites and Adrian had never read it. I've reread the book several times, and was happy to hear it out loud.

*I read Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, by Oliver Darkshire. Decidedly weird, funny fantasy. A lot of the humor is in the footnotes, which seem to be at least a quarter of the text. Also, the title does in fact describe the book. Isabella lives in a poor, out-of-the-way village, whose wizard keeps the local goblin market in check, until one day he doesn't. The goblins sell one thing, unnaturally tempting and dangerous fruit.

*Did not finish: Girls Against God, by Jenny Hval. I don't remember where I saw this recommended, and just couldn't get into it.

Currently reading:

*Installment Immortality, by Seanan McGuire, the latest book in her InCryptid series. I started it late last night, and only read a few pages before turning the light out.

*Twelve Trees, by Daniel Lewis, nonfiction about trees and climate change. I picked this up at the libraru, as a "book with a green caover" for the summer reading challenge.

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Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Don't mourn, organize

Sticky: Welcome

Family resemblances are complicated

we will be visiting London

farmers market

new horizons in stupid error messages

looking for a link/website

July 4th

Wednesday reading

farmers market

acelightning has died

Wednesday reading

updates

(no subject)

the sandals didn't fit.

BPL Summer Reading

strawberry follow-up

#NoKings

strawberries

talked to the GI doc

it's been a busy day

Wednesday reading

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