More comments I've left on other people's posts:
Someone on my reading list has been doing genealogy, and found, among other things, that a lot of his ancestors started in New York when they landed in North America.
My thought was:
That is cool.
Also, New York is like that. I am smiling at the thought of being connected to you and a huge number of other people because our ancestors all came through Ellis Island.
Which in reality might as well be expanded to "because we share the Most Recent Common Ancestor," but it's a cheery thought in an otherwise drab day.
A comment on Dec. 15 about how I'm handling pandemic restrictions (the context was someone whose family wants them to travel for Christmas):
Another thing is, many people are looking for loopholes, for reasons why the rules shouldn't apply in their case--and are finding, or imagining, different loopholes. Everyone thinks that they are being the right amount of careful, because it's easy to think that you're smarter than whoever made the rules, while agreeing that other people need guidance. I'm reducing that tendency in my own case by having decided, as an intelligent person who doesn't want to use up all her executive function on this, to make the meta-decision that I will be at least as cautious as Somerville would require (Somerville has the most cautious set of rules in Massachusetts, and I lived there for a while). So if I couldn't do something there, I won't do it over here in Belmont; that doesn't mean that anything that I could do there is sensible.
This works because, for me, "past Vicki made this decision, I trust her" is emotionally easier than reconsidering every time, and "past Vicki" isn't someone I think of as being unreasonably strict--which it's very easy to think of a government being, even if I also think that they are if anything being too loose.
Memorable views out of airplane windows:
Having read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars made looking at an ice-covered, mountainous landscape from an airplane at 33,000 feet feel science fictional. I knew that Siberia would be snow- and ice-covered in March, and mountains are a thing that happen on Earth, but that's different from expecting to see that entire landscape of ice and snow on mountains, on a Seattle-Hong Kong flight.
At this point I usually try an aisle seat on overnight flights. I had to climb over sleeping people a few times on the flight back from Hong Kong across the Pacific, a flight on which it felt like all the other passengers were asleep. I'm glad I didn't already know to do that in 1997, though, because I got to look at Comet Hale-Bopp through the airplane window.
puddle-jumper from Vancouver to Seattle at sunset
watching sunset colors for hours on a London-New York flight
Also, the time I encouraged the middle-seat passenger to lean over to look out my window at Rainier and the Cascades, because she mentioned that this was her first trip to Seattle and she hadn't seen the mountain.
In response to someone complaining about chronic pain and what the doctor and PT want her to do:
At some point there can be more PT things than there's room for in the day/in one's life.
Therapists (and anyone else suggesting ongoing exercises or other practice) aren't very good at things like "it would be great if you could do this X times a day, n days a week. If you can't manage that, or can't manage it every week, try to do at least Y. And even a little might postpone the need for surgery, or ease your post-surgical recovery."
I keep an exercise chart to try to balance between them and not forget any. That's based on the understanding that ideally I'd do most of them three times a week and the rest twice, and in reality twice a week for some and once a week for the others is a realistic goal. So far, that's kept me out of the surgeon's office.
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white_hart took a poll about covid risk-tolerance, and talked a bit about where theirs is right now. I answered the poll, and then said:
I'm using public transit both for leisure purposes, and for non-commuting necessary trips (to get a chest X-ray, for example), and will probably continue to do so, with the deciding factor being less "am I willing to get on a bus/subway for this?" than "is this trip sensible right now?"
I'm fairly sure that I am more comfortable than average about taking transit now, and suspect this is because I was more comfortable on transit than a lot of people before Covid. My subconscious files subways, even ones I'm not familiar with, as comfortable/safe.
Someone on my reading list has been doing genealogy, and found, among other things, that a lot of his ancestors started in New York when they landed in North America.
My thought was:
That is cool.
Also, New York is like that. I am smiling at the thought of being connected to you and a huge number of other people because our ancestors all came through Ellis Island.
Which in reality might as well be expanded to "because we share the Most Recent Common Ancestor," but it's a cheery thought in an otherwise drab day.
A comment on Dec. 15 about how I'm handling pandemic restrictions (the context was someone whose family wants them to travel for Christmas):
Another thing is, many people are looking for loopholes, for reasons why the rules shouldn't apply in their case--and are finding, or imagining, different loopholes. Everyone thinks that they are being the right amount of careful, because it's easy to think that you're smarter than whoever made the rules, while agreeing that other people need guidance. I'm reducing that tendency in my own case by having decided, as an intelligent person who doesn't want to use up all her executive function on this, to make the meta-decision that I will be at least as cautious as Somerville would require (Somerville has the most cautious set of rules in Massachusetts, and I lived there for a while). So if I couldn't do something there, I won't do it over here in Belmont; that doesn't mean that anything that I could do there is sensible.
This works because, for me, "past Vicki made this decision, I trust her" is emotionally easier than reconsidering every time, and "past Vicki" isn't someone I think of as being unreasonably strict--which it's very easy to think of a government being, even if I also think that they are if anything being too loose.
Memorable views out of airplane windows:
Having read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars made looking at an ice-covered, mountainous landscape from an airplane at 33,000 feet feel science fictional. I knew that Siberia would be snow- and ice-covered in March, and mountains are a thing that happen on Earth, but that's different from expecting to see that entire landscape of ice and snow on mountains, on a Seattle-Hong Kong flight.
At this point I usually try an aisle seat on overnight flights. I had to climb over sleeping people a few times on the flight back from Hong Kong across the Pacific, a flight on which it felt like all the other passengers were asleep. I'm glad I didn't already know to do that in 1997, though, because I got to look at Comet Hale-Bopp through the airplane window.
puddle-jumper from Vancouver to Seattle at sunset
watching sunset colors for hours on a London-New York flight
Also, the time I encouraged the middle-seat passenger to lean over to look out my window at Rainier and the Cascades, because she mentioned that this was her first trip to Seattle and she hadn't seen the mountain.
In response to someone complaining about chronic pain and what the doctor and PT want her to do:
At some point there can be more PT things than there's room for in the day/in one's life.
Therapists (and anyone else suggesting ongoing exercises or other practice) aren't very good at things like "it would be great if you could do this X times a day, n days a week. If you can't manage that, or can't manage it every week, try to do at least Y. And even a little might postpone the need for surgery, or ease your post-surgical recovery."
I keep an exercise chart to try to balance between them and not forget any. That's based on the understanding that ideally I'd do most of them three times a week and the rest twice, and in reality twice a week for some and once a week for the others is a realistic goal. So far, that's kept me out of the surgeon's office.
white_hart took a poll about covid risk-tolerance, and talked a bit about where theirs is right now. I answered the poll, and then said: I'm using public transit both for leisure purposes, and for non-commuting necessary trips (to get a chest X-ray, for example), and will probably continue to do so, with the deciding factor being less "am I willing to get on a bus/subway for this?" than "is this trip sensible right now?"
I'm fairly sure that I am more comfortable than average about taking transit now, and suspect this is because I was more comfortable on transit than a lot of people before Covid. My subconscious files subways, even ones I'm not familiar with, as comfortable/safe.
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And OMG word re PT! There are not enough hours in the day, it feels like. And I am adding in new PT in September. Here's hoping that some of those overlap some that I am already doing!