Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Three more random topics:

2019-06-19T22:59:22Z

kaberett gave me "Haematite, trains, clouds."

I associate hematite with roadnotes, who had a necklace of hematite chips. She also had a similar-shaped necklace of myrrh; I have a necklace of amethyst beads of that shape, which I don't think I've worn in this century.

Trains certainly aren't something I don't know or care much about. I started taking the subway alone, daily, before my twelfth birthday, in order to get to school. Sometimes I stood between cars on the (#7) elevated trains (shown in this userpic), even when there was room inside the subway cars. People in their early teens don't have a good grasp of mortality, but I did stop leaning on the subway car doors after a few well-publicized incidents of doors opening while the train was in motion between stations. I have been to railroad museums on three different continents, including two or three in the United States (depending on whether the San Francisco Cable Car Museum, which I recommend, counts as a railroad museum). And this reminds me that I've been meaning to go ride on the Mattapan Trolley since before I actually moved to Massachusetts.

Clouds can be very pretty, and eye-catching even when they're not pretty. My favorite skies to look at lately are the bright blue skies of sunny days with a few white clouds shining against them. That somehow reminds me that one of the ways people on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.fandom would reply to really out-there assertions was "what color is the sky on your planet?" And one day I realized that if I was asked that, seriously, the answer would be "all of them." Mostly shades of blue or gray during the day, and gray or black at night, but the sky contains all the colors of the visible spectrum, in all sorts of shades and combinations. (That's not a new discovery, of course, but it's not something most people think about much.) Come to think of it, the cloudy sky at night is different color than it used to be, since there are fewer sodium-vapor lamps.

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idonethis

2019-05-06T21:06:54Z

I've been using an odd thing called "idonethis," which bills itself as "team progress tracking" software, for several years; the pitch is that you can write down a few things in 30 seconds, so other people you're working with can see what got done and share plans. There was also a free single-user mode. The site would send out daily emails, prompting a reply with what I'd done that day, and reminding me of what I'd done a week, or month, or three or six months, earlier.

I started using this after roadnotes mentioned it; she liked it despite the ungrammatical name because it helped her remember that she had in fact done something useful or interesting most days. Sometime in the last week, they quietly discontinued the free service. I went to log into the site this afternoon, to jot down some things I'd done, and was asked for a credit card number and told that my free trial expires in three days.

idonethis is cute, but it's not worth $5/month to me, so I guess I'm done with it. Mostly, I'm going to miss the way the "what have you done today?" emails were an ongoing low-key reminder of roadnotes.

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memory is weird sometimes

2018-02-09T13:46:28Z

conuly posted a link to an article called "Toothpaste Is Our New Favorite Souvenir," which I clicked on out of curiosity:

Cardamom sounded appealing (right now I'm using Tom's of Maine cinnamon-clove), thymol no, cucumber coriander mint… mastic dental gel "that's for Velma" and a momentary sad pang because of course I won't be able to share that with her.

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Thinking about Velma

2017-12-26T15:55:42Z

A couple of unrelated things had me thinking about, and missing, roadnotes. First was a conversation yesterday, at dim sum, with Elizabeth (who is not on DW) and a couple of people I don't know well (I think ron_newman was one of them), which went from "we all look so similar on 8 1/2 by 11 paper") to me telling Elizabeth that I understood people confusing the two of us on paper, but the weird thing was that they did so in person. Velma and I were sisters by choice, and looked as much alike as any two women of similar age and different ethnic backgrounds; nonetheless, even people who knew us intimately occasionally referred to us by each other's names. (This is the first time I can recall someone responding to my shorthand of "she was a few inches taller than me, and black" by asking if our hair had been the same color, though it'snot actually an unreasonable question.) That led to a brief discussion of missing her, and other people Elizabeth misses, and someone saying that these days when he sees an obituary he checks whether the person is around his own age. (I deliberately lightened the conversation by mentioning the family photo my mother recently sent me a copy of, taken at my grandfather's 96th birthday party.)

(ETA, something I was reminded of by a friend's post about her family: Elizabeth said that one difference between me and Velma was that Velma was a lot scarier/more dangerous. And some of that was deliberate acting: she once posted a Facebook status of "no heads on pikes this week." And some of that impression may have been that white people are likely to read a tall Black woman with a shaved head as dangerous. I don't think people read me as a threat, but as knowing what I'm doing in a way that means I get asked for directions by endless strangers, but have never been mugged. And when I had my pocket picked on a crowded train, I grabbed the guy's wrist and shouted "Where's my wallet?" without stopping to think about whether that was a good idea. (He dropped it, I recovered it, he got off the train, and then I held onto a pole and shook a little.)

And this morning, I saw that seanan_mcguire had posted another episode of her "Velveteen versus..." series about a superhero, called Velveteen, real name Velma Martinez. That's not a coincidence: elisem pointed me to these after Velma died, because Seanan had known her, and named the character after her partly to cheer her up. Early in this story, the Princess observes that Velma could have used a fairy godmother, but she's the wrong age to do that for her. And I thought "yes, she could" and felt sad in a slightly different way than the "I miss her" sadness of mourning.

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Visited roadnotes this afternoon

2014-09-18T02:42:32Z

roadnotes (Velma) has been home from the hospital for a couple of weeks, and I went to visit her this afternoon.

She is doing a lot better than when I last saw her (which was a day or two before the hospital sent her home). She is also more cheerful: she asked me to mention that not eating hospital food helps.

Velma is still on IV antibiotics, but the doctors are hoping to switch that to pills in a couple of days (and ideally stop the antibiotics altogether in a couple of weeks). Her surgical incision is healing well and fairly quickly, but it's not fully closed yet. When that's done, probably in 2-3 weeks, she'll be getting chemotherapy to deal with the remaining cancer, since not all of it could safely be removed surgically. She described herself to me as "scrawny" (which is an overstatement), and hopes to regain a bit of the weight she's lost since April before she starts the chemo.

She (and Soren) want to see people, but scheduling may be a little tricky: they're working around appointments with the oncologist and the occupational therapist and so on and so forth.

Velma is working on a longer and more detailed post, including more about her experience in the hospital, but accepted my offer to provide at least a brief update. (I'm cc'ing this to the Vanguard list and Making Light.)

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