redbird | Reading

It's Sunday, and here I am hanging out in the hotel...er... hospital. Diagnoses are cellulitis and massive anemia. Best thing to come out of this is learning how many types of anemia there are; this one has nothing to do with iron. Worst thing to come out of this is learning how not great my veins are. Couple that with an antibiotic that is acidic and the outcome is not ideal.

Lots of sleeping.

Oh, and here likely through at least mid week. Just asked for a visit from the Spiritual Care Team.

Sleep now

I'm surprisingly annoyed that Mozilla is killing Pocket, given that my personal use case for it is "that's where I throw unread links that I realistically know I'll almost certainly never actually dig up again, thus satisfying the itch of 'but I need to know where it is in case I suddenly have a desperate need to read it'". I've backed up my Pocket data and will presumably never look at it again, but what will I use as bottomless pit now?

Reading: I finished The Incandescent, which was a great read and also a wildly different book from Some Desperate Glory, so hats off to Emily Tesh's range! Now I'm a couple of chapters into Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice.

I'm also still working my way through Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

Watching:

scruloose and I are caught up on Murderbot and (until tonight) The Last of Us, and have finished The Pitt, which was, as advertised, fantastic. (Medical shows are so very not my genre that I don't have anything to compare it to; I think the only other one I've seen is Scrubs, manymany years ago.)

I duly read through the trivia section and whatnot on IMDb and saw when season 2 is apparently going to be set, and I think that's more months into the future that the newbie!doctors' ER rotation will last? (Have I successfully absorbed the terms for the various levels of doctors in an ER? No. >.<) That's a bit of an upsetting prospect, since Mel is my favorite (and

scruloose's, and probably unsurprising for either of us). But I haven't read much else about the show at this point.

EXCEPT! I did remember that Sarah Kurchak [standard disclaimer: friend] wrote an article about Mel for Time last month, so I've read and can recommend that: "The Pitt’s Dr. Mel King Is a Small but Meaningful Step Forward for Neurodivergence Onscreen".

So now we have one episode left of TLoU, and odds are good we'll shift back to Kingdom for season 2, but Kingdom's seasons are very short, so we'll be back on the "what to watch now?" train relatively soon.

(Wheel of Time fans, I'm so sorry about the show's cancellation. :( On a personal level, I guess it pretty much guarantees that we're not going to go back and resume season 3 from where we drifted off after the first couple of episodes.)

Current Mood: tired

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After the rest of the party are kidnapped by gnolls the wizard thinks carefully about where he should have lunch.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

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photos,
pixelfed

Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg!

A time-displaced cop struggles to protect history and the glorious revolution from a time-displaced psychopath, as well as from the cop's own better nature.

Night Watch (Discworld, volume 29/City Watch, volume 6) by Terry Pratchett

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Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/5/25/misguided-plumber-or-modern-artist

Via MTSOfan

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/5/25/misguided-plumber-or-modern-artist

A note to anybody who wants to read this: I get the impression that we're supposed to think that the "original" book was written with prose so purple it might as well have been in grape-scented marker. The effect can be a little much, but hey, at least nobody gazes outward with a glint in their silvery orbs, limpid, lambent, or otherwise! But yeah, if you aren't able to get into it within a chapter or two, that's not going to improve itself.

I liked it, but to be fair, I like most things I read.

Oh, one more warning - somebody at Goodreads was going on about the fact that the author either misunderstood or willfully misused the term "Ladies in Waiting" for this book. I don't quite agree that it's something to get so annoyed about, but we've all got our thing. I don't like books which have potatoes in pre-Columbian Europe (or not!Europe). You'll all be pleased to note that I observed no potatoes in this book.

( Spoilers )

1. How Coventry is building a tram for a tiny fraction of what it cost Edinburgh: (tags:trams construction UK GoodNews )

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https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250524.html

Deimos Before Sunrise

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250524.html

Got steroids to the left wrist on Tuesday, and sulked for the rest of the day because it was tender ( Read more... ).

Friday I put together the Cronch Tower, to replace the Cronch Pile. It's a 5 foot construction of wire shelf panels, with two two-foot high baskets and a final open topped container. This is to manage the chip needs of 3+1 people.

After shopping Friday, Belovedest pulled the Holiday Morass in front of me, for me to sort out into Yuletide, Halloween, and ~~It's Fall, Y'All~~ Decorative Gourd Season. Plus None of the Above. And Thorn came up for company while working and sociability. Since they had hung the work privacy shade on the window.

Today before I woke up, Belovedest had herded the Cronch Tower further. And unboxed my printer. And while I took advantage of the 80+F weather to lounge, they ran a test print.

The print came out fine! Belovedest now knows where I keep the spare filament (in The Heir and the Spare, naturally). We are discussing next steps!

Entertaining: the Art of Maintaining Spoons

We had a young friend over for supper tonight. He's a reporter I've known for a few years. He's very good at what he does, although I sometimes wonder if he fully realizes it. He is an immigrant, whose family came to the U.S. when he was fairly young, and he's worked through some challenges, and done so very well, in my opinion. He recently became an American citizen.

I put together some slow-cooker beef bourguignon (well, it started that way, but I added a lot more than just red wine, plus vegetables that don't normally go into that dish), and an orange cake, put the place generally to rights, with Bob's help. I'd hoped to dust the living room, but Bob got the carpet vacuumed, and that made the place presentable.

For a wonder, everything was ready when our friend got here. It's been some time (as in, a few years) since we've had him over. We truly are hermits; we have friends who we haven't interacted with for horribly long periods of time ... anyhow, last week I ran into him at a social event for people who work for one of the local online news outlets I do stringer work for. He was feeling fairly down for various reasons, and asked if I could give him a hug. Well, that did it for me; I had to have him over for supper.

We had a really enjoyable time with him, for a couple of hours, and then I had to bring the evening to a close. The physical reason was because my back was starting to suggest that I should find some heat or ice as soon as possible. The mental and emotional reason was that I abruptly lost every one of my remaining spoons and I needed to be alone with Bob, STAT.

It happens to me, and to Bob. We still enjoy entertaining people, albeit not nearly as much as we used to, when we had a larger place, but it's always been tiring, and these days it's even more so. Entertaining people means you have to put your own best foot forward; you have to be on, in order to make sure your guests have a good time, to make sure you're listening to them, to make sure you're not talking too much at their expense, and so much more. And yes, you work hard to present yourself as an excellent host.

It is fucking exhausting. It's fun, but only for a given amount of time. Once that last spoon is gone? It's time to beat a determined retreat.

And that's what I'm about to do. Painkillers and heating pads, ho!

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: Ateez, "Inception"

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I hate that it had to be done in memoriam instead of normal celebration, but I love that Nathaniel Parker read Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917) for Derek Jarman, from the first edition he was given when he played the poet in Jarman's War Requiem (1989). He made his feature debut clutching its holograph ink in his cold hand, laid out like an effigy with the mortal candle-flicker pinpointed in his dark eyes until the greatcoat he would no longer need against the slither and freeze of the trenches was flung furiously across him like a shroud: the author who has always been dead. He was perhaps more beautiful than the real-life Owen, but he had the mustache and the patent dark hair exact. I never remember him as the living man at work on his poems by the lantern-light of a dugout or kneeling beside the barbed-wire snarl of the friend he brought to his death, but on the other side of a fire-sheeted abstract of towns shelled to skeletons when the parable of the old man and the young has already killed him, his face a ghost-powder of lime and his notebooks and tin hat springing with the green turf of war cemeteries, the sacrificial Isaac himself led to a tomb of waste ground and slaughtered by a diabolical cardinal in a butcher's apron to the applause of a crowd of pantomime-rouged profiteers. The image haunted me, the poet telling his own death, writing his own ghost poem. It got into "Red Is for Soldiers" (2013), which I wrote for Armistice Day in a year the living links of memory had finally snapped. And Jarman who was already HIV-positive at the time of filming died younger than he should have, no government's hand stayed by a child-poet's angel to spare him, either. Any number of poems could have been read for his memory, from Christopher Marlowe to his own words, but this one had so many echoes. It makes me think well of Parker that he thought of it. He was not one of Jarman's muses, but he didn't forget.

Current Music: Peter Pears & Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, "It seemed that out of battle I escaped"

( Read more... )

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bicycle,
rainbow

Analogy of the day: car reversing sensors. Warn of impending, potential tissue damage, as distinct from actual tissue damage. Sometimes panic about A Plant, or The Bike Rack. Sometimes totally fail to miss the six-inch tall bollard that makes things go crunch in a way you don't notice until later.

Book purchase of the day: The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, recced by a friend as popsci/popmed and one I'd nearly wound up buying yesterday anyway (... and a National Trust baking book to go with it).

Book purchase of the tomorrow, probably: Fitzgerald's Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neuroscience 7^th ed (2015), recommended via a NYU med student reading list (Cambridge's all appear to be paywalled and I'm sulking).

Links for further perusal: introductions to the nervous system on Biology LibreTexts and Health LibreTexts.

Reorganisation: possibly I am going to want to rewrite the introduction again (though the words do keep being useful), but crucially while murbling at A I think I have concluded that actually the reason the structure doesn't make sense is that neuroanatomy doesn't want to be the middle section, it wants to be an appendix. But I'll want to, er, know slightly more neuroanatomy before actually settling on that...

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on pain of pain

Crack

A smooth arc
Knows naught
Of becoming;
It must break itself
Into
A whole bird

The song shivers
Like an egg,
Warbling shards
Of something
New

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Short version:

snuggling in bed with my lovely boyfriend, being the little spoon, holding my phone up for both of us to watch

( Long version: )

watching the Twins win and getting to kiss my lovely boyfriend in celebration

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I did not get out of bed until after noon. Hestia was curled at the foot of it to make sure. It was the first real sleep I'd gotten all week. Outside in breezy contrast to the last couple of days of November for May, we seem to be having a kind of spring-rinsed, sunshowery day. I have eaten a peanut butter granola bar. Hestia has wrapped her tail possessively, temple-cat-fashion, around my mug.

Because the internet is hazardous to the human condition, within the same five minutes I read some evolutionary psychology on atheism and ran into a reminder of the persistence of ace discourse and experienced a similar resurgence of antipathy. Any discussion of atheism predicated on a framework of faith would always fail to find purchase on me, but even when expounded by a self-identified atheist it grinds my gears to find the state explained only in terms of lack: an inability to imagine, a disaffection with religion, a failure to be socialized to it, a decision against it, all negative paths of arrival, no neutrally variant initial condition. Basically just replicate most of that complaint for discussions of sexuality, since if there is one thing the human species does seem to be majority-wired for, it's sloppy othering. It has occurred to me before that I was shielded from a lot of damage by coming at so-called normality from such an angle that not only did it make too little sense to me to feel aspirational, I didn't recognize for years what much of it was supposed to look like. But I'm also just kind of starting to have it in for the alpha privative. Defining by not still lets the thing it isn't set the terms.

WERS has been playing Jesse Welles' "Horses" (2025) on a near-daily basis for weeks now and because I too belong to this conflicting species, I feel that generally I agree with its message of letting go of self-defeating hatreds and divisions in the bigger picture of stellar time and at the same time the government of my country is pursuing policies of active harm to just about everything which seems to limit the degree to which I should be reasonably expected to let down my guard. Now I suppose I get to worry that finding a popular folk song naive means I have just flipped into the last verse of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."

Current Music: Sea Lemon, "Stay"

I accidentally walked up on this lovely heron at the lake today (US Midwest, small man-made lake that just happens to be close enough for me to walk to), and he was obliging enough to stand still until I had a chance to get out the camera! I see a lot of birds out there every year (right now we also have ducklings, a small geese population, and a lot of red-winged blackbirds), but this is the closest I've ever gotten to one of the herons, and I thought this community might like to see him.

Fairly sure it's a great blue heron, though I'm not a bird-identifying expert.

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Donald had concert tickets on Thursday night. He was prepared to take public transit down to and back from SF, which would have taken him at least 10 hours of transit time to do a 4 hour round trip. Added to that; We have pretty much decided on a contractor to do the rebuilding project in SF and that contractor is asking us to clear the whole garage. Eeeekk! There is 20 years of stuff in that garage. We knew the "stuff" would need to be pared down and have been working on it; but total removal? That is a big job. There were four items that I was struggling to figure out how to move: my good table saw, my dust collection system, a lime tree and a lemon tree. All four are too big to get into my car, or even M's Suburban, and three of the four were heavy enough that I wanted help loading. Out of the blue my friend Mike B. contacted me. Something about a little fire that Watch Duty reported up here. We texted back and forth a few times before I asked if he would mind moving my four items in his truck. He would - but as any good stagehand does, he wouldn't commit to when he was available. I spent the evening on Thursday and the morning on Friday disconnecting and removing the dust collector and at least some of its piping. The table saw also needed to be taken apart: the third party fence came off, the extension table was removed and the two, heavy, cast iron "wings" on either side of the body of the saw were unbolted. The butcher-block table was removed from the back wall of the shop. I pruned the lemon and the lime trees severely, removing more than half the wood (they needed it, the lime had lots of dead branches, the lemon had lots of branches that some critter (rats?) chewed the bark off of). They will be happy about the pruning once they get over the shock. I called Mike on Friday morning. Thankfully he was not working.
It was SO nice to work with someone who is used to moving heavy things, and does it regularly. We loaded his truck with my four items, plus a couple of other things that were bulky. My car was filled with dust collection pipe, and the first load of things like clamps and wood stains. Also some boxes of folk music on CD's. Wood and some PVC pipes were on top. Driving north took 4 hours to do a trip that normally takes 2 hours. Miserable. Mike stayed the night rather than drive back last night. We had a nice visit.
My friend Kim had booked herself, and her new pup Twix, for a dog training class. Twix is a 6 year old, tiny Jack Russell Terrier, who is just sweet. Kim really wanted me to come to the class with her. Of course the class was this morning. The instructor supplied a 2' square mat, and a chair for each of the 6 human/canine teams, spaced around a warehouse room. She went over basic commands: place (the mat), sit, down, stand, off, look (at me) and leave it. She stressed that dogs are visual learners. She showed how to use a treat to help position the dog. Chena was majorly distracted by Other Dogs. Over all though Chena was by far the best trained dog in the room and did keep reasonably good focus. The two new commands for us; "Look" and "Stand" were challenging. I've been struggling to teach Chena "stand". The instructor said: start with the dog sitting take a treat in front of your dog's nose and move it forward. Sure enough this method was very clear to Chena and she stood. Sadly I won't get to next week's class, I'm off judging in Martinez, but will resume for the final two.
Ok, time to go unload the last things from the car.

I am torn between squeals of glee and WORSHIP ME AS YOUR GOD.

ChatGPT user delighted to combine sloth with theft

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Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Don't mourn, organize

Nearly a week

Weekly proof of life: the media intake report is long enough to make a post

Photo cross-post

Remember the People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May!

Night Watch (Discworld, volume 29/City Watch, volume 6) by Terry Pratchett

Misguided Plumber or Modern Artist?

So, my library eloan of Long Live Evil came through

Interesting Links for 25-05-2025

Deimos Before Sunrise

Recent shenanigans: wrist, Cronch, and 3D printer

Dept. of Social Interaction

I mean the truth untold

ebike under the rainbow

[pain] notes

Next poem

Crack

The best way to watch a baseball game

Why not loosen your tie for the park?

Heron takes flight

San Francisco and Back, dog class.

My first Beaverton piece

About Me

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