Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

cattitude and I got up early this morning so we could go for a walk before it got too hot, on a day with a heat advisory. We got back around 7 a.m., an hour before the heat advisory took effect. It wasn't a long walk, but it's good for me to walk a bit (the hip and knee problems are chronic and need attention, but I did okay despite not having taken an NSAID, because I try not to do that on an empty stomach.

adrian_turtle sent me a stuffed turtle, like the one that I've been propping my left hand up on when I stay over at her place. This is both emotionally warm and cozy, and practically useful, (The turtle is of just the right shape, more so than the stuffed animals I already had.)

I went out for a walk after breakfast this morning, which was about 9:30 and before cattitude got up. I was outside for a while, and saw a lot of robins, and a few humans (two with dogs).

Along the way, I signed a nominating petition for Sen. Ed Markey. Someone had set out a chair with a clipboard of petition pages, and a jar of pens saying to take one, use it to sign, and take it with you to avoid possibly spreading germs. That seemed like a good way of dealing with the situation.

Most of what I head was birdsong, wind, and the faint noise made when my jacket sleeve eubbed along my torso. I am thinking of trying to get out earlier tomorrow: not set an alarm, but go out as soon as I've had the morning stimulants, rather than waiting an hour and having breakfast first. This might get me more birds, and it works well with the social distancing thing. It will also be colder, but I have suitable clothing. ("Colder" in this case means the forecast is for a degree or two above freezing, with enough wind chill to make it feel a few degrees colder than that.)

Since it's a very nice night, I asked cattitude to go for a bit of a walk with me, just around the neighborhood.

We saw pretty sky, one other walker (on the other side of the street), a few cars and, a few blocks away, the 73 bus.

I wanted to go out because this was probably the warmest it will be in the next 72 hours, and I like walking around in the dark sometimes. This part of Belmont, unlike our old neighborhood in East Arlington, has street lights at least as far as we went or saw. To go from our old place to the Bikeway in the middle of the night required either very good night vision or a flashlight. The street lights are definitely useful for walking around, but without them we might have seen more than one star.

The lights in the neighborhood are spread out in a way that means a lot of them produced the odd radial lines that are an effect of my post-cataract replacement lenses. I asked Dr. Lazarra about that, in one of the post-surgery follow-up appointments. He said it was a known and harmless effect: the synthetic lenses aren't as flexible as the natural ones in the human eye.

today, in brief:

I:

• told Matt I'd do some queue copyediting for $47/hour, and he said yes (mostly I proof for them, for a lower rate)
• did some proofreading and a little copyediting for queue

cattitude and I

• checked out the "Hollingsworth 5 and 10" near Cushing Sq, and bought a replacement tea kettle

• tried Aram's Cafe, tiny place on the same block of Trapelo. I had mujadara, because I could--the mujadara itself was heavier than I wanted or expected, but it came with a nice-sized serving of cucumber pieces and yogurt. Not tzatziki, just the plain yogurt and cucumber. Cattitude had an omelette with Armenian sausage; I tasted a piece of sausage and liked it.

Meanwhile, I think the tennis elbow is healing, slowly -- I didn't need any tylenol today -- but I bruised the thumb of the other hand. icing both hands at once is a little odd.

I went to the nursery this morning, in search of cucumber plants, and wound up with a pot containing three little Diva cucumber seedlings, and another pot with a slightly larger Black Krim tomato plant. Black Krim isn't my favorite tomato, but I couldn't find Paul Robeson last year, and Black Krim is almost as good, in the same direction (though it doesn't get extra points for a cool name).

I planted the cucumbers this morning, in the small raised bed next to the driveway; I should get a cucumber trellis, but they will probably still wind up competing with the grapevine for space. cattitude did some more weeding in the front yard this afternoon, uncovering more slates in the process, and I planted the tomato in the just-weeded area near the second half-dozen lettuces I put in recently. I have no idea why someone put a slate path up the middle of the front yard (leading to nothing in particular), but I'm not surprised someone else piled topsoil on them. Pending landlady approval, the slates will be getting a new home across the street with 42itous.

I also put a few tiny purple basil seedlings in the planter with the green basil plants I bought and planted around the end of April. The idea of starting our own seeds was good, but it turned out that when the sprouts got large enough to be moved out of the mini-greenhouse and into pots, one or both of the cats was treating them as a fresh salad bar. (They're not allowed on the counters, but we're not always awake, or home, to enforce that.)

I have no idea what we're going to do with the rest of the garden space. Chance more cucumbers, or melon? More tomatoes? Root vegetables? I should probably sow clover seed in the meantime; we've got enough of it.

On Thursday, cattitude, adrian_turtle and I had our now-traditional Thanksgiving dinner. This year we had the turkey with an interesting gravy instead of stuffing; lots of roasted root vegetables; cranberry-orange relish; some last-minute green beans with sesame seeds; and apple-cranberry crisp for dessert. The gravy was good but not worth the amount of work, and I missed the stuffing. We treat the holiday as cozy time for the three of us to just be together, and it was good that this year nobody had to travel a long distance for the occasion.

Yesterday Cattitude and I met some of his relatives for lunch: his sister, brother-in-law, their kids, and another niece who is at grad school in the area. (The brother-in-law has family in the area.) That was a pleasant hour or so of conversation over Vietnamese food: they asked us to suggest a place in Harvard Square, and we knew Pho Le is both good and convenient to where we were meeting. He then went to a museum with them, and I came home and spent some time making annoying but necessary phone calls.

In the evening Adrian and I went to a party at the home of some fannish friends of hers (who I know casually), featuring more turkey, good conversation, and a hot tub. Soaking for a while seems to have done me good. (The tub is outside on the deck, a short walk from the back door; the air temperature was 40F/4 C outside, which was warmer than I was expecting when Adrian first mentioned the possibility to me.)

This afternoon I have pulled out the tomato plants and a bunch of weeds from the front yard and the planting strip, and brought in the last few halfway-plausible green fruits to ripen. I also collected a few more quinces, which I had overlooked last week. browngirl, the quinces have your name on them.

Tomato season really is over, despite a few hopeful flowers left on the plants, and the last yard waste pickup of this year will be Monday. That leaves us with lettuce, 42itous's peppers, rosemary, some chives that were lurking in the bed next to the house. Also a miscellany of flowers: radish, wood sorrel, and the lavender gives every sign of planning to flower again. Why not? There's a fine rhododendron in bloom a couple of blocks away on Mass Ave, and Cattitude showed me a periwinkle flower around the corner yesterday.

For my reference: the cherry tomato that produced a small number of really good purplish fruits is called "Black Cherry." (I think I lost the label for the burgeoning yellow-orange one.) We got almost nothing from our yellow Brandywine plant, alas. That's a really tasty heirloom variety.

This is partly for my own records.

This morning I planted some basil (planter near the back porch), radishes (a patch near the sidewalk, a little bit east of the front walk), and sunflowers (in the planting strip). I ordered the radish seeds, the sunflowers were a freebie from the seed company, and 42itous gave us the basil seeds.

Meanwhile, a nondescript clump of greenery in front of the house turns out to be a patch of gorgeous purple irises, and the rhododendron next to it is blooming.

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We have just had a very nice visit with one of the neighbors across the street, Martha (42itous). Our landlady had suggested that she could share any garden space we didn't want (the guys downstairs don't garden), so she came over to talk about what we, and she, wanted to plant.

We invited her in, and idle conversation about making ice cream led to me offering her some violet hard candy that rysmiel and papersky had given me. And then she mentioned "an ice cream event," and I asked "you know jbsegal?"

Eventually we went downstairs and discussed what to put where, and did some more weeding; there are now a few pepper plants in the front yard, and a plan for cucumbers, tomoatos, and corn, and we've pulled out almost all the mint. I mentioned that I was thinking of ordering milkweed seeds this fall, but it turns out I won't need to: the landlords had grown milkweed, and it has self-seeded nicely along the side of the house.

I asked to see Martha's garden; she has roses and raspberries and strawberries, among other things.

The building that burned down early this week will be demolished, possibly very soon. There was a meeting earlier this evening to collect suggestions and assistance for the business-owners: the posters solicited (among other things) suggestions on places the businesses might re-open, job opportunities for the people who had worked there, and ideas on fund-raising. I suspect the largest short-term impact for people who didn't own or work at those businesses is that there may not be another laundromat as large anywhere nearby.

The largest effect on me personally is that the elevator from the street down to the subway station is out of service, estimated repair date February 4; my knees were not happy last night on the way home from the gym, or this evening coming out of the station. I suspect I'm going to be back to keeping careful track of how many stairs I climb; so much for the lunchtime jaunt to Chinatown I'd been thinking of at the beginning of the week. Thursday morning I was thinking "okay, I can handle this" but it's going to take some combination of caution and lots of NSAIDs. (I may try getting off the A at 175th and taking a bus the rest of the way, but I don't have the time to do that in the morning.)

Oh, I forgot to post that I went to the gym yesterday; worked with Emilie, the same kind of thing we normally do, with reasonable cardio first, but I fell off the foam roller while doing balance stuff, and decided to do an exercise where I lie flat on the mat to steady myself, emotionally: sometimes it's good to know that I won't fall off the floor.

I visited adrian_turtle last weekend, partly just because and partly to provide practical and moral support because she'd been rear-ended while driving earlier that week. The practical support included a couple of loads of laundry; the moral support included tea, conversation, and snuggling. On Saturday we went to a party, with games and latkes and such; I got in a four-handed game of Scrabble and a couple of rounds of Fluxx and then decided it would make sense to go home before I was worn out. I realized after I got home Sunday night that all three days had felt delayed, in various ways; some plan-changing and extra bus trips on my way over to Adrian's Friday; delays getting up, out, and to lunch on Saturday; and an annoying 40 minutes waiting for a bus in the rain on my way back to South Station Sunday. But Adrian and I were also closer to being on the same schedule than usual (I tend to wake up early), which was pleasant.

When I got back to Inwood, I saw that we have five new street trees along Isham Street, in spaces prepared in the concrete some weeks ago. They all have numerical tags; two of the five also have "One in a million" labels tags with the name of the tree written on them. The tags say those two are American elms. I am surprised and pleased. (Elsewhere, I've seen trees labeled Zelkova (also elm genus) and hackberry.)

I now have enough hats. I tend to lose hats, not so much the way other people lose gloves as putting them down on park benches, tables at diners, buses, and such. Sometimes I find nice hats to replace them: one of the nicest hats I've lost was one I bought in Paris to replace one that I seem to have left near the Eiffel Tower. (The replacement was left behind after a meal during Minicon a few years ago.) So, Adrian just got me eight hats. That's enough that I can shove a hat in a coat pocket and not miss it when wearing a different coat (I had thought I'd lost my magenta "turtle fur" hat and it turns out it was in my parka). It's also enough that if/when I lose one, I can just grab another. These are plain hats (mostly black, but one each in purple, gray, and white), and all eight fit into a gallon zip-lock bag.

I am in the middle of too many books, in part because I was close enough to the end of Golden Witchbreed that I wanted a fresh book to take with me this weekend. And one of my library books is due December 24, two-week loan instead of three, and not renewable, because it's relatively new. I will start that as soon as I finish at least one of the current books.

I went to the gym after work, and had a decent workout.
( numbers, as usual )