Praise also then light, and creation unfinished

Despite being awake late last night, I woke up a little after 7 a.m. I made tea, then went down to the fitness center. This time I did a few exercises and soaked in the hot tub for a bit, which my legs appreciated.

That took me to about 8:30. There was no Sunday morning programming that interested me, and I didn't feel like hanging out for a couple of hours hoping someone I knew would walk past and be in a mood for conversation, so I got dressed, checked out, and headed home. (Judy Bemis saw me in the lobby as I was heading out; we hugged goodbye as she explained that she was on her way to a shift in the con treasury.)

I stopped off at South Station and grabbed a savory croissant at the Pret a Manget; I hadn't wanted to wait in line at the hotel lobby Starbucks, but it seemed imprudent to wait until I got home. One disadvantage of this year's Boskone is that the con suite had only packaged snacks--chips, candy, cookies, I think some little packets of cheese and crackers, rather than bagels or donuts, or the lots and lots of hard boiled eggs they've had in previous years. There wasn't even milk for the coffee and tea, just packets of sugar and creamer. (This seems to have been a change in hotel policy.) If I go to another con at that hotel, and stay overnight, I am going to make sure to bring yogurt and other food I can keep in the fridge. (I'd bought a couple of single-serving yogurts, and forgot to grab them on my way out of Adrian's apartment Friday; if I'd known how limited the con suite would be, I'd have stopped in South Station and at least gotten some more yogurt.)

Since getting home I have played three games of Scrabble with cattitude, combed Molly, proofread one short article for Queue, stretched and exercised, and unloaded (twice), reloaded (twice), and run the dishwasher. Tomorrow's plan is more Scrabble, proofreading, stretching, and playing with the cats.

Our electricity went out around 6:00 this evening, and was out for a bit over an hour. I used my keychain flashlight to find the big camping lantern, called Eversource to report the problem, and then we used the lamplight to play Scrabble.

When the power came back, I made a mug of tea (which I had been about to make when the lights went out), and some iced tea. During the outage three weeks ago, we decided to get a better flashlight—which we have—and I thought about keeping iced tea in the house, but hadn't done so. I may wind up throwing this out and making another batch, but I get grumpy (and less functional) without my caffeine, and tea bags are relatively cheap.

We had dinner, and then I loaded the dishwasher and tried to run hot water before turning it on. We have no hot water; the radiators are cold, but it's warm enough in here right now that I don't know whether the heating system is running. I called the building management company (or, it being Sunday night, their answering service) and reported the problem. I just checked, and we lost heat and hot water after the outage three weeks ago; that time they said they needed parts.

Friday was my (rescheduled) date night with adrian_turtle. We had a quiet evening (and morning) at her place; we cooked chicken, and had that, rolls, and salad for dinner, with enough left to make another meal for her. Saturday I came home via Arlington Heights, stopping at Penzey's for nutmeg, horseradish powder, and their latest free sample offer, "Bavarian seasoning," which I decided was worth trying as a blend with neither salt, sugar, nor hot peppers.

I baked Quick After-Battle Chocolate Cake, because I felt like baking. It was quite tasty, but would have been quicker if I hadn't had to start by mixing up chocolate soy milk*, and if I hadn't then spent several minutes looking for the electric mixer, and thinking about what to make since I couldn't find it, before cattitude found it behind something on a shelf in a closet.

Cattitude made salmon and asparagus, and after dinner he put a candle in the cake and he and Adrian sang "Happy Birthday" to me. We were eating seconds of the cake when the power went out. Glancing around we saw it wasn't just our building, but a multi-block area. If I can believe the Eversource phone system, I was one of the first people to report the outage. About half an hour later, I got a call that T-Mobile flagged as "SCAM LIKELY," so I let it go to voicemail. It turned out to be Eversource with an update on when they thought they'd have the electricity back on, which has me wondering about their scam detection algorithms.

Adrian left around 9, and we got the power back about 9:40, which was long enough to conclude that we need more, or better, flashlights (and not just because one of mine is vacationing in Cambridge).

When we woke up this morning we had no heat or hot water; it took me a while to figure out that this wasn't just me feeling cold. The repair crew got those back on about 3 p.m., so it could have been a lot worse. The management company told me (around 10:30 a.m.) that it would be a few hours because they needed parts; I don't know if the timing on this is coincidence, or if the power failure (or restoration) provoked the failure.

*The recipe calls for the milk from a chocolate cow, but I used milk from a patch of chocolate beans instead, so Adrian could eat the cake.

I decided to take advantage of the combination of my improved hips and knee, and a warm (for October) day, and wander around outside, and asked cattitude to join me. He happily agreed, so we got lunch in Davis Square, took the train to Alewife, and walked around Alewife Brook Reservation.

We spent a lot of time looking at plants; I photographed things and uploaded the pictures to iNaturalist in the hopes of identifying them later, or of someone else identifying them for me. I also took a few photos of things I did recognize: a monarch butterfly, a sumac tree whose leaves have turned bright red.

Cattitude spotted one frog (which just looked like a dark lump when he pointed it out to me), a wood duck (too distant for me to tell from a mallard), and a muskrat or two (we might have been looking at the same animal twice); the muskrat was a pleasant surprise. Plus some less surprising animals, including mallards and robins.

I may have overdone things slightly, but got home okay by walking slowly and carefully for the last bit of the trip, and found enough energy a couple of hours later for some PT exercises.

We'll be going away for a few days and have hired a cat sitter, but the cat sitter wants us to have an emergency backup person in case she and her staff can't get here. [Bad username or unknown identity: jenett"] kindly agreed to do this for me, so I went to her place yesterday with a set of spare keys, and spent about half an hour visiting, which was fun. (Given her and my limited spoons, neither of us visited the other in the 18 months I lived half a mile from her, in Arlington.)

The keys were more of a hassle than they should have been, because the first set of spared we got didn't work. Apparently the apartment door lock )(which our landlord put in within the last year) uses an obsolescent blank, and the first hardware store used the wrong one. The second hardware store explained the problem, but didn't have the necessary blanks; they gave cattitude the name/code number for the correct blank, and referred him to Commoonwealth Locksmith, which is conveniently located near Porter Square. He got three keys made, that being what he thought we needed (two for the cat sitter and one to give Jen); I'd been thinking four, but I'd forgotten that the spare I gave adrian_turtle also doesn't work. So, I stopped in there and got two more copies of the key, which I tested as soon as I got home.

All this also means that the cat sitter, who came over a few days ago to meet us and the cats and get the spare keys will be coming back on Monday, to get spares that actually work.

First, I am very glad I woke up around 7 this morning, had tea, pulled clothes on, and headed out at about 7:30. cattitude and I walked slowly down the Community Path to Davis Square. That early, walking was pleasant, as we looked at greenery and lots of flowers, mostly yellow but some nice purple morning glories and blue dayflowers. Then we bought groceries and took a bus home; I did one of my PT exercises while we waited for the bus (stepping on and off the curb, sideways). It was "only" 27 C/82 F when we got home, at a quarter to nine; the high for the day was 40C/104 F, a level of heat that would be bad not just for me but for enough people that the National Weather Service issued a warning.

I spent much of the day on paid proofreading and editing work (different projects, for different clients). It was a productive day, and apparently Cattitude and I can both work from home at the same time, which is worth knowing. (He usually goes to the library to avoid distractions, but that would have meant going back out in the heat.)

This evening I watched/listened to a webinar, training for the volunteer work I'll be doing on Primary Day for Yes on 3, to protect transgender rights in Massachusetts. We're going to be approaching primary voters and asking them if they support transgender rights. If they say yes the follow-up script includes asking whether they know about this ballot question, a bit about why it's important, and then asking them to sign a card pledging to vote yes in November.

Apparently only 1/10 of Massachusetts voters know this is going to be on the ballot. So: a YES vote will keep the existing law protecting transgender people in Massachusetts from discrimination. (Yes to protecting people, yes to upholding the law.) That's been the law here for a little over two years, and now we have to fight to keep it.

While the scripts we have do talk about why this is important, next Tuesday we won't be trying to persuade people who don't already support the law—this is a get-out-the-vote effort. If someone says "no" or "I'm not sure" to "do you support transgender rights?" we're supposed to say "that's cool, have a nice day" or the like. (Ben, the organizer who was explaining this, suggested "that's great, have a nice day," but if she can say that with a straight face she's a better actor than I am.

This is a sales-y kind of task, and the script is a little long, but I'm going to at least try, weather allowing.

I got my hair cut today. It's very short, shorter than I've ever had it before.

I had been thinking in terms of something a bit edgier, more likely to be read as queer rather than just "practical older woman," but when i talked to the stylist it turned out that all those interesting-looking hairstyles involve hair product, blow drying, and other things that I doubted I'd follow through on.

What I have is short enough that combing is redundant. It shows off the white hair I inherited from my maternal grandmother, and makes me look a lot like my aunt Lea—not so much the hairstyle as the way it frames my face. I like my aunt Lea.

If I want to keep it this short, the stylist said I'll need it cut again in 4-6 weeks, depending on how fast it grows. At that point, I may try a more interesting but higher-maintenance style.

I'm also considering unnatural colors, but I want to give myself time to get used to rocking the white before I cover it.

(Photo posted separately.)

My usual method for black beans and rice is based on the recipe on the Goya can; however, rather than buy their seasoning mix, I grab whatever seems good at the time, usually including cumin and oregano.

So, I had the chopped onion and bell pepper ready, the bacon was cooking (the base recipe not only doesn't call for bacon, it's quietly vegan), and I grabbed the jars of spice and the measuring spoons. Singapore seasoning, cumin, garam masala, ginger…and then realized I'd forgotten the garlic, and threw in a bit of garlic powder because it was quicker than using fresh.

…I took the bacon out to cool and cut up (and put back in at the end of the cooking), sauteed the vegetables in the bacon fat, added the beans to the pan, stirred in the spices and a bit of water and vinegar, and realized that I'd mixed up the spices I would normally use for a chicken or shrimp curry.

At that point there wasn't much to do but finish cooking and hope it worked.

It worked well enough to be dinner, but this isn't going to become my standard spicing for black beans, though I may try using more cumin and ginger than I have in the past. It's also not going to replace the rather tomatoey chick pea curry recipe I've made a few times. Still, variety is good, even if in this case it came from getting sidetracked on something that I've made often enough that I don't need to think about it.

cattitude and I went to the farmers market this morning. I had hoped to get ginger cheese: last week the vendor told me she had none left, and promised to keep some for me this week. As I walked up to her table today, she said she was sorry, but they didn't have any ginger cheese, because they're not making it right now. I commented that she had a good memory, and then we talked a bit more about the cheese. I am probably out of luck, since they're not coming to the Somerville, Arlington, or Cambridge summer farmers markets this year; she said they don't do enough business in/close to Boston.

So we bought apples and pasta and beets, and went upstairs to the Boston Smoked Fish Company so I could get my free fish (for having made ten purchases). I said hello, and that I had free fish coming. The seller asked what I wanted, and then gave me a container of smoked salmon pate. I thanked her, put it away, and asked if she needed my phone number. No, she'd recognized me too.

The combination of those had a "Somerville is a small city" feeling; I know I'm somewhat recognizable, but "that's the woman who wanted ginger Adelisca" is a bit different from "we owe this woman free fish, and I can find her in the database without asking for her phone number." When I talked about this with Cattitude, I thought of another thing that might be relevant here: we're at the farmers market almost every Saturday, because we like walking to a farmers market on Saturday morning, as we did in Inwood. (Wednesday afternoons are nice too, but the combination of Saturday morning and walking distance feels very right.)

I feel as though I've started the year by dealing with the cold weather (mostly by staying indoors) and having a cold (which I suspect I should have taken seriously sooner than I did). Neither of these are helped by the fact that I've had my menstrual period not-quite-continuously since December 19. ( not very graphic details )

I ordered two pairs of earrings from elisem recently. When I ordered, she sent a note saying they would look good on me (because of my coloring). They arrived today, and are as nice as I hoped.

I'm seeing my doctor tomorrow, for follow-up on a couple of things; I will mention the cold while I'm there, but don't expect her to tell me to do anything different than I already am.

Other than that, I've been spending a lot of time on the Zooniverse "Cheetahs of Namibia" project, which I find more rewarding than the "elephant expedition," or the Cleveland and Chicago park wildlife projects: I haven't spotted many cheetahs in the photos, but very few photos have "nothing here." Along with the few cheetahs and leopards, there are a lot of pictures of baboons; warthogs; birds; oryxes, kudus, and other antelopes; and once in a while something like a giraffe, aardvark, or honey badger. There are about fifty possible classifications (including "livestock" and "bird (other)," and I'm amusing myself by keeping a list of the ones I have found so far.

*Yes, I know oryxes are antelopes. But oryx, warthog, baboon, and "bird (other)" are what I see most of.