Praise also then light, and creation unfinished

I saw the movie Apollo 11 this afternoon, at the Somerville Theatre, and enjoyed it. This film is very much what it says on the tin, a documentary of the Apollo 11 flight put together entirely from archival footage, and works well.

I recommend seeing this on a large screen (in a movie theatre, or maybe on a large flat-screen television, rather than something like an iPad).

I had meant to go sooner, but I've been dealing with a lingering cough; there were a few days when I wasn't exactly sick, but was still coughing enough that it seemed unkind to go to the movies. By this afternoon, I sat for more than an hour and a half without coughing at all, aided only by a single medicated cough drop.

I was walking forward on a moving bus yesterday, stumbled, and landed on/across a bench seat. I don't think I'm seriously hurt, but this left me with several bruises. I iced the ones on my calves as soon as I got home, but that was ten or fifteen minutes later. I tried soaking in a hot bath, which did help, but first I discovered that the stopper in our bathtub no longer works, and had to improvise something with a plastic bag and a ceramic rice bowl. ( medical details )

A night's sleep helped some, enough that I walked down to Davis Square with cattitude this afternoon, because walking and daylight are good for me, it was sunny and mild (for Massachusetts in February, 5°C/42°F), and the forecast for the next few days isn't promising.

I had been vaguely considering going to the Women's March on Boston Common tomorrow, despite the cold, but decided against that almost immediately after getting hurt. I probably will go to the Winter Farmers Market tomorrow morning and see about more vegetables, smoked fish, and maybe some interesting bread and/or cheese. (That market is one of the best things about living in this bit of Somerville.)

I saw my eye doctor two weeks ago, expecting to get a new eyeglass prescription (I've had the current ones since early 2016, before I left Seattle). Instead, he told me I should schedule cataract surgery for some time in the next year.

I have had a couple of conversations with his surgical coordinator, and am probably going to schedule the surgery for late February and early March. They do one eye at a time, but prefer to do them fairly close together, so the patient doesn't spend too long in an in-between state when the glasses that are appropriate for the not-yet-treated eye are no longer right for the one where the cataract has been removed.

In those conversations, I found out that the "don't look down while you're healing" part of the aftercare instructions applies to things like looking under the sink; I should be fine brushing my teeth or looking at a book or my keyboard. (I may stay close to home, though, because while looking at the ground while walking should be okay, retying a loose shoelace sounds problematic, and I'm not going out in sandals in winter.

I'll have to go out to Lexington or Concord to have measurements done before the surgery, and then Waltham and Chelmsford for the surgery. For reasons that they didn't explain, he does cataract surgery in Waltham on the second Tuesday of each month, and in Chelmsford on the third Wednesdays, so having both eyes done in the same place means a longer wait between operations.

I do not want to discuss the surgery itself, because I would rather not think about it. I am going to think about logistics (like whether cattitude, adrian_turtle, or both will be there at the surgery to be the competent adult of my choosing (as Cattitude's oral surgeon put it) to get me safely home after the operation. I will also need to make an (extra) appointment with my GP, for her to check/confirm that it's okay for me to have the surgery, which has to be done no more than 30 days before the surgery.

I know this is very routine outpatient surgery, and I go home the same day. I'm still nervous, which is an argument for having the surgery relatively soon. "Relatively" because he's booked up through January, and I want to go to Boskone, and don't think scheduling surgery for the Tuesday before the con would be sensible. I think the nervousness is because surgery, because eyes, and because it will be a change, though hopefully a very good one. I don't expect not to need glasses, but am hoping that I will have a simpler prescription—and even if I still have near-sightedness, far-sightedness, and astigmatism, I won't have the cataracts blocking areas of my vision. (It doesn't matter how carefully I clean my glasses, that's not where the spots are.)

(Back in Seattle, my eye doctor said I had "incipient" cataracts. When I first saw Dr. Lazarra, he said they weren't "incipient" (I think partly he thought it was an unhelpful term in general), but that the appropriate thing to do at the time was to wait. So I knew this was in my future, but wasn't expecting it this soon.)

I signed up to be part of a "street team" for Yes on 3, to recruit more people to make get-out-the-vote calls next week. I'd been going to do this yesterday, in Davis Square, but my building elevator was out of service, so I went to Downtown Crossing today.

That was uncomfortable--both because of the cold and because my knee hurt--and I didn't actually recruit anyone, or get through even part of a conversation with any of the passers-by I approached. I bailed after about half an hour of training and half an hour in the cold, and wound up walking down too many stairs because I got turned around (again) in Downtown Crossing, walked blocks out of my way, and decided I wanted to be in the T more than I wanted to find the elevator to the red line.

My current plan is to look at my calendar, compare with cattitude and adrian_turtle, and sign up for one or possibly two get-out-the-vote phone banks in Cambridge or Arlington, either next week or the weekend right before Election Day. But right now I am going to drink herb tea and make no plans beyond dinner tonight.

cattitude and I got back from Montreal a couple of hours ago; we were there for Scintillation, a small science fiction convention organized by Jo Walton.

I mostly had a good time, despite some bits where I was having trouble connecting/finding people to hang out with, and some down moods that I suspect were due either to physiological stuff (I bruised my left thumb badly, and pain interferes with sleep) or the state of the world outside the convention. I did a lot of walking, at least by my recent standards; if this doesn't leave me miserable in the next day or two, I'm going to treat it as hip strengthening PT and increase my goal for that. ( health/exercise details )

I went to a few program item and enjoyed all of them: Friday evening Jon Singer and Teresa Nielsen Hayden talke about medieval recipes, and Sunday morning Jon and Emmet O'Brien talked about lasers, odd corners of biology (endosymbiosis is more complex than I'd realized), and the possibility of using Bose-Einstein condensates to explore how event horizons work. (They told us that it's possible to slow light down to a few meters per second in a BEC; the suggestion is to see what happens if you move said concentrate at several meters per second, i.e. faster than the speed of light inside the BEC. As far as either of them knew, this hasn't yet been tried.)

As a tribute to Ursula Le Guin, Jo decided to have an hour of people reading Le Guin's work aloud. The pre-con description had said that it would be good if other people read, but Jo was prepared to read Le Guin aloud for an hour. I emailed her last week to say I wanted to read, and mentioning a couple of specific things I was thinking of. Yesterday morning, when I walked into the Jon Singer/Emmet O'Brien mutual interview, Emmet asked if I'd be willing to be organizer for the Le Guin panel an hour later, because Jo might be dealing with other things. I said yes, of course. I decided to read "Coming of Age in Karhide," which worked well: if I'd practiced and known how long it was, I might have picked something shorter, but people enjoyed it, and I got comments afterwards from people who were pleased because they hadn't already read that story. Someone else then read "The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadahn of Derb," a delightful piece that is partly about Venice. We then got a couple of excerpts from Malafrena about what it means to work for freedom, and a few poems. (The person who read the poems wanted to read from Le Guin's version of the Tao te ching; I don't think Jo owns that.)

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.)

Our cat Molly was pissing on the bed some weeks ago. We took advice cattitude found online, and put a shower curtain on the bed when we weren't in it.

That worked, for a few weeks (after a time or two of having to wash the shower curtain, which is easier than washing the sheets, and a lot cheaper than replacing pillows). Then she did it again (and I no longer have a feather pillow). A couple of days after that, ( possible TMI )

That got us to call the vet.

Last Thursday, we took Molly to the vet for an exam. They said it was probably either stress or a urinary tract infection, and we should get a urine sample. The sample showed blood in the urine, but no infection. The next step was an X-ray, yesterday.

The X-ray showed a bladder stone (which I gather is somewhat similar, chemically, to a kidney stone); the vet recommended surgery to remove it. That was this morning.

Molly is now home, without a "large, jagged" stone in her bladder. She is wearing one of those cones to stop her from licking the incision (which was closed with glue, so no sutures for her to pick out). We have just offered her water (now that it's long enough after surgery); the plan involves waiting a bit, then offering food, and once she has kept something down, an assortment of medications; some are liquid but the antibiotics are pills.

I really hope this doesn't mean I have to stay up late again to get the cat medicated before we sleep. (We stayed up a bit late last night, because the instructions included "no food after midnight" and we didn't want them hungry longer than necessary—especially Kaja, who isn't sick. And got up a little early, to have Molly at the vet at 7:30.)

If Molly hadn't been having surgery, this would have been a rest day. As is, I went to Boston to return an overdue library book and get stuff at the Copley farmers market; I may not leave the house tomorrow, which implies that I won't be going to the Davis Square or Arlington market tomorrow afternoon. I came home with three kinds of berries, plums, a cucumber, a yellow watermelon, and smoked salmon pate. Between the trips to the vet and to Copley, I probably walked too much, despite taking the bus for the parts of the vet trips when we weren't carrying the cat.

tl;dr: My cat had surgery this morning and is now recovering, and I hope all will be well.

ETA: We have gotten her to eat a bit of canned food, and then some turkey with pills wrapped in it. In a bit, the liquid medicine, and then I can go to bed. (er prescription for the antibiotic is 1.5 pills at a time. Fortunately, I already own a pill cutter (the vet tech didn't ask), but the pills aren't designed for splitting, and she actually got more like 1.8 pills as her first dose.

I woke up not much after six yesterday morning, and decided to work on a proofreading test. I then sent the (potential) client an email about it. Then cattitude and I had an early lunch and headed into Boston for a protest against the border guards separating refugee children from their parents. I was already feeling tired/unfocused from lack of sleep, but some things need doing.

adrian_turtle met us there, and we listened to speeches, and chanted things, and signed postcards asking Charlie Baker to please, please do the right thing. Cattitude estimated the crowd at about 700, not bad for 1 p.m. on a Thursday, with such little notice. When the gathering ended/dispersed, the three of us went to Harvard Square for ice cream. I went home with Adrian, and rested while she tidied up.

I slept very badly indeed last night: the cough that was bothering me the night before had gotten worse, and my leg muscles were cramping badly. (Adrian also thought I had a fever, but the thermometer showed 98.4 °F.)

I managed to doze a little before lunch, and Adrian then kindly escorted me back to my apartment. We ate strawberries. The basic plan for the remainder of today and tomorrow is to get as much rest as possible, and not to exercise today.

I decided I wanted one more PT session for the hip, partly so we could discuss what my long-term maintenance/homework is in terms of stretching and exercise at home.

Quick summary: I can reduce the exercise and stretch frequency to three times a week (instead of almost every day), but should do the stretches more often if I'm having trouble. Also, I should start walking more quickly, at least for short stretches. I've been walking much more slowly than had been normal for me, because moving quickly has been the most likely trigger for significant hip pain.

Details ( cut for discussion of exercise )

I went into Boston today, for a Friends of Captain Awkward meetup, which this time was at one of the cafes at the Boston Public Library. I found the group, put my stuff down, asked where to go to get food, and walked smack-dab into a plate glass door.

As I was catching my breath and getting someone to bring me ice for my head, I learned that someone else had almost done the same thing five minutes earlier—which makes two of us in the fifteen minutes after they closed the door. At that point, the staff put a table in the way, to indicate "this is not open air." Apparently they were required to have it closed because they were serving alcohol, but that's not a reason not to tape up a snowflake decoration, or stencil some drawings of books on the glass, or something.

Then there was coloring and pleasant rambling conversation. After a couple of hours I said my goodbyes, then got a library card. (BPL will give a card to anyone with a current Massachusetts address.) From there, I headed home: before I banged my head on the glass, I'd been thinking of going to Tosci's on the way home, but that would have been significantly more complicated and time-consuming than just taking the green line back to Lechmere.

I had apparently not used up all my social energy, but was chatting cheerfully with a six-year-old about things like the ice cream cake she was going to have later in the afternoon, photos, and libraries: she and her parents very much like the Arlington Library, but hadn't known about the beehive. (The six-year-old asked me where I'd gotten the bees, and I explained that they're not mine, they're the libraries, and I don't know where the librarians got them.)