Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I talked to Carmen again this morning, and told her that while some of the symptoms have eased (including that I am not running a fever) the parts that still hurt interfere as much with walking as they did on Friday. She is sending me to have blood drawn for tests, at a lab selected for minimal walking between the sidewalk and the actual lab (even though it's further from my apartment than some others).

Carmen told me she was waiting to order the tests until she can talk to her colleagues, in case they want to add any tests--I said I would rather have an unnecessary test than have to make an extra trip, as things are right now. Carmen's current hypothesis is inflammation, so she asked me how I tolerate steroids (reasonably well, fortunately). She and Adrian both think I should loop my neurologist in here, even though I doubt this is an MS flare-up. She thinks that if the cause is a viral infection, I may be fighting it off, but she would have expected better recovery by now in that case. On the other hand, and I only just thought of this, I am on an immune-suppressant drug that means I start with very few antibodies to anything.

Also, it took them long enough to order the labs that, by the time I got there, they weren't taking any more walk-ins. So, that was a waste of time and money, though it hurt less than I'd feared, thanks to the quad cane Adrian bought a few hours ago. The next available appointment at that location is Thursday afternoon, which I took (there was one offered Thursday, and lots of available times for Friday).

I stayed indoors all day yesterday, for no particular reason, and then at about 8:00 I checked the forecast for Friday-Sunday. Friday (today) in particular was forecast to be hot, so I got cattitude and adrian_turtle to go for a short walk with me after dinner.

I woke up a bit early this morning, and instead of trying to get back to sleep, I got up and had tea, and sat for a little bit until I was awake enough to be hungry for breakfast. I had yogurt, pulled on clothes, and walked over to the nearby Whole Foods. (The Star Market opens earlier, but is a bit further away.) I got a few useful things, including more non-dairy ice cream sandwiches, because I (mistakenly) thought we had none left.

Those ice cream sandwiches are for Adrian and Cattitude. I'm happily eating (dairy) ice cream, and currently have peach, ginger, black raspberry, chocolate, and chocolate orgy. That is a lot of flavors, but I'm buying pints of ice cream if I'm near Lizzy's, or sometimes Tosci's or JP Licks, and expect to be able to get the ice cream home before it melts. Insulated shopping bags definitely help.

cattitude and I took the bus to Harvard Square, where we got pizza for lunch at &pizza because it's convenient and has outdoor tables. The set-up there is that you can put as few or as many toppings on your pizza at a fixed price (rather than paying per topping). I saw that I could have a fig and balsamic vinegar drizzle added after cooking, so I tried from memory to recreate something I used to get at Mod Pizza when we lived in Bellevue. It wasn't bad, but I should have asked for more basil than the person put on at first, and maybe omitted the cooked onions instead of asking for extras of those. I think what I was getting at Mod was tomato, mozzarella, basil, and mushroom, and then the balsamic drizzle, but this really isn't a good summer for tomatoes.

From there, we went to Central Square, for the farmers market and H-Mart. I also wanted to go to Target and look at socks, but there was nothing there I really liked (it's a small Target, but I keep not getting to the one at Porter Square).

We bought some produce, along with conversation like "oh, I still have some plums from last week" and whether to buy a tiny orange or purple cauliflower: cattitude sensibly pointed out that we shouldn't get both that and the cabbage, and he has plans for the cabbage. Tasty plans. What we did get was a few yellow plums, a half-pint of raspberries, a cucumber, a cabbage, and two Puritan apples to see if we liked them. I couldn't get Evernote to show me my "apple list" note the note with my apple; now that I'm home, I see that we had tried it before and been unimpressed, but I am usually unimpressed by early-season apples. But we have them, and I will eat one, because maybe this year's crop is better.

We got another loaf of the Luce bread from Hi-Rise, and seeing their display reminded me that I hadn't finished the lemon curd cake I got last week. So I had that with my afternoon tea when I got home; in a zip-lock, it was still good after a week, though a little drier than when fresh. At H-mart, we bought cherries, pork-and-leek dumplings, and a quart of milk.

Thence, Cattitude went to Davis Square to pick up a prescription at the CVS there, and I went to Harvard Square to buy ice cream, and then home via the CVS nearest our house, to pick up my prescription. The timing worked out that Cattitude and I got to 73 the bus stop at the same time, so he came with me to the drugstore.

That was a lot of walking, possibly too much, even though I took a naproxen before we set out. But I don't have to go anywhere tomorrow, or Wednesday, hHaving postponed my dental appointment.

cattitude, adrian_turtle, and I had lunch at Cafe Barada, which has a permanent fenced-off area with tables on the sidewalk. This is the first time the three of us have done something like this since before the pandemic. I suggested Barada for our first post-vaccination outing, and Adrian mentioned that they had been one of the first restaurants to go to take-out-only, last spring. (It's a family business, which might mean the management cared more about the health of the staff than someone who was employing strangers and expecting rapid staff turnover even in normal times.) I had lamb kebabs, cattitude had vegetarian kibbe (squash, mostly), and Adrian had falafel, and they shared stuffed grape leaves as an appetizer, and it was all good.

After lunch, cattitude went home and I went with Adrian to her place for a couple of hours. First, we walked up to Davis Square because she wanted to get vegan ice cream at JP Licks, but they were out of the flavor she wanted. I suggested taking a bus from Davis to Arlington Center and then catching the 77, rather than walking back to Mass Ave, but the bus ride it was bumpy enough to make Adrian uncomfortable, so we got out at Clarendon Hill. She was thinking of waiting for the next 87, but I suggested we walk along Alewife Brook Parkway instead, even though that was a longer walk than the one (trying to remember how long the walk would be) and said yes. After a few blocks of sidewalk, we got onto a boardwalk next to Alewife Brook. It was a nice day for a walk, and for sitting quietly for a few minutes on a random bench, and my hip was fine (with my usual caution of moving slowly and taking breaks before it started to hurt). Oddly, on the trip back to Belmont, my feet hurt from the short walk in the Harvard bus tunnel from the 77 to the 73.

I went for a walk this afternoon, because getting outside in the daylight is good for me, especially on bright sunny days like this afternoon. I saw this cherry tree two blocks from home:

( tree, behind a cut for size )

I live in an inner suburb of Boston, and wasn't expecting to see flowers other than some vagrant dandelions.

ETA: I am reliably informed that this looks like a winter-flowering cherry, and they're supposed to do that.

I just walked close to two miles, as part of the Belmont pride parade, which I found out about as they were walking past our house. I wasn't planning to go anywhere today; in fact, I was planning not to, for the sake of my hips and left knee.

cattitude happened to notice the parade going past on Beech Street, and I couldn't see an obvious reason not to join them. He had an obvious reason--no shoes--but I grabbed a mask and set out before remembering I did have a reason, and by then I was a couple of blocks from home and decided to keep going for a bit. I hope I don't regret this later in the day, or the week.

I hadn't expected a Pride parade this year, since the big-city Pride events have all gone virtual because of the pandemic, and Boston, at least, then said they are scaling down and refocusing the online stuff to focus on Black lives matter and anti-racism. This parade was small enough that we mostly maintained social distancing, and I hope they're right about outdoors and sunlight, as well as masks, being protective.

When we were still on Beech Street, someone offered me a flag, so I happily waved a small trans pride flag at passing cars, people sitting or standing on the other side of the street, and so on. The parade got friendly waves and honks from almost everyone we passed

I turned before the parade got to Belmont Center, because walking that far before walking home seemed like more than I could handle.

(My route/walk, just because: https://www.mappedometer.com/?maproute=815131)
Also, I have now met my state representative, who introduced himself as we were walking down Common Street; we chatted a little, both general stuff and about legislation to make it easy to vote by mail.

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.

We had one full day in New York on this trip, and cattitude spent part of it visiting a friend on the Island. adrian_turtle and I met my mother at the Cloisters at around noon. On our way uptown, we'd gotten into line for a Metrocard vending machine when a stranger came over to the line and asked if we had just gotten into the city. When we and the woman in front of us said yes, she handed us each an unlimited-ride Metrocard with four days left on it, saying that she was leaving town and didn't want them to go to waste. The woman in front of us asked "how much?" and the donor shook her head and said "Merry Christmas."

The trip uptown was unremarkable, and I found that I have a good memory for the details of that trip, including the irrelevant ones: I knew we were approaching 110th when the track sloped downward, and then (having lost count of stations) recognized 145th by the color of the pillars supporting the roof.

Adrian was delighted by the Cloisters, including the famous Unicorn Tapestries. This visit what caught my eye most was sculpture and artifacts (including a unicorn-shaped hand-washing pitcher in the room with those tapestries); when we went downstairs to the Treasury, I pointed out the wooden carvings on the staircase we had just descended. We had time to look at almost everything before we decided it was past time for lunch, which we got at the diner Cattitude and I used to go to regularly when we lived in Inwood. The staff has changed and the menu is shorter than it was, but it was basic good diner food, and they still know how to make tea.

Then we took the train down to the Village so we could go to Varsano's, my old favorite chocolate shop, which roadnotes had first introduced me to. I was pleasantly surprised not to have to wait (the Saturday right before Christmas), and we bought lots of interesting chocolate. My mother asked the difference between a lemon cream and a lemon truffle. I wasn't sure and asked the shop assistant; she passed the question to Mark Varsano, who explained and then put one of each on the counter for Mom to taste.

After I'd paid for my chocolate, Mark said something like "I still miss our friend," meaning Roadnotes, and we talked about her a little; one thing he mentioned was her dry sense of humor. I'd been afraid I would have to be the one to tell him she had died, and warned Adrian on our way downtown that I might need my hand held—but it's unsurprising that the same "small town that just happens to have eight million people" feeling that had Mark asking me how she was after she moved to Seattle means he'd gotten the sad news from some other mutual friend.

( here there be politics, but relatively low-stress, I think )

The day involved a lot of walking, including at least ten flights of stairs; by the time we headed back to our hotel my ankles were complaining about the stairs in front of my aunt's building, but my knee and hips were (and are) doing okay.

adrian_turtle, cattitude and I went for a delightful walk today. Yesterday I'd figured we would need to get out in the morning in order to avoid the rain; that turned out not to be true, but by the time we realized that Adrian was over here, and Cattitude and I were ready to head out, for what turned out to be a couple of hours in the sunshine. (It was mid-60s F (18 C) when we went out, very good walking weather.)

I wanted to head south on Lake Street and explore a little I hadn't done before; the two of them worked out a route while I was tediously renewing my prescriptions. (Rite Aid's system is a lot more efficient than Walgreen's, in case you're trying to decide between those two chains.)

We walked down Lake Street past Route 2 into Belmont, and revised our plans when it transpired that Google Maps had tried to guide us onto the highway. The streets in that bit of Belmont are curved around Little Pond. We found the unpaved, very pleasant access route from the street to the pond, and spent some time looking at the water. That bit of woods is mostly conifer, so we were walking on dried pine needles. The other pleasant surprise in Belmont was some late, very fragrant honeysuckle blossoms: I smelled them before I saw them, which is unusual. (I like honeysuckle, but not as much as Cattitude does.)

After Little Pond we found the Fitchburg Cutoff Path, which connects to the Minuteman Bikeway at Alewife Brook T station. There's a boardwalk leading from that path into a delightful constructed wetland, built for storm water management. In among the water lily pads, we saw several frogs, the first Cattitude or I had seen in the wild in years. (There is, alas, a worldwide amphibian shortage.) First Cattitude spotted two fairly small frogs sitting on lily pads (not jewel-colored tree frog small, but small), and then Adrian saw a much larger one swimming below the surface. We spent quite a while watching the frogs sit, swim, and even hop, and then walked a little further and saw more frogs, including another large one. There were also dragonflies and a goldfinch and a wood duck, all of which are good, and all of which we had seen in the area earlier in the summer (okay, we probably hadn't seen these dragonflies before, though the goldfinch or duck might be one of the ones we'd seen in August).

We eventually decided that lunch would be a good idea, walked the last bit to the T station, and went to Central Square for lamb shank, pumpkin kibby, and then ice cream and tea.

More comments from elsewhere: ( gender (twice), collecting rivers, 'guilty pleasure, critics and book reviews )