savemylif3 | Reading

current mood: energized
current music: nothing but i’m so excited to listen to the new pinko fibers album later
current beverage: water bottle
current activity: posting on the clock (i’m between tasks at work and have to wait on something to do the next one)
goal for today: do some paleo! i’ve been struggling with it
i’m looking forward to… LISTENING TO THE NEW PINKO FIBERS ALBUM
i’m feeling grateful for… how chill my job is
notes: i was in a rush and forgot to check my lilac after watering it this morning, i hope it absorbed everything and isn’t just sitting in a pool of water :/ i’ll check over my lunch break

eve_prime

I was quite fortunate today. In the afternoon, I went over to Hideaway Bakery to meet with SDH’s grad student, E, who is about to start their dissertation. I met with them once before and had a lovely conversation, and today went likewise. We chatted for two hours! We have lots of common interests: narrative psychology, cats, books, etc. Then in the evening, J went on a bike ride, and when he was headed homeward I texted BHW, who has just switched back to a non-night-shift work schedule and asked if she’d like to borrow a couple of books. She agreed, so I walked down to the park to meet J then headed back up the hill for a block to her house. We sat outside and chatted for another two hours! J was envious.

essexcats

again the station coreography
the transference of souls from north to south
the veins that circulate the city
the bitter wind that blows us all

today i heard the train was late
because someone had fallen down
lost and dazed they jumped with haste
to find the meaning of it all

i stare at a stranger's eyes
through our reflections on the window
we run the walls of the tunnels
and get pierced by all the lights
since it's the early hours of the night
cold sweat runs our feet in trunnels

i try to guess where they will leave us
and disappear forevermore
the next station approaches fast
but they remain in such a bore
that i guess they've a long way to go
they must endure it more and more

someone plays the violin
but i'm too distracted to notice
someone shouts they're dying slowly
but i'm too distracted to notice

the doors open and close
new lights flicker on the map
and we go through curves, we go through ramps
i just fiddle with my bag strap

some places make me really scared
they're full of ruins and dangerous at night
and as we cross underneath their grounds
i feel the urge to close my eyes
i feel like i'm afraid to die

lost eyes, tattoos, bicycles
prams, old men, haircuts
foul smelling, beautiful, loud
alternative, giddy, asleep
dark skin, light skin, backpacks
beggars, workers, children
far-sighted, thin, athletic
strange, depressed, unremarkable

sometimes living is not in the new
in some distant lands full of money and light
living is finding in the ways of everyday
things that never truly crossed our sight
in train tracks and tunnels that open up to show us
the ugly beauty of the cityscape at night
in comparing the boots and shoes of all these strangers
and trying to decide which is the one i really like
in hearing the announcement of a station
i remember visiting all those years ago
and letting a memory take over contemplation
trying to escape the harsh words of foucault
by creating a world outside of control
inside this nasty day by day
that keeps on wearing out our souls

there might really be no love in SP
but i think that what remains is hope...

beehaiku

i got a golden pothos, a spider plant, an aloe vera, a hardy aloe cutting, and radish seeds at the plant swap and i’m super happy that they all made it home okay! my friend’s mom also gave me a cutting from one of her thai basil plants (which i was warned to keep far away from my other plants; it spreads like mint). i love love love having new plants and it came right in the middle of a spike in my plant interest (i just finished braiding sweetgrass, got a new plant, and set up a new plant care system) so i’m super excited!!
i fertilized everything before i we left and my theory about my old apartment mold hiding out in my potting soil was totally right. it showed up in my snake plant and i’m sure it’s in everything else as well. i actually bought new potting soil yesterday because i was pretty sure that was the case and now i’m very glad i did! my plan is to repot everything as long as the plant is stable enough to handle being repotted (which i think all of mine are). all the new plants will also get the fresh soil when they get repotted but they need to recover from the drive first!
the plant swap lent itself to cuttings, so most of what i got are recently planted cuttings still growing roots. the hardy aloe “cutting” was less of a cutting and more of a chunk of a plant, so i sanitized everything and peeled away the bottom leaves to expose the stem. it’s forming callouses in a shady and dry part of my apartment right now:
a piece of hardy aloe sitting on a paper towel. the leaves on the bottom half have been peeled off, leaving the stem bare. the stem is light green with rings indicating where the leaves were attached

a piece of hardy aloe sitting on a paper towel. the leaves on the bottom half have been peeled off, leaving the stem bare. the stem is light green with rings indicating where the leaves were attached

after a day or two i can get that put in a pot and hopefully it’ll start growing roots as well! i’ve propagated cuttings myself at least three times now so i feel reasonably confident that i can get this guy to flourish.
some other exciting new is that my fennel plant seems to be putting out a new stem! it’s in a strange and not very photogenic situation right now where the actual living plant is only about a third of what’s in the pot; a lot of it died off a while ago. i’m waiting for a dry day to prune the dead parts off, but it’ll be tricky navigating around the healthy stuff! i also need to check the roots for rot to see if that’s why it’s so droopy, but i kind of think it might just be topheavy.. the new growth always stands up for a while and then seems to get pulled down by the weight of the rest of it.
as i repot i’m planning to check out roots and prune as i go. i’ve been a little worried about root rot and general health, so repotting will give me a good opportunity to take a look at that and hopefully fix things up if needed. hopefully new, mold-free soil, the recent fertilization, finally clearing out the last of the aphids, and root care will help my plants thrive!

beehaiku

https://www.drinktrade.com/ ← i’m too broke to make the most of this now but my friend’s dad always has super cool coffees and i finally just asked where he found them and apparently there’s a whole world of specialty coffee i wasn’t tapped into. i’m looking at this $17 medium roast with so much lust in my heart: https://www.drinktrade.com/products/black-bear-blend

eve_prime

The heat pump technician came just over two weeks ago and let me know that it actually worked – it was just very low on fluid. He added a bit and gave me two options: They could refill it fully, including an ultraviolet dye that would help them identify the leak, or they could have someone come and give me an estimate for a brand-new one. I asked for the estimate for the replacement, and they didn’t get back to me about that until 10 days had passed; they’ll come on Thursday. Meanwhile, it’s been working so well that I was leaning toward the leak detection, but as of yesterday it stopped working properly again, so maybe the leak took away the coolant or maybe the fact that it’s finally back in the 90s overtaxed it. In the evening, when it became cooler outside, I decided that coolness outranked pollen (grass pollen levels are still high), and I opened up the windows in the main room. Unfortunately, I can’t easily open the bedroom window, nor, with Ajani, can I let the air circulate around the house, so it may be a very unpleasant night. It’s still nearly 80 in here. At least we expect cooler weather tomorrow – low 80s – but this weekend it may reach the upper 90s.

eve_prime

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, by Zoë Schlanger. I’ve now read several books about the surprising capabilities of plants, and this one – carefully researched and informed by credible scientists doing cutting-edge research – is by far the best. I made a point to read only one chapter at a time, because I wanted to take time to assimilate what I was reading. If we were to consider a simple animal that had a long list of abilities – it can communicate, possibly hear, and even possibly see; it can recognize its kin, its neighbors, its allies, and its enemies and treat them as such; it can remember its experiences, form preferences, and make future decisions accordingly – we would recognize that such an animal has awareness and at least a rudimentary form of intelligence. However, suppose the living being is different from animals in three main ways: It’s anchored to the ground, its perception-and-response system is distributed throughout its body (no brain, but as if the entire body were a brain), and its food source is neither plants nor animals but light. Suddenly we no longer see awareness and an appropriate level of intelligence; we’re more likely to think it’s basically a living machine. This is a major bias on our part! But note that it hasn’t been all that long since animals, even familiar ones like dogs, were seen as living machines too. It’s absolutely fascinating that so many surprising things have been discovered about our plant neighbors, and I encourage everyone to read this book.

eve_prime

The book I assigned myself for June was There, There, by Tommy Orange, which I read quite early in the month. Later I started on my book for July, Here on the Edge.

I didn’t start a new game, and I didn’t eat any lentils.

eve_prime

A Drop of Corruption (Ana & Din #2), by Robert Jackson Bennett. This is the second fantasy mystery set on a world where there’s a vast “science” of human enhancement and biological engineering fueled by strange chemicals from undersea leviathans. It starts as a locked room mystery set in a strange building in a land that the empire plans to annex, and we get more character development both for young investigator Din and his exceedingly quirky and brilliant boss, Ana. So many extraordinary things to learn about! I appreciated the brief afterword of real-world political commentary too.

eve_prime

Today I finally got to meet my online friend P, who knew J briefly in high school and more regularly in college. I knew them both from the same online game but was friends with P first. We’d somewhat lost contact with him – we knew he was living in Hawaiʻi and doing volcano-related work, and that he was married and had kids. We didn’t know that his wife is from Oregon and that they regularly visited her family in the Portland area, but this year he had time to come down to see us! We spent about eight hours in conversation, catching up, and we ate Thai food for dinner and took a walk and introduced P to the Hollow Knight game. As it happens he’s become locally famous in Hawaiʻi for his work on volcano preparedness and emergency community response – he’s running an online site with 160,000 followers – so the anonymity of visiting Oregon is quite welcome.

Azalyn, who has been very shy of visitors in the past, apparently decided she could cope with yet another new-to-her person within days of the last two, although she was wary. Ambrose, however, was horrified – he had evidently maxed out on JM and NW – and not only refused to come inside while P was here but got into a great loud howling fuss directed at his friend Oberon, who was quite bewildered. He was making such a racket that we thought he might be sick or injured. However, when P headed down the driveway to go back to Portland, Ambrose let J pick him up and was calm and normal thereafter.

Now we expect things to be back to normal for an entire month! J will be home, and we won’t have any special guests. It should be quite relaxing.

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

eve_prime

As I’ve probably mentioned many times, I’m supporting not only my own cats but the ones who used to eat at my late neighbor Hiram’s house, many of whom were born there. One of the cats has been especially troublesome, as he’s not part of Samantha’s family (despite probably fathering many of its members) – rather, it turns out, he was an early kitten of Bella’s, making him a much older brother of Ambrose and Azalyn. I named him Derwood, as Samantha made it clear from the start that she cannot stand him. He’s made it hard to feed the others, being more feral than the rest of them, and hostile – at every meal he’d be more interested in attacking them than settling down to eat. I’d always have to serve him extra food, very carefully, and first, on one side of the porch, and then all the others would huddle on the other side and try to eat as much as they could before he tired of his own plate and went to see what they had. All this is by way of explaining that when we discovered today that the poor fellow had passed away (in his favorite cardboard box, on J’s porch), my sadness that his life wasn’t better than it was is offset by my relief that the other cats’ quality of life will be much improved. (We hope whatever was wrong with him wasn’t contagious.) So now I have six porch cats, plus Ambrose and Azalyn (who spend most of their days inside J’s house though they do come out to socialize), plus the three “kittens” who live in my extra bedroom, plus of course Ajani.

Derwood was so much more aggressive than usual this spring that I was wondering if there would be any point to going out and buying a trap, to get him neutered, or if he was so old (8-9) and set in his ways that it wouldn’t help. (The others are all spayed/neutered except for Twobacca, but I was able to get them each into a cat carrier, although it did take two hours with Blitzen.) Thankfully he never attacked me, but he certainly could swipe at me when I was putting the food out for them. He sure made Parker and Blitzen miserable, and was even more aggressive toward Oberon, who is the biggest, and sometimes Theo and Twobacca wouldn’t even try to eat; they’d just watch from afar. Only Samantha, who knows she’s entitled to food, would go ahead and eat regardless, and she wasn’t thrilled that he was always hanging around. Now they can relax.

eve_prime

The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, by George Lakoff. This excellent book presages the rise of Trump and MAGA, as well as the recent general collapse of the Democratic leadership, even though it was published more than 10 years ago, as an update to a book published 10 years before that. The Democrats don’t understand how to communicate. Lakoff points out that the Republicans invested heavily in understanding the psychology of communication, so they know how to put together winning messages, while the Democrats tend to spend their money helping the needy and thus don’t have the same type of think tanks. He hopes his book can help make up the difference, although obviously it didn’t have the impact one might have hoped, since here we are. It’s a quick read, and useful information – I only wish he cited the academic papers on which many of his points are based.

beehaiku

the cover of Deathconsciousness by Have A Nice Life

Earthmover // Deathconsciousness (2008) // Have A Nice Life
https://open.spotify.com/track/77yGZRjuWfSzbDT0ROSSUG?si=5fswXLR5RsG7bt9F9kaaAg

beehaiku

an art professor at my school held a workshop at my town’s nature center on making cyanotypes and it was super fun! the first one didn’t get exposed long enough but it’s kind of cool in a ghostly way. the second one is david lynch’s angriest dog in the world (as recreated by me, to the best of my ability). it came out better (still could have used more exposure) but i want to do more with the composition, so i might turn it into a collage background. the final attempt is “we went to blue world” and was finally exposed long enough to turn super blue!! the cloud was a loosely-tied ball of lace :) all three were collaborations between alison and i.. we had a lot of fun coming up with ideas and trying to make them turn out! we stuck around for a while waiting on our last one and got to chat with the professor, who gave us ALL the extra supplies, so we’re going to start doing these for fun! if i do end up trying to get some community thing organized it might be cool to advertise it with laminated cyanotype flyers

beehaiku

current mood: too energetic to sleep, too tired to do anything
current music: earthmover by have a nice life
current beverage: bottled water :/ not my favorite
current activity: hanging out with alison and watching the katmai bears while we both do our own thing
goal for today: find some cool plants! ✓❀
i’m looking forward to… going to h mart.. i’m hoping to find hochija
i’m feeling grateful for… all the music coming out lately! uboa, a stick and a stone, riddance, and soon pinko fibers
notes: i’m staying with my best friend for a couple days since xe’s about to move halfway across the country and it’s really nice to hang out again! the plant swap today was super fun and made me wish my city (a small-ish college town) had something like that/more of a community. there’s a lot of nonprofit and charity stuff but younger people don’t really have those sorts of ways to connect that you get in bigger cities. i’m wondering what it would take to get something started and i even have a venue in mind, but i don’t know how to find people to show up!

beehaiku

plant update! i keep getting distracted learning about plants lately, i took notes on preventing and treating root rot for like half an hour today. anyway
❀ my lilac is probably doomed, but i’m going to do my best. that means being really brave and checking the root ball (i’m terrified of plant roots and also the other parts of the plant) to see if i can do anything to help there. it’s still putting out new leaves so i’d really like to help it pull through, but it has a serious case of lilac blight :(
❀ my fennel is droopy but vigorous, which could either be a sign of early stages of root rot or just a topheavy plant. i’m going to do some investigating there, too. i also need to prune it but am waiting for a dry day since it’s been so humid
❀ i’m worried that something got into my soil, and it’s probably just paranoia but an awful lot of my plants have had very similar problems lately. i’m going to use a gift card i got for my birthday a few months ago to order some fresh soil and toss the old stuff.. it’s not a huge expense and could potentially make a big difference
❀ i fertilized the plants that needed it (a little late), we’ll see if it helps anything
❀ as far as good news goes, my succulents are doing well and my outdoor cacti are finally back outside (they finished painting our front door and porch at last!)
❀ most exciting of all i’ve gotten new plants, which is inspiring me to make sure everything’s in good shape. i got three lucky bamboo stalks (i used to have another bunch, but they succumbed to the mold that my old apartment was infested with), a golden pothos (i’d been wanting a full shade trailing plant!), a hardy aloe, an aloe vera, and a spider plant as well as some radish seeds. i’m hoping i can get that new soil soon and pot them properly, but until i know i have clean potting mix i don’t want to pot them. i got them at a plant swap so some of them honestly don’t need to be repotted and the few that do will be fine for a little while. i do have a cutting i’m anxious to get in the ground but i need to get its roots started first anyway

eve_prime

By the Book, by Jasmine Guillory. Yes, I read it again. It's even more fun the second time through, because the allusions to the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast are even more obvious. Great bedtime reading.

eve_prime

Today I picked up Ajani’s new meds, then we did some grilling and had a nice outdoor lunch with JM and NW, with great conversation. Soon after 4 pm J drove them to the airport for the next stage in their summer vacation. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing outside – it was 80ish with a strong breeze. I read bits of three books, and he curled up on his big lawn chair and looked at his phone; then we took a walk. Tomorrow is “off,” then we’ll have another friend visit on Monday. After that, it will be about a month until our next out-of-town guests.

eve_prime

Tonight I attended the opening concert for the annual Oregon Bach Festival; this time the theme was Beethoven's first “Akademie” with music taken from a 1800 concert he promoted where he showcased some of his early work and introduced his first symphony. He put posters up around Vienna, and interested people had to go to his apartment to buy tickets from him! His actual concert lasted about four hours, whereas our event was two-plus hours of music from his event and an intermission. I went with my new friend CH, who had an extra ticket as her other friend wasn't able to go. I hadn't sat up in the balcony at the university concert hall before, and other than the excessive heat it was a pretty nice place to be; I saw several other people I knew up there too. Meanwhile, J took our friends to the sword school's "fight night" and then out to dinner at a restaurant in Springfield.

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Log

Reading

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Excellent socializing!

underground

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HVAC update

Book completed

Resolutions: June Report

Book completed

Meeting my friend P

Rebuilding journal search again

And then there were 12

Book completed

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Book completed

A super Saturday

Beethoven night

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