savemylif3 | Reading

I have lots to say about the heat pump installation process, but I also need to get to sleep early for tomorrow’s duct cleaning. The gist is – the heat pump installation was completed today, although they didn’t start cooling my house until around 5:30 pm and didn’t leave until 5:50 pm, which meant that I had to make D’s birthday apple pie and wrap his gifts in the 85-degree heat, and which also meant that since I had to shower after they left, I didn’t make it on time to the pre-concert talk for Kim’s first string quartet appearance since leaving Delgani a year ago. Tonight she performed Shaw, Mozart, and Mendelssohn with three local musicians, including our mutual friend Julia, who played at our wedding. I also got to chat with SDH during the intermission.

Anyway, after that, I shopped briefly at Market of Choice then came home to host D & S for D’s birthday celebration. He opened the gifts and we ate about half the pie, and we chatted a bunch about One Piece and their upcoming trip, and we also spent a while looking for his birth certificate and passport. Once they left, I suddenly realized that we had only 15 minutes to complete our weekly Safeway shopping, so we rushed out and did that.

Tomorrow’s big challenge – getting all four cats into carriers and taking them out of the house before the noisy duct cleaning process, and then do my best to get back into my usual routine. At least I get to sleep in my own bed tonight!

beehaiku

a spineless prickly pear cactus in a terracotta pot lit by the midday sun. it has four new pads growing which have small, cone-like leaves where spines would be

my prickly pear is looking radiant with its new pads coming in :) i’m also being careful not to mess with the spiders using it as a home!

eve_prime

The Case of the Reborn Bhagwan, by William L. Sullivan. I have now finally read the third (and final?) installment in the “Case of” series by local author Bill Sullivan; in each book the “case” is a literal object. This one brings together the Portland detective from the second book with his Eugene niece Harmony from the first book – she’s been tempted to join a revival of the Rajneesh cult that wreaked havoc in central Oregon during the 1980s. Apparently a Portland barista is actually the reborn spirit of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, and the whole cult business apparatus (which has been laying low in Costa Rica) springs forth to support him. He’s a very nice young man, but he and Harmony soon find that they’re both in over their heads, and her uncle Detective Ferguson has to try to help… but he has some serious issues. There are lots of great strong female characters, especially Ferguson’s girlfriend Connie Wu and his autistic daughter Susan. There are also some amazing scenes in the Crater Lake area, and we learn about the Modoc legends associated with the region. I definitely recommend it, and there’s no real need to read the other two books first. Fun!

essexcats

i wonder if he knew i'd notice.
he took my sticker off his guitar.
and though we remained friends afterall
i wonder what it means at all.
is it he's announced we're done for good?
or just trying to forget me, really?
like, if every time he looked down at his guitar
there i was to stare back at him...
and remind him we're no longer one.

you know, i don't even want him back.
sincerely, i don't.
i like him, don't love him.
but it doesn't mean it didn't hurt to see it gone
a window closed, a path behind us, burried, shut, done.

he took my sticker off his guitar.
i wonder if he knew i'd notice.
because i did.
and now i don't know-
-what to quite do with it.

Current Mood: confused

eve_prime

Okay, I’m all settled in at J’s house, having made his guest bedroom dark enough for someone who sleeps until noonish. If this works well, I could get other things done in my house and yard too, like my plan to replace that horrible blackberry thicket alongside the south of my house with stamped concrete.

Tomorrow morning, the heat pump replacement team will arrive and start work – they can get into the garage just fine, and if they think they need to get into the house itself before I arrive, they’ll come ask J. They’ve scheduled two days for the installation, although online I see that it typically takes 3-8 hours – maybe they’re allowing for complications, or maybe the new fancier thermostat takes a lot of work. Then on Wednesday will be the duct cleaning; I still have a few more things to get done for that step.

Today was quite tiring! All I did, really, was sweep and mop the floors in the kitchen and both bathrooms, but that sort of work is much harder on one’s body when it’s over 80 degrees inside. First world, 21st century problems right? Everyone else is used to summer heat. Then I moved both mattresses off my bed, which was surprisingly easy (they’re standing on their side now), and tomorrow I can vacuum beneath the bed. After that, I walked down to the beginning of the path through the park and met J returning from a bike ride to the river – the evening breeze was great!

beehaiku

current mood: optimistic
current music: enjoying a quiet morning
current beverage: room temp water
current activity: resting my back (dealing with a flareup)
goal for today: laundry and paleo
i’m looking forward to… hanging out with my mom for a little
i’m feeling grateful for… diy shows :)
notes: i’m working on making friends online and irl and making slow progress.. i really want to start up community events and a scene in town, but i don’t really know where to start. i miss having a community like i had in my old town

beehaiku

Kwame Akoto (“Almighty God”) // We Must Stop Smoking and Give Our Lives to Jesus Christ, n.d. // oil on unstretched canvas

beehaiku

finally potted my hardy aloe cutting. i feel like the pot is a little big but the shape of the cutting meant i needed something wide… i have a better pot but i’m saving it for another plant. i hope the cutting grows well! i might put it outside, idk yet

eve_prime

The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner. Queen's Thief #3. Eugenides - a basically good person with some amusing but serious character flaws - has to come to peace with a new set of responsibilities, and, more important, needs to earn the respect of those around him, although he's not even trying. Our point-of-view character is one of the guards, Costis, and it's an excellent story. On to #4.

I should add... this one comes with an additional story at the end, an event in the life of the future queen of Eddis, at age nine. Quite memorable.

eve_prime

Since I have been overdoing things, today I was quite tired and did only a little cleaning in the afternoon (although I did some of my actual work, for once). I didn’t do anything with the garage until after this week’s Friday movie (2 Fast, 2 Furious), but then I decided to go ahead and move more boxes, since then I’d feel much more relaxed about the whole project. So I did, although it was getting dark and I broke two things, oh well. I moved five more boxes to J’s garage, along with B’s old bicycle. Now all I need to do in there is clean the top of the dryer and the shelf above it, recycle some cardboard, move that last heavy box of my mom’s books, and sweep the path. And I realized that I can move that last heavy box myself, without hurting myself or risking injury to J or D, by the simple method of opening the box, having fun looking at the books, then repacking it in the spot I want it to be. Whew!

While I was doing all that, J was at “armored fight night,” and this weekend he’ll be playing at Magic prereleases for the new set, so it will be fairly quiet, and (in addition to the remaining cleaning and rearranging) I’ll do lots of reading and relaxing.

eve_prime

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry, by C.M. Waggoner. This fun romantasy pairs “gutterwitch” Delly with kind, aristocratic, half-troll Winn as they work with several other women to investigate a new kind of “drip” (a magical opioid) that has nearly killed Delly’s junkie mom. I’d rather that Delly had been slightly more likeable, but at least she grows up more over the course of the book. Some of the side characters were quite interesting! I’ll want to read the author’s earlier book, which looks to be the backstory for Winn’s parents.

eve_prime

The Neural Mind: How Brains Think, by George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan. This long-awaited book combines Lakoff’s interest in framing and conceptual metaphors with his earlier linguistics research and new findings in neuroscience to present hypotheses on the embodied, neural basis of cognition and how it relates to our use of language. When I say “long-awaited,” I’ll note that I have a 2018 book by Mark Johnson citing a 2017 manuscript of this book, but the book itself didn’t appear until this June. It’s thorough and the arguments are convincing. My background is relatively weak in neuroscience, so it was frustrating that those sections, especially, hadn’t received a careful copy-editing. Another oddity was that the References and Bibliography were formatted identically, so that when looking up a reference one might start with the Bibliography, fail to find it, then have to remember to turn to the References instead. They could certainly have been integrated.

beehaiku

(most of) my collected rocks from my desert trip. the left is all cherts and agates. notable in these is the sort of washed out looking chert.. in better lighting it’s actually green! also at the bottom center there’s an agate with pockmarks. these are traces of volatiles such as CO2 bubbling out of the rock as it cooled. volatiles make eruptions much more explosive, so the volcanic activity here would have been intense. this is backed up by the rhyolites i collected (rhyolites are felsic, and felsic magma is “sticky”, which makes the eruption more explosive as well). the two i have here are actually the same formation but look totally different! the bottom right is a classic pink rhyolite is liesegang(-like; this is supposed to only happen in sedimentary rocks!) banding caused by the diffusion of iron-rich minerals during cooling. next to it is a green rhyolite from closer to the core of the formation. the green color is caused by high sodium content! at the top right i have all my limestones. the ones with big calcium crystals are interesting because the macrocrystals represent recrystallization after formation. in the middle are my non-recrystallized limestones. the one with concentric circles is cool because those circles are the remnants of an algal mat! the more rectangular piece shows evidence of rippling in the freshwater environment where it was deposited as well as some algal remnants. when i took this picture i thought the volatile pockmarked agate would be my coolest find, but the next day we found what we THINK (none of us are paleontologists) are fossilized plant roots. they absolutely look organic and you can even see some of the pattern the potential stem would have had. if we’re correct these are probably reed-like plants living in a shallow lake environment. this is supported by a previous researcher’s discovery of freshwater snail fossils and what he also suspected to be plant stems. we really need to get a paleontologist out there

eve_prime

I overdid things today – in the evening I worked on widening the path to the circuit breaker box in my garage, and that involved moving 15-20 boxes, most of which were pretty heavy. And it was about 88˚F, and I definitely got dehydrated and even rather faint, once I’d stopped. I will still need someone to lift one of the boxes of my mom’s books to set on top some of the others. I wish we’d packed her books in smaller boxes!

As part of the process, though, I did find B’s old box of Magic cards, the box he dropped in a puddle. It’s a famous box in our household, and I hadn’t seen it in quite some time. It doesn’t appear that any of the cards are valuable, even ignoring the water damage, but D could find it interesting to look at them, I hope.

Anyway, I still need to move about a dozen boxes to J’s garage, and a piano bench. Besides that, the main thing will be to move the mattresses off my bed – maybe that can be Saturday.

beehaiku

today was so wonderful, i had such a good time. i worked a while and then went to a show where i found a new band to listen to and got a cd from a band i’d seen before. i just took one of the best walks i’ve ever taken in my life. i sang along to an album i was worried i would never be able to listen to again. and i did all that in my favorite shoes because the zipper’s finally fixed!

eve_prime

Yesterday a person from the HVAC company was here to do more measurements for the heat pump replacement, and I was quite demoralized when he said I would need to move a lot more boxes in the garage to make a wider path, both from the driveway to the heat pump area and from there to the circuit breaker box. It wasn’t so bad when I looked at it today – for one thing, I’ve cleared extra space where they already asked me to, and I could move some of the boxes there. Unfortunately, many of the boxes they want moved near the circuit breaker box are quite heavy, as that’s where I’ve got my mom’s books. I guess we’ll see.

eve_prime

The Queen of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner. Queen’s Thief #2. My reread continues – I can’t give many details here, but for Eugenides, a bad thing happens and then eventually a good thing happens. We learn more of the difficult history of the queen of Attolia, too. The two chapters with the plot twist are excellent; I read them twice this time.

eve_prime

In the summer, it’s harder to feed the “porch cats” because of the yellow-jackets, who are much too interested in the wet foods I give them twice a day (and then the ants like the dry food). This year, though, maybe there’s a nearby nest, because there are many more yellow-jackets than usual. Samantha and her family do not understand or agree with the idea that their 6 pm meal has been postponed until around 9 pm, when the wasps have gone home, and they follow me up and down the driveway, looking at me like I’ve gone derelict or worse.

So J asked Claude (the Anthropic AI) how to make a yellow-jacket trap, and then he constructed one. It’s a plastic milk jug with the opening inverted, so they can go down into the base, where there’s a mixture of fruit juice and dish soap. The idea is that the fruit juice attracts them, but when they drink it the dish soap will make it impossible for them to fly back out. It’s quite harmless to cats, of course, so after he built it I set it on the porch.

The wasps totally ignored it (although some ants made their way inside). J then asked Claude why, and it turns out that yellow-jackets aren’t interested in fruit until late summer; at this point they still prefer meat. Claude hadn’t bothered taking the date of the query into account. I guess I’ll have to put some wet cat food inside and hope it still appeals to them when it’s fruit-scented.

eve_prime

Tonight we watched the last three episodes of Lazarus, a new anime series with some iffy plotting but spectacular graphics. I liked it more than J did.

I was short on sleep and didn’t get as much done as I would have liked. Actually I was sleeping better when the bedroom was hotter, because then the fan felt good. Now the fan is necessary or I’m too hot, but it makes my shoulder too cold. Twelve more nights until my room is comfortable again!

eve_prime

Today I got to break the usual pattern of cleaning then reading outside then reading inside. DG and AA have gone to Boston for the weekend, so I get to spend time with their cat Momo. He’s very happy to see me. Later, for Friday movie night, we watched The Fall, a very creative and visually beautiful movie in which an injured stuntman in maybe the 1920s tells extravagant tales to a girl in the same hospital, an extraordinary Romanian-born five-year-old. It was mostly filmed in fabulous locations in India; the hospital is supposedly in Los Angeles but was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa. I am sure I’ll want to see it again.

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Log

Reading

A very full day

✎

Book completed

he took my sticker off his guitar

Home stretch

✎

♛

✎

Book completed

Progress, while tired

Book completed

Book completed

◈

Much too much

✎

Yet more to do...

Book completed

AI versus the wasps

Saturday night

Variety!

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