pantryslut

I got Cattitude to disconnect my old Windows PC from the peripherals, move it out of the way, and put the MacBook in its place instead.

Moving over is being more annoying than I expected. Some of that is that I don't remember offhand where I left some files. But I also spent a bunch of time wrestling with the Mail app, which decided for no apparent reason that the server was offline. Restarting the machine didn't help, and then the problem went away on its own.

Also, the displays for just about everything have too little contrast, and the text is too small. I thought I'd found a way to change that for everything, but apparently not, so I've only done a few.

I'm probably done for tonight. I have an appointment to get my teeth cleaned early tomorrow afternoon, and I may not work on this further until I get home afterwards.

redbird

This was the quarterly check-in so she can refill the Ritalin prescription, and cover anything else non-urgent.

I talked about how my gut is doing, and that I'm trying to reduce my use of naproxen (and NSAIDs generally) at the advice of the GI doctor. So far, that has meant waiting a little while before taking a naproxen because something hurts, and not taking it preventively for short walks. Airports, yes.

Carmen said there aren't a lot of good options, and recommended a turmeric supplement that someone she used to work for, who also did Ayurvedic medicine, recommended. I expressed some general skepticism, and specifically how much turmeric people had to eat to benefit. The recommendation is for a supplement that you tuck in next to your gum, so it's absorbed directly into the bloodstream. Carmen said "you can get it on Amazon," and Adrian pointed out after the visit that I should check the inactive ingredients carefully.

She also asked about my breathing, and I told her that recently, I've coughed up less phlegm after using the flutter valve, without having more trouble breathing. Less crap in my lungs is good, of course, and this means I won't worry much about skipping the flutter valve for things like travel and dental work. However, I'm basically sticking to the same twice-a-day schedule at least until the next time I see the lung doctor.

I also told Carmen about the strawberry allergy, and what symptoms I'd noted. I mentioned that I'm also probably allergic to stevia, and she made a note of both allergies.

The next appointment, in about three months, is for a physical exam, so longer and in person. At 1:30, so I can get lunch in Davis Square, weather allowing.

brithistorian

I created this post on 2 Dec. 2024, when I decided to start keeping a books-read log as part of my Dreamwidth journal. Each month will get a new post, to be updated as the month progresses, and links to the monthly logs will be kept in this post, which will be both stuck to the top of my journal and linked from my profile.

2024
- December
2025
- January
- February
- March
- April
- May
- June
- July

redbird

I just got off the phone with a (genuinely) helpful person at Amalgamated Bank.

I've been talking to them in order to close a joint account in my and my mother's names, and the bank told me in June that the easiest way to do this would be to withdraw all the money and then have them close the account. In order to do that, I had to set up online banking, but only after adding my phone number to the account, which I did in June. Apparently the reason I couldn't log in to the online account after setting it up was that I'd written the password down wrong.

The person at the bank reset my password for me, and then told me how to link this account to an account at another bank. I'm waiting for the test deposits to hit my account, which may take a few days. After than, I can transfer the rest of the money.

Also, I got up in time to go for a walk this morning, to the grocery store and back, before it got too hot. It's a hot day in July, so the six things I bought included ice cream, Italian ices, and fresh blueberries.

brithistorian

I just finished my second book for the reading challenge: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, which is both "a history of a resistance movement" and "a history that's been sitting on your shelf for too long" (my mother-in-law bought it for me for Christmas about 10 years ago). Having already read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States, a lot of this a lot of this material was already familiar to me, but Brown's choice of events to focus on meant that I still ended up learning new things from this book.

While I admit to not knowing enough about the subject to recognize any faults in Brown's research, I did find one aspect the writing of the book that displeased me: It seemed that as the book progressed, moving closer to the present day, the coverage of material accelerated, as if Brown was starting with a preset limited page count and, having written the first part of the book, was scrambling to include all the material he wanted to before reaching that page limit. The result of this is that the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, which I would have expected to be fairly significant parts of the book, are covered in 12 pages immediately before the book ends.

And when I say the book "ends," I am choosing that word very deliberately. The book just stops at the end of the day of the Wounded Knee Massacre, when the wounded survivors were carried into the church at the Episcopal mission at the Pine Ridge Agency. There is no conclusion, no examination of the reactions to the massacre, nothing. If you removed the table of contents and the back matter, which make it clear that this is the end of the book, and had a group of students read it, they would come back asking you for the rest of the book.

redbird

Tom Lehrer, a satirical songwriter and professor of math and musical theater, has died, age 97. A lot of his songs are satirical, often about then-current events, but most of those songs hold up pretty well, I think.

The Universal Hub post about Lehrer's death links to several videos.

Lehrer placed all his music in the public domain, including performance rights and the right to publish parodies and distortions, in the public domain a few years ago. Everything is available for download, though the website includes a notice that it will be shut down at some date in the not too distant future (relative to 2022.

Oh, and Lehrer also wrote my favorite song from the PBS program The Electric Company, "Silent E."

brithistorian

I read a news article today "K-pop trainee ordered to pay damages after tattoo and dorm exit led to canceled debut". In the article, the trainee was referred to as A, in an effort to protect their privacy — they even used "they/them" pronouns throughout, thinking that concealing their gender might have further helped in concealing their identity. However, they referenced the company involved by name and gave the debut date of the group that A didn't debut with, which meant that 30 seconds at the Kpop Wiki was enough for me to find A's identity. Definitely sub-optimal anonymization.

I'm also not too keen on the headline. To me "canceled debut" sounds like the group that A was to have been in didn't debut, but instead it was just that A didn't get to debut with the group.

Also, if you're curious, according to the contract, the damages in question should have been 60 million won (approx. US$43K) for 2 violations for contract terms (once for leaving the dorm without permission, once for getting a tattoo without permission). For some reason, though, the company sued A for 80 million won (approx. US$58K). The judge ruled that this amount was excessive and ordered A to pay 5 million won (approx. $US3600). The agency is appealing the ruling, though, which just has me eye-rolling. (It seems significant to me, though I don't know if a court would feel this way, that the group that A was prevented from debuting with has already disbanded.)

redbird

This is health/health care, specifically vaccines, but it's related to US politics: If you live in the United States and are wondering whether you can get a flu shot this fall, yes they will be available. Whether you have to pay for it depends on what kind of insurance you have. The following applies specifically to the flu vaccine, and not to most other vaccines.

If you have Medicare, the seasonal flu shot is covered at no charge. For adults with private insurance, that's up to the insurer, and Dr. Jeremy Faust thinks most insurance companies will cover it. For children, either their insurance covers the flu vaccine, or they can get it from the "Vaccines for Children" program, but only in certain locations, which do not include the pediatrician's office. I'm linking to Dr. Faust's post, and his description is complicated because it's describing a complicated situation.

https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/is-rfk-jr-calling-the-shots-who-can

That article says that federal law also has specific rules for three other vaccines--pneumococcus, covid, and hepatitis B--but neither Dr. Faust nor the website he links to say whether the same rules apply to them and to seasonal flu shots.

The information above is as of July 25, 2025.

brithistorian

When I first started writing, I would get comments about how things I'd written were "so funny." This perplexed, confused, and annoyed me, because most of these times I wasn't trying to be funny. But after a while I realized that this was just sort of how my writing came out — even when I'm trying to be totally serious, I often still end up slipping little funny bits in, and when I'm not trying to be totally serious. . . well, you end up with things like this conversation that I wrote last night, and that I'm particularly amused by:

Lily lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. After a while, she rolled over to look at Jiwoo, who was lying on her bed, watching a drama on her laptop. “So how long do we have to pretend to be dating?”

Jiwoo laughed, then paused her drama and turned to look at Lily. “‘Have to’? You really know how to make a girl feel wanted!”

Lily tossed a throw pillow at Jiwoo. “You know what I mean!” she said teasingly.

“Who knows?” Jiwoo teased back, her eyes sparkling. “Maybe we decide to end it next week. . . or maybe we end up pretending to date for so long that we end up pretending to get married and then we pretend to have kids and end up pretending to live happily ever after.”

“Pretend to have kids?” Lily asked. “How would that even work?”

Jiwoo shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “But we’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. Before we do that, we’ll have to pretend to get married, and before we can do that, you’ve got to pretend to propose to me.”

“I’ve got to?” Lily asked. “Why wouldn’t you pretend to propose to me?”

Jiwoo raised an eyebrow skeptically and scoffed as she looked at Lily and said “Because you’re older than me, so obviously people would expect you to pretend to propose to me. If I pretend to propose to you, it’ll look like I’m pretending to tie you down because I’m not really sure that you pretend to love me.”

Lily laughed. “Should I be worried that this is starting to make sense?”

redbird

I read fewer books than I'd expected to while I was in London. Recently finished:

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent-Teacher Association, by Caitlin Rozakis, is a fantasy novel about a magical school, from the viewpoint of a student's parent.

The Eights, by Joanna Miller, is about four women students who enroll at Oxford University the year the university starts offering degrees to female students. It's set in 1920-21, with flashbacks to earlier in the four women's lives. (The "eights" in the title means the residents of corridor 8.)

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Code-maker's War, by Leo Marks, describes working at one of the British government agencies that sent coded messages to underground agents in occupied Europe during the second world war. The author's job included deciphering messages that were mangled either in transit, or by the agent who encoded them, and coming up with new and hopefully better codes.

Evvie Blake Starts Over, by Linda Holmes, is about a woman who was in the process of leaving her husband when he died in a car accident, and her recovery from both the bad marriage and from all the people who expect her to be grieving him. A romance, more or less.

I enjoyed all of these, and don't remember who recommended ~~any~~ most of them to me (

adrian_turtle just reminded me that she recommended The Grimoire Grammar School PTA). There's a range of moods here, less because of planning than because of what came up on my library hold lists.

None of these books are useful for my Boston Public Library summer reading bingo cards: I'd already filled the squares for "book with a name in the title" and "published in 2025." I have a book with a green cover on my desk, and got email while I was in London telling me that it had been automatically renewed for another three weeks.

redbird

In no particular order:

Mom wanted my cousin Janet to have two rings, and two specific books, and we couldn't find any of them, despite searching repeatedly. This doesn't make sense: if only the jewelry was missing, it might conceivably have been stolen, even though other appealing jewelry was in her bedroom closet, including the few items that are mentioned in the will. If it was just those two used books, maybe they were put away somewhere safe. But there's no reason the rings and books would have been in the same place, where we couldn't find them while going through things that thoroughly.

Mark was already planning to take all of Mom's unclaimed jewelry back to New Orleans, photograph it, and offer it to our cousins. Because the rings Mom promised Janet are missing, he's going to give Janet first pick. (He, Linza, and the three of us have already looked at it, and taken a few things.)

The whole process was very amicable. We weren't arguing over who could take something that wasn't specifically left to either me or my brother, but agreeing that Mom's crystal might be pretty, but wasn't worth trying to take home on the plane. Instead, Mark took a glass bowl that a friend of his made, and Andy took a small piece of cranberry glass. There were two envelopes of paper money; we split the pounds, and I told Mark to take all the euros, because he's probably going to visit the EU fairly soon.

There were more than enough good photos of Mom, her parents, and other relatives for me and Mark to take home, in some cases duplicate prints of the same picture. I labeled a few photos of people I wasn't sure I'd recognize if not, including a couple of pictures of my paternal grandparents, and one of Dad's older sister. I decided I wanted my mother's first US passport, from a trip to Europe in 1953, and her resident alien card (from before they were green).

Mark took some photos and documents home because he thought Janet would want them, and he was willing to schlep things for her. I'm not sure if that's because he's one of the executors of the will, or simple generosity.

As we were packing yesterday, we decided to take Mom's salt and pepper grinders: they have no sentimental value, but we've been unhappy with both our current pepper grinders and one of our salt shakers.

otter's comment reminded me that there also is, or may be, a gold charm bracelet that belonged to our grandmother. Janet asked to buy it from me and Mark, but we didn't find it either, only a different gold charm bracelet that belonged to Simon's first wife. The one we found is in the will as going to his daughter Liz, and after Mark took a picture, Liz confirmed that the bracelet we found was her mother's, and Janet didn't recognize it. We left that in the flat, because Liz will be in London in a few months. It's possible, though not likely, that my aunt Lea had the bracelet Janet wants, and that it's still in her and Dave's apartment. We asked Lea's daughter Anne, who doesn't have it but is going to ask Dave.

If Dave finds it, or if the bracelet turns up a few months from now at Mom's flat, we'll give it to Janet, not sell it, but we're waiting until the bracelet turns up before telling her that.

[I am adding to this as I think of other things that seem to belong here.]

redbird

We got home last night, very late in terms of the time zone we woke up in yesterday morning, then spent some time petting and playing with the cats, eating chocolate and ice cream, and unpacking a few things that I needed or wanted right away (slippers, toothbrush, and prescription drugs). I washed a few dishes, because I walked into the kitchen for chocolate and saw that we were almost out of clean mugs in the size we'd want for tea and coffee in the morning.

The trip home was OK as these things go: I ordered a cab to take us to Heathrow, using the service Mom always used, and paid in cash using my half of the British money she'd had in an envelope, including a generous tip for the driver. We had time to finish things like washing our dishes and clearing Mom's data off her computer before leaving, and enough time at the airport to be at the gate before boarding started, but not enough to get bored. I arranged the cab, and got us all aisle seats for the flight home, on Sunday, and then turned everything over to Cattitude and Adrian once we got to Heathrow. By the time we got off the plane, I was so worn out that I was stopping occasionally to lean on the walls in the airport, but fortunately doing better once we got home.

I woke up this morning at 7:30 Boston time, which seemed good--about 7.5 hours sleep, and back on my home time zone. The milk from before we left was iffy but the cut of tea tasted OK. The igniters for the stove burners didn't work when I turned them on, but I remembered both that we have long matches for just this purpose, and where we keep them, so that was OK for the moment, and we can investigate that further when Adrian and Cattitude are also awake.

We plan to do very little today: order groceries, unpack, and I might inject the about-monthly dose of my current MS medication, which I take every 4-6 weeks, and would have taken Saturday if we'd been home). Some balance PT would also be a good idea.

brithistorian

One of my friends on FB was talking about the experience of having a daughter who's a bookworm (at her birthday, as soon as she opened a present and saw she got books, she wanted to go read). It reminded me of this story from my past:

One of my mom's favorite stories to tell about me was that the Christmas I turned 7, one of my gifts was a stack of books (Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). As soon as I got those, Christmas was over as far as I was concerned - I opened Alice in Wonderland (because it was at the top of the stack) and started reading. In the back yard was a new swingset that my dad, my uncle, and my grandfather had spent all day Christmas Eve putting together. They had to drag me away from my books to go see it. I played for about 10 minutes or so, then went back in and went back to reading.

redbird

We went into central London this afternoon, intending to visit the British Museum, but we made a very late start, and after our late lunch discovered they were sold out of (free) tickets for today.

So we went to the National Gallery, a few bus stops away, and looked at paintings. I wasn't up for a huge amount of walking, but bny the time I was ready to leave, so were Adrian and Cattitude. We spent a few minutes just enjoyong being in Trafalgar Square on a sunny afternoon, then walked to Charing Cross to get the Underground. Annoyingly, while it was (as whichever app Cattitude was using said) only a few minutes walk to Charing Cross, there was a lot more walking underground, and we had to go down several flights of stairs.

ETA: I was emotionally worn out to the point that I was glad it was just the three of us yesterday, not socializing with anyone else. I hadn't realized that beforehand, only that I was tired enough that committing to anything involving other people seemed imprudent. Being around my brother for most of several consecutive days was a lot of 'there are people here,' even though, or because, much of it wasn't socializing so much as being near each other and sometimes asking whether we needed, or wanted, various items.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little my joints hurt by the time we got back to Mom's flat. I took both naproxen and acetominophen before we left, and wore my better walking shoes and a pair of smartwool socks, and the combination sdeems to have done me a lot of good.

We're flying home tomorrow. I booked a cab, which will pick us up at 2:15, and logged onto the British Airways website and changed the (acceptable) seats it had assigned us to ones we like better (I got us all aisle seats, instead of all next to each other so one person was in a middle seat).

redbird

We are essentially done at Mom’s flat. I didn’t have a lot to do today, but am still tired. We will decide tomorrow what if anything we want to do.

Leaving for Boston Monday afternoon.

We had Chinese food delivered tonight, and it was basic good Cantonese food. They included a small bag of those weird shrimp chips, which I turned out to be in the mood for.

redbird

We expected to finish going through Mom's papers, photos, etc. yesterday, but despite me and \mark both pushing hard, we realized in the late afternoon that we were both badly worn out, so we stopped. He left, and I got Adrian and Cattitude to tale care of me. I was worn out both mentally and physically; Adrian pointed out that I had worked steadily for longer than the previous couple of days. Mark will coming back to the flat in a bit, but we did not set an alarm, because I needed the rest.

We reached a point yesterday that I could be satisfied just packing everything the three of us have decided to take--photos, the gorgeous candlesticks Mom left to Adrian (officially to me, but she had discussed them with Acrian), and a few other small mementoes, but there's a stack of paper that Mark wants to take a second look at: he was looking for financial paperwork as well as photos and other mementoes. It felt like it might be 45 minutes more work today, but could take three times as long if we had tried to push through last night.

I told Cattitude and Adrian to go out and play yesterday, so they spent the afternoon at Kew Gardens. It is raining steadily now, and forecast to do so for several hours. I'm thinking I want to not do much today, just finish the tasks here, and maybe go out and do something interesting tomorrow, before leaving for Boston on Monday.

I am very glad we saw

liv on Tuesday, when we were still feeling energetic.

brithistorian

I read a couple of articles recently, one about the recent Magic: The Gathering/Final Fantasy crossover and another a review of the most recent D&D book. The common thread in both of these articles was the way that the economics of being owned/produced by Hasbro (a multi-billion-dollar corporation) was affecting the content of the games. This got me to thinking that perhaps some games would be better off as lifestyle businesses. I don't think this is practical for all games — major corporate intellectual properties are more likely to deal with a major corporate game company than a lifestyle game company, regardless of the quality of the game — and I think at this point a lot of small game companies are just small companies that haven't scaled up ("yet," in the owners' hopeful thoughts) — but I'd like to deal with a game company that's run more for the good of the designers and the game than for the benefits of a huge faceless corporation.

ETA: It occurred to the just after posting this that a lot of the "companies" I dealt with when I was active in historical miniatures gaming were lifestyle businesses, simply because there's not really much room to scale historical miniatures. While this occasionally meant delays in orders because of issues in the owner's life (e.g. "I'm having my gallbladder out, so orders for the next couple of weeks will be delayed") or because of the realities of dealing with a small business (e.g. "I don't have any of Napoleonic Spanish irregulars on hand, so there will a slight delay while I cast some more"), it was generally a pleasant experience, even given the realities of transatlantic shipping in the late 1990s. It wouldn't really be compatible with today's "Amazon overnight delivery" mindset, though.

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pantryslut

November 2017

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Page generated Jul. 31st, 2025 07:39 pm

Reading

Macintosh (computer)

appointment with Carmen: naproxen, gut, lungs

Books read log

a productive day

Book reaction: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

RIP Tom Lehrer

Not so anonymous as they might have thought

flu vaccines

On writing and humor

Wednesday reading

more notes on the trip to London

Well, I'm home

When your kid is a bookworm...

National Gallery

Mission accomplished

not quite done

(no subject)

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November 2017

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