hrj

So during yesterday's morning yardwork break, I was weed-whacking the parking strip. (Have I mentioned that I have become completely enamored of Ryobi cordless power tools?) And I spot a plastic card under the edge of one of the lavender clumps and it turns out to be a Clipper card. So having determined that there's no easy way to notify Clipper of a found card, I put a sign on my fence about it and inviting the owner to ring the bell to pick it up from me. (Wondering what the likelyhood is that someone would lie about it. And whether it's on an auto-load account. So maybe I'm creating more trouble for the owner?)

Anyway, someone did take me up on the notice and rang my bell to ask about it. At 6:30am this morning.

Now, this isn't actually a problem, as I'm more or less supposed to be awake at that point, though I did have to take the time to throw a robe on. It was a kid (older teenager?) -- I think he's someone I chatted with about my little free library at some point -- but it turned out he'd lost an entire wallet and not a Clipper card, but was hoping that maybe I'd been being cagey about the nature of the find for ID purposes. So it wasn't his, alas. I think maybe he was feeling a bit embarrassed about having clearly gotten me out of bed for nothing, but I'm actually delighted that people feel comfortable talking to relative strangers in this neighborhood.

So I still have someone's unclaimed Clipper card. The location suggests that it fell out of someone's pocket when they were getting into our out of a car, so I'll give it a couple more days for people to have a chance to see the notice. Then I'll try to find out how to report it found and get instructions what to do with it. (If it isn't a registered card, just one that gets cash added, then there's no way to find the owner. But people who commute regularly often have significant sums on the card and may have auto-load activated, in which case the account needs to be dealt with.)

# # #

The blackcurrant curd came out wonderfully -- a lovely dark veinous-blood color, rich and flavorful on a plain scone fresh from the oven. With that as the snack accompaniment for tea, I figured I could choose something robust today. So Bingley's Lapsang Souchong ("the favorite tea of Sherlock Holmes" it says), a pine-smoked black tea.

If you'd asked be before I started drinking it, I might have expected not to like Lapsang Souchong. It's a very strong and bold taste. The smokiness is consistent from the loose tea, to the aroma, to the taste. And I love it. I tend to save it for when I'm in a certain mood -- or when I have a blackcurrant curd that I want it to stand up to. It's like drinking a campfire in the woods, which conjures up wonderful memories.

Brewed at 190F for NLT 5 minutes and left in the pot. (In reality, since I put the scone in the over around the same time I put water in the pot, it had brewed for about 10 minutes by the time I took the tray into the office.)

[Apologies to those who also subscribe to the alpennia blog rss feed and will see this twice.]

* * *

For those of us of a Certain Age, who grew up in a Certain Cultural Context, there is a birthday that comes with a default soundtrack.

When I get older losing my hair, many years from now

Some sentiments in the song mark the point of view as strongly gendered—and gendered within certain specific cultural expectations.

Will you still need me?

The speaker assumes that the value they provide will eventually decline—

Will you still feed me?

--while the listener is not granted the respite of age. Nuturing and service are expected to continue.

If I’d been out till quarter to three, would you lock the door?

And only the speaker is framed as socializing freely outside the home, with the expectation that this will be tolerated. The queries and images assume a highly specific life script.

Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear; we shall scrimp and save. Grandchildren on your knee

Knowing the authors, this image of respectable working-class conventionality carries an inescapable edge of satire, but a kindly satire. And today—both in the British society that spawned it, and in my own American society—the image of an idyllic, relaxing retirement in which only a little scrimping and saving is necessary to enjoy a few pleasures is out of reach for too many. Retirement age creeps upward and the equivalent of a summer cottage on the Isle of Wight may be only a fantasy. Even for those of us with traditional retirement plans, nothing is certain.

You'll be older too, and if you say the word, I could stay with you

How many people still assume that they will find a relationship in which you can expect to grow old together? My parents, and both sets of my grandparents all celebrated 50^th wedding anniversaries. As a lesbian, I always knew that the legal system would deny me even the theoretical possibility of achieving the same feat. But that paradigm was always what I measured my life against and found it wanting.

I can be handy, mending a fuse...I can knit a sweater by the fireside...Sunday [usually Saturday] mornings go for a ride...Doing the garden, digging the weeds

It’s a good life. Truly it is.

Who could ask for more?

Yes. Yes, sometimes I could.

Will you still need me?

I do, you know, want to be needed—or if not “needed”, at least valued. One of my persistent psychological failure modes is the belief that I must provide value to people in order to find social acceptance. It doesn’t matter how often people assure me it’s not the case, this is a fixed part of my personality and unlikely to change.

Will you still feed me?

Feeding takes a lot of different forms. Nutrition is far from the most important way we feed each other.

Send me a postcard, drop me a line stating point of view

I’m bad at the whole spontaneous casual communication thing. I remember, when I was much younger, coming near to having panic attacks at the thought of contacting someone out of the blue without a specific purpose “just to chat”. How did people do that? Social media makes it easier today (and I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if the internet had existed when I was young), but throughout my life I’ve tended to drift away from people if there wasn’t a structural context that brought us together. It’s on me; it’s not other people’s job to telepathically determine that I’d like to keep in contact. And social media still defaults to passive consumption, rather than interaction, much of the time. I’ve always hoped that being a “content creator” would fulfill my part of the reaching process and inspire people to drop me a line (see previous comment about being valuable).

Yours sincerely, wasting away

But all in all, it’s a good life. And I’m not sure it would have been possible for me to take any road but the one I’m walking.

Mine for evermore

Birthdays can be a time for taking stock—for looking backward and forward. For asking those eternal questions.

Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?

(With apologies to John Lennon and Paul McCartney)

...there's not enough time left in the workday to start anything new.

1) I begged to be given some "quick and easy" investigations after closing 5 major long-dragged-out investigations. So today I was handed off an environmental monitoring deviation, transferred from a co-worker on sudden emergency family leave. And I sent it off for closure the same day. Now that's what I'm talking about! (To be fair, she'd already done 90% of the work.)

2) Got my Covid booster (Moderna again). Just a little sore today -- enough to know it's working, not enough to distrack in any way.

3) My saffron crocuses are crocusing! I always have high hopes that they'll survive and come back next year, so we'll see. I've only tried growing them a couple times and the previous times were in pots rather than in a flower bed.

4) It's time to make the sad decision over whether I'll stick to my principle of only eating in-season tomatoes (mine or the farmer's market) and do without, or compromise my principles and keep tomatoes in my life over the winter.

5) I actually scheduled my Tree Guy to pollard the mulberry and trim the palms before the end of the year this time. Much easier to do when I'm working from home!

Went to post an entry through Firefox as usual, and the "post" screen didn't include the box for entering the message. It shows the Rich Text and HTML tabs. But on "rich text" there's no editing box, just a line and then the "autosaved draft..." message followed by the tags footer. The HTML tab offers an editing box. And the site behaves properly in Safari, which is where I'm composing this.

Very strange. Trying to decide whether it's worth contacting Dreamwidth help with the detals or just use workarounds and see if it resolves itself.

But that's not what I was planning to post (obviously). I was planning to say...

Bodies are weird.

As I was washing my hands this morning, I realized that it's been a very long time since I had problems with arthritis in my hands. (I was having "hammer joints' as well as inability to completely straighten or clench my fingers. It would wear off over the morning, but made pulling on socks or leggings a big awkward because I couldn't grasp them in the usual way.) And now I can't quite remember when the last time was I had those issues, but maybe a year? So maybe it's one of those things that comes and goes on its own. Or maybe there's something I've changed in my life that makes the difference? Which...hah! What hasn't changed in my life in the last year and a half? Maybe it's something as simply as "I'm not clenching a steering wheel for over an hour every day."

But I thought I'd take note of it.

I went and saw a movie in an actual movie theater for the first time since The Before Times. (In the Heights.)

I went to an actual hair salon and had things done to my hair. I still haven't gotten the hang of posting photos in dreamwidth, but here's a link to a twitter post.

Work had a "team-building" thing yesterday afternoon to celebrate various milestones (like closing out all our 100+ day old investigations) with both the investigators and our QA partners. Of course, having been scheduled well in advance, it ended up happening during a week when we have multiple high-profile investigations at critical stages and have been facing a multi-week workload crunch. But that's life. A couple of people had to drop out to get work done, but most of us showed up.

Previous teambuilding events have been things like corporate-structured productivity exercises (gag me), escape rooms (surprisingly fun -- would have been more fun without the time limit), and some sort of cooking thing (didn't attend because it conflicted with FOGCon last year). This time,, given the constraints, we did an online murder mystery thing. It was...ok.

The mystery puzzle itself was fairly straightforward and stereotyped. Several of us predicted in chat who the most likely murderer would be even before they'd gotten to the death. The information came in an initial live sketch (set up to be  properly distanced zoom presentation, so props for using the technology); a set of relatively simple logic puzzles to "unlock" things like relevant newspaper articles, forensics reports, and toxicology information; and the opportunity to interview the various (remaining) participants in our team breakout rooms.

The live sketch was overdone and crowded out time for the actual investigation activities (we ended up having to do the puzzle-unlocking and report-reading in parallel with doing the interviews, which meant we didn't have the background to know what questions to ask). I wasn't the only person who found the live sketch to be a bit of sensory overload to an unpleasant degree.

I got picked to be my team's captain/spokesperson (which I was completely unsurprised at -- and if you know my history of such things, you won't be surprised either). But I confess that my usual high-level competitive spirit had already checked out at that point. Fortunately, the team members were multitasking independently, so one person took charge of the interviews, a couple of us worked on the logic puzzles, and when we compared notes to ID the suspect, means, and motive, it was straightforward enough that we didn't have to hash through things.

We tied for most right answers, though I tried to argue that we should have had a perfect score because one of the "official" answers didn't jibe with the toxicology evidence.

The event organizers (who do these things as a business) knew we were a group from [name of pharmaceutical company] but were not aware that our group were professional investigators. They had a bit of a "Doh!" moment about some of our approaches and commentary when that got mentioned in the post-discussion.

All in all, ok as an afternoon's silliness. Not so much with the "team building" but definitely a bit of "team affirming". Definitely affirms the value of having a bunch of independent multi-taskers who don't wait to have an authority organize their activities.

 When I fall off the wagon of posting here regularly, I really fall. Two weeks since I even read my reading list. Almost three since I posted.

I can feel the turn of the seasons. Back in the Before Times, I'd measure the end of summer by the light levels on leaving and returning home. Now the most granular measurement is the angle of the sun at 8am when I "go to the office". Since my house aligns NW to SE with the back wall (and my office window) facing NE, the angle of the early morning sun is very evident. Which side of the curtains do I need to draw? At what time? And when can I pull them out of the way again?

But there's also the fact that it's still twilight at my normal rising time, so I've gotten out the "daylight" alarm clock again (the one that turns a light on gradually at a set time). And sitting here at 7:30 in the evening, the sun is down already. At high summer, it's light until my preferred bedtime. [Side note: I swear I'm hearing coyotes crying out in the hills. Might be some other source, but coyotes aren't implausible.] I need to start thinking about some things I want to do for winter mode of WFH. My office doesn't have any built-in lighting and the various portable lights aren't doing the trick. I'm thinking of having recessed ceiling lights installed like I did in the library.

I spent almost all weekend working on podcast stuff. Not the usual tasks of writing scripts and editing recordings, but instead re-mastering all the existing episodes (all 174 of them) in preparation for something I'll be announcing in the next podcast episode. It was very tedious but I got to a point where I decided to just power through and finish the job.

I feel like my quarantine brain has turned a corner in the last couple weeks. I read a couple of e-books this weekend. (Short story and novella, but still...) By necessity I'm back in a regular routine of reading and summarizing for the LHMP blog. On Saturday, I cleaned one side of the garage! The other side requires me to think seriously about how to arranged my "workbench" area. No actual workbench, but that's where it would go if I had it. In fact, organizing it probably requires actually acquiring a workbench with storage area for larger items underneath as well as surfaces that are usable for projects. Ha. This assumes that--now that I'm not making medieval camp furniture--I'm likely to actually do major woodworking projects. But you never know.

It's also time to start thinking about what I want to do with the garden over the winter. Before, I just let it rest because I never had enough daylight at home to do anything serious in the winter. But now? I'm thinking about trying some cold weather crops. Definitely start some winter onions, maybe try peas and beans? And speaking of the produce of my estates, I was checking out the citrus grove the other day and my Buddha's hand citron has two fruits! Plus, the kumquat tree is covered with blossoms. I have my second bushel basket of apples needing to be processed. After that, a break before I need to do anything with the pomegranates, quinces, and medlars. In the mean time, it's still high summer as far as the tomatoes and eggplant are concerned. The secret to eggplant seems to be to give them enough water. (My water bill is suggesting to me that I find a slightly happier medium.)

And now it's dark and the mosquitos are waking up, so time to go back inside and do something productive again.

.

Where did the week go again? It's not just that I lose track of what day it is, it's that the days disappear. I have a couple of visual metrics for the passage of time: the stack of cat food cans in the cabinet, the need to refill my 2-week pill boxes. There are other indications of the passing summer: the berries are in full swing and I'm just on the edge of thinking about preserving some of them. (Possibly just doing a smashed sauce frozen in ice cube trays.) The tomatoes are still ramping up (none ripe yet) but I have zuchhinis! Big ones! The cucumbers are also starting though not big enough to eat yet. If I'd gotten my act together to plan onions in a timely manner, I might be able to go weeks at a time without even buying produce. (Nowhere near close to self-sufficiency. My abundance season is limited.)

As expected, I didn't get any home projects done during the week. The theory is to do the rug shampooing in the library this weekend. SInce it doesn't involve moving furniture or regular foot traffic, it's ok that we aren't at peak drying temperatures. I'll also start on sorting the SCA detritus in the living room. I've already rescued a couple pairs of medium-weight linen braies to use as lounging pants.

I've been reading/annotating for the LHMP blog every morning before work this week, so there's another piece of evidence that my brain may be coming back. And after including a semi-spontaneous rant about the dearth of f/f historical fiction by/about Black people, I figured I should do more than rant and this month's book appreciation show will be a list around that theme, while the end-of-month essay will be about racial issues in historical sources for female homoeroticism. Inspiration comes where you find it.

Having set up my home office for temperature control, I've found that I only really need to turn the AC on if it goes over 90F. I have an elaborate daily schedule of windows, fans, and whatnot for passive control. Simply moving the office to the guestroom contributes to keeping cool, which is serendipitous. The cats are adding to my work environment by acting as my "you're working after hours again" alarm, since they now get their wet food when I leave the office for the day.

I didn't mark it on the anniversary itself, but I've now been working from home for three months. Since the latest from my employer is that current arrangements are guaranteed through Labor Day, that will make a minimum of 6 months. And we've already been told that my department is likely to be among the last brought back on site. (And when we did a department check-in, pretty much everyone in the group would love to have a hybrid arrangement with only 1-2 days per week on site as a permanent thing, if allowed.) I've gone through stages in what I notice about WFH. At first it was just a matter of getting used to the new rhythms and cues. Then it was the occasional annoyance of systems not designed for WFH. Then I started missing the casual social chit-chat. (We do some of that with an official zoom social hour every two weeks, and I've sponsored a MWF half-hour video drop-in for knowledge sharing.) But coming back after my week off, I also noticed a disconnection -- a sense of no longer being connected to the physicality of what my job accomplishes. It manifested in part in a sense of, "I'm tired of this, it feels pointless," and in part as an impatience with the errors that generate my investigations. ("Why does this keep happening?") Sharing with a number of WFH buddies makes it easier to deal, because we're all going through similar feelings.

Today is going to be a shopping day so I need to make lists for efficiency. I don't feel any particular anxiety about going to stores, but I still want to minimize trips.

 Serve up several 90F days in a row, follow up with high winds, and sure enough there's a grass fire close enough that the diversion traffic is all going past my house. I only noticed because there were some road-frustration noises (like: someone trying to turn left through the stream of diverted traffic and no one letting them through, so there were some squealing tires when a gap presented itself). Went out to get the mail and a pedestrian let me in on the traffic diversion. I can hear helicopters and there were fire trucks earlier.

Let's see, I haven't posted since Tuesday, mostly because I was scrambling to get today's podcast together. And the day-job did the "welcome back from vacation thing with a bang, landing me a relatively unexciting investigation to which was added a completely artificial and unnecessary emergency deadline. (The artificialness of it was clear when me pushing back and escalating resulted in an easy work-around.) Sorry for being vague, but the details aren't exciting and require too much explanation.

I don't know whether I've seriously come out of my Saturday Slump or whether I was just particularly motivated today. After working on the blog, I plunged into the next stage of the House Project, which was to remove all the furniture from the bedroom (except the bed frame itself), vacuum thoroughly, and then do the carpet shampooing, If I didn't get that done today, then it wouldn't dry properly by tomorrow (fortunately, in this heat, I can assume it will be dry by tomorrow). And I really want to be able to move things back into place (and have a bed again) by Sunday night. It occurs to me that for tonight I guess I get to confirm the workability of the office-as-guest-bedroom.

Completing this stage will mean the wardrobe is no longer in the way in the living room, but it'll be a separate task-group to sort through all the costume and SCA gear that's sitting in the middle of things. That requires mental and emotional energy, not just physical stamina. While moving wardrobes and wrestling mattresses, it occurred to me to speculate on when I might get to a point of *not* being able to assume I can do that sort of thing by myself. I've always been rather proud of being strong enough to wrangle most things on my own (though I'm fine with asking for help when I need it). I know all the tricks, like slipping cardboard under the legs of the heavy furniture to "skate" it over the carpet, or walking things little by little rather than trying to push them all at once. But I do have to admit that I've passed my physical peak, mostly because the sciatic nerve damage affects certain lifting and balance requirements.

My order of tapestry yarn for the "hunting rabbits" needlepoint project arrived, so I'm completely set up to the point when there's only background left. It's going so quickly! I got a lot done at the Nebula conference. Quarantine logistics have that going for it.

The berries are in full season, which makes me think of the usual timing of my June garden party. Maybe next year. I'm not quite getting enough berries to need to make jam or freeze them, but I have plenty to enjoy every day. In a few days, I think I'll harvest one of the zucchini. The tomatoes are coming along, but not near to ripe yet. It looks like I'll have plenty, though.

I had an amusing bicycle tire adventure this week. Went out to take my ride Thursday and found the rear tire flat. After some diagnostics to determine the cause (especially to see if there was some pointy object stuck in the tread) it turned out the leak was around the inflation stem. Odd, but ok. Replaced the tire with my spare, but when I went to top off the pressure on the front tire since I had the pump out, I found that the tube appeared to have "herniated" out through the opening for the inflation stem. There was a little balloon at the base of the stem. It still took pressure, but  I didn't feel like risking a ride until I at least had another spare tube available. Ordered a couple of tubes from REI for curbside pickup on Friday, and sure enough when I went out to the car on Friday to go get them, the front bike tire was flat--abraded where the stem had herniated through the rim. I've never had a tube do that before. I'm guessing that the heat over-pressurized the tires, though I don't generally inflate them to maximum pressure. And I've ridden the bike in hotter conditions than Wednesday's. A mystery.

I'm not ignoring the larger political goings-on, but I don't think the world needs my input on it in my blog.

 Dreamwidth forgive me for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last posting. I wouldn't have considered that a long gap in The Before Times, but I guess I've settled in enough that I don't need to share on a daily basis?

My birthday celebrations back on the 12th were delightful. The weather warmed up just enough for hauling out the grill and having dinner on the patio. I had just enough food of enough variety to feel like a feast but not gluttony. People posted lots of lovely pictures, as requested, and a good variety of recipes (several of which I saved off to try later).

Work is doing that annoying thing where I'm working twice as hard as usual to hit all my deadlines before next week's vacation. Because vacation doesn't actually mean you don't have to do the work. I put in a couple of late evenings on 5/13 and 5/14 just to make progress on my "top priority" because all the lower priority investigations nibbled away all the regular hours.

I'm not sure what-all else I did with my time. FB reminds me that I did a different bike route than usual on Friday because I had a letter to mail, so I went off to the main post office to do it. The short route would take me along the main drag through town, while the long route takes me on the rec trail along the riverbed by the airport. I compromised and did one long and one short leg, which was a little longer than my usual route, but not by much.

Saturday was packed with online events, starting with a lecture on homosexuality in the middle ages, live from Drachenwald (which was at 4:30am my time, but then there was no reason for them to schedule it for my convenience!). The SFWA business meeting was done online in mid-morning, then I logged in to a Sirens Conference Bay Area social meet-up when was mostly just two of us for the majority of the meeting (but we had lots of interests in common so it was a fun chat). And Sunday mid-day was my DISTAFF crew chat as usual. Back a month ago I decided I needed some handwork to do during zoom socials and went through my stash of stalled projects. I settled on a needlepoint project of a medieval manuscript illustration with "the rabbits triumphing over the hunters and dogs" that -- I kid you not -- I started when I was in college. I've been making serious progress on it and have gotten to the point where I need to order some yarn colors that weren't part of the original "this yarn is on sale so I'll buy a bunch of stuff that I know will be useful" stash. Perhaps I'll finish it by the end of quarantine. Or at least get it to the point where all that's left is filling in the background.

Between my usual weekend brain fog and the off-again on-again rain we've been getting (which limited yard work) I spent all the rest of the weekend binge-watching the new She-Ra series, which I finished up last night. (Heart-eyes!!!) Where was this sort of content when I was a kid?

So...um...let's see...the pasta maker that I ordered from Sur La Table arrived at the UPS outlet yesterday. I got it confused with the Le Crueset cookware that arrived today and warned them the package was heavy. (It wasn't.) But at least they may remember me when I joke about it today for the cookware pickup. I think that gets me up to day with all my pending deliveries. Time to shop some more!

Speaking of which, Tuesday is now officially farmers' market day, with a break in my lunch-biking routine to do my produce shopping instead (but still by bike, of course). I may see if I can do most of my fruit and vegetable shopping there. There's also a butcher who shows up. In theory I could get my eggs there, but not via bike+backpack!

I got a very nice "we can't buy everything" rejection from the Silk & Steel anthology for my story "Visard in Velvet" which...I'd convinced myself from the start was quite a longshot given the ratio of submissions to available slots. I'll put the story away until I actually start writing the series it ties in to, then I can use it as a promotional freebie.

I've added a new item to my daily routine, exploring YouTube stretching routines. Not exercise as such, and I confess the moves I want are mostly from yoga instructors (several fb friends agreed in a particular teacher, so I'm trying her out), which gets my back up a little with the woo-woo packaging. I get it: it's a wholistic practice, not just an exercise routine. But it's not me. But I definitely need to do some sort of flexibility routine. The biking goes for cardio and the legs. The yard work goes for upper body, more or less. But it's scary how inflexible I've gotten just from being too busy.