checking in

Sep. 25th, 2025 11:05 pm
kareila: (sketchy)
[personal profile] kareila
September is almost over and I don't know that I have all that much to show for it, although I have stayed busy.

Progress on the old house continues, but not as quickly as one would hope. We had to switch from homeowners' insurance to renters' insurance since the building is unoccupied, and the property tax exemption is about to expire. But the trim replacement on all of the first floor windows that we decided was necessary (and long overdue) is just about done, and I finally finished removing all the trimmed branches from the back yard. (That was rate-limited to the two trash bags per week that would fit in with the rest of our garbage, because the city discontinued their yard waste pickup service.)

Symphony chorus rehearsals started back up a couple of weeks ago. I did get permission from the chorus manager to sing with the altos for the Beethoven Ninth, which I requested for two reasons: one, to save my voice from all the high A's, and two, to give me something to LEARN in a season that consists mostly of the Ninth, the Messiah, and Carmina Burana, all of which I have sung multiple times - as a soprano.

But actually, we do also get to perform a new thing, or so I found out this week. It's called "A Time for Jubilee" and the composer is Nkeiru Okoye, a black woman only a few years older than I am. That's scheduled for the end of February.

Connor is still feeling positive about school. He had his first CS exam on Tuesday and his first big English assignment was due today. The only class he doesn't seem to be thrilled with is his "introduction to student life" seminar, which is understandable. So far I haven't had to sit around campus waiting on him for more than a couple of hours at a time.

I have one more book to go before I'm caught up on the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I've also finally started the Earthsea books, and I'm rereading the sixth Old Man's War book to refresh my memory before getting the newest one, which I'm hoping will arrive at the library next week.

The baseball season ends on Sunday and the Red Sox still haven't locked up a wild card spot for the playoffs. It's going to be a chaotic weekend in the American League for every contender except Seattle. As for the Dodgers, they clinched the NL West today and their pitching rotation is finally in good shape, although their bullpen is still looking shaky. But I'd love to see them manage to pull off the World Series repeat, if only to give people one less reason to talk about the Yankees.

some good things

Sep. 25th, 2025 10:00 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Discount raspberry trifle + freshly toasted flaked almonds. Excellent bonus pudding yes.
  2. Social limb-wiggle! Outside, half under the trees, interspersed with The Toddler being Delighted to see us.
  3. Some successful communication debugging, thus far of the "okay, well, we now have a better understanding of the shape of the problem" variety rather than in the "... and we've implemented a solution" sense, which is still useful progress.
  4. Successfully got a bunch of other people's stuff out of my house and headed back to its people, even though this involved both Actually Parcelling It Up and then a whole entire trip to the post office. Good Job Alex.
  5. FRIEND HAS FINISHED ORPHAN BLACK. FRIEND SCREAMED AN APPROPRIATE AMOUNT. I am thrilled she loved it & was willing to yell about it all the way through when I didn't even try to lure her. She got here by herself. I am DELIGHTED. Did I mention I'm delighted? I'm delighted and I've had some Big Feelings and I have ALSO had some brand new-to-me horror from the penultimate episode Revealed unto me! Which is a different kind of delightful!

some good things

Sep. 24th, 2025 08:40 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Today's post brought THREE of my (latest batch of) books from Oxfam, of which two were non-work-related: Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), which [personal profile] recessional mentioned when it was first published and which I am only just now managing to get to, and Chihuly at Kew, the exhibition book for the 2019 installation. I am having so many feelings about getting to flip through professional photography of all this art again. I'm so so pleased.
  2. I mentioned these books to [personal profile] simont, who promptly went "hold on, isn't that the one that has a good Wikipedia article?" Turns out it very much is.
  3. To my delight, despite the fact that I'd not been to the plot in something like two and a half weeks (between ten days away and the post-event collapse seguing immediately into A Cold that A brought home for us) all of the peppers various in the greenhouse were looking perfectly happy with themselves. HURRAH for Svaemskog terracotta watering bits + 2l drinks bottles. This is actually the happiest the chillis have been all year, given my... erratic... ability to leave the house; I am looking forward enthusiastically to the fruits of Expanding The System Further next year.
  4. The ancient spinach seed is coming up! In vast quantities! That I was expecting to be dead and thus sowed all of across half a bed! There is going to be SO much spinach and even I will get to turn some of it into seeds for saving purposes, probably, and much of the rest of which I will go "oh right, I have discovered I like adding fresh spinach to the sad emergency noodle pots" about.
  5. Brought home A Pannier Full Of Food, about which I am feeling very good given the Neglect. I am looking forward to turning a suitable array of tomatoes into part of the ongoing cooking project (at which point I will have some leftover puff pastry, so will also do the banana tarte tatin).

(I have not today achieved my Assigned Reading, by which I mean "30 pages of The Challenge of Pain, with notes", because instead I finished reading the last five pages of yesterday's thirty pages and still need to go back and Make My Notes on, like, twenty of those pages. I am learning so much neuroanatomy good grief. But there is bread, and there is yoghurt, and there is drying laundry, and I went to the plot, and I have started digging myself back out from under my pile of PD e-mails, and there was an excellent sunset.)

alextr98: (Default)
[personal profile] alextr98
Вот мы писали здесь о том, как В.А.Гусинский взял в долг у некоей Галины Мышкиной в 2019 году 85,000 фунтов на месяц и не отдал совсем.
Дело было в Лондоне.
Так вот, очередной суд в Америке пару дней назад вынес опять решение - вернуть деньги истице.
Вопрос только в том, сколько вернуть.
Истица (то есть Мышкина) просит вернуть 787,358$ - за пять лет и восемь месяцев наросли проценты.
Правда, проценты она считает 100% годовых - это написано в долговой расписке.
Вот посмотрим, что скажет суд на это.
И ещё, как хорошо известно, никаких "активов" у В.А.Гусинского в Америке нет, уже искали, так что как она собирается взыскивать эти деньги, непонятно .

(no subject)

Sep. 23rd, 2025 08:19 pm
ysobel: (fail)
[personal profile] ysobel
Me: Dear brain, I know my mom is increasingly fucked, but obsessing in circles about what to do about that isn't helpful.

Brain: Okay what if I just dwell on the time in high school when you tried to be captain of the academic decathlon team, and the faculty sponsor gave y'all "practice questions" to work on that, when you got to competition, turned out to have been that year's actual questions, meaning you looked not just like cheaters but incompetent cheaters that didn't even have the intelligence to make it look plausible

Me: In actual fact, that doesn't help...
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

A little while ago I got Stable cortical body maps before and after amputation via an NIH press release; today it was *Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia in people with chronic disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis...

... which dovetails neatly with the bits I just got out of The Painful Truth (Monty Lyman) about the bidirectional relationship between insomnia and pain, where each worsens the other but insomnia worsens pain more. (It's bedtime, so I'm not going to pick the book back up to get you those onward references just now.) With n = 5232, and their conditions including "cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and stroke", "CBT-I was associated with significantly improved outcomes" (for insomnia severity, and moderately improved outcomes for sleep efficiency and sleep onset latency).

What'll be next? WHO KNOWS.

They checked it

Sep. 21st, 2025 05:37 pm
azurelunatic: Hinky: adj: pure evil fuckery afoot. Syn.: suspicious (hinky)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
The worst part of colonoscopy prep turned out to be the sheer number of trips to the bathroom, which knotted up my legs something fierce. The second worst part was the taste of the solution, even with added flavorings. It was salty! (I got the huge jug rather than the Miralax version. Miralax at least isn't salty.) Next time, probably either green unsweetened Kool-Aid or lemonade Crystal Lite or whatever.

Off topic for FFA )

I did make the planned gallon of orange jello, but since it was a little late for me to actually eat it, I put mandarin orange slices in it. Since that's often part of Belovedest's lunch. Today I packed it into smaller boxes to help with that effort and to decrease the crowding in the fridge.

I got a slight nap after everything was about finished. The split prep schedule meant that I started the second half around 12:30 am. Appointment check in time 6 am.

The distance in the facility wasn't super bad, although we brought my chair just in case. (Speaking of the chair, I have decked it out with retroreflective tape and electroluminescent wire. It looks much safer. The cup holder went on Friday.)

The procedure wasn't bad. )

I got dressed again. I had picked a cute nightgown for the outing, black with flowers and butterflies. Instead of a coat (it's getting chilly at night) I wore my dramatic black velvet robe, the one with lace trim and bell sleeves. I received a compliment. And as soon as I proved I could stand up without excessive wobbling, we were off.

Belovedest gathered breakfast for me on our way home, and I took a much needed nap (interrupted a few times to confirm that I could be made conscious and accept hydration).

And that was that.

We did our usual Friday shopping on Saturday. I was still sore. Today my legs are thankfully feeling normal.

vital functions

Sep. 21st, 2025 08:22 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

[... sorry about the template, I hit return in the title field and IT POSTED. details to appear shortly. :-p]

Reading. Ann Leckie, Monty Lyman, Ronald Melzack & Patrick D. Wall )

Writing. ... I have actually put some more notes into The Document.

So many lost property e-mails. (And at some point I'm going to need to start replying to them, too.)

Watching. On YouTube: True Facts: Bats, The Science Of The Hunt. NSFW. Definitely... An Experience.

Cooking. ... yeah no I managed to make veg spag bol on Friday but otherwise we've mostly just been feeling faintly sorry for ourselves. Okay, no, that's not quite true, I did also achieve baked potato on Wednesday.

Eating. Misc takeaway from The Field (leftover Sunday night curry for dinner on Tuesday; leftover vegetable fried rice + Szechuan tofu for breakfast on same...). I remain mildly resentful that the Wagamama menu still does not contain any of My Favourites.

Growing. The second attempt at pineapple has NEW LEAVES. The second attempt at lemongrass is maybe Going? And other than that I have no idea because I have spectacularly failed to make it to the plot this week.

Observing. BATS. A variety of excellent dahlias and passion flowers on a Trip To Town (post office, pharmacy).

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

... and doesn't quite make it.

On page 187 (of 218), we finally get this paragraph:

At this point we need to return to a crucial caveat. In most cases of persistent pain, whatever caused the initial injury has healed. Pain is now the primary disease. But there are a number of cases where there is continual damage that triggers nociceptive fibres; chronic inflammatory diseases are good examples. It is also important to point out that not every case of back pain is our brain's overreaction. A small -- but important -- minority of cases are caused by serious conditions -- cancer, some infections, spinal fractures and the nerve-compressing cauda equina syndrome -- but these can usually be ruled out by doctors, who will be on the lookout for 'red flag' symptoms. However, in the majority of cases of persistent pain (and over 90% of cases of back pain), there is no longer any identifiable tissue damage; our brain has become hypersensitive.

In a book that otherwise dedicates a lot of time to talking about gender and racial inequalities in healthcare access, including a solid half-paragraph on how common and how painful endometriosis (a chronic inflammatory condition!) is, the bit where "well this only applies to most people..." gets breezed past is certainly causing me more feelings. And yet it's still the closest anything I've read so far actually gets to engaging with the fact that the rest of us exist, so... no get-out-of-writing-essays-free card for me here, alas.

(The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, mostly pretty good and definitely got me to think constructively about a few things -- like the merits of classical vs contemporary Pilates for my specific usecase via discussion of knitting -- and introduced me to some more, like open-label placebos and "safe threats" and the impact of paracetamol on empathy. It's incomplete, but not disrecommended.)

[growth] pineapple is go!

Sep. 18th, 2025 07:19 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

A little while ago the toddler's household told me that you could turn the top of a pineapple into a whole entire pineapple plant (with the caveat that at least 60% of the time it goes mouldy). My first attempt at this had got as far as growing a whole entire root network but then suffered a Tragic Incident from which it never recovered; the second had been sat around with partially-browned but no-longer-becoming-more-browned and definitely-still-partially-green leaves for Quite Some Time. I had more or less hit the point of "... is this actually doing anything? at all?" and then upon my return from the most recent round of Adventures I rotated it in service of watering it, to discover...

a pineapple crown, growing a whole new set of leaves

... that it's growing a WHOLE NEW SET OF LEAVES. Look at it go! I am very excited!

(My understanding is that if I manage to keep it alive that long it'll take somewhere in the region of 3 years to fruit, and then in the fashion of all bromeliads will die having produced said single fruit. Happily this is about the rate at which we eat fresh pineapple...)