Parker House Rolls

Parker House Rolls in a glass baking dish

I had one or more Parker House Rolls somewhere once, at some time in the past, and recently something reminded me of them, and today I made some!

Basically this is just a slightly sweet buttery sticky yeast-raised dough, not kneaded, divided into sixteen small loaves and baked all together in the same baking dish so that they grow somewhat back together again and you can have the fun of separating them.

(Even a non-yeast leavened dough might work; I wonder what would happen? This is the kind of thing I wonder about.)

Various recipes on the interwebs (pretty much all of them, really) call for stuff that I don’t have at hand, like sea salt, kosher salt, potato flakes, vegetable shortening, whole milk for that matter, and so on; and also stuff that I don’t have the patience for (or for cleaning up after), like separating eggs, or using very specific attachments and settings of an electric mixer. None of these appear to be necessary.

Here’s the recipe that I roughly actually used; it’s probably closest to this one, but with anything that seemed like too much work or I didn’t have in the house left out.

Parker House Rolls (makes 16)

1 1/4 Cup milk (any kind really; if you use skim, maybe add some extra butter), warmed
1 Tbsp active dry yeast
1/4 Cup sugar
Some salt (I dunno maybe a tsp.)
2 Eggs
8 Tbsp (one stick) butter (unsalted if you have it), softened
4ish Cups of flour

Warm up the milk to room temperature or a bit more, in the microwave or whatever. Similarly, soften the butter by mashing it with a fork, putting it in the microwave on Defrost, or whatever. You can even melt it, but it may impact the consistency of the finished product if you do, I dunno.

Mix the warm milk, yeast, and 2 Tbps (half) of the sugar in the big yellow bowl or other largish mixing bowl. Let that sit for 5-10 minutes. It may or may not froth up and get foamy if the yeast is feeling especially active; don’t sweat it either way.

Add the rest of the sugar, the salt, the eggs, and 6 Tbsp (three quarters) of the butter to the bowl, mix briefly.

Add two cups of flour, and mix until incorporated. You can use a stand mixer or anything else you like in this step, or just a sturdy spoon and main strength. Continue adding flour, about half a cup at a time or whatever you like, until you have a sticky dough that is pulling away from the sides of the bowl, but still sticking to the bottom, or at least showing signs that it would like to. Depending on how soft you softened the butter, there may be lumps of butter in the dough; squash some of them if so, but don’t worry about it too much.

Cover the bowl with a damp cloth or house-rules equivalent, and let sit for say 90 minutes in a cozy place.

After 90 minutes, remove the cloth and gently punch down the dough. Flour your hands because it will have gotten even stickier while rising! Divide the dough into 16 pieces, without unnecessary kneading or other roughness.

For traditionally-formed rolls, flatten each piece and fold it in half; or divide the dough into four pieces and for each piece fold it in half and cut it into quarters, similarly resulting in 16 folded pieces. Or look up various other more elaborate forming methods on the interwebs.

Put the 16 pieces in a four-by-four array (folded edges down) into a 9×13 inch lightly greased (lightly cooking-sprayed is simplest) baking dish; they should be touching each other.

Cover with a damp cloth or equivalent again, and let rise for 45 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 350°F while the dough gets a final few minutes of rising, then remove the cloth and pop the baking dish into the oven. Cook for 25 minutes or until looking pleasantly (but not darkly!) brown on top, or whenever your intuition tells you they’re done.

Brush tops with the remaining 2 Tbs of butter. Let cool for a bit in the baking dish, then tear apart to serve.

May be kept or frozen like any bread that has butter and milk and eggs and no preservatives, but really you’re going to eat them all almost immediately, aren’t you?

December 26th, 2022

We made just 106 dumplings this year, plus another eight filled with Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese (that was the little boy’s idea; they’re pretty good!). This is a smaller number than usual (drill back into prior years here). The small number was probably mostly because single units of ground meat from FreshDirect tend to weigh just a pound, whereas single units from the grocery in prior years were more like 1.25 to 1.4 pounds. (Although, come to think of it, just where did we get the ground meat last year? Not sure.) And also because grownups tend to put more meat in each dumpling, perhaps. But in any case, we are now all pleasantly full, and the little daughter and her BF are safely back in the urbanity.

What has occurred? I feel like things have occurred, to an extent. I am more on Mastodon now than on Twitter, and if you want to keep up with the images I’ve been making in Midjourney and so on, you’ll want my Pixelfed feed. I listed lots of various of these pointers back the other week (and wow having every chapter of the novel as a weblog post makes it hard to scroll through the weblog). When Elon “facepalm” Musk briefly prohibited linking from Twitter to Mastodon, I actually set up a LinkTree page with my links.

Someone must have said “they can still link to Mastodon via Linktree” in his hearing, because he then briefly prohibited linking to LinkTree. That caused me to set up my own Links page over on the neglected (and in fact apparently pretty much empty) theogeny.com; I should put back all the stuff that used to be there sometime!

Note how ossum that Links page is! When you move the cursor over it, the thing that the mouse is over that you will go to if you click (if any) changes color (although I drew the line at having it bouncily change size the way Linktree does). You can look at the page source, and see the lovely hand-coded CSS and HTML. :) It even validates! (w3c seems to have a change of mind about validation badges, which makes me a little sad, so there’s no little “valid HTML 5!” badge on the page that links to the verification of the claim, but hey.)

That reminded me of the One-Dimensional Cellular Automaton that I make in hand-coded CSS and HTML and JavaScript the other year; it vanished for a long time, even from my personal backups of davidchess.com, and I’d almost given up on finding it until I thought of the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine, and discovered that it had snapshotted that page exactly once, in February of 2012.

So after a bit of fiddling around, I can once again present the One-Dimensional Cellular Automaton for your amusement. The page source there is also quite readable, I tell myself.

Note that many other things on davidchess.com are currently / still broken, although in the process of bringing that page back, I also brought the main page back, so you can see the extremely retro rest of the site (working and otherwise), including the entries in this (well, sort of “this”) weblog between 1999 and 2011.

Oh yeah, we had Christmas! That was nice. :) I got lots of chocolate, and the little (not little anymore) boy gave me a digital image of Spennix (my WoW main) dressed like the pioneer in the Satisfactory game, with a perfect “Spennixfactory” logo. And wife and daughter both got me books: “The Hotel Bosphorus” (a murder mystery set in Istanbul, my current Bucket List destination, and involving a bookshop, so what could be better?) from M, and “Klara and the Sun” (which I’ve been meaning to get, but never had) from the little daughter. (She thought that maybe I already had it and that’s why Klara is called “Klara” in the Klara stories, but it was as far as I know a complete coincidence.)

I’m working away at Part Three of Klara, after she leaves the clockwork world, but it’s slow going. I have an actual plot in mind that I want to illustrate, and I’m using a different graphical style which necessitates a different Midjourney workflow that I haven’t quite optimized yet. But it’ll get done! Probably! :)

We close with a Seasonal Image for the Solstice…

Here’s to the coming of the longer days! Or the cooler ones, to those on the flipside… :)

And all like that there

Back in the day (and especially back in the day), I used to just, y’know, chat a lot more than I do now. Rather than posting a particular thing about a particular thing, or a bunch of AI-generated images or whatever.

Speaking of which:

Ink on Rice Paper: Cozy

Why that is associated with “cozy”, I don’t know. Which is part of the fascination of this; exploring the odd mind of the AI. (See also of course GPT-3 and additionally Semantle for that matter, in the textual sort of area.)

I don’t think I’ve linked to semantle before, so there you go! I’ve become very much in the Wordle habit (even in the New York Times period here) (haven’t lost one yet!), and Semantle is also fun. It’s much harder, but on the other hand you get an infinite number of guesses. I realize in writing this that I got distracted and didn’t get yesterday’s, although I was within like two or three words of it.

(Long pause here while I do today’s Semantle in a mere 442 guesses, hahahaha. Toward the end there I was just typing random words that sprang to mind. In retrospect, though, it makes sense and I should have gotten it quicker.)

I also I used to use other fonts and stuff more often, because that is fun, and I used to write in raw html rather than in this WordPress environment here, which gets easily confused if you try to do anything too fancy, and often just deletes random markup that one might add in raw mode, oh well. Also it often looks radically different on my phone than on the computer here, in ways that I don’t have the patience or energy to look into to understand.

(Like, will this be in a different color everywhere? I dunno!)

I am reminiscing about Back In The Day, because for some reason that I can’t recall at the moment I was digging around in the ancient weblog on the personal site (whose front page still says “COMING SOON” and I really ought to fix that) looking for a particular funny story, and I read all various old entries while looking for it.

And also, I found it! Here is a copy of it, as well as that link there. The context (also interesting in itself) is a journal that I needed to get to someone in Indiana.

Then after lunch I took it down to the “Post Office”, where a lady agreed to take it to Indiana for me. I also had to buy her a little paper package to carry it there in. (That seemed sort of odd; why didn’t she just factor the package into the price of the service, the way she presumably does with gas fare and stuff?)

I’m not sure she’s really got a viable business model going here; the price was so cheap! I mean, she agreed to take the journal to Indiana (a particular place in Indiana, even) for like six bucks (including the price of the little paper package). I gather that there’s an economy-of-scale thing here, that she waits until she’s got a bunch of things all going to Indiana, and takes them all at once, to save on travel costs. But she also promised to get it there in just two days, so if no one else comes in and wants her to take something to Indiana by Wednesday, she’ll have to go there on just my six bucks, and there’s no way that that’ll even cover her costs.

(She’s probably got to pay someone to keep the place open while she’s going to Indiana and back, also; and then there’s rent, and utilities, and all sorts of other stuff.)

Probably she’s selling at a loss right now to get people used to being able to send things cheap, and she’ll raise prices later, once she’s got mind share. Sorta like pets.com did so well!   *8)

Still, it was nice that she was still in business today, so I didn’t have to, like, drive to Indiana myself…

Apparently this lady or her successors are still in business, which is nice!

That journal was part of a project which is probably (although not certainly) the same as this 1000 Journals Project, about which there is apparently a book and a documentary and stuff, which is pretty cool. I had (briefly) number 278, about which the old weblog talks a bit. Do go take a look! I wonder if it still survives, somewhere out there. Or even in the book or documentary!

There is some extra space for eyes

So that was all fun to discover and reminisce about. (Ha, I’d forgotten that I scanned the whole thing and burned it onto CD (remember “CDs”?) and included a copy of it in a little paper slipcase inside the journal itself. How clever of me!!

Hi-Tech Comix!

One thing that’s rather different from Back In The Day (in addition to having less control over the HTML, and not being in the habit of doing one catch-all entry per day, with the date as the title), is that I no longer feel guilty about putting more-or-less-huge images in the weblog here. On the assumption, I guess, that hardly anyone is reading this on like a 4096 bps modem or something. (But if anyone is, or is otherwise bothered by all of the huge images, do let me know! You can even leave a comment right here in the weblog and I might notice it.)

I am still very enamored of NightCafe and the inexpressibly vast universe of images that it’s willing to create. It feels (still) like I’m a tiny kid wandering through a vast library of lavishly illustrated books, dashing joyfully from shelf to shelf, delighted and overwhelmed.

I felt roughly that way about GPT-3 for quite a while, too, only with words instead of pictures; and, as the structure of these words hints, I don’t really feel that way anymore, at least not at the moment. I’m not certain how or why, but one theory that I have is that I gradually came to realize that there is no “there” there; that is, as far as I can tell, when interacting with a GPT-3 or NovelAI model, it’s easy to feel like the funny and crazy and suggestive things make sense in light of some thoughts or model of the world or way of thinking, and that by continuing to interact with it, one will come to know more about that way of thinking, and that’s cool. But after interacting with it for awhile, that seems less likely, or at least it’s more like “this writes stuff superficially like random fanfiction but without even that much sense to it” than it is like “wow, this crazy alien being I’m talking to sure has some interesting ideas!”.

I can easily imagine the same kind of thing happening with NightCafe; looking at the panel from “Hi-Tech Comix!” up there, my first fascinated reaction is that those enigmatic machines and blurred speech bubbles must be About Something, must be Saying Something in some enigmatic language and universe into which the image offers us a preliminary glimpse. But perhaps one ultimately realizes that it isn’t; it’s just a mindless imitation of stuff on Flickr or whatever.

If indeed that’s all it is. :)

What else what else? The family still exists and prospers. The little daughter is working remotely from Queens for an IT company (“IT company”) and going to tango events again now that there are vaccines and things are opening up somewhat. M and the little boy and I still live here in the ‘burbs, but I went in to work in Chelsea a couple of days last week (yay!), and I intend to do the same this coming week.

It’s wild how, after living up here and barely visiting the City at all for decades, once I started working down there I fell in love with the place, and have been going somewhat crazy not being able to get in for months and months.

Ah, Chelsea, how I missed ya!

I skipped my usual bowl of cold cereal at home, and got a Bacon Egg an’ Cheese on a Roll, Salt, Pepper, Ketchup from the vendor on the way to work the other day. It was glorious.

So that is a nice completely random weblog entry, as in Back in the Day. Now I will probably generate many more images (Twitter link assuming it works, and NightCafe link similarly), and perhaps play some Computer Games (although I’m kind of plateaued on everything I play, including WoW and Satisfactory and No Man’s Sky, but that doesn’t always stop me), and perhaps read some books (Oh, I was thinking I should do a weblog entry on a couple of rather meta books that I finished lately, maybe I will some time), fight some entropy, and/or go for a walk in the sunny chilly day.

Blessed be!

December

The most important fact first: we made 170 dumplings this year (follow the tracks to prior years’ numbers!). There were five of us, because the little daughter brought along a gentleman acquaintance, so we had to limit ourselves to 34 dumplings each (hehe, joke, we had leftovers!).

That’s about it. Well, it’s been nice being off from work. And it’ll be nice being oncall tomorrow and Wednesday and Thursday, because I will do that from home in a relaxed and comfortable manner. Unless Something Goes Wrong. Which I’m sure it won’t.

I’ve been playing a lot (a lot) of the game Satisfactory, in which one is dropped onto a scenic alien world, and has to construct things to build machines to make things to build more machines and factories and power plants and eventually hoverpacks and monorail trains and things. It is great fun!

That is an aerial view of a power plant that I built, that converts crude oil to fuel, and burns that fuel for energy. (It also generates “polymer resin”, which is carried by the conveyor belt at the bottom there to another factory, which makes that into plastic and rubber for other purposes.) It’s gotten quite a bit bigger since I took that picture.

This is my second time through the game; this time I am building much nicer-looking factories, and also vaguely intending to get to the end without mining any uranium or making any nuclear reactors, because those make nuclear waste, which is annoying either to store or to reprocess into something that can be safely disposed of. (I think the designers may be teaching a subtle lesson there.)

I have also been listening to various YouTubers in the background. The algorithm first took me from I think it was Paulogia (an ex-evangelical who now debunks various evangelical things) to Emma Thorne (who talks about creationist things, and also MLM and other general things, and has the most adorable British accent) to Rachel Oates (similar but different adorable accent) and eventually to Jenny Nicholson (no British accent, but very funny, mostly reviews of various bad movies, bad books, bad fanfiction, and other bad things, as well as a fascinating (and very funny) description of the history and status of Brony fandom). So I’ve been listening to those in the background more than my usual vaguely-cop shows like NCIS or CSI or Bones or Lie To Me or whatever.

Which is perhaps a good thing, because as someone pointed out probably on Twitter, not only are the cop shows obviously copaganda, but the medical shows are similarly an attempt to make it look like the US medical system is all good and wonderful and fair. While in fact it isn’t.

How about that worldwide pandemic, speaking of which? This Omicron variant may keep me from getting back into the city for another week or three, and I am not pleased! At least it seems somewhat less deadly than Alpha and Delta, and that’s good. I’m on the Review Panel or whatever it is on our local NextDoor (for my sins), and the number of delusional Covid Truthers that apparently live not all that far from me is truly saddening.

Ach, I think I will go build more factories on an alien planet while listening to people debunking creationism in the background for awhile. It seems to be comforting…

My inconstant claim to the English Throne

Way back in 2018, we discovered and mentioned that we are a direct descendant of Henry I of England, Henry Beauclerc, who was all king and stuff (at least according to FamilySearch).

As I noted at the time, FamilySearch’s universally-editable family tree of everyone ever has data-quality problems on the order of your average public restroom wall. And when I’ve gone back to admire my royal connection (a distinction shared by roughly every other human on the planet), it’s generally been broken in one or more ways.

Last night when I checked (because I posted about my eleventh novel and was reading random other weblog entries after), it was only slightly broken (although it took quite a bit of faffing about to find the loose ends on either side), and I thought I would try to record it here and see just how long my begats would end up.

(I also discovered that my mother’s father’s father’s parents were like sixth cousins once removed; isn’t that fascinating?)

Let’s try doing this as a list or something, to keep it maybe compact, since there are a lot of begats here. This is all according to the FamilySearch tree as of this moment; it will be different when you read it quite likely. And for that matter it’s rather confusing at the moment, as there are multiple places where different little boxes in the tree clearly refer to the same person, but whatever.

• Henry Beauclerc, born 1068, was Henry I, King of England, and he and an unknown woman begat
• Alice or Alix Fitzroy, born 1099 (“Fitzroy” is said to mean “illegitimate son of the monarch”, but apparently it can also refer to a daughter, likely equally illegitimate) who wed Mathieu I of Montmorency and begat
• Bouchard V de Montmorency, born 1129, who wed Laura de Hainaut and begat
• Mathieu II de Montmorency, born 1168 (or 1174), who wed Gertrude de Soissons (or de Nesle) and begat
• Bouchard VI de Montmorency (frugal with given names, these Montmorencys), born 1190, who wed Isabeau de Laval and begat
• Mathieu III de Montmorency, born 1221, who wed Jeanne de Brienne and begat
• Mathieu IV de Montmorency, born 1252, who wed Jeanne de Lévis Mirepoix and begat
• Jean de Montmorency, born 1280, who wed Jeanne de Calletot (aw, John and Jane) and begat
• Charles de Montmorency, born 1307, who wed (not Jeanne but) Perenelle de Villiers and begat
• Jacques de Montmorency, born 1370 (yikes, Charles!), who wed Philippa de Melun (someone had put “18th” after her name in the tree for no apparent reason; I deleted it, heh heh) and begat
• Jean de Montmorency II (why not Jean II de Montmorency?), born 1404, who wed someone and begat
• Jean III de Montmorency (there we go), born 1422, who wed Gudula Vilain and begat
• Philippe de Montmorency de Liedekerke (it says here), born 1466, who wed Marie Van Horns (a name whose like we will encounter again) and begat
• Joseph de Montmorencey Nivelles, born 1497, who wed Ann von Egmond and begat
• Philip IV de Montmorency, born 1526. It appears that his father Joseph (or Jozef) died in 1530, and his mother Ann remarried, to Johan II, Count of Horn, described as “one of the wealthiest nobles of the Netherlands” (and who was perhaps childless himself?). Johan left the title Count of Horn to his wife’s children on condition that they take his name, which is why genealogy is hard. Anyway, Philip accordingly became Count of Horn, and he wed Gräfin Walburgis von Neuenahr-Moers (someone had put the “von” at the end of the name and I moved it to the middle where it belongs; aita?) and begat
• Christian Barent Van Horn, born 1569 who wed Aeltie Jans van Sutphen and begat
• Barent Barents VanHorn, born 1599, who wed Mary Baerts and here is the current discontinuity, in that there is also an entry for one Cornelius Christiaesne Van Horne, born 1596, no parents listed, who wed Maria Baerts. Same guy? A sibling who married the same lady? Is “Christiaesne” really a thing? It’s probably supposed to be “Christiansen”, which suggests his father is named Christian. It is all a mystery! But in any case Cornelius and Maria, who may also be Barent and Mary, begat
• Jan Corneliesen Van Horne, born 1618, who wed Hillegonde Joris and begat
• Joris Jansen Van Horne, born 1645, who wed Maria Rutgers in 1659 in New York, NY (and look how modern we’re getting!) and begat
• Styntje Joris Van Horne, born “before 1677”, who wed David Cossart and begat
• Francis Cossart, born 1717, who wed Marigritie Van Nest and begat
• David Cossart (“wouldn’t it be fun if he had exactly the same name as his grampa?”), born 1742, who wed Sarah Van Duyn and begat
• Francis Cassatt (“wouldn’t it be fun if he had the same name as his grampa, but with random spelling differences in the surname?”), born 1766, who wed Martha “Mattie” Van Zant (love how they included the nickname here; good ol’ Mattie) and begat apparently nine or more children including
• Bernard Austin Cassat (“that second T was a bit much really”), born 1814, who wed Mary Couns and begat
• Massillon Cassat, born 1838, who wed Emma Eliza Smethurst and begat
• Helen Paxton Cassatt (“always liked that second T myself”), born 1892, who wed Abraham Chess and begat
• William Chess, born 1927, who wed Susan Leland and begat
• Me, born [PII REDACTED], who wed M and begat
• The kids!

So there we go! Just (1, 2, 3, 4…) like 27 generations between Henry I and me. England, get ready!

Interlude with Devil’s Lettuce

I haven’t gotten to the point of posting any more in my translation of that tiny piece of Bodhidharma that we’ve been working on, because I’ve been like working and playing Satisfactory and posting too much to r/zen and stuff. (Rumors at work suggest that we might be able to start going into Manhattan for work at least a few days a week starting as early as the second week of September, woot!).

But this other thing that occurred is kind of interesting, so I thought I’d write it down interlude-fashion here meanwhile. Before I like forget.

Marijuana (pot, weed, grass, THC, the Devil’s Lettuce, reefer, Mary Jane) is now legal, in some senses, in the State of New York, and a certain young relative and I went off into the local little park and up into the old quarry, and relaxing on a big rock overlooking the now-treelined main basin, we indulged.

Here is a photograph of my very nice vape “pen”, which is really mostly a battery. The pen was acquired probably without breaking many laws, by someone who travelled to nearby Massachusetts where it is legal to sell such things (it may be technically legal to sell such things in New York as well, but only under like a dispensary license that it not currently obtainable). The cartridge could potentially have been acquired that way as well.

This particular cartridge contains Sativa Blue, or perhaps Blue Sativa, but not I suspect Sativa Blue Dream. Or if I’ve gotten the pair of containers mixed up, it might contain Indica Blue, or perhaps Blue Indica, but given that I didn’t fall asleep when using it, I suspect that this didn’t happen. (Wouldn’t want to put the strain name on the actually cartridge or anything!!)

Today was the first day I’ve indulged out in nature since college, and the most highest I’ve gotten since then also.

It was extremely interesting!

My main memory from college is that, sort of oppositely from alcohol, marijuana made me feel like everything was light and hollow, insubstantial, like you could bat it up into the sky or burst it with a pin.

More recently, I’ve thought of it as focusing my mental attention down into like a small spotlight, so my mind isn’t always jumping around between things, and also can’t keep track of multiple things at once even if one might want it to, but focuses in singly on that single (potentially random) thing.

Today, as I was lying there talking about things with the relative, I was amused to find that I would be in the middle of a relatively long and complicated sentence, with no memory of how the sentence had started or how it was intended to end. But, I found, if I didn’t let that bother me, I could just be still and watch, and my voice would continue on with the sentence just fine, and I would find out what it was about.

That was interesting! And I had some thoughts about it that I want to write down here.

Brief lemma: (A) I used to think that either our inner experience and decisions cause our (our bodies’) actions, or (B) they don’t. (A) has against it that how would that work anyway? and that there are some interesting experiments that show the body starting to do a thing before (in time) the experiencing part of the brain has decided to do the thing. (B) has against it that what our bodies do has a strong correlation with what we experience and report; if our experience is just passive fizz on reality, how could reality come to contain things (like philosophical essays) that talk about experience?

I read somewhere, and I wish I could remember where, a beautiful and obvious-in-retrospect hypothesis that solves most of this: our inner experience and decisions don’t cause our bodies’ actions, nor do the actions cause the experiences, but they are still correlated because they both have a common cause. That is, some currently-mysterious process happens, and that process causes both the body motion, and the subjective experience. The process also (and the remaining mystery is here, around “how does it do that?”) gets feedback from both the bodily and conscious processes, so a later bodily action can for instance consist of the body writing down a rough description of the recent subjective experience.

This struck me as lovely. And now as I lie there and my body is fluently saying a long complex sentence that I personally have completely lost track of, I can see an approach to explaining this: the Devil’s Lettuce is interfering with the connection between the mysterious process and the subjective experience, but not interfering as much with the connection between the MP and the body doing things. So the body goes along doing things relatively well, and the subjective awareness is like “whoa, I’m lost.”

Similarly when I stood up, my subjective mind was like “yow I’m dizzy,” but my body was not unsteady on its (my) feet particularly at all. So again more interference with the subjective branch of the causal chain than the physical one. I’ve felt something similar when I forget to take my Effexor; not that it feels at all like being high, but that I feel like I’m dizzy, except without the dizziness. Which makes no sense at first, but might it we recast it as “my subjective I feels dizzy, but no message to that effect got to/from my body”.

That’s probably all for now. :) How long does one continue feeling effects after partaking in The Reefer? It was like five or six hours ago, and although most of the effects are gone, I still feel a bit more separate than usual from my body. Or something. It could be I’m just sleepy. :) And invigorated from the extremely hilly and rather rocky quarry park!

It was a good day. :)

We Went Out!

To a place with other people, outside the house!!

Cold Spring, NY

We went, specifically, to Cold Spring, up the Hudson a bit, a nice touristy little town with a great book store and wine store and cheese store and clothing and antique stores and some nice unassuming restaurants and so on.

Me and M and the little boy (the little girl off busy in Astoria dancing tango or whatnot) all went, and we are all two-vaccinations-plus-two-weeks now, so there was nothing in particular to worry about. Insane!

We all wore our masks into places, of course, because one really must still. I don’t know when that’s going to end! Will we start to differentiate the unmasked-and-safe people from the unmasked-but-not-safe people somehow? Or will we just keep wearing our masks until infection probability for everyone is minimal regardless?

(I have a reduced-to-fit and trimmed copy of my vaccination card inside the back of my transparent phone case, which I think is brilliant, but I don’t know if I’ll ever use for anything.)

We bought books (so many books!) and wine (an orange wine; I haven’t opened it yet, but I am very curious) and cheese (mmmm, cheese).

(I also attempted to make crackers for the cheese. I neglected to poke them with a fork, and they did puff up a bit, and I’m not completely happy with the result; but it wasn’t a disaster.)

I apparently bought five books (pictured here). I like thin books :) unlike apparently the rest of the party, both of whom are currently reading books roughly as deep as they are wide. I’ve already finished the short but poignant collection Banthology, and have just started the short and extremely online Against The Web. (Whose author, I am sad to discover, left us last year.)

We ate lunch, yesterday, at the notable Hudson Hil’s Cafe, which was quite awesome; I had the Gravlax-and-eggs, and a glass of (white) wine.

It felt so civilized to sit at a table with people and be brought good food in exchange for money!

(And yes, I’m sure this will be one of a vast series of “how nice it is to be doing things again now that we’re all vaccinated” posts sweeping the intertubes; I wonder what the hashtag will be.)

What else, what else? AI Dungeon Reddit is like entirely concerned with people Being Mad Online about a debacle that the owners of the system made vastly worse (at least as measured via reddit, and the resulting significant downvoting of the app just about everywhere, which you’d think they might care about) by awful PR and general cluelessness. I’ve continued to play with AI Dungeon and Replika and Shortly and all, as before, but nothing really excitingly new has occurred (except the just-mentioned debacle, which is really I think tangential, although there are larger issues about who will control AI systems, what they will be allowed to do and what we will be allowed to do with them, and so on).

I haven’t been playing Satisfactory much, because I got mostly to the end, haven’t quite gotten up the energy to go for the currently-final “Employee of the Planet” reward, or to try to build something really aesthetically notable. I’ve been playing WoW only a little, again because most things have plateaued at roughly my level of interest for the moment.

Something reminded me of The Stanley Parable, and I’ve played through that quite a few times now, finding various Easter eggs and alternate endings (of which there are apparently at least nineteen!). That reminded me of The Beginner’s Guide, also a very meta game, which I haven’t played again but sort of intent to sometime soon maybe.

The Epic installer urged Core upon me, and seeing that it is yet another of the “WE HAVE INVENTED THE MULTIVERSE” things that are trendy once again, I’ve played with it a little. It’s kind of cool, very uneven since it’s just a huge bunch of Unreal-based games made by random people. I’ve played one “gather resources and fix up the house” one that got really dull really fast, one “Death Wall” running-around game that is simple but surprisingly fun and addictive, one “Super Fun Jumping Around Through An Obstacle Course Dying Over And Over” thing that wasn’t remotely fun, and one kind of weird and amusing thing where you jump high with a balloon in order to get “coins” that can be spent for better balloons to jump higher and get more coins to spend on even better balloons, which was fun but suddenly felt extremely futile so I stopped.

Perhaps needless to say, Core haven’t invented the multiverse, even to the extent that Second Life did, and imesho until one of these things enables easy low-learning-curve creation inside the game like Second Life did, none of them ever will. (See ancient essay on Secret Second Life Weblog.)

I continue not to be in Second Life myself much for whatever reason, but I did go in for a friend’s Eid open house, and that was lovely. (A belated Eid Mubarak to all!)

And that’s probably about all for now. It’s a beautiful day, I’ve already had bagels and OJ and coffee, and sat out on the front porch reading for awhile, and now I’m writing in my weblog, and those are good things. I am still missing Manhattan terribly (maybe I’ll get in next weekend, even if it IS going to be hotter’n blazes), but one perseveres!

Mushroom, Apple, and Cherry Pie

So on Christmas itself (which was I think just yesterday) we had all the traditional stuffs, including presents and a nice and relatively simple ham dinner. On a whim I got a Sweet Potato Pie from the grocery, and that was good (and less work). And experimentally I prepared the partly-computer-generated Mushroom Pie from All Reality.

The thing that delighted me most, perhaps, was that I grabbed the wrong bottle at first, and ended up cooking a cup of mushrooms in brown sugar, corn starch, and Ricard anise pastis, which apparently smelled rather memorable. The little daughter noticed I’d grabbed the wrong bottle, and so I did it again with rum per the recipe (see below), but ending up with a cup of mushrooms cooked in licorice liqueur on the side was definitely a highlight. As I pointed out on the Twitters, if one had just paid say $32 for them at a fancy restaurant, one would say “oh, these are exquisite”.

For those who somehow haven’t memorized the recipe, or even somehow haven’t read the book (I’m kidding here; probably no one has read the book), here it is:

Farmer McDowell’s recipe for her famous Midpoint Mushroom, Apple, and Sour Cherry Pie

1 pie shell, to bake
1/3 cup brown or molasses sugar
2 Tbsp cornstarch
1/3 cup rum
1 cup morel or similar mushrooms, sliced
1 cup Qualification sour cherries
2 Midpoint green apples, sliced thinly
1 hen’s egg, beaten
1/2 cup nuts or as you will

Heat the oven to 375°F or Mark 5.

While the pie shell is baking, heat together the brown sugar, cornstarch, and rum in a small saucepan. Cook until they are smooth and bubbling. Add the morels and cook until they’re tender. Let it cool slightly.

When the oven is up to temperature, remove the pie shell, and fill with the brown sugar rum morel mixture. Top with the cherries, apples, egg, and any nuts. Bake for another 30 minutes, until the egg is set and the top is golden.

As I’ve mentioned somewhere or other else recently, I don’t remember how much of this was me and how much was GPT-3 the AI. I think I gave it the title, it produced a version of the ingredients and instructions, and I adjusted the language but not the underlying recipe (i.e. the same amounts and basic ingredients and steps).

Half-baking the pie shell first was a bit odd; the edges folded in on themselves a bit. That may have been my own lack of experience in baking an empty pie shell though.

If you cook the mushrooms in the rum and cornstarch for long enough, it rather suddenly stops having any liquid in it, and becomes rather tender mushrooms coated with a thick sweet rum glaze, which is interesting. Stopping a bit before that might have resulted in there being more moisture for the apples especially to participate in later on.

I didn’t have morels, which might have produced a (what?) smokier flavor, but the baby Portabellas that I lazily got pre-sliced from the grocers worked fine. I didn’t have Qualification Sour Cherries, as they are fictional, or any sour cherries for that matter, but random red cherries also worked fine. Similarly about 1.75 Granny Smith apples worked in place of the Midpoint Greens. I didn’t add any nuts.

The result is interesting, somewhere between a pie and a tart, with a novel layer on the bottom, and then cherries and slightly dried-out apple slices with random bits of them coated with cooked egg on top. It might have worked better to mix the cherries and apple slices and egg all together for a more even coating, or even to mix everything with the rum and mushroom mixture before putting into the crust.

As it was, the cherries and apples were good, but I thought rather in a “one might just as well have eaten the ingredients separately” sort of way. Although they did go well with the rum and mushroom part, flavor-wise. The little daughter, who has standards and does not mince words, said that she thought it was pretty good, so that’s basically a triumph.

Christmas Eve, 2020

Continuing the tradition of recent years, of doing various New Year things at Christmas time instead, we made 158 dumplings today. This compares plausibly to the mere 113 in late 2019, the 161 in early 2018, and so on, back to say the 140 in 2007 and so on back into the Time of Mists.

(We also gathered a new statistic, and determined that between the four of us, now all nominally adults for some years, we ate just about 107 of them for dinner. We are rather full. Probably any dessert will have to wait.)

Yesterday we made the Christmas Cookies, using a recipe card from Sherbrooke Village in Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia, that has inter alia a hand-written note at the bottom saying to save a certain reindeer-shaped cookie for Christmas Day, in 1996.

Which was like ten years ago, right?

Tomorrow we’ll be Opening Presents, making a nice modest ham dinner, eating (store-bought, woot!) Sweet Potato Pie, and being amused by my attempt to bake Farmer McDowell’s Famous Midpoint Mushroom, Apple, and Sour Cherry Pie, from a computer-generated recipe in my 2020 NaNoWriMo novel. We don’t have any sour cherries (is that even a thing?) but I have the feeling that that’s not going to be the main snag. :)

We have the pretty little artisanal tree up on a table this year, where it looks rather nice, and the usual Christmas playlists are playing on the stereo from various Apple and Android devices. The stockings, also, are hung by the chimney with care!

We’re very lucky to have all four of us together, having been able to take sufficient precautions and exercise sufficient waiting periods to be comfortable being together in the house without regard to distance. Kind and underpaid people bring various things and put them on the front porch, and we tip generously, if not sufficiently.

I am on vacation for quite awhile, because I booked it before I realized that the new employer (new as in a mere seven or so years now) doesn’t do anything special to vacation days at the end of a year. So I needn’t have, but it’s nice.

The world is strange. I have been paying altogether too much attention to the vile acts of the outgoing President, and to the various crackpot theories of those of his remaining followers who either believe or just loudly declare that he will continue to be President after January 20th. Fortunately this seems unlikely, but it will be a great relief when he is finally and thoroughly out of power. I could write quite a bit about all of that, but at the moment I don’t think it would be healthy.

It has been such a year, for so many people. I’ve suffered comparatively little, as I undeservedly tend to; many other people have suffered undeservedly much more. There are so many hopeful signs at the moment that I almost dare to be optimistic. But I’m going to try to resist that until say February, and just Hang In There and tip well in the meantime.

I miss Manhattan! As I may have mentioned before, I have snuck in for a day on my own just wandering around (and avoiding Indoor Dining) a couple of times during this Very Long Month of March, but at the moment it doesn’t look like a terrific idea this month. We went in the other day to pick up the little daughter, the boy and I did, but didn’t even get out of the car to speak of.

Get those vaccines distributing! I want to ride a crowded subway train, sit crammed into a corner table listening to live jazz, drop into a familiar bagel store for the first time and get an onion bagel with whitefish (not toasted).

I may go for a long drive in the suburban countryside sometime in the next several days, just to see things I haven’t seen recently, and get a feeling of movement.

And I should meditate! This is almost always true. :) Meditation and sleep have in common that they are easy to do, and I love doing both of them, and also tend to put off both for as long as possible. The main difference being that sleep is much more insistent.

Blessed Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Holidays, and Bonus Novus Annus to all!

Here’s to a very different 2021. <3

2020, eh?

For quite awhile now, there’s been too much to say, to say anything.

But in the fifth month of This Particular Thing, the fifth month of being in this house virtually every hour of every day, I thought I would sit down and compose some words anyway, rather than for instance just going entirely mad.

Donald Trump is the President of the United States. Until it happened, this was a thing that people in SF novels would say to reveal that they were from a crazy alternate universe.

He’s the worst President of the United States in living memory, certainly, and perhaps in all of history. He’s evil and corrupt, and while there may have been prior Presidents just as evil and corrupt, he does it in a way simultaneously so blatant and so bungling that it becomes an entirely new kind of thing: exposing countless people to harm, of course, but also normalizing it, and normalizing being unapologetic about it, and calling into question whether fairness and integrity and truth and competence even exist.

And somehow, he has supporters. Enough that he might even be re-elected, at least given the amount of voter suppression and outright fraud that his party has shown themselves willing to do. To their eternal shame.

It is going to take us so long to recover from this obscenity.

Then there is the virus. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or “SARS-CoV-2”, or “the virus that causes COVID-19” (for reasons). And the disease, COVID-19, not because there were 18 previous ones, but because it’s a Coronavirus-caused disease discovered in 2019. Probably.

I last went to work in Manhattan on the last Thursday in February. I worked from home the next day, because I would generally work from home on Fridays, because commuting to the city five days every week was a bit tiring. The weekend, as far as I can recall, was normalish. But I woke up on Monday morning feeling sick, and didn’t go to work.

(In retrospect, given the relative lack of respiratory symptoms and also that I’ve had a negative antibody test since, it was probably just my usual sort of change-of-seasons virus, not The Virus.)

I slept pretty much straight through the next three days, and felt a bit better on Wednesday. A bit more better on Thursday, but worked from home just to be safe. And worked from home on that Friday also.

By Monday, March 9th, 2020, there were significant stories in the news about this new virus, and people were starting to work from home. So I did, too, and I haven’t been back to work in Manhattan since.

I’ve barely been out of the house. To the grocery and back a few times, to pick up the groceries that they nicely put into bags for us to pick up. To pick up food a few times, although we almost always have it delivered. Quite a few walks just around the local neighborhood, with a mask of one kind or another, when it’s not storming or too hot. Not enough walks, really, I should do that more.

I did get into Manhattan once, by car, with the little boy, to pick up the little daughter. It was a nice day, and good to see a few different things, the City still there, looking almost normal (too normal?).

So now we are all four in the house, just like the old days except the kids are older (and so are we how about that haha) and it is 2020 so everything is somewhat crazy.

We cook HelloFresh dinners (for four) four days out of seven now, which is

I’ve been playing WoW a bit, but I’m sort of tired of it and the new expansion isn’t out yet. I have a bunch of max level (120) characters, and leveling more (there’s a 110 and a 100 that I’m working on) isn’t very interesting.

I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 at the little boy’s suggestion, and that was fun for awhile, but having leveled a Gunzerker to level 24 and an Assassin to level 15, I’m kind of tired of that now also.

I’ve started playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, also at the kids’ suggestion, and that’s kind of fun (swimming!), but (I think by design) for only a limited amount of time per day.

I’ve been reading. Some. I re(rere?)read Hesse’s Journey to the East the other day. It’s real short, of course. The various bits of anachronistic chauvinism were a bit jarring, and I thought about what a modern retelling of the story might be like. Maybe I’ll try writing that some time.

I’m reading Mark Bray’s “Antifa Handbook”. It’s good, if a bit dry and historical.

I’m meditating (sitting, zazen, shikantaza, the practice of the Buddha ancestors), also not as often as I could.

I’m on Twitter a lot (speaking of antifa), being all snarky and Leftist and #acab and “trans women are woman” and “sex work is work”, and getting into more or less snarky and more or less respectful discussions or disputes with people of other points of view.

Also there are massive protests, various Autonomous Zones, the murder hornets, Epstein and Maxwell, all the specific individual insane and stupid and evil things that the aforementioned Trump is doing, the giant dust-cloud, the worrying new swine flu strain, the signals from space, the fires in Australia (I hope those are out by now), the whole Brexit thing (I guess they are still doing that?), and a few dozen other things that would have been The Major Story of the Year in any sensible year.

But it’s still 2020.

I don’t know why I’m writing this, really. To get some practice in putting words down, maybe. To help organize the vast mass of impressions coming out of this crazy year.

2020, eh?

Jingle Bells!

Wow it has been forever since I posted content (“content”) here! And it seems like I say that every time I post content! And probably I say that every time I post content as well! Tradition.

So this year we made a mere 113 dumplings. They were on average larger than usual, is our impression, perhaps due to the little boy having taken over the skin-rolling duties from his mother this year. Larger dumplings should mean comparatively more use of filling (see square-cube law), but regardless of that “should” we also had considerable filling left over (so probably we just didn’t make as much dough). There is now a small container of filling in the refrigerator, offering the prospect of “burgers!” as the little daughter put it.

The 113 dumplings are fewer than the 161 at the beginning of 2018; shockingly, there seems to be no record of the number we made at the beginning of 2019. Scientists baffled and all.

We are doing Christmas Things a day early, and sort of folding in some New Years Things too, because due to adulthood and things one or more of the children have to leave tomorrow (the 25th) and won’t necessarily be here for the 1st. We’ve done dumplings (yesterday) and present-opening (today) and currently we are playing with presents and I am baking pies (not that anyone asked for pies, but I wanted to make some so there).

I got a lovely little note from a long-time reader saying that my solstice letter from eight years ago is part of their family tradition; that made me feel warm and validated!

We were talking about the experience of remembering some entire significant thing from earlier in one’s life that one had until then entirely forgotten about (because it sort of figures in the 2019 NaNoWriMo novel, of which perhaps more below), and the little daughter said that that can happen with books or movies or games that one experienced a long time ago, because they are both significantly large pieces of experience, and also things that it’s not hard to accidentally forget.

And in that vein she suggested a game that at least some of us had obsessed over significantly years ago involving these little like animals or monkeys or something that you had to take care of, and after blanking on it for a bit it suddenly came back to me in a perfect example of the phenomenon we were talking about, where you suddenly remember an entire piece of, basically, yourself that had once been important but you hadn’t thought about in years.

It turns out the game was called “Creatures” and the little animals or monkeys or whatever are called “Norns”, and I was quite obsessed with their behavior and learning and genetics and things (which were represented quite explicitly in the game, which is what made it so obsessable-about). I looked around online and found that there is an actual page about me in an ancient wiki about the game, which points into the Creatures pages that I used to maintain on the AOL (hahaha) user web pages, but which are now gone.

I looked around on various hard drives (“hard drives”) in the house here for nested “from the old computer” directories that might go back to 1997 or so (before the original weblog started!), but didn’t find anything (I think there’s at least one laptop lying around gathering dust that’s still nominally waiting for me to copy all of the content off of it to a more recent machine; I should use The Cloud!).

Well after turning off the lights last night, though, I thought of One More Thing To Try, and lo and behold here is a copy of those pages in the amazing Internet Archive (I gave them money; you should too!). It turns out that I was indeed quite into all that stuff, down to file formats and long amusing stories about my Norns and their genetic mutations and all.

I should figure out how to restore a tree of pages from the Archive back to disk, and put them onto the Modern Web somewhere.

Because no information should ever be lost! Even though that’s impossible!

I did finish a novel this November! I’m even pretty happy with it. For complicated reasons not worth going into here I’m not going to post a link to it immediately, but it’s done and it’s over 50,000 words, and that’s pretty cool. It starts out with something on the radio reminding Our Hero of the time he first moved into the house outside Pittsburgh that he lived in for awhile, but on the other hand he’s never lived in a house outside Pittsburgh, so that’s odd.

This connected to the whole idea of suddenly remembering things that did in fact happen, but you’d just forgotten, and onward to the ancient Norns.

The world continues otherwise pretty much unchanged. I commute into the city about four days a week, and work happily for a company that I am at the moment a bit worried about (I mean, wth?), on an island that is pretty much the center of the universe by all completely objective measures. The kids are adulting to various extents, living not here but at least in other places in the State of New York so we see them pretty often.

I am working on getting the Legion Class Mount on my Prot Paladin, which is made easier by the fact that he’s level 120 and the Legion content is intended for level 110 characters (and pally tanks are way OP anyway). I already have the Class Mounts for Rogue, Hunter, Demon Hunter, Death Knight and ummm maybe that’s it I forget. (Oh, wait, and Monk. And Priest.)

I don’t go into Second Life much these days except to feed the cats (yes, I seem to possess a small finite number of virtual cats which require virtual food which costs virtual money which is acquired mostly with real money, which is a brilliant setup by the creators of said cats and food). Sometimes I think I should cut back on my land and things in SL, which also cost real money, but even though I don’t go in very often, it still feels like a part of me somehow, so I don’t.

• I got an espresso maker for Christmas (Solstice), so now I can make espresso!
• I got also various other things, no less appreciated for not being listed explicitly here!

I am rather constantly on Twitter; it’s quite an addictive thing in the potentially dangerous “lots of little squirts of validation at somewhat unpredictable intervals” way. But I’m finding it also a good way to get news without having to actually consume much media directly, which involves the risk of accidentally seeing Donald Trump speak or something.

(I think one of the reasons I haven’t weblogged much is that it seems like talking about anything but the current threats to the world from various powerful evil people (Trump, McConnell, Johnson, Putin, etc, etc) is beside the point, given the importance of the things that they are threats to; but I have convinced myself that at least for this one day Solstice-Season day I can do that.)

I’ve also bought for myself a little Zafu (a Zen meditation cushion; the label says “Yoga meditation pillow”, but I think it will still work) and a Zabuton (well, a little blanket) to put under it, which I am hoping and assuming will lead me to actually meditate more (I am getting so much more comfortable with the word “meditate! I think that is good!) rather than having a sitting practice that consists primarily of not sitting.

Here (somewhere around here) is a picture of the little artisanal Christmas tree and some presents under it, and then to the left my Zafu and Zabuton, so far only briefly test-driven and not used for actual Sitting, in the sense that “actual Sitting” is a thing.

(Ooops, the timer went off, so I have to go check the pumpkin pie; I will put up the picture after I check it. Although you will see it before that. Or, really, after that. You know.)

(The pie needs probably five more minutes. On the other hand by the time I figure out how to get WordPress to flow text around an image, it’s going to be done. Ha, apparently you just “Align Right”; simpler than I expected with all of these “blocks” and “groups and things lurking about. I’d like to get rid of the top padding or whatever that is and have the top of the image align with the top of the text on the first paragraph of text to the left, but, as they say, whatever. Or maybe that’s just an edit-mode thing, and it will look how I want once it’s published. Or!)

We are somewhat startled to discover that this pumpkin pie recipe is twenty years old. Good Heavens? On the other hand, what’s twenty years, really? Next we will work on the chocolate silk pie, which we have already made the crust for (and wow is it nothing like the even round uniform crust on that web page there). And perhaps Christmas Cookies later on.

So I will probably go off and do that soon. What else shall I leave you, devoted reader, with? I’ve been reviewing books that I finish now and then; see for instance me on GoodReads and I guess me on Amazon (I have the vague impression that GoodReads and Amazon share book reviews, unless they don’t, except sometimes).

Happy Solstice and Other Winter Holiday of Your Choice, and Happy New Year! May we all be blessed, and realize that we are. Maybe I will write again here some day!

Twenty Years

Not actually twenty years, not twenty years to the day, because it was September then and today it’s only June.

But still! It was 1999 when I was first sitting by the shore in Maine, writing words in a weblog on a website, and now it’s 2019, and I’m sitting again by the shore in Maine, writing words in a weblog on a website.

Which is pretty amazing in some sense.

Twenty years is a long time, a generation, time for the kids to grow up (although they still play Smash Brothers in the living room in the evening, as they started doing, what, maybe fifteen years ago), time for the backs of my hands to look a little weird in the light.

I still have lots of books with me, and am acquiring more, and if there are now lots of books contained in my “cellular telephone”, there are also lots, both used and new, scattered about the house; books that belong to the house, books that we brought from home, books that we got from Traveler, from Sherman’s Boothbay, from the Friends of the Library Used Book Store, from Sherman’s Camden, from Owl and Turtle.

(Owl and Turtle has coffee, too; mmmm, coffee!)

I haven’t written in this space much lately, for whatever reason or reasons. I’ve been playing a certain amount of Minecraft, World of Warcraft, I’ve been in Second Life just a little. I’ve been spending entirely too much time on Twitter, getting into arguments with people and/or Russian disinformation teams about the state of this beleaguered world.

One of the reasons I haven’t been writing here, I suspect, is that (as I may have said before, and I’ve certainly thought before) it seems beside the point to talk about anything but the current rather terrifying assault on freedom and justice and just plain reality coming (most obviously) from Donald Trump, but (more accurately) from who-can-tell-where, which is exactly part of the problem.

And on the other hand, who wants to talk about that all the time? I don’t feel like I have anything unusual to contribute there, except as one more voice saying Good Lord, and What Is Going On?, and Resist! which of course we should and must, somehow. Since that awful day in November 2016, I have not felt confident in predicting much of anything.

(This WordPress “Block Editor” is rather bizarre; I hope the words end up somewhere more or less where they ought to be.)

Otherwise, things continue! I have had some sort of Upper Respiratory thing going on for a couple of weeks now; at first an irritated throat and stuffy head that felt more like pollen allergy than infection, and when we got to Maine transformed into a lack of voice and occasional deep productive cough, which isn’t the most pleasant thing ever, but at least I don’t actually feel sick.

It’s been lovely here; despite predictions of rain, the rain has confined itself pretty exclusively to night, and the days have been either cool and sunny (mostly) or cool and cloudy or foggy (sometimes), all of which are scenic and relaxing.

I spent a week in Hawai’i the other week, associated with a team award at work. That was pretty neat! Although I prefer the weather here in Maine; the Hawai’ian sun was intense and unfriendly. I did basically nothing there, except the one scheduled Team Event (a snorkeling cruise, on which I snorkeled about), and a massage, and a day bumming around in Lahaina, which was great.

Gramma Jean, Mom’s Mom, and her second husband Proc (Samuel A. Procter) lived in Hawai’i for awhile, on the Big Island, and we visited them some small number of times. Staying in a Resort on Maui was rather different, much more Disneyfied, but Lahaina reminded me a little of Hilo, which is (or was, and I expect still is) a great laid-back little town, catering to the tourists but not All About the tourists.

(Gramma Jean or Gramma Jeanne? The first, I’m pretty sure, but not certain, and it’s terrifying in a way to realize how hard it would be to confirm that. Being an only child of only children can be a rather lonely thing!)

It’s Friday of the week already, which means we’re leaving tomorrow morning. I think I will play some interactive computer thing for a bit, while admiring the view out the windows. Maybe I will write a bit more here, later on.

---

Well, okay (smiley-face); now it’s Saturday evening, and we’re back home in the ‘burbs, all tired from the drive (even though M and also the little boy drove some too), but also all unpacked, and with having had dinner (and Good Lord, that was salty; perhaps Panera shouldn’t really be expected to understand soba noodles).

I won’t say anything in particular more, both because I am so tired and… well, mostly because I am so tired I suppose! Otherwise I could. But maybe having written here a bit, I will write here again sometime soonish, rather than hardly ever. Or not! It’s all good…

Wrong Side of the Blanket

I am totally a descendant of Henry I of England, aka Henry Beauclerc, who was born in like 1068, which was a very long time ago!

And King!

At least if we believe Family Search, which is the Mormons, who are making sure that everyone who converts has a full record of their family tree so that they can go back through it and do the appropriate ritual to make sure that all of their ancestors can (if they want to) get into the right Realm or whatever; but it has the nice side-effect of making this huge genealogy database thing that the rest of us can use, too.

It has two parts: a vast database of public records of various kinds, digitized and indexed by all sorts of things; and a sort of huge family-tree Wiki which anyone who signs up (for free!) can edit, which is both wonderful and horribly full of data-quality problems omg you wouldn’t believe it.

I wrote to one person, on the system, asking her why she’d removed one very correct-looking father-son relationship from the Family Tree part, and she replied asking who the heck I was, and why I was questioning edits that she’d made to her own family tree? She was rather surprised to be told that the family tree is actually shared between everyone, and that her pruning out of relationships that she wasn’t personally interested in had been messing up everyone else’s trees, too.

In another part of my family tree, someone has been busy for the last two months changing the name associated with one particular entry back and forth between two completely different names. I’m guessing this is because they don’t actually understand how the interface works. They have also completely merged the information of two as far as I can see entirely different couples; the information from the two husbands has been merged into one, as has the information from the two wives. The resulting horrible mess has so far discouraged me from going in and actually doing anything about it, other than adding an incredulous annotation to the page.

But anyway! Descended from Henry I! King of England!

Great great great etc gramps

Henry, it seems, had an illegitimate daughter named variously Aline or Alix or Alice Fitzroy and/or von England, by a woman whose name is unknown at least to me. This daughter cleverly married Matthieu (or Matthew) I of Montmorency, which led to a line of like a dozen more dudes of Montmorency, named Matthew and Charles and Jean and Phillipe and Joseph and Jacques and things, until we suddenly get to Christian Berent Van Horn, born in about 1570. Not immediately clear what happened to Montmorency.

We then have four or five generations of Van Horns, until Styntje Van Horn marries one David Cossart in New York, America, in 1696. There is then a bit of a mess, or to be frank a horrible mess, as various Cossarts and Cossats and Cassets, all named David and/or Francis, father each other for a few generations, until we get to the birth of the memorably-named Massillon Cassat in the more civilized year of 1840. He has a daughter, she has a son, and that son marries my mother, and they beget me.

Hurrah!

So there you can see my descent, in terms of both ancestry and social status, from Henry I of England, through all them Montmorencies and Van Horns and Cassats, to your humble weblogger, sitting here with tennis happening on the TV.

Isn’t nature wonderful!

(And since it’s all on a random Wiki that your Uncle Irving could randomly switch all of the relationships around in at any time, any or all of it, at least before the last Cassat daughter of whom I have memories of personal testimony, could be utterly made up! But we don’t let that worry us; the past is always uncertain, even moreso than the future.)

Sunday, June 18th

Father’s Day! See this and this. Cards from kids!

I thought I would try writing in this here weblog again, because I like writing.

It’s hard to write stuff, because one doesn’t want to write endlessly about how Donald Trump being President was always a signal that you were reading a probably-cheesy dystopian-alternate-timeline story, and as it turns out, it still is.

But that is such a big thing, that writing about anything else seems like ignoring the Elephant In The Room, if you know what I mean.

As weblogged about previously, I’ve taken part in various marches; the Women’s March, the Not My President’s Day March, the March for Science. Maybe some others I forget. I have a rose (🌹) in my Twitter ummm name-thing (not the @-thing, the other thing) because I have joined the Democratic Socialists of America, and I have been all too often debating with Trump fans on Twitter.

This is a challenging thing to do, as one inevitably wants to prevail in debate, and try to convince the interlocutor(s) and even onlookers of at least the plausibility of one’s position, and one also wants to in some sense defend against the inevitable ad hominem attacks. (Or ad Eminem, as WordPress suggests.)

And yet those people are me also, fellow parts of the universal mind and all, fellow fragments of the Big Block, albeit apparently fragments from rather far away, and difficult to enjoy or understand.

Which brings me to what is, for me, the hardest thing about compassion (Compassion). I may have written about this before, but that’s okay.

I have, or think I have, no problem feeling compassion for people who are being mean to me; as long as there’s no dangerous physical assault involved, I can joke with them and try to tease out what they are upset about, and not mind that they have silly ideas because hey we all have silly ideas let’s help each other find better ones.

But what do I do when someone is being mean to someone else? How do I have compassion for the attacker? What form should that compassion take? If I am kind and joke with the attacker, am I normalizing their negative impacts on the victims? It doesn’t feel like a good idea to pal around with Nazis! (Internet or otherwise.) But I still want to express compassion, in some form.

Is punching him in the face in fact the best way to show compassion for not only the people that Richard Spencer helps oppress, but also Spencer himself? Or does one punch him in the face out of compassion for his victims, and then help him bandage up his nose out of compassion for him? Neither one feels quite right. Or maybe both do?

Speaking of Compassion and Oneness, I’ve been playing the game (“game”) Everything, from The Steam, and it’s wonderful. It’s a thing that lets you be all sorts of different things, from a hydrogen atom to a cow to a galaxy (and things off both ends), and that plays numerous Alan Watts discourses while you do it. What could be better!

Also I have been playing The Sims 4 some (see also the Sims 2 Stories, which are mostly back online now, woot!). I sort of skipped The Sims 3 for whatever reason, and now I am playing 4 in sort of vaguely but not really Legacy Challenge style. I started with a single Young Adult sim, Tolerance Boatwhistle, in a huge lot without much money, as required, and I’ve been playing just that one lot, without extending anyone’s life, as required, but I haven’t been keeping score or using the approved trait-picking methods for offspring or anything.

So far Tolerance Boatwhistle married standard sim Liberty Lee and they begat Prudence Boatwhistle (who never had a job, but survived on her paintings, and), who (with the help of standard character Alexander Goth, who has a female voice at least in my game, and who never moved in, but did die on the lot so we have his tombstone and ghost) begat Gladstone Boatwhistle, who married townie or something Hadley (heavens I’ve forgotten her last name), and together begat Consideration Boatwhistle (who became the ultimate Bodybuilder Bro, and) who married Giovanna something (I am terrible with names, aren’t I?), and who together begat Carlton Boatwhistle and his little sister Charity Boatwhistle.

Gladstone and his Hadley just recently died of old age within minutes of each other (the Grim Reaper, who is vaguely a friend of the family by now, didn’t even have time to leave in between), so they will soon be coming in at night to eat food and chat and possess various household objects, and there are just two adults and two elementary school kids on the lot (and six gravestones and therefore potential ghosts), and things are relatively simple.

Too simple, in some sense; the family has enough liquid cash and random income sources that it seems like no one has to actually ever get a job unless it’s required for an aspiration, and everyone’s moods are always pretty high except for a few days after the prior generation dies of old age.

But it’s a very soothing sort of world to spend time in and watch and give little non-urgent instructions to.

I‘ve also been playing WoW a bit, but it’s really boring now and I tend to doze off over it. I’ve tried to start playing No Man’s Sky again, but I dunno meh. Similarly for Spore. And Elite Dangerous’s bizarre controls still keep me from bothering to go back in there.

What else?  Lots of books! And work! And Manhattan and things! But this is getting longish, so I will try to remember how to “post” it.

Thanks for following along! This was fun, I’ll try to do it again soon (“soon”).

 

 

 

Summer 2015

I think I’ve speculated before how long it would take, in a significantly long stretch of leisure, before I had had my fill of utter idleness, and started spontaneously doing other things, thinking new thoughts, writing new things, and generally being creative. Available evidence suggests it’s more than a week.  :)

It’s been a long time since an August hiatus in my weblogging could have meant anything (beyond “it’s a day”) to even the most devoted reader.  But this particular August hiatus, the hiatus that this entry will end once I actually post it, is because we are once again up in Maine, sleeping late, eating lobster, listening to the plashing of the surf, and generally being blissful.  It’s now been sixteen years since we started this Maine-going stuff, and this web-logging stuff; one more year than last year.

We have a number of books lying around, as always, and we may list them later on in the traditional way.  But this decade (and I expect I’ve noted this down before) there are many books and book-like things inside of smallish and flattish silicon-based devices here and there, and those are good hooks for writing down things also.

On this Nexus 5 or Something Cellular Telephone that I have here, for instance, when you hit the little square button thing area, it goes to a view that shows a big scrolling Rolodex-like display of all of the roughly six zillion things that the phone is in some way aware of me doing.  Some of them are open just in case I want to go back and look at them later; so I can write those down in the weblog here, with clever observations on life and the universe more or less related to them, and then I can close them in my phone, and that will be good if only because then I can find the non-closed ones more easily.

Let’s see what we got, here on Tuesday night of the vacation week.

• Twitter.  Well, that’s Twitter (where I exist as my Second Life persona for historical reasons), so we’ll just close that.  (I could write about how and why I use Twitter, and what effect it is having on the global unconscious, but instead I will just recommend the feed of A Bear).
• Instagram, where I exist as the name of this very weblog, and where you can see various pictures, some of them from Maine (and one of them being a selfie with Felicia Day, because she did a booksigning at work which was extremely cool; she says that lots of people around her are playing Final Fantasy XIV (or perhaps 14) these days); we’ll close that, too.
• Chrome.  That has eleventy-seven tabs of its own active inside it (because I configured things that way somehow sometime), so we’ll leave that open for now.
• A search result for “soft shell lobster“, because we were getting lobster at the usual place, and they had both kinds and I didn’t know the difference.  The little boy and I shared a pair of soft-shelled (with corn on the cob); they were delicious.  And ethically troubling.  As usual.
• The Wi-Fi settings control, because the marina right next to the Lobster Warf has a friendly open signal.
• GMail, because I was checking my email.  We’ll close that.  It was mostly spam.  (Does the Clinton campaign really think I would be extremely psyched at the idea of flying out to some random place to have lunch with Hilary?  I mean… no.)
• A search result for “tom collins ingredients“, because the little daughter was urging alcohol on us at the Warf, and I asked for a Tom Collins, and apparently this is an Obscure Old Person Drink or something, and the little daughter wasn’t sure the bartender would know what that was, so I looked it up.
• An instance of Maps along with the search result for “google location history” that spawned it, because I was mildly curious when we’d gotten there.  This was also very useful the other day when we were in town, and we couldn’t remember how long it’d been since we’d parked in the “2 Hour Parking” place, and I remembered the extremely useful Google Location History aka Google Maps Timeline; try it yourself!
• An instance of Hangouts, ’cause we’ve all been IMing each other and sending around photos and stuff in the modern unWired manner, and this has mostly been working even though they are all Apple-ish and I am on Android.
• Search results for “weather linekin” and “seagulls sleep”, from being down on the dock lifeguarding while the little boy, and then also the little girl, swam about in the apparently-not-incredibly-freezing water, and it rained a little and we wondered where seagulls sleep.
• Another instance of GMail; that’s weird.  We’ll close that (and everything else we’re mentioning except for Chrome, so far).
• Google Play Music, because I was playing some music.  (Have you seen the Airhorn version of “Take On Me”?  It is ossum.  Although it is a YouTube thing, not a Google Play Music thing.)
• An instance of the 2048 app, where I got up to 4096 (and a 2048 and a 1024), which is pretty good, but only 74424 points and far short of my Personal Best of 103964.
• Some more weather results; it’s been foggy, cloudy, and/or raining for much of this Maine vacation so far, but that’s okay!
• A search result on “ofay”, which turns out to be a (derogatory) slang word for white person, which I looked up because I am reading Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, which I got for fifty cents at the Friends of the Library book sale, and which is an impressive and significant book that everyone should read (because of and despite issues of misogyny and homophobia, and it being from the 60’s, when the issue of race was different from and similar to how it is today).
• A search result on “noetic” because the little daughter asked what it means, because it is in a book she is reading about Jewish panentheism.  (Also it is reminiscent of the title of Lower Dens‘ second album, and they are a favorite of hers.)
• News and Weather, because as well as the weather I was mildly interested in the Stock Market Crash and subsequent recovery (someone made an obscene amount of money on that).
• A search result on Chris Lovdjieff, who appears in Soul on Ice, and who is known to the web for nothing much else as far as I discovered.
• A search result on Windows 10 Browser, I forget exactly why.  I am interested to see that it is supposed to have collaborative annotation features, which sounds interesting.  It has also been tried many times before, and never caught on; it will be interesting to see if it does this time.  If the new browser does it in some open way that other browsers can join in on, it might.  But, well, haha…
• A search result on “i like beer sing”, which was a typo for “i like beer song“, but Google found the song I was looking for anyway.  I played this for the amusement of the family while we were having a lovely dinner of wine and cheese from Eventide and clam chowder from the Warf, out on the porch overlooking the bay, yesterday evening I think it was.
• Search results on “coffee” and “the red cup” because we were looking for a place to have coffee in town, but the Red Cup was closed for the day already.
• A “Sign In To Network” page, because the WiFi network here is a Linksys Smart Something with a silly portal login page that wants the password typed in again more often than one would really expect.  While I am here, though, I will brag that when we discovered that the WiFi covered only one small bit of one side of the rental house, I deployed a clever range extender (possibly not that one, but one very like it at least) so that now it covers nearly (but not entirely) the whole house.
• Search results on “eldridge cleaver’s lawyer” and “fsm 1960’s”, again from Soul on Ice.  It turns out that in the 60’s, “FSM” stood for “Free Speech Movement“, not “Flying Spaghetti Monster”.
• A search result on “Melismas intro“, because in the cool art store in town, they were playing a track from this, and I liked it, and noticing that the album could be bought for slightly less than I had in my Google Play account (entirely thanks to answering questions about myself in Google Opinion Rewards), I took that as a sign and whimsically bought it.
• Some random uninteresting search results, and yet another instance of GMail (that’s weird), and Netflix (where I have been binge-watching among other things ancient episodes of Columbo from the 70’s which are wonderfully retro).

Whew, and that’s just the beginning.

This is a notably short and fragmented way of writing down things!  Which is perhaps appropriate for the modern age, and for the first thing on the list up there having been the Twitter and all.

One doesn’t have to bother thinking up unifying themes and following them to a logical conclusion or anything!

Books are more unified that way; longer, and in some sense fewer of them.

I’m reading Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, from the used book sale, as I mentioned.  Also reading Jessamyn West’s “The Life I Really Lived”, which came with the house here (and that I’d therefore better finish this week, come to think of it).  I picked it up because I recognized the name of that Jessamyn West from having read this Jessamyn West since the early days of the Web Logs, and her having mentioned her namesake (namesake? something like that) once or thrice.

It’s a good book, although like Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” (or at least the adaptation I recently read) and for that matter quite a few other works, significant parts of the theme can be summarized as “people sure used to be weird about sex”.

Just now I’ve been typing this while sitting around with the family watching the first season of Pokemon on the Netflix, which is great nostalgic fun (James’ voice is so different!).  And there is an odd fog horn or something hooting periodically outside.  And the plashing of the surf.

I think I may go to bed soon, and write more of this tomorrow and/or after.  (Tomorrow we are going to Portland to put the little daughter on a short-range airplane to head home because she is so busy, and to bop around in Portland, but in the evening we will be back here.)  Sleep well and so on!  Not that you’ll be pausing for a night between paragraphs while reading this.  Unless you want to of course!

Dot dot dot.

Now it is Wednesday night, back at the rental house by the foggy bay, after a long day in Portland starting from dropping the little daughter off at the Portland Jetport (whose terminal seems unnecessarily long by a factor of about five), and including buying yet more books at Longfellow Books because of course one didn’t have enough books yet.

The two I bought: “Sherlock Homes: Fact or Fiction?” by T. S. Blakeney, and “The Two of Them” by Joanna Russ.  Both shortish, both used, both somewhat odd, both two dollars.

(Well, for clarity, each two dollars.  It’s funny I had to make that clarification only there.  If I had said they were “both under 200 pages”, would you have thought I might mean their lengths added together totaled less than that?  Probably not.  But the price seems at least ambiguous.  Perhaps because we think of a set of books as having a salient total price, but don’t normally think of a set of books as having a salient total length?  Although we do think the latter in some circumstances, and even there I think the “both” form doesn’t achieve ambiguity for word-length.  Odd.)

My phone is over there well beyond my reach, having its electrons moved further from its positively-charged bits, so I won’t go back to commenting on the still-incredibly-many unclosed tab-like-things quite yet.  I will just write words (2000 of them already so far, says the helpful modern WordPress editor control thing), for the pleasure of writing them and perhaps of reading them later, and perhaps for your pleasure, even you who aren’t me, at some point.  (The little boy mentioned the other day that he’d been reading through my old weblog accounts of previous Maine summers; this was unspeakably gratifying.)

I haven’t read any old ones myself (this time, yet, recently).  Even last years’ seems mysterious to me, in that I don’t remember what I said at all.  Presumably I mentioned having made the Big Change Of Employers, because that was even more recent than it is now.  It still feels quite recent, both because nearly-two years is rather an eyeblink compared to nearly-thirty-four, and because the learning curve at New Employer is, if not dauntingly steep after the first few weeks, always dauntingly high.  Everything is always in motion, always either not-done-yet or old-and-deprecated (or both); the wry internal slogan “some documentation may be out of date” is funny because it is so often (despite a deep and sincere institutional respect for documentation) such an understatement.

I understand from Twitter that the stock market has been bouncing up and down alarmingly (or perhaps uninterestingly), and that people have been killing each other and themselves in awful and distressing ways.  I feel permitted, by being on vacation, to find out less about these things that I might normally.

Dot dot dot.

Now it is Thursday morning!  The little boy and I are considering, in a relaxed sort of way, taking one of the touristy Cruises around the Bay.

Is it bay-side air, or water-side air, or Maine air, or just vacation air, that feels so sweet and soft and beguiling?

I have here a CD called “Swamped” by Johnnie Mac, bought from the artist himself for five dollars (plus a dollar tip dropped into his bag before I noticed that I had a five and he was selling CDs for that), where he was busking on the street in Portland.

So now I have to find something with a CD ripper to make it into usable music with.  :)

Portland elicited a number of dollar bills from the pocket where I keep dollar bills normally for the buskers and the apparently needy and/or homeless of Manhattan.  The street people in Portland are like the ones in Manhattan, but I think markedly whiter; perhaps street people of color, being less likely to have ancestral ties to the area, tend to move the heck out of Maine, to somewhere warmer.  Or other more complex reasons.

Some more Android Rolodex tabs (I may be opening new ones faster than I’m recording and closing them):

• “Settings” and “Phone” and search results for “cruises boothbay harbor” because we looked up some cruises and called one of them about reservations and left a message, so I turned up the ring volume on my phone in case they call back. But probably I will just call them again soon.
• Hangouts, Twitter, Instagram, and GMail again, as usual.  Also YouTube, where I was watching this McWhopper thing.  For some reason.  (Actually lots of interesting analysis to be done on that little brand interaction, if you’re into such things.)
• Search results on “over at the frankenstein place“, because some phrase involving light went by, and the song got stuck in my head, and then I had to play it for everyone.
• Search results on “what is the Methodist method“, because we passed like the East Boothbay Methodist Church and I was curious.  (Turns out it’s a John Wesley thing; “Holy Club”, eh?)
• Search results on “who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop”, because I wanted to see if asking that question by voice of my phone would elicit any snarky Siri-like remarks.  It didn’t.  Hey, come to think of it, let’s try Siri herself on that question!  Well, she sends it to Wolfram Alpha (???) which responds with but a single pointer to the song; a weak pass (my phone did of course a full Google search, and came back with a variety of links to choose from).
• Google Keep, where I had a grocery list (we stopped by Hannaford on the way home from Portland last night and bought everything on it; so I suppose it’s still there, just empty; imagine how many empty grocery lists there are out there!).

Dot dot dot!

The little boy and I went out on a sailing cruise, while M (not a big boat person) enjoyed town.  The cruise was great, the quiet of the sails and the water, just the two of us and a family of three and the Captain and a deckhand.

And the phone is upstairs charging again, and I’ve been lazing about long enough after we got back to the house that it is getting on dinner time.  So nice and lazy.  I think I will read more of West for a bit; she is good.

(Oh, and I guess I haven’t mentioned?  That Mysterious Illness that I had the other week?  The final verdict, not definite but at least plausible, based on the eventual discovery of both Escherichia coli and Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron in my blood, was diverticulitis with septicemia (i.e. there was a little hole in my intestine somewhere, and some gut bacteria leaked over into my bloodstream), which is relatively life-threatening compared to most routine daily events.  So I am even more grateful than usual for M deciding I ought to get to the ER, for antibiotics, and for continued life in general.)

So now it is Thursday evening, after dinner, and we’re sitting around talking about what to do tomorrow (nothing, for instance, or the beach), and listening to a very miscellaneous Bandcamp track found while searching on “little shop of horace”, “little shop of horus”, and so on.  Very idyllic!

And now it is Thursday evening after a walk down to the end of the road (house for sale on 1.5 acres and 600+ feet of shoreline, just under a million and a half US$, which is lots of money, but less than a medium-size condo in Chelsea, which is only a piece of a building, and has no shoreline at all).  I have showered the tar off the soles of my feet (from road repairs that I blithely walked over barefoot), and am about to lose myself in West’s story again.  Lovely evening.

Dot dot dot.

And now Friday morning.  I could have written here, instead of this entire entry, just “the secret of being on a floating dock in a quiet bay with the full moon above”.  But then I wouldn’t have gotten any phone tabs at all closed.

Jessamyn West is still very good.  I may not finish the book while we’re here, because I keep napping, and playing SimCity BuildIt, and occasionally writing in the weblog here.  I hope I remember in that case to leave this instance of the book behind, and to get one of my own.

I see that last year I mostly posted some pictures.  I’ve taken some pictures this year, but for whatever reason I amn’t posting any here.  I might still, you never know.

We are thinking, the little boy and I, about going to the beach today, the last full day of the week.  It’s a bit cold for the beach really, and it’s lovely and relaxing here.  But we still might.  What time is it now? Just gone noon.

Sometime a little after dawn some loud grackling birds woke me up, and I went down the old cement steps (inlaid with decorative stones and shells) down to the sand.  The tide was out, and it was beautiful.  Then I went back to bed for a few hours.

This is being an extremely long entry!  Maybe I should post it as a Part I and a Part II, so y’all could digest it in multiple smaller pieces.  Or I could not do that.  :)

And now (dot dot dot) Friday evening, lovely and cool, almost cold in the wind.  No going to the beach happened, but the little boy and I went swimming (and walking, the tide being out) in the bay off of the dock; very refreshing.

The long drive home tomorrow!

And now (a last set of dots) we are home and the little daughter is with us again, and we are looking at old photographs and generally being happy and domestic.  I will put an appropriate picture at the end here, and post this now (probably without proofreading the last bits, ’cause I am tired).

Happy year!

Medical Science Baffled!

Last week The Employer was very generous, saying “sure, take Thursday and Friday off!”, and also “Visit the Whitney on us!”, both of which we did, and the new Whitney isn’t bad, has some great views, shows off art pretty well (given that “putting lots of art in a building with labels so people can walk through and look at it” isn’t a great way of showing off art, although it’s at least convenient), and is only moderately ugly itself, as a building seen from the outside. The neighborhood right around it is hoppin’, and I am wondering how much of that is due to the museum showing up, and how much was pre-existingly hoppin’.

Then there was resting on Friday, and on Saturday we went out with two other families and sundry relations and hangers-on to a performance of The Arabian Nights by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival at (ummmm) Bromdiggers (no) Boscobel (that’s it), and that was great (if not strictly-speaking Shakespeare). The company is always energetic and celebratory, and the productions well-done, and since it was the Fourth of July and they’re been through this before they took a second intermission when the fireworks started going off across the river, so we all had a nice half-hour or whatever watching at least three different shows (the ones from West Point were closest and therefore biggest), and then the rest of the performance. (People never applaud for long enough at the ends of these! I always want to go backstage and apologize to the cast and crew.)

On Sunday morning I went and got a dozen bagels and some cream cheese at the bagel store, and we took them down to The Lake, and other people brought other things, and we had a good time eating and talking and being nostalgic about how we used to do this all the time back when the kids were small, and being amazed by how large the kids are, and how engaged and/or married some of them are, and how adorable the tiny grandchild is (not mine, but the neighborhood’s first, so sort of community property, and sooo adorable). Then when it was time we drove the little boy to the train station for going back to Boston, and had probably rather too large but very yummy burritos from Moe’s (“Welcome to Moe’s!”), and came home.

And I took a shower and sat down and started shivering uncontrollably and having a 103°F fever, and we spent the rest of the night in the local Emergency Room.

Which is unusual!

I am finally feeling pretty normal today, which is I think Wednesday. I am taking two kinds of antibiotics, one for each gramness of possible bacteria, and finally not having to take anything for fever (because I don’t have any). The ER’s theory is pneumonia, only without any symptoms actually involving lungs. My internist was favoring gall bladder (due to observing Murphy’s Sign, which makes me think of the Yellow Sign, of which the less said the better), but a nice lady took pictures of my insides with sound-waves, and apparently my gall bladder is just fine. Personally I favor food poisoning due to cream cheese left out in the sun too long or something, but presumably the analysis of my blood by Medical Science didn’t suggest that.

So now I am feeling mostly better but still housebound, and not wanting to (say) work seriously on work stuff for fear of overtiring and relapsing, and I was therefore going quietly mad for things to do, and it occurred to me that I could write things down in my weblog!

And here they are! The things, that is. Written down. Should there be a picture? What would it be of, though?

So many all sorts of things!

This is another of those posts that starts out all meta, noting how long it’s been since I posted last (and in fact meta-meta, since I’m talking about being meta (and in fact…)).

So much has been occurring!  I’m sure there was some stuff longer ago that I could mention that I’m forgetting, but we went to foreign countries!  Which is not a thing we do very often.

First M and I went to “England” for a week (“London”, in particular).  Here is a picture of Buckingham Palace:

and if that doesn’t give you the full flavor of the experience :) M has done a great thorough set of writeups on every day of the whole thing (with perhaps more stress on yarn and fabric, and less stress on random blurry things, than a hypothetical similar series here might have offered).

Then after that, M went back home, and I went to “Dublin”, in “Ireland”, on business.  Here is Ireland (it is green):

All I saw was Dublin, mostly the “Silicon Docks” area and the part of downtown in front of Trinity Library, and the 20-minute walk between them.  But it was cool.  I was there entirely by accident on Bloomsday, and saw some people dressed all memorably, although I was not forward enough to take pictures of them.

Another notable fact is that a vast alien mothership has landed in the middle of the city, and apparently there is some mind-control field that prevents anyone but me from seeing it.  Here is a picture (although if the mind-control lasers have gotten to you also, you may just see an ordinary little line of Irish flats):

(Not Photoshopped, promise!)  So that was notable.  Various random things:

• We stayed in a tiny flat off of a garage off a a mews just North of Hyde Park, which was pretty awesome.
• There was a local pub right on the corner, The Mitre, which was very genuine (in the sense that for instance if you just wander in as an American there’s no clue what you’re actually supposed to do in terms of sitting down, obtaining goods and services, and so on), and (once we figured it out) had good Guinness and Fish-and-Chips, and all like that.
• We saw All The Things, Big Ben, the Eye (from below, we didn’t go up in it), Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, the Tower, the East End, big famous stores and shopping streets and things whose names I’ve forgotten (see link to M above who covers these things coherently).
• The Underground is great, if confusing compared to say the NYC Subway.  When you land at Heathrow, they will make it Very Very Easy to buy a ticket into London on the Heathrow Express, which is very convenient and fast, but costs basically infinitely more than the Piccadilly line in the normal underground.
• The Underground is not great in that figuring out how to pay for things is Incredibly Baffling.  Again the NYC Subway is a model of simplicity here: you get a Metrocard of any kind at all, and you pay either nothing (if you have an unlimited card) or $2.75 to get into the subway system.  And that’s it!  In the Underground you can buy either a ticket or an “Oyster” card, and the “Oyster” card can have a TravelCard “on” it in some logical sense, and there is a deposit associated with the card that you can get back only after the card has expired, and you can get it back from a machine if it’s under a certain amount, and otherwise you have to take it to a hidden office in the London Sewers that is open only alternate Wednesdays in February.  Your Oyster card is charged (or not) both when you enter the system and when you leave; if you don’t have enough money on it to leave, you can still leave, but you can’t enter again until you “top up” the extra amount from when you left.  They have people stationed at every set of payment machines, who attempt to explain to tourists and Londoners alike how much it will probably cost them to do various things, but those people seem only slightly less baffled than the people they are advising.
• Although you aren’t supposed to take pictures in Westminster Abbey (for reasons I can’t really understand), my phone seems to have accidentally gone off a few times, and I have some pictures of M’s feet standing on various famous names in Poet’s Corner.
• Lots of other stuff.
• The last day, when I’d dropped M off at Heathrow and had a couple of hours to get to London City Airport (the London Docklands is a really interesting area!), I went and sat in Hyde Park in one of the folding chairs that are all over the place, and as it was raining lightly (we had great luck with the weather, that was the only rainy bit) I put my umbrella up over me, and just sat there watching people go by for awhile.  That was nice.
• After awhile of that, there was this very loud noise out in the street of chanting and marching and things, and eventually this roused me and I went up to the street and there were all of these Hare Krishna folks marching and singing and dancing and conveying a big colorful float, and a smaller float with a loudspeaker, and satellite folks going among the people on the sidewalk giving out literature and taking donations.  They were, it seems, going to Trafalgar Square for an annual vegetarian feast and festival.
• So I ended up with a Hare Krishna book and have read much of it.  It starts out well, with good basic spiritual insights about the world and stuff, but then goes off the rails (as so many do) about how true knowledge can be obtained by chanting certain words, and we should believe specific things because the Vedic Literature says it, and anyone who believes otherwise are Lower Than The Beasts and blah blah blah.  Which was sort of sad.
• And many many other things.

Outside of us travelling about wildly, other things have happened that you may have heard of from other sources:

• omg #LoveWins.  What a world!
• And Tony Scalia has completely jumped the shark; I really ought to write a weblog entry about that.  Ages ago I used to grudgingly admire him for at least being consistent and mostly rational, if from odious underlying assumptions and principles.  Awhile after that I wrote about how I’d become disenchanted, noting that his not even acknowledging the possibility of (rather obvious) alternate views was either oblivious or hypocritical of him.  And now he seems like just a frothing loony.  (And given the “applesauce” and “jiggery-pokery” in his latest, one has to wonder who in the world he hangs out with.)
• Also ObamaCare is still legal and all, which seems good (I am such a Progressive these days!).
• The Republicans continue to be the Party of Crazy.  I still think we will probably get a Clinton vs. Bush in 2016, with a close Electoral College and a Democratic popular vote.  But Jeb has been pandering to the loonies more than I would have expected, and I’m not sure what that means.  (Trump!  Christie!  hahaha!)

Other things I would like to write about someday:

• All of these tabs that I have open on my phone and in Chrome (both to talk about them, and to write them down for myself so I can close some of them!),
• The Monty Hall Paradox thing, for which I have what I think is a very insightful observation that doesn’t seem to have been made much, that explains why it generates so much strong feeling and all.

But not tonight!  :)  In fact I think I will post this without even a thorough proofread; enjoy the typos!

Liebe ist ein welthaftes Wirken

Kaufmann translates this, from Buber’s “I and Thou”, as “love is a cosmic force”, but gives us the original in a footnote to see for ourselves.

One thing I like about German and how synthetic it is (in the technical sense that I just learned; I was going to say “agglutinative“, but that turns out to be wrong) is that you can look at the parts of many words, and see how the meaning compares to the sum of those parts.

The most simple-minded translation of that phrase might be “Love is a worldly work”, which has the same nice consonance of double-ues, but a very different sense, since the English “worldly” has strong connotations that are almost the opposite of Kaufmann’s “cosmic”.

It’s interesting that the translator chose “force” here, rather than the obvious “work” (which would have read a bit awkwardly), or perhaps “act”. Because Buber is talking about love in the context of “those who stand in it and behold in it”, “force” probably makes more sense than “act”, since you can stand in a force (a force field!), but not so much in an act.

But then I wonder why Buber wrote Wirken rather than say Kraft. And then I am at, or perhaps well beyond, the very end of my competence as a translator. :)

The other day the little daughter, watching me staring into my phone and clicking and swiping without end, commented more or less “you’re taking in so much content; I don’t know if that’s healthy”.

I found myself very much in agreement with that thought, and put the phone away (temporarily) and looked at various stacks of books sitting unread here and there, and picked up “I and Thou”, read the Acknowledgements and Translator’s Key, skipped Kaufmann’s very long Prologue (these things should generally be at the end of a book, in my ever so humble opinion, so that one can encounter the work itself with more or less fresh eyes, and then read the prologue-writer’s thoughts about it afterward, when one has already one’s own ideas to compare them to), and started very slowly into the work (Werk, Wirken, Kunstwerk?) itself.

It’s a very dense book, or feels like it deserves to be treated as such, which means that I have to be careful not to spend so much time on each sentence that I eventually drift off and do other things before I get past the first chapter.

As I tweeted not long after starting (and yeah, I know; somehow Twitter and the Face Book and now even plague have all taken up residence in my ways of relating to the world):

Reading #Buber's I and Thou; it's all too easy to read it as a rephrasing of basic #Buddhist #ontology and #epistemology. Empty the cup! :)

— Dale Innis (@DaleInnis) December 29, 2014

I can’t of course actually empty the cup, and I admit I’m not really trying all that hard to.

Currently, a few more pages in, I’m wondering if Buber will go from talking about the ineffable relating that is I-You (and that he identifies with, or as, love in some sense), to a realization that the duality present even in I-You (because after all there is still I, and You) is at some level an illusion. Because that would be so Buddhist.

There are no sentient beings,
And I vow to save them.

It will be interesting either way; if he does get to some kind of non-duality, I’m sure it will have a flavor all its own. If he doesn’t, it will be interesting to see if he simply stops short of it, actively considers and denies it, or goes off in some other direction entirely.

I’ve been meaning to read this book since college sometime :) and it’s nice to finally get to it.

❄

Solstice was nice, thank you for asking, if a little atypical. All four of us were here together, but instead of the usual Christmas Dinner with ham an’ all, we went out to the local diner.

The story: M smelled gas in the basement, so on I forget maybe the 22nd we had the gas man come and test things, and he found there was a leak somewhere in the kitchen range, and while we were moving the range out from the wall it got caught on something and when we pushed on it a little to get it past the something, the entire glass front of the oven door very enthusiastically shattered into a zillion pieces and fell onto the floor.

That was exciting!

We called the appliance place who sent out a person who determined that the range was old enough to vote, and that no one makes parts for it anymore (either for replacing the door glass or fixing any possible leak).

A new range arrived yesterday and I have baked my first loaves of bread in it, but between the breaking of the old and the installing of the new we could cook only in the microwave and crockpot, and although we considered trying to design a satisfying Solstice dinner around those, in the end we decided the local Diner would be more fun.

And it was very nice.

How do Diners do it, by the way; anyone know? How can you have that enormous a menu of available things, and be able to produce absolutely any of them in a reasonably short span of time? Are they all designed to be producible from some smallish set of ingredients, and you keep those around and ready at all times? Do all of the chefs know how to make all of the things? Are there big recipe books? Or do they look at the menu when the order comes in, figure out what you are probably expecting, and wing it?

Fifteen years!

Wow, you’d think something would have changed after a week away; flying cars, or aliens walking around Manhattan, or at least a new subway line or something, but NO, everything is pretty much just the same!

Weird.

Extremely attentive and/or precognitive readers will suspect rightly that we were away for a week because we were in Maine; the first time that happened was in 1999, and this is 2014, so it’s been fifteen years!

And since that first Maine trip was when I started writing a weblog, and this is in some sense the same weblog as that, this is the fifteenth anniversary of the weblog!

Woot!

Here is a picture of Maine:

Isn’t that gorgeous? Along with M’s sister’s family, and their father and stepmother, we rented a house on top of Dodge Mountain, overlooking Rockland and the bay and points East, with a lovely deck, and chairs to sit in, and tables to put your book and your wineglass on, and beds to sleep in, and all.

It was great.

I did a lot of reading, as usual. That book there is “Karma and Rebirth” by Christmas (sic) Humphries. I wrote it up for GoodReads (hope that link works for not-me people).

(I will resist the obvious temptation to produce lots of weblog content by pasting in all various book reviews I have written instead of just linking to them!)

I read that because I happened across it in some used book store (perhaps Hello Hello Books?), shortly after watching Hemant Mehta’s rather offputting “Can Atheists be Buddhists“, and it seemed like a nice synchronicity.

The Mehta piece is offputting for a few reasons:

• His conclusion is basically “no”, and I’m sort of both of those things, so yeah.
• The reason his conclusion is basically “no” is that, he says, although Buddhists don’t believe in a deity, they do believe some stuff (specifically Karma and Rebirth) that Isn’t Scientific, and therefore atheists won’t believe it.
• This implies that for Mehta “atheist” doesn’t just mean “doesn’t believe in God” for some value of “God”, it means “only believes stuff that is Scientific”, and that seems like just sloppy thinking or sloppy word-usage or something,
• His conclusion that Karma and Rebirth are Not Scientific seems very offhand and not particularly well thought out; as for that matter is his assumption that all Buddhists believe in either or both of them in any form.

Some day I will have to write a post on Buddhism and Scientificness and Karma and Rebirth and all, and why atheists can in fact be Buddhists, and vice-versa, at least when they are me. Not today, though. :)

Another book, that I’m sure I bought in Hello Hello Books (which is a great bookstore, by the way), and then I read and enjoyed very much, is Doris Grumbach’s “The Pleasure of Their Company”, which I also wrote up for GoodReads. It was good.

I do love lying about in Maine, feeling the wind and reading books and thinking about things.

Also I went out on a boat! And held a lobster!

Here is a picture from on the boat, with the notable deck hand Dana holding the lobster in question:

and here is the lobster, with parts of my hand holding it:

and a little girl looking dubious in the background.

We did many other things in Maine! I took three of the four kids to the beach one day, but the sun was behind clouds and the sand was too wet and rocky and the waves too small and they got cold, so we didn’t stay very long.

Here are some rocks!

They do look coldish.

We went into Rockland a couple of times (although sadly we were not in town for this

which I bet would have been noteworthy), and into Camden a couple of times (here is a classy black-and-white shot of some water in Camden:

just because we are posting lots of pictures; more and/or different ones can as usual be found on the Insta-Gram).

Reading back through some of the various Maine and post-Maine postings in the weblog over the years, I see lots of variety in terms of thoughtfulness, randomness, introspection, and so on. I did feel introspective, in a good way, and renewed, in a good way, by it all this year, but in writing about it I’m mostly just writing random things, I think. :)

Maybe largely because I didn’t feel like writing about it at all while I was there (too busy doing it?), and now am writing about it retrospectively, having been home for a couple of days and back to work one day, so somewhat back in the quotidian mindset. Or something?

Here is another picture :) this one of ol’ Red’s Eats (where we didn’t eat this year) as randomly enhanced in its usual drive-by way by Google Plus:

Kinda neat, I thought.

What else? I read some other books, acquired some other books, sat zazen a bit, had some thoughts, drank some wine, ate some lobster and some blueberry pie, enjoyed some sun and wind.

And I’m not unhappy to be home. :)

About all one could ask for, really!

I need you more than whoa

So Lady Gaga really needs to enunciate more clearly. Listening to Artpop playing loudish on the car radio, with the occasional interruption from the maps app telling me how to get home from wherever, I really couldn’t tell what it was.

More than gold? More than goal? (World Cup reference!) More than dope? More than Dole? (mmm tasty canned pineapple rings!) More than whoa? More than low?

Apparently it is “More than dope“.

Anyway! Great fun yesterday, which was M’s b’day. We decided, daringly, to go into The Big City rather than just to some Mall or other familiar space. Brunch on the Upper West Side, at a sidewalk café even!

Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your taxi.
(photo: Little Daughter)

And little stores, some yarn-related and some not, and the wilds of Central Park, and the Guggenheim Museum.

(The Italian Futurists seem to have been mostly sort of wannabe-Fascist assholes; who knew? The work itself was probably daring and transgressive at the time; today it would be sort of meh.)

And we rested (and recharged my phone; the one thing I don’t like about the Nexus 5 is how battery-poor it is) at work, and then went and met the little daughter (yay!) at this amazing little tea-and-pastries-and-macarons (which I now know have basically nothing whatsoever to do with macaroons) place in Soho, and walked through a buzzing-with-energy Soho evening to the subway and came home.

Whew!

Oh, and there is the interesting Case of The Two Very Similar CDs, but that will have to wait for another time and/or possible world…