Well, I'm home

Jul. 22nd, 2025 08:36 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
We got home last night, very late in terms of the time zone we woke up in yesterday morning, then spent some time petting and playing with the cats, eating chocolate and ice cream, and unpacking a few things that I needed or wanted right away (slippers, toothbrush, and prescription drugs). I washed a few dishes, because I walked into the kitchen for chocolate and saw that we were almost out of clean mugs in the size we'd want for tea and coffee in the morning.

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

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

We plan to do very little today: order groceries, unpack, and I might inject the about-monthly dose of my current MS medication, which I take every 4-6 weeks, and would have taken Saturday if we'd been home). Some balance PT would also be a good idea.
jadelennox: a sign which reads "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS GORGEOUS LIBRARIANS"  (liberrian: girls girls girls)
[personal profile] jadelennox

I have started rereading the Amelia Peabody mysteries. It makes me sad that they've definitely had at least a light visit from the suck fairy [note], because I've never realised before how much Amelia is in love with Evelyn in The Crocodile On The Sandbank.

She's obviously got it bad for Emerson as well, but my goodness her jealous desire to spend her life with her beautiful Evelyn is overwhelming.


Note: Amelia was never supposed to be a reliable narrator, and her Victorian Orientalism was always to be read as historical. It's just that in modern conventions we -- correctly -- no longer feel it's okay to portray the likable heroines of (wholly unrealistic) historical romances with historically accurate racism. [back]

i drive a volvo. a beige one.

Jul. 21st, 2025 11:54 pm
tsuki_no_bara: (Default)
[personal profile] tsuki_no_bara
(the rock is on. the second you don't respect this, it kills you. i love this movie.)

happy day after moon landing day! part of me still thinks it should be an actual us holiday. i mean, we put humans on the moon! it was eight years from the first person in space to the first person to stand on another rock besides earth. that's pretty cool. i celebrated by stuffing my face with fried clams with [livejournal.com profile] tamalinn, friend a, and friend a's hubs, then walking around gloucester (cute seaside town and the home of gorton's seafood - trust the gorton's fisherman :D ) and buying chocolate turtles because who doesn't love a good turtle? right? i did not unpack any more but i thought about it. i also did not find a moon pie but to be fair i didn't look that hard.

and saturday i got a pedicure and went outlet shopping with my sister as is tradition before we go on a big trip. i now own slightly more clothes. but one of my toes is already chipped which, seriously? afterwards we went back to her house and watched mission: impossible iii which i liked better than m:i2. possibly i just liked philip seymour hoffman as a villain better than dougray scott. and we meet benji.

and today i did sweet fuck-all at work (ok, i did something altho now i don't remember what) (oh, right, i collected and set up a lunch for admin d who hurt her wrist and was out) and tonight i unpacked one - count it - box because it's the one with the scarves and winter hats and i've been told i might need to bring a hat to iceland.

and i did sweet fuck-all because i spent so. much. time. last week on the summit. like, tuesday i went home at 11:15. oy. wednesday we lost a bunch of name badges which made us look disorganized (program manager m thinks someone took them to make her look bad) and we offered campus tours for small groups of fifteen and that was a mistake because we actually were disorganized - like, one of the tours left without a couple people and the other two tours somehow swapped tour guides - but! we learned from our mistakes (and also begged around and got more tour guides) and thursday everything went much more smoothly. well, except we still didn't have a bunch of name badges. thursday night was a reception which was delicious and i even got to take home some leftover shrimp bao. i do love a good shrimp. overall i think it was a positive experience for the attendees - we had a contingent of teachers and high schoolers from puerto rico and when i met one of the teachers on friday i swear she was so excited she wanted to hug me - but we're not doing it again next year and i am not sorry about that. i made some good overtime tho.

i assume by now everyone has heard about the ceo who was caught on the kiss cam at a coldplay concert snuggling with the woman he's having an affair with. what a fucking idiot. (altho i don't give her credit for brains either.) it's impressive and scary how fast the video went viral and how fast people figured out who the couple was but come on, if you're going to fuck around on your wife and bang one of your coworkers maybe don't go to such a public event together and don't act all coupley where the kiss cam can find you. he resigned - or possibly was asked to resign? - which is the least he can do.

on this date in 1933 the good voters of oregon voted to repeal a tax on... margarine.
lb_lee: a penguin saying "Just because you decide to sell out doesn't mean anyone's going to buy!" ($ellingout)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Rogan/Mori: So, way back in the tumblr days, I would see this multi urban legend that you could only become multi if you'd been traumatized before the age of... well, the exact age would change depending on legend iteration, apparently nine was the magic number I saw in 2011, but I feel like seven was another. I could not for the life of me figure out where this stupid idea CAME from, and it drove me crazy!

Well, surprise, but while digging around doing etymological research (i.e., digging in Ralph Allison's published papers), I might've found a source of the urban legend: Allison's "Critical Issues: MPD & DID Should Be Used For Two Separate Groups of Dissociators" CANDID (California News of Dissociation and Identity Disorder), 3(3):4, 1995. (And apparently I even knew about this back in 2011 when I first blogged about this stupid urban legend, but I didn't dig deeper or put two and two together.) This paper is worth discussing, just because... well, it's crackpot as hell, and a nice example of why you shouldn't believe everything a therapist tells you, no matter how famous or (once) well-respected they are (or were).

This started as us reading a stupid paper about this guy's cracked ideas, only for us to get sucked into pointing at it as a stellar example of why therapists should not be treated like gods. )
sovay: (Jeff Hartnett)
[personal profile] sovay
Major props to the Somerville Theatre for accommodating the accessibility needs of my still-healing mother so that she could get out of the house tonight for the first time in a month and a half and watch the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957), which she first showed me in high school on rental VHS. It was my introduction to Glenn Ford and my second experience of Van Heflin and remains on the long list of movies I love and have never written about, but I had never seen it on a big screen, either, and its silver drought winter-for-summer looks like nothing else in the Western catalogue. It's full of tensions and strange tenderness, high-angle shots like the sky soaring back, sweat beading like the rain that doesn't fall. It's a film about failures and fisher kings: how could I not love it? My mother had a wonderful time. I am so glad she had a wonderful time. It was her first movie in theaters in five years.
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
[personal profile] sabotabby did me as a mermaid!

sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
Before the thunderstorm broke in such steel-drum sheets of solid rain that we realized only after the fact that we had accidentally driven through a washed-out bridge on Route 127, I lay with my face against half a billion years of granite cooled in the volcanoes of Avalonia and weathered across aeons of which the ice ages were only the finishing touch to a boulder as rough as rust-cracked barnacles: it pushed into my palms like the denticles of sharkskin, my hair clung to it in the wind that smelled of high tide and the slap-glass of waves coiling around the sunken cobbles and combers of weed. The stone itself smelled of salt. I found a fragment of gull's feather tangled afterward in my hair. [personal profile] spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.

psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
[personal profile] psocoptera
I did not do a great job reading this year, and as a result there are authors whose works might be perfectly good or even great who are getting shortchanged in my votes, and that's what's happening. At this point all I can really do is try to do better next year.

Read more... )

National Gallery

Jul. 20th, 2025 09:14 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
We went into central London this afternoon, intending to visit the British Museum, but we made a very late start, and after our late lunch discovered they were sold out of (free) tickets for today.

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

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

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

We're flying home tomorrow. I booked a cab, which will pick us up at 2:15, and logged onto the British Airways website and changed the (acceptable) seats it had assigned us to ones we like better (I got us all aisle seats, instead of all next to each other so one person was in a middle seat).
jadelennox: Girlyman: Does Nate ever think of anything he doesn't say? (girlyman: nate doesn't think)
[personal profile] jadelennox

if I were a fae of some sort in a punk band I would simply call my first album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pixies.

I will not be taking questions at this time.

Watching the Rabbits and Bees

Jul. 19th, 2025 07:35 pm
l33tminion: (Default)
[personal profile] l33tminion
I finished reading Watership Down to Erica, reading to her over video call in the evenings while she was on her trip. Great book, I'm very glad that I got around to reading it. It is simultaneously:
  • A fantasy story where the main fantastical conceit is "what if rabbits had mythology?"
  • A war story centering around the Battle of Arnhem with the twist that the protagonists are rabbits.
  • A Tolkein-esque story told in the style of something translated from another language, pieced together and recorded from an oral tradition. (And that in large part as an extremely elaborate setup for a climactic bit where one of the protagonists gets the last-minute "you could give up and join me" speech from the big bad and rejects the offer in a way that otherwise would not be getting past the censors in a book intended for children.)
  • A book where prose description of flowers is a surprisingly high percentage by volume.
Definitely understand why it's a classic.

On a possibly-related (but definitely a pretty big jump of a tangent) note, one of the thing that's been bouncing around in my head is some of the discourse around wild-animal welfare, centering around this recent post arguing against beekeeping and responses like this. It's interesting, but personally I think that post has intuitions that are wildly off from mine. Bees' lives seem like they'd be full of stimuli that would be particularly pleasant and non-aversive for bees. They routinely store surpluses, which gives them flexibility about when they gather food. Kept bees lose some of that surplus, but seem to gain quite a lot in exchange for that, and compared to most domesticated animals they're uniquely able to just leave if conditions are bad. There was also some discussion arguing the post was emblematic of the pitfalls of negative utilitarianism. Seems like there are a lot of contexts where it's easy to add (or multiply) up pains and sorrows and decide it would be preferable to succumb to the call of the void. I was also reminded of this good but really odd sci-fi short story, which took me a while to re-find based on my vague recollection and I link to without further context.

Also, it is really pleasant to stop and watch bees harvest. I've definitely spent a lot of time doing that this year.

Mission accomplished

Jul. 19th, 2025 10:36 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird

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

Leaving for Boston Monday afternoon.

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

not quite done

Jul. 19th, 2025 10:43 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
We expected to finish going through Mom's papers, photos, etc. yesterday, but despite me and \mark both pushing hard, we realized in the late afternoon that we were both badly worn out, so we stopped. He left, and I got Adrian and Cattitude to tale care of me. I was worn out both mentally and physically; Adrian pointed out that \I hade worked steadily for longer that the previous couple of days. Mark will coming back to the flat a bit, but we did not set an alarm, because I needed the rest.

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

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

I am very glad we saw [personal profile] liv on Tuesday, when we were still feeling energetic.
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Obviously I am not at Readercon, but on the other hand I may have fixed our central air: it required a new filter, a section of insulation, and a quantity of aluminum tape, but the temperature in the apartment has in fact followed the thermostat down for the first time all week. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Although its state-of-the-art submarine is nuclear-powered and engaged in the humanitarian mission of planting a chain of seismometers around the sunken hotspots of the globe, Around the World Under the Sea (1966) plays so much like a modernized Verne mash-up right down to its trick-photographed battle with a giant moray eel and its climactic ascent amid the eruption of a newly discovered volcano that it should not be faulted for generally shorting its characters in favor of all the techno-oceanography, but Keenan Wynn grouches delightfully as the specialist in deep-sea survival who prefers to spend his time playing shortwave chess in a diving bell at the bottom of the Caribbean and the script actually remembers it isn't Shirley Eaton's fault if the average heterosexual male IQ plummets past the Marianas just because she's inhaled in its vicinity, but the MVP of the cast is David McCallum whose tinted monobrowline glasses and irritable social gracelessness would code him nerd in any era, but he's the grit in the philanthropy with his stake in a sunken treasure of transistor crystals and his surprise to be accused of cheating at chess when he designed and programmed the computer that's been making his moves for him. If the film of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) had not made its inspired change in the nationality of its aeronautical engineer, McCallum could have knocked the part out of the park. "No, you don't get one," he almost gets the last word, distributing his sole precious handful of salvage among his fellow crew with the pointed exception of the captain played inevitably by Lloyd Bridges: "You blew the bloody submarine in half."

[personal profile] spatch and I have seen four films now by the husband-and-wife, director-and-editor team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone and on the strength of Ring of Fire (1961), The Steel Trap (1952), The Decks Ran Red (1958), and just lately The Last Voyage (1960), the unifying theme of their pictures looks like pulp logistics. So far the standout has been the nail-biter noir of The Steel Trap, whose sprung ironies depend on an accumulation of individually trivial hitches in getting from L.A. to Rio that under less criminal circumstances would mount to planes-trains-and-automobiles farce, but Ring of Fire incorporates at least two real forest fires into its evacuation of a Cascadian small town, The Decks Ran Red transplants its historical mutiny to the modern engine room of a former Liberty ship, and The Last Voyage went the full Fitzcarraldo by sinking the scrap-bound SS Île de France after first blowing its boiler through its salon and smashing its funnel into its deckhouse without benefit of model work. The prevailing style is pedal-to-the-metal documentary with just enough infill of character to keep the proceedings from turning to clockwork and a deep anoraky delight in timetables and mechanical variables. Eventually I will hit one of their more conventional-sounding crime films, but until then I am really enjoying their clinker-built approach to human interest. Edmond O'Brien as the second engineer of the doomed SS Claridon lost his father on the Titanic, a second-generation trauma another film could have built an entire arc out of, and the Stones care mostly whether he's as handy with an acetylene torch as all that.

We were forty-four minutes into Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) before anything remotely strange occurred beyond an impressive protraction of soap and with sincere regrets to Lew Ayres, I tapped out.

Cripping Interior Design

Jul. 18th, 2025 08:03 pm
lb_lee: Biff kissing M.D. on the cheek. (mori&dudema)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Mori: you know how some people got really into sourdough or birding because of COVID? Well, Biff got really into interior design.

Read more... )

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