flarenut

Not just because it recalled what was in many ways a better time for our country, and brought back the tragically unnecessary death of Jim Henson (and the subsequent corruption of the enterprise he built). Because it felt like a huge corporate slap in the face, all beautifully packaged in a well-written savvy feel-good movie.

The kicker that the writer and performers are playing with is that the plot of the movie is the plot of the making of the movie, but not in a good way. Old, respected but now obscure hangovers from a less nasty-and-cynical age: check. Owned by a ruthless conglomerate run by power-mad jerkwad(s): check. Power-made jerkwads leveraging wealth and monopoly in other areas into control of a formerly independent enterprise, check. Heroes lose, have to go on anyway because it's the thing they love and the only thing they know how to do well, check. Writers pretending it's really OK because the power-mad jerkwad(s) had a change of heart: check.

I was sad at the endless shoehorning in (often lampshaded) of every other possibly-bankable disney property that could be made to fit.

I was sad at the neutering of Animal, who got one barely-loud drum riff. It's like the new Cookie Monster on Sesame Street, who doesn't even eat the cookies any more.

One of the things I particularly missed -- in retrospect, while I was trying to figure out why the movie made me so sad -- was the kindness. Sure, it was funny to have violent comeuppances and a hot who was tied to his chair, desperately trying to escape, but one of the things that really marked the old muppet show was the rapport between the muppets and their human guests, and the empathy so many of the human stars showed for the muppets around them. This was just mean in a lot of places.

The 7-year-old and the 3-year-old liked it, though.

Current Mood: melancholy
Crossposts: http://flarenut.livejournal.com/48780.html

via firecat. npr's sf list, my version

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
As with firecat, read the first two, the first in magazine. Never read anything else, don't care to.
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
Read the first one, then I the second later, then damned if I can remember. Oh, and the concluding line of the first one must rank today, out of its time, as one of the stupidest sentences in all of sf.

5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman -- thank you, spider robinson.
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson -- but it reminded me way too much of EE Smith. They're all fundamentally preppies.
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore. My parents wouldn't let me read comic books because they were subversive, and it stuck.

16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
22. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
25. The Stand, by Stephen King
26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson -- read the diamond age, seemed like close enough.
27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
28. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut -- as with the orwell, it was assigned reading in high school...
29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess -- I might have finished it, don't remember. The language bored me.
31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey and the whole damn rest of the first generation of pern.
34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny -- damn, he could write.
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley -- probably the only MZB I didn't read...
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White -- most of it, I think. When I was a kid.
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons -- the first couple, then I got tired, kinda like with Gene Wolfe.
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson -- maybe someday, maybe not.
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle--not his best work, I think.
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. One bleeping episode at a time.
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson-- there's a book's worth of time I'll never get back.
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote In God's Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke -- started it, intend to finish it, no real hurry.
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard -- I kinda like the musical version better.
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger--J read it, I didn't much.
71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man's War, by John Scalzi--started it, might finish when the kids are older.
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel's Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe--started, then stopped
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan--J has read it, I've read a little
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson--a few pages
96. Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle-- I think I found a copy in a bus station. It was a mistake.
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis-- Well, yeah, but I liked ... Dog so much better.
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville-- Imagine reading this, to the accompaniment of offkey mozart, while sitting in a room with a napping baby you're still not entirely sure will survive. Someday I'll read more of his stuff, or maybe not.
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony it is my secret shame. Oh, wait.
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis -- except for the last half of the last book, which I could not comprehend.

Anyone who has gotten this far will see a pattern: stuff that came out before I hit mid-career, stuff that came out before the kids were born. Many of the ones I haven't read, I either never heard of or don't think of as sf&f -- go figure. Oh, and most of the books I've read in the past 5-10 years are nowhere near that list...

The folks in the next booth at lunch today were a quartet of Harley riders from somewhere in the south. Perfectly nice people; they'd gotten off the interstate to find that the BBQ place a few block down had closed last winter (no loss, but they didn't know that). All I could see was the back of one of the men's ball caps, from a dealership in Texas, and they were looking for the local dealership a few miles south of town. J commented that it was really de rigeur to wear all the logo gear when you went out riding, and we talked about how much the idea of motorcycling had changed since young toughs ran cheap bikes in rings around one another. And J noted how the motorcycle guy who moved in a few streets down (you can tell by the bikes in the driveway and the tools perfectly lined up in the garage) had a perfect lawn.

"But they still think of themselves as rebels," I said.

And I think that may have been an important insight. Because if you mix slavish loyalty to your favorite corporation with the unshakable certainty that you're an individualist in a community of like-minded individualists, you've got the Tea Party and their ilk. Perfectly nice people (mostly) who manage to hold and act on terrible beliefs, secure in the knowledge that they have come to those beliefs through careful consideration, whether rational or intuitive.

And yes, in the last special election, the motorcycle people had a yard sign out against the district-heating plant, which is expected to trim $50-100K off the city's annual fuel bills. The slogan "No on Heat! Fix our Streets!". The idea that this investment (which is 90% funded by federal and state money) would result in more money available to fix the streets in question didn't seem part of the discussion at all.

Crossposts: http://flarenut.livejournal.com/47421.html

(that's what my freshman-year roommate who became an anesthesiologist said surgeons were taught to say in the OR instead of "oops", as in "There. I have just opened the femoral artery. This appendectomy will take a little longer than usual.")

Just finished Man In the Iron Mask, the last of the musketeers books I downloaded to my gizmo sometime last year. Damn those things are long. You can see why people just watch the movies instead of reading them. I don't know how people reacted to them at the time, but as a sometime consumer of modern potboilers I was a little disappointed that not much has changed in a couple hundred years. Mostly I was sad because good fails, evil (by our modern standards) is rewarded, and ultimately nothing happens.

No, really, nothing. All the main characters die without issue (so that their estates escheat to the crown) leaving not a trace of themselves in any record that might have survived to the writer's day. When I realized this, it made me think immediately of the time loop in The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (ok, I had to look up the title), which even has a bunch of old french settings. So I slogged through 1400 pages of cynicism drenched with purple bombast, only to hear "And then they all got hit by a bus."

Yeah, some of it I liked. But I'm not even sure I'm glad it's over. On the one hand it's over, but as long as it wasn't, at least I could hold out some hope. I wonder what I shall read next.

Thanks, firecat. (I wanted to write something about the $#%@%@% jeep and the snow day and driving to boston and back to get the cat out of hock, but I'm too damn tired to say anything coherent.) So:

March 1961: we were either still in Chevy Chase (don't know the address) or already back in New Haven. I remember being told I shook hands (at all of 2 and a month) with JFK when he came through during the transition, but don't remember or necessarily believe it. (My mother also told me once that, because of a snafu in the timing of resignations and reappointments, a family friend had been secretary of the treasury for several hours.)

March 1971: In the house in New Haven, across from East Rock Park. Front bedroom. I would have been enjoying the heck out of 7th grade, knowing that I was going to skip directly to high school the next year and never see most of the kids in my class again.

March 1981: In an apartment on Edwards St, also in New Haven. I had finished all my coursework (sort of, barely), but I had to write the non-credit senior thesis for a BA in physics, and that could only be done in the spring. I was also continuing (though I never quite finished) a research project about why the beryllium-on-carbon films they used in a sophomore lab course didn't behave the way they were supposed to. I now think I was completely wrong about my hypothesis. Hung out with my friends who were graduating normally, lived with a guy named steve who was in town to have space to write his senior thesis (on synagogue architecture) from CMU and a crazy classics grad student who had a poster of a french nuclear test on her bedroom door. Later shared an apartment with steve in new york.

March 1991: a nice little one-bedroom on the upper east side. But I was already getting ready to move down to Chambers St -- I'd realized a while before that that if I was getting on the First Avenue Bus every other night at 3 in the morning I should probably live somewhere else. I don't think I was seeing anyone at the time, having made a serious hash of my love life in the previous few years. But I did have a hopeless crush on a co-worker. Or maybe two. That was also the winter/spring that I ripped out all the ligaments in my left ankle (12 weeks unable to accomodate even tiny changes in slope) which gave me an appreciation for the phrase "temporarily abled" that I hope I retain even now.

March 2001: here in vermont, contemplating the first of endless renovations to this house. Kitchen was first, as I recall. Working for various folks in New York remotely, firmly enspoused with J (if you can pack and unpack a house together...)

March 2011: still in vermont. House mostly finished, except the parts that aren't. Officially married for some time. Two charming-from-a-distance offspring, sometimes also charming close up. Hoping this summer I can clear the backlog in the shop (dining room table extension, toddler bed, trim for my office, blah blah blah.)

If C could just lie quietly in his bed until he falls asleep, that would be fine. But he wants to read, he wants to sing and dance, he wants to find out what we're doing, and if a kid is up till 930 or 10 that doesn't bode well for getting up at 645 to catch the bus. (And it doesn't bode well for his parents having any downtime at all unless we want to sleep all day.) When he was little, he used to listen to lullabies, and then later to TMBG's lids' albums, but he's outgrown that, and the stuff he listens to now is more of the rile-you-up kind than the relaxing kind.

So any suggestions for music of previous centuries that might be good for relaxing to? I like my Bach, but I think that's too scratchy and plinky for him. I don't know if Tallis or something like that would go over, over maybe something completely different in a category I'm not thinking of. Any ideas gratefully accepted.

Current Mood: tired

I love my new boots. I can walk in them comfortably, and my toes don't freeze in 11-degree slush. This could make a real difference to my daily out-and-about habits.

I like meat. A lot. (If you don't, you'll probably want to stop reading now) But in the US, if you cook with meat -- unless you're obsessive about parting things out or have a butcher who's willing to sell you a quarter pound of protein at a time, you're going to have leftovers. And leftovers just seem to expand exponentially. For instance, last night J cooked a stock with a bunch of turkey drumsticks to get read for thanksgiving. Still plenty of flavor in the drumsticks after 7 hours of simmering (and a lot less tendon) so I had one for a midnight snack and stripped the rest to use as generic meat.

For lunch I chopped some up and mixed it with pesto for a couple of turkey salad sandwiches. For supper, I chopped up most of the rest and put it in marinara sauce (usually we put in a block of ground turkey).

So now in the fridge there is: a half-full pint container of leftover turkey-pesto salad for sandwiches. A full quart container of leftover pasta sauce. Another half-full pint container of turkey embedded in gelled juices. Oh, and a full quart container of pasta, but duh.

That's probably four more meals. But if I cook too much rice with the tail end of the pint container (and don't forget the veg) that will probably be another meal or two. At which point the meat will be getting a little thin on the ground in the leftover starch-plus-meat-plus-veg, so I'll have to cook another piece of meat to throw in with it. Which will be from a biggish chunk that leaves more leftovers...

Admittedly this would be easier if we didn't have picky kids and could just focus on wearing the leftovers down in whatever form they appeared. But it's still a little freaky to think that I've committed to half a week of meals from something that by rights could have gone right into a compost heap.

I just got email from the spouse of a college friend with whom I'd lost touch (he moved Hoboken and that was just Too Far) saying that he had died this past spring. Part of me wants to respond "So that's why I couldn't find him on facebook!" I feel really bad about not having kept in touch, sad not to have known before now, surprised that my email address was still somewhere in either of their stuff. I think he would have laughed.

Current Mood: sad

I got the main structure of the cabinets in my office up the autumn before C was born; since then it's been a long slog. Last winter our carpenter-of-all-work assembled the drawers I'd cut out the year before, and a few weeks ago I lacquered the last of them preparatory to installing. (I am proud, yes I am, of the 150# drawer slides.)

But as it turned out, he assembled one of the box joints on the last drawer about 1/16" out of true, so that the drawer didn't fit. If it had been too small, that would have been easy. Today, while C and B were both out of the house (calloo! callay!) I nipped into the shop and clamped a good flat board to the side of the erring drawer, with one end shimmed up about 1/16". Clamped the drawer to my assembly table, got up on a stepladder to reach the top, and routed out a flat patch just the right depth at the back, tapering to nothing at the front. It's as if I still knew how to work with wood a little.

Next big deal will be tuning up the bandsaw and slicing those planks of birdseye I bought for facings way back when....

Current Mood: cheerful

So last night I took out a quart container of lentils that had been in the freezer since 2008 or so. There was a little ham in them when I cooked them the first time, but I wanted to throw in some more to increase the flavor (I really wanted sausage, but couldn't find it), so I found some of that in the freezer too. Then I added water so the whole thing would cook properly, then some broc on top to steam as a vegetable.

Ate my fill, and what did I put in the fridge? A brimming quart container of lentils.

Tonight, I'm attacking it again, and I threw in some carrots and a little couscous to thicken the broth. If the container is full again, I don't know what I'm going to do.

This is just remarkable. The post itself is great, the commenters -- even many of the apparently-more-clueful ones -- sound as if the ideas of snark or connotation had just never occurred to them. They either don't recognize it at all, or turn it around gingerly in their hands as one might examine an alien artifact. "What is this thing you call a B-E-E-R B-O-T-T-L-E ?"

I'm working on a medium-sized technical document with a couple other people, and the first 10 or 20 minutes of every editing pass I do involves fixing (from my point of view) the structural screwups that the other guy(s) have made, so that the TOC no longer works, references don't refer, formats don't flow etc.

What I've come to believe is that the problem comes from (other people) working in too structured a fashion. Every paragraph, every bulleted list is part of their document's outline. It has a level, it has things that should happen to it because of that level, and when one randomly moves chunks around or plunks down big pieces of new text willy-nilly in the middle, as editors do, that organization gets broken. I, on the other hand, have a simple rule: If it's formatted as one of the Heading styles, it's a heading and goes in the TOC; if it's not, it's body text. Outline, schmoutline.

(And yes, this can be serious -- the last job I did with these people, with a couple of 100+ page documents brought together from many different highly structured files, each with its own structure, turned into a complete clusterfsck, with tables vanishing, illustrations losing their captions, callout fonts changing to greek depending on the size of the illustration, blah blah blah. 20 or 30 unbillable hours just patching things back together.)

Partly I blame this problem on the editor, but then openoffice wasn't exactly meant to do this kind of thing in the first place. The closest analogy that comes to mind is battle war between structure editors and text editors during the early Lisp era. Just as a lisp program is a set of trees represented as S-expressions, the ideal structured text is a tree, seen on screen as a flow of characters. Which of course is the problem. The thing we get to manipulate is the printed representation of the tree(s), not the trees themselves. And many of the operations that we perform on text strings leave the trees in invalid, inconsistent or simply wrong configurations. The people who built structure editors in Interlisp thought long and hard about how to reconcile manipulations of the stuff displayed on the screen with the "true" underlying representation of the program, but for the most part I don't think text-editor and word-processor people have given similar issues similar kinds of thought. They have enough trouble, after all, just keeping valid versions of all the information needed to get attributed text strings out to the screen or the printer.

I'm also kind of surprised (because in the lisp world I adore the notion of structure editors) that, in effect, I'm coming down firmly on the side of pure text from which structure can be derived when it must. Maybe because big ugly natural-language(ish) documents offer so many more syntactic and structural options so that structural editors just don't make sense for how I write. Or maybe because I never wrote a big enough ugly piece of code.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: faure pavane, damnit

via firecat and lorres

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Marsh? Pratchett? Appleton II? I'm something of a completist. (If you count gutenberg, it's PG Wodehouse, because I downloaded everything they had, but much of that is the same book with different names.)

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Probably a ngaio marsh that the publisher keeps putting new covers on.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
A little. It just seems infelicitous.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Too many to count. Probably starting with Leigh Brackett's Mouse.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
Big Red Barn. fsvo "read". Most real books I read just once. Some comfortable bilge, like EE Smith's Skylark series, I like to reread.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
If I hadn't gotten to the hobbit by then, it was Gods of Mars.

7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
Not counting all the bad 19th-century detective fiction from Gutenberg (which is at least enjoyable in a certain way), I didn't actually finish Zettel's Playing God. It's not so bad per se, but I kept wanting to shout "I don't care about your stupid protagonist's whiny inner voice and annoying problems!".

8) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
Stross's Family Trade, I think. It would be Under the Banner of Heaven, but I don't have the stomach or energy to finish it. Although my favorite is Elizabeth David's Christmas.

9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
Probably Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage. Of course you have to be of a certain age and mindset to get anything out of it, and lots of people probably don't need it at all, but what the heck.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
No clue.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Too many choices, but just for the heck of it, Seetee (another book that I like to reread).

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Ulysses. 30 pages of Joyce is about right for a two-hour movie.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I had gotten somewhere outside the observable universe, and coming back involved writing passages which then happened. But they had to be written so they worked in context. And while I was dreaming, I could see the pages and read the words.This is what happens when you read too much Cordwainer Smith and don't get enough sleep.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
No idea. But at my former employer I had the office next to the book-review editor, and the slush pile included (some publicist should have been commended for being really stupid but at least trying) regular helpins of time-travel romance.

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
Ulysses. Possible only because my then-SO was working on a book about Joyce and Woolf. (Which, some time after she got tenure, became two connected books.)

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?
Winter's Tale, unless the Henry's are more obscure.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
French

18) Roth or Updike?
Who? Never got through more than a few dozen pages of either.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Sedaris

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Chaucer. Haven't really read enough Shakespeare. (And I once did most of the set and lighting design for Samson Agonistes)

21) Austen or Eliot?
I've avoided both - I could never hack them.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
No serious novels to speak of post 1860 or so.

23) What is your favorite novel?
I have no clue. For language it might be Gormenghast/Titus Groan. But I haven't reread in so very long.

24) Play?
Cloud Nine

25) Poem?
It used to be Lines to be Mumbled at Ovington's, but I've moved on.

26) Essay?
Is Chatwin's Songlines short enough to count?

27) Short story?
Something by Neil Gaiman, couldn't tell you which. But I know the short story I hate with a cold, abiding passion: The Cold Equations.

28) Work of nonfiction?
Curve of Binding Energy

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Terry Pratchett, I think.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
No clue

31) What is your desert island book?
The Lord of the Rings

32) And… what are you reading right now?
Strange Attractors (ebook), Victory Conditions

I didn't mean to have this many shoes, really I didn't. But somehow I do. Part of it I blame on living in a state where Mud is an officially-recognized season.
Inside crocs
Outside crocs
bogs (waterproof low-cut)
bean boots (waterproof, uninsulated)
insulated boots
water shoes
tevas
light trail shoes
heavyish trail shoes (old)
brown formal shoes
black formal shoes
walking sneakers
lawn-mowing/painting sneakers (old walking sneakers)
running/elliptical shoes
ancient running shoes (from 15 years and 50 pounds ago)
mephistos first pair
mephistos second pair (for when the first pair is out for resoling)

One the one hand 17 pairs of shoes seems like way too damn many. On the other, on any given day I will find myself needing two or three of them, and in any given year maybe 10. And it's not like shoes are something a lot of people would want secondhand. Has anyone else found themselves wondering something similar?

So the other day was kinda rainy and windy with occasional snow, and before I took the kids to daycare I anted to know whether I should bother with a jacket. I checked the outside wireless thermometer, which sits under the tiny balcony outside my office. and it said 72. Repeatedly.

I had a hunch, after I got home I checked, and yes: some birds built a nest on top of it. The top of the thing is may 1x2", so I admire their engineering, but it renders the thermometer pretty useless for the rest of the season. I think it's some kind of titmouse or something else small, brown and crested. When we first moved in, there was a nest on top of the junction box for one of the outside lights, last year there was one on the bottom flange of the I beam that holds up the ceiling of the garage. They seem to like places with close top cover -- as who would not, I guess, in a climate where spring is full of wind and rain.

Next year, I think I might put up some ledges under that same balcony, and some hardware cloth around the sensor. (This is the second one we've had incapacitated by wildlife; the first had airholes that were apparently just the right size for nesting earwigs.)

Current Location: home
Current Mood: contemplative

Our plumber/electrician dropped by the other day (a snowplow broke the cover off our water-shutoff valve this winter, and we're strategizing what to do about it) and I asked him about his bum knee, so we ended up getting into a political conversation about healthcare reform. He was all upset that he's going to have to pay $800 to the IRS because he won't buy health insurance, except of course he won't because he's covered under his wife's policy from her job. And then he was concerned about all the young healthy people who were going to have to pay that money, and I explained to him about adverse selection, and then he started complaining about his retirement savings, which were cut in half during the crash...

The problem he has, and it's a pretty serious one, is not addressed by the current reform. He's been working for 35 years straight, with the occasional vacation or time off for illness, and one knee has a torn ligament with a few shreds of tissue holding it together. He laughs as he tells how the first time he went to a doctor for it the doctor couldn't believe he'd actually walked through the door. Lately his other foot has started bothering him. Oh, and his shoulder has a constant burning sensation, so that he can't get much sleep. Can we say rotator cuff? Fixing the knee will take 6-9 months (four of it in a cast) and fixing the shoulder just about the same. But guess what, they can't be done at the same time because he's going to need that shoulder so that he can be on crutches while the knee is recovering. So he's looking at a year or two out of wok while his body gets fixed. For a sole proprietorship whose customers really can't turn off their plumbing problems for a year. In other words, he's screwed.

There pretty obviously ought to be a program to deal with this. He's got another 20+ years of serious earnings ahead of him, if he can once get fixed. Otherwise eventually too many things will break at one time and that will be it. He looked into disability insurance, and he couldn't find a policy that would cover his monthly nut even if they didn't exclude the knee and the shoulder as pre-existing. So of course he takes his usual conservatism and piles his fear onto it and hates healthcare reform, because it doesn't (except very indirectly) do anything for him. Ugh.

(It seems to me that it's possible social security disability would cover at least some of his expenses if the recovery period lasts more than a year, but it's not clear if that can be arranged prospectively, plus it's one of those evil gummint programs for freeloaders.)

Current Mood: sad

But now for the next chapter I need something fancier than high-temperature ropes and pullies to lower stuff into the caldera. Maybe a hot-air balloon powered by the upwelling gases? C and I will both be grateful for any ideas.

( why I want to know )

Hope allayez have been or are having a good time. We have been too. C has been mostly delightful; B has been sick but game (and those long naps are golden no matter what their source)

Today I learned how much there still is to learn.

For me: our sleds are completely unsuitable for packed snow. They don't steer, and the only possible way to slow down, namely digging in both heels, throws up roostertails of snow directly into the faces of the riders. "I can't see! There's snow all over my face! That was not a good experience! I don't want to do it again!" Other people with smaller, boxier pieces of plastic fared much better (as did C and I when we borrowed one).

For C: pretty much everything there is to know culturally about christmas. From Charlie Brown, he got that Snoopy is voiced by an actor. From the Grinch, he got that the scene on top of Mount Crumpet when they pull the sleigh back from the brink is a physics violation. Oh, and the Grinch feels better about christmas when it's over. So many things packed into even simple expressions of the dominant culture, and not clear how much of it can actually be taught rather than just absorbed by experience (which he mostly won't have).

(I whistle a lot when I'm with C, even more with B, since there are only so many things to converse about past "Bring Big Red Barn to Dad", and one of the things I was whistling today was "When Johnny Comes Marching Home". As I did, I considered how much cultural baggage is contained in a passage of a dozen notes or so, how much history. Its use in Dr Strangelove, for example, must be very nearly incomprehensible to people of generations that have not heard and sung it from early childhood -- with all the sentiments about war and familiarity with war that that implies. And Dr Strangelove itself is probably mostly incomprehensible to people who haven't grown up with the likelihood of annihilation woven into their everyday lives. If anything, they watch the movie as a window into that time -- should they care to have one. It puts some perspective on my plans to explain to C that we do some things the way we do because of the views that his great-greatgrandfather formed 150 years before he was born.)

Oh, and when he got home from watching a movie with his friend Henry L tonight: ""this little robot's batteries are dead. Please put three AAAs in my battery compartment in the morning."

Me too.

Current Mood: contemplative

So this afternoon C found a self-inking stamp among his craft supplies and decided he should set up a library. We folded and stapled some sheets of paper for books (and C drew lines on pages represent text), C pasted slips into the back for due dates, and then we spent half an hour checking books out, returning them, being reminded that they were overdue and paying fines, getting book recommendations and so forth.

He's a freak, but he's our freak. And tomorrow is his 5th birthday HTF did that ever happen?

Current Mood: cheerful

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