Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Wow.  8:00.    Got up, exercised, dressed, breakfasted and headed out to the Walk In Clinic for a relatively new skin irritation.  They prescribed some ointment for my embarrassing location.

Got home, sorted and shredded.  I've got a lot of old paperwork I don't need that's taking up space.  

10:40 - off to the Senior Center for my first ever line dancing class.  It was harder than I thought.  I've got steps and terms to study and learn  It was a good workout both physically and mentally.  Learning new ways of moving exercises the mind and body.  

11:45 - Lunch at the Senior Center!  Meatball parm sub.  Yum.  

After lunch, off to the hardware store for sink caulking.  I had other things on my list but I think I'll need to go to an electronics or craft store for those itty-bitty needle nosed pliers.  

Then it was off to the drug store!  It was on the way home from the hardware store.  I got my ointment, a COVID booster and a pneumonia vaccine.  

Right now at 13:45, I'm chilling for the first time today with a cup of half-caf   I've got more shredding and sorting and collecting the garbage.  I still need to do something musical today: practice an instrument, compose or study a particular piece of music. 

The keyboard on my bench... I'll deal with tomorrow.  There's a very fiddly connector that I just can't get to back in correctly.  If I can't put in back in the keys won't work.  The original manufacturer used a penny pinching way of connecting two circuit boards that requires a good eye and a steady hand to insert - of which I have neither.  It only cost me 30 dollars but it's eaten into my time.  I'll be disappointed  if I can't reassemble it correctly.   I part of my personality has been that I can fix things and the inability to do so hurts a bit.  But I have physical limitations and really fine work - never my strongest suit - has become more and more limited as I've gotten older.  

I'm adjusting.  
  

We were away from home Friday and Saturday, in order to stay at a hotel for Pinball At The Zoo and maybe not have to get up unspeakably early Saturday morning when we'd be hopefully getting some last-minute games in to qualify for a playoffs. Story on that to follow, though to spoil the big thing, neither of us qualified for anything.

But, since we'd be missing the mail a couple days, and it's been raining between four and 214 inches a day the past week, I had the mail held. Something about our mailbox encourages letter carriers to not just slip things in; they like to leave a little bit hanging out so any rain will get wicked inside fast.

Saturday I came home to find two pieces of (junk) mail in the mailbox, one sticking out ready for the rain that hadn't come yet. Also, Sunday, I got an e-mail from the post office confirming that my mail hold would be expiring soon.

I once more checked on the form that the mail should be kept at the post office where I will go in person to pick it up. What odds am I given that the mail will instead be left in the box?

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Since that's not much of an update how about a lot of Idlewild pictures? Thought you might like that.

At the end of the story book forest walk is this castle that we weren't sure was different from last time or what. Turns out it was new since our last visit, although nearly a decade old by the time we saw it, and was a reconstruction of a castle that used to be at the end of the fairy tale trail.

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And here's the sign explaining the castle. Duke the Dragon is, yes, our Dutch Wonderland pal, so this dates it to after when Hershey sold the park to Kennywood's corporate owners (who already owned Idlewild).

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Here's the area inside the castle, with a bunch of mock medieval-ish hose fronts and a broom that's probably not a witch's, just janitorial, but who can say for sure?

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Here's that sword you could try pulling from the stone. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't think to try pulling myself to learn what happens.

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And here is Duke in something that looks bronze-ish all right! The broom's behind him.

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Duke dolphins decorate the base of the fountain, though they weren't spitting water at this moment.

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Believe that's Raggedy Ann and Andy leaving the castle ahead of us for the gift shop.

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And there's the pair going into what I assume is a staff building. It was far enough away there was no plausibly wandering off to see what was there.

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And now let's get back to the park; here's the Loggin Toboggan, local log flume, doing good business since it was a Saturday and a 140 degrees.

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It's in a part of the park named Hootin' Holler, which has a hillbilly theme and seems like it's got that name independent of the setting of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, but you never know for sure.

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Last time we visited the park had disassembled their ... I'm going to say Spider ... ride. (There are a bunch of similar rides with names like Spider, Monster, Octopus, and so on.) Was very happy to see it reassembled and working.

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And up on a hill one of the picnic pavilions would like to take a moment to sell you a tall glass of America. What do you think?

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Trivia: Although Ransom E Olds appears to have made the first steam-powered car built in Lansing, the first steam car company in Lansing was the Lansing Automobile Works set up in 1902 by George J Bohnet and J W Post. Source: The Bicentennial History of Ingham County, Michigan, Ford Stevens Ceasar. If I'm not grossly misled, the location of the Lansing Automobile Works (219 North Washington) is currently a parking lot, like all of downtown. Anyway it didn't last long; even by 1902 gasoline engines were vastly ahead of steam and electric. Also in looking this up I learn on that same block is a Telephone Pioneer Museum I never heard of before. And I know what you're thinking and yes: Bohnet Electric is the company that sold us, and installed, our current kitchen light fixture.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

My apologies for the lateness of the chapter, but it comes with some news. First, I will no longer be announcing chapter posting dates. My life has become far too chaotic recently for me to accurately project when I'll have chapters done, and the disorder is likely to continue for quite some time. That said, I will continue to aim to post chapters weekly, and they will be posted on Sundays, if that is any help. Secondly, I need to restate: I WILL finish this fic. I'm very much hoping to have it done this year, but given how weird my life got, that may not be possible; still, it's my hopeful goal. Thank you all so much for reading and commenting! I treasure every one of you so, so much.

( Read more... )

I finished all the outlines on Art Nouveau Autumn! I then tried to start the colours and promptly did a section with the wrong shade & had to undo.



I finished the moon on Upon A Star, and started some trees on the left side. There are still 2 stars to do, once I have enough trees done to have easy reference points.

Dang, today was really good!

And like......I've been saying for a while now that my hypersimplified political stance is "community is good". And while it wasn't the first thing I did today, it was pretty early in the sequence that I looked at the young woman with the small child standing in Park Street station and looking _extremely_ confused about the lack of a map, and so went over with my phone and helped her identify the station she wanted to be at and which train to get on. Then I sat on a bench and did some knitting until my own train arrived. This wasn't the entirety of the day, but it did set the tone really really nicely!

Before that, I had a lovely long phone chat with my mom as she was driving to her sister's to do more work with their dad's stuff --we organized when and how I'll be going to MD to visit this summer, and then chatted about many lovely inconsequential things. And I visited the post office to mail off a book for a friend (I was point person for a kickstarter a bunch of folks on my discord were excited about). And then it was off to bells, where I arrived halfway through but had a jolly time ringing everything after. Not going to bells very frequently means that we suddenly have an all new crop of skilled ringers and that's quite neat to observe!

Bells lunch was lovely, and taking the T home with Laura lovlier still --I got to hear some of her exciting upcoming plans for adventure! And then I was home long enough to change my clothes and take a quick rest and then off to my work-bestie's old house to help him move a bunch of boxen out of his attic. Originally the plan was three of us and I think he was expecting it to take 2-3 hours. The two of us were handily done in well under an hour and I near melted in delight as he said "you being the stupendous badass you are"¹.

(His attic ladder broke right before moving out, so he'd rigged a quite nice pulley setup with a little handmade cargo net. But I don't think he realized how strong I am, and subsequently how quickly I could get things out of the netting and stacked up in the room downstairs. It was a very jolly time!)

Afterwards, I got to see his new house, which is absolutely gorgeous in every way except that it's diagonally opposite our principal's house (which like, isn't an inherent flaw but is very very funny). And he treated me to dinner, which we did at a nice sushi place on Mass Ave that has set out their outdoor seating --it was just warm enough to be happy, and I think we spent the entire time joyfully discussing Taskmaster. I'm real lucky!

Home again home again, and I managed to kick my brain into enough order to get started the newest bit of knitting project (or rather, the first in a series of swatches for thus) before getting into the car(?!) and driving to the airport. It's Magus and Keira's car, on loan while they were overseas, so we can do grocery runs in exchange for giving them rides to and from the airport.

It was my first time hanging out in the cell phone lot, and that was actually quite jolly as well. "Take your time", texts I, "I have music and knitting" and I did and they were both quite good, which was especially good because their airplane did not have access to any stairs for quite a long time and so what could've been a 45 minute errand had everything worked optimally was actually about two hours. But again, I had music and knitting and that was _lovely_. I only had to work on two of the projects (and listen to my CD twice through) and then suddenly we were back at my house and I was handing them the keys.

Dishes properly done *before* coming upstairs to fuck around, and that's where I am now. I have a few hours before bed, I expect, and while I can never guilt-free do things (there is grading and my desk is a disaster) today really was enough that I feel like I can really relax into whatever else I decide to do with my evening.

Community is good! I am so happy I am a part of mine.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Call me pretty and I will smile, call me useful and I will melt. I know what I'm about. (5'2" and carrying classic oldest daughter trauma)

I accompanied adrian_turtle to an MRI facility, where she had an MRI with contrast, which hopefully will help her current neurologist figure out better medication for her seizures. Like many people, Adrian finds the contrast medium unpleasant, which is at least part of why she wanted company.

Afterwards, we went to JP Licks, where I got us both ice cream. They have non-dairy coconut almond lace ice cream this month, and there's now a pint of that in our freezer.

The day before I left on a road trip last month I booked my hostel in Cape Town. When I arrived today they asked my name, scanned my passport, let me put my bags in storage, and said to come back at 3pm to check in. I went on a lovely aimless wander through town and returned to the desk. I wasn't on the list of people checking in today. The attendant poked through his computer and said I'd reserved in March, but the email they sent bounced and the number I registered isn't on WhatsApp[1]. I looked at the event I'd created in Google Calendar and saw I'd written "Check email or call to confirm." I'd assumed they were going to send an email during South African working hours, then promptly forgot about this TODO item during a week on the road. Oops.

Fortunately, traveling to Cape Town is more like my memories of Central America and not like modern Amsterdam, at least in shoulder season. I was able to find another hostel with an open room for a week just four blocks away. As expected, dragging my three heavy bags along the sidewalk was workable but not a lot of fun.

Speaking of my three heavy bags, before I bought my Turkish Airlines ticket I noticed their baggage page said carry-on bags are limited to 8kg. I'd never seen or heard of a carryon getting weighed, and it sounded like something a budget airline like Frontier or Spirit would do, not a flag carrier set on making Istanbul one of the busiest airports in the world. A quick Internet search found some Reddit threads with anecdata of cabin luggage not getting weighed, so I bought the ticket and mostly forgot about this limit. When I arrived at DEN (3 hours early, thankfully) the Star Alliance agent told me to weigh my carry-on first. Uh-oh. My clever packing plan had been to put my whole portable ham radio backpack in a wheelie bag, plus a change of underwear and some card games and small electronics in a big pocket. I knew this would be way more than 8kg because I'd tested the backpack radio kit on a short walk and it's heavy. (I have a lighter option, but I'm worried I'll need 45 watts to get my signal somewhere with enough hams to chase me for the magical 10 QSOs POTA target.) Fortunately there are luggage scales around the corner from the check-in counter, so I spent 45 minutes experimentally moving about 23 lbs from one suitcase to my two checked bags (each with about 5 lbs of spare weight) and my backpack, which has a width-expanding zipper. The next agent cheerfully weighed my exactly-8kg bag and checked my two exactly-50kg bags and handed me a baggage tag for my backpack without visually inspecting that it was clearly too big to fit under an airplane seat. As soon as I was out of eyesight I moved my camera bag, card games, and pockets full of granola bars back to the carry-on, knowing the gate agents have better things to do than weigh everyone's bags before they get on the plane.

I'm now going to be super aware of any objects I acquire on this trip. I'll obviously eat all the snacks, and gifting a lot of metal buttons will clear up some weight. But I'm also going to receive gifts, plus my AfrikaBurn shirt and hat. Hopefully my last lodging has a bathroom scale… or the CPT ticket agents are more chill.

8 kilograms is remarkably light for a carry-on. I was down to a mostly-empty backpack, a medical infejection pen, a folder with a dozen pieces of paper, and a fluffy pillow. I don't think I've ever had a bag this light on a plane, except my return trip from China when I put an erhu in a cardboard box in the bin. My empty suitcase probably weighs a kilo on its own. The rest of the flight experience was fine, but needing to leave a big void in my carry-on makes me not want to fly Turkish again. My lithium batteries aren't allowed in checked bags, so it makes no sense to require me to put them under the seat in a backpack while packing bulky light items like pillows in a hard-to-reach spot. Judging by the amount of space in the overhead bins they made a lot of money on extra bag fees, though perhaps they lost out on selling extra freight space.

[1] In much of the world, WhatsApp has largely replaced the open phone system because Wi-Fi and mobile data are cheaper than SMS, particularly internationally.

I write in paragraphs, and then when I post, it all runs together. What secret don't I know?

This one was good by Law & Order standards, in that while the dialogue and acting were quite bad* and I called the murderer almost immediately, it actually performed a socially useful function.

However, it deals with infanticide and I'm putting everything under a cut.

( Uncertain Justice )

This is an honest question. As taxpayers, we more than tithe to our county and country. If everyone's doing this who can afford to, why is my checkout machine asking me to donate to alleviate hunger in my own tiny city/county?! We are spending billions on an unnecessary war and yet our citizens go to bed in the streets hungry? We can't afford everyone medical and mental care?! Where are our priorities? Maybe it's because I live so close to the shithead decisions. "Oh, we're not doing very well at housing the homeless and feeding the poor. Let's make a war. It will distract everyone from our failures. Throw in a moon launch." Riiight. I'm just disgusted. My grocery bill is up 33%. Mom and I are hoping for a death. She got mad when Hinckley tried to assassinate reagan. I didn't. Now we agree I have no experience with killing beyond bugs and mice. I hope some well-trained veteran... Just fed up with greed, evil, stupidity, cowardice, and megalomania. How much would it cost to get everyone on Earth contraception and potable water, compared to making war on Iran? I don't know . Anyone want to tell me?

 IT'S PODCAST FRIDAY EVERYONE go listen to Wizards & Spaceships' season 2 finale, "In Praise of Difficult Women ft. Silvia Moreno-Garcia"! It's largely about SFF's Skyler White problem, i.e., why are men allowed to be difficult, unlikeable, or deeply problematic and non-villainous women basically aren't. Basically, an excuse to listen to a multi-genre genius hold forth on her opinions for about an hour. She's so cool. Holy shit.

Other and sadder mouse news. We've been getting the live traps out to catch the mother deermouse, and what we suppose are children. bunny_hugger has already caught what seems to be the mother and one child, moved outside to the detached garage where they're welcome to hang out.

In getting out the live traps, though, we went to the basement to find one of the tin cats that we had loaned to a friend whose house was, a year or so back, overrun with mice. It was closed, and what we most feared had happened. A mouse had gotten in and, with no food, water, or way to escape, died. This is why we try to leave them open, ideally with some prop inside that makes it impossible to close. We don't know how we failed to notice it was put away unsafe. It's possible our friend gave it back to us closed and unaware a mouse was trapped inside, but that doesn't relieve us of responsibility to open it and make sure it's safe.

You can imagine how we feel, which isn't a patch on how the mouse must have. We buried it near our pet mice, as much kindness as we can offer at this point.

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On merrier news, let's get back to Idlewild and fairy tales.

Red Riding Hood pondering whether she dares go into Grandmom's house, which is inducing a delay that's probably just making things worse.

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Well, there's the wolf dressed up as Grandmom and in her bed so I suppose things can't get worse than this.

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Some more scenes set up but the centerpiece here is an American Elm tree, like you never see anymore. Trust me, that's what the sign on it says.

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Here's the Seven Dwarves, of Snow White fame.

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And their house. Yes, there's seven little chimneys coming out the top.

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And here's Jack B, the nimble one jumping over a candlestick. He doesn't seem to be unscathed quite.

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Here's a clock that has both a mouse running up and down it but also one that pokes its head out as the hands rotate.

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You can see the other mouse at the base of the pendulum and also see they made their own choice about spelling 'Hickory Dickory Dock'.

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Here's a pretty solid Humpty Dumpty. The wall looks like it's ancient, although that probably actually means they rebuilt it from scratch in May.

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Here's Old King Cole, with pipe and bowl.

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And here's a talking tree; there's a speaker in the mouth there and it reels off, if I remember right, a bunch of tree puns.

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The giant keyhole I think is tied to Alice In Wonderland/Through The Looking-Glass.

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Trivia: It's estimated that in 1849 Americans ate about 139 pounds of pork per capita. By 1889 this had dropped to 119 pounds. Source: Down To Earth: Nature's Role in American History, Ted Steinberg.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

I mentioned we got the side door fixed; its strike plate had fallen off years ago and replacing it just required someone with confidence to screw the new one in sideway. So that's nothing big.

Since then, though, we have realized just what rough shape so much of the doorframe is in. Particularly the base. I don't know how old the doorframe is, but that many winters plus the occasional four-inches-an-hour rainstorm has degraded it badly. bunnyhugger had gone around the base of the house to fill up spots where outdoor mice might be getting in, and the base of the door is basically all filled with this steel wool-like stuff. It'd be better if there were wood in there. Probably we should get the whole frame replaced. But the new latch is so good!

Also, now, our coal chute. Which we still have; the house is old but it hasn't been so old that getting rid of the chute was worth spending money on. It's also been a spot where mice could get in, and while bunnyhugger sealed it up last time we were having unauthorized mice, it's in considerably worse shape these days. It's in bad enough shape it might be reasonable to replace it entirely, but where do you even get a new coal chute door? Probably the thing to do would be to make it into a new window, but the company we got our fantastic glass block basement windows from went out of business about twelve minutes after they gave us fantastic windows. For now, we're hoping bunnyhugger has got mice sufficiently discouraged from going in that way.

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And now, to pictures of Idlewild and the fairy tale forest there.

bunnyhugger approaching the Old Shoe of the woman who lives within. Yes, they had a performer for the Old Woman.

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Inside the foot was this seemingly inadequate bed. It is labelled in front 'Sandman Special' and I'm sorry I didn't get a good picture of the plaque on the leftmost side of the bed.

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There's the shoe and the Old Woman set out front, with her chair and water bottle.

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And here's the pumpkin shell, with Peter Peter on top.

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Here's what life looks like from within a pumpkin shell.

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There's LIttle Boy Blue, with the new-since-our-last-visit sign reminding us how the story goes.

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Over here's the brick house where the Three Little Pigs live these days.

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And Jack and Jill, with Jack face down in his egg and chips.

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A sign outside Jack and Jill urges us to use the well for its intended non-water purpose.

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This rhyme about Hickety Pickety I have not seen referenced anywhere but here. I believe last time we visited there was a chicken in the roost but now there's just sculptures.

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Here's the giant watering-can house from the famous fairy tale ... uh ... ... um ...

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Table inside, with some Jack and Jill Seeds so you can grow your own fairy tale. Also, apparently, a bit of the Halloween decorations they missed taking down.

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Trivia: By 1870 Urban Jean Joseph Le Verrier (discoverer of Neptune) was on speaking terms with zero of the members of the Paris Observatory's Board of Advisors, and for six months the Director refused to have anything to do with the body. Finally compelled to attend a meeting it ended (by reports) with three advisors kicking Le Verrier out of the room, and Le Verrier was forced to resign. Source: In Search of Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton's Clockwork Universe, Richard Baum, William Sheehan. He was reappointed director in 1873 when his successor (Charles-Eugène Delaunay) accidentally drowned.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

Been another week so it's time to talk about my humor blog, which was mostly wrapping up the thing I most look forward to writing every year. I'm sad it's away for months now unless I decide otherwise.

• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 12: The Next Day
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Wearing Loose Clothes to Hide Your Weight vs Somersaults
• Statistics Saturday: You Doing Okay? A Daily Checklist
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: The Final Four: Extended Dance Remixes vs Gumption
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: The Final Four: Cost-Benefit Analysis vs The Coalsack Nebula
• What's Going On In Dick Tracy? Why's BB Eyes trying to kill Silver Nitrate? January - April 2026
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: The Finale: Commercial Jingles vs Shelving
• MiSTed: FX Down To Mobius, Part 13: Two Weeks Before Doomsday

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I now bring you to the fairy tale forest at Idlewild. Great spot.

Outside this big cheese sculpture is this rhyme that I don't remember seeing elsewhere. This --- and a lot of the fairy-tale signs --- are new since our last visit a dozen years prior.

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That's the cheese sculpture. You know we don't get Swiss cheese holes like that anymore.

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Around back is where you enter the cheese. The sign, I believe, dates to our previous visit.

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Here's what the park looks like from inside a block of cheese.

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Over here we see where the Three Bears are when Goldilocks is prowling around their place: they're checking out their apiary.

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The inside of the Three Bears' house, with some of the stuff Goldilocks has yet to break.

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There's the beds. No sign of anyone inside, though.

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And here's Geppetto's Workshop. They had a guy inside talking about his son, Pinocchio, doing a bit of talk about how who knows where his son is and there's something about a Hollywood adaptation.

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Inside Geppetto's Workshop. It at least looks like the sort of stuff you might use to carve and dress a puppet.

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Another old sign encouraging people to not deliberately mess up the grass.

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And oh, hey, a dragon! I don't think he's part of any particular fairy tale that I remember.

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Dragon's just got this little pile of rocks to hang out.

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Trivia: Tapa, a paper-like material made by beating and stretching and drying wild fig tree bark, has been found in South America dating back almost as long as there is evidence of inhabitation; there are stone tapa beaters almost ten thousand years old. Source: Paper: Paging through History, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: Michigan History, September/October 2025, Editor Kristen Brennan.

This one's about crypto, which admittedly makes my eyes glaze over even though it's really important. It's just that I know enough about economics to know that all money is fake, but crypto is especially fake, and really has all the downsides of money without the advantages of money. Also everyone involved is an asshole, much more so than is depicted in this episode. It's based largely on Andean Medjedovic (and good job casting someone who looks a great deal like him) and the many attempts to find the real Satoshi Nakamoto.

Warning that this episode discusses autism in ways that are fucked up and shitty.

( WAGMI )

I'm trying to be better at _stuff_. The warm weather is coming back, so that's helping. I despair a little, wondering if it will ever be possible to put structures into place that actually support me year round.

(I have also been despairing a little, lo these last six months or so, as I stumble over wordsing from 2020 and realize that I was probably mentally healthier then, which is wild considering how much worse certain things were. The end of the world has been fuckin' _hard_, y'all! I'm glad for the ways in which there is good community to ride it through with.)

Next week is April vacation, and I will fuck around town for the weekend, then go down as efficiently as I can to Providence to hang with Tuesday for the week --it only just struck me today that I would most likely be leaving on Monday, meaning I'll be trying to travel on public transit on Marathon Day. I'm sure this will be fine.

(It will not be fine, but I am willing to be very very patient.)

The real tricky part will be packing --I need to figure out if I'm going straight to NEFFA from Tues's, which will be an extra layer of packing. I would also like to not bring an infinity of grading with me, so maybe I can get the tests graded over the weekend? This does not feel likely.

But I am looking forward to being floppy and low-maintenance in someone else's space. Make some food, play some video games, do some knitting, perhaps. Maybe I can bring useful projects that I want to work on down with me, and try and do some of that while Tues is at work. We'll see.

Work proper has been rough as hell, in ways I don't care for. It's non-renewing week, where everyone who didn't get hired back learns this fact, often with very little warning. I am Not Happy about the structures in place that are causing that. It would be nice if there were better ways to cope with supervisors who routinely eat rocks for breakfast and refuse to actually engage with their employees in a way that's remotely helpful.

Also we're t-minus one wakeup until April Vacation and the children are READY for it. Which is tentatively fine, but gosh, it sure would be nice if they were also READY for Geometry along the way.

At least I get to walk home with my work-bestie. That part is lovely! And I had a student trust me with the very early stages of their transition, and ask me today if I would tell some other staff on their behalf (because they felt nervous to do it themself). It felt very honoring!

There is hope for the future, or maybe there is just community and joy right now.

~Sor
MOOP!

I got a covid booster yesterday. When I told the pharmacy clerk I wanted the vaccine, he checked that the Pfizer vaccine would be OK, then started to ask when I’d gotten my last booster, stopped, and instead asked whether I’d had one in the last two months. When I said no, he asked whether I’d had covid in the last two months “as far as you know.”

The last time I'd checked, they were saying to wait at least three months after having covid, and I thought the recommended interval between boosters was also at least three months. (My previous covid booster was last fall.) Massachusetts is now advising everyone to get boosters twice a year, and having that as an official recommendation means health insurance companies will pay for it.

In a few hours I'll be on an airplane en route to Cape Town for AfrikaBurn, South Africa's regional Burning Man event. On the way back I'll be taking a couple weeks in Benelux so I can get in my Burning Man ranger training in Amsterdam and check out some old art and old crafts in the Low Countries. You can vicariously view my adventures in this shared photo album, and I'll try to post here a time or two.

My parents spent three months backpacking in Europe in 1972, and have been telling stories about the trip for over 50 years. Not only would they not be physically able to take that same trip now, many of the experiences they had are no longer available: 2020s Europe is a very different place than 1970s Europe.

As I've been preparing for this trip I've been recalling the trip Molly and I took to Guatemala and Honduras in 2009. Besides buying round-trip plane tickets and reading the Lonely Planet, we hadn't made any plans for our nine week trip. The first night we planned out a route with approximate times in each town. We'd get off the bus in a new place and walk to a LP-recommended hostel and say "Hi, we'd like a room for a few nights." Cell phones were abundant, but smartphones hadn't yet made much headway in Latin America, so everything was very face-to-face. Every week or so we'd check in at an Internet café or the shared computer in a hostel to check email and share a rambling travelogue with friends.

Fast forward a decade and a half, and travel planning is way more front-loaded. Every detail of a trip can be booked online in advance, though I've tried to only book things that I'll be very upset if I don't have, like lodging and tickets to key destinations. Today you can't just show up to the Rijksmuseum, buy a ticket, and check out the paintings. You need to book a specific time slot, several days in advance. If you're not feeling well, or it's a beautiful day and you'd rather go to the beach, too bad: you won't be able to go to the museum tomorrow. I had to put together a spreadsheet with two activities per day for two weeks in Benelux, two months in advance. I made sure to leave a couple open spots for spontaneity.

In 2009 Molly said "As long as you've got your passport and your toothbrush you're good to go." Smartphones have now become the other key travel item. Visiting a museum? Show the QR code on your phone. Need a taxi? Order an Uber on your phone. Buying food? Tap to pay on your phone. If my phone gets stolen, I'm not even sure I'll be able to find a desktop computer so I can organize a response. (This scenario is why I don't have two-factor on my GMail account: I want to go from "everything was stolen" to "I can send an email for help.") Molly and my late-20s travel instincts of carefully guarding a debit card and occasionally withdrawing cash at a secure bank ATM is going to feel awkward in Europe where websites keep telling me they don't even accept cash.

As I age, I also seem to acquire stuff that I need to carry around. In 2009 I brought a regular backpack and a hand bag of clothes; Molly just had a regular backpack. (I had a DSLR camera and socks, neither of which Molly brought.) When I packed my bags this week I discovered that my mental packing on the big suitcase was spot on, but it was way over the 50 pound limit. So now I'll be dragging three suitcases and a backpack over cobbled streets in old cities. One for camping and sleeping gear at AfrikaBurn, one for clothes and useful items, one for ham radio gear. The backpack's still got a DSLR, because even though smartphones have become our key digital items, travel photos with a proper camera body and lens just feel different.

The Arenal Volcano tour guide had pointed at a ridge in the distance: "Do you know what that is?" He liked to quiz us on what we thought of the features, and inevitably we got it wrong, so he explained: that is the Continental Divide. Caribbean to this side, Pacific to that side.

( Days 8-9: Cloud Forest )

( Days 10-11: Pacific beaches )

( Days 12-13: the way back - with bonus El Salvador! )

For our 10th wedding anniversary we went to Japan, so for the 20th I felt obligated to plan us something no less epic. But also I was getting overwhelmed with my customary planning of all the details, and so decided to experiment with a packaged tour. As always the March-to-April timing limited our options. The closest new-to-us warm place that offered a variety of packaged tours turned out to be Costa Rica. Most tour itineraries and costs were relatively similar; we chose amongst multitudes of well-reviewed options based on date availability.

The package included hotel bookings, bunches of guided activities with hotel pick-ups, and shuttles to deliver one between destinations every other day, which is a pretty good pace for my travel preferences. One can WhatsApp the agency for clarifications and issues, and they respond reasonably promptly, even if there's not a whole lot they can actually do since all they do is book third-parties. Which is no small logistical feat, and on the whole while I might have chosen a few things differently, I appreciated the result. Also, I probably would have hesitated to book all the individual activities at their published rates if I knew what those were in advance, but somehow the package which rolled it into reasonable-compared-to-a-cruise pricing seemed reasonable, even if no doubt it added up to much the same thing plus a bit of overhead for the agency.

For a summary: a tropical paradise is a fun way to spend a couple weeks. The terrain is gorgeous. The cuisine is tasty - especially if you like tropical fruit. The folks are friendly, and their catchphrase, used liberally and unironically, is "Pura vida" - literally "pure life", serving as a mix of "aloha" and "hakuna matata" - hi, bye, life is good, don't sweat the small stuff. Which somehow comes across as charming and grows even on this curmudgeon.

( Day 1 - Arrival in San Jose )

( Days 2-3: Tortuguero )

( Days 4-5 - Caribbean Coast )

( Days 6-7 - Inland on Carribean side )

I've just had the second suspicious spot removed from the skin on my left shoulder.  I was well numbed up for both so the procedures  wasn't painful, were merely uncomfortable.  

Today, it hurts a bit.

My primary dermatologist ignored the spots when I pointed them out.  My secondary ordered biopsies.  Then she removed them.  In addition, my primary ignored the flaking, the pus and the bleeding AND the loss of hair on my head.  I'm going to one more appointment with my primary to chew them out, show them my bald head and fire them.  

Steroids helped with the scalp but made me jittery and (more) sleepless.  I'm off to get blood tests to see if a new treatment will work for me without side effects. 
 

So we had a spot of weather last night. We got home from pinball league and the Michigan Furries telegram group was busy sharing weather maps and reports of lots of water coming down and lots of wind going fast. Turns out we were under a severe thunderstorm warning until something like 1:15, and while we did not face down a tornado, they were pretty plausible things. When the TV switched over to Stephen Colbert, he was nowhere to be found, with the local news's weather guys having converged on the screen to look at radar, point at things that might be tornado cells forming, and thanking people for sending in footage of things that might be funnel clouds seen in-between the rapid lightning strikes.

Fortunately, we did not get a tornado, or even hail heavy enough to do us damage. The rain was apparently going at the rate of four inches an hour at some points, but for small slices of an hour, and there was humbling beauty to appreciate in the density of the rain and the incessance of the lightning. Our satellite TV lost the local station --- it froze up just at the moment our lights flickered a moment --- and we had to follow it on the Internet until I went to bed. But, far as I can tell, we didn't lose power, or at least not long enough to force clocks to be reset. And hey, free goldfish pond expansion, what's not to like?

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Now let's continue walking Idlewild Park's fairy tale forest.

Behind the Crooked House is this old statue of the Crooked Man and his Crooked Mouse.

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In the midst of the park is this, surely once a snack stand. The poem --- ``There was a jolly miller who lived on the River Dee, he worked and sang from morn' till night, no lark so blyth as he'' --- I can find elsewhere on the Internet so it existed, I guess.

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And here's just a statue dedicated to ``the wonderful memories of childhood'' and the days of childhood when you were covered in pigeons.

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A dock and somewhere in there statues to Huckleberry Finn, who's not really a fairy tale.

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A little pirate ship on the lake; we also had some fun interactions with the captain, who did some up-close magic with us that got us lollipops.

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As you see, it's a legitimate pirate ship, complete with plank.

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There's a tiny cabin that you can fit in if you're a kid or if you just stick your hand in and photograph around.

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Then there's a little train playset with a bunch of face up front.

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I remembered the park had a bunch of signs on the grass and around trees asking people to not damage them, and while the park didn't seem to have as many as my memory dictated there were some, like this Please Don't Tread On Me sign for the grass.

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Remember the tale of the Three Billy Goats Gruff? ... I believe the last time we visited in 2014 they had actual live goats but this time it was just cutouts.

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Now what would a cat be doing inside a wishing-class well?

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Oh yes, it's because of this rhyme that I know exists but not any parts past there. Let me just look up and see if that's how the rhyme ends or if there's more parts to it and oh my well I see why Idlewild cut the rhyme off there, all right.

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Trivia: The words ``neat'' and ``net'' both derive from the Middle French ``net'' meaning ``clear, clean, pure'', and both began in English meaning ``finely made, clean, clear, trim, elegant''. Source: Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, Sol Steinmetz.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 89: Moon Plant!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

HEY PALS I'm back with more trashy copaganda from Canada, oh yes it is the return of Law & Order Criminal Intent: Toronto.

( Skin Deep )

Just finished: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar. This one has been on my list forever just because of the author, so I never looked up what it was about or anything like that. If I had, I'd have read it sooner. It's a queer feminist retelling of "The Two Sisters"/"The Twa Sisters," a.k.a. Loreena McKennitt's "The Bonny Swans," which I loved as a teenage goth and still love as an adult goth. It's so immersive in its writing that I somehow failed to connect there being two daughters with one suitor, a miller with a daughter, a river, a land dispute, and a harper until about halfway through when the realization hit that El-Mohtar is at least goth-adjacent and approximately my age lol. 

Anyway, it's about Esther and Ysabel, two sisters whose family owns a willow grove (willow being used for "grammar," a.k.a. magic) downstream from Faerie. Esther is being courted by the village incel but is in love with Rin, a shapeshifting Fae who plays the harp and has become enchanted by Esther's singing. Esther would kill or die for her younger sister, and the bond between them is gorgeously written.

Tangentially, "The Bonny Swans" always confused me as a kid because it's stitched together from a bunch of versions of the story, so the father is a farmer in the first verse but the king in the last, and it's unclear whether what the miller's daughter pulls from the river is a swan or a woman, and the novella actually goes a fair way to resolving some of these contradictions. But I also noticed that this is low-key a trans narrative, because in the first verse the farmer has "daughters, one two three," and in the last verse there's no middle daughter, but there's a brother named Hugh. This particular story just leaves out the middle child but there's a free plot idea for you if you want one.

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou. Apparently feminist fairy tale retellings is the Nebula theme this year. This is Bluebeard; a modern day woman telling a story to her son about his father, flashing back to a dreamy narrative about a man who curses the land wherever he goes. It's haunting and poetic and unflinching in its depiction of not just domestic abuse but why women stay in abusive relationships. I thought it dragged at the end but was so well-written that I'd absolutely recommend it.

Currently reading: Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple. I just started this last night after pre-ordering it the second I knew of its existence. It's a detailed, illustrated history of the Jewish Bund and the concept of "doikayt," or hereness, the formation of Jewish identity in the diaspora. Obviously this is very relevant and very up my alley and this is the right person to tell the story.

While we were burying Crystal's body we figured we could probably turn off the pond heater, what with it being 72 Fahrenheit. We went to turn on the pond pump, in fact, and were annoyed that it never started pumping water. We're confident that the power point is all right --- the plug on the end has a light, and we were able to get the pond spitter's pump to go --- so the question is now whether the main pump has gone bad, or whether the main pump has got the hose up to the top of the pond blocked. Either is annoying and either was too annoying for us to do Sunday night, so that's going to wait until we don't know just when. Probably this coming Sunday, since we're booked Saturday.

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And then the Saturday of our big amusement park trip last year we planned just to drive home from Hershey, maybe stopping at Cedar Point for a break. But a stop for lunch and gas turned out to be in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, a short distance from Idlewild Park and, you know what? We're doing it. We're making another park trip and you're going to see it.

We got the one spot left in Parking Lot A! We have never seen parking lots B, C, or D.

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Part of Idlewild is the Story Book Forest, long ago a separate attraction and now part of the gate price.

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Here's the entrance trail. Inside the book is a small house where you can chat with Mother Goose.

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The Book's been repainted since our last visit.

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I hadn't noticed the Frog Prince before but here he is now.

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And that's what the Big Book looks like from the other side. You can see a person talking with the obscured Mother Goose inside.

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Here's another entrance to the Story Book Forest.

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Little Miss Muffet and a spider. There are a lot of static displays of moments from fairy tales and nursery rhymes and also, for some reason, Huckleberry Finn.

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Here's a chair for giants which would be more interesting if we'd got a picture of one of us on it. Sorry. Next time.

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Down here's the Crooked Man (seated, with crooked ruler) and past him his Crooked House.

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Behind the Crooked House you can see the non-actor Crooked Man statue.

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The furnishings inside the Crooked House are all like this. Yes, there's a Crooked Mouse around somewhere but I think I don't have that photo.

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Trivia: The ``phantom circuit'', an electrical hookup allowing three telephone conversations to be conducted on two lines, was first demonstrated in 1883; it was first put into practice in 1910 with cable-born phantom circuits carrying phone calls between Boston and Neponset, Massachusetts. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 89: Moon Plant!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.

PS: What's Going On In Dick Tracy? Why's BB Eyes trying to kill Silver Nitrate? January - April 2026 because you have the right to know!

Is he was some top secret crazy security guy who died unexpectedly? He had seccret lover? Like a normal guy? Why when I write about him do my posts just disappear?

No point in posting. It just dies.

't Provide. He simply is not interested in love. No cuddling. No affection. The odd hug must be requested. Once every month or so. I bought into the idea of marriage because it came with health insurance as a spouse. I told him that on our first date. Washington Folk Festival 1996. I remember it distinctly. Were standing by some flowering bushes. He was clad in bicyclist clothing. I said that I would marry again only for health insurance. He said he had a fairly good plan. In short, men who love me do it up front without my expecting anything of the sort. Okay. Lisa set up me and Steve, which has ultimately failed. I'm sorry he's gone weird. Not that it's my fault he's gone weird. I'm just sad that he has. He used to be so direct and sensible. Oh, well. We all change with time. Some of us go whacky. I am still Andrea. He fails to respond. No longer Steven? He's entitled to change.

+ gorgeous sunny warm day
+ MULTIPLE asparagus spears emerging!
+ finally managed to book 2/3 of my birthday trip flights
- something in how I configure my browser means I cannot interact with the airline website and must do everything on the library computers
- I bragged to my therapist yesterday about how productive and upbeat I am now that it's properly spring and today I think my everything is made of molasses

If, in sixty-five years God has not manifested itself in my life in any way that cannot be attributed to other causes, even if logic can't prove a negative, I am now an atheist, hated by all foolish stupid Believers. Jews, Chistians Mormons, Idiots All.

On Sunday, we had Ny's Online Thing. (Wake. Memorial.)

It was very good; full of singing and poetry and science facts and art and memories and sadnesses. and made me sort of/almost cry at various time periods, but because I was the Official Zoom Host I felt like I couldn't, like, take breaks, which is of course Never True. Once it finished, I ended up with a dyspeptic-and-congestion-related headache that took a bit to clear out, but it did eventually.

There were a thousand small details that I didn't quite think of, which makes sense because generally I'm not the one hosting large Zooms, or, for that matter, organizing memorials. And also, the sad.

The general inchoate "we" of the Discord have been hashing out ethical stuff about posting and/or linking to the video of the memorial. Because, it was a semi-public event, but also private, and the simultaneous chat in particular had a lot of linking up wallet names and online handles that is perfectly fine in a semi-private space, but less so in the wider world. And yet, one of the things I appreciated about Ny was that she created a life where she could, to the extent possible, be as much herself as she could, out loud, and I don't want her life's celebration muffled.

But, we didn't quite make it clear that it might be posted later, or ask people if they were OK with it being posted (see above re: small details), and in the general sense, we're fans of opt-in rather than opt-out. So we've come to a (current) compromise. I am quite positive there will be further movement later. (For all I know, someone'll make it a Project to ask everyone who was there if they're OK with it being public, or if they'd like their identities ambiguated. I'm sure not doing it, though, because I have overdue client notes to write.) But anyway, for now, we're not sending out the chat, but will send out the video. So!

If you're interested, either

a) email vicka about it, and she can send you the video. (vicka's the one with the Ny Page, which was where I originally found out about the dying-of-COVID part. Her email is findable on the wider andor pages.)

or b) PM me/comment here/email me/send me a carrier pigeon, and I can send you a link to the video, which is on Mega, which is how I got it to vicka because I decided I wasn't up to figuring out SCP. I'm not including the chat there because of the aforementioned linkages.

Or c) gingicat is, soon, going to post the link to the announce-list, if you're on that.

Yesterday we buried Crystal's body, out in the backyard near where we buried Fezziwig's. This involved a bit of struggling to find his burial spot, as the stone we placed for it had got overgrown and the statue on top was lost beneath myrtle. But we did find it, by poking at the ground with the shovel until it hit rock. And then digging, with an alarming sound of crackling wood that we worried was my breaking the shovel. In hindsight, I was probably crackling the many roots of trees underneath.

We've set one of the potted plants on top to serve as a marker, until such time as we can get a flat stone and maybe another mouse statue. It's at least something to make sure that if any raccoons or other creatures smell the disturbed dirt they're going to find it too much bother to fuss with. And we can look to pay attention to the three mice we have as pets remaining.

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And now, friends, I bring you the end of the 4th of July at HersheyPark.

We were not where we wanted to be for the fireworks, but we weren't in a bad spot either.

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Folks were interested in the show, mostly, with the occasional check-in with friends on Small Internet.

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We were close to the arcade where we'd found that Star Wars pinball, which you can see closed up on the right there.

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It was a huge show, and it kept going on, with enough straggler fireworks set off long after the main show that it got funny.

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Here's a moment from the finale, though, that also shows off how close we were to some of the boring services buildings.

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We were finally convinced the fireworks were over, and someone came in through the Employee gate, and then, you know, as we were walking away there were a couple straggler fireworks yet.

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One last picture of Milton Hershey, a beacon in the darkness.

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Getting back here to the entrance plaza here's that carousel we worked so hard to get to.

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And there it is put to bed.

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A last look at the park entrance, although there was still the gift shop ...

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And that's what the gift shop looks like. The HP wheel there I believe rotated liek a Ferris wheel.

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And, oh yeah, we ran across some history on one of the plaques leaving, so there it is.

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Trivia: Zuider Zee reclamation required building an earthen dam over seventeen miles long. Source: Engineering in History, Richard Shelton Kirby, Sidnney Withington, Arthur Burr Darling, Frederick Gridley Kilgour.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 89: Moon Plant!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Mad sciencey type trying to make Popeye the first man in space for like the fifth time!

Hey did you know what happens when two highly ADHD nerds get engaged?

They forget to tell people for ages and then drop it into casual conversation and are confused that people are shocked. So uh. Yeah. Tuesday and I are gonna get married sometime!

I am not particularly good at dramatic romantic gestures, and I'm definitely not good at like. Sharing romantic things in my life with the rest of the world. There's a lot of things that make me nervous and weird about it. Tuesday doesn't make me nervous¹ though! They make me happy, over and over and again, and have been doing so for many years now. And are gonna do so for many years to come, is at least the plan! I'm very happy about it!!!

The most likely time for the wedding is "Iunno, maybe 2028?", for both obvious and non-obvious reasons. We're currently in an opposite-of-race with our respective younger siblings about who can get married last, which is very funny. Tuesday has rejected my offer of "okay but hear me out, let's do like twenty weddings" but then countered with "what about one wedding per person we want to invite?" because the two of us are in love with each other but also very much in love with the bit. You'll get accurate details about how many we actually plan to have closer to when we actually decide to have it. (them >.>)

We do intend to get photos at some point, but in the meantime just keep taking cute selfies of us at places --I'll drop a nice one that she took at Pinewoods last summer in the bottom of this post. I want to get them a pretty ring, but we're doing it slow to figure out something they actually want and would wear regularly. In the meantime we've got a lovely pair of matching fidget rings we got at the Rennfaire last October. I really like wearing mine!

I don't know what else to say here. It's 2026 and America is miserable. We're both queer and every day we don't get forcibly removed from the country is a success. We are joyful and happy together and we have families that like each others company --we've started overlapping our holidays in a way that feels real successful! We still don't live in the same place, but that's a longterm plan that we want to make happen, and I like thinking about the ways my life will be like when that happens. Sometimes I'm terrified to even believe I'm allowed to have a future. I'm terrified to try and think about what might happen because all of it is just overwhelming and scary and depressing.



....But at least we'll be fighting the scary stuff together. That's pretty cool.

~Sor (and Tuesday <3)
MOOP!

1: ke does make me weird, but that's definitely on the "pro" column :3

Got to a film at the Capital City Film Festival today, but no time to write up thoughts. They'll come. Promise. Meanwhile, our day at HersheyPark approaches its end:

A kiddie carousel that we went past and stopped in front of, I thought because bunnyhugger was taking time to appreciate. Turns out we had miscommunicated and she was looking at something else nearby.

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The center and the rounding boards for this carousel are done up as if wood slats which I have never seen on another ride like this; it really builds the attraction up.

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And here's what it looks like. I believe the ride took no adults so we couldn't have ridden it in any case.

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And here's the main carousel! We spent some of our precious last minutes hurrying back to the front of the park to get a final ride on this.

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A badge with numbers on it --- 3 and 91, it looks like --- on the inside of the horse I rode. I first noticed some horses had these on, I want to say, Kings Island's carousel and since then I reliably look for these signs of the original numbering and placement scheme.

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Center of the carousel but photographed at an extreme angle for the fun of it.

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And here's what it looks like staring out from the carousel's interior.

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Between waiting for Fahrenheit and rushing to the front of the park and hurrying to the back and my getting us lost trying to find Lightning Run, well, we went to Great Bear as a last ride of the night. And from here we got a view of Coal Crusher shut down for the end of hte night.

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Nice dramatic view of the steps down from Great Bear; Hershey is built into the hillside and I didn't photograph enough of the contours.

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Great Bear in the stillness of the night.

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And there's Comet, I believe also finished with rides for the night.

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And here's what we hoped to see! This is another fourth of July spent at an amusement park and we'd heard the show would be good.

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Trivia: The first dispute between church authorities in Rome and those in Alexandria about when to celebrate Easter was based on when the vernal equinox should be, Rome using Caesar's date of the 25th of March and Alexandria using the more astronomically correct 21st. Source: The Calendar: The 5000-Year Struggle to Align the Clock with the Heavens --- And What Happened to the Missing Ten Days, David Ewing Duncan.

Currently Reading: A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day, John Withington.

It's not as good as it was 35yrs. ago. But I'm still weeding w/o a headlamp. I haven't seen many stars in ages. I think this area overlit.

I am pausing in my dandelion destruction to note that I am performing it at nigh midnight. I think this intersection may be overlit.

THERE ARE AT LEAST THREE (3) TINY ASPARAGUS SPEARS POKING THEIR HEADS UP IN MY GARDEN!!!

I went up to grimly continue tearing out the god damn creeping charlie, and there were actual tiny asparagus stalks emerging! They aren't dead!

And the rhubarb is continuing to grow!

I am so pleased.

The waning crescent moon is rising. Dawn spring birds (the determined ones remaining here) sing. They used to be almost deafening. This place has changed for the uglier since I moved into this 1949 tract house in 1998. Traffic has multiplied by five including really loud big trucks (I know they're an economic necessity) and motorcycles, and this weird phenomenon of small cars rigged up to make huge unpleasant noise. This is not what I bargained for. No wonder I have artificial noise on 24/7 now. Ugliness seems to pervade all. And Arlington still allows car stereos at any decibels and frequency. This county will crawl up your ass over how you live, steal your belongings and projects of 30 yrs., but not protect you from thinking you're having a heart attack because some future Deaf Driver of America wants to project his car stereo's bass ability a block in advance. I no longer want to live here, where I've sunk my roots. I picked this house because it was a familiar shape, and was constructed to maximise good southern exposure. If you watch the sun through the year, it doesn't come in south windows much in summer, but in the winter, though the angle is low, it does wonders for heat. Good southern exposure means good gardening, too. It had to happen. There is a streaming channel devoted entirely to "The Beverly Hillbillies". I can relate to some aspects of that program. I can cook road kill (check for freshness), be grateful for the bugger's stupidity, season (as available) or not, and be grateful. The moon is barely visible between for contrails. The sun will soon drown her reflected beauty in the original flame. Wait. How did the sun ignite? Okay, I know someone's answered it and I don't care. Maybe I'll type more, or not. It's nothing special anyone, even me. It is a vanity to think that my thoughts are worth recording anywhere. I'm a parasite on society because no one gives me a chance. Got an office? I can fix it to run both more pleasantly and efficiently. Content employees are productive. Happy employees are 3x so. And happy. HaHa. I will cost little. What I recommend will be expensive short-term but profitable long term. Something 19-early20th century Broome County, NY. rich people understood: Your employees are people. You are not any better than they are, just more fortunate. Working for other people of current min d enlarged my knowledge of evil, well, immensely. I always thought that a business was to nake everyone participating in it a good living and a good standing. Okay, part-time students got exceptions. One of those part-time exceptions graduated to a manager position at another pet store in her home town. I helped her move there. I fledged a nestling, although she was much more than that before she wandered in. Clouds have obscured the moon.

I've come to a small turning in the road, metaphorically speaking. I've decided to quit newsblogging on Facebook, possibly permanently.

I am worn down by dealing with so much bad news all the time. When I worked long hours at newspapers, there was always something good in the mix, but now it's getting hard to find. And with the overflowing river of news these days, some days I work longer than I did at the papers, just to get through it and try to understand it all.

But there's more. In the last three months I have lost six people, some I've known for 30+ years, others all my life. A beloved older cousin, a talented and kind aunt, a teacher whom I will continue to learn from every time I open one of her books, two friends who always encouraged me (separately, in different ways) to be creative and innovative, and a third friend who challenged me to be as uniquely myself as she was uniquely herself. None of them were under 50, and all had rich full lives -- but the gaps they leave in the world are enormous, not just for me but for many others. And each death's loss and sadness get added to that which was here before, even if for some it was a relief at the end of long illness.

That's a lot. It would be a lot at any time, but it feels like more, now, because of all the horribleness going on -- ICE, the war with Iran, the Epstein entanglements and the many cruelties of this regime.

Also, nobody's paying me to newsblog. Not one no-longer-available cent. I've been doing it because it feeds my newsjunkieness, the reporter's need to know what's happening and tell others. It also ate my day, usually about six hours of it or more.

Enough.

I will still forward relevant articles (as long as I have arms and hands to type) but I'm not going to do the intense drop down into the zone any more, with multiple subject-categorized posts. I'd like to have a bit more life in my life than can be found behind a keyboard -- and have it be my own life, not one I'm looking at from the sidelines. I'll still write the Substack column, but leave it at that.

I will still be there, as I am here, just not as much every day.

And getting away from the keyboard serves my other life goal, which is to outlive the regime and the Occupant and his ilk (great non-swear-word for them) and have a good life doing it.

I just attended part of the online memorial for minoanmiss. While I was there, a couple of people talked about Ny, and read poetry. I disconnected after listening to one song, because listening to people sing over Zoom feels thin. There were some great photos of Ny, smiling.

Also, yesterday I went to shul with Adrian to say kaddish for my mother. Most of the service, including the singing, was in Hebrew, but I felt more of a connection there, I think because I was in a room full of people, not looking at boxes in a Zoom window.

California and some European countries are trying to ram age verification on the operating system level as you install or register it. To "protect the children".

This is not a field where you type in your age - they want some kind of identity check. Okay, how are you going to do that?

Are you going to give the companies that own the operating systems access to official government databases? Which ones? Passports? Driver's licenses? Social Security records? This would be a treasure trove for identity thieves and scammers. This might work for Apple, Google (Android) and Microsoft which are well heeled, monolithic corporations which have the funds, manpower and skill sets (maybe) to set up secure identity monitoring systems and loot them for profit and shovel ads at you (I'm looking at Windows 11 which tracks you to do just that) but again - secure systems have been hacked. Lots of times.

And even if they're not hacked - denial of service attacks can be easily arranged especially in times of conflict.

So the whole concept is technically a BAD IDEA.

Now, let's talk about this age verification. To set up my IRS account to clean up the f*ck up H&R Block did, I had to create an IRS account. I had to:

submit my email

submit my cellphone number

set up two factor confirmation with my computer and cellphone

go to a website with my cellphone and take a live picture of an appropriate identification (driver's license - both sides)

go to another site on my cellphone to take a live video feed of my face to verify my driver's license.

That's a lot of information. And it was a pain in the ass.

Now, to Linux. With the except of two distributions out of hundreds, NONE of the Linux distros are owned or managed by a corporation. Most distros are volunteer created, maintained and run. Donations are asked for - not demanded. The software is free. It's open source so anyone can examine the code and find problem or vulnerabilities. They don't track you. You own your computer. Only Red Hat and Ubuntu have some kind of organizational cash and skill set to create a centralized server for a secure identity database. Everyone else? Nope. All those operating systems will become illegal.

I am not fully convinced that the idea of the laws are put there to "protect the children" from inappropriate internet content. That's what parents are for. Content of this type of that is marketed towards children is relatively easy to find, trace and people who provide it can be arrested. Having companies hold sensitive, personal identification data on their servers to loot is just a money grab for them and any hacker inside or outside said companies. Why do I think this? Because Apple, Microsoft and Google have all been quiet about these new laws. You have to go to their walled garden (prison) and eat their shit. No choice. No privacy. No way out. They own your computer, your data, your software, your life.

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

Sunday --- last Sunday, I'm not forecasting this week's --- we went to bunny_hugger's parents. We had several objectives. Dyeing Easter eggs, for one. This we did very well, including my discovering that if you left an egg in the blue dye forever it would become impressively blue, like the blue you imagine an egg could be. This year we had a glitter-dye kit, where after the dying we'd also smear on some glue and roll it around in glitter making an egg that appears to be more sparkly than usual. This was also successful, but we didn't find any new glitter kits in buying stuff on clearance the days after. Next year might be less sparkly.

Next goal was to replace bunny_hugger's father's universal remote control with one that has fewer than 460 million buttons and --- this is not an exaggeration --- an on-remote menu screen that --- this, too, is not an exaggeration --- has led to bitter fights at more than one holiday. Someone at Best Buy years ago sold him the most fangled remote control they have, and nobody else is able to use it for things like 'turn the TV on' or 'turn the TV off' or 'start a DVD'. He finally yielded to her entreaties to let her buy a universal remote with a normal number of buttons and controls and set that up. So there was some time spent testing out different configurations for things. But this would fail: they have a sound bar connected to the TV, and we can't figure any way to configure the remote to send volume controls to the sound bar but not turn on the TV's audio, so the universal remote is not quite universal enough.

The thing that got bunny_hugger's father to accept he needed remote control help, though, that was resolved. He had accidentally turned on closed captioning on the TV, and couldn't figure how to turn it off, and nothing in the overcomplicated remote seemed to help. It turned out the TV's closed captions were not turned on, which is why they could not be turned off. They were turned on at the Amazon Fire Stick side of things, a separate device not covered by the Too Much Remote Control and governed by a different remote. This, it turned out, was easy to turn off. Also we learned it was very easy to turn them on by accident, which has to be what happened.

We also gave their dog a good hearty walk around the park. I was a little unsure it was wise for me to go along, since I was still getting over some kind of stomach bug, and I was still not feeling quite well. But I hadn't had an extremely urgent and sudden need to use the toilet in over a day and decided to chance it. And I wanted to see the park as it looks in one of its last springtimes; they're slated to renovate the area and tear out some dams that will completely change the waterways. That the place was also flooded, thanks to our getting 112 inches of rain the previous three days, also made it appealing. Here, I did just fine. Their dog, though, she had to poop far more than we're accustomed to; I even had to be dispatched to run back to the house and grab another bag for her droppings. No idea what that was about.

The one thing we missed was bunny_hugger's mother was having some problem with her iPad and reading books from the archive.org library. But she wouldn't let bunny_hugger take a good look at it to see what the trouble was.

Also, I made tea on their new induction stove for the first time. This after her father tried to explain how it was 'kind of complicated', which it's not. You need to use an induction-friendly tea kettle, yes, but the actual process is 'turn the burner on' and 'when the water is hot, pour it into your mug'. I hadn't had any tea last time I visited, and didn't the first couple times they offered this time, which I think led them to worry that I was afraid(?) or something(?) about the new process. Someday I'm just not going to be thirsty and it's going to cause no end of anxiety.

We were eating leftovers that they sent with us through to Thursday.

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My pictures continue coming nearer the end of our HersheyPark day. Just watch.

Coal Cracker is HersheyPark's log flume and it's the glorious old-style 70s log flume with the big carpeted roundtable for loading and unloading. You don't see that much anymore.

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This evokes so many happy memories to me of riding Great Adventure's log flume.

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I tried a panoramic photo before the people behind us got too upset by my dawdling.

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Two roller coasters, the Jolly Rancher Remix and the Storm Runner. We'd ride Storm Runner and figure we would come back to Jolly Rancher Remix, a boomerang coaster, when we had time, which we never did. The ride itself we could skip --- we'd been on it in its old incarnation and every boomerang coaster is identical --- but we were curious about this tunnel it passes through with Jolly Rancher-inspired odors. Yes, we missed the odor tunnel.

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Eating up so much of our time was the line for Fahrenheit, the more-than-vertical drop coaster that had some maintenance problem that sent it down. We kept getting test runs through just as we were ready to cut our losses, though.

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And it finally got running again! So we did get a ride and I think a front seat ride, but the time lost to it would cost us.

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Trivia: The first launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia was the 77th human spaceflight, 32 of which were made by American astronauts. Source: NASA's First Space Shuttle Astronaut Selection: Redefining the Right Stuff, David J Shayler, Colin Burgess. Based on this number they're not counting the launching of lunar modules as separate spaceflights, but they are counting the suborbital Mercury flights. They're not counting the X-15 flights that reached the Kármán line, and I don't know whether they're counting the Soyuz 18A flight that failed to reach orbit.

Currently Reading: A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day, John Withington.

Okay, dream cast, The Lion in Winter, Broadway/West End. Important caveat: must be currently working actors (no Marlon Brando, no Philip Seymour Hoffman, no Bette Davis).

Go!