mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
mdlbear ([personal profile] mdlbear) wrote2025-11-30 08:43 pm
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Done Since 2025-11-23

Mixed. A couple of minor high points, including a very nice Thanksgiving (observed) dinner yesterday evening, but enough lows to more than compensate, plus enough problems with both my health, and my abject failure to get those across during my appointment Friday morning, to throw me into a tailspin that I still haven't fully recovered from. Oh, and Leslie Fish died yesterday. There's another bit storythere, too, but it'll wait for another day.

Three walks. One guitar practice, Friday, but after spending the day in a funk it lifted my spirits a litte, as did a little more Dutch on Duolingo. I take what I can get. The top quote of the week, from Paradox of hedonism - Wikipedia:

Happiness is like a cat, if you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.

Apparently the same thing applies to sleep. But it's only 20:48, so I have two hours, more or less, before I have to not-try to put that into practice. If the cats will let me. But I'll stop here, incoherent as this post is, because between now and then I have to compose an email to my doctors. (Or at least their clinic. It's complicated, and a large part of Friday's trainwreck was because I didn't know how complicated it had gotten while I wasn't looking.)

Why Nature will not allow the use of generative AI in images and video So apparently Nature abhors AI.

How about ending with The Illustrated Version of “Alice’s Restaurant”?

Notes & links, as usual )

madfilkentist: Pensock, the penguin puppet and one-time MASSFILCscot. (Pensock)
madfilkentist ([personal profile] madfilkentist) wrote in [community profile] filk2025-11-30 11:31 am

Sad news

Leslie Fish died yesterday.
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billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2025-11-29 11:06 pm

Snow, Tree, and Fish

It has snowed a lot here today. A ruler in the back yard carried by younger child measured in excess of six inches at around 6 PM. It is still snowing now. Happily, the snow is supposed to clear out by 6 AM which means that the roads should be clear for K to take her bus back down to Ball State for Monday classes. All I have to do is get her to the pickup site before noon. Assuming that I can get out of the as-yet-unshovelled driveway...

The tree was purchased and placed in its stand yesterday. Late today, the lights and ornaments were added and it is very pretty. We are not sure what Calvin the Very Hungry Dog is going to make of the tree, but I am sure that we will find out. I really wanted to get this done this weekend, because I wanted K to be able to help decorate and I didn't want to wait to get a tree for another two weeks. And so it is done. :)

The news came down the line yesterday that Leslie Fish was very ill and in home hospice, followed today by the news that she had passed. I was never particularly close to her for a wide variety of reasons, none of which were particularly anyone's fault. Nor was I likely to have ever agreed with her politics in general, although I might have agreed with one thing or another at one time or another. This is somewhat akin to two blind squirrels discovering the same acorn.

But there was music. So *much* music! And when Off Centaur Publications was being a tremendous force in the filking community and being built on the contributions of so *many* different people, well, to filk Kipling, "It was Fish, Fish, Fish." And that made a difference in my life and that of many other people. She wrote a lot of songs and some of them were great ones.

Maybe that's not a bad way to be remembered.
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billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2025-11-28 09:58 pm
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Black Friday Shopping

Gretchen hopped in the car with me and we headed out to get lunch and after that to the La-Z-boy store out in Schaumburg. This required driving past Woodfield Mall which was closer than I wanted to be today. Traffic trying to get in was fantastically backed up. The furniture store, on the other hand, had fairly light traffic. Gretchen had done research on-line looking for a suitable chair and had narrowed it down to two models. Since the chair was for Gretchen, this seemed fair.

We were looking for a chair that was correctly sized and built for Gretchen to be able to sit comfortably and get in and out of without difficulty. One of the two models turned out to be the correct one, so it is now on order and will show up eventually in a fabric that should suit our needs.

Once we got home, I ran out to Sam's Club to pick up hamburger for meat loaf tomorrow. Then Gretchen and I went to Home Depot where I picked out a suitable Christmas tree. It is reasonably tall, but narrow, which seems to be how they are coming lately. This may be advantageous. We'll see. :)

And that was quite *enough* shopping for Black Friday.

Tomorrow, Snowmageddon is supposed to occur. We'll see how it goes. If nothing else, I have two teenagers here to help shovel...
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billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2025-11-27 10:29 pm
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Thanksgiving

It was a lovely day. Cold and windy, but lovely inside due to the magic of central heating.

The entire family participated in preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Julie tried out a new bread recipe that we all like a lot. K helped get the turkey into the oven. I made the stuffing. Gretchen made the mashed potatoes, apple salad, and the cranberry orange relish (the last with help from Julie). And we all ate too much.

There are leftovers. Tons of leftovers. If only I had the recipe for potato pancakes from T-Bob's...

I hope that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, wherever you are!
mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)
mdlbear ([personal profile] mdlbear) wrote2025-11-27 05:52 pm
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Thankful Thanksgiving Thursday

Today being (US)Thanksgiving, I will try to extend this back over the last year, more-or-less. I am thankful for...

  • Having survived what is now almost 13 months here in the Netherlands, making this my second Thanksgiving here. (And my fifth without Colleen, for which I am NOT thankful, but sad.)
  • Finally having gotten the kitchen and other parts of the house re-stocked to a useable level, if not exactly where we left off.
  • 220V house wiring, for electric kettles, other appliances, and vehicles.
  • Frame.work.
  • Having successfully signed up for health insurance and gotten reasonably-priced health care. Including for the cats, who don't have insurance.
  • While I'm on that subject, a vet who makes house calls.
  • Having, with N, started our (required for immigration) business, and thanks mainly to N's book, actually made some money at it.
  • Living in a country that has both good public transit, and excellent bike paths (which work just fine for mobility scooters).
  • (Tin)Lizzy and Scarlett-the-carlet, our folding mobility scooter and micro-car respectively.
  • Fuzzy blankets. NO thanks for whatever health problem makes me feel cold in the evening no matter what the ambient temperature.
  • Finally getting screen rotation working on my Frame.work convertible laptop. Whether it's automatic depends on the window manager, and possibly the phase of the moon. But it should be usable.
  • Walks, and occasionally st/rolls.
  • Compression socks. (No thanks for the condition they're supposed to improve.)
  • Hydrocortizone ointment.
  • The filk community.

Last year's Thanksgiving entry is mostly still applicable, but a few plans for what was then the coming year have, predictably, gone by the wayside again, and my health isn't holding up as well as I would like. I'd be thankful for executive function if I had any. I'll be thankful for good drugs once we get my BP and psych meds figured out.

Again, happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it. (That includes us, but we're having the feast on Saturday to accommodate j's school schedule. Including the annual American Thanksgiving celebration in Leiden,)

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billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2025-11-26 10:35 pm
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Thanksgiving Break

K caught the bus home from Ball State today. It probably would have been better if the bus had run yesterday, given that the dorms closed at 9 AM this morning, but leaving at noon was better than the original 3 PM departure that they had planned. (I suggested that K make some phone calls asking about where she was supposed to be after leaving the dorm at 9 AM until the bus left at 3 PM. This resulted in changes. "You mean there are no classes on Wednesday?" "Nope.")

Anyway, K is now home, has collected her belated birthday presents (including a Neil Caffrey hat) and is now engaging in a "Back to the Future" marathon with Julie.

This is good. :)
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billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2025-11-25 10:18 pm
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Restaurant Trial

Our usual Chinese takeout place is closed on Tuesdays and I felt like having Chinese food tonight, so I ordered in from a different place that I've been wanting to try. It was pretty good. I was able to get orange beef there, which I haven't had in quite a while. It was mostly soggy, which is the hazard of not getting it at a sit-down place, but it was still tasty.

They also have assorted moo-shu dishes, so I will be trying one of those next time. :)
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billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2025-11-24 09:35 pm
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Calvin non grata

We had managed to avoid more puppy poop events in the house for some time, but today was a complete failure. I fed the dogs, we ate our dinner, and then I let the dogs out in the yard. Calvin peed, then came in and drank a lot of water. We had decided to try leaving him untethered in the house, as he'd behaved reasonably well the night before. This turned out to be a mistake, because immediately after getting his drink, he pooped in the living room again. Not once, but twice.

I tossed him in his kennel, dragged the kennel to the living room, and spent the time cleaning up the poop yelling at the dog, and waving fouled toilet paper at him in the kennel. (I have taken to trying to wipe the mess up with toilet paper, because I can flush the whole thing and it will leave the premises.) Then I cleaned it up with the new enzyme spray that Bill Sutton recommended.

Gretchen will try spending more time in the living room with Calvin in the hope that this will convince him that the living room is part of the house and not for relieving himself.

This would not be *nearly* so aggravating if the dog had not been outside immediately before the incident.

*sigh*
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billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2025-11-23 04:43 pm
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Newly Minted

I went upstairs to do some light cleaning and putting things away. Part of this was making a box of dead electronics to go to recycling. As I was tossing things into that box, I found my old laptop that I had given to K and that she had given back to me well before she left for college. The power brick was with it, so I figured I'd plug it in and see what shape it was in.

Happily, it powered up and took a charge, so that was a good start. But it turns out this laptop is just a wee bit too old to be upgraded to Windows 11 and with only 8 GB of RAM and no further expansion capabilities, probably not worth fighting to upgrade. It is, however, a perfectly fine machine for certain purposes.

So I have installed Linux Mint on it, which is my first time doing this. (I have Zorin OS on a much older laptop that I mostly haven't touched in years. I looked at Zorin first and decided that Mint would be a better choice.)

The install was easy, although I had to use a different tool than the one they had suggested to make the bootable USB stick for the install. Happily, Rufus works for this.

And now, everything is up and running and I'm able to access the Internet and even post updates.

Like this one. :)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
mdlbear ([personal profile] mdlbear) wrote2025-11-23 01:08 pm
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Done Since 2025-11-16

I had a lot of trouble getting things done this week. That may have been due in part to having gone out of the house three times (for a doctor's appointment, labs, and picking up drugs at the pharmacy). Each of which burns up two or three hours, and I seem to have trouble switching gears after that. Or maybe I'm just lazy.

Thursday I let the cats out of my room, which may have been a mistake. Picking Bronx up afterward and trying to carry him upstairs to put him back was definitely a mistake, and a firm reminder to keep one hand on the banister every damned time. Fortunately, I got away with it -- this time.

I've started using compression socks; they seem to help somewhat with the edema, but it's still there and doesn't seem much improved in the morning after not wearing the socks at night. Well, I have another appointment this coming Friday.

Linkies: Record Numbers of Younger Women Want to Leave the U.S. -- if you're surprised, you may be reading the wrong blog. Also, Satellite images reveal the fastest Antarctic glacier retreat ever. On the other hand, it seems that A Poem Is All You Need to Jailbreak a chatbot.

And on the gripping hand, here's a filk adjacent cat video: Bohemian Catsody.

Notes & links, as usual )

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billroper ([personal profile] billroper) wrote2025-11-22 10:18 pm
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Lack of Support

I am scheduled to go see the podiatrist on Wednesday for a follow-up visit for the new orthotics that I got last month. That is good, because these things are killing me and today is especially bad.

The problem is that I'm simply not getting enough support. Now I think he thought there was a good chance that these were going to be insufficiently supportive, but he didn't want to err in the opposite direction.

He has not. They are "sort of" ok, but today everything is hurting from the hips on down, because I've been out walking around and that actually requires, well, support.

After the follow-up, I may hand these orthotics back to him and switch to the standard supports that come with these shoes that I can install. They normally work pretty well for two or three months and then I've just caved in the shoes and it's time to start with a new pair.

But I suspect that things will hurt less.