It's getting closer...

I started the dropped stitches on the "One and Done" shawl today:

There's just the border left, and then a picot bind off (which takes longer, but looks nicer).

I am thinking about next projects. I should probably finish the various socks on the needles, and maybe the couple of almost-done hats, but I also have this yarn, which I want to make into a simple small shawl some time:

I have a lot of different options I could use for it, I will want to think about it.

(So apparently New Blogger won't allow you to post photos from Flickr? What am I even paying for Flickr Pro for then? Argh)

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Carl Reiner died today, there have been a lot of encomiums to him online - he seems to have been a genuinely nice guy from what I've read, supportive of people, and funny, of course.

One of my favorites is from someone on Twitter called David J. Roth:

"The fact that Carl Reiner hung out with the same buddies for the last 70-odd years of his life, just, like, eating deli sandwiches and trying to make each other laugh, is the most crystalline expression of "squad goals" I've ever seen. I just think it's great."

(Yes - he was friends with Mel Brooks and also with Sid Caesar. Apparently he and Brooks would watch "Jeopardy!" together in recent years and there's just something so wonderful about that to me)

And yeah, sigh, squad goals. I know I've said before I wish I had friends like that. (There are two women at church who have been friends for at least 60 years - grew up together, married local men, lived here their entire lives. They support each other a lot, especially now since one is a widow and the other's husband is unwell).

Sometimes I wonder if something failed in my generation - if we were too mobile or something - to have those kind of lifelong friends. (Or if it's a failing in me, or if maybe I just was unlucky in how my life played out, in that I moved enough and at critical times. It's very hard to make friends, I think, once you're over 30 or so: everyone is too busy and also people get very fossilized (?) into a belief system and sometimes it's hard)

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Little change in plans; instead of G. and me delivering today, it was Mike and me. That was good, though, I like Mike and also like me he is a quiet person and doesn't always need to be talking. And while I like talking....these days I find too much talking overwhelms me a little after a while. (It is going to take me a while to be back out in public again once it's safe/once I have to go. Too many people).

(It's hard to find the sweet spot of human contact. Many days now it's way too little, but back in the before-times, it was often too much for me and I couldn't wait to get home where it was quiet.)

One more day of this. I will say it kind of eats a bite out of the middle of the day - I go down there at 10:30 and it can take from 45 minutes to an hour to deliver all the meals, and then once I get home I have to scrounge up some lunch for me....

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Finished Kolata's book on the flu. It was not as harrowing as I feared it might be - most of the book is NOT about the 1918 flu specifically; it's either about the "swine flu" of 1976 (which I just barely remember) or the actual search for remnants of the 1918 flu in preserved tissues or bodies buried in permafrost so it could be sequenced. I think Kolata wrote the book before the 2009  H1N1 outbreak when people realized "cytokine storms" were a thing (and they may be a thing now in our current troubles, or the fact that apparently in some people the coronavirus causes something like a clotting disorder where the blood goes nuts and clots - I wonder if there's a hemagglutinin gene in the thing like there is in some influenzas).

I stared another book, on the history of ecology in the US and while I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to learn it....well, some of the early "natural historians" were fairly racist, especially in re: Native peoples. (One of the naturalists talked about setting aside most of northern Canada as a giant park, and I guess encouraging the Native folk to move there, and so they could be, "the noblest animal of the vast preserve" and big oof, as the cool kids say now.

(I mean, yes: all humans are technically animals. But when you are referring to a group you do not belong to, one that has historically been pushed aside and oppressed, as "noble animals," that's....yeah, yikes)

There were also people who were weirdly into eugenics and the like who were on the fringes of it, and that is Not Cool, but then again, I suspect 120 years ago there were a lot of fields that believed a lot of Not Cool stuff.

(Interestingly, early on, women were....perhaps more welcome in botany/ecology than some fields? Because they were seen as "softer" I guess, than geology or physics is.)

I will say that ecology is still - or at least was up to about 10 years ago when I last went to the very big conferences - exceptionally white, and it makes me wonder what perspectives we are missing. (I do remember one Afro-Caribbean woman from an ESA conference who spoke, but I would be hard-pressed to name very many people).

I don't know if that's because of exclusion the past and perhaps currently, or if particularly promising students in certain groups were persuaded to go into lab or medical science (if someone had thrown $50,000 at me to do a Ph.D. in some lab thing, I probably would have, even though the field is my real love and my lab technique is kind of crappy - I suppose you would have to have good lab technique for it to be offered). Or if it's just a realization that better money comes from medical or lab sciences. Being an ecologist is generally not that remunerative and I admit now, especially, I read of the coming "higher ed apocalypse" and wonder what earthly good I would be to anyone if I couldn't be teaching; most ecology skills are pretty specialized and are not that useful to industry.

For "fun" reading (before bed) I am trading off between The Castle of Llyr (I plan to finish that whole series this summer if I can) and a book on prehistory called "Home" - where the author points out that humans lived much more settled and "civilized" lives than was once assumed, even quite early in the Paleolithic.

I don't know, I just like trying to imagine what life would be like. Much less comfortable, I am sure - but maybe if you don't have comforts and never had them you don't miss them? And there might be other comforts - far fewer worries than modern people have (well, we don't have to worry about large predatory animals, and most of us in North America need not worry about starving) and maybe more closeness of clan?

You'd have to have a high tolerance for dirt and bugs and parasites, that's for sure. Though again, I suppose you get used to that. (Please God that we won't have to, though I keep thinking of another quotation I read somewhere, about a woman in Britain during the period of time the Romans left, and how it would have gone from a fairly orderly - if perhaps, oppressive of the native Britons - life with currency and jobs and something like cities to a very rural, barter-based economy where you had to scrabble to either grow enough food or hunt enough food or have something worth bartering for enough food....and I admit at the worst if the epidemic I look around and go "just how bad is the economy going to get?")

But it's nice to imagine that even the so-called Stone Age people may have had their happinesses and their comforts in life, even if they are very different than the happiness and comfort we seek (though some, I suspect, are not so different: being warm, having sufficient food, being close to ones you love...)