Monday evening things

 * I've been working on the vest some again. As I said, I'm still a few inches short of dividing for the back and front, and I've used not quite all of the first skein (I have three, not sure it'll take more than two.)

 * I did do Meals on Wheels on Friday. The person I worked with (they send us out in pairs most of the time) wanted to drive and....she drove (in my opinion) too fast and without a lot of caution for our torn up streets. I mean, it was her suspension, but I also had to sit for a bit at home after getting home before I could think about lunch because I was a little nauseated. 

After that I went over and did a couple of samples. I tried to do more Saturday but the roofers had the whole lot full of vehicles and material so I just went home.

* I do find that the weekends in summer get long, especially with campus technically closed on Friday, and no one around and not much happening on Saturdays. I don't deal all that well with idleness and I think 2020 really broke my ability to be alone for long periods of time; even being able to talk for a few moments with someone helps (my colleague was in today; she wasn't last week because she and her husband decided that they had to change houses - the landlord for the rental they had been in was not attentive at all after their carport collapsed on their grill and mower - and they found a reasonably good place and spent last week moving.)

Saturday afternoon I HAD to get out, so I drove to the "Amish store" (jams and jellies and cheese, mostly) and got some cheese and a loaf of bread and a jar of spiced peaches. Really I need more places like that that are somewhat less than a half hour's drive, but are different and interesting and not where I go every day

(I saw some article online - and I am trying not to give it credence it doesn't deserve - that claimed women were "dull" because "they only go to work, the grocery store, home, and maybe to church" and honestly that's my life a lot of weeks. Then again - I'm 56 and have an injured knee, I can't paraglide even if I wanted to and I'm not really that big on "aimless" driving around. And frankly a lot of women don't go a lot of places because if it's not exactly UNSAFE, it can be unappealing at times - I have heard of women going into male-dominated spaces, like makerspaces or fan spaces, and immediately being gatekept, like "oh, you like Star Trek? Name all the episodes in TOS" or similar. So it's not *entirely* our fault if we're "dull") 

But yes, I do kind of live in the middle of ... not much. I mean, there's the casino, but I don't like gambling, and I don't fish or hunt, and I don't have kids to be involved in things, and those are the big three "things to do" here. There is some hiking, but it's not always wise to go alone, and it's also not wise to go out when it's in the upper 80s with dewpoints in the 70s - and also not fun. 

* I'm still reading on "All Clear." I admit I find it slightly anxiety producing reading? I mean, I know, it's Connie Willis so I assume everyone will live and things will be fixed and put right by the end of the novel, but there are so many near-misses and a lot of anxiety in several of the main characters (right now, the time travelers are worried because the "drop" that would allow them to get back to 2060 Oxford won't open, and they're afraid that something happened that killed the people back there, so no one exists to operate the "drop." And it also feels claustrophobic to contemplate that you have knowledge of the distant future, you lived there, and yet you have to pretend every minute of the day (except for a few rare moments when you're out of earshot of anyone but a fellow time traveler) that you don't know anything of the future. And right now, several of them have big worries that they may be causing "anomalies" - of course one of the paradoxes of time travel* is that you can't alter anything because it'll cause a "butterfly effect" and they're afraid they might be doing that, and so, maybe, they were what wiped out 2060 Oxford, because something happened to cause the UK to lose in WWII....as I said, I don't think Willis would write the story that way, but it's not super comfortable to read right now

 (*this is why I suspect time travel - either Quantum Leap or Connie Willis style - is not going to be possible.)

I dunno. I want to see this one through this time but I might have to intersperse it with something a little quieter; I found where I put my copy of Mississippian Beginnings (a semi-scholarly book about Native peoples of the Mississippian era/places (mostly the eastern Plains / Mississippi basin, and ranging mostly from about 500-1000 AD). It's a time period I've been interested in learning about for a while - about a decade ago I made the trip up to Spiro Mounds (though there's less there than there could be; they were essentially looted in the 1930s and the artifacts dispersed around to various museums, and a lot of what they have on display are actually reconstructions or copies). It's just interesting to me in a "how did they live" sense and in how different it would be from today (some authors argue that the human sacrifices done in some places and at some times, the people sacrificed went totally willingly to it, and I admit through my modern lens I find that a bit hard to accept, but whatever)

I also found my copy of "A History of Ordinary People" - about the same time period, but a broader geographic scope in the Americas - and I don't think I ever finished that one, so I might try to finish those two this summer.  

* Also in "I guess I never will tire of this sort of little plastic tat, even though I already have too much" I got a "mini whinnies" blindbag set from Breyer. I remember when I was a kid, the big Breyer horses were kind of the be-all toy for girls who liked horses (I never had any; I had a couple knockoffs that weren't Breyer, but I was also not into horses the way some girls were. But Breyers were EXPENSIVE and I guess the big ones still are). 

But these tiny ones are fun. They're maybe an inch and a half long:

 They come named. The dark brown horse is "Gwen," the grey is Iggy, and the red and white (paint? I think he's supposed to be a paint) is Ronnie. (And yes, if you turn them over, you can tell which ones are boy horses). They are kind of pretty little things, and I have a couple other small Breyers (but on a different scale; the next size up). Most of the fun, honestly, is opening the package to see which ones you got....I keep saying I should get more shelves for these sort of things. 

I wonder if part of this is that when I was a kid, a couple of my teachers had "treasure boxes" - not anything as nice as Breyer horses but they did have some of the small plastic animals like from farm sets - and if you did something particularly well, or were well behaved when other people weren't being so, sometimes you'd get to pick something from the box. And it was a nice little treat! And I maintain that there aren't enough nice little treats for adults, and we have to sometimes do way harder things than kids in school have to do...