busy week starts

 Thursday I leave town, but first I have to 

- finish sorting 12 soil samples (I got 4 done today, there are 12 left)

- this afternoon was Budget Committee

- this evening was CWF

- tomorrow night is the program at the museum

- Wednesday night is board meeting at church.

AND I have to pack, AND I have to probably mow my lawn before I leave. Tentatively, I do the packing Wednesday afternoon (if I can force myself to do eight samples tomorrow, I only would have to work Wednesday morning) and then maybe mow the lawn EARLY Thursday, shower, and get on the road. 

 Over the weekend I cleaned house - "enough" I guess. My house will never be uncluttered, that's not who I am as much as I might wish it to be (I like my stuff even as I wish my house were"barren" enough people could come over on short notice without me panicking). But at least all the hardsurface floors have been vacuumed and wetmopped, and I did some dusting, and I put some stuff away.

Tonight I did get a bit more done on the Book Lover's Mitts:

 I finished the base of the thumb gusset (on the left) and it's on a stitch holder until the upper part of the hand is done. 

I also have to start thinking projects; there's some yarn I will need to wind off for them. 

A day out

 I needed it. I decided, after successfully grabbing my gradebooks late last night (when Canvas came back), that I could take a day and go.

I went to Farmersville, which an interesting little old town in north Texas. It has really narrow sidewalks that are well elevated (several steps up) from the street level; I am guessing that goes back to the days when the roads were dirt and could get muddy and also have horse manure in them, people would prefer to walk up above that.

And some of the buildings have odd old features. One of the shops I went in (for the first time today) had a WELL in the middle of the shop:

 Yes, they invite people to toss a coin in and make a wish (there's a penny bucket, but it was empty, perhaps because pennies are getting scarce).

And yes, superstitious, maybe, but I dug out a quarter I got in change and threw it in there and heard the plink and made a wish. No I am not telling you what it was; it won't come true if I do. 

My main reason was to go to the yarn shop. I did stop there first (needed a restroom) and bought a skein of yarn, but I needed lunch so after I paid for that I went to the barbecue place I stopped at in December when I passed through there on my way to the train station

I considered getting a "more healthful" side with my pulled pork but before I ordered I saw one of the cooks dishing up the mac and cheese, and it looked SO GOOD I got that instead. (It was really good)

 And I splurged on a grape Crush (in a glass bottle, with real sugar). I've not had or even SEEN Grape Crush in years. And yes, it tasted good to me.

 I also went around to some of the little shops. I got some birthday presents for my mom - a little art-glass nightlight that plugs into a socket, and one of those Swedish "dishcloths," and a fancy soap and new little nail brush (for gardening; the soap is lemon and basil scented). Up there, I will get her a gift certificate from the garden center she likes. So that's sorted, too.

One of the shops had a shop cat who came and yelled at me (but then rubbed her face on my lower legs). I put my hand down to see if she wanted to be petted but she seemed not to be so I didn't try (both as a "don't violate consent, of even a non-human being" but also because I didn't want to get scratched). 

Her name is Delilah, the shop owner told me.

 And I did go back to the yarn store. Bought another skein of sockyarn (Madtosh, which has occasionally disappointed me in the dyejob not being consistent throughout the skein.....but it also has a holographic glitter thread running through and I am a sucker for sock yarns with sparkle) and a skein of a sportweight Malabrigo for mitts; the color is called "sea slug" and it has bright orangish red speckles on it.

(The yarn I bought previously, on the left in this photo, is from a dyer who has given up dyeing, I have a pair of socks on the needles of one of her yarns; the color of this one is called "Lilo and Stitch" and I guess I can see the bright, saturated "cartoon" and "Hawaii" colors, and anyway, it's one of my favorite Disney movies, so)

 Really, Farmersville isn't THAT far. It's just over an hour, and it feels closer than McKinney does, partly because the last time I went to McKinney (more than 10 years ago) the traffic was such a nightmare; to get to Farmersville it's a pretty straight shot on what are effectively farm to market roads, so it's much less traffic and the drivers are less aggressive. 

I also stopped at Albertson's on the way home. I'm only here for about another week (before I go visit my mom) but I still needed milk and I needed to plan a meal for Sunday because we all decided that trying to go out after church on Mother's Day was probably not the best idea (also, I am sure some of the women with children who live close to them have plans). 

But yeah, I just needed to get out of town for a bit.  

well, this happened

Update: shortly after 10 pm, Canvas came back. I IMMEDIATELY downloaded my gradebooks onto my personal (home) laptop and then e-mailed copies to my campus address. So now I'm safe even if the jerkos take it down again; literally every other document I had on there I have a copy of on my hard drive on my office computer. 

 

Gonna take a bit for me to calm down enough to sleep though 

 

 

 I managed to get eight samples sorted today; that leaves sixteen. I'm not sure I'll be able to finish them in time, still, and eight is.....it's a lot. I'm mentally fried.

 But also from something else.

Taking a break midafternoon and checking bluesky, one of my mutuals sent me a screenshot of a ransomware page that someone ELSE posted showing up instead of their (student) Canvas page. She asked if my campus got hit. I said "I don't think so, I entered final exam grades like an hour ago, but let me check"

 

Uh oh. A "we are down for routine management" page (which is in fact a lie)  but at least it wasn't the (pretty clearly to me) phishing attempt page (which said something like "click here and enter your credentials to unlock Canvas") that the person screenshotted.

 

But. I had not downloaded my most recent gradebook; I think midterms is the most recent one I have. Yes, yes, I know you need to do that but I have SO MUCH to remember and so much to do that I forgot. I'm not sure how I recover from this if Instructure can't bring it back - I don't think my campus has cloud backups. So I'm stuck if it doesn't come back. Grades are due Tuesday - I was planning to submit them Monday, and while I remember what everyone in my smallest class earned, I don't for my other two classes. In some cases, I'm pretty sure - I remember who earned As and I remember a D and an F student (someone who quit showing up mid February). But actually reconstructing a gradebook would be difficult, especially since I've handed back papers and exams.

Best I can do, I think, if I have to, is go on "vibes" based off the midterms and my memory of recent performance, and hope if I give too low of a grade to anyone they can successfully grieve it (=kept their old papers I handed back)

So, that, on top of being tired from all the soil sorting, I kind of want to scream. 

I'm STILL going to the yarn sop in Farmersville tomorrow. I will run into campus first (I can't really leave here much before 10; the shop doesn't open until 11) and hope that Canvas came back so I can download my gradebooks. 

But I guess - MORE COGNITIVE LOAD, YAY - I have to set myself reminders from now until I retire to down load it every two weeks incase some jerkos decide to try to extort either the tech company (Instructure) or thousands of students (with the phishing page) again.

 

We really ARE a scam-based economy in large part now; being honest feels like you're just waiting to be a victim, but God help me, I cannot do otherwise.  

exams are done

 ....I'm just tired. One was machine graded, but the second one was my largest class and I just wanted them done; I worked from a bit before 1 pm until after 4 but I got them done and the grades loaded. This was a pretty good class; I think most people will be happy with what they earned.

I added a couple rounds to the Moon Moth sweater but I'm STILL not up to the color work. Tomorrow I need to get back to research so I am going to try to spend most of the day there, and then tomorrow evening is the AAUW dinner out.

I tentatively have plans Friday to go to Yarn and You. Yes, it's over an hour away, but I've not done a lot for fun this spring and I really need the chance to get out of town. One thing I've noticed since the pandemic is how SMALL my town feels to me, it feels almost like a trap - drive three miles any direction and you're at the edge of town, just pasture land or things like fields of solar panels. (And as I said: our downtown is almost dead at this point. I doubt, given the economy, we'll get anything much new EVEN IF it becomes prohibitively expensive to drive places; people will just order online and, I guess, pay the higher shipping rates)

But for now, I'm just tired; this was in some ways a long semester and at times a frustrating one. 

The semester's end

 This afternoon I was thinking how different the end of the school year is if you teach as an adult, than what I remember as a kid when I was a student.

This is the busiest and most tiring time for me: giving exams, grading them, totalling up grades, making sure I've done it right and remembered to do things, like, dropping the lowest lab grade like I promised the students I would. 

But also, there's a lot of additional stuff, people needing things from me. Someone had to make up an hourly exam they had missed, they missed the first appointment and I gave them another (I am perhaps too generous but this is someone with accommodations for some mental health issues and I don't want to add to their anxiety, even if it makes *my* life harder). Another person who wanted to make up a lab quiz they missed (this is permitted) but they never showed up today and have not e-mailed me. And the person looking to redeem the I? Isn't going to do it. They said they had a transmissible illness and okay, fine, but I can't let them redeem it after this semester is over (those are the rules) and I am NOT in this case going and trying to talk an administrator into letting them; I tried that more than a decade ago with someone who demonstrably COULD NOT come back (extended cardiac rehab after having to have a congenital issue fixed on an emergency basis) and I darn near got my head ripped off (though the admin relented when I wrote a letter explaining and had my department chair sign it). This person is mostly just avoidant, and I recognize that as someone who tends to be avoidant, but I'm not at all sure it's my problem now when they had months they could have dealt with it, and in fact, they had two or three instances where they said they were coming in and then something "came up" at the last minute.

So yeah, I'm pretty worn out, and also trying to work on the research I hadn't had time to do. And I don't deal well at all with sudden schedule changes like that, where I stop doing things one way and do them a different way. I recognize that and yeah it's silly, but it also messes with my brain wiring to change on a dime how I do things. 

Thinking back to K-12, though - well, I always think of the line from "Square Meals" that went something like "no matter how miserable it actually was, the farther you get from childhood, the better it looks" and yeah, I mainly remember the Big Countdown to the last day, and doing things like taking home art projects that had been up on display, or gathering up the textbooks to turn them back in (and removing the brown-paper-bag book covers I always made for them, it was recommended we did that, to keep the covers nice).

And cleaning out our lockers, and in the years we had gym clothes (Junior high, where it was daily, rather than once a week like in the lower grades) taking them home and *leaving them at home* (I hated the gym clothes; they never fit well and they were uncomfortable; the shorts were too short). 

And of course there was the anticipation of summer - whole days to do what you wanted! Making plans to play with friends! Getting to watch cartoons all day (or, well, the part of the day they were on - we didn't have cable and there were only 2 channels that showed cartoons on weekdays). Running around outside. Not having to do homework. And for me: not having to deal with the kids who bullied me. 

And some years there was day camp for a few weeks, which was fun, and there was the annual town-wide ice cream social, and some years we went berry-picking to make jam.

And the very last day of school - some years the school bus driver (A couple years he was one of the scions of a longtime, well respected family in town, and he was a good driver and was nice, I don't think he was a grandfather but he was grandfather age) took the route IN REVERSE so we saw parts of it we never saw, and the kids who normally got dropped off last got dropped off first, and it was actually kind of fun and neat because it was different.

(And it occurs to me: maybe one of the things that gives me malaise is that I don't have enough simple little "different" things in my life right now, given that I kind of live surrounded by "nothing," so there's nowhere much to go and see or do different things. A little while back I went to the new Aldi and it was surprisingly enjoyable - I do think I haven't done enough that's even a little different and I wound up in a rut. And I don't know how to avoid it, as I said it's hard to find things here in town - and given what's going on in the world, I suspect I'm going to have to cut back on gasoline usage as prices spike up)

 I was also driving home today from the Budget Meeting, and passed one of the local restaurants, and saw a couple young teen girls *skipping* together out to the car (Well, fsvo "young" - they were probably 16) and I wondered to myself if part of aging is losing the capacity for that kind of simple delight. I mean, I could not skip like that now (not physically, I don't trust my knee not to buckle on me with that kind of a jump) but also I don't.....tend to FEEL that kind of easy delight any more. And I don't know how to get it back. Or maybe I actually never had it and I'm misremembering? It's just, sometimes these days I feel a lack, and I wonder how to get what it feels like I am missing.  

restarting a project

 It was a long day today. I got six of the samples sorted (I have 24 more to do, though) and by the end I was just really tired and sick of doing it, but I powered through. It's unlikely I will be able to do any tomorrow - there's an exam to give and grade, and a student is supposed to be coming in to redeem an incomplete, and then I have the second Budget Committee (this is for church) meeting in the afternoon.

Also, midday got a little sad news: the chemistry teacher (Ms Fiedler) at my prep school passed away. I admit I had not thought of her in a long time (and apparently she was in a nursing home; she was in her late 80s), but it's another person from my past who's gone.

She was a good teacher; I was a bit ahead of my college classmates in my chemistry knowledge despite only having had "basic" and not AP chemistry.

When I got home, I mowed the lawn and trimmed back some of the shrubs. That second part is harder now because the city no longer will pick up cut brush (once upon a time they would do it once a month) and you have to take it somewhere to drop it off. AND you're not supposed to put it in your rollcart. I have a pile at the back of my backyard where i'm going to have to hire someone to haul it off. I probably just have to come up off the money nnd hire a landscaper to cut and remove it all; I don't have time and stamina.

And then another piece of hard-sad news: the local news recounted a story of a man arrested for animal cruelty, and they described fairly graphically what he did (it involved a cat dying as a result of his cruelty) and I admit that hit me badly and made me sad. 

The world is a hard place and has a lot of people who choose evil in it.

The project I restarted? I had been thinking again about the Moon Moth sweater - a two-color sweater with a colorwork moth on the front, and phases of the moon on the sleeves. I had started it a while back (it is sort of an oyster color with a dark purplish blue as the contrast color). I only got the first seventy rounds done on the body - all knit plain - and then got distracted by other things. I kept thinking I needed to get back to it but sometimes inertia is hard to break. But tonight I managed to dig it out and because of how I had stuffed it in a bag, a few stitches had dropped and i had to fix that FIRST.

I still have a couple rounds to go before I get to start the colorwork...but it does feel kind of good to work on a big project again, and maybe I can force myself to make more time for it this summer, since I don't have teaching to think about. 

And some reading

 I finished "Between Two Rivers" (Moudhy Al-Rashid) last night. I enjoyed it. Before reading it, I had known of the existence of cuneiform but I didn't know that it had been used for a number of languages' writing systems, and also, that some of those systems had been pretty well figured out, so some of the tablets can be translated. 

I found the role women played in those societies (as scribes, as priestesses/symbolic wives of the moon god) particularly interesting; a lot of the more "traditional" history I learned in school never discussed that. 

And yes, I did have to put it aside for a couple days during the worst of the "we're going to wipe out Iran" rhetoric, because I was at the point where Al-Rashid discusses the "tell" where thousands of human remains were buried, possibly the victims in a truly cataclysmic battle, and it seems at least plausible that they were actually buried by their enemies (the victorious army), perhaps as a way of avoiding disease transmission.

 And I admit another bit of distress was thinking about the bombing in Iran, and wondering if there are some antiquities that might have provided additional clues to how people lived back then were being obliterated, and that makes me sad.  

And yeah, humans really haven't changed. and that makes me sad. We've had several thousand years, I think, we should be better by now. 

I found the discussion of innovation, and the roles of women in society, and especially Ennigaldi-Nanna, a priestess who may have been fundamentally the first museum curator (in that objects from hundreds or even thousands of years before her time were found in a building she apparently either lived in or managed) a lot more enjoyable and interesting. And then also the idea that in their time, there were things even more ancient than them, as far removed from their time as theirs is from ours. 

I also liked when she spoke just a bit about her small daughter, and how she told her the story of Gilgamesh (adjusted in an age-appropriate way!) and how she saw herself in some of the Babylonian lullabies that had been inscribed somewhere, and spoke of her wonder at seeing a comet (NEOWISE, which I was never able to find a dark enough place with enough space at the horizon for me to see it, and she also saw Hale-Bopp as a child - and I do remember seeing that one, when I was in graduate school)

And so, maybe though the bad parts of humans haven't changed, perhaps the consolation is that the good parts have always been here - love and care for younger ones, and stories, and songs, and the wonder of seeing an astronomical event. 

And she ends the book on what feels to me like a hopeful note, and something I needed to read: "There is something to be said for things that have survived from so long ago, for the clay and mud that tell such a long history that they give some hope for the future. If something ancient is still here, then maybe some part of us will also be thousands of years hence." 

 

I needed to start a new book - I had a dental checkup today, late in the day, and often they get enough behind that you have to wait a while, and waiting without something good to distract me means I am more anxious when I finally get into the chair. So I grabbed a fairly new-to-me book (I saw someone comment about it on Bluesky, it was a topic I'm pretty interested in, and so I ordered a copy from Bookshop): "Hoof Beats" by William T. Taylor. So far, I've read a bit more than the first section of the first "beat" (He arranges it as four "hoofbeats," groups of several chapters that hang together). And I was reminded of a fact I knew, and had passed on to my class, and then worried that I had got it wrong - but I had not: that horses originated in North America (just like camels and elephants did), and then during a period of cooling (lower sea levels; land bridges), crossed over into Asia. Horses here later seem to have gone extinct (perhaps the same early hunters that helped doom some of the other megafauna), but they survived in central Asia, where they were eventually domesticated and even worshipped. 

Years ago I read "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language," and while I don't remember a huge number of details of it, I do remember some of the broad patterns about horse domestication and how important they were, and some of the attempted reconstructions of proto-Indo-European. That kind of early human history (I guess you'd call it anthropology; it predates written language in many cases) is fascinating to me, thinking about how people lived. So I think I'll enjoy this new horse book.  

Shawl is bigger

 I gave two hourly exams this week, so I worked more on the blue shawl. And this evening I took a photo of it for comparison

 I think the last time I took a photo was in October but I admit other than exam times I didn't work on it a lot

 I feel like I can relax a little bit about it, now that I won't be worrying about running short on the second skein, since I bought  a complementary color skein for the lace part

 

The color of the body of the shawl is called "Egyptian stucco" (I don't know if they mean like faience, I don't know of stucco being used in Egypt, but there is a blue style of faience not too unlike the blue of the yarn - famously, the little hippo sometimes known as "William" is done in that faience)

 Here's the contrasting/complementary color for the lace, it's the same yarn line ("Auxanometer," made of bamboo) but the color is "Alabaster"

 The only thing I might have to take care with is when I block it; I don't want to risk the blue bleeding onto the cream color (possibly cool water to wet block, and then use white vinegar to help set the dye)

Something surprised me

 I guess I'm getting cynical with age (and maybe with exposure to wrong doing). 

I was reading through the papers again today before putting more comments and grades on them. Many of the people are students I have had in this class for the first time, so I haven't seen big samples of their writing (most of my exams are short essay type questions, which are different from a whole research paper). 

And I caught myself thinking: "some of these are *awfully* good for what might be a student's first effort" (And yes, I know: I had seem some of these before in draft form and I didn't really think this then. But, too be fair, the drafts were mostly from students whose essays on the exam were a cut above). And then I thought, "okay, how do I check these"

My old trick - of websearching a sentence (with quotation marks around it to return exact matches)  - which caught plagiarism (oh, did it catch plagiarism, though not so much on this assignment in this class because it would be a hard one to lift directly from a website), doesn't work on LLM work. 
 

I mean, there weren't any of the "tells" I used to notice with earlier gens - overly vague sentences, overly wordy writing using words that don't "go" in most scientific writing. So I decided "okay, all I can do is check the sources they cited to be sure they're "real"

For fifteen papers.

It took a while. I mean, in a few cases, they were sources familiar to me, and I was like "yeah, this one's good" but I did search the topics less familiar to me.

All the sources were real; none "hallucinated." 

I assume that means the students DID write their papers themselves, and they're either more experienced writers, or they worked with someone who helped them edit (that's okay, I tell them consulting with others is fine)

But I found myself angry with myself - angry because I suspected my students, all of whom seem like perfectly lovely people - because we hear SO MUCH about AI/LLMs  being used, and the implication is "they're cheating their way through" and I think it's damaged some of my trust. I mean, I am not great at trusting people to begin with, that's one of my problems (to be fair to myself: I had several "friends" or people who pretended to be such when I was growing up who betrayed me in some way)

But we do live in a society of declining trust; I think it accelerated after the pandemic, and I KNOW my ability to trust other humans has gone downhill even more (after a couple experiences of finding out later through the grapevine in the earlier days of COVID that someone had tested positive but chose to be out around people, including me, including people I know with immune systems less robust than mine)

But not trusting your students is bad, and is kind of a breach, and I admit I spent part of the afternoon wondering if maybe it's getting to be time to retire, if I'm just burned out and I can't keep up with how much things have changed.

And then I asked myself: why does it matter to you? why have you always been so hung up on ferreting out cheating, and twisting yourself in knots to try to formulate cheat-proof assignments (truth: it's almost impossible to make a take-home assignment that's LLM proof, and I'm kind of unwilling to take more instruction or lab time to make people sit and write in blue books, and some people's writing is hard enough to read that it would be painful) 

But the other thing? More and more I feel like the cheaters are winning. And so why should I, with my archaic, outmoded sense of honor, someone who is enough of a quixotic fool to do things the hard and long way all the time, stand in the way of people's success? I mean, look at government, look at tech CEOs: the deck is stacked. It's definitely stacked against my students so maybe why NOT let them do what they can to get ahead a little? 

I don't know. So many things about these times make me profoundly sad. And yes, I also admit I worry that in a few years, LLMs will be advanced enough that the general decision will be "the exceptionally wealthy, connected, or brilliant will get to go to one of the remaining universities; for everyone else there will be "chatbot professors" and it won't be good but it'll be seen as economical" and while I'm close enough to retirement that losing my job that way might be unlikely, it still makes me feel like......I did all this for nothing, that I worked at a job that's now gone. 

But also, yeah. The feeling that the cheaters in the larger world have won, and insisting on ethics all those years was stupid, that hurts me too.

And I don't know if I'm just getting old, or if the world seems more terrible than it is, or if it is just getting that terrible. 

And I admit, some days it feels like soon there may be no place for me left in it, and I don't even know. I hope I'm wrong about that. But you see things like administrators on some campuses talking out both sides of their mouths, promoting faculty's "academic freedom" (such as to disallow AI generated work) while also giving money to the companies making them and incorporating them into the departments that permit it. And I do worry that either i'm a fool for rejecting it, or that I'm going to be completely left in the dust and my ethical compunctions won't matter when I never manage to get another paper published.  

semester's almost done

 This is the last week of classes. I have one more lecture in one class, and then an hourly exam in two of them, and student presentations in the third. I collected the "big" papers from the one class (the one doing presentations, it's over the same project they did their paper over) today and got about half of them read and comments on them.

Most of them were pretty good; several people took me up on the offer of "get a good draft into me by day X, and I will put comments and give it back and you can rewrite" 

except one person did that, and then.....didn't make any of the changes I suggested. I suppose time got away from them but it annoys me to spend my time on that and not see a paper improved any over the original draft. 

So it'll be a mostly-work week this week. 

I have been picking away at the various socks; I'm a bunch farther on the current striped pair 

looking for joy

 Some of these weeks lately have felt very, very long, and some weeks I don't really take time to get OUT and do things. I go to work and I go home and home is good, I guess, but I think 2020 may have broken me a bit from wanting to stay at home all the time.

Also, I needed to grocery shop, and to be honest? Aesthetics matter to me when I have a choice. And Albertson's has the most pleasant aesthetics of the groceries accessible to me*. SO I thought about trying to get out there - even given expensive gas, even given a busy week. 

Tomorrow it's supposed to storm, and also I have Zoom knitting, and it's hard to get down and do anything much and get back in time for that. It was supposed to storm today, too, but not until after 4 pm and I figured if I left right after class I could get home by then.

Also, a post that came across Bluesky, from author John Scalzi, made me think:

""Joy is resistance" is not just a platitude, it's actual f(redacted) praxis" 

Okay, I don't know much about praxis; I'm not a philosopher. But maybe yeah, looking for things that make you happy (in moderation, of course, you don't want to be totally self-centered and never think of others) can help be an antidote to the worse bits of the world. 

And I KNOW I feel better when I get a little time to decompress, and I can't always decompress sitting at home so well.

So I went. I also DID have a "loyalty coupon" at the yarn shop, and I figured I might as well spend it. 

I had half-thought of getting another skein of the Auxanometer yarn (which is what I'm making the Syysalaulu shawl out of) in a contrasting color for the lace part; I fear I will run short for the lace part and there's NOTHING worse in knitting than running short on a yarn. I figured since the yarn is a dark indigo blue, a cream or off white would be best. (I chose  a color called Alabaster; it should work well, and now, I can knit the garter stitch part BIGGER which will fit me better - I am a bigger person and while I am not *unusually* tall for a woman, I am taller than many women.) So that soothes a minor worry I had while working on it - now I can just knit it up until it's "big enough" and fits the correct number of repeats for the lace section, I don't have to count so much and watch the yarn as it gets shorter.

this is the most recent photo I have of it; it's bigger now but doesn't look much different; it's just a big triangle.

 

But first, I needed lunch

 This is my usual at the downtown coffee shop (CJs). Most of the other sandwiches have sprouts or other things I don't like or can't eat on it, and sometimes you don't want to be "that person" asking for a special order. This is scrambled egg with cheese and ham on a croissant. And a large iced chai tea. (I am coming to the conclusion that the spices in chai, which usually include cardamom, do NOT bother me - and maybe I need to try carefully adding cumin back in to cooking to see if I was wrong about it upsetting my stomach)

I also walked around a bit and went to my favorite fancy soap store, and to a place that is now called Niche, used to be Coffee Collective. They do have a coffee bar (and a few food items), but they are also a shop - they sell houseplants, one of the few places I know of that does, and they have a LOT of vintage clothing, and some things like costume/not fancy jewelry. Sort of what I think of as a "hipster shop," even though the hipster type is maybe out of vogue now.

And I did make an impulse purchase

 

It's some kind of fossiliferous mineral, I am pretty sure those are crinoid "stems" in it. It's cut and polished so they show up. And yes, it's a much larger ring than I normally wear, and I have to wear it on my pinky because the ring part is a bit small for my usual ring finger on that hand. I'm not sure often I'd wear it but it does make me happy. 

 

And yes, yes, yes, I know buying stuff is a very hollow path to "joy" and I'd be better off working to find some more friends (when? in what time? and what if it doesn't work out and they wind up hating me or they have certain things about them that are dealbreakers to me) or have more experiences and YES I want to go to museums and parks more, but since this was primarily a "grocery store" trip, there wasn't really time, and here, you need the better part of a day to get to and visit even a small museum.

So this will have to suffice some times.

Also, getting to the yarn shop does get me a few minutes of conversation with the owner, who has similar interests to me, and I don't get enough conversation about non-work, non-service things.

And yes, I bought a couple other skeins, one for socks, one for mitts:

 

 

 This is a new-to-me dyer; apparently Quixotic Fibers is just starting to carry them. These yarns have flecks that light up under blacklight (the owner had a blacklight pen to show me when I was paying for them) and while it's unlikely I'd ever have that experience while wearing them, still, I like the bright colors. 

But yes. Trying to find even small joys. It's hard sometimes, or at least for someone like me, who tends to maybe be self-critical to the point of not being able to be satisfied with what we do, or are too prone to feel like being serious is the only way to be a "real" adult, and to be too worn down and saddened by the sadder parts of life, and I admit in some moods I could be annoyed with Mr Scalzi's admonition, like "I am living through all THIS and I also have to strive to find joy, too? And if I don't, the Bad People win?"

But maybe sometimes just having a nice lunch you didn't have to fix, or a short conversation with someone who shares a hobby with you, or being able to pick out food slightly nicer than what you can find in town, is enough? 

 

digging out books

 I have a LOT of books, and in recent years (especially when I was having renovations done), I moved a bunch of them around to different places. This is always hazardous to try because then I forget where I put things.

As I was taking a short break from "Between Two Rivers" (which I will finish soon), I was reading one of those British Library collections of older mystery short-stories. This was academic/school-related mysteries and one was a Raffles* story where he and Bunny returned to their old "public" school as Old Boys....and I'm not done with it yet. Apparently no murder, which is nice, most of these do involve complicated thefts.

(*Raffles is also known as The Amateur Cracksman; theft of valuables from people richer than him. And I admit, there was something on Bluesky today about some guy who wrote a "theft is okay, maybe" essay, though in this case it was theft from (public) museums into private collections, and that feels particularly wrong. I mean, I suppose I could forgive the Jean Valjean type of theft, where it's food for someone genuinely starving (though I would HOPE in a civilized country there were enough things like food banks to make sure no one HAD to), but stealing to further pleasure or enrich a selfish person? absolutely not. Or shoplifting for the "fun" of it, which damages public trust and leads to things like people like me being asked to show our receipts walking out of wal-mart when the control person could clearly see I went through a checkout with a checker and paid for the stuff. And yes, that rankles me, and someone who had never interacted with me on there before caught a block from me after sniping at me that I shouldn't be allowed to be annoyed at the "minor inconvenience" of it being hinted I was a criminal because....I don't even know).

But anyway: Raffles isn't real, and he mainly, in the stories I read about him, he is stealing from pretty awful people, and in some cases the proceeds help someone else.

And it's a very particular type of late 19th c. type of story; I joked that "surely Raffles/Bunny slashfiction exists" (and yes, it apparently does, and what's more, is that possibly Hornung was AWARE of the cryptically-gay impression but never really denied it - which he might have had to, back then, after all, Oscar Wilde went to prison...)

And in a ways, Raffles is sort of an inverse Sherlock Holmes - committing crimes rather than solving them, and Bunny is his Watson.

But I remembered that years ago, back when I was in grad school, I had run across a Raffles story and wanted to read more, and special ordered a compilation volume (I think it was from the old and now-gone Borders' outlet in my parents' town)

I wondered where I had put it, and if I could find it (or if I'd given it away in a fit of cleaning once). 

After doing my afternoon workout (I didn't feel like it this morning), I took a couple moments and checked the shelves in my former guest room (now mostly a boxroom).

And yes, there it was:

 Yes, they're old stories, and like a lot of these there is some casual racism and other stuff objectionable now, but I also realize that's how people wrote and thought back then and hopefully we've improved today. 

I also found another book I had bought a long time ago, pretty sure this one was from the dear, departed A Common Reader catalog. (I used to get those, back before they folded in 2005 or so. They were nice catalogs, small newsprint pages stapled together and full of descriptions of unusual and often-scholarly books - not bestsellers but what I'd describe as "books you didn't know you needed until you read about them." I'm sure Amazon and their ilk was what did them in but I do miss them).

I had wanted, a while back, to learn a little Latin but being busy got in my way. Finally, last summer, I ran through what Duolingo had on Latin. So now I can say things like "I like the tables in the inn" or "Corinna has a plate and a cup" but I don't know the RULES and I admit I don't understand the noun declensions (a form of which exists in German, and I still don't quite have the hang of THAT). So finding this book made me think I could learn a bit more. (I also have a copy of Wheelock somewhere, I know better where that is. I had forgotten I had this one)

 

Wednesday evening things

 * I had to go out and buy some salad greens for dinner; I could not face the idea of eating another serving of that pasta/cheese sauce/ground beef/garlic thing. I SUPPOSE I should freeze it but it really does not appeal to eat more. It made way too much (four servings my foot; more like eight) and it really was too garlicky for me (sometime things that are very garlicky don't agree with me)

* Even though I SHOULD be limiting trips because of gas costs, I need to get out of town this weekend. I drove around town a bit today and saw the fifteen or so vape/dispensaries here (including one that replaced a longtime small caterer/lunch restaurant and I admit seeing all the weed and vape shops weirdly makes me feel unwelcome here. There are SO MANY of them - several in some blocks - and it's not something I use or would choose to use, and there's almost nothing here that feels like it's "for me." So once in a while I have to get to Denison where there's the yarn shop and a used-book store (actually, two, now) and the Albertson's and a nice place that sells candles and fancy soaps. I don't know. I wonder what I'll do after retirement. Will I stay here, seeing that I own a house and moving is a giant pain? Will going places for stuff be less difficult when I don't have a class-officehours-research work schedule to keep to? Or will inflation and global instability make it too expensive to go out of town for things, and ultimately I do decide to move? (which would be expensive, and I'd also have to jettison so much stuff)

But honestly, a lot of my life has been feeling "unwelcome" or like no one cares about my interests, this is not new, but it does seem to rankle more now.

* I did pull out another stalled project

 I'm still not sure I love them, the colors feel kind of meh to me. I might feel differently when they're done. Not sure what I'd do with them if I decide not to keep them, though. 

 

Back to vest

 I pulled out the long-stalled English School Slipover tonight and added a few more rows. It's now divided for fronts and backs, so not only is every other row a purl row (which is slower, and is kind of awkward on this yarn), but I also have a bunch of stitch holders flopping around. They are like giant safety pins, only a thicker wire. And yes, I know, you CAN use waste yarn but I always worry given how I stuff things in knitting bags and the like that I'll drop stitches off waste yarn and make even more work for myself.

 I have about six more decrease rows for the armholes, and then just have to knit plain until it's long enough. Then the front is similar (but has a deeper neck opening, so more decreasing) and once that's done, it's just the arm and neck bands. 

I also started the "sort bags" of soil today, and since I had only the one (early) class, I managed to finish four, which is 1/9 of what I have. I might be able to do a couple each day the rest of this week. I'd really like to get through all these samples before I go to visit my mom in mid May; I am tentatively planning a June sample date and I don't want to get too many samples stacked up ahead.  

too many feelings

 This is just my brain being....my brain. But I'm sad and also disappointed but also angry at myself for being disappointed because I'm disappointed for a silly reason. So I am writing this all out in hopes of GETTING it out so I'm in a better mood and can do piano practice. I already have dinner sorted - I found a recipe online for these beef-garlic noodles and I have leftovers (don't use the full pound of farfalle if you make it, it makes too much. 3/4 pound would be plenty). I also mixed up a just-instant white-chocolate flavor pudding to use up the rest of the half-and half, and I'll open a can of what we used to call "Mexicorn" (is it racist to call corn with peppers and onions Mexicorn?)

Today was the faculty appreciation "hour." (It used to be a whole evening and they fed us dinner; now it's an hour on some random Monday near the end of the semester, and there's a plate of dining-hall cookies and crudites as refreshments). 

I went, mostly to support the people winning. I had been up for a teaching award (I talked about it back in February) but I knew honestly that I wasn't going to win - there are people more deserving than I, and as it's voted on by faculty, it's people better known across campus than me.

But I confess, stupidly, I got my hopes up a tiny bit. More about that later.

But what made me sad? They do in memoriams and there were three people I had known pretty well - the former Print Shop Lady (we all called her that, she didn't mind, her name was Pam), and a woman I had been in AAUW with. And then my friend Jane E., who had been a fellow congregant until her health declined to the point that she had to move closer to her adult children.  I had forgotten she had died and so it kind of opened the grief back up a little. 

I THINK I was also sad because once I opined "usually the winner of the teaching award is someone who is retiring, or someone who has received a serious diagnosis, and yeah......it was a colleague who is battling a major medical thing, and recently had a complication, they actually could not be present because they had a medical appointment and....it just makes me sad. I like this person. the students like this person. They're really young, and I feel like this is just another horrible unfairness of the universe that they're dealing with and I hope with all my hope they beat it. 

But the disappointment, which was stupid and silly - before I knew the other nominees*, I had allowed the tiniest hope I might win

 (* I don't vote in these when I'm up for one, I feel like I should recuse myself). 

And another colleague won for research, which is also deserved. 

But I feel bad. Bad that I'm so mediocre compared to other people and again I bitterly think that it's probably bad for parents and teachers to praise their kids for being good at school because then those kids get used to external validation, and they don't learn the internal kind, and I've *always* been bad at internal validation.

But I also admit I had the salty thought on the way home: why should I even TRY to stop being mediocre if I never have successes? Maybe it's not worth it and my role is to just live out my career and retire and be forgotten and never have made any kind of impact on anything. (And I suppose a form of that bitterness is actually a supervillain origin story, isn't it - "I can't make the world better but I can damnsure make it worse!" and then you start stealing tiaras or something). 

But I'm also mad at myself because it's such a stupid thing to be salty about. The award winners deserved their awards far more than I would, I frankly kinda suck, and I just need to accept that, that I was never really that good at much beyond taking tests, and in adulthood? being good at taking tests is worthless. 

So anyway. 

There's also discussion on Bluesky again about covid isolation, and one of the really heavily followed and sort of "elder" members commented that even though they were fundamentally an introvert, they did NOT have a good time during covid, and there were a lot of people chiming in that even for introverts the isolation was bad (and the original commenter even acknowledged that they had a partner, and figured it was probably harder for people who were totally single, and YES IT WAS). 

and of course a few people who have to be right all the time weighed in with something like "so you're saying you wanted to go to the bars" or something similarly nonsensical, and another person parodied it claiming that those were the people with the "wire monkey mother" mocking those who chose to cling to the "cloth mother" (it was a whole psychology experiment, it could probably not legally be done today because of animal use and care guidelines)....and yeah. 

Someone else commented: "...but being SO isolated made me fall apart in ways I'm still trying to claw back and nearly ended my marriage." and yeah. "falling apart in ways I'm still trying to claw back" fits me. I feel like I've lost my SPARK that I used to have, and even going to counseling during didn't fix that. I feel like part of the reason I maybe kind of suck at things now is that I just....I got this feeling that my life might not last much longer, so why bother? I think also mourning my dad during that time (he had died in July of the previous year) and a couple friends who died less than two months after hit hard and really made my brain hang out in morbid places. AND I had a low level cancer scare (short version: I thought I had completed menopause, had a surprise! period, my doctor wanted to make me have some fairly intrusive tests done but did say she wanted bloodwork first. The bloodwork showed I wasn't in menopause yet and her assumption was I was close, but the stress changed things....)

So it was a LOT. All at once. And I remember going multiple weeks without talking to people other than on the phone, and that is not the same. 

Another person commented: "People are all like “remember his creatively liberated we were during Covid?” No I don’t. I was creatively hobbled by it. I spent most of 2020 drinking and playing Skyrim."

And yeah. I didn't drink or play Skyrim, I listened to a lot of BBC news on the (now dead, because of copyright holders) phone app and I watched a lot of Murder, She Wrote or Parks and Rec on Amazon Prime. I barely knit at all, even. I struggled to teach online for the first time in my life. 

I remember how at the beginning of the pandemic I bought a bunch of ice-green fingering weight wool and a pattern for a complex cardigan, thinking it would be my lockdown project. I couldn't start on it. I couldn't even wind off the yarn. I ran across it in my stash a little while back and wondered if I'd ever be able to think about knitting it up or if I should just give it away to someone.

I know I've changed and not for the better and while I've tried to get back to the person I used to be, it seems she's not coming back. 

Friday evening discomfort

 Not too bad, actually, but I've got one of the Central Illinois tv stations that live streams online because there are tornadoes there, but it seems like my mom's town escaped the tornadoes. It's still possible she got hail, which she always worries about, because she has skylights in the kitchen and worries about what she'd do if one got broken ("Call your insurance agent" is my answer to her, but that doesn't solve the overnight problem, if one breaks late in the day, and they're too high up for anyone around her to get up and cover the area. I guess you put buckets under the opening and hope for the best....)

We might get storms but it looks like the worst here is smallish hail, and my car is garaged, and I have an impact-resistant roof, so I should be fine.

Today I had a lot of pain, though - my knee had been bugging me (I stepped down hard in a hole on Tuesday in the field and while I'm pretty sure I didn't actually injure anything, I sure jarred myself). And then last night I got sleeping on my left side in such a way that my left shoulder kind of "folded" towards the front of my body and I think it just irritated the ligaments or something (this is the side I probably broke the collarbone on in a fall about 15 years ago, and never got treated).

When I got up I almost couldn't move it. I did most of a workout but only did a little of the arm motions, because it hurt. This is the day I go in a little later (8 am rather than 7), so I took a while and tried first a heated buckwheat bag, and then an ice pack on it (the ice seemed to help more, and I had an ice pack over at school from when I hurt my knee, so I was able to put it on for a while during my office hours. 

It did get gradually better over the course of the day (I was afraid at first I might not be able to dress, and pulling the sports bra off after my workout wasn't fun) and now it just hurts a little if I try to raise the arm, and it's much less stiff. So, yay being over 50, I guess? I don't think I actually damaged anything but I did turn down an opportunity to go help with some fieldwork tomorrow because of it (Well, also, I really need to work on my own research and maybe get a little relaxation time in)

I admit I'm a lot less cavalier about small injuries/aches and pains now than I once was, after hurting my knee, and I think my pain tolerance IS less. At least this time it seems to have been really nothing, and I'll just to be careful how I position myself to sleep tonight.

If the weather isn't too bad tomorrow (it is supposed to rain), I might either try checking  out the new Aldi (I haven't been yet; I wanted the crowds for a "new thing" to die down a little) or drive over to the little shop in Bokchito - it's a gift shop/antique store and it's kind of nice, not too far of a drive. I do need to find some small, easy-to-get to (=not costing too much gas, gas is expensive now) things to do just to not stick in town all the time. 

Thursday evening things

 * Got all the catch-up grading done, taught my classes, and I also changed over to the last extraction (3 of 3) of the soils that I collected (I break this one down Saturday; they get 48 hours). 

* I had some cabbage in the fridge that was still good, so I made okonomiyaki. This is one of my favorite simple meals and I make it a couple times a month. It rarely comes out looking so perfect so I took a photo for posterity:

Yes, that's a bottle of the famous "Kewpie" Japanese mayonnaise next to it; the wal mart here carries it, and yes, it's better than the kinds (Duke's or Hellman's) I've bought before.

*I had a little time to relax tonight (for a change), so I worked more on the mitts. I'm within a couple rows of being done with the thumb gusset:

 The staggered-rib pattern is more clear when you stretch it out (like when they are being worn; there is a little negative ease built in)

 * I've also been working on the blanket but it's not at a photogenic stage, but it does feel like I'm getting close to finishing it. I'll be glad when it's done; I've worked on it on and off (mostly off, to be honest) since 2022.

Second field day

 So there are three sites I am collecting from; we got the first (and hardest) one done Friday, and since the student was free again this afternoon, we planned to do the other two provided it wasn't storming.

This week has ALREADY felt long. Monday was hectic in a couple ways at work and then I had CWF in the evening, and it was a LONG meeting. So it feels like I've been through a full week already.

Also, I didn't sleep well Sunday night or last night because there were a lot of things that just had to fall into place, some of which I had to manage, and it was just too many things to remember (one of them being: send off my state tax payment, which I did yesterday). 

I also had unpleasant dreams, though perhaps that's as much that it's hot and humid now and I don't sleep as soundly. But I know a couple of them centered on having a lot of things to get done and being prevented from doing them somehow, and that's a classic anxiety dream for me. 

Anyway, today I had to prepare the soils for the ecology lab tomorrow, and get out and set up at least most of the equipment (this is the hardest lab, logistically and procedurally) and then I had to be ready at 12:30 to meet with the student, and I had to be sure I had all the equipment, and I admit I am also always apprehensive now about how my knee will hold up. 

The student was an hour late (no fault of her own) and I decided driving out that if she had something later in the afternoon (often students have late classes or jobs), we'd just do the one site.

It was kind of a comedy of errors getting there. You have to cross a double train track to the site,, and as we got up to it I saw a train slowly proceeding through. Okay, fine, we sit. But as it turned out.....there was a train sitting on the second track. Okay, fine, we wait for them to move after the first train (they were parked, blocking the intersection, technically against the law but you see it from time to time). There was a brakeman walking around looking at it and finally I said, "There's a driveway about 100 feet back, I'm going to back up and turn and there's a different way I can get there, if this train doesn't beat us to that crossing. (They did not). So we got to the site and found the sample points and as we were getting the soil, I heard a train horn and said "that'll be the train" so we decided to drive back the shorter way.

 But. There was a THIRD train, but fortunately they were moving. I don't know what was up. Lots of tanker cars so maybe oil is being moved around? Given what's going on in the Gulf maybe more domestic oil is on the move now?

Anyway, I asked her if she had somewhere she needed to be. She didn't, so we went to the second site, which is the shortest one to do, and managed to get all the samples but I was really beat (and my knee is sore) by the time we were done. And I got snagged on a greenbriar and tore the heck out of one knuckle, but luckily I had a tetanus booster in 2023, so I should be safe there.

It was after 5:30 when I got home (I set up the second set of extractions)  

So I decided to splurge again instead of either eating cereal or an almond-butter sandwich, and got one of the good big loaded baked potatoes from the bbq place - sour cream, cheese, your choice of meat (I got smoked chicken) and barbecue sauce. I'm glad I did, I needed a big and fast meal.

 

breaking the stall

 Sometimes I get that way about certain books. Either it's a part I find upsetting, or I get bored with it, or I get annoyed at one of the characters, and I put it aside for a while.

(This is different from "I am annoyed at the author's style or where they are taking the story," that's often when I don't finish a book)

I got that way with Between Two Rivers, which is that history of the Mesopotamian area and specifically cuneiform writing.....which I think might be among the earliest, if not the earliest, form? And the first part was interesting with the "mystery" about whether Ennigaldi-Nanna really had a "museum" of things even more ancient than her own ancient times or not...

(And an aside: Another mindblowing thing to a non historian is to be reminded of how LONG the Egyptian culture stretched in ancient times, like how the Sphinx was as much older than King Tut's tomb as the fall of Rome was to Gutenberg's development of the printing press in Europe - but non historians like me tend to think of "ancient Egypt" on this compressed timeline because it was so long ago)

And there were some interesting ideas about how ordinary life might have worked, and what their religion was like, and the fact that women priestesses were apparently not uncommon......

And then I hit up against an episode where she wrote about two cities at war, and something like 5000 to 10000 people were slaughtered (and of course, each side would have their own narrative about what happened)

And she described the "tell" (burial mound) that one side erected to bury the dead of the other side. Maybe for reasons of honor? (though given that the remains show evidence of having been left exposed for a while, maybe it was actually for stopping-spread-of-disease-and-scavengers reasons) and.....they erected a stele with vultures on it, and that was what got me. ESPECIALLY reading it during a new war ramping up in that part of the world (Through really, hasn't it always been at war, more or less), and thinking for a few hours last week that "if things go very wrong, this might be how humanity goes out; one person drops a nuke, and another country - not Iran, they don't have one currently - decides "oh, that's how it's going to be" and drops one themselves, and then all that's LEFT are bones and cockroaches. And that just got me down, and made me sad and scared, and I had to stop thinking about it.

So I read mystery stories for a few evenings and as I noted one of them broke kind of bad (though perhaps it was a very specific horror - essentially, being buried alive - for me)

But last night I went back to Between Two Rivers and manged to push through the upsetting bit into something calmer. I don't know that there won't be more hard stuff to read but maybe I can get through the book now.  

Fieldwork day today

 I needed to get my first spring sample of soils for the ongoing invertebrate project. Fortunately, a botany student was free this afternoon and wanted to come help me. She helped carry stuff, and ran the tape out for the distances, and she held the bags as I dug soil. And she just was there in case I kneeled down and found I could not get up (that didn't happen but I always worry)

Only one from-the-field picture; we were hurrying as rain was forecast (none yet) and it was already 1 pm when we could get out there. But obviously a fire came through here between the last time I sampled and now, there were a couple burnt trees I don't remember:

 

 We got the sampling done fine. I was pretty tired and sore by the end (my knee has bothered me this week). But we got them back and I set up the extractions. These go for about 48 hours, and if it doesn't rain Tuesday we'll go and get the rest of the soil

 I also got a photo of the "Portable" air conditioning unit that's been installed in my teaching lab. It takes up a lot of space and I swan it looks like those tubes could start waving around and it saying "EXTERMINATE" or something similar. 

 After all that, I went home and washed my hair, and decided to get barbecue for dinner:

 I only ate about half of it; it's a lot of food, but then it amortizes out to feeling less of a splurge (the whole dinner was about $18), because you have leftovers for a later meal. 

***

After that, I mostly watched the Artemis splashdown. I admit, I was apprehensive, these past months have sensitized me to "no good can happen it can only bad happen" and I also remember the Columbia disaster (which I think happened on the shuttle's return, if I remember) and Challenger before it. 

But no, it went off perfectly, and once I saw the chutes deploy I relaxed a bit (I didn't fully relax until just now, when all four astronauts are safely on the Navy ship and off the capsule). This was very cool, despite me not being an astronomer or anything. It was just lovely to see some of the moments of kindness and camaraderie among the crew (most famously discussing naming a feature on the moon for Caroll, the late wife of the commander.)

It was also nice to be able to share it - first, Facetiming with my mom at splashdown, we were both watching it, and then later, chatting with friends on Bluesky about it. 

I feel like our country needed a W, and it seems like we got it.  

A busy week

 Last night were the monthly meetings at church. Because it's getting to be budget time (I am on that committee) and nominations time (fortunately not on that one), it was a longer meeting than usual, so that was basically my day after teaching yesterday.

Today I gave an exam and graded two (yesterday's and today's).

I found out that they kind-of solved the "broken chiller unit" issue - there are large (maybe 4 1/2 foot tall) "portable" air conditioners - I use scare quotes because they have to have flexible ductwork (it looks like the white polymer-fabric dryer vent tubes) that attaches into the building ducts, so you can't move them.

It is a solution, but they're very loud. I had to kind of shout in lab to be heard. The good news is the lecture rooms don't have to have them, the AC on that side still works. Also, there's only like 2 weeks of labs left for me in that room, and I don't teach summers (and hopefully it will be fixed over the summer). 

Someone on Bluesky posted - because everyone is sad and often it seems like cruelty is everywhere - that they wanted people to do one kind thing today and then post about it. I can't find the original post again to post to it, but the thing I did that I remember was to scoop up a jumping spider (we have little black and white fuzzy jumping spiders; they're cute. They're probably a Phidippus but I've never really tried to determine species; they're super common). It was walking down the hall near the lab room and I saw it and thought "someone's going to see that and squish it" and I didn't want it to get squished, so I took the paper I was carrying and gently slid it under the spider (I suppose they COULD bite, but they've never been aggressive towards me) and carried it to the nearest door. There's a small garden in the back of the building so I was able to set the spider down in some leaf litter around a clump of iris. Hopefully it can find food out there. (I know I get a lot of those little guys in the house, I just let them be because I'm not afraid of spiders and I figure they get food somehow or they'd not stick around)

So I don't know if trying to be kind to a spider counts, but that's what I did.

I got a few more rounds done on the sock cuff; you can see the full progression of colors here. I do think I'll keep doing the ribbing all the way down the leg and maybe on the top of the foot.

 

 

Two quick photos

 Difficult day again. Of course the geopolitical thing, which, I guess I can at least say when I go to bed tonight I can be reasonably sure that society will still be as functional tomorrow as it was today. (I made an anxious run to the grocery to stock up, you know, just in case, and filled up my car, and got some cash out of the bank, because really these days you never DO know)

But also:

- a friendly colleague of mine who is undergoing treatment for a blood cancer, and I thought they had concluded it successfully, had to have a liver biopsy because something else seems wrong, and it's just, can bad stuff stop happening to people I care about? it's too much on top of everything

- they were taking down a tree near my office, I got to hear it ALL THROUGH MY SEVERAL HOURS OF OFFICE HOURS TODAY and between worrying about what was going to happen in the world and the not-great news about my colleague it about undid my concentration. I got some grading done but that was IT. (I did go back after lunch when the tree guys were on break and got some data entered but left when they came back again a little before 4 and started cutting again)

I'm just TIRED. Mostly emotionally tired. Things seem to have been bad and difficult for very long and there aren't a lot of consolations to make up for the bad stuff. 

I had to put "Between Two Rivers" aside for a bit; she is describing some ancient battle and how it seems like thousands of men were killed, and the rest of that army just LEFT, leaving them on the field, and the victors did apparently (finally; there's evidence of scavengers) gather up the remains and bury them in big mounds, and it's implied it was like 5000 people and it's just.....people have always been bad, people aren't getting any better, all we do is kill each other and I don't want to hear about it any more.

And the mystery short stories I was reading, one of them by a little known writer ended with the missing Oxford undergraduate being found (alive, at least) after being kidnapped by a crazed Egyptologist who wanted to make his very own mummy and since I am claustrophobic and have that "fear of being buried alive*" it was a particularly uncomfortable ending to the story

(*not like buried-while-still-alive-in-a-grave, I know that doesn't happen any more, but like.....getting trapped under rubble or something in a building collapse)

I think I need to find a different book. 

I did work some more on the mitts this evening, I'm up to the part where you start for the thumb part (you can't see it in this photo, though, it's on the other side)

 I also realized I never posted a photo of the green waffle-stitch hat, which I finished over spring break. I think it's because I'm less satisfied with it - I washed and blocked it and it stretched, so it's a little too big. I might try rewashing it and putting it in a warm dryer (inside a lingerie bag) to see if I can shrink it a little

I'm trying to smile bravely in this photo but......this week has already been a lot*

 (* I know, I know):

 

A difficult day

* I think part of it is I'm just tired, and I didn't love when I took little breaks to relax and Bluesky was down, maybe forever? (it's back now). But any more everything is so dependent on a few services that if those go down (like AWS), we're all in the dark, and given what may happen tomorrow evening in the Iran war, I'm apprehensive.

* A weird little thing; when I got home from school and went to get my mail, this was in the box: a plastic Easter egg and as I took it out I sighed and said "if there's candy in it, I ain't eating it" (Yes, I'm a child of the 70s and I remember the stern warnings on Halloween candy)

 but instead, it was  this:

 A Bible verse. From Psalm 139. Which, I guess, okay, but it's not completely Easterish. And I admit I would have liked a few more words of hope, rather than basically an instruction. Yes, yes, I know the way I should go.

I wonder if the neighbors got them too, and if they were different verses. The handwriting looks like someone older than a small child - either a teen or a young woman (I could not write that neatly as a child) so I'm wondering if someone did it and then had their kids put the eggs out.

Anyway, it was just unexpected.

It's just that there's a lot to do at school. Too many things to juggle and I admit I am TIRED. Saturday was entirely out in the field (Well, "entirely" - 11 am to 2 pm, and I was too tired after to do much).

And Sunday I filled the pulpit. Yes, none of the people who ordinarily to was available so I did it, even though I'm not ordained and not any sort of theologian. I guess it went okay.

But things have been A Lot lately and sometimes I feel like I don't have enough time to do what *I* want or even kind of what I need to do (research stuff). There's just lots of urgent stuff that comes up and takes time from other things and I find myself staying over at work later and later, and then I wind up staying up at home later at night as a sort of revenge for "but I didn't get free time" and I can't continue in what I think of as "bare survival mode"

 The world just feels hard, and so even little things make me kind of lose my composure a little bit.

I do think something is going on inside me, I don't know what. 

I did see a bit of coverage of the Artemis mission and I watched the liftoff on Wednesday (I had to look that up, I thought it was more recently than that - that's how I feel like my life is out of my control). And I admit, having been around for Challenger and also Columbia (in 2003, I was already living here, in 1986, I was a junior in high school), I said a little prayer as they lifted off and got nervous when the feed briefly went pixelated. But so far everything is good and I hope they can safely land when the mission is over.

And I saw a bit of the coverage of them going into "radio silence' - as they passed around the moon, there was 40 minutes where they couldn't communicate. The part I saw featured was the  “To all of you down there on Earth — and around Earth — We love you, from the moon.”

And I admit, that undid me a little, hearing it, this evening. I had taken a break from doing some cleaning/bedmaking in my room to look at things and I saw it posted. And I sat down and just cried. 

I *think* part of it is being tired, and just worried all the time now about EVERYTHING. But more: it was just a simple, kind, thoughtful message, and in our culture now that's in such short supply. How often do we hear people saying "I love you" as a general statement to humanity. (I admit it: I cannot love humanity a lot of the time. Or perhaps: I don't LIKE humanity and what it does a lot of the time). But there's so much meanness and upsetting coarseness in what's said now that hearing "we love you" from a man who took on the risk to do something like this....it's disarming, because hearing that kind of language seems so rare now.

And there's actually a longer video than what I saw, and Victor Glover referenced Christ's two Great Commandments, and.....wow. I know, I know, maybe some people didn't like it but I presume Glover is a Christian and feels it and believes it, and it's something that's important to me and in fact I referenced these in the sermon yesterday and it does make me feel like I have something a tiny bit in common with him.

I've read that a lot of people who traveled to space were changed by it - more thoughtful, more cognizant of the fragility of life, perhaps even more spiritual

This link to the video is Instagram but it's the best link I can find quickly. 

But I don't know. I need to hear more words of hope, or someone saying something with care and love, and I want to hear fewer people being insulting or bullying or rudely angry, and some days it feels like those attitudes are pushing out the other ones, and it makes me sad. I mean, I can keep trying to be kind, but if all the people around me turn cruel, then *I* never get to hear kindness myself. 

It's dead, Jim

 Allegedly Bluesky incorporated a bunch of Claude code to its running over the weekend and GUESS WHAT?

 

it's down. 

 

I guess it's just dead. You can find me here and.......I don't know. When I posted on mastodon no one ever TALKED to me so I figured they thought I was too weird or dumb for their site so maybe I'm done with social media and will have to learn a way to get through the day without "talking" about things other than work or cracking my little jokes.

 

I did it before, in the days before social media, but it'll take me a while to adjust

 

well, maybe I get more research done :( 

It's finally Friday

 I started a new pair of socks the other night. They're just going to be simple socks, I might continue the ribbing down the leg and onto the top of the foot; I think that would look good with this colorway

 It's an older yarn from my stash; I had it wound up into a cake for a while (I think I took it as a "just in case I finish everything else" project at Christmas). I think I bought it from Simply Sock Yarn, I'm not even sure if they still it. The brand is Night Owl Yarns and the colorway is Puffins of Fair Isle. I like the colors; a couple of them remind me of lichens. 

I had to run some errands - I was nearly out of one of the cosmetics I use and Ulta is the only place I know that sells it. And yes, yes, I could mail order it, but I didn't want to wait a week or more, and I just needed to get out and look at things. Sometimes I need to get out of town, living in as small a place as I do, and a place with very little that is "for me."

So I quickly plotted out the most efficient path, starting with the yarn shop and ultimately ending with Albertson's (I needed groceries, and I wanted something special for Easter dinner). 

And yeah, I went to the yarn shop first, and spent part of my tax refund.

 I had been looking for that Laine "52 Weeks of Sweaters" - I have several of their other books and I really like them, and yes, they are FULL of patterns. And more and more, I feel like bound books of patterns are probably the way to go. The internet is impermanent, and even having a flash drive and cloud storage of patterns, they can get lost. And I need a printed copy on paper in front of me, because I usually only get a few rounds or rows knit in an evening, I don't want to keep having to scroll back to my place. On a paper pattern, I can put a sticky note next to where I stopped, or even write annotations in pencil. 

The single skein of yarn is a Texas dyer called Chicken Coop; it's a newer yarn the shop is carrying (they've cycled out a few national brands, either because of changes in ownership or because tariffs and such have made them prohibitively expensive) and tried to find some more "local" yarns, which is kind of nice. The colorway on this one is "Mint Julep," and I just like the odd mixture of colors.

The really bright orange-and-pink yarn is a closeout; Dream in Color is one of the yarns the shop is phasing out. I like this colorway (I have a ball of it for mitts that I stalled on and need to restart) and I decided it was so inexpensive I'd get some and maybe make a simple lacy scarf. Those were the last three balls; I think I have a bit more than 700 yards of it. I'll just have to figure out a good pattern.

I did do some other shopping and when I was at the Ulta I saw this - they had been renovating the old JoAnn's and I wondered what it was going to be (I was holding out hope for a Barnes and Nobles, or at least maybe the Ulta expanding and becoming a Really Big Ulta? But Nope)

 

 Boo! or perhaps <Hans Moleman Voice>"I was saying Booooooourlington"</Hans Moleman Voice>

Yeah, I'm displeased. This is just moving from the dead mall so it doesn't count as a new store. And I don't care much for these overstock-discount places; I can never find what I want in them, just lots of stuff I don't really want that MIGHT do but I'd rather not buy unless there's literally nothing else in that category of Stuff to be had anywhere. 

 I suspect it'll be a long, long, long time before we get any "new" stores, given what's happening with the economy, and also the general attitude and finances in the area. 

I did buy myself a few more things, I got food for the coming week plus (including some already-chopped Brussels sprouts; call it lazy but I'm more prone to cook up and eat veggies if I don't have to totally break them down first). I like sauteed Brussels sprouts so I'll make them for Easter, or, failing that, Monday night. I also got a small steak. Beef is horrifically expensive now so I almost never eat it, but Albertson's tiny packages of the filet cut tend to be pretty good, so I got one. 

I also got a few bits of chocolate Easter candy, since it's too hot for it to be sent through the mail now (so my mom won't send me any, and I have literally no one else who would get me Easter candy). And seeing this, I remembered a few years as a child I got a small stuffed animal in my Easter basket, and it was just nice, and is a happy memory.

 It's Chloe, one of Bluey's friends. She's not terribly show-accurate in that Chloe on there is kind of a skinny little girl dog, and this Chloe is plumper (I suspect they use a similar pattern for all the dogs in this line). But she is cute and her ears are pleasingly floppy.

 

Tomorrow is fieldwork with a colleague (a project she initiated but I'll have my name in there along with the students working on it) unless it is still raining.