Summer book memories

 I've written before about the summer reading club at the library when I was a kid.

 Some places still do these but I think they've been jazzed up a lot, with "digital rewards" and you can log your progress online. When I was a kid you wrote out the titles of the books you'd read, and then usually there was a folder with "stickers" (actually: cut out bits of paper you colored in and then used a glue stick to put on the scene printed on the folder)

I think about the books, though. When I was small, I remember a few authors: Richard Scarry (The pictures generally carried more weight than the type there), and Beatrix Potter (in the little dark-green library bindings that were used back in the 70s for those, and that may have been my foundation of liking British literature, she used more complex words), and also Bill Peet,, who seems to be less remembered today. 

Peet had worked for Disney and (IIRC) quit around the time of the strike, and started writing childrens' books. Some of them had a fantasy tone; most of them were about animals. My two favorites as a kid were "Farewell to Shady Glade" (About animals having to literally hop a train - riding on the roof of a caboose - to find a new place to live when they found out their home was going to be developed) and "How Doofus the Dragon Lost His Head" which was about a (friendly) dragon. There was also "The Pinkish Purplish Bluish Egg" which was an egg that yielded a griffin.

 I really kind of wanted a griffin as a pet as a kid, even though I was pretty sure they didn't actually exist. 

He also had Capyboppy, which was probably the first introduction any of us had to capybaras (who are now a "hot" animal). I recently (in the last three years) bought the Squishimal plushie of a capybara and named him Capyboppy in memory of that book.

There were a number of others but those were my three favorites. 

As I got older, I moved to "Chapter Books." Most of these were about people, who were less interesting to me (in general) than animals. Oh, I liked the Narnia books that had talking animals, and there was a series about mice who were kind of in a gang but weren't so very evil (It may have been the Marvin books by Jean van Leeuwen).

And there was Michael Bond! I loved Paddington, of course, but he also wrote a book called Olga da Polga about a guinea pig. I liked series books because it was nice to return to familiar characters; I read a lot of series books.

There was also a series about a girl named Katie John, who lived in sort of a rural area. I thought of her as living 'a long time ago' but her era might have been as recent as the late 1950s? They were mostly about her growing up (I think she was 10 in the first book, which was my favorite). 

And All-of-a-Kind family, about a bunch of sisters growing up in a Jewish family in New York 

And a favorite from earlier childhood, maybe one of the first longer books I read, was Jean Craighead George's "My Side of the Mountain" and I admit I wanted to run off and live in the woods every time I read that. (I still think about it). 

There were other one-off books; a lot of them were shelved in "the Young Adult" section. I remember Summer of my German Soldier, which was pretty sad. Johnny Tremaine had its sad moments, too. (I think there was another Revolutionary-war era novel, about a boy going off to fight?). There were a number of so-called "problem novels" where I went "oh this book is about divorce" or "oh this is about a girl going 'too far' too young (I don't think any EXPLICITLY discussed abortion but I seem to remember one where it was implied) and I admit I mostly bounced off of those, they felt too didactic.

There was also some fantasy and sci-fi. I'm frankly surprised no one introduced me to the The Dark Is Rising sequence; I'm sure I would have liked it as a kid (and at least the first couple books would have been published by the time I was 10). And the same with Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series. 

I did read the one with the Tripods - The White Mountains was the first in the series. It was fundamentally about how in early teenagerhood, kids were "capped" by the Tripods, apparently some invading alien force, and the "capping" basically was mind control. A few kids (the protagonist of The White Mountains and a few people he picked up along the way) resisted, if I remember correctly they had fake "caps" that didn't have the neural connections so they were still free, but LOOKED "capped." 

That was my main introduction to dystopian novels; I admit I don't care for them. 

 

MOST of those books were from the (old, back when it was downtown) Hudson Public Library, for most of my growing up the children's librarian was Marjorie Origlio (nee Grissom) and I LOVED her,  she was a great librarian and if she had a hand in picking books, she did a good job, there were so many from that library I remember fondly. My family would go weekly - sometimes twice a week, if the weather was bad and my brother and I read through the books we had - every summer, and often weekly during the school year. 

Sorry for huge…

I’m not sure how well this will work but I figured out a photo workaround using copy and paste.

Anyway, this is the busted mirror on my mom’s car.

It’s gone now; the replacement came in and I drove out there with her (she wasn’t sure about driving the traffic on the interstate to get to the body shop). At least it’s fixed.

And yeah, I hope the person who hit her car in the grocery store parking lot and didn’t leave a note steps in dog poo.

Sigh, photo didn’t paste…

"The good things"

 Nostalgia post. I think a lot these days about some of the "properties" (the pop cultural things, in particular, characters) that were popular when I was about 10-14 years old - not yet a teenager, not still really a child (But oh, I wanted to hold on to childhood as long as I could. I was bad at being a teenager as it turned out, and actually holding on to childhood things probably made me seem weirder and more-rejectable by the other kids. But growing up scared me a little, and I was probably right in that; being a grown-up is scary a lot of the time). 

Thinking back to what I remember: there were Smurfs, there was Strawberry Shortcake and friends in their original (Raggedy Ann-influenced) incarnation (And heck, there was a Raggedy Ann and Andy MOVIE even though I never saw it). There were Care Bears and there was My Little Pony. And there was Garfield and there was still Snoopy, and there were the Muppets, and there were some lesser-known-back-then lines like Hello Kitty and the SS Happiness Crew.

Most of these were anthropomorphised animals, or what you might call "fantasy humans" (the Smurfs, while humanoid, were DEFINITELY fantasy creatures, and I would argue Strawberry Shortcake and her friends were; in some cartoon versions of them they were portrayed as being tiny and I imagined them as being kind of Tinkerbell-sized - so maybe about 6" tall, so the little dolls would be roughly "life sized). 

A lot of them drew heavily on the theme of friendship and what we'd now call "found family," when you think about it. Really NONE of the characters were a single, simple, nuclear family - there was only one girl Smurf in the original run (and the idea of Smurf reproduction and, I presume, sex, was entirely ignored). The My Little Pony OG generation had "babies," but as I remember they were basically clones of the mums, produced by a magic mirror (again: there were few "boy ponies" and I don't think the cartoon had any married couples even though in the old, 1980s line of ponies, there were toys that were family groups with a "daddy" and a "mommy" and babies).

And Garfield had Jon, and Snoopy had Charlie Brown.....but most of the characters, the "families" were loose friend groups. 

And I wonder if that's why I liked it? As I've said, I had relatively few friends as a kid and I kind of dreamed of being part of a big squad of friends even as some of the bigger friend groups I saw at school seemed to fracture frequently, and there were arguments, and someone once commented "if three girls are friends, most of the time two will be ganged up on the third" and yeah that seems kind of accurate. 

But again: a lot of these showed a nicer and better world than what we actually have. Things were more colorful! Characters had talents that they clearly knew were their destiny (Oh, to have a "cutie mark" or a "belly badge" that showed you what you were really good at!)

A lot of these were televised cartoons. I didn't actually watch many of them - oh, I liked the Peanuts specials, many of which had been around since long before I was born, and I liked the Garfield cartoon and specials. My brother (five years younger) was a huge Smurfs fan, so I guess I watched it too. Never really watched the old (1980s) My Little Pony; by then I was trying to be very sophisticated and grown-up in order to try to have friends and so I mocked it with the other girls. (But flash forward some 30 years to the 2010s, I came home from summer field work one day, flipped around to find something to just watch while I ate lunch, hit the new cartoon (sometimes known as Friendship is Magic or FiM) and said "ha ha, let's see how blatant of a toy commercial this is" but wound up HOOKED because it was an episode ("Bridle Gossip") about tolerance and not being prejudiced and....the characters all had slightly different designs and different voices and personalities? And from then on, I watched it, and figured since I was in my 40s no one needed to know and no one could mock me. 

(And yes, now, I am much the same with Bluey, too, which is actually more accessible in re-runs; Disney Jr. shows it late in the evening and while I've seen every one multiple times, it is a SOOTHING show and good to watch right before bed)

What the different characters/"properties" had in common for me, though: there were toys, in many cases small "collectible" toys available of them. Smurfs were a HUGE fad for a few months around 1981 or 1982. People would buy the little figures. And yeah, I had less pocket money than most kids (frugal parents who didn't believe in frivolous or conspicuous spending), I would save my allowance and the money I earned for "extra" chores (like helping clean the garage or mowing the lawn) and occasionally go buy a Smurf. And it's weird to think about now, but, oh, how happy that made me. It was a very simple thing and I SUPPOSE it was more the anticipation of "I have $X in my pocket, I can go pick out a Smurf, I wonder which ones they will have" and yet, also, having them was kind of nice, too. And at the very end of my childhood, I could STILL kind of play the game of moving them through little daily dramas (like my friends and I had with our stuffed animals or Barbies or with the little plastic toy animals that were kind of ubiquitous in the 1970s). And if nothing else? I could line them up on the desk in my bedroom and look at them.

And I had a much loved stuffed Snoopy (who finally disintegrated) and I had a Garfield (and I saved up my own money to buy that). And I had a Kermit the Frog, which I saved up for literal months to be able to get. 

And I always wanted  a Grumpy Bear, but I never asked for one for my birthday or Christmas, because again, it felt babyish to me to want one. (Many years later? I now have  a little one that I even sometimes carry along on my travels):

 And all those things - I once referred to them as "a rock to wind a string around" (in the metaphor from TMBG) and yes. There is something I derive a comfort from in them, a comfort I can't quite pinpoint - it's not JUST nostalgia for a cheaper time when, as I said, walking into a shop with $5 in my pocked and knowing I can buy two Smurfs,, and the happiness that brings. (And yes, stickers are kind of the same way, too? Collecting stickers was big when I was a tween and it was actually one way I was able to interact with some of the girls who might otherwise not have been friends with me, we could trade stickers and talk stickers and show each other our collections and it was a point of connection). 

Maybe it was the idea of connection? Of wearing (at least at a YOUNGER age than 12 or so) a t-shirt with Hello Kitty on it, and having someone else say "oh hey you like her? I like her too! Want to be friends?" and it was sometimes just that easy as a kid (and why is it so hard as an adult?). But also, the imagined connection between the characters in their own specific world - like you knew that Funshine Bear and Cheer Bear might roll their eyes over Grumpy's grumpiness, but they'd never actually exclude him or mock him for how he was. Maybe a lot of those shows/books/whatever modeled a better, nicer world, one that I wanted - but one I never really got. 

First embargoed post

 (Written about 10 am on the 13th). 

 

I'm going to try to do a few of these, given that for some reason I can't get google/blogger to talk to my Apple photo cache any more, so I can't post photos from my phone on here, which kind of stinks, because typing on the phone is a pain, and the latest update (well, the latest update minus one, I haven't tried it with the new security patch that was loaded overnight) had TERRIBLE voice to text recognition (I don't have an unusual accent and it used to recognize me but now it's wildly wrong when I try to use it).

So anyway, a photo for today, from several days ago

 It's a polyphemus moth. Probably  Antheraea Polyphemus.  They're related to silkworms (I don't know if you can make silk from the cocoons, though, and I don't know that they're destructive in the way Lymantra dispar is (the common name on that contains what some now regard as a slur to the Roma people, so, I don't know if we have a new common name* or not but I can remember it as Lymantra). Of course Lymantra is an invasive in the US and Polyphemus is native here.

 

(*oh hey yes, you can call it the "spongy moth" which makes me laugh so maybe I use that with my classes now) 

These creatures don't live long; they don't have functional mouthparts (unlike some moths and butterflies that eat nectar); they only live about a week and they exist to mate, lay eggs, and die. Which looking at that with a human bias, that seems kind of sad, but then again: will moths ever write symphonies or novels or draw maps?

The other thing that always weirds me out if I think much about it is the metamorphosis process: lepidopterans dissolve into a puddle of goo, leaving behind "imaginal disks" that direct reorganization of what's left into the adult. 

There's a short essay here (Scientific American) that talks about it, and here are some photos from a natural historian who raises silkmoths and had one that "oopsied" and somehow metamorphosed without a cocoon (so apparently the "puddle of goo" was an overstatement)

Well, It's late.

 I was gearing up, early this morning, to go out and mow the lawn. I had checked on my train; it had left San Antonio and was at that point on time

 

then my text alert chimed: It's stuck behind a disabled freight.

That's bad. The BEST outcome in this case is it's a couple hours late, if they can either get the freight moving again or get a helper engine to tow it to a siding. The other option is a quick bustitution (which is more miserable than the planned ones; often it's old, poorly-kept buses pressed into service) or cancelling the trip altogether, and while I don't HAVE to be in Illinois right tomorrow, I don't like dealing with the worry and frustration of having to try to rebook (and trying to get a compartment, I am too old to ride sixteen hours in coach where I can't lie down)

So I kept checking in between doing the front and back yards, and checked again after I got back in. Finally it got moving again (two hours late) and at first they were claiming it would be on time to my stop. I laughed at that; I know Amtrak.

Then it was a half hour late.

Then an hour.

Now, it is an hour and fifteen minutes ("I have given you a delay. Pray I do not make it....longer")

So I got everything done, ate lunch, checked my luggage over again to be sure I'd not forgotten anything, threw a snack into my carry on (in case it's late enough that no food is an option once I get on). I'll leave here in a bit but I don't want to leave TOO early because sitting in the station isn't much fun, and usually when I left around 1:30 (as in the past) I was sitting for AT LEAST an hour in there, and that's when the train was on time. 

If I had more energy and had not gone just last week, I'd have considered just leaving early and swinging by the yarn shop in Farmersville but meh, I want to leave the option of a more relaxed trip there for later in the summer.

I don't like being dependent on circumstances, like a train being late or on time, where I have no control... 

got it done

  I got through the last five soil samples today. It was HARD. I was tired, and I kept resisting wanting to do it. Also, some of the soil from the third site was weirdly hydrophobic; I don't know if it was resins from the cedars (or the pines; there were a few pines in the area) or what but it would not soak up the water which made it harder to sort doing the float test.

When I get back, I have these to "score" - that is, go through and count up all the different things by their taxonomic order. That's a little less awful, and I can do it at my office desk instead of in the lab, so I can have streaming music playing on my computer. (And I am not sitting with my back to a door, which is never 100% psychologically comfortable)

 

And then, later in June, I guess I do it all again.

I hope the trends I think I'm seeing are real so this is publishable. 

 

Anyway, I came home and quickly (mostly) packed before the board meeting. I still have to put in the various makeup and tooth stuff and hairbrush and deodorant and such, but tomorrow morning I need to mow first, then shower, then I can put that in. (The meds can go in after I eat breakfast).

I'm just tired. I hope this break is good. I need a refresh. 

 

I have a couple embargoed posts (I still cannot post photos to Blogger from my phone, which annoys me. If I write any posts on the road they'll have to be without photos). If I have time and inspiration tomorrow I might write another one or two.  

Another Chautauqua program

 Tonight was the Chickasaw storyteller at the Native American Art museum (the Choctaw one was in March; the Choctaw are the main tribe here and we are on Choctaw land). 

It was a similar set up to before, even with a similar menu, but it was served buffet style, I presume because the student workers who would act as waitstaff had gone home for the summer. The food was still pretty good (the green beans were a bit larger and more mature than I like them). It was turtle cheesecake for dessert (I think I enjoyed the lemon dessert from before more, but the cheesecake was fine)

The storyteller told several stories - a couple of creation stories (one, of how the land was formed by the crayfish and the vulture, and how humans then came up out of the pile of mud the animals made). The other was about the creation of butterflies by Ababinili, which is the traditional Chickasaw word for God.*

Basically, God created them from all the beautiful colors He could find, as a gift to the children, so they could be happy, and it was also said in the story that if a butterfly landed on you, and you breathed a prayer to it, when it flew away it would take that prayer directly to God.

I found the story surprisingly touching. 

(*I know that the folks dubbed by the colonizers "the Civilized Tribes" were probably heavily influenced by Christianity; most of the Choctaw people I know are Christian, and even if the Tribal people aren't Christian they seem to be monotheists and I do wonder what the pre-contact ancestors believed. But her description of God and how God loves his creatures is definitely in line with what most Christians believe about God) 

There was another, more comic/more child oriented story about "Who Wants a Wife," that almost was like a riddle (the punchline being the "courting couple" were the first birds of spring). 

And another one, about a sad old man who was healed when the red-headed woodpecker (again, sent by Ababinili) taught him to make a wooden flute and play it - so he would always have music.

The storyteller said she based some of her stories on ones shared by Te Ata, a Chickasaw storyteller from the early part of the 20th century (Well, she lived to be 100; her life actually overlapped with mine). She shared stories with FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, and with King George VI. She was also an actress but Donna (the storyteller) emphasized her heritage and storytelling. (And Te Ata is not a Chickasaw name, it is a Māori name that someone along the way gave her (her birthname was Mary Frances Thompson) and apparently she preferred her new name? 

At any rate, it was a very enjoyable program, and again reminded me: yes, this is why you choose to live in a university town even if the town itself is kind of small and limited in some ways; the cultural programs are definitely worth it. They are trying to plan another storyteller for July, and I should take a day during my summer break and just go spend some time at the museum; it has two floors (I didn't realize it had a lower floor). It's a very attractive building; lots of natural light, lots of windows, and situated so most of the windows have a view out on wooded areas. It's also next to the old outdoor amphitheater, which I would love to see brought back and some programs given in it. 

And yeah, I was tired when I got home after working on samples all day and at first wondered if I should go (Also, I have to pack some time, though I DID wind off the yarn I wanted to take with me before going over to the program**) but it didn't go that late, I got fed, and it is really good to hear a talented storyteller - having a live human tell you stories is different and better than watching tv or listening to an audiobook.

 (**Priorities) 

And I think it was relaxing and refreshing. I woke up very anxious today for some reason (perhaps because there's a fair amount to still get done before 1:30 pm Thursday when I have to be on my way out of town) and then I realized I had BETTER take my car in for an oil and filter change (both to be sure nothing was unsafe about it I didn't know about before having to drive about 150 miles to Mineola but also someone on bluesky panicked me a little with the comment that "Walmarts and Costcos on the west coast are reporting shortages of engine oil are probably coming" and I thought "what if you come back in two weeks and that's widespread, and you're already overdue for a change timewise if not mileage-wise). So I got that done, but that meant I didn't get quite as many samples as I planned on done....but it really should be OK, I think. 

Another thing I should do this summer is make time to go to some of the Shakespearean festival plays; I used to do this every year for a couple years and then got out of the habit. (And this year, one of our student-singers at church is a director for it, so it would be nice to support her by going). Probably I need to slowly work back up to being more "social" - I admit I was nervous eating tonight (I didn't know the people next to me and the museum crowd seems "fancier" than most people I hang out with) and I realize my table manners have gotten a little feral. (And I spilled salad dressing on my white shirt; hopefully oxyclean and washing it right after I got home will prevent permanent stains) 

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.