Monday morning things

* As planned, I did break the stall on "Great Horn-Rimmed" and added a couple more rounds to it. (It moves slowly.) I want to try to force myself to work on this more so I actually get it done. I have too many long-term projects (also Celestarium) that are more-or-less in stall. Part of this is that many days when I get home, I am tired, and also after piano practice and doing Duolingo and cooking dinner - I often don't have as much time as I'd like and it's easier to work on something small.

* Sometimes, I guess, things happen for a reason. One of the roads I might have been on Saturday morning had I not run into construction and had to punt? There was a v. bad accident (fatality accident) on it. I don't know exactly WHEN, it might have been earlier than I would have been coming through there - but still, if the road had been closed, I would have hit a bad delay and might have been just as late as I was otherwise. (ETA: it was several hours before I was to have been through there, but still - avoiding an accident scene is a good thing. And apparently it was still an active scene with first responders trying to get people out of the vehicles around the time I would have been coming through there)

* Reading more in "Back from the Land." One big point the author makes is how unprepared a lot of the people were - didn't even know basic stuff like "you have to let wood season and dry for at least a few months or you won't be able to heat your house with it and may not even be able to keep a fire going." Also the sheer weight of work.....I guess maybe I don't feel bad exchanging between 8-10 hours of my life five days a week (and the odd sixth day here and there) for income, because one person who kept goats as a source of food (milk, especially) noted that "it was a big deal when we could take a half-day off and go somewhere). Apparently some goats are even worse than toddlers about getting into stuff and causing trouble? And also the point that for couples going it alone (let alone singles) it was so much harder because there was no one else to ever shoulder the chores.

There was also some discussion about how it was largely impossible for people to live totally off the land; you just can't grow enough or sufficiently-diverse food. (And also: they couldn't easily "opt out" of buying things - which was the smug attitude some took - because there was no one, for example, hand-forging shovels)

Also a discussion of "What is a 'luxury' and what is a 'necessity'" and how there were arguments on whether deodorant was a luxury to be shunned at the like and....I dunno, that kind of thing just makes me tired and, given my Sunday school background, realize that once a people give up the intricacies of Levitical laws or similar, they seem to want to invent their own earth-bound laws to "prove" how pure or earnest or something they are, and it makes me tired. (From this week's Sunday school lesson, a quote from Martin Luther that said something like how we're all sinners but are also all "justified" (to use the language of the lesson-writer; that was probably not how Luther said it in the original German). But yeah. I tend much more to side with Luther on this: we have areas where we're good at doing what we 'ought,' and others where we aren't, and everyone is like that, but they have different places where they fall down, and as long as their 'falling down' isn't actually hurting anyone, it seems excessive to judge them harshly. ("I don't eat anything with almonds," says a person. "Do you know how much water they require as a crop?" and my butter-like-food loving self over here, who is now apparently allergic to peanut butter kind of wants to weep, because I'm not giving up yet another food; I'm to the point of only giving up foods when I canNOT eat them for health reasons (bad teeth, allergies, bad digestion) but then again: there are a lot of things I forego, not so much out of deep environmentalism, but because I can't be bothered (e.g., watering my lawn on a regular basis. So far the St. Augustine hasn't died, and that even includes the dry summer of 2011). And these days I tend to drive as little as possible because I have come to dislike it so much (see: this weekend's trip)

And also, there comes a point where things that make you happy probably cease to be a luxury and become a necessity: I remember spring of 2016, during Furlough Days Time, when I cut out nearly all "frivolous" spending, how welcome that Doki Doki crate was every month, and what a big thing it was to go yarn shopping on my birthday. People need stuff that makes them happy and perhaps another reason why some of the communes failed is that either there was too high a ratio of grinding hard work and insecurity to enjoyment, or too many people preaching (an ironically Puritan thing, given our usual image of hippies) that pleasures in the form of food "from outside" or new clothes or  hot showers or even deodorant were "bad" somehow. (I guess, from what I'm reading, sex and weed were exempt from that? Sex presumably because it was free as long as you had a willing partner and weed because....well, I don't know. I've never even been remotely curious about it so I can't really comment)

* Still in a cycle of weird, borderline-unpleasant dreams. First one: my two lower-left molars were loose and wiggly, I was told they were "probably dying" and I might need dental implants (dental implants, while I am sure they help many people, are something that squick me out badly, the whole idea of what the preparation for them requires).

I woke up middle of the night, got up to go to the bathroom, and, uncharacteristically, turned on the light. I do this sometimes after an unpleasant dream to wake myself up more fully so that I hopefully won't go back into the dream.

(I suspect the loose-tooth thing came from a random gag in The Simpsons, which I happened to watch last night - Lenny had got a crown done at the local tech-training school, and he PULLED IT STRAIGHT OUT to show to Marge. Her response: "I.....don't think those are supposed to come out.")

The second dream, while unsettling when I first woke up, is kind of funny to me now: We were participating in an election. However, it was done by caucus. (I prefer the secret ballot and I find the whole idea of caucusing uncomfortable to begin with). But this was a different sort of caucus: there was a burrito (or maybe it was a blintz) type representative of each candidate, and you were supposed to selected a burrito (or blintz) with the filling representing the candidate you preferred.

Except, all the fillings were gross and were things I did not like (and in one case, could not eat), and I stood there wondering what I was supposed to do.

I'm....glad we don't do voting that way.