This evening's things

 * I am finally up to the next color in the "Mandala" multicolored yarn cake I am making a corner-to-corner blanket of:

Orange shaded into yellow. I still have a way to go on this cake; I plan to knit until I'm a couple rows short of running out and then start the decreases (to be sure I have enough with the second cake). It's going to be quite large but that's what I wanted, I wanted a big heavy (in terms of weight; acrylic yarn is heavy because it's dense) blanket for winter. 

It's what they call mindless knitting, which is good for when I'm tired, but I admit it's also harder to stick with than something more complex is. 

* I took a little time after lunch today and ran out to the local farm to table store; they sent out an e-mail saying beef was back. So I got 3 pounds (in 1 pound packages) of ground beef and a slab of spare ribs. They are all frozen so I could just bung them in the freezer - if we do get the possible cool down this weekend I might thaw out the ribs and do them in the slow cooker. 

They also had really nice mixed salad greens, a generous bag for $3, so I got one. Had a big salad with dinner. may have another one tomorrow. 

(They have chickens too and I was wondering to myself as I washed the lettuce if the greens they don't sell, that go a little "off," if they wind up going to the chickens. I know when I've gotten lettuce for various labs and there's some leftover, I often have a student offer to take it to feed to their chickens.)

It's a nice drive and a nice break to go out there. And I also found the little mercantile over in Bokchito last week so maybe once in a while I go there - sometimes you just need to get out and both those places are closer than Sherman would be (and also less traffic, and they're now warning people again about nasty construction on 75). 

I wish there was another grocery store this side of the river though that had a decent selection of things that our local stores didn't, but you can't have everything. 

Maybe some day I go up to Atoka and look around - I haven't been there in a long time and supposedly they have more stuff now.

* Read the next two chapters for the biostats class today, will probably compile the notes on them Thursday (so I don't totally burn myself out) and also read a bit on the Uncommon Ground book - which I'll probably work on, along with some research reading.

I also read (during breaks from that) two other short pieces - one, purportedly by someone knowledgeable about physiology about what happens to the human body at deep ocean depths. I slightly regret reading it now, other than knowing that the people almost certainly didn't feel any pain or even know they were about to die. (During the "search," before we knew what had actually happened, I had horrible, agonizing thoughts about being trapped in a tube like that, where maybe the lights failed because the batteries ran out, and there was no way to communicate with the outside world.....one afternoon I had to actually get up and walk outside because my living room felt too close. 

The other one was more interesting from the stand point of animal behavior - it was about the so-called "Mouse Heaven" experiment where mice were given safety, and freedom from disease, and all the resources they needed. And at first, things were pretty good - a hierarchy developed, babies were born. But then, there were the mice who didn't get to have "harems" and unlike the real world, they couldn't migrate elsewhere for a better life, so they basically formed something like a Mouse Fight Club in the middle of the arena. And some of the crowding made the female mice either fail to successfully raise babies, or some became essentially hermits in their cubicles and never tried to breed or even interact with other mice. And other of the male mice became what the researcher called "the beautiful ones" - grooming excessively, with no interest in either getting a place in the hierarchy of other male mice or finding a female mouse to breed with. It seems that the crowding and possibly the unnatural conditions (maybe the mice would have benefitted, as they counsel the very online humans, from "logging off and touching grass"?)

And yeah, yeah, there are all kinds of dangers in relating human behavior to animal behavior, but....some days I do feel like one of those female mice hiding in a cubicle without really a place in the world. It's better now than it was during 2020 but still....some days it still does feel a little disconnected. 

Also, yeah - this is the Rats of NIMH guy, the person who did the experiments that led Robert O'Brien to develop a science fiction story around the fundamental principle of rats innovating new behaviors (n the real world - the rats who had never learned how to carry soil when burrowing, they started rolling and packing it into balls and rolling those balls out of the tunnels, which was more efficient). I read the book in third grade. I liked it, but parts of it are awfully sad. (Just like Watership Down is. Neither of those is a "funny animal book," they are rather more sort of a modern Aesop fable, but with more depth and more of an emotional barb to them.)