* I was too busy yesterday to look at any of the field samples but I examined the first three today. As I feared: no invertebrates and not even really any signs of decomposition. That's what you get when you have has less than an inch of rain in an area for two months, the time overlapping with the time the samples were out there.
Hopefully we get some rain soon or this project will (ironically enough) be a washout.
* I was writing next week's homework (I nearly forgot!) for my stats class and was redoing an old exercise (from 10 years ago) comparing mean and median; the data set is a hypothetical baseball team where a couple players have very high salaries and the rest are clustered more closely; I have the students calculate and compare a mean and median value. And back in those days I used characters out of Nero Wolfe, and a few well-known plant taxonomists as the hypothetical player names, but since I was redoing numbers I also wanted to redo names.
and then I had a brainwave. .Well, for me, a brainwave: I can use Bobson Dugnutt and company!
Some years back there was a baseball video game ("Fighting Baseball," I think?) with the most ridiculous player names:
Bobson Dugnutt is the one everyone who remembers it remembers, but the others are funny too. So I grabbed some of those.
I don't know if any of my students will "get" it - it's an awfully old meme - but it amused me anyway.
* And I think of Bobson Dugnutt because a year or so ago when the angry little rainfrog plushy that Jellycat made came out, I bought one, and didn't know what to name him ("Ricky," his company-assigned name, seemed not right) and then I thought of Bobson Dugnutt, and Bobson Dugnutt he became.
Here's a placeholder photo ganked from the Jellycat site, if I have the energy once I get home I'll take a picture of my Bobson:
* Last night I pulled the corner to corner knit blanket out and added....well, one more row (it's close to time for me to start decreasing but this is just the really tedious part). But I do want to try to finish this soon. I had to take the weighted blanket off my bed because I realized the weight (it's a 15-pounder) was exacerbating my hip and knee pains - I think it makes me stay too still while sleeping and I stiffen up then. But, since I've taken it off I also notice I sleep more restlessly - and I wake up a lot, and I'm having extremely action-packed dreams again (that could just be the stress of being back in class, though). But the corner-to-corner blanket is heavy (it's acrylic) but is NOT as heavy as the weighted blanket but it's heavier than the small thin quilt I have on there now, so it might be a happy medium.
I am not sure whether to box up the weighted blanket for some future time when I need the weight and am willing to do it at the sacrifice of a little pain, or whether to launder it (I might have to take it to a laundromat so I don't overstress my geriatric dryer) and offer it up to anyone who needs it (locally! I am not paying to mail a 15 pound blanket somewhere).
*Of course, I also want to finish sweaters and work on the Leaves of Grass socks and start a shawl and all of that. Not enough hours in the day and right now not much to watch* that holds me in the chair enough to keep knitting, and knitting in silence means I ruminate, and ruminating these days is bad.
I wish the writers and actors would get what they're asking for and be able to end the strikes. This fall network/non premium cable is going to be DIRE, the networks are advertising schlocky looking game shows and horrible "reality" tv and things like "real crime" that is literally documentaries on ugly FBI cases.....and yeah, no. I want stories. I want dumb shows that make me laugh and forget the awfulness of the world right now
(*remember I don't have streaming other than amazon prime and sometimes my shoddy internet is too slow in the evenings to stream on it, and I'd have to watch on my old laptop because my dvd player doesn't recognize that as a streaming service)
I do have dvds. I've got the full run of The Good Place and Parks and Recreation and a set of Keeping Up Appearances and that would keep me occupied for a while but I admit when I'm tired in the evening I don't want to fiddle with putting a disk in and pushing extra buttons to select what I want, I want to just look at the onscreen tv guide and pick the best thing.....except now, "best" is disappointing, it's more "best of a bad lot"
* A little frustrated though because a few weeks back I ordered tights from Snag UK (good quality tights, come in colors hard to find, and sized more comfortably than even the largesized tights you can buy in stores - which usually come in black and MAYBE grey if you're lucky). Got a shipping confirmation on August 22. Didn't think much of it because I figured they were coming from the UK but I decided to check today to see if I could see where they were on their way.
Well. The tracking code defaults to the Purolator Courier website. Which I admit, made me go "what the fracas?" the first time, because I've never seen Purolator deliver here, but I thought "maybe there's a USPS handoff at some point).
Except. Purolator does not recognize the tracking code. I even went through chat help with what alleged to be a real person and they said "no that's not the format we use" and I don't even KNOW and by then it was late enough people in the UK would have gone home from work.....I did e-mail them but I wonder if my tights are just lost forever, or if somehow they got delivered to me in some other dimension instead or what. But I'm not happy, because also the yarn I ordered for that Moon Moth sweater is now in an eddy-pool of the USPS and has not moved since the 25th of August and all of this is slightly triggering to me as I remember times in 2020 where packages just disappeared (in one case for eight weeks) or were damaged badly in transit.
And it's hard, you know? For one thing, living in a place with very limited shopping (I don't even KNOW where I would go to buy tights other than the bog-standard L'Eggs in black or grey) is frustrating and it's upsetting when it's hard to get stuff shipped with any reliability. BUT SECOND it's frustrating and kind of depressing that because I'm going it alone, it's on ME to navigate what passes for customer service now - increasingly using AI bots that just tap out at some point when they can't help you, or trying to type to a person and wait and wait for their response.
And it makes me feel very small and sad and bereft. I'm not even sure where I'd go here for in person clothes shopping (other than MAYBE for field pants, which I could probably get at the farm store), my last several dresses have been ordered from Vermont Country Store which is good (but often uses Fed Ex for shipping, which is kind of atrocious here).
(It doesn't help that I have a couple difficult people in my Thursday class, on top of the people in general not seeming very mature. I feel like I'm being giggled at behind people's hands and no I know I shouldn't care what a bunch of 18 year olds think of me but again I have few enough human interactions in a day that bad ones needlessly color my mood. Like, I will never come home to a spouse who is happy to see me or a kid who occasionally might go "MOMMY! I MISSED YOU" so I just drag home and many days now there's not even MAIL to pick up, or if there is, it's a bill....)
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