taz_39 | Reading

Remembering Skye.

This morning I was noticing the emptiness of the spot where Skye used to like to sit and watch the birds.

Dave's gone fishing with his brother Jim and I have nothing planned so it's a free day. As usual I have lots of stuff I can do here. Finish an amigurumi panda that I started a long time ago then start a pastel colored winter weight crochet crib blanket I want to make for Rowan (that's something that gets me excited - a new project), paint on the morel mushroom walking sticks, mosaic in the shed, walk the dogs...

mallorys_camera

Multiple errands took me to the other side of the river yesterday—which I like so much more than this side of the river. I have fond memories of living in the sleepy little town of Hyde Park. The local cottage industry is Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

Though that may be changing. Hyde Park is also the home of the Culinary Institute of America, which has become pretty famous with the rise of food content programming across streaming networks. No fewer than three enormous resort-style hotels are going up in Hyde Park, all scheduled to open in the next three years. I can't help thinking that those investors misread the economic signals: Is anyone gonna want to blow five grand on a luxury vacation in fuckin' Hyde Park, NY, in three years? Is anyone gonna have five grand to blow on a luxury vacation anywhere in three years? I mean, apart from the one-percenters?

But I've been plenty wrong about those things before.

###

Among the useful things I bought yesterday were a knee brace and a weed wacker. I'm trying both of them out today.

I went across the river to have a fasting blood sugar drawn—so maybe that's why I felt so weak while I was shopping. I ate a banana, but honestly, I thought I might collapse at Home Depot. Of course, Home Depot—this cavernous warehouse with weak flurescent lighting, no air conditioning, and aisles and aisles and aisles of machinery and building materials—is one of my least favorite places in the world, so maybe that played into it.

Anyway, when I got home, I more-or-less collapsed. Yes, idleness is bad. But sometimes...

Rewatched Ghost World, which continues to be a brilliant movie.

That bus Norman waits for throughout the film. That finally comes for him at the end of the film, even though Enid knows the route was discontinued more than two years ago.

The bus is analogous to the symbol of the door in the wall in H.G. Wells' story of the same name. It's a story that's been a great favorite of mine since childhood. The door in the wall is what's in modern parlance called a portal. Ah! But a portal to where?

Is the bus a modern parallel to the mythological ferry over the River Styx? When Enid finally boards it at the end of the film, is this a code for her suicide? Is it a metaphor for the end of childhood? Or is it just a weird thing in a movie filled with weird things?

I still get goosebumps at that throwaway flash of a scene when Norman actually gets on the bus.

flemmings

Today's Big Excitement was losing my house key, the one on the Hakkai keychain, not the one with my Kryptonite lock key that lives in my backpack. I carry Hakkai in whatever pocket is available, unlock door, and lay him/ it down on the kitchen table after putting backpack on the kitchen chair. But today he/it wasn't on the table, or under the table where things sometimes fall, or under anything else on the table as so often happens. So I went out, leaving the door on the latch as I used to do all the time, and wondered who of the various people I've given keys to I could hit up to get my key back. What I really minded was losing Hakkai, but oh well.

Not to keep anyone in suspense, I did find him/it when I got home, in a pocket in the backpack that I'd looked in before.

Went out for sushi but had salmon teriyaki instead-- the teriyaki dinner, not the lunch, because the lunch gives you fruit (cantaloupe and orange) that I don't really want. But the dinner has huge helpings of both salmon and veg, more than anyone can eat who isn't an adolescent male. So now I have dinner for tomorrow as well.

The day was pleasant and breezy and not nearly as hot as certain weather pages said it would be. Since I was already at Bathurst and Bloor, I thought to suss out the newly reopened Markham St part of Mirvish Village, whose towers are mostly responsible for the day's breeziness. Signs advertise the businesses that will locate there, and evidence (trash cans) suggested that the famous pizza place was already open for business. At present it's the only one, located I *think* where the old Victory Cafe was in happier times. I won't be trying it out because both its doors are up a flight of concrete steps. This is all new construction and they could have put in a ramp but of course they didn't. Markham used to be a shady street but most of the trees fell victim to construction of the towers so now it bakes in the sun. Wind tunnel or no, that block no longer invites the pedestrian. But I turned onto the little cross street that takes you west and that was shady and filled with flowering bushes and green grass, just as in the old days when I used to bicycle home from work along its length.

summersgate

I'm going to count making this little book as my art-a-day for today. Once again I feel the need to try and get a handle on my food intake. One of the things I like to do is have a little pocket sized book that I can write my food down in after I eat it so I can at least feel like I'm being honest on some level. But for this book in the morning I'm going to list the food I think I should eat that day and see if I can hold myself to that. I'll feel better if at the end of the day I can see that I haven't eaten everything that came my way, like I have been doing. Lately I've just felt so HUNGRY and if I feel hunger it must be time to eat. But I'm not really hungry - can't be. Anyway. Today I wrote down plenty of food in my plan so I don't think there will be any danger of real hunger:
1 fried egg on nan bread with mayo
2 whatever I have when I go out with Jan and Berdella today (it ended up being a toasted cheese sandwich and applesauce)
3 leftover broccoli and mushroom crustless quiche with 1/2 cup of vanilla milk
4 vanilla yogurt with walnuts, granola and blue berries
5 3 jelly beans

I took my big box of words to group today and we took turns drawing out words and then talking about what they reminded us of. That was fun. I also brought the book The Story of Jumping Mouse and read it aloud. I thought it would be entertaining to hear it read. As usual a couple times I got choked up as I read it. That book always makes me cry and that's what I like about it. Maybe because we are getting closer to The Far Off Land and I can relate to all the stuff that jumping mouse loses as he travels on his journey.

I took some supplies out to my shed and to the tent this morning. I get very excited in the summer when I can get out of the house and spend time in something like the tent or the shed. Probably part of it is that I am a borderline hoarder in the house and it's just more pleasant to be in places that have less STUFF in them. Some pictures:( Read more... )

Well, I have the rest of the day free. There are a few things I could work on: mosaic, continue painting the morel walking sticks, take a nap (though for once I don't feel tired this afternoon like I usually do), continue watching Love on the Spectrum (I love that show) or maybe take the dogs for a walk. We're having perfect beautiful weather still.

mallorys_camera

Down once again to one chicken—the indominable Black Chicken.

Happened on Icky's watch—I never let the chickens out unless I can sit outside watching out for them for a couple of hours. Not that that matters, I suppose—Nature red in tooth and claw, predators are gonna do what predators are gonna do. Without a chicken run, they were dead chickens walking.

But it feels better to have someone to blame, and I blame him.

I think it was some kind of raptor.

Icky had let the chickens out and then taken off.

When it was near dark, I went down to shut them in their coop—only they weren't in their coop.

So, I took off calling for them: "Chickens! Chickens!"

And eventually found Black Chicken, sitting dazed by the compost heap, with a big (thankfully superficial) wound on her back. I'm thinking the only way she could have gotten that is if some large raptor bird had swooped down on her & tried to carry her off.

Somehow, she managed to get away! Black Chicken is a survivor.

The other black chicken wasn't as lucky.

The other black chicken had just begun trusting me enough to take bits of tasty tortilla treats out of my hand. I was almost comfortable enough with her longevity prospects—almost—to make up a silly nickname for her. She was a very cautious chicken.

Icky did take Black Chicken to a vet—the wound will heal, she'll recover.

But she won't be fine without a companion: Chickens are very social little creatures.

I wish I could just kidnap Black Chicken and smuggle her to

egg_shell! The Underground Chicken Railroad!

egg_shell knows how to take care of chickens!

But she's not my chicken.

I am sad, though I accept the inevitability. This is what life is. Since animals can't photosynthesize, eventually all of us are on the cafeteria menu. In the end, we all get eaten, whether that be by lions and tigers and bears or bacteria.

###

The garden is driving me a bit nuts because the weeds are growing so fast, particularly those fuckin' nettles. The weeds are thriving! My vegetables, not so much.

It's a very different environment than the Hyde Park Community Garden. For one thing, it's in full sunlight. Since we are now in full summer—not by the calendar but meteorologically—I've been watering the garden every other day, but possibly I'm overwatering it? The cucumber leaves have yellow spots, the basil pinkish spots.

Traditionally, I've always found weeding by hand meditative. But not this much weeding! So today, I'm gonna go over to the Home Depot to see if I can pick up a cheap, portable weed wacker.

###

Finished Chapter 7. It was difficult to write: I really wanted a different authorial voice than I used in Part 1. I think I succeeded in that. But Flavia is just not as interesting a character as Grazia was. Plus I am now in the realm of pure fictioneering, since Flavia is not a Patrizia interject. Whole cloth fictioneering carries a special set of challenges that involve plotting as well as style.

###

My knee is still a problem. Some days it improves; some days, it's Not Good. It's not the patella—it's some ligament behind the patella. Although it affects the patella because if that ligament is hurting, I use the leg in a particular way that puts weird stress on the patella.

It was bad yesterday, very achey, so after I watered the garden, I just lay on my fainting couch icing it all day and reading (Chaim Potok's The Promise, which is a treasure trove of useful Hasid information should I ever go back to my June Miller novel.)

It feels 100% better today, so maybe that's what I need to do for a couple of days. Nothing

But I always feel so guilty when I do nothing.

flemmings

I will eventually learn to read all the info provided before buying clothes. Old Navy's cotton tops are distressingly thin for autumn or winter wear but, I thought, might do well in summer. My tanktops are all thick cotton and I have to wear them with something that covers my arms, which is generally another thick cotton something, and so I sweat in TO's summer humidity. The (palest pink and easily stainable) tee I bought earlier is certainly thinner than my other ones, so maybe they'd actually be cooler than tanktops? Men's t-shirts of course, and they're on sale in colours men don't often wear, like burgundy and saffron, that don't show splashes nearly as much.

They arrived yesterday and were indeed lightweight. Wore one today in the humid sun and thought them a little unbreathing. Yeah, is because they're 97% polyester. When you buy cotton t-shirts, make sure they're really cotton. But they'll do for actual t-shirt weather, I suppose. I have two cotton tees that are useless because they have Japanese logos on them and can't be worn to any of my Korean-run restaurants. Shall gift them to some clothes depot probably, to make room for the new ones.

Meanwhile my final property tax bill arrives. I know the second bill has included increases in the past, only these last few years the final installments have been lower than the first half. But not usually $110 a month lower, which was an extremely pleasant surprise.

Memory goes with heat, so I only know I've finished a couple of Dr. Priestleys this week, and The Eagle of the Ninth, which I finished today. Still rereading System Collapse and Platform Decay, the former as hard to envisage as ever, the latter making much more sense. No idea what I'll go on with: summer is line of least resistance when it comes to reading, and I'm pretty much all out of Cecil Street and his various avatars.

summersgate

Had a nice walk at McKeever near Sandy Lake yesterday morning with Jan and then lunch afterward at McCullough's Kitchen Table. Came home to take a nap in the tent. When I got up I weed wacked the path through the woods that the borders the lake next door. Lots of multiflora rose needed chomped. I went through 2 batteries on the weedwacker this time instead of just one like I did earlier in the season. My right hand grip is getting stronger. After dinner and walking the dogs Dave and I went shopping at Walmart. Going at 9 at night to walmart is a good time to go. Barely any people there.

Yesterday I got an idea for something to make with stained glass mosaic this summer. I bought a dozen glass jelly jars last night and I'm going to glue stained glass pieces on them and then grout around that. It might be a dumb idea, and it's certainly not an original design but it will get me outside to the goatshed this summer and that's all I ask. I like to be outside as much as possible in the summer. It's a season that I love. The goatshed is relatively cool in the heat of the summer. Maybe it's the cement floor and the building is shaded by big trees all around too. The cups could hold tea lights or be pencil cups - whatever.

Today is going to be an at-home day. Yay! It feels like I've been running somewhere everyday for days and days. I want to get caught up with the bills and some phone calls, plant the marigolds I got last week, and spend time in my shed and the tent.

flemmings

Woke at what I thought was 9:30, didn't want to get up then so floated for a bit, then did All The Exercises, then went downstairs to get my breakfast. And the kitchen clock said 9:30. Battery must be dying, I thought, but the second hand still ticked away happily. When I got back upstairs, yeah, kitchen clock was right and I'd been awake since 8:30. Hence why I'm yawning at 10 p.m.

Well and also because I did indeed wash the stairs today, even if I had to stop halfway and take muscle relaxants for the back. I think the candle wax stains are there for good even if I scraped the actual wax off. Unfortunately used the wrong Dr. Bronner's so the house now smells of tea tree oil. But anyway, stairs are as clean as my arthritic elbows can get them.

Midafternoon I took a load of towels and pillowcases and fleeces to the laundromat, so that's also out of the way. Must go back eventually to do a cold wash of the velour throw that I use on the sofa in winter, which is too heavy for my ancient washing machine, but that can wait. And finally went out in the evening coolness and cut down more vines from the back fence, which I will bag up eventually. Daytime temps and humidity are rising so not going to do this during the day, but we're at the happy time of year when it's light after eight and I shall make the most of it. I heard Oliver barking indoors, oddly enough, because he's usually out in the yard. I fancy SND is away, possibly getting married, and she has a dogsitter in. Certainly I haven't seen him running around his yard lately.

So though I much prefer sitting on the couch with the fan and beanbags, I think I've moved sufficiently today.

picori

So re: my last post on the 31st, I lowered the amount of caffeine I had on the 1st and I didn't get any of the side effects (e.g. the tremors) that I had before, which just makes me think I had too much caffeine that day. Still got a racing heart, though, and it's a little irritating and slightly concerning in equal measure, so I think I'll tone it down.

The thing is, I took a break from the pill today and went back to having my usual three big cups of coffee per morning, and you'd think the three big cups would be greater in caffeine than one cup + 200mg caffeine pill and so the effect would be greater, but I'm back to being dead tired and sort of listless—my improved mood from the past two days has me feeling better enough to write some, at least, even if I don't feel as good today. It's kind of ridiculous that three cups of coffee makes me feel this exhausted and doesn't even help me focus that much (as opposed to having zero caffeine) compared to the caffeine pill. Maybe the pill form just releases faster within the body??? Idk, I'm no doctor. Coffee being more than just caffeine probably has something to do with it. But man, I'm right back to feeling lethargic and zombie-like. Interesting to note.

summersgate

Summer Naptime. Yesterday Candy and I hiked the Window Trail at Kennerdell. That is one of the longer hikes we go on. 6 miles and 2 of those miles are on a gravel road. I wore my barefoot shoes because they are wonderful for the soft ground of the woods but I forgot about the part of the hike at the beginning and the end when you are on the gravel road. My feet were bruised and sore by the time we got back to the car. I think it's interesting how at times an idea can strike and I do have the energy to carry it out, when usually I am very lazy. Yesterday I got home with my sore feet and all I wanted was to lie down and take my afternoon nap but the thought of being in the house on such a beautiful day seemed very unattractive. For many years I set up a summertime tent (though not for the last 3). The first time was after we moved here in 2000. I didn't have a tent so I stretched a piece of clear plastic over a clothes line tied to two trees in the back yard, put cement blocks on the corners, set up a cot and started to take my afternoon naps there. The next year I got a real tent and used it year after year till it fell apart. The tent I have now is very spacious, supposedly sleeps 10. That means that it will accommodate 10 sleeping bags on the floor. I'd hate to see 10 people try and sleep in there. Anyway, I set it up soon after I got home yesterday. Not easy. The tent poles stay attached to the tent walls and it's like a giant harvester spider attached to a polyester web. You have to be gentle and also strong to unfold the spider's legs so they don't break at the joints. Takes a lot of walking around it and making small adjustments. In the end I needed to ask Dave for help with the rainfly. I swept it out, brought out the memory foam cot and a sheet and a pillow, cleaned off a plastic chair and 2 little tables and found some old throw rugs to put in there. Then I sat in the lawn chair and drew the above pic. Last night I called my sister and lay on the bed talking to her till it got dark. It's only about 50 feet from the chicken coop so it was easy to stop off there and put the chickens to bed before I came in for the night.

Last evening I also helped Dave stretch chicken wire along the bottom of a fence he has around his corn garden. He has 2 lines of electric wire stretched around the plot to keep the deer out but he forgot the chickens. They were going in under the electric wire and scratching up the corn seeds as they searched for bugs.

Two pictures from yesterday morning's hike to Window Trail:

The mountain laurels are in bloom again. I love these flowers.

Me on one of the rocks that juts out from the edge with the Allegheny River far below. Even though it's called Window Trail there isn't a good view of the river or Kennerdell from it. Too many trees.

Today the plan is to hike with Jan at McKeever, come home and take a nice nap in my tent. Beyond that I don't know.

mallorys_camera

Chapters 1 through 6 are here.

Part 2: Flavia

Chapter 7

If I had it to do over again (famous last words!), I would have torn the place down. It was one of the older dwellings on the Cherrytown loop—roads that had never seen a single cherry, but which, once upon a time, were overrun with feral crab apple trees. Hard little crab apples might pass for cherries if you weren’t paying attention. The tanners who settled this part of the Catskills probably used them for hard cider. By the 1930s, though, when the place went up, the tanners were long gone. They’d stripped the bark off the native hemlocks, polluted the streams, and moved on.

I bought it to save it: two hundred acres of mostly untouched woods plus a residential structure, more shack than house. The man who’d been living there since the Depression was one of those mountain hermit types, but he'd had distant relatives who'd waited out probate and were being courted by developers. You wouldn’t expect a developer to be interested in a parcel some hundred miles from New York City at the end of a twisting road, but you’d be wrong. There's always someone willing to bulldoze a hillside if the survey looks promising. So I decided I’d make the relatives rich instead and then donate the land to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development.

Except they didn’t want it.

“What am I going to do with it?” I moaned.

“I’ll live there,” Neal said.

And within two months of the day I signed the deed, he'd moved in.

Hardly anyone who knew him understood why he would leave the small but bustling city of Kingston, where he had so many friends, where everyone knew his name, where he was one of the cocks of the walk, for the isolation of a mountainside.

But I understood.

And now he didn’t live here anymore. He didn’t live anywhere. He was dead. I’d been with him here most weekends for the past five years—and in plenty of other places besides, of course—but those other places weren’t imprinted with him the way this one was. Here was the kitchen where he cooked for me, the garden where he grew me kale and heirloom tomatoes, the bed where he brought me to sweet moan.

( But wait! There's more! )

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

flemmings

Today is sunny and cool, or cool in the shade at least. The sun is June hot but the sky is the deep blue they photoshop into the background of picture postcards. This is extremely rare in downtown TO. The rest of the week will warm up but I see rain forecast for Saturday ie Open Tuning wall'o'noise day. Naraba ii, says the grinch over here.

Having gardened on Saturday, Sunday I did nothing but medicate the aches and stiffness with beanbags and vodka. Today I have at least done a wash and hung it on the line, just as SND's tenant is drying hers in the back garden. I might even get at the stairs (inside) with the scrub brush I just bought, though I forgot to buy rubber gloves, and my eczema'd fingers are really not up for dipping in hot soapy water. Must hang my Pride flag as well, but my legs are once again not steady on step stools.

Did at least locate System Collapse in the safe place I put it, and have started a reread. Especially as the word is that System Collapse (ETA Platform Decay, of course) may be the last Murderbot installment, alas and οτοτοι.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

picori

Steeples my fingers together like one of those intimidating mob boss guys who dramatically turn around in their chairs upon someone entering their room in a movie. So.

I feel like there's something wrong with me.

I don't mean that in like, a self-loathing way. I mean it in sort of an "objectively looking at my mental health" way. I walk around my house like a zombie, or maybe just a hollow shell of a person. I can't focus worth shit anymore; reading is getting difficult because my eyes keep sliding off the words and my brain won't retain information worth shit. I have no real motivation to do anything. I feel good today, but it's only because I've discovered the wonders that are caffeine pills and taking one of those (after two cups of coffee, which was not brewed very strongly because not much was used in terms of coffee grounds) is the first time I've felt like an actual normal person in...Idk, a year? Little more, little less? Something like that. Information from articles and blog posts I read (and I have the energy to read again!) was actually being retained, and I remembered that I read it. Shit's incredible.

I had a doctor's appointment back in March or something where the topic of me potentially either being depressed or having ADD came up, and my NP brought up the idea of researching medications for ADD and getting back to her about it. Which, like, is useful in theory, and I should probably follow up on it eventually (and also maybe revisit the depression point?) but I still have one more semester of college left to go (I'm in my final semester! Yay!) and I don't need to be screwing around with medications when I'm trying to focus on passing these final three classes plus my exit exam. And the exit exam is the most important—I'll pass those three classes no matter what, they're not the worst things in the world, but I need to score above the tenth percentile on that exit exam in order to graduate and my mental state has been so in the gutter for the past year (well, longer, but this particular state of mind I've been in has just gotten progressively worse over the past year specifically) that I can't recall anything I learned. So. Guess I'm crash-coursing my entire degree for the next two months, starting tomorrow. Should be fun.

The fact that I've written two full paragraphs above this is kind of wild to me, genuinely. I've written longer on this journal in the past, but in recent times it's been so bad, man. "It" being everything about my complete and utter inability to just fucking focus on anything. I'm so tired all the damn time, and I know part of it has to be burnout from college, but the other part really does feel like something that needs to be chemically controlled. Case in point, the caffeine pill I took today. I genuinely forgot what it felt like to be able to look at something, anything and see the detail on it instead of my eyes straining to the point where I have to squeeze them closed in an attempt to even look at them because my mind just doesn't want to see anything. Hence, the zombie/hollow shell comparison. Of course, all that caffeine at once hits and gives my body some slight tremors and a sort of racing-heart feeling, so I can't take one every single day because that's annoying and also probably unhealthy, but my mind feels...normal. Like I could close my eyes and take a nap normally instead of just waiting for the perpetual exhaustion to knock me out after tossing and turning for a little bit. Does that make sense?

Damn, that last one made three. I realize that this post sounds concerning and also like I may be suicidal, and I want to make it clear that I'm not (had to reiterate that to my NP multiple times lmao). I'm just exasperated, and listless all the time, and happy to have one day where I don't feel like complete dogshit and/or a ghost. So yeah, something wrong with me, haha. If all goes well, I graduate in August, and then maybe I'll look into getting whatever it is diagnosed (while also trying to contend with the horrible job market, holy shit). For now, it's nice to be able to write my thoughts and experiences out again.

Current Mood: awake

summersgate

Morning.

mallorys_camera

So, there was supposed to be some kind of work day at the New Paltz Community Garden yesterday. I showed up at the brutal hour of 9am, and nobody was there! No apologetic emails or texts either. Not then and not since.

You're supposed to do one of these work days each season, & this one was mine. (I believe in getting this kind of chore out of the way early.)

Anyway, they had their chance, and I ain't signing up for a work day again.

###

Also, mega-snark from the usual suspects when I posted the news about Alpha Male's passing to the Well group on FB.

I have heard from various sources... I wrote.

That's just a rumor!

You don't know that!

Snark! Snark! Snark!

Well, I do know that, and since Alpha Male basically saved the Well—a tottering horseshoe crab of a social media site that has been around since the 1980s—by scraping up and leading a team of investors to buy the damn thing and run it as a type of coop, I thought they might want to know too.

But no, they'd rather activate moldering feuds from 30 years ago, so I took the post down.

I fumed!

Then I chastized myself: These people are irrelevant! Why do you let yourself care?

But it took me a good half hour to stop caring.

###

Apart from that, it was a pleasant if melancholy day. Real-life Flavia was once again up at Brian's old house. "Do you want anything? Come up and see what you might want."

So I drove up to the Catskills through the Shawangunk Mountains:

Claimed Brian's really high-end Ninja blender and an excellent portable mixer with many fabulous whisk attachments. And two Moroccan end tables.

Also took more boxes of books to disseminate among various local libraries (all of which raise money with periodic book sales).

And promised to find a good home for Brian's voluminous collection of camping gear. I am hoping RTT wants it. There are bags & bags of it.

It was good to see Real-life Flavia. The house itself, though, was... sad. I'm still shocked by how much I miss Brian. I've weathered the deaths of people who were closer to me with far less emotion. Though it wasn't just Brian's ghost that made me feel sad, it was also the horrible state of neglect the house was in. There were mouse turds everywhere and dust and filth and smoke grime.

How could real-life Mimi (who showed up to take a shower) have lived with this for 10 months?

###

Calling Betsy has been on the To Do list for over a week now, so I did that last night.

I actually like Betsy, but she is exceedingly high maintenance, which means I've gotta ration my exposure, plus I am not a big phone person.

Betsy has had a recurrence of her Lyme disease except maybe it's not Lyme disease, maybe it's just a complete physical & mental breakdown. (I can relate: That's exactly what happened to me with the Schlock gig).

Towards the end of the call, though, it occurred to me that in addition to all that, Betsy is really quite nuts.

She was ranting about some sort of penalty she had to pay on her 2023 taxes, which was all due to some TurboTax snafu.

"Well, if you don't really owe it, don't pay it," I said. "Amend your 2023 return."

No, no. She couldn't be bothered.

"You don't have to do it. I'll file the amendment for you."

No, no. It was too much work.

"Betsy," I said. "If you don't correct the underlying mistake, they will keep charging you more penalties. Do you not get that? I am happy to do this for you—"

No, no. She just couldn't deal with that.

It occurred to me then that she liked the fact that she was being targeted unjustly. She enjoys thinking of herself as persecuted. She will actually go out of her way to create situations where she can feel persecuted.

This is one of those insights you wish you hadn't had.

summersgate

The spiderlings were totally gone yesterday morning when I checked on them. All the webs that they were clustered on were gone too so I suspect something came in and destroyed (ate) them. We have lots of chipmunks around so I imagine one of them might have discovered them.

Family. A thing I drew while we were on our way to Pittsburgh yesterday to go to a high school grad party for the oldest of Dave's nephew's sons. As usual I was dreading it since it was a social event but it all went fine once we got there. I found people to talk to and since it was a perfect day weatherwise there was lots to do outside with tons of kids playing on swings, monkey bars and 2 trampolines in the backyard. I helped one of the nieces watch over her little 18 month old son playing on the slides and playground. Talked to a lot of the usual people that I talk to at these family affairs. When it was all done I feel like I played the part of Aunt Mary well with no public gaffes.

The front yard this morning. I liked the way the light was. One bird on the feeder. Last night the moon was beautiful and bright in a clear sky. We had walked the dogs down back to the creek when we got home from Pitts to check on Roswell and his friends who were camping there, and on the way back up the moon was rising. I took a pic but it wasn't nearly dramatic enough so I did some photoshop:

It was behind the powerlines - that's what that cross is.

We won't have any of the young people for Sunday dinner tonight but I'm still going to do it for just Jules, Dave and me, and Candy if she can make it. That means some cleaning today and cooking. I'm going to make Pad Thai. I think I'll serve it like a casserole dish.

flemmings

Lovely cool sunny day, perfect for gardening, which is what I did. Filled up a garden waste bag, cleared maybe two square feet of ancient desiccated vine runners, cut back the other vines that insist on growing atop the fence. Cutting back only encourages them, I know, but what are you gonna do? Also tried cutting back the linden's lower branches out front with the extendapole cutter, which is a bit unwieldy with my lack of arm strength. I could have sworn the thing was telescoping and could be pulled out to several feet more but I can't see how.

Newly resoled shoes do seem to help my balance, but to get at the backyard vines growing along the wires I need something stable to lean against, and the fence isn't it. Shall have another stab at it tomorrow

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taz_39

June 2026

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goofball on a train

(adventures of a touring musician)

Reading

friday

You're Either On the Bus or Off the Bus

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thursday

This and That

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wednesday

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further experimentation being done

tuesday

Chapter 7: The Real Sister Wives of the Quaint & Scenic Hudson Valley

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every time i make a title i feel like it's always some variation of "i'm alive" nowadays

sunday later

Insights You Wish You Hadn't Had

sunday

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June 2026

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