ethaisa

Two guys came and measured the space for my new dishwasher and it will apparently fit, but there are as always several - okay, 2 - unexpected wrinkles: 1. the current machine is hardwired into the electric, but the new dishwasher needs a plug, so the installers are going to have to build an outlet? These 2 guys didn't seem to think it was a big deal but it is another $75, which at this point is whatever, fine. Secondly, they were concerned that the installation might damage the drain pipe under my sink, and I was like, can we wrap it in something to protect it from being dinged? and they were like, "Eh, maybe, but if it breaks you're responsible for fixing it." Which, thanks. I suppose I can get under there and wrap a towel around it if necessary.

So we'll see how this goes on Tuesday. Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't complete wreck my kitchen!

Speaking of wrecking my kitchen, my current HGTV viewing is "Help! I wrecked my house!" which I'm enjoying, but oh my god, the sheer hubris of some of these mediocre white men, who think they can demo a kitchen or a bathroom down to the studs and then figure out how to put in a new one, and then have to call Jasmine because of course they can't. I don't understand these people, tbh. There is nothing wrong with asking a trained professional to come in and do that kind of work, especially if you're not particularly handy. (And even you are handy in the "can change a washer in the faucet" variety, what makes you think you can install a shower from the ground up??? WTF?) On the other hand, I am really sympathetic to the folks who did hire a contractor who turned out to be shady and didn't do the work properly and stiffed them of their money to boot!

In other news, I am now on vacation and very excited about it! Except shit, I forgot to set up my out of office message. I will have to log back in and do that.

*

My nephew David got married this past weekend, on July 5, which happened to be my 39th wedding anniversary, which was rather bittersweet. We had family come in from out of town, so some of them got to meet M, which was a delight.

There was a July 4th welcome party at my sister's home, and then the ceremony the next day wonderful--so well-planned and heartfelt, and everyone had a marvelous time.

Unfortunately, I am not yet recovered from this terrible cold, and so I didn't stay for the dancing. I had to content myself with the videos and pictures of my family dancing late into the night.

Compare the collage made for one of my other nephew's wedding three years ago, Janus.

Image description: A couple smiles at the camera, fireworks exploding in the background. Overlaid over the fireworks are a semi-transparent clasped woman's hand and man's hand, each wearing a wedding ring. Lower left corner: a wooden box planted with wildflowers with the words "Welcome: We're so glad you're here. David & Jordan 7 . 5. 25

Wedding



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

It is too much. Let me sum up:
Fired previous Dr. Hematology. I suggested an iron infusion and his reply was, "Your numbers don't support an iron infusion [I note he didn't order the most critical test that helps determine that], and I will closely monitor your labs." Those would be the labs he didn't feel were necessary on a weekly basis (so nothing to monitor) and that an appointment a week prior to the July date would be fine to rectify everything so the surgery could go as scheduled. Uh no. Not how bodies (and hemoglobin) work!

So got new hematologist who seems way more on top of things AND sees my medical care as a partnership. He ran the test previous Dr. Hematology missed (soluble transferrin, in addition to everything else) and it said iron infusion (because this is clearly iron functionality anemia, not deficiency; it's like my body's response to being roughed up in surgery was to put my iron on lockdown). Bit of an insurance hiccup (why don't we spell that hiccough any longer?) but it's happening today. They actually apparently happen in pairs so next is Wednesday. Should have labs drawn again then, too, and chat about what else we can do.

( Some medical explicitness ahead; you may wish to look away )

Hospitalization caused me to blow past two scheduled surgical dates. Missing the July date is not an option because I have to get home. I can't handle another extension (my original 6 month stay has doubled - with dates planned for July, October, January, and March, and staying for two months after that for more MLD therapy).

Ever onwards.

Happy birthday, emperorzombie!

July is half gone already, and just yesterday I got a flyer from the town hall about "summer events in [my locale]".

Me: But summer is almost over???

(But for real, people taking their summer vacations in August feels so wrong, like wishing someone Merry Christmas in February. Summer is over! Schools are starting! Except here they aren't. Also the sun has kept setting, so emotionally I've had a May that's three months long.)

Also I'm about to disappear into battleshipex for two-three weeks. Good luck everyone, have fun, sign-ups are over but you can still drop a prompt or twenty if you want.

I mentioned that I did in fact read a couple of good books in my late-June travels to counterbalance the bad ones. One of them was The Pushcart War, which I conveniently discovered in my backpack right as I was heading out to stay with the friend who'd loaned it to me a year ago.

I somehow have spent most of my life under the impression that I had already read The Pushcart War, until the plot was actually described to me, at which point it became clear that I'd either read some other Pushcart or some other War but these actual valiant war heroes were actually brand new to me.

The book is science fiction, of a sort, originally published in 1964 and set in 1976 -- Wikipedia tells me that every reprint has moved the date forward to make sure it stays in the future, which I think is very charming -- and purporting to be a work of history for young readers explaining the conflict between Large Truck Corporations and Pugnacious Pushcart Peddlers over the course of one New York City summer. It's a punchy, defiant little book about corporate interest, collective action, and civil disobedience; there's one chapter in particular in which the leaders of the truck companies meet to discuss their master plan of getting everything but trucks off the streets of New York entirely where the metaphor is Quite Dark and Usefully Unsubtle. Also contains charming illustrations! A good read at any time and I'm glad to have finally experienced it.

It was helpful of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (2021) to include a dedication to its inspiration of Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" (1967), since I would otherwise have guessed Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964)/Rocannon's World (1966) as its jumping-off point of anthropological science fiction through the split lens of heroic fantasy. As far as I can tell, my ur-text for that kind of double-visioned narrative was Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), some of whose characters understand that they have been sucked down a time vortex into the late nineteenth century where a dangerously bored trickster of an enigmatically ancient species is amusing himself in the Pale of Settlement and some of whom just understand that Ashmedai has come to town. I got a kind of reversal early, too, from Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1988) and White Jenna (1989), whose modern historian is doomed to fail in his earnest reconstructions because in his rationality he misses that the magic was real. Tchaikovsky gets a lot of mileage for his disjoint perspectives out of Clarke's Law, but just as much out of an explanation of clinical depression or the definition of a demon beyond all philosophy, and from any angle I am a sucker for the Doppler drift of stories with time. The convergence of genre protocols is nicely timed. Occasional Peter S. Beagle vibes almost certainly generated by the reader, not the text. Pleasantly, the book actually is novella-proportioned rather than a compacted novel, but now I have the problem of accepting that if the author had wanted to set any further stories in this attractively open-ended world, at his rate of prolificacy they would already have turned up. On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.

Brian's house was hard.

I brought lunch & bubbles. (Brian was a big fan of blowing bubbles. There's nothing he liked to do more at the end of a day than smoke ganja & sit out on his front porch blowing bubbles.)

But as far as any of the practical tasks that had to get done?

I was useless.

Fortunately Brian's excellent neighbors—an elderly and charmingly licentious gay couple—had already cleaned the kitchen. It was more spotless now than I had ever seen it when Brian was alive. I fed them lunch.

"We will miss Brian," Willie—the elder of the two—remarked. "Do you know how we became friends? Well, one time, we were entertaining a trick—"

"He wasn't really a trick!" interjected Eugene. "We just liked to call him that!"

"—and we ran out of lube. So, I walk across the road, bang on Brian's door, and say, 'Hey, do you happen to have any lube I could borrow?'

"And without missing a beat, he asks, 'Water or silicon-based?'"

###

As soon as I got to Brian's, I felt utterly fatigued. Denatured somehow—like all the protein in my body had turned to jellyfish protoplasm.

All I could do was collapse on Brian's front steps and prattle on & on, hopfully entertainingly—to Brian's gay neighbors (but they had already cleaned the kitchen—and since I was amusing them, that kinda meant that I had cleaned the kitchen, too, right?), to Flavia's friend Betsy who had dropped everything to support Flavia for four days even though she was not the biggest Brian fan. So I sat while Flavia and Mimi did the tour of the house, tackled the stuff in the fridge and the washing machine, went around the cottage unplugging appliances.

Then the four of use went out to the garden.

It was nowhere as big or various as it has been in past years. Which, of course, made me think, Huh! Did he...?

There are a couple of tomato plants and half a dozen chilis I could rehome. But that would mean spending an hour in that garden, and that garden was crawling with tics. Tiny deer tics, the ones that give you Lyme's disease. All but impossible to distinguish from dirt flecks.

Much of my entertaining conversation with Betsy had had to do with her two-year battle with Lyme's disease. It is not a disease I want to contract, so I don't want to be digging in Brian's garden.

I will go up & water it, though. On weeks that don't get much rain. I only live 25 miles away although the drive there takes me on backroads over the Shawanagunk Ridge and through the Catskills, so it's at least an hour's drive.

And I'll sauce the tomatoes when they're ripe.

###

The next day I had to get new tires and rear shocks for my car.

Mavis Automotive told me the work would take four hours at most to complete.

Belinda picked me up, fed me lunch, took me to see a really bad movie: Jurassic World Rebirth.

Dropped me back off at Mavis at the four-hour mark.

Looking up at the little Prius on its hydrolift with its wheels disassembled, was exactly like looking down at a surgical patient on an operating table. And I noticed the customer service people lied just as glibly as medical personnel: Oh, nothing's wrong! It's just taking a little longer than we...

Another hour, I was told. Ninety minutes, tops.

If they'd just fuckin' told me, It will be finished when it's finished. Leave it here. We'll call you tomorrow...

I must say, Belinda despite her Trumpishness was an excellent friend. When I texted her I was on the verge of a massive panic attack, she swooped down & took me to the local Dairy Queen (which she owns) for dinner. The DQ cheeseburger is Not Bad.

Then Belinda took me back to Mavis.

I wandered around to the back of garage and watched the mechanic thrashing about with my car.

The culprit was some sort of nut that could not be dislodged from some sort of bar.

Even with no mechanical aptitude whatsoever, I understood perfectly well that no amount of torque or elbow grease was gonna get that nut off that rod because that nut was stripped. That nut would only be removed with some kind of drill apparatus.

But the mechanic didn't understand this. He was growing more & more desperate to grip as he twisted his clamp round & round that nut.

And I thought, Uh oh. Because I have been a charge nurse, and I know that expression I saw on that mechanic's face! It was that panic that comes when you are trying to cover because you have made a potentially disasterous mistake.

Whenever I saw that expression as a charge nurse, I would try to take that nurse off an assignment as soon as possible—not because he or she was a bad nurse, but because once you get that rattled, you cannot do anything right, you will just keep making horrible mistakes!

By this time, it was 6pm, which is when Mavis officially closes.

They wanted to stay until the whole thing was fixed.

I figured that wouldn't be till midnight. So, I said, "Absolutely not! If you put the car together, will it be driveable?"

Well...yeah... but it will make an awful lot of noise.

And it did make noise. It sounded like the ghost of Keith Moon was beginning his world tour in my trunk.

But I got it back to the casa safely. And back to Mavis at 8 the next morning. Where it took them another two hours to fix it. Different mechanic!

###

Then I went off to the Hyde Park Community Garden, where I knew I'd be able to regroup. Tics are never seen in the Hyde Park Community Garden!

Weeded. Lay more straw.

Despite my massive neglect, tomatoes, cucumbers, & peppers are coming along quite! nicely:



Especially my wonderful volunteer California poppy:



Afterwards, under the cool shade of the Linden tree, I had my first conversation with Claude that was not about gardening.

We talked about growing old. Both of us had expected to die by 30.

And youthful mistakes. You expect to die by 30, if you make a lot of those.

I like Claude. He is very solid.

Thinking is hard.

Feeling is impossible. Except for anxiety.

(Wait! Is anxiety even an emotion?)

I haven't slept more than four hours a night since Brian died.

Sleeping would make me feel a whole lot better.

Happy birthday, azara1, hawkwing_lb and mmestrange!

How do the characters learn their new powers?

I scorn to use pop-ups. Besides, this isekai is not a RPGlit even if the heroine acquired a class, as many others do. So I say that the newcomers intuitively know what to do.

So now she has to learn subtle differences in what she had perceived as undifferentiated problems.

Intuitively.

sigh

A busy last week's throwing meant I had basically no shelf space left in the studio.  Time to dry things out so I can load a firing. 

Fortunately, the sun is cooperating. I love that about summer.

The New School Reader: Fourth Book by Charles Walton Sanders

A 1856 book on elocution. Opens with discussions of how to say things, and then offers many samples of eloquent prose and poetry to praise on -- and to have your character formed by, since, as he writes, they were chosen toward that important end.

It's no meeting week at work, which is the best week! And then I'm on PTO next week. I carefully portioned out my to-do list so that I have one main thing to do every day (on top of whatever comes up each day) and it's so satisfying to mostly just cross things off it and not have to go to any meetings (which always add things to my list).

Yesterday, it was so quiet that I was able to read a whole book! Just sitting at my desk and answering email occasionally! So, Wednesday reading!

What I've just finished
Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch, the very latest Rivers of London book. And when I say, "very latest" I mean it was released yesterday. I enjoyed it! ( spoilers )

What I'm reading next
Idk, I'll keep opening books in my library until I find one that holds my interest, I guess.

*

When kate_nepveu started doing a real-time readalong for Steven Brust & Emma Bull's epistolary novel Freedom and Necessity in 2023, I read just enough of Kate's posts to realize that this was a book that I probably wanted to read for myself and then stopped clicking on the cut-text links. Now, several years later, I have finally done so!

Freedom and Necessity kicks off in 1849, with British gentleman James Cobham politely writing to his favorite cousin Richard to explain he has just learned that everybody thinks he is dead, he does not remember the last two months or indeed anything since the last party the two of them attended together, he is pretending to be a groom at the stables that found him, and would Richard mind telling him whether he thinks he ought to go on pretending to be dead and doing a little light investigation on his behalf into wtf is going on?

We soon learn that a.) James has been involved in something mysterious and political; b.) Richard thinks that James ought to be more worried about something differently mysterious and supernatural; c.) both Richard and James have a lot of extremely verbose opinions about the exciting new topic of Hegelian logic; and d.) James and Richard are both in respective Its Complicateds with two more cousins, Susan and Kitty, and at this point Susan and Kitty kick in with a correspondence of their own as Susan decides to exorcise her grief about the [fake] death of the cousin she Definitely Was Not In Love With by investigating why James kept disappearing for months at a time before he died.

By a few chapters in, I was describing it to genarti as 'Sorcery and Cecelia if you really muscled it up with nineteenth century radical philosophy' and having a wonderful time.

Then I got a few more chapters in and learned more about WTF indeed was up with James and texted Kate like 'WAIT IS THIS A LYMONDALIKE?' to which she responded 'I thought it was obvious!' And I was still having a wonderful time, and continued doing so all through, but could not stop myself from bursting into laughter every time the narrative lovingly described James' pale and delicate-looking yet surprisingly athletic figure or his venomous light voice etc. etc. ( mid-book spoilers )

Anyway, if you've read a Lymond, you know that there's often One Worthy Man in a Lymond book who is genuinely wise and can penetrate Lymond's self-loathing to gently explain to him that he should use his many poisoned gifts for the better. Freedom and Necessity dares to ask the question: what if that man? were Dreamy Friedrich Engels. Which is, frankly, an amazing choice.

Now even as I write this, I know that genarti is glaring at me for the fact that I am allowing Francis Crawford of Lymond to take over this booklog just as the spectre of Francis Crawford of Lymond takes over any book in which he appears -- and I do think that James takes over the book a bit more from Richard and Kitty than I would strictly like (I love Kitty and her cheerful opium visions and her endless run-on sentences as she staunchly holds down the home front). But to give Brust and Bull their credit, Susan staunchly holds her own as co-protagonist in agency, page space and character development despite the fact that James is pulling all the book's actual plot (revolutionary politics chaotically colliding with Gothic occult family drama) around after him like a dramatic black cloak.

And what about the radical politics, anyway? Brust and Bull have absolutely done their reading and research, and I very much enjoy and appreciate the point of view that they're writing from. I do think it's quite funny when Engels is like "James, your first duty is to your class," and James is like "well, I am a British aristocrat, so that's depressing," and Engels is like "you don't have to be! you can just decide to be of the proletariat! any day you can decide that! and then your first duty will be to the proletariat!" which like .... not that you can't decide to be in solidarity with the working class ..... but this is sort of a telling stance in an epistolary novel that does not actually center a single working-class POV. How pleasant to keep writing exclusively about verbose and erudite members of the British gentry who have conveniently chosen to be of the proletariat! James does of course have working-class comrades, and he respects them very much, and is tremendously angsty about their off-page deaths. So it goes.

On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. One of the major political themes of the book is concerned with how to keep on going through the low point -- how to keep on working and believing for the better future in the long term, even while knowing that unfortunately it hasn't come yet and given the givens probably won't for some time. Acknowledging the low point and the long game is a challenging thing for fiction to do, and I appreciate it a lot when I see it. I'd like to see more of it.

Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.

I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.

As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.