necturus

I went out in the cold today, took a shuttle buses that was replacing the central part of the green line, and walked into a Fidelity office to get the medallion signature I need on the BNY form.

They provided the medallion for my signature, but the woman who handled that told me she thought I would need to redo the _Fidelity_ forms once BNY had transferred the funds, because the inherited IRA would need a brand-new account, not the one I created for the purpose a few weeks ago. Having printed and signed those forms, I asked her to keep them, in case they are usable. (She may have been thinking I'm trying to move the money into an account that already has money in it.)

She also said I do need to put the form with the medallion signature in the mail to BNY, Fidelity can't send it to them electronically. I brought the medallion-ized form home with me, but before I put it in the mail I'm going to scan it and upload the scan to the Fidelity website, in case the previous advisor is right and they can do this electronically.

So that will be another outing in the cold, to a post office, in the hope the letter gets to BNY in good season despite both Christmas packages and the Republican effort to destroy the postal service. Fortunately, there are post office branches at this end of the green line, the part that's still running trolleys.

ETA: I scanned the document, and just uploaded it to the Fidelity website, with a message explaining that I will be mailing the hardcopy to BNY tomorrow.

First: The cat in question seems to be basically well.

So, cattitude has been worrying on and off that our cat Kaja was getting skinny. A few days agp. that got to the point of calling the vet and then taking the cat in for a check-up.

At the exam, the vet told Cattitude that Kaja has not lost weight; if anything, she has gained an ounce or two. What's going on is, the cat has lost some muscle mass, which has led to some redistribution of her weight, and what Cattitude noted was that her legs were thinner. The vet said it was probably arthritis, drew blood to test for some more serious problems, and sent her home.

We got the results this morning, and they are reassuring: Kaja's kidney function, liver function, and thyroid are all fine. So is her blood sugar.

The email said we could have them do X-rays to check for arthritis, but that would require sedating the cat.

Or, they can assume it's arthritis, and give her monthly injections of a pain-killer to treat that, and see how she's doing in a few months.

The third choice is to just monitor the cat's health for now, and give her omega-3 supplements. We need to discuss the choices, but it's Saturday, and none of them involves "so call the vet and set this up right away."

Books read in the last couple of months:

Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories:. This is odd and somewhat disjointed, set in the same secondary world as A Stranger in Olondria (which I read ages ago and remember very little about). The threads all come together at the end. I’d been displeased earlier because I thought we’d lost both the first narrative voice, which I liked, and the continuity of the narrator's story. The book does get back to her story, or at least her sister and cousin’s stories.

James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks: read aloud, because Adrian had never read it. Still delightful, a fairy tale set in a world where people have at least heard of fairy tales.

Lorraine Baston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. Baston talks about rules as measuring devices, as sets of instructions, and as models, and various shifts in meaning over time. She talks about thick and thin rules, thick rules being ones with (more) examples and details, and which anticipate more exceptions. A about the change in how people learn/are taught all sorts of things, including math. I enjoyed this, and if that description sounds interesting you probably will too.

Edward Eager, The Time Garden: Children's magical adventures while spending the summer with a relative because their parents are in London, working on the premiere of a play. Another read-aloud, this one was new to me, and fun.

Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be: The state, as of 2023, and possible futures of the ocean and ocean life in the Anthropocene, according to an oceanographer. I asked the library for this because I liked the author's book about mollusks.