Wednesday books

Sep. 3rd, 2025 07:11 pm
redbird: full bookshelves and table in a library (books)
[personal profile] redbird
[personal profile] cattitude and [personal profile] adrian_turtle finished reading The Prisoner of Zenda--the original swash-buckling Ruritanian romance-- aloud to me and each other. We all had a lot of fun with it. We may (or may not) go back and read the sequel at some point, but not right away.

I also read The Birding Dictionary, by Rosemary Mosco: a humor book about bird and bird-watching, in the format of a dictionary. Cattitude, who borrowed this from the library, seemed to find it funnier than I did.

Current reading:

The Winged Histories, by Sofia Samatar. This is eight loosely connected stories, each with a different narrator. I'm enjoying it, but having trouble settling in to read much at a time. The ebook is now overdue at the library, so I am carefully not synching my kindle until I finish reading it.
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
Governor Healey has overridden the CDC restrictions, and authorized pharmacists to give the covid vaccine to everyone over the age of 5 (younger children will have to get it from their pediatricians).

I heard about this first from my state senator's office: I emailed over the weekend to ask him to work on fixing this, so his staff knew I was interested. There's an article in the Globe, but pay-walled: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/03/metro/healey-covid-booster-massachusetts-trump-kennedy-vaccine/

unexpected excitement

Sep. 3rd, 2025 06:12 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
First: we're all fine.

I got a phone call this afternoon from someone at the company we rent a storage unit from. She was calling to tell me that a construction crew doing something on the lot next door had last control of one of their machines, which breached the wall of our storage unit.

She was calling to tell me that, and to ask my permission to cut the lock on the door, so they can go inside and move everything to an undamaged unit. She wanted that ASAP, so they can start work tomorrow at 7 a.m.

I was on the bus when my phone rang, so while I could give her my approval right away, when she asked for my drivers license/state ID number, I told het I'd call her back, the information was hard to read on a moving bus

So, our plans for tomorrow now involve getting up early(ish) and going to Medford to look things over, and so the company can give us keys for the new lock.

I'm glad the phone was in my pocket when she called: otherwise I might not have noticed and listened to the voicemail before their office closed for the day.

Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!

Sep. 1st, 2025 05:10 am
wcg: (Default)
[personal profile] wcg
 
Happy Kalends of Septembris!  Are you ready for the Ludi Romani?

elynne: (Default)
[personal profile] elynne
The visitors to Elpis stumble into a challenging situation and emerge with varying conclusions.

Read more... )

Covid vaccine heads-up

Aug. 30th, 2025 09:49 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
Because Bobby Brainworm is out to get us:

RFK Jr blocked CDC approval of the updated covid vaccine. There are three states where pharmacists can't legally give a vaccine without CDC approval: Massachusetts (where I live), Nevada, and New Mexico. In another 13 states, pharmacists can give the vaccine but only with a prescription, and CVS isn't shipping the vaccine to pharmacies in any of these 16 states.

Note: the vaccine is legally available in every state, because the relevant FDA committee did approve it, but some of us will have to get it from a doctor's office, which will be more of a hassle even when it’s possible.

P.S. Walgreen’s too, per a comment at Universal Hub.

Those are state laws, so call your state representatives and governor and tell them to change it.

“Massachusetts )

a reassuring trip to the dentist

Aug. 28th, 2025 02:38 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
I just had a reassuringly boring dental visit. I called yesterday because I'd been having pain on and off for the previous three days, and they gave me an appointment for this morning.

I felt much better last night and basically OK this morning, but I still wanted the dentist to check in case there was a problem—intermittent symptoms can be hard to diagnose. The dentist looked inside my mouth, poked in a few places, and took two X-rays, finding nothing wrong. His best guess is that something was caught between my gum and bone, and I got it out by cleaning my teeth yesterday; I don’t know why the previous three days of brushing and flossing hadn’t done the job.

The dentist did see a little tenderness in the area that had been hurting, and wrote me a prescription for something to rinse with. Other than that, call if there are further problems, or come back in three months for my usual cleaning.

I am pleased with the outcome: it stopped hurting, and the dentist confirmed that there's nothing wrong, so I don’t need unpleasant and possibly expensive dental work.

The dentist said to hold the prescription rinse in my mouth for “a few seconds,” then rinse with water, and I only need to rinse that side of the month. The printed prescription label says 30 seconds and not to rinse for 30 minutes afterwards, which I assume are the standard instructions for this medication.

misc. comments 67:

Aug. 26th, 2025 08:43 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
Another collection of comments to other people’s journals:

[personal profile] elise was asking about "ways to learn to wanna when you're gonna hafta"

I said:

Sometimes I get things done by reminding myself that I don't have to want to do them, as long as they get done. Meaning that I'm not going to enjoy the task, but maybe I want to have done it, or maybe I'm leaning on bits of habit. That mostly works for small things: it's easier to think "don't have to like it, as long as it gets done" about relatively short things, like brushing my teeth, than about anything longer or more complicated.

Typing this, I realize that this is something I mostly do/need to do late in the day. Even with meds, I run out of executive function well before I run out of day (or evening).


[personal profile] cosmolinguist posted about feeling like everyone else hasn't just stopped talking about the pandemic, they're not thinking about it, and he quoted his manager saying "something like 'You're the only one who remembers covid.' Not in an accusing way or anything, just making an ob. Clearly based on the fact that I'm still masking and I've never seen any of my colleagues wear a mask at in-person gatherings."

My comment was:
As I said [on Mastodon], it reminds me of something Siderea posted about in 2018-19: a hundred years ago, in the 1920s, people didn't mention the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though flu was still killing a significant number of people every year (as it still is today). People did write about World War I, and men who died there, and there were novels about the young women who were never going to marry because of the gender imbalance, but it looked from 2018 as though there was an agreement or decision not to talk about the pandemic.

Six years ago, that seemed odd; four years ago, I was deliberately posting almost every day just so I would have a record of what those first months of the covid pandemic had been like.



A comment to [personal profile] buhrger, who lives in Alberta, about finding a new doctor:

It's not just your area, or province, that is short on doctors who are accepting new patients. A couple of months ago, we were talking to a friend of Adrian's, Ruth; they are both dissatisfied with their current doctor, but Ruth has had trouble finding another that she can get to reasonably. Oddly, I am seeing a nurse practitioner in that practice, and am entirely happy to keep seeing her, and not just because I don't want to roll the dice on someone else taking me and my combination of medical things seriously while still taking as given that I am a competent adult.


Comment to [personal profile] ambyr’s post about characters with an annoying sort of genre-awareness:

I haven’t read any Moreno-Garcia, but that shape of genre-awareness feels all wrong to me. I'm fine with characters having no idea they're in a horror novel, or a detective story, or whatever. And I'm fine with characters being aware if it's something like "if he's really a vampire, we should make sure all the doors are locked, buy some garlic, and not invite anyone inside," or with "there's no such thing as a vampire, what is this person really hiding?"

For example, I'm amused by the Terry Pratchett books where the characters know that million-to-one shots often work, so they're carefully trying to contrive those long odds against themselves before trying to do something like shoot a dragon. For me, that works in part because it's a given that the Discworld runs partly on Narrativium, and is out at the far end of some sort of probability curve.

"Don't separate the party" is a fiction-flavored way of saying :don't wander off" or "we should stay together" that doesn't require us to think we're actually in a work of fiction--but I would be annoyed by a book where the characters routinely said thet, and then someone ran off without saying anything or taking useful equipment entirely because the plot required it.


#burger and I were talking about (not) carrying cash:

If I’m out and about (not just going for a walk in the neighborhood) it’s usually for some sort of errand, and even if the main goal is to pick up a library book I’ll be passing shops and it often makes sense to go inside: maybe this branch of CVS has the specific earplugs I’m looking for, maybe the supermarket will have good berries.

That’s separate from the fact that I carry cash and credit card in the same wallet as my ID and other useful cards including my transit pass. Some of that is just-in-case planning: if one kind of thing goes wrong, I may need ny health insurance card. If I’m picking up certain prescriptions, they want me to show ID.

But mostly, having enough cash to get home in case I lose, or someone steals, my wallet is an old, ingrained habit. Once upon a time, that meant always having a subway token and a coin for a pay phone. Now, I keep a $5 bill in my daypack, and one in each of my coats that has a zipper pocket. It’s a firm enough habit that the daypack also has a Canadian $5 bill, just in case. (I didn't put a five-pound note in my pack when we were in London. Maybe I should have.)

One Million Rising zoom

Aug. 24th, 2025 07:34 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
I joined [personal profile] adrian_turtle this afternoon for a One Million Rising gathering/training session on zoom, led by one of her comrades from Talmud study. This was 90 minutes, distilling or summarizin six hours of training Aliza did recently.

There was less new information and ideas than I'd hoped for, but I'm glad I did it. I had nothing else specific to do with that chunk of time, and it didn't take away energy from some other form of activism. (In fact, I had called my congresswoman and senators half an hour earlier, while Adrian and [personal profile] cattitude were out shopping.)

Aliza presented some of the material from a specifically Jewish viewpoint/context, including that this organizing and resistance work could be part of preparing for the High Holidays. I'm not observant, but introspection is a useful activity.

I am now on the One Million Rising email list, and will see if anything interesting comes of that.
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