nosrednayduj

Today I stood on the usual overpass. Our message was "NO$ FOR J6 FELONS". Often we have a small sign with the message to show to the drivers on the overpass. We got some little honks from them and also joggers and bicyclists in addition to the freeway folks.

At one point a guy parked at the bottom of the overpass (blocking the bike lane), and walked up to where we were standing, and started shouting at us. He called us traitors and said things like "where were you when my family was taken away" and "where were you when they were chasing me". And I thought "are you an illegal immigrant? We're on your side." We have a policy of "don't engage", so I didn't say anything and we just let him rant and then he went away. We did try to interpose our small sign in front of his eyes so that he could perhaps try to figure out that we were on his side (if in fact we were; his message was somewhat confused). Then he drove back and forth a couple of times over the overpass and yelled at us through his car window. That was helpful, because we got a picture of his license plate. I don't know if the organizers are going to do anything about it. He did not touch us or actually threaten us; he merely made noise and got in our personal space a bit. Maybe he thought we were on the Trump/ICE side because we were also holding American flags. "Take back the flag!"

I bicycled there and got Valerie to give me a ride home. At the time I left I wasn't sure if she was coming but I was prepared to bicycle the 10 miles back if needed. Perry came, his first bridge brigade. He's glad he came but isn't sure how many more he's going to bother with.

I've been spending a fair amount of time on gardening. Two years ago we grew 3000 cherry tomatoes. Last year Ken decided gardening was too much work so we didn't do it. But now I have lots of time, right? I seem to be kind of screwing it up. We do container gardening because our soil is contaminated with lead paint, and I didn't really read the instructions very well and I bought the wrong kind of dirt, and I put the fertilizer in the wrong place and a bunch of other stupid things. But probably the plants will survive anyway.

We are putting the containers in an enclosure which has a hardware cloth base and a deer netting top, and I had to put these things together. I needed help for some of the things because they are two person jobs, but a lot of it I managed to do myself (perhaps badly, see above.) Deer netting in particular is an obnoxious substance to deal with, because it flaps around in the wind and tangles with itself and you can't see what's going on to de-tangle because it's just little strands of tiny black threads. I haven't yet set up the electric fence, which we run at the base of the hardware cloth to deter chipmunks and the like. I did set up the rain barrel and have been using its water for my container set up.

Then my friend Cally asked for help with her garden, which is at a community garden in my town (her yard is unsuitable for gardening because it is completely shady), because the person she'd lined up for doing watering on the days when she can't (which is most of them) had to move out of town unexpectedly, and I agreed. If all the tomato plants that Cally planted produce like my tomato plants two years ago, we will really be drowning in them!

The community garden used to be a mile and a half from my house, on the flats, very convenient for bicycling, but the town decided they wanted that space for (yet another) ballfield, and arranged for some space up on top of the hill in town, so it's now a 4 mile ride up a moderately noticeable grade. So far I have driven there once and bicycled there three times.

I'm also growing basil, so I can make pesto, and eightball squashes (spherical zucchini), but they haven't come up yet. On the other hand it's been kind of cool, so maybe the seeds just got a late start. It will be warm in the next week, so maybe they will notice that it's time to sprout. And if they don't, I will try sticking some new ones in the ground.

On Thursday afternoon I stood on the usual overpass. The message spelled out in three-foot-high letters was "workers over ballrooms". We did a little informal counting, and it seems like 10% of the cars honk approvingly.

Friday was May Day, which was supposed to be a "general strike: no work, no school, no shopping". Well, I don't go to school and I don't work anymore, but I tried to at least not do much economic activity. I was foiled because our cleaners were coming that day, but my guess is that they either are or support undocumented immigrants, so I approved of giving them money on May Day. Also, I have a couple of things on eBay from our Tesla, and one of them got an offer on that day, and so I clicked accept. I have no idea if there was even a noticeable blip in the economy from any national actions. Not sure how I would find out. (Randomly googling didn't really find anything useful.)

I went to two demonstrations in Boston. (I bought my train tickets on Thursday.) The first demo was at 2:30, put on by the Communists, and it was not very well attended; 70-80? I kind of like the idea of communism, but the tactics are not all that useful. Like, many of them don't vote because they think that all the political parties are the same, and so we get Trump, and I do not understand why they think that the political parties are in fact the same. They used to be a lot closer. Now, the Democrats kind of suck because they don't actually do anything useful, but at least they don't want to kill us. One of their speakers was Jill Stein, and she definitely is on my shit list for spoiling elections. (I did not hiss or boo, though.) The location was Dewey square, which is where Occupy Boston was staged, and one of the speakers was a mover and shaker of that protest and so he said some things about having camped on this pavement etc.

At the end, we marched to Boston Common where there was another demonstration at 4:30. Because we were so few, they were able to get us across major streets in the allotted time of the walk signal, and the actual marching was on little streets or pedestrian malls, so there wasn't really any need for police escort (which they did not have).

The one on the Common was better attended, but I would say less than 1000. I kind of expected more. I knew it wouldn't be like No Kings with tens of thousands, but this seemed a little lame. A couple of the people who had spoken for the Communists also spoke at this one.

I went to the annual board game event in Vermont, which I'm blogging about so I remember in January to put it in my "places I slept" list; some previous year I forgot, and nearly missed it. (Some things are important? Not really.)

I had a good time; there was board gaming, there was square dancing, I brought my bicycle and biked to New Hampshire (it's only 4 miles away). I successfully charged the Kia at a random fast charging place in Lebanon NH on the way there. This particular place was selected because it's halfway to Montréal, where I am going in July for a square dance, and there's some thought about using my car for the trip, carpooling with some others. So I wanted to make sure that it would actually work out.

Anyway, on the way home we passed under two separate protests on overpasses, saying things like "no liars war" in three foot-high letters attached to the overpass fencing, one on 89 and one on 93. I managed to see both of them in time to give little supportive toots.

I forgot to blog that on Thursday afternoon I stood on a bridge over a highway, with a bunch of other people, and a sign that said "hands off our votes" in single letters each 3 feet high.

(Maybe my readers don't really care, but this is how I keep track of it.)

Also, after the shop charged up the 12 V battery they couldn't find anything else, and they told us that because it was "testing fine" they couldn't just replace the battery on warranty. Bah.

So there's this giant gaming convention called PAX, and PAX East is this weekend. I had heard of this before and been vaguely curious, and now that I have more time on my hands, I thought I would go. I decided to go for only one day, and to go for Friday to reduce the overcrowding that probably happens on Saturday. It was plenty crowded!

It was not exactly overwhelming, but close. The big money is in video games, and so a substantial amount of the convention is dedicated to video games, including videogame tournaments. There are enormous booths by computer manufacturers and game companies, which had lines for getting a demo of this and that. There were also some people who were selling boardgames, and a lot of Magic the Gathering stuff, and quite a lot of tabletop RPG kitsch like paintable miniatures and shiny dice. I didn't buy anything (except extremely overpriced food).

The open gaming area was more than four times the size of the room at Arisia. Interestingly, I only saw one person I knew, besides Perry who came with me. Maybe other people I knew were there and I just didn't see them in the 1000 other attendees.

Their game library is about 4-5 times the size of the NESFA library (which gets used at Arisia and Boskone) – but a lot of that was duplicates of popular games so that multiple groups could play the same thing. I did pretty well by just looking for the "looking for gamers" cones that people would put out when they wanted to play some game; I would walk up and ask if they were still looking for someone (sometimes they had forgotten to fold up the cone), and then inquire something about the game, and usually join them.

The first one Perry and I approached turned out to be a Magic the Gathering thing, which I had not realized because the box he was sitting next to said "Commander", and who knew that Commander was a type of MtG. (Well, not me anyway.) It was best for 4 players, and the two of us made 3, so we played for a little bit, with a lot of reminding me how the game worked. Then a couple of other people approached, and we decided that it would be better if we abandoned this game, and I bowed out, leaving Perry to play, since he has played MtG a bunch at Arisia. Of course he doesn't have his own deck and stuff, but usually at these things people have loaner decks.

I ended up playing about four other games, pretty much all of which I enjoyed. Too bad I don't remember the names of them :-)

I spent an hour just walking around in the booth area, and exploring the other floors where they had various big rooms and theaters with things going on. I didn't actually try to understand the things. There were board game tournaments, but I'm not really excited about a board game tournament. I want to play once, not multiple times. I suppose I could just lose!

After about 6-7 hours I was getting to be done. I had joined back up with Perry at some point and we had just finished playing a game with some people who had to go participate in an event, and I allowed as to how I was getting kind of tired. The noise was pretty oppressive, with hundreds of people all talking as they played or as they interacted with booth bunnies. There were later trains and we could have come home a couple of hours later, but after some discussion and poking at the game library we decided to hang it up for the day.

I might go again next year (is it every year? I don't even know that.) I don't think I would go for more than one day.

And then, on Saturday, there was No Kings. I went to two of them – one in my town where there were 300 attendees, and one on Boston Common, where there were tens of thousands. It was big. Probably bigger than the no Kings in October. I think it might've been the same MC as last time. Different speakers. One of the speakers had also spoken at one of the others I went to earlier in March, an Iranian woman from some peace organization.

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The main floor as seen from above. In the foreground is some area for eating the overpriced food, and some trucks, and behind is a section of the booths.

The dance was great. One of the callers was kind of too hard for my little pea brain, and apparently also for a number of other people's little pea brains, but there was a lot of stuff that I did understand in real time and able to execute, and there were a lot of good moments of teamwork, getting the whole square to do all the parts, and not just one person pushing, but really working together where some people understood some parts and were able to explain them well enough in tiny soundbites to get other people to understand other parts and really make the whole thing work.

I wanted to put my feet in the ocean this trip, since two years ago I had failed due to weather. Somebody said there was a nice restaurant on the beach that had its own parking lot (parking is always an issue) and we could go there. 6 people wanted to go, so we split into 2 cars, with one other person was assigned to my car to help navigate. The other car got going a few minutes before the two of us got going. The other person didn't really know where she was going, and was just using Google, which was fine, until it ran us into a traffic jam that seems to be being solved by the cars ahead of us making three-point turns and coming back the way from which they had come. When we got to the head of the line, we discovered that there were barricades across the road, so we made a three-pointer etc.

We called the other car, they had successfully arrived at the restaurant, and were giving us various advice about which roads to try, and we tried one and then we tried another and then we discovered there was another thing that was blocked off and then we went really far east so that we could get around it, and then we were on the south side and that should work, but it didn't, and there were cops everywhere and it was just a mess. Turned out it was a St. Patrick's Day parade. Nevermind that it was really pi day. Anyway, at some point the two of us realized that we weren't getting there in time to have lunch and get back to the dance, so we bailed and went somewhere else that was quick. Bummer. Sunday, there was not a St. Patrick's Day parade, and the two of us and one of the people in the rest of the group who actually liked this place a lot so happy to go again did succeed in going, so I got the beach view experience at this restaurant. And I got my feet wet.

But, since I didn't know that that was going to work out, on Saturday evening I said to some people "I want to go to the beach this evening after dinner" and a couple of them said "sure that sounds like fun let's do that". So we had dinner and we headed towards LAX because there's a giant parking lot on the beach very close to the airport. We dodged some airport traffic successfully and were heading towards the beach when we discovered a road closure with a lot of police activity. Didn't seem like a time for a parade. So we tried to dodge the closed road, and we discovered a giant amount of traffic. There's a lot of hills right near the ocean in some places, so we were able to see down to the actual beach from the road we were on, and there was this enormous crowd and a lot of lights and more police cars which seemed more like security as they didn't have their lights going, and a ton of traffic where we were, apparently trying to find parking and/or get down to the beach area with the crowd, and we were like "we don't really want to be here; we don't know what this crowd is all about, but we just want to walk on the beach", so another three-pointer. After about 15 minutes we got away from the horribleness and found a place where there was a beach, with less parking but we were able to park legally, and I got to get my feet wet on Saturday evening as well as Sunday afternoon. It was extremely foggy, so that contributed to the delay, because you couldn't really go fast even if it wasn't heavy traffic. Fortunately it's not like I had anything else to do that evening.

Here's hoping that traffic is not insane tomorrow morning when I am driving to LAX. There could be some excitement returning the rental car, because they have just opened, and I mean just, it was the first day when I rented my car on Friday, a new consolidated rental car center for the airport. I hope there are signs. I did see some signs when we were returning from the beach, though I'm not planning to go that route, so hopefully it will in fact work out.

We needed to get a hitch installed on our new Kia, and rather than ordering it and having our local shop do it, because they made a hash of installing the hitch on the Tesla, we decided to go to a place that does all hitches all the time (actually they do roof racks as well). But they were in Framingham, which is 23 miles away. I had the idea I'd bike home today and bike back to get it tomorrow, but then Valerie needed the Kia for a trip tomorrow morning, so I only went one way, and we just went and got it with two people and a car in the afternoon.

22.59 miles in 2:18. Average 9.7, because I'm slow, but also the roads were sometimes covered in puddles from melting snow, and you can't hit a puddle fast if you can't see for certain what's under the water, because it could be a 3 foot pothole. There were a couple of downhills I got to go fast because it was dry and clear, but there was a lot of being cautious. Also there was a bunch of icky traffic in Framingham.

Don't know when the last time I went more than 20 miles was. I suppose I could scroll back through my bicycle tags. Perhaps there will be many more now that there's less demands on my time, and it's warmer. Even if I have time, it's hard to bring myself to go more than about 10 miles when it's 30°.

(edit: It was June 12: https://nosrednayduj.dreamwidth.org/159443.html)

I spent the weekend at the Tech Squares annual square dance weekend, where I had a blast. There was dancing on ice skates, dancing to pre-recorded stuff from the 1950s, dancing to silly hacks that people invented, just regular plus dancing, higher level dancing, board gaming, jigsaw puzzles, chatting with people I only see once a year, chatting with people I see more often than that, decent food, and not enough sleep.

Somebody had brought a Rubik's 4x4 cube, and I learned that I have forgotten everything I knew about what to do with the centers. At some point I had edges and corners solved and was making progress on the centers, but slowly, because the thing I was doing did more than I wanted it to, so I tried to figure out what I needed to do to be more restrictive in what changes my moves made, and of course ended up messing it up completely. Then I repeated that situation, and then I got into a mess where I couldn't solve the edges, and the centers were still a mess. Then I gave the cube back. Maybe I will get mine out and spend some of my retirement re-deriving how to do this.

The new car went 220 miles and returned with 24% left in the batteries. It's "guess-o-meter" is moderately accurate.

I found out about the whole bombing Iran thing while I was away, but mostly was not looking at any news sources and stuck my head in the sand about it til I got home. Today I clicked around for protests, and I found one, this evening in Boston. I would say there were 200-300 people there. This one was also put on by the socialists, like a previous one. Some decent speakers. The MC was pretty good at getting everybody to cheer at the right times and he led us in a number of chants. After an hour of rallying we started marching. I don't know what the destination was, because after 40 minutes of walking, it seemed we were getting further away from the train station, and when it was 15 minutes away and there was a train in 20 minutes, I got my phone to give me walking directions and, like a dork, I just stuck it in my pocket and had it announce things like "your next turn is in 1000 feet". Walking is often faster than taking public transit, and more reliable (assuming your feet work, which surprisingly, after dancing them off all weekend, mine did). I'm sure I would've missed the train if I'd taken transit, even though I walked past a couple of T stations.

After meeting with my fidelity representative a couple of times, we have concluded that I have enough money in retirement + Social Security to retire (assuming that they fix the SS problem by 2033). So I am stepping back from the brink of the job market cesspool. I have toned down my LinkedIn profile, and written various announcements (like this one, not that any of you are going to offer me a job), and started replying "nevermind" to recruiters (none of them really had a job I wanted anyway).

I realized that it's been five months since my last Covid vaccine, and I'm about to go to two separate square dance weekends, the first in two weeks, so I went and got jabbed this afternoon.

Then I took the train into Boston for an action which was billed as a "Valentine's Day Vigil for Dignity and Freedom" (never mind that it's actually Abe Lincoln's birthday). They were having a vigil in support of incarcerated women, and protesting against a proposed a new women's prison. They say, correctly, that the money could be better spent on community support, in particular support so that people don't do crimes just to survive. Stop the pipeline. And a couple of "fuck ICE"s thrown in for good measure. They had some good speakers, many of them were young people. They had a chorus leading us in songs (starting with "this little light of mine"). At the end when it got dark they handed out little electric candles for the vigil part.

This weekend I am going to Boskone just for Saturday. I haven't been to Boskone in many years, but it seemed to have interesting things on the schedule. Decided to go just for the day rather than spending on a hotel room. Also not plugged into the volunteers and I probably would get bored if I were there all 3 days without filling time with volunteering. Next winter when there's no Arisia, we'll see if I go to more of Boskone.