nosrednayduj

From my mastodon post:

It wasn't as big as the Women's March, but it had that size vibe. I did not get close enough to any speakers to hear them, either at the beginning in the Common or later after we "marched" to Government Center. Really it was an extremely slow stroll as the huge crowd covering half of Boston Common had to squeeze onto the street.

I hooked up with my daughter and a friend of hers, surprisingly we both had cell service, so we were able to locate each other. By the time we got to Government Center, other people were already leaving, having had enough of standing around in the rain. (It did not rain very hard, but enough for people to deploy umbrellas or pull up their hoods.) I was there until my train left so I stuck around reading signs. I had seen a number of them before. My daughter got a kick out of "Porsche: fast. Ferrari: faster. Tesla: Fascist".

Favorite new chant: "We the People! Are Getting Pissed Off!"

The friend had been to a few of the "Tesla Takedown" protests at the Boston Tesla dealership. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, since I'm not ready to realize the $30,000 loss by dumping our very devalued Tesla and then having to buy a replacement. So we're driving it, with one of those "we didn't know" stickers.

Last weekend I went to the local science-fiction convention, Arisia. There was an enormous amount of chaos surrounding this convention. I am not privy to why the convention committee all resigned or whatever and a brand-new one appeared in the middle of the planning, but chaos kind of showed in the execution of the convention. They also had lost their hotel, so they had to scramble to get a different one, again not privy to any details here. The different one has been used in the past, but it's really not big enough. I didn't remember how too small it was; I think the last time they had it there my kids were small and so my needs were modest and focused on kids stuff.

They also have been taken over by "accessibility Nazis": I'm all about accessibility (e.g. I put alt text on my images) but roping off a hotel space because it is only accessible by stairs and not allowing people who can use stairs to utilize the space seems ridiculous when space was at a premium.

I'm a little concerned that somebody will notice that the "stairclimbing contest" is not accessible and not allow it next time. It's kind of fun: the hotel is a pyramid, and the fire stairs just go down along the side from floor 14 down to floor 4, so you have this long mountain that you are descending or ascending. So the previous time we had this hotel somebody had the "Climb Mount Arisia" idea. Last time some people actually brought climbing gear and ropes and played around with that (though most people just walked up with their feet). This time it was just walking up the stairs with your feet. I'd say that about 50 people participated. If you got to the top, you got a sticker, and if you did it more than once you got a star on your sticker. I did it twice. It's quite a lot of work to climb up 16 floors, some of which are double height. (Although 13 is absent so maybe that makes up for that.) This time somebody had a bunch of small posters printed up about "if you got this high it's the same height as some pyramid in Central America" or "some other pyramid in Egypt is much taller than where you are now" or something related to climbing, mountains, pyramids, or just height. They also got this found art.

The bottom of a beige wall next to a brown door and gray cement floor. The wallboard has had its outer cover ripped in such a way that the underneath darker brown layer looks like a cartoon mountain with a high peak and a low peak. Taped above the high peak is the words 'Mount Arisia' and taped at about the 1/4 height mark of the high peak is a stylized hiker icon labeled with the word 'you'.

The bottom of a beige wall next to a brown door and gray cement floor. The wallboard has had its outer cover ripped in such a way that the underneath darker brown layer looks like a cartoon mountain with a high peak and a low peak. Taped above the high peak is the words 'Mount Arisia' and taped at about the 1/4 height mark of the high peak is a stylized hiker icon labeled with the word 'you'.

I spent a bunch of my time volunteering in the game room and in the goat check (typo of coat). It's fun because you get to see a lot of people; I caught up with a couple of people I hadn't seen in a few years because they wanted to check their goat. (Some people actually did check stuffed goats; much hilarity ensued and a lot of photos taken of said goats by other customers checking their coats.)

I think if I didn't volunteer, there wouldn't quite be enough stuff that I want to do, and I would be bored. In fact, I did read a moderate amount of my book while there. But maybe I would actually play more games instead of just proctoring the room. Perry came with, and spent 95% of his time in the game room, where he played a number of games. Seems like every time I was looking for him, he was in a game, rather than just lurking and wishing he was in a game. The only T-shirt that I got was the one that I got for volunteering. The dealer's room was less than half the size that I think it usually is, and there was nobody selling T-shirts. (A lie: there were people selling T-shirts from whom I had bought T-shirts the previous year and did not want another one just like it.) There weren't a lot of booksellers, though I did end up buying 5 books.

I wrote my usual holiday letter. Content, ICYC:
https://www.olum.org/yduj/holiday-letters/2024/
(The actual .rtf file was enormous, I guess it's a very inefficient way to store images.)
Note: Some of my readers will be receiving physical copies and a nice card.

I neglected to blog when my daughter was in a double rear-end accident a few weeks ago, with her car in the middle. Nobody was injured, but it doesn't take much to total an 11-year-old car. So she was without a car and we agreed to help buy a newer car for her.

Of course she has no time ever to do anything. Including, it turns out, renew her drivers license. Hopefully the new car can be registered in her name despite the expired drivers license, and she promises to just renew it online, rather than getting a new photo, which is what she had hoped to do, which is why she put it off.

We thought we were going to try to go buy a car on Wednesday afternoon, but it turned out she had like one hour of free time instead of the entire afternoon, and it wasn't a good day for me work wise, so we put it off until today. She had to rearrange some of the things she wanted to do, but she and I got to the car dealership right after they opened, and I had a clipboard with the used cars we were interested in all printed out and that makes the car dealers less pushy. I did have a conversation in which he said "what's the most important thing to you in a car" and I said "I want to look at these cars on my clipboard I don't want to have you match me with my dream car" and that was the end of that, and he went and got some of the cars that were on my clipboard. Unfortunately, some of the cars were at the dealership across the street (owned by the same company, so he didn't mind that we wanted to go over there, and this whole business where they don't negotiate anymore is actually really convenient, you just say I want this car and you write a check). So we had to trek across the street after we looked at the cars at the first place.

The place across the street was much busier, and so we had to wait for a salesperson, I guess because it was more than an hour later and not as close to opening time. But we looked at a car and we bought it. Sadly, the actual buying of it took two hours. There was a lot of sitting around while he xeroxed drivers licenses and more sitting around while he figured out if we were eligible for the various incentives (it's an electric car, surprise), which we were if Jocelyn was the owner rather than somebody like me who makes too much money, and then more sitting around because it turned out that there was only one guy who was able to finalize deals, and he took 20 minutes per person, and there were people out of us. What's up with that?

We've may have made an error in putting it only in her name, rather than trying to put one of us on the title as well, because then when she goes away in the summer and needs to garage it at our house we won't own it and so it might be complicated, but maybe it's fine and she can just change her official address to our house when she leaves. We actually tried this trick when we gave her the Prius, with one of us on the title, and there was a flaw where they reregistered that person to vote in Cambridge, and we had to fix it, so we were trying to avoid that mishap. Maybe we could have just not checked the "reregister me to vote" box on the form, but maybe that wouldn't have worked.

Of course we don't get to drive it off the lot. She has to call the insurance agent on Tuesday and get some insurance number to the dealership, and then they have to fart around with the registry and get plates and "prep the car". What do they need to do? It looked fine. Anyway, they are saying we might get it on Thursday or Friday.

At the first dealership when we test drove cars, the salesman did not come with us, so we could have her drive even though she has an expired license, how could they stop me from switching drivers? But at the second dealership, they came with us, so I had to do all the driving. It drove extremely similarly to one of the other ones.

We had looked at: Kia Niro, Hyundai Kona, Hyundai Ionic (the first model, not the latest ones), and a Chevy Bolt. The listed Bolt had been sold, so we didn't get to test drive it, but we'd driven friends' Bolts, and the people who had bought it were picking it up, and so I got to walk over there and engage them in conversation and get a "my wingspan" measurement of the back storage area with the seats down, to compare it with the Kona, which had looked smaller, but that's because the Bolt is narrower and taller and so the perspective is different.

We ended up with the Ionic. Why? Because it was cheapest. I don't know why it was cheaper. Maybe because this model isn't made anymore. But it has the high trim level so we get adaptive cruise, which I am going to appreciate when we have the car for a few months in the summer while she is off circusing. It also seems to have enough space in the back for her bicycle, and likely, I'm going to find out if it has enough space in the back for my bicycle (which is larger) on Thursday when I pick it up!

We have been having many guests over the past two weeks. We started with a couple of friends of Jocelyn's from Portland Oregon who were in the East for two separate family reunion vacations, with a few days between them. So they killed some time here, where I taught them to waterski. They are both fun people.

Then Valerie's grandson, who stayed with us several weeks last summer, returned for a week. Last year he had been very disappointed that he had to go home before the annual Sharon triathlon, and this year he arranged that his stay would include that, and he competed. He came in 45th out of about 500 participants. Not bad for not really training, and just running on raw strength and youth. Our house is on the route for both biking and running, and my neighbors like to stand by the road and play uplifting music (the Olympics theme song was rotated frequently into the playlist) and cheer as people go by. I joined them for a while, but it turned out that he'd already gone by.

I did my usual unithlon of riding the bicycle part, and then seeing how I did after the results were posted. Worse than usual; I came in last in my age group by about five minutes. Took me 57 minutes to ride 12.4 miles. Which is faster than I usually go; I was trying hard to never coast but power down the hills and trying to go up them at a faster pace than usual etc. But, there's a reason I don't enter such things. I'm at 1400 miles for the year, though, so I'm not doing too badly.

Now we have three others of Valerie's grandkids: the first one's younger brother and two cousins. The cousins are 13-year-old twins, and so we had to do the whole pickup unaccompanied minor from the airport thing; it was a big deal for them to get to go by themselves without parental units or older brother. They aren't here for very long, but we are making the most of it. There has been a lot of boardgame play in the evenings (Perry has been here on and off to participate in that). One of Jocelyn's friends came back for a couple of days on her way to some other thing, and she and the twins went to Salem to do witch things yesterday.

Then today it was outdoor activity day: we visited Jocelyn's aerial rig, which we lent to somebody in town a couple of years ago after it was clear Jocelyn wasn't using it, and Jocelyn and the friend (of course also a circus performer) did a lot of stuff, and the younger set tried a few beginner things. Then we came back, had lunch, and hit the lake for skiing (by the older grandson) and tubing (by the twins). I got a ski ride with Jocelyn driving, before she had to deliver her friend to the train to go off on her next adventure. (It looks like we will see her again in a week or two, because she left a large duffel bag which she needs to retrieve.)

Dinner, more boardgames, and playing with my cats, which is also a hit. Tomorrow the people who live here will be away in the afternoon watching Perry graduate, so the visiting small fry (medium fry?) will have to amuse themselves for a few hours. But, there's the whole boardgame wall, and they have permission to swim as long as more than one of them is down there at the lake, and there are any number of places they could go by bicycle or foot. I think there will be shopping at the thrift store in the morning. I think this is a random activity, but the twins were both excited about it. Then, off they go at oh-dark-thirty Sunday morning. The other one will still be around for another couple of days. His activity on the Salem day was to go into town and take the self-guided tour of MIT and then a Perry-guided tour of Wentworth. He's applying to college this fall. His impression of MIT: "it's big."

During all of this I have been managing to work a moderate amount, but I have been taking time for lake activities (I got a lot of ski rides with the older grandson driving when he was here), bicycling, and stuff, so I have been working less than usual, which is good, because I've been unhappy about the amount of working I've had in the past few months.

… For one short ride on the roller coaster

I went with Perry to a graduating senior fun event, which was a trip to Six Flags. Normal humans don't bring their mothers to senior fun events, but neither Perry nor I claim to be normal humans.

There was a little foo foo rah with the buses, but it worked out because the time they planned to leave was way too early anyway. (Sadly, I had to get up at dawn and drive in to meet the bus. But at least at the end of it we managed to bring most of Perry's stuff home from his dorm room, so will be able to pick up the last of it after graduation next weekend and still fit all the people in the car.)

Thus we arrived right at opening time of the park. I had the idea we should ride the wooden coaster first, but it was still doing its final checkout before opening, so we wandered over to Superman. I was a little concerned this would be too intense for Perry, and he said it was pretty intense but it was okay. There was like 10 minutes of line, if that. I believe it was the tallest roller coaster in the world for a while, but that has been since surpassed. It's pretty freaking tall. And that first drop is indeed pretty intense.

On the way up, you get a good view of the park, and there seemed to be two little roller coaster things right next door (Catwoman Whip and Gotham City Gauntlet), so we did them on the way back to the wooden coaster. They both had 5-10 minute lines, and so by the time we got back to the wooden coaster it was a little more than an hour after opening. Well. That's a little different, and the line took about an hour. It would be faster if they didn't have this flash pass thing where 1/3 of the seats are pretty much reserved for the people who are "waiting in line" elsewhere in the park, which makes it slower for the plebes.

It was fun, but was it worth an hour of my life? Not sure. So we threw another hour of our lives away on "the scream", which is pretty cool, but the major bit (free drop) is over in 2 seconds. (Yes, I screamed.)

There was a lot of inefficiency. For example, the scream has three towers and they were only running one of them. I asked the attendant when we were close to the front of the line and she said that one of them is broken, and they just don't have the staff to run the other one (though a couple of hours later we saw it running two towers, so I guess somebody came in to work or something). Superman seemed like it was being run pretty efficiently but the wooden coaster had two minutes of ride and about four minutes of load/unload. So you could have another car on that, and just run every four minutes rather than every six minutes. Which would fix the 1/3 loss.

I had noticed that there was this "one-shot flash pass" that you could get for a single ride, without having to buy the pass for the entire day, and I thought that we could buy that for a repeat ride on Superman (Perry was iffy about whether he wanted to turn upside down, and some of the other rides are perhaps too intense for me). But then we discovered that it would be 90 minutes before our pass would be ready, and we had signed up for the early bus home, thinking that (a) the weather originally had been predicted to rain so maybe we'd be done and (b) in Perry's other experience with a big amusement park (Canobie Lake) he was ready to leave after 5 hours. Thus it was less than 90 minutes before the bus departure. We managed to get lunch and do bumper cars and the merry-go-round, which were fun, and still make the bus.

Captive audience pricing on lunch: $18 for a hamburger or chicken nuggets. OMG.

We think we're still glad we did it, even though the bang for the buck was a little shy. (Actually, since Wentworth paid for the entrance tickets, maybe we shouldn't complain about money efficiency, just about time…)

A sleepy looking young man in a green shirt and black shorts with red vertical stripes along the outside seam, sitting on a merry-go-round horse, leaning his head against the gold-colored pole in front of the saddle. There are many other merry-go-round horses visible in the background. His long brown hair and short scraggly beard are unkempt.

A sleepy looking young man in a green shirt and black shorts with red vertical stripes along the outside seam, sitting on a merry-go-round horse, leaning his head against the gold-colored pole in front of the saddle. There are many other merry-go-round horses visible in the background. His long brown hair and short scraggly beard are unkempt.

So we are having our eclipse adventure.

It started out kind of a mess. I had a Turo car reserved for a year or so, and occasionally communicating with the host. In fact, my last communication with him was him wishing me a good flight yesterday morning. However, when I landed, I found he had canceled the reservation, while I was in flight and unable to do anything. Thus, I found out when I turned my phone back on after landing.

So I called Turo, and spoke to a customer support person, who said they would rebook me on some other car in the area, but they had to find one. Then there was some mishap with the phone and so I had to call back and of course I got a different representative, but they also were able to work on this, and this person didn't say "I'll call you back", but left me on hold while they worked, so that was better. Happily, they said that I would not have to pay any difference in price for the new booking. Which is good, because I'm sure the guy canceled because he was able to get many hundreds of dollars more, because he did not have eclipse surge pricing in place back when I originally reserved. Unfortunately, the car they got was a half-hour away, so we had to get a Lyft there, which of course we did pay for. Also, the car is a piece of junk. Apparently some fly-by-night used-car dealership called "Cash for Cars" figured out that they could put all of the cars they had for sale up on Turo for this weekend!

It is a 2014 Dodge Charger. I don't know how bad the gas mileage is; I'll find out when I fill it. The check engine light comes on periodically, because it runs very rough at low speeds, so as you accelerate away from a stoplight it tugs and gasps, and if it recovers within a few seconds, then it doesn't turn on the check engine light, but if it takes a while before it recovers then it does turn on the light for the remainder of the trip.

And then, on the way back from the grocery store after we finally arrived at the Air B&B (which is perfect) I was stopped by a cop. I saw the cop as I was driving by, but I was going 31 miles an hour, and I was pretty sure that the speed limit on the road was larger than 30, so I just tootled on by. But, then, there was blue lights in my mirror. Turns out that the little lamp over the license plate was burned out, so that was "probable cause" to stop. The fact that it was a muscle car probably made the cop very excited about getting to stop me. In fact as he was approaching the car he addressed me as Sir before he looked at my face, assuming that no way would a woman be driving this kind of car. I was very polite and I explained about the whole "it's a Turo" thing. Of course, it's a car dealership car, and so it doesn't really have a license plate. It has a temporary tag. But I explained about picking it up from "Joe's used cars", and stuff. I didn't go into the whole "we got screwed and this was a replacement" drama. Anyway, we had a nice chat about the eclipse and where I was staying and so forth and he elected not to give me a ticket. Happily, I believe we will not be driving at night again on this trip. I did text to the owner of this car about it, and he said "you could stop at an auto parts store and give me the receipt and I will reimburse you", but I'm really, just not.

Then, today was awesome. We started out with a trip to Dinosaur Valley State Park to see dinosaur tracks which are in the harder limestone riverbed, the river having eroded some softer rock to reveal them. They are not always visible; if the water is too high then you can't see them. We did have to wade, but not too deep, and we had brought waterproof sandals for the purpose. It was pretty darn cool.

Then after lunch (with the groceries purchased on the aforementioned trip with the interaction with the local constabulary) we headed to Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, which is a wild animal park of the inverted zoo type where you drive around in the animals' pastures. We paid for "guided tour", which means we got to ride an open-air bus with a tour guide and 20 other tourists. It was totally awesome; they do the usual thing where they pretend to "not change animal behavior", but then they give you a little cupful of food to toss out of the bus for various animals which might be nearby, and some of the deer really know about this and they start running on the bus appears because they know it's treat time. Others of them care less, but we could still see various animals in the distance, and sometimes the fairly near. Our tour guide was really great. We know a lot in my family in general about science, and we are not shy, and so the questions that we ask our sometimes more complicated and technical than normal humans, and she nailed them all as far as I could tell. (Obviously she could of been making up the genus and species of things that I might not know, but I'll bet she was right.)

Then, because I hadn't really gotten exercise looking at dinosaur tracks, and especially sitting in a bus, Ken and I went back to Dinosaur Valley because they have hiking trails. Unfortunately the hike we planned, the trail was closed, but we did some other brisk walking around. And then dinner was Texas barbecue takeout.

Tomorrow, not looking all that great for the eclipse with the cloud cover, so there will be some stress, and there might be not seeing the eclipse, which would be sad. There might be some last-minute attempting to drive to space between clouds. And there will be some teeth gnashing about the fact that it looks like Vermont might have perfect weather, and so we could of like stayed closer to home... But at least we've done the thing "don't hang your entire trip on the eclipse; find other stuff to do" pretty well, considering we're in the backwoods of Texas.

There is also some chaos going on with Jocelyn; she was supposed to be here this evening, but she hasn't left Austin yet. So she's looking to arrive at 1 AM. Hopefully they will get in safely and without waking the rest of us.

I took pictures of various things today, and perhaps I will post them at a later time.

I arrived around 4 PM Friday, stayed overnight in the hotel on Friday and Saturday, and stuck around through the masquerade Sunday evening and took the 10 PM train home. So I was there for most of it.

I bought some books and some T-shirts and I saw the art show and I went to a bunch of sing-along things. And the masquerade and the "gender swapped Star Trek show" and the ignoble awards reading.

So this leaves a lot of extra time, so I volunteered. I did some stints in the gaming room, where I could keep an eye on Perry (who is 21 and should no longer need eyes kept on him, but it's hard for mom to stop) and also in coat check. Coat check is fun because you get to see a million other people, so you get to see everybody's costume, and you run into people who you didn't know were at the con etc.

Things were confusing about food, because I didn't really want to eat unmasked in a restaurant, so I wanted take out, and there was confusing notice of how the in-hotel take out worked, so when I went to try to have some lunch at 2:30 PM on Saturday, it was done even though the notice seem to say it ought to be happening. But, there's a Jimmy John's across the street, so I managed to acquire fuel, anyway. I wasn't really expecting gourmet from hotel take out, anyway. (Friday night I brought sandwiches.) Having learned how it worked, Sunday I had food success.

I also cleverly didn't bring a real suitcase, but instead I brought something that's the same shape as a cloth grocery bag (but has a zipper on top), so it could be checked at coat check on Sunday after I had checked out from the hotel. Perry brought a suitcase, but I stuck it behind the desk at gaming and that was okay. The area head raised his eyebrows when I said I was planning to do this but did not make me not do it, and nobody stole Perry's stuff and all was well. I mean, he was in the room the whole time, but whether he would've noticed somebody making off with his suitcase, I don't know.

So, I had a good time, but the hotel is kind of expensive. Who knows what will happen next year, since they don't have this hotel, so they have to find a new venue. Probably I will still volunteer if I go. And probably I will go, cause I have a free membership… Although, I could choose to go only for one day, in which case probably I would not volunteer. Last year I went only for one day.

Biking: despite feeling under the weather, the actual weather was gorgeous (if chilly), so I had a short bike ride today, bringing me to 2203 for the year. (Fun fact: anagram of the year! No, this was not planned.)

Beds:
All: Sharon, MA
February: Portland, OR; Chico, CA
April: Fairlee, VT
July: San Mateo, CA; Chico, CA
August: Frankfurt om Main, Germany
October: Lee, MA

Books: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2023/10758541

Edit: realized I forgot to put a link to my holiday letter. Though most people on this site would have seen the updates that went into it. http://www.olum.org/yduj/holiday-letters/Happy_holidays2023.rtf

'Nother edit: Apparently I forgot to blog about the gaming party that I attended in Vermont in April, so it wasn't there when I was going through my trips-tagged entries to make this post.

First, a couple of weeks ago I was looking for the extra plastic lids to our glass leftover saving containers, because the current plastic lids all have cracks in them, and I asked people in the household if they knew if we still had any, or if I should proceed with the order I had just started online, and someone said "cancel that order and wait until solstice." So, I knew what I was getting...

Second, we got hard-to-find granola bars as a gift by ordering them online. A week after receiving and wrapping them, the intended recipient learned that this particular set of granola bars had been recalled for salmonella. So, that gift was a wash. At least we got our money back.

Thirdly, my gift to Perry was going to be an Instant Pot. I ordered a used one on eBay, because it seemed like a slightly greener thing to do, and Perry might like that. But, it arrived damaged, with an enormous dent in the side. So I had to start a return process there. At first I had thought it was the seller's deception, but careful examination of the box did reveal dents that corresponded pretty well to where the blow probably originated. The box dent then snapped back into box shape, so it wasn't obvious until you looked carefully. So there went my present. Valerie found someone on a Facebook Freecycle type group giving away a smaller version of Instant Pot and snapped it up. So we gave him that. I wasn't really sure which size I should have picked anyway.

Finally, a mile or so into my traditional "bicycle ride to Solstice Way", my derailleur cable snapped, so I had to alternately walk and coast back home. Fortunately, we had a spare and we were able to install it, rather than having an unscheduled trip to the bike store (which would have been open, because the nice thing about celebrating a weird holiday is that of the else's celebrating, so stores are open. But they might not have been able to fix it the same day.) So I got my ride after all!

We lit the fire midafternoon, and it turns out that the trees in our neighbor's yard have been growing over the past 20 years that we've been doing this, and so we ended up doing it inside our porch, and didn't really want to smoke up the house too much, so we delayed making the "2023" shingle until today when we could do it in the morning when the sun was not over the trees. Not sure if that counts as a minor disaster or not.

I took pictures of many things, because this was the first solstice without Jocelyn. She is performing in California for three weeks. So I sent her a text with pictures. She wanted to try lighting the fire from the sun, for which we sent her some supplies earlier, but she was unable to because it was hazy so the sun was insufficiently bright and point-source, and then later it was raining, so the sun was insufficiently available. Kind of fun that in Massachusetts we had bright blue skies and in California it was raining.
( Photo blast )

It's before Solstice Eve... On Solstice, we will do our usual fire from the sun thing. Looks like the weather will be great for it. And we haven't had any snow yet, so I will also get my annual bicycle ride up Solstice Way.

Actually a little concerned about the weather being so warm, though the last few years it really hasn't gotten cold until the end of January. So maybe we will have snow eventually after all. Meanwhile, our heating system is slightly on the fritz, so perhaps it's good that we are having local warming. (The fritz is that the heat pump has lost some coolant, and we need them to come and do something which will find the leak and then fix it. Unfortunately, since we are not actually "no heat", our repair is less important in their minds. We're just wasting energy running more often than it should.)

Solstice will be a little weird this year, with Jocelyn still in California performing. She will come home in January, either for a week or for a few months, she hasn't decided yet.

So Perry continued to test negative on antigen tests, so we decided that he had had Covid a couple of weeks ago and was on the tail end and no longer contagious, and let him down into the rest of the house.

In personal health news, I had a weird thing happen: I was trying to open a sliding glass door, and something bizarre happened to my hip. I mean you have to torque your body a little bit, especially if it's a door that's a little bit stiff, but the amount of pain was, I felt, inappropriate. And then it hurt the entire rest of the day, and took like a week before it really felt better. I had to skip square dancing. Fortunately, bicycling seemed to actually help it feel better.

Don't get old.

So it's indigenous peoples day weekend, and Perry came home for the weekend.

So we stuck a Covid test up his nose, and we used the fancy kind that is more sensitive (Cue system), and it was positive.

So we used an antigen test, and it was negative.

His room is on the third floor with mine, and so I packed a bag for the weekend and am moving into the guest room on the second floor so he can just have the third floor, and we will deliver him food and communicate by email. It won't really be a lot different from when he's at school. Fortunately, for him it won't be that bad, because mostly he sits in his room with his computer anyway.

We will test him with the antigen repeatedly, and it's possible that he is on the tail end rather than the leading beginning of Covid; he says he hasn't had symptoms, but sometimes you don't. If he is still antigen negative on Sunday, then we will let him back downstairs. The fancy test will test positive for a lot longer than the antigen. So it's actually more likely that he's on the tail end, because the tail end is longer.

Hopefully we will not get it. If he's on the leading end, we would expect the antigen to read positive tomorrow night or Sunday morning. I guess if that happens, we need to keep them here until he's better.

Bah.

Whatever my G.I. illness was, I got better. I did the crazy plan about car retrieval and Perry pick up, and there was a nightmare of traffic due to tunnel closures and patriot preseason games, so it took an extra hour.

We had a two-couple zoom square dance here today – I mean, the caller was on zoom, and there were many other people on zoom who were dancing, but locally I managed to score 3 other people, so we had a full half square; I have sometimes done these with 2 people locally. Occasionally I have done them alone, but I don't find that to be fun. Sometimes I'll stop in and say hi to the other people briefly before the actual dancing starts if I would be alone. I will be dancing with some of the people in person in Germany next weekend, who I have only met on these zoom things, so that's very exciting.

Apparently I'm allowing zoom to train its AI on my data, because it asked me about accepting its new terms of service, and the Internet has been on about how it's going to be training it's AI on your calls. I did not read the terms, so I don't really know what they are. Bad me.

Here, have a blort. I've been thinking I've been boring, but my boring is actually pretty interesting. There's been a bunch of waterskiing; we tried to get up on the knee board at a separate time, but it seemed like I'm missing some body part involving core strength to succeed in that, so I didn't try for very long, not wanting to break some unrelated body part.

Our summer house guest will be leaving on Sunday at oh dark thirty. I decided that I would rather spend money than get up early, and so I made him get Uber on his phone and we have reserved one and paid for it with my credit card. It's been entertaining being fed wild mushrooms – he is a big mushroom hunter – but I don't think I'm going to continue with that plan after he leaves. Also, he's a vegetarian, and I'm a little bit missing meat. I'm not a big meat eater, but there are a couple of dishes that I make with meat that I haven't had in a while.

We are getting ready to go to Germany. (They will feed us meat there.) Ken has a conference, and he is going with Valerie for the weekend before, and then I will join him for the weekend after, and we will go (not making this up) to a square dance convention. We will also randomly take the train to places and be tourists. I have selected the towns of Lorsch where there is an abbey which has at least one brick that still remains from the year 746 (and other tourist trap things) and the other town is Aschaffenburg where there is Johannisburg Palace. It seems like there's kind of a castle desert around Frankfurt, so there weren't that many that were train accessible and moderately close. Probably it will be cool, even though it is of a kind of blocky square design rather than Cinderella kind of castle design, because there will be nifty things inside. Anyway, we will pay our 9 euros and like it!

We think we've figured out how to buy tickets on the train. Ken and Valerie are leaving at oh dark thirty on Thursday for a flight to London, where they will stay overnight, and then make their way to Frankfurt the next day. They have some plan about all day boat ride down the Rhine. Not wanting to be left out, I have a plan about a one-hour boat ride on the Main. I will be leaving the following Thursday, but I'm having an overnight flight, which I mostly hate, but decided not to spend the extra time and many hundreds of dollars going through London. So instead I have arranged that I will be able to check into my hotel in the morning when I arrive and hopefully get some sleep, and then I will mainline penguin caffeine mints when I get up so that I will be perky for square dancing. Ken will join me after the conference ends. The conference is in the town of Mainz, which is an hour away; the square dance is in Frankfurt itself.

Ken and Valerie will be taking a car to the airport, and I'm going to go get it on the train, and then come back via Perry's college, where he is having his last class of summer semester. He has one final, which he will commute to on the train; everything else is projects. So I will pick up him and all of his junk. In the fall he is supposed to have a co-op job; he applied for many but regular jobs were not calling him back.
However, there is apparently some professor at the university who has some projects that kids can work on for their co-op time if they fail to get a job job.

On top of all this, I seem to be sick. I had some very mild upper G.I. symptoms yesterday afternoon and evening, and then I slept really well, and then in the morning I was slightly off but mostly fine, but by 2 PM I was really feeling bad with lower G.I. symptoms. So I took my temperature and I had a fever. Which I thought was weird. I haven't been anywhere. I went to the bank on Saturday morning where I spoke to a teller for a few minutes, and I wore a mask the entire time. Other than that, I have been riding my bicycle places and working from home. So I just have no idea how I could be sick, unless it's something I ate, but nobody else is having issues. And usually you don't have a fever with bad food.

Hopefully I will feel better in the morning. And really hopefully I will feel better by Thursday when I have to go do this airport plan. Also, there's a meeting with the customer tomorrow at 11 AM, so I hope I'm able to take that call.

I'm in California.

After the delayed flight finally arrived, I had very late (for me) dinner and went to bed at my host's house. In the morning I did morning things, including a walk around their neighborhood with a stop at a convenience store to acquire Mountain Dew. Enjoyed this art, and also did not take a photo but there was a driveway which was covered in sidewalk chalk, and they'd had stencils, so it looked like a stained glass window.

There was a square dance at my host's house, which was supposedly a one square dance, but we had 16 people for C2, and preceding that we had 14 for plus, so it was quite a crowd. We did intro to hex with the plus dancers for part of it. Some of them are small children (okay, 10-year-olds), which is great. Perhaps there is hope for the activity after all. And we crammed a second square into their kitchen during a few of the C2 tips. A great time was had by all. Well, by me anyway.

And there was some gameplaying. I surprisingly came in second in Dominion, I had thought I was way further behind, and we also played some game whose name I've already forgotten, about path building, which was pretty good, and that one I won, which didn't completely surprise me; I think my planning-ahead skills are superior to 10-year-olds'.

Today I drove to Golden Gate Park where my mom's ashes are and walked around the tree in question, didn't see any sign of them, which is probably best. Said "goodbye mom" and admired some other nearby foliage. Then I headed to Sausalito where Jocelyn is performing with Flynn Creek Circus.

I got there early, and offered to "do stuff", since one of the problems with the traveling circus is that, because she has no car, it's hard to get stuff done when you are set up in a random park that is at least a mile walk from anything. So she gave me a shopping list, and I fulfilled it with two different stores. Then I picked up subway sandwiches for me, her, and her boyfriend, so they didn't have to worry about feeding themselves lunch. Unfortunately, the whole shopping expedition took a little longer than I had hoped, and so they only had 10 minutes to inhale before they needed to do show things.

I invited some of Clyde's relatives, and they thought it was great. Some other friends also came (I let them buy their own tickets), and they also thought it was great.

I did a little clandestine videoing of Jocelyn's main act, which she does not do every show. Every show she has a few acrobatic/clown sequences, but those were difficult to video without disturbing people behind me.

The rest of the show was also good: they have an amazing juggler, and a guy who does "card tricks" – it was really a whole magician act, but it was based on doing amazing things with playing cards in your hand. I hope they make a professional video of this show, because it would be great to see it again. I'm not really a fan of contortion, but their contortionists were very good.

The theme was a little odd: it was about finding water in the desert, so there was some clowning, including people dressed up as cacti. There was a bunch of stuff about aliens visiting Earth, and I guess that might have something to do with area 51 being in the desert. The intro to the juggler was people being dressed up as Men in Black (or maybe from The Matrix? Men in Black is kind of a spoof on The Matrix, right? I have seen them both, but it was a while ago.) And there was a bunch of other random stuff about mysterious things happening, and then they would segue into some circus act. They had Chinese Pole, in the guise of a coconut tree which our hero was trying to get water from, and had to climb and so forth. He did an excellent job.

And there were a lot of other things that I'm not remembering, since I didn't video them and I didn't take notes, I just said "wow man".

During the second show (I had gone to the first show), I did laundry for Jocelyn and her boyfriend. Laundry is expensive when you use a laundromat! It cost about seven dollars for one fairly large load.

Then I drove to Chico, where I am now. It was lovely in Sausalito, and it was still 101 degrees at 9 PM in Chico. On the drive up, I was treated to a stellar sunset. I stopped and took a picture of an early portion of it, and it just got better and better, but I did not pull over again, and by the time I actually got to my hotel it had faded.

I took a lot of pictures of Jocelyn's abode, and the outside of the circus tent, but I had the stupid "live" option selected, so it is a minor headache to extract the photos for posting. I guess I must select that option in my pocket or something, because I always turn it off when I notice it's on, and it comes back.

My kid is going to be in the circus! She's performing in a traveling circus that's going through California and Oregon called Flynn Creek Circus. I'm going to go to the Sausalito show, and do some other dorking around in California with friends and relatives. Check it out!

https://www.flynncreekcircus.com/

I had the first waterski ride of the season yesterday, which is late for us. It's been a pretty cold spring, after a heat wave in early April, so the lake is only 66.

Then we thought we should put in the rest of the dock. I have notes from previous years that say that I should wear my thicker wetsuit when it's 66, because otherwise I get cold while standing in water up to my neck working on the dock for an hour. But, I was already wearing the thin wetsuit for skiing. Guess what? I got cold. So we stopped early, and we will finish it tomorrow, when the wind will be from the East, which means it will be calm at our shore. Today it is when from the southwest, so there are waves. The remaining bit is actually considerably less work than the portion we just put in, so maybe I can get away with the thin wetsuit again, but we'll see. Today it's going to be over 80 in the air, which will help with the water temperature.

Jocelyn is visiting for a couple of weeks, so she got to ski. She's been slightly annoyed that it has been so cold (it was 40 a couple of nights ago) because she's going away on June 6, and was hoping to do "summer stuff" here before running away to join the circus! I see I neglected to mention here that she got a surprise offer from a traveling circus in California, Flynn Creek, to tour with them. She had applied in the spring but not been accepted at that time. The tour season lasts late June through late October.

I'm going out in July to see her, do a little square dancing, and stop in on my stepfather. I have plane flights, rental car, and a plan for where I'm sleeping three of the four nights.

Perry is here for the weekend, to see his sister. He's taking classes this summer since he spent the spring having a co-op job, at which he apparently did extremely well. I'm not surprised that technically he was a star, but sometimes he has interpersonal issues, and apparently he managed to get beyond that with these people. So he's mostly living at school.

So I see that I have not been keeping up with posting!

Health update: I had the implant put in where I had a tooth extracted four months ago. It was kind of unpleasant; I don't remember it being quite this traumatic my previous implant. But, this is a rear molar, and so it is apparently more difficult.

I still have that stupid leg pain; I went to a different PT and they did different things than the previous people and give me different exercises, and they may or may not have helped. Thing that seems to help the most is not wearing jeans anymore, but wearing loose pajama pants. Then I did some mild trauma to it, so now I have a bruise, so it's making it hard to tell what part is actually hurting, since now I have two problems.

The fallout from Covid seems to be that I sleep an extra hour than I used to. This is annoying, because I already sleep more than the average person.

Lake update: we put in the first section of the dock today! It was 59° in the water. I wore a wetsuit, and Ken wore waders, and we learned that the waders leak pretty badly, so he got almost as wet as I did.

Bicycling update: as of this morning I had 666 miles, which is 1/3 of my goal and it is 1/3 of the way through the year, so that's great! (Then I rode 11 miles today, so I didn't keep the number of the beast for long.)

Kid update: Perry had a co-op job this past semester (Wentworth's schedule is little skewed, so the semester is over already and he's home). Apparently he did well at it. He will go to school during summer semester, and then have another co-op next fall semester.

Jocelyn seems to be dropping out of school before her last year and going to do circus stuff in San Diego. She applied to real circus schools, but once again did not get in. (Still waiting for a response from the final school in France, but not really expecting acceptance.) The San Diego place is a step down from a real circus school, but it's a place that she is familiar with, and maybe something good will come of it. I don't know what her plan will be about finishing her degree, but I'm expecting that eventually she will do so. I have explained to her that she needs to pay attention at around 10 years to whether she wants to do that because it will become harder and harder to get places to accept old credits as time passes. She doesn't know what her plan is; I think she's going to see what happens at the end of the year, like can she get a job doing circus stuff (performing, not just teaching), or is that too much of a pipe dream and she should give it up as a career and have it just be a hobby, and finish her degree and get a day job. She's been talking about physical therapy as a potential career, which would require first finishing the bachelors, and then going to PT school. So that's all much in the future. This summer she will live in Portland with her boyfriend; she'll get some kind of job probably teaching circus.

Jocelyn got fish in 2014 when she was 12. We bought her a 20 gallon tank. Fish came, fish went. Early on we got some plecos from a friend of hers, which are bottom feeders and glass cleaners. Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that "tropical fish" have a maximum temperature that's cooler than you would expect, and all of the pleco's were dead after there was a heat wave and our air-conditioning was not really working. Eventually we bought another one, which was just an inch or so when we got it.

Six or so years later it is 8 inches long, Jocelyn has left home. We were waiting for the fish to die (a few have expired), but it seems like the pleco was going strong and might do that for a long time, and somebody might actually like to have this fish. So we called a specialty aquarium place to see if they would like to take it off our hands, and they said yes. They will take the rest of the little crappy fish as well. So off all the live parts of the aquarium will go tomorrow, and then we will clean up the inert parts and maybe give away the whole setup.

I took many pictures, including close-ups of the pleco, and the top of the tank for the "fish cooler" that Ken made out of old computer fans. This works remarkably well, to keep the temperature below about 77 when there is a heat wave.

I made a page to advertise the aquarium, including some of the above pictures.

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Entries tagged with kids

Protest #5: It was YUUUUUGE!

Arisia recap

Holiday letter

Cars cars cars.

Staycation

Four long hours of driving…

no eclipse yet but...

I went to Arisia last weekend.

Year in review

The Solstice of Minor Disasters

Happy Solstice Adam

All's well I guess

Maybe we should stop having guests

(no subject)

trips, lakes, kids, food, and health update

Trip report

Circus performer!

Lake &c news

Non-pet spam

Done with fish