1. The bookcase project is now complete. It only took three weeks of my office looking like an explosion at the Library of Congress, two separate trips to IKEA, and one unplanned late night of weeding a final time to try to fit everything into available space, but it’s done and for the first time since we moved into this house a quarter century ago I finally have all of my books out on shelves instead of scattered in boxes.
2. This means all the books I plan to keep, to be clear. There are 18 boxes of books sitting in my basement that need to be donated to a good cause. I started this project during lockdown, when nobody was accepting donations, and then took a very long break from it in order to deal with … well … [waves hands vaguely at everything] … so things kind of piled up. The end of one project is just the beginning of the next.
3. I have a wide range of options for my next project. I can a) deshamble-ize my office, since a great many things got shuffled around for the bookcase project that have not yet been unshuffled, b) work on my upcoming history class this fall, a course I have not taught since 2015, which is before I did anything online with my face-to-face classes so I will need to address a great many things, not least of which is the fact that there is more material to squeeze in but the semester is a week shorter now that we’re part of the Mother Ship, c) work on my other upcoming history class this fall, which I have taught since 2012 and I’ve always hated the first discussion assignment but have never worked out a better one, so perhaps this is the time, d) work on my upcoming history class for spring 2024, which needs a complete reboot that I have been threatening to do since 2019 and I know what I want to do for it (the class will likely be illegal in the state of Florida when I’m done, but such is the price of teaching actual history) but haven’t had both time and energy simultaneously to do it, e) work on any of the three separate major genealogical projects I’d like to be working on, f) work on any of the infinite number of projects other people would like me to be working on, and/or g) not do much of anything. It’s a quandary.
4. Does anyone have any idea what’s going on in Russia at the moment? First there was a rebellion, then there wasn’t, and in the end I’m not sure what if anything will come of it and I suspect nobody else is either at the moment. I could go for some less interesting times to live in, if I’m being honest here.
5. The best comment I saw on the situation in Russia was “Huh, maybe giving a psychopath his own army of criminals wasn’t a well thought out plan after all.” There are no good guys in that conflict.
6. It needs to rain here in Baja Canada. We have not had real rain in a very long time. The grass is crunchy, the river is low, and it’s 15 degrees Fahrenheit (9 Celsius) above normal for this time of the year here. The air is still hazy from the Canadian wildfires (nothing like the orange glow that they got out east last month, fortunately) and every statistical measure out there says this is the new normal. Why there are morons loudly complaining that climate change isn’t real in the face of all this escapes me, but then I live in a country where a loudly vocal minority of people think the solution to daily mass shootings is to give people more guns so they can shoot more people, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of critical thinking here.
7. San Pellegrino makes a Limonata soda that is truly a healing balm in this vale of sorrows, yes it is.
8. There is nothing quite as satisfying as recommending a book to someone and having that person actually enjoy it.
9. I am now officially old, having been diagnosed with arthritis in one finger – the one that doesn’t really bend anymore, strangely enough. I keep thinking that I’m too young for this sort of thing – when I was a kid “arthritis” was something reserved for bent-over shuffling greybeards who would tell you all about that damned scoundrel Herbert Hoover if you weren’t careful – but then I do the math and I realize that they weren’t that old and I’m not that young and this is why people don’t like math.
10. It is getting on time for me to get a new computer, as I’ve had my current one for six years and it wasn’t new when I got it. It is as updated as it can get, and it is falling behind. Eventually there will be things I need to do that I can't, and I should solve this before that happens. The problem is that I am not edgy enough for Apple’s current product line and I genuinely can’t stand working with Windows machines (and do not suggest anything along the lines of Linux or other niche operating systems – I’m lucky to get Apple to work and I’ve been in that ecosystem for 34 years). Yet another quandary.
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12 comments:
1. I have also made progress on my office. There is now a path from the door past my desk all the way to just over three feet away from the window.
3. I’m going to vote for g. Although, d sounds interesting if only because of its potential Floridian illegality.
4. Vodka. That is what is going on in Russia. It makes me ... uh ... people behave in weird and mysterious ways.
5. Welcome to life in the desert. You should probably work on becoming accustomed to it.
7. I just found out that I can purchase Nehi Grape Soda on Amazon, $4 a bottle, and worth every penny. I bought a six-pack. Not sold in stores ...
9. Old? Haa! Get off my lawn.
10. My Mac Mini (built in 2020) and both of its predecessors have proven to be extremely reliable (three computers in nearly 25 years). Nothing ‘edgy’ about these little puppies - simply utilitarian. Prices range from fairly reasonable to ludicrously outrageous depending on how you build it out. I bought the first one directly from Apple. Its replacements were purchased on Amazon. You should check Amazon if you’re interested - deals are frequently available.
Lucy
1. Congratulations! And with room for future projects, no less! Retirement coming up soon... :)
3. G is definitely the option I'm leaning toward though E is also compelling. But B and C are going to bite me in sensitive areas if I don't get them done, and my first rule is "No pain, no pain." So we'll see how things go.
4. I would believe that. I once hosted a group of Russians as part of a joint university/Rotary Club project that somehow got delegated all the way down to me, and the one stereotype about them that they lived out to the fullest was the sheer quantity of vodka they could put away. It was awe-inspiring in a way.
5. No, no, no, no. I am a native of the well-watered temperate east and I will not grow accustomed to either the heat or the dryness of the desert. "But it's a dry heat!" people say. Yeah, yeah - that's how you make beef jerky. I'm the guy who's going to retire to Scotland for the weather, after all.
8. Win!
9. I think I'm young and then my body says, "Well, actually ..." and it's a hard thing being mansplained by your own body.
10. I've had Macs since 1989 when I bought a Mac Plus (6" b/w screen, 1MB RAM, 20MB external hard drive). My current is a 27" iMac, which I really like except they stopped making this model because even though it was their most popular seller it just wasn't edgy enough so now I need to find something else AND a new monitor because fuck you that's why. I've looked at the Minis and the Studios and they look ... complicated. And monitorless. But it has to happen, so it will. Sigh.
1. No. I shall resist future enhancements to my space. It has been years in the making. It will be decades before I seriously consider dismantling this mess.
3. Yeah, go with g. U has a reputation to uphold.
4. Experience has proven that Vodka is the only distilled spirit to which my … uh … the human body develops a tolerance, requiring increasing amounts are required to achieve the desired effect.
5. Welcome to my world … such as it is.
10. Just looked at the Studio (didn’t even know that existed) to see what the hell that was - Immediately closed that tab and ran away.
It should be understood that I’m a Professional Driver - NOT an IT guy. If my computer was any more complicated than ‘plug & play’ I’d give up and go back to living in a cave. Complicated is, in point of fact, the last word I would use to describe my Mac Mini. Picked up this monitor for $125 at Wally World, Keyboard for $40 bucks online, and I’m pretty sure the mouse was dragged in by the cat.
Lucy
1. At some point it becomes Someone Else's Problem and thus invisible.
5. I'm happy to visit, but living there would make me insane, I suspect. I remember driving from Salt Lake City to the Grand Canyon a few years back and thinking, "This is really lovely, in a 'thank the gods I don't actually have to live here' kind of way." I wish you well.
10. My goal is to buy as much computer as I can afford, since I will probably have it for the next 7-10 years and they depreciate by the hour. I want lots of storage space and memory. It all adds up. I'll figure it out eventually. What I really want is what I already have, only updated. But apparently manufacturers across the board have decided that this is illegal. Oh well.
Just home from New Mexico (105F and will actually kill you before you notice that you are becoming a raisin) via Chicago (86F and raisins explode spontaneously from osmotic shock). The former is vastly preferable even to me, whose idea of comfortable naked ambience is ~55F. But DON'T forget that water. [https://www.ktsm.com/news/5-stranded-hikers-helped-down-from-organ-mountains-outside-las-cruces/ relates to part of my son's rocketry team this past week, the reason for my being in NM in the first place. Two jackknife IVs later and all was well. And they won the rocketry contest, so even with a 72h trip from heck that Aidan endured on his return, I think a win. It was VERY fun to talk to some of the 2,000 enthusiastically geeky engineers crammed into a too-small ballroom on the 'display' day, and amusing when the several who had biologically-based payload experiments realised that they were being asked Qs by an actual biologist - the one exception to the 'deer in headlights' was a grad student who really *did* know a ton about electrogenerative bacteria and we had a great conversation that was incomprehensible to anyone else in the room. Also fun to cook chili for the 20+ cornell engineers; much more (and extremely) heart-filling to have my elder son actually invite me and enjoy me being there, to be fair. Almost undiluted joy for much of several days. Sorry, I digress - wait, I believe that's encouraged here.]
I loved the landscapes in Utah; otherworldly. And I like mountains. But I don't think that I would ever wish to love somewhere so brown as opposed to green. Canada is looking nice. [In a further nod to climate change, we're about to take our first-ever cruise, to Alaska. See the ice while it's there... and hope that the scopolamine works.]
I'm using a 2014 MacBook Pro, and have been since 2014. It is getting close to refusing to talk to my software or phone* though. Which means that at some stage I am going to have to bite this particular bullet if only to get photos to transfer. Which means that ALL of my actually-used software will cease to function. I already went through the pain, once, of having inadvertently upgraded OS, realised that everything was now broken, and having to go down to bare silicon and rebuild. It took a week nonstop. Ouch. But otherwise this thing is as much computer as I will ever need. Is it even possible to buy an Office version that I own, rather than rent, any more? Maybe I can get all my papers written before trying to update reference software?
(*Er, camera. With phone attached. Just went from 6 to 14Pro to get the top-line camera - see 'Alaska cruise' above - and wow is there a difference. Also a mortgage. But this thing disdains to speak to mere OS 10.13.6. Sigh. At least it has a TB (!) of storage so it can hold the photos for now...]
Digressions are always encouraged! Those were called "conversations" until they got pathologized by the preternaturally focused, I think.
I'm glad that Aidan invited you along - that's a definite parenting win, and a lovely thing. It sounds like you both had a lovely time, heat and hydration issues notwithstanding! But speaking as a city guy, I appreciate the vistas of mountains and deserts but living there would make me nuts within weeks. I always think of Leo Szilard's reaction to Los Alamos, a remote mesa hundreds of miles from the nearest delicatessen, when they asked him to join the Manhattan Project. "Nobody could think straight in a place like that. Everybody who goes there will go crazy." Yeah, that would be me. Enjoy your trip to Alaska!
I remember the OS Tango that I had to do when I upgraded to OSX and lost all my <64 bit programs, but since I'm now at 12.6.6 I figure I'm okay for the nonce. Good luck to you on your computer quest - we can compare notes.
And yes, modern smart phones are just small computers that will grudgingly and inexpertly make phone calls, most of which nobody wants to receive since nobody actually likes getting phone calls anymore since most of them are just spammers, pollsters, and/or fundraising appeals. I should update my iPhone as well, since it is a 10 and I really want to get a good phone camera. If the 14 is that much of an improvement, maybe I will bite the bullet on it.
The subscription model of things that once were products is yet another sign we are living in the End Times.
The 14*Pro* has the 48 megapixel camera, vs the 14 which is 'only' 16. It's the only model that does AFAICT.
Not a city guy. But I like theatre and restaurants and microbreweries, so city-adjacent works for me.
I love cities. I love the energy they have. I love the fact that there are people everywhere. There are theaters and restaurants and book stores and delicatessens and wherever you look there are stories. I know that many people are not city people, and good for them. But cities are just wonderful places to me.
48MP? Wow - that's a lot. I can dream. :)
I guess that I enjoy almost all cities to visit, and some I would be happy to live in - Portland, for instance, or Philly. Maybe even Boston. But NYC is my local and it's just not a welcoming place to me.
Oddly enough, I've never had a bad experience in NYC. I know as a Philadelphia native I'm not supposed to say nice things about NYC, but in my (admittedly idiosyncratic) experience it's been a good place. I find it helps to know the rules - when merging in traffic, for example, you get 7.3 nanoseconds to make your move before they take the space back, but you do get those 7.3 nanoseconds.
YMMV, of course.
I'm glad my hometown made it onto your list of places, though! :)
I find rural areas unwelcoming, but that might just be a Me issue.
Oh, rural areas are quite welcoming, but it helps if you know the rules ... though the rules change from place to place. A Sherpa or similar personal/interpreter/guide would probably come in handy.
😳 😉 😁
Lucy
A local guide would probably make a big difference. I will have to take you up on that offer sometime. :)
But even with a welcome, rural areas just feel unsettling to me. Where are the people? Why is everything this undifferentiated carpet of green? Or brown? Why is it so quiet? For a lot of people these are precisely why they prefer rural areas, and good for them, I say.
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