Barn Pixie

In an attempt to find comfort, and some small measure of predictability, in the current chaos, I found these double pendulum animations. Staring at them, and realizing that the patterns are wild but bounded, nonrepeating but bounded, has improved my brain.

In COVID news, the mayor and my two neighbors who were sick with it are better and back to their usual work. The number of cases in the county is falling. The redder, more reactionary towns in my county are full of people who do not believe in virus or masks, parroting the mendacious individual in the white house, and they spent a lot of Memorial Day weekend out and frolicing.

It seems like half the things I read are "when the vaccine comes, when we all behave better, when we have better leadership" and the other half is "this virus will always be with us, vaccine development is very different from distribution and compliance, we will be doing this FOR.EV.ER" and I am getting whiplash.

I am also getting whiplash from Alice's planned top surgery. It was slated for June 2, and we both assumed it was postponed indefinitely. Then she got a call last week to come in for her pre-op appt and she was slated to go forward if the state allowed different standards for W. Mass than Boston. And then they called back a week later and gave her a new date for October. And also I don't know what to say to my kind and well meaning but nosy step-mother. So it was on, off, on, off again and I am feeling raw around the edges and can only imagine what Alice is feeling although she is mostly bummed about being too hot over the summer.

She and her crew are all dispersed, even the ones back home in town here are present but unreachable, and biding their time until the next thing happens. There are no jobs to apply for, there are no places to go to be young, there are no pieces of a summer of 2020 to have right now, so they visit by phone and group chat and various skype and discord things I do not understand to keep each other sane and cheerful.

In the range of sublime to ridiculous, I have landed hard on the ridiculous in terms of keeping track of what we are using.

I have a stack of toilet paper tubes that are dated twice - on the inside when we put them in and on the outside when they were finished. I am sort of saving them for a project, but also I felt like we needed to know how many rolls of toilet paper the three of us actually use. I have a date on the cover of my instant coffee, and a date on the dishwasher soap, and all of them are there to help figure out when we will need more of them.

I feel simultaneously vry scientific and analytical about the process, because I am Data Gathering, but also kind of helpless, and a little bit dumb for A) not knowing this beforehand, and 2) taking such ridiculous lengths to figure it out. Although in my own defense, when I was shopping more routinely, the rate of usage was not as much of an issue as just how close we were to running out.

I have had ongoing ideas about keeping track of consumption as an art project of some kind - an array of all the things I have used up, accounted by the tops and covers of the containers mosaiced together. But this is the most disciplined I have ever been about dating and saving things like this. It really feels like there is an art project in there somewhere. Or social commentary. or... something.

The Boston Bean (what DO you call your non-binary child? esp when they're a fully functioning adult and living with a partner and acquiring other partners as they go along? I have defaulted to skookum bean, as well as beloved child. Any additional suggestions will be taken under advisement) got an email from their landlord asking if they were doing ok, and they wanted to answer them with --ha ha, we need to pay less rent, this is going to be an issue, at least until the virus situation lifts and Jared can get work--  So we talked about phrasing and intent, and I helped them edit the final email, and they sent it out (after a minor panic over the subject line - it is always the last details that trip us up?) and then had to talk. So we talked some more and they are thinking about a cat, because soft and independent and also soft and cozy.

Alice and I continue to remove daylilies from the southwest corner and side of the house, along with removing false bittersweet as we go along. There are a LOT of them there. My plan for disposal includes driving around the block and tossing them into various ditches in the neighborhood, especially on relatively unobserved land. There is a fair amount of farmland nearby, I can get stuff into those ditches.

I think we might have accomplished sourdough starter? Or at least starter of some sort. I halved it yesterday, and fed it and put the other half in a bowl with water and more flour and hoped something might happen. More than 24 hours and a half cup of sugar later, it has become a fairly well risen sponge, and I might try to make pizza on it tonight.

Gaudior posted:
and that right there is how I am. Fine, I guess? but everything is hard.

I got nothing. Literally - I tried to put together an online order for Peapod, and there are no, none, zero delivery slots for the entire next two weeks. I tried camping on the site, refreshing every minute or so, across midnight and into the early morning hours, but I missed the turnover, and there are no slots for the new day that is two weeks away from today either. Al is wanting delivery, and it is not happening, and I am assuming one or th eother of us will don a mask and gloves and brave one location or another for food. We are not, in any way shape or form, desperate, but merely looking into the future, it would be nice to have new groceries in a week or so. I tried to explain to Al that I was deeply uncomfortable with Instacart for grocs, but it may be moot if they are striking, because at least he won't cross a picket line.

We are having neighborhood drama around an old woman (who may or may not be losing her mind) simply turning her fierce little terrier out the door, but dragging a leash? which either indicates delusion about leash laws or the escape artist antics of said terrier. Anyhow, it chases and kills chickens, romps around the neighborhood growling at the innocent, and is provoking a lot of back and forth. When it isn't let out, it barks, constantly. This is stressful for everyone, especially the chicken and children keepers in the area.

When my mother is bored, she buys real estate. When I am bored, I research how to look after new kinds of pets, and also backyard farm animals. I know a lot about miniature cattle, particularly miniature Highland cattle (so. much. like. stuffies!!!!!) and miniature horses, and while I don't want chickens I did spend a fair amount of yesterday looking into raising quail for eggs. There are the truly tiny and adorable Button Quail, but they require being inside, and also are timorous and do not like petting. I want an animal I can pick up - that is most of the pint, right there. Cockatiels look promising, as do rats, but I have not moved past the research stage.

hi. Happy Saturday Sunday

just feeling blah, which is a thing that seems perfectly reasonable. I did find this person making purely gorgeous tiny things - the jellyfish tutorial is a serious education in ways to use resin, and layering things/oder of operations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKViHX2rC0Y

I finished a re-read of Murderbot, which I recommend highly. They use serial dramas the same way I've been using comfort reads, for reassurance in troubled times. Having finished Murderbot again, I guess I am forced (forced, I tell you) to go back to Leverage and watch ridiculously handsome and competent people trick bad guys. It is entertaining and cathartic! Also I can knit (mostly socks) which is also cathartic.

It is blowing about 30 knots of wind out there and it is a good day not to be at sea.

So I am maybe not coping as well as I hoped, because people keep looking hard at me, and asking how are you ~really~ and I have no actual useful answer? I am. I persist, and I am going along, and I have a head full of things I am working on not thinking about too hard, and I don't think I am, right now, terribly far off the mean? I know people who are sick - two neighbors, and Mayor David, and they are quarantined and recuperating, although they were pretty fucking quiet about it last week? I dunno. They were sick. And getting better. But still. We need the flags - I wonder why we don't have a set of international signal flags, or at least Q and the other one....  OK - the quarantine flag is L(ima); black and yellow quartered. Q(uebec) is solid yellow and indicates all aboard are free of disease and customs is requested for clearance. So we need L flags for houses with the actual plague inside, and Q flags for "healthy so far as we know" and then we can elaborate on that because the messages one can send via signal flags have their own delightful brevity that is easy to compose humor from when mixed up and hard ashore. On the hard, Mattie says.

I have noticed my focus on the news gets closer and closer to home as the national and state numbers start accumulating. When the country as a whole was teetering on the brink, the state had a small number of cases and no deaths, and now it is still smaller than the nation and I can only look at the county statistics and see that we have 12 or 24 or more cases identified, and certainly an order of magnitutde or more stealth cases, and it is close enough now. Now we have neighbors and friends getting sick with it, and soon enough, deaths of people I know.

And then it feels like borrowing trouble, and honestly if one more person mentions the grief article i shall bite something. It doesn't tell me anything. It says nothing useful to me. Maybe someone thought it was helpful to recognize that we are about to descend into a national crisis (with a bored toddler at thte helm) and it is ok to feel worried about it? gee thanks. Don't mind if I do. Or Anticipatory Grief - what kind of crap is that, that assigns a name to the lurking dread you are having that the world will change and you will fucking lose people that matter and nothing will be good ever again?? I mislike the grief people anyhow. It could be sueful to ahve some feel for the process, but it is so widespread it feels really stupid to section it and analyze it. So many different cultures have so many different ways of coping, maybe those are the things that should be acknowledged - coping strategies, a whole wide range of them, and also mourning rituals that people use to comfort themselves. It certainly feels like time for cutting off all my hair, and rubbing ashes into it, and wailing for while in a hut in the backyard.

That shouldn't sound like such a good idea right now, should it? Yeah, maybe I am not coping so well. Since no else is either, it doesn't win anybody much to say so. Forge ahead, one step at a time. Don't borrow trouble. Do something for someone else. Do something for yourself. It always boils down to the same advice, and the same basic steps to moving out of the darkness. Or through the darkness, I guess.

The mayor, a friend and parent of Alice's elementary school friend, tested positive for the virus. He's home, with his wife (an Ob/Gyn) and younger daughter. I have started counting my friends and wondering what 1% or 2% of my immediate circle looks like, and what some small percentage of people in town looks like and feels like. I do not like this part at all. 

I realized this morning, as I was working on 63/100 for #thecreativeproject that the last several weeks of daily work is composed almost entirely of things that are suspended or things that are tied down. Or today's effort which was things suspended between things that are tied down. You can see them on Instagram Which makes me think of the Tarot's Hanged Man - tied upside down in a tree, the only thing you can do is wait - possess your soul with patience, like I tell my dear demented Da when he gets fretful.

Saw my dad, distracted him for a couple hours. He was really concerned that Lucia might not come downstairs in time to make lunch, and he wanted her to come down before noon, so that lunch started at noon. Next time I bring a cookie, I'll save it for 11:30, and see if he won't feel so worried about lunch starting "on time".

If there is karma in the world, I am kind of doomed, because I have been wishing horrible ends to a lot of people. I mean, they absolutely deserve it, but also venting that kind of anger, and putting those kinds of wishes into the world is unkind at best and deeply hazardous at worst, or so I am told. 

Al suggested I go stand in the middle of the UMass sunwheel and shout at the universe. Which honestly sounds like the perfect idea, and only in part because it is the equinox. I love the equinox, but it goes so fast! It is a matter of moments when the sun skips over the equator like a jump rope and heads north (I know, I know, all Earth-surface centered thinking, but it works, and it has persisted for millennia because describing it from space is just way too hard). Spring is all about longer days and stuff bursting forth, and etc. but one major theme is that it is fleeting. Summer and winter are both a solstice - the still stand of the sun, when it hovers in the same place in the sky for more than a couple of weeks. But equinox - you gotta grab them when they zip past, no pre- or post- celebrating that. So I am going to harness some fury, and the movement of the earth, and go shout at the universe from the center of the tiny stonehenge that a dedicated astronomy prof had built so she could talk about the solar system.

In other news, there is no news. This is the calm before the storm, when all the preparations seem like too much and all the doubters are catcalling, and then the wave comes.

hold on tight

Alice's last and final shoe dropped yesterday when Gov Baker closed the schools and banned groups of over 25. SEA, being both a school and containing 27 students was again in disarray, and still somehow managed to fail with relative grace. So I've had 6 hours of driving plus and also the weather was cold, drizzly and crappy (but not freezing, thank you) and my driver side windshield wiper was borked. Likely because it gets more use than the passenger side. So I replaced it on the way home, having located a Honda dealership on the way, and of course once it was on the rain died down but that's OK!! Because now I am prepared for it when it comes back. So.

I did not do any of the things I am supposed to accomplish daily before I left this morning, so I still have finger torture guitarlele practice, and the daily artwork. And talking here.

I did talk briefly with Alice's Captain and Chief Scientist, and also Peg Brandon who runs the place, and someone named Cricket who makes things happen in the office. We all agreed I should send Al to sea on one of the adult berths in the Caribbean. He can't not do it, once the rest of us have.