laramie

Happy Spooky Season from us at Wiscon!

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It's time to put the garden to bed.

These chores get a little more difficult every year. Thank heavens for my garden kneeling bench, but I feel the ache in my joints a little more every time I go through the process of pulling up dead plants, raking, and putting the hose and tools away for the winter. But it is immensely satisfying to get it all done.

Image description: a rather forlorn-looking concrete patio with emptied planters. Several paper bags full of yard waste are in the foreground. The background, above, shows a red garden leaf rake gathering up leaves. Top: a shovel and garden rake.

Cleanup



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

We are back in Sunny California tm.  Unfortunately I came down with M's cold a couple of days before we left.  It is a really vicious bug.  I never left the condo on Monday.  Got up at 3:30am Tuesday after no real sleep and went to catch our plane. Staggered in here and went to sleep.  Today has been bed rest interspersed with 5 or 10 minutes every couple of hours of cleaning up and watering. Sigh. Tonight I'm feeling a tiny, tiny bit better so hopefully tomorrow I can get up and do things.  My list keeps getting longer. 

Chena came off the flight her usual cheerful self and is clearly happy to be back home. I think she will miss our walks out in dog friendly Alaska parks.  Goodness there are a lot of dogs in that city!

I have my ETS dates for this year.  I will have obstacle competitions on April  25 & 26 and October 17 & 18. Between now and then Carrie and I will try and do an Obstacle Fun Day once a month. I'm really hoping to do one in a week or two, and one in early Dec, but Jan and Feb might be too rainy.  Maybe tomorrow I'll make up some obstacle sheets for Fun Days. That is a nice quiet thing to do. 

Anne McCaffrey, Tania Opland & Mike Freeman, Jim Thorne, Carol Ferraro & Barisha Letterman, Random Fractions, Linda Melnick, Bill Sutton, Meg Davis, Dan The Bard, Ju Honisch & Katy Droege-Macdonald, Jordin Kare, Puzzlebox

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com

I'd love to call this post Alaska Adventures, but really we have been very, very quiet this last week.  M had a bad cold which, hopefully, I am not catching. 
The beautiful fall foliage that was here when we arrived has now disappeared.  Yesterday it tried very hard to snow, but only managed a few tiny flakes.  It's cold, but not yet really icy, with the first big winter storm approaching as we leave to go back to 80F in Ukiah. ( More, with pics )

I stumbled on a list of word counts of famous novels and discovered that my longest piece of fanfic is approximately 16,000 words longer than Moby Dick!

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

This was one of those weeks that had me wondering, "What was this week about? What can I do for my collage?"

I had a hard time coming up with anything. The week was uneventful, and I have been feeling quiet inside. A little subdued, maybe.

The cold is starting to settle in, and I see frost on the grass in the mornings now.

I have been drinking hibiscus tea to try to bring my blood pressure down a bit.

Fiona and M came over for a visit last Sunday. Poor Fiona was so exhausted (hard work digging trenches during the day, welding classes in the evening, and up with a screaming baby at night), and so after I fed her apple pastries, I told her to go upstairs and take a nap on my bed while I hung out with M.

Babies are oblivious to schedules and deadlines. They live in the moment. I sang songs to her and let her stand on my thighs and bounce up and down (she has Strong Opinions and Takes Umbrage at traditional baby holds. No, no, no. She wants to stand). She fussed for a while until I gave her a bottle and let her sleep. I stared at her for half an hour, just drinking in her presence and enjoying the quiet, until Fiona awoke and came downstairs again, looking sleepy.

"Thanks," she said.

"Anytime," I told her. "Come back again to rest anytime."

Image description: A hand holds a brown leaf up against the sun. Top: a woman's hand cradles a baby's hand. Lower right corner: a cup of hibiscus tea with a slice of lemon floating on the surface of the tea. Semi-transparent overlay: frost on the grass.

Quiet



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Hey you. Want to volunteer for a Feminist Inclusive Convention?

https://wiscon.net/volunteer/concom/

#WisConCommunity #WisCon #WisCon2026 #FeministSFF #Volunteer

Went yesterday for my annual physical and vaccinations. I’m pleased to report that I’m in better health than I was this time last year! I got my flu and COVID vaccinations, and after drowsing off and on all afternoon and evening yesterday, I'm feeling human again. Most of my labs are within normal limits, and the ones that aren't are much closer to normal that they had been. The only issue that needs any sort of intervention is I got a referral to podiatry for hammertoes. (Sing it with me: "Think it's time to Stop! Hammertoes!")

I hope you're all doing well, and if you have the means to follow up on your healthcare, I hope you're doing it.

Today is our 36th anniversary. John surprised me with flowers, candy and a card. I...failed. In my defense, we mostly don't do anything other than have dinner at a nice restaurant if we're not on a trip to celebrate it. Last year we were on Kauai. Two years ago we were on Rapa Nui. Five years ago we were in Carmel, I think. Anyway, I made him a latte and promised to make reservations for dinner.

A couple of days ago we went to San Leandro to have dinner with Pam Davis and Terry Floyd, the friends who hosted our wedding at their house in 1989. It was just great to see them again. We saw them last month at John's birthday party, but had not been to their house since they got married 20 years ago. It seemed so improbable that it had been that long, but on the other hand it's true we don't go to the East Bay very often. Anyway, we had a nice dinner in Castro Valley, which is a sentence I've never said before, and then more talking at their place about family. Their two sons are in their mid and late 30s now, which also seems improbable, and Pam and Terry adore their only grandchild. Pam is waiting for hip surgery, which has to be scheduled quite a ways out in these days of aging Boomers, I guess. We all agreed aging was both a fine thing and kind of bullshit, especially the bruising.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a particular tooth was sensitive and I panicked. I always panic when my teeth act up. I took myself to the dentist to get their opinion. They said everything looked fine, but such an old (33 years) silver filling really should be replaced with a crown. So I got that done yesterday and it turns out two cavities were hiding under the old filling. Virtue rewarded, though I also think I deserve a reward for being a pro-active adult about it. Well, there's always my anniversary candy.

The cat I'm seeing is happy to have me visit and wants to be on me, but I am not allowed to pet her, not even when she headbutts me. Now that this set of boundaries is established I do a ten-minute food, water, and litter cleanup, then we sit for half an hour together peacefully. I get paid for this! It's a damn fine life.

Another K-pop artist's North American tour has been cancelled at the last minute. Visa issues? Venue issues? The management never says when it announces the cancellation, but it's making me worry about Key's scheduled concert here in December. I have my tickets metaphorically clutched tightly in my hands as I scan the K-pop news daily.

A., L., and I are rewatching Brooklyn Nine-Nine. As we were sitting down to watch tonight, L. asked "Do you think there's Brooklyn Nine-Nine fanfic on AO3?" As A. and I assured her that there certainly was, I picked up my phone so I could tell her how many there were. As it turned out, there were 6,999 of them. So of course after we finished watching, I wrote a drabble to bring the totally up to an even 7,000. If you're interested, go check out "Dance the Night Away", in which one Sergeant Terrence Jeffords attends a TWICE concert!

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

In case you've not heard about yesterday's theft of some of the French Crown Jewels from the Louvre yesterday, CNN has a good article about it. There is one paragraph from the article that I have issues with:

Christopher Marinello, the founder of Art Recovery International, said that if the thieves are just looking to get cash out as quickly as possible, they might melt down the precious metals or recut the stones with no regard for the piece’s integrity.

I suppose it's technically true that they might do this; I just don't think it's at all likely. I don't think the thieves will be looking to cash out quickly because, given the degree of planning that apparently went into this operation, I think the items were sold before they were even stolen. I think it likely that their new owner, who probably lives in Russia or the Middle East, has already taken possession of them. (And if I were one of the thieves, I'd be extremely worried that said owner might decide that their generous payment for the items wasn't sufficient to ensure my ongoing silence.)

“Exhibitions, like dreams, are temporary phenomena — but, also like dreams, they leave indelible traces in our experiences. Through a dialectical short circuit, exhibitions draw from the material culture of the past, are situated in the present, and anticipate futures.” (Adam Szymczyk, in “Passages: Koyo Kouoh, 1967-2025,” Artforum, Sept. 2025)

This was something I really enjoyed learning about in my museum studies classes. An exhibition tells a story. Sometimes it's a simple story, like people "People like Monet and our museum needs money." (Although hopefully even an exhibition like that can still tell a deep story.) Sometimes its a more complicated story, like "Here are some interesting and/or controversial things that contemporary artists are doing. You may find some of them shocking, but you should see them anyway.". And sometimes, an exhibition tells a story that can totally change the way people things about something, such that the exhibition lives on in peoples minds long after the wall tags have been taken down and the objects have been returned to storage.

For example, I would be very surprised to find someone who'd studied art history or museum studies in the US who had never heard of the 1992 Maryland Historical Society exhibition "Mining the Museum". This exhibition was mentioned in several of my classes, to the point that as soon as we heard "1992" and "Maryland" together, we'd start nodding, knowing what was coming next. In this exhibition, conceptual artist Fred Wilson combined items from the museum's collection that would typically be found in an art exhibition with items that are tied to the state's slave-owning past and would usually be hidden when discussing the art of the era. One photograph from the exhibition has become a shorthand for the whole thing. It's of a case labeled simply "Metalwork, 1793-1880," which contains a number of elaborate silver cups and pitchers as well as a pair of iron slave shackles.

The story that the exhibit designer is trying to tell is generally summarized in the large wall text at the beginning of the exhibition, which I've observed many people to skip over in their rush to get to the "good stuff" (i.e. the objects). If you're someone who skips over the wall text at the beginning of an exhibition, I'd like to urge you to do not do that — the experience of viewing the items will be even richer if you have this story in your mind as you view them. And if you're someone who already reads the wall text (thank you!), try keeping that story further to the front of your mind as you view the exhibition. You'll come to see that not only do the individual items have meaning, but the order in which you encounter them as you move through the exhibition and they ways in which they're juxtaposed spatially will also contribute to telling the story.

OK, I need help from my guitar-playing friends - hopefully one of you will have the answer for this.

Lots of detail here, because I don't know what's relevant and what's not: About 10-12 years ago, I bought one of those Walmart super-cheap guitar and amp combos, then I never got around to learning to play it, devoting my time to learning ukulele instead. Today I remembered I still had that guitar down in the basement, and I realized that if I took off the 1st and 6th strings, then tuned the middle strings to G-C-E-A (from low to high), I would have converted this guitar into an electric ukulele. So I tried it. While I was at it, I moved the peg for the guitar strap to the other side so I could play it left-handed. I also ground 2 extra slots in the nut, so that the strings stayed the same distance apart for the entire length of the neck (like I'm used to on the ukulele). I put on the strings and tuned them with a digital tuner that I know to be accurate. The open strings were all tuned correctly, but any chord I fingered sounded wrong. So I fingered an F chord and played each note, looking at the tuner. On a ukulele, this has 3 open notes: G, C, and A, and 1 fretted note, F (1st fret on the E string). The G, C, and A were right, the F was sharp. Thinking that my changing the path of the strings might have changed their length relative to the placement of the frets enough that it might be throwing the fretted notes off, I tried putting one of the strings through the original slots so that it was the proper length. The open string was fine, but each fretted note was sharp. Oddly, each fretted was sharp by a different amount.

At this point, I've put it aside in hopes that one of you sees what's going on here. I see three possibilities:

1. There's something wrong in how I'm pressing on the strings, and if I learn the right way, everything will be right.

2. There's something wrong with the guitar that can be adjusted to make the notes come out right.

3. There's something wrong with the guitar that's just a side effect of "cheap guitar" and it's really not fixable. (Or at least, not fixable without massive amounts of time and effort.)

Ideas?