Day in the Life of an Idiot

Turns out, in a surprise to only the richest man in the world, if you cut funding for the National Weather Service, storm predictions suffer.

We have a neighbor in one of our closed neighborhood groups who is a meterologist. When everyone (including me!) was complaining about the storm prediction that had "everyone overreacting," she explained some things to us.

Firstly: Garbage in, garbage out.

When budget hatchets come down, fewer things like weather balloons go up. Atmospheric conditions are largely tracked by weather balloons and some states have gone from releasing the usual two a day to ONE a day. Our weather here in Minnesota largely comes from the west. So, that means, on the day leading up to the potential big storm, the weather predictors were depending on data that was last current IN WYOMING, approximately 900 miles (1,448 km) away.

There was no new data between here and there that included upper atmospheric pressures, etc. All that data normally goes into the models they use to run their weather prediction maps. When they don't have data, their predictions are... SURPRISE!!... crap. Garbage in (or nothing at all in); garbage out.

So, if you feel "ripped off" because we got no storm on Monday, then BLAME TRUMP.

I mean, this is where it feels dumb... rather than evil. Like, I expect this current administration to be vindictive against what they call "wokeness," but what the f*ck is "woke" about weather reporting? Did people really feel there was a Big Weather problem, lots of bloat and misuse of funds? (Don't feel the need to answer this, these questions are rhetorical. I know that all government agencies got hit.)

/rant

But, so here it is Wedensay already, and I'd been meaning to write up some notes about what I've been reading. I am currently eighty-some percent of the way through the audiobook of The Mechanics of Memory by Audrey Lee. I will say that I think this book is a little longer than it needed to be, but I'm enjoying the general premise of it. It's about a woman who is basicaly wrongfully sent to a psychatric "spa" in order to have false memories implanted in her--though it turns out she's resistant (or maybe was prepped to withstand the "treatment"), so she's trying to figure out the mystery of why everyone has been sent here and what it has to do with a bunch of hackers known as the Mad Hatters (which, I mean, the name alone gives us a clue that perhaps this psych ward is, in fact, somehow involved.) It's one of those mysteries where you're pretty sure you're guessing ahead, but then another twist is introduced. It feels like it should be closer to the climax than it is right now. I'm at that phase where I would LIKE THEM TO GET AWAY WITH IT, but another complication just dropped. But, despite that, I would recommend it. The audiobook has at least two narrators and, unfortunately, one of them reads like he has never experienced an emotion in his life. But, luckily the majority of the chapters have someone else reading.

Previous to this I had someone read The Sculpted Ship (by K. M. O'Brien) to me, and that was another one where I started out more keen than I finished. The Sculpted Ship was to science fiction what Legends & Lattes is to high fantasy. The place where I ended up growing disintersted in The Sculpted Ship was where it left the formula of low stakes problem solving. There's a whole heist at the end that solves one of the main plot issues of the story, specifically how our heroine will get the parts to finish making her ship space worthy, but it goes deep into characters we only just met and I could have done without it, even though it puts a bow on the whole thing. I was there for the "how will our heroine make enough money to buy this part?" and "Will the heroine pass her etiquette lessons in time for the safari booking?" non-tension conflicts.

We all need a book like this from time to time.

If you pick it up, my only caveat is that K. M. O'Brien is a dude writing about women and I knew that the moment that his point-of-view heroine described another woman as "well-endowed." This wasn't a cardinal sin? I do know some women who might say something like this, but there is later an aborted sexual assault that just didn't quite ring true for me. Mileage may vary, however.

So, with The Memory Mechanic nearly done, I have another list of possiblities.

HOWEVER, if I can figure out how to get the audio files to my phone, the following list may be moot, as the Hugo Award reading packet included audio files for almost all of the books nominated this year. Audiobooks included are: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher, Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, and Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wisewell  (the last of which I listened to some time ago and really enjoyed.)  So, it's missing a couple? But, that's pretty impressive!

The list of things that I have queued up in Libby are:

Nnedi Okorafor's Remote Control (this appears to be a novella, as it's only 4 hours long)
Annalee Newitz's The Future of Another Timeline
Mike Chen's Light Years From Home
Kemi Ashing-Giwa's The Splinter in the Sky
Vic James's Gilded Cage
Jenn Lyons's The Sky on Fire
Christopher Paolini's To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

If anyone has recommendations among those (or which Hugo nominee I should start with), I'd love to hear what you have to say.

I THINK I have a plan to get the Hugo nominees over to my phone, but if not, I'll end up listening to those piecemeal on my computer while doing things in the house (which is fine, it's just less convenient than my phone. And now is the weather for yardwork, so! I may actually become one of those people who has two different books going at once!) 

Anyway, I hope you all are doing well. Reading anything fun or different? 

 It's been stormy and windy here in Saint Paul for the past several days. We will have brief periods of sun, but then another storm will roll in.

I'm such a Minnesotan. I really do prefer these cool, temperate days. I would be fine if it never got over 75 F / 23 C. God damn, feel that wind, people! It's COOL. 

That is all.

I didn't really do too much else for my birthday other than spend a lot of money on food OUT.  I got myself a fancy latte in the morning, we had takeaway ramen for lunch, and takeaway Ethiopian for dinner. (At least that last one served for two meals, as I just finished up the leftovers for lunch today.) Shawn and I watched a bunch of the British Baking Show, and I got this crazy idea to use up all of the blank journals that I've collected over the years, which is to write in a different one for each day of the week. I'm going to try, for instance to record "a year of Wednesdays." We'll see if I keep it up, but it might be fun? Particularly if I don't try to do EVERY DAY of the week.  

I also spent some birthday money on a few more postcards for myself. I have slowed down on my pandemic "world(s) tour" (a series of postcards that I've been sending friends from places and times I wish I could travel to,) but I got inspired today and sent out another set. I've prepped some follow-ups as well. If anyone reading this suddenly wishes that someone would send them a silly story postcard every so often, please let me know and I will add you to my list. For me, it's been a fun way to connect to those people who make up what I once heard referred to as your "middle circle of friends." There's the inner circle--close friends you regularly see. The extreme outer circle--your barista, cashier, pizza deliverer, etc.--the people you interact with, but only barely socially. And, this article I read (in the Atlantic?) talked about the people that most of us have really lost touch with during the pandemic is that our middle circle--the people we like and used to see very irregularly (in my case, at cons or in other SF related venues.) So, a lot of people on my postcard list are in this range, though there are a few what I've never met in meat space. 

The weather here has been cold and blowy, so it's been perfect for these kinds of things. I have a manuscript for the Loft that I should be reading, but I'm hoping to spend a lot of Thanksgiving vacation catching up with that.

Tomorrow night is gaming, so I have that to look forward to, too!

 The last few days have been Hellishly hot and I am not enjoying it. 

My garden, which I will share some pictures of in a bit, is doing a bit better with it all? But, I have also been getting up super-early in order to get water in the ground before the temps soar to 100 F / 38 C. 

I am hoping that the weather will break soon. We are headed to Bearskin Lodge on the Gunflint Trail on Saturday for a two week vacation (and before you worry that the thieves are all marking their calendar, we have someone staying in our place because we have an insanely geriatric cat who needs someone to make sure she's eating and drinking.) My point is, we have only two rooms with air-conditioning and that would SUCK for the person who is staying here. Our house is normally lovely? They will HATE it, if they have to sweat in it. I don't even love my house when I have to sweat in it.

Speaking of the up-coming vacation, I nearly panicked when I thought we wouldn't be home in time for this (https://events.sfwa.org/events/writing-date-with-lyda-morehouse-quiet-writing-room/), but we will!

Yesterday, I picked up the last of the Spring CSA. (Our house sitter will get the first two summer ones.)


Image: A lot of green!  We got baby bok choy, a bag of power washed spinach, cilantro, mint, green onions, asparagus, and green kale. 

The spinach is amazing, FYI. Even at the grocery store, I usually have to wash extra hard to get the grit off spinach. This stuff must have been power washed because, I could just grab a handful from the bag and munch it up!  Which is handy because the amount of stuff I feel like doing in the kitchen (which is NOT one of the two air-conditioned rooms) is exactly ZERO. So, I made a couple of salads for dinner last night and they were AMAZING. To be fair, I also used the opportunity to use up some leftovers we had from our visitors who came for Mason's graduation. 

Otherwise, I just want to show off a couple of flowers from the garden:


Image 1: The volunteer purple spirea that is just growing in a weird spot between my house and my neighbors.
Image 2: These I planted intentionally. In fact, I want to get more of these bright red Asian lilies.


Image: Another volunteer, spiderwort growing in that spot between the houses.

Hopefully, you are all doing as well as my garden and not feeling as melty as my brain.

Oh, and our cabins now come with some wifi (one of the few benefits of the pandemic!)  So, I will be posting directly from the great northern Minnesota woods over the next couple of weeks. 

Minnesota's weather has been terrible. It snowed today, people! SNOW.

All these consecutive days of gray have not helped lift my mood, which has been in the pits in the latest murder by police. I was able to get outside over the weekend and plant some pansies.  I have a boulevard garden around the street lamp in front of my house and I added a ring of pansies to help give it a dash of color in these early spring months.

There are signs of life elsewhere in the garden:

  
image: Three dwarf irises (and a yellow flower I forget what it's called.)

These dwarf irises popped up all over the yard because some time last November a huge box of over 200 bulbs showed up. I don't remember where I ordered them from, but I remember writing a sternly worded email to the company saying that I appreciated their "fall" bulbs, but November is actually WINTER in Minnesota and I was lucky the ground wasn't entirely frozen when I went out to plant these. They clearly survived the trauma, however.

Likewise, I my Siberian Squill continue to thrive.

Image: Little clusters of bright blue flowers -- squill!

Of course, they are spreading in the wrong direction. You can't see very well in the photo, but they have jumped the garden's brick edging and are moving into the pebble/stone path. I should dig them all up this spring and replant them on the other side of the path, but we'll see what happens to my time now that more people are vaccinated and seem to want to spend time Doing Things Together(tm). (Not sure I approve of this, btw.)

In our back garden we have a o'jizo-sama in the backyard to commemorate our daughter Ella, and in the winter you traditionally make him a red hoodie to say warm. Yesterday, there was a lot a wind and his hood came apart into a kind of Dr. Strange look:


Ojizo-sama in the rock garden.

So, that's me. Waiting on sunshine. You?

 I've finally decided to try my hand at a butter-folded danish. This is one of those things like making croissants at home that I would normally leave to the experts because it is picky and time-consuming.  But, the pandemic really has me in CHALLENGE ACCEPTED mode. 

In fact, just the other day, we made tortilla wraps from scratch... and now we may never go back. I did not know tortillas could be light and flaky!  I will happily post the recipe to that if people are interested, but, be warned, we have a tortilla press. You can, apparently, roll them out by hand, but.... with the press I only have to roll them out a little and then they end up looking almost exactly like store-bought.  We also have a really nice round griddle to finish them off on, so we may have some advantages that your kitchen might not.

It's raining in St. Paul today, a nice soaking rain. 

I realized, looking back on it, that I had said that I had planted 'cover' seeds yesterday. That is true, but the majority of the seeds are actually CLOVER, though I also tossed in something colloquially known as 'self-heal' or 'heal-all' on the ground as well, as my bee resources (namely the University of Minnesota's bee pages) told me that the bees like those.  The internet informs me that, if I get a good crop, I could also eat it. myself.... hmmm, hopefully, it won't come to that. Self-heal/heal-all is apparently also a home for a specific butterfly's eggs (clouded sulfur butterfly), so that would be cool if it takes off.  (Prunella vulgaris: https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=prvu).

I'm just not interested in mowing and now that I can post signs that say "Excuse the Mess, It's for the Bees!" I am doing that EVERYWHERE.  

...

Okay the pastries came out of the oven. I nailed the butter/puff pastry from scratch thing, but failed presentation. They look like angry blobs of jelly. But, they are really, really tasty. 


I am an angry pastry, mes ami!  I should be beautiful because I am delicious, but no, I am a blob of mess! Sacre bleu!

In a few minutes I have to get up and fetch kitty litter (oh, the glamorous life I lead!) Before I head out, I wanted to post some pictures of our adventures with the Newcomb Fair loom this weekend.  

For those of you just tuning in, Shawn and I inherited my grandparents' loom via my folks a couple of years ago. It's a big loom. I don't know the exact dimensions, but it's as tall as me, certainly, and as wide as I am tall, as well. (Which, if you don't know me in person, is just a little over 5'.)  It's big enough that the best place for it is in the corner of the finished section of our basement:



As a bonus, you can see our goofy travel posters. We have interspersed real travel posters with NASA's space travel poster, Rivendell, and Hogwarts. 

But here it is in process. At some point I will post a picture that shows what it looks like when the threads are all the way through the machine, so you can get a better sense of how it works.

There's a big beam on the back where you spool all your thread. Now, each individual thread has to come off the loom in a specific order and so you have to wind the threads on IN THAT ORDER. How is this done, you ask? Several steps, but the basic process looks like this:



Shawn sets up this gift device with dozens of spools of thread. We're using black and white because we're currently weaving what's called The Hollywood pattern. We bought color thread and at some point may experiment with other patterns. Then, each bit of string is threaded through this nifty device that keeps them coming off the spools in order...



You can see Shawn's carefully printed out notes (thanks, Mom!) that mark in what order the black and white threads come off the spools and into this guide.

Then, there's a crank on the side of the big spool that I crank at least 50 rotations of.This winds everything on, through the guide, onto the beam. (Side note, with my new dyed hair and that little smile on my face the extent to which I look EXACTLY like my grandmother is a little bit uncanny.)



Ultimately the spool is completely covered (not shown, us having to rearrange the threads to accommodate the special pattern of this particular rug style AND the one weird section, 13, I believe, where there is ONE less thread.)


 
That was a big chunk of my Memorial Day. 

It was actually a perfect day for such a big undertaking because it was cold and rainy and dark outside. There really wasn't anything better to do. I certainly couldn't have gotten any more work done of the garden; I would have been drenched. 

After all of this, Shawn napped and I made us a big roast chicken dinner, which was quite lovely and hit the spot on such a chilly day. 

Now "ALL" Shawn has to do is tie each one of those threads to the ones already strung through the heddles and then carefully pull them through the machine. I will try to get pictures of that process, too. Because it really is quite the operation. Unfortunately, I can't really help her with this part, because it really does have to be one in order, one at a time. If I started on one end and her on the other and we ended up meeting in the middle with strings that didn't connect, there would be gross sobbing and probably more than a few recriminations. Best to just do it, piecemeal, a bit at a time. It'll probably take Shawn the rest of the week to do it, because it's such picky slow work.

But when it's all done she can get back to work.

This is the first year she's going to enter a few of her rugs into the Minnesota State Fair competition, so there's some pressure to make some good ones for next year's show, too!

 I'm sitting on the porch because the weather is so nice.

It's 50 F / 10 C out, which probably doesn't really warrant wide open windows, but, after the last bit of winter we've had here, it's just what I need.

I spent a good portion of this morning cleaning.  Shawn is on her bi-annual or semiannual (or whichever word means twice yearly) fairly deep cleaning kick. I say "fairly" deep, because we are NOT the sorts to move the fridge to clean behind or anything of that magnitude. But, I scoot around on the floor and scrub-up bits of cat puke and dust that have become part of the decor over the past several months. Of course, the frustrating part is that when I'm finished with all of this no one will be able to tell that I've made a dent. Our house generates cat puke and dust spontaneously, I believe. Like, I bet if we moved everything out and hosed the place down, the very next day it would look Miss Havisham's.

I decided today would be a good day for housecleaning because, for reasons known only to the universe, I woke up incredibly sleepy.  It might have been the weird dream involving the sushi place that served their sushi with a bucket of live minnows and prawns, as well as a side of roe-encrusted nan.  Perhaps that wasn't restful. It seemed wise to take advantage of my sleepiness to do some mindless drudgery. 

Right, back to it!

Yeah, I know it's not necessarily unseasonable weather, but, frankly, I'm tired of it.

I'd been hoping that the snuggly weather would make me feel in a writerly mood, but, instead, I've been kind of zoned out or distractible all day. This kind of weather always makes me want to cook and eat All The Things. So, I distracted myself with some cooking. I made a big batch of borscht again this morning and had two huge bowls for breakfast/brunch. I pity my co-workers at Maplewood tonight. (Beets make me FART.)

I didn't really want to say 'yes' to work tonight, but, somehow, I managed to miss the call last month for regular hours for THIS month.  It's kind of on-call for me for April, or nothing at all. Of course, tonight is kind of the worst possible night to have to drive all the way to Maplewood (and back after 9 pm!) They're expecting as much as 8 inches?

Did I mention how done I am with this weather?

We keep getting random texts throughout the day from Mason.  Today's best one was, "Have seen three street preachers in two days so far.  If you listen closely you can hear hundreds of people's un-given f*cks."

That's my boy, the comedian.

He also reported today that they were on the Staten Island ferry, so presumably they made it to see the Statue of Liberty and all that.  Ms. Auyeung's itinerary for them was fairly ambitious. They had to bail on a bunch of things yesterday, though I notice things aren't so tightly packed today.  Today it was supposed to be: Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange, Battery Park and ferry to Staten Island (for AM), in the afternoon: Manhattan Chinatown for lunch, Museum of Chinese in America, some shopping time after, and then...?  She has nothing for the evening, but they're staying in the Chinatown in Queens (which apparently at one time was known as "Little Taipei" for all the Taiwanese that settled there) so I suspect they'll explore their own neighborhood, as it were, in the evening.

I'm really sad that I'll miss whatever texts come through while I'm at work tonight, but I'm so glad that he seems to be having fun.  Apparently, they only briefly lost some students in Times Square....