Network

Entry tags:

A Long Rest to Restore Hit Points

I lost two days.

Not exactly, but I was starting to feel sick on Wednesday and went down for the count. I just slept. I woke up now and again to eat, drink some water, take meds, and go back to sleep. It was insane. I told

naomikritzer that I felt a little like Murderbot just doing a complete hard reboot. I woke up some time last night to get the status update that I had returned to 40% operational, and then woke up at 80%.

Crazy.

Now, I'm trying to catch up a little on WorldCON. I'm listening to the Virtual presentaion "Food in Fantasy" which has an all Nigerian author panel (Presenter(s): Amadin Ogbewe, Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Uchechukwu Nwaka), which is really fascinating. I just learned that there is a supersition that if you pick money off the ground you could turn into a yam. Apparently, this was something that really freaked out one of the panelists when he was younger. I would love to learn more about this, but I will say that Google is becoming pretty useless thanks to AI. I also just learned that, in Nigeria, if you accept food in a dream it can transport you to another place. They are now talking about how you translate certain foods specific to Nigera for non-African readers, which is a good question because there's something to be said for both trying to explain it or just letting it be there. Ogbewe just suggested something I really like, which is to not over explain, but to let the food exist as is, normalize it.

I am of two minds. When I write about foods that are unusual in the West, particularly when I'm writing fanfic, I do like to take a moment to sort of give a sense impression of it. Like, what it smells like, taste, and texture. But, it is true that if you explain something too much, it can knock a reader out of the story and focus on something that isn't what the story is actually about.

Anyway, I'm back.

I hope at all of you at Seattle WorldCON are having a great time!

Entry tags:

just one thing

Just One Thing (15 August 2025)

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Entry tags:

Almost...

Almost done with week one.

I was just getting back into the Vista sweater. Now I'll probably have to restart the back because I cast it on and only knit about ten stitches. It's been going back and forth to work with me, so it's probably weird.

Entry tags:

stitchery

current stitching

I've passed my mother part of my sashiko thread cache---just Olympus yellow and leaf-green, a few little skeins each. After her cataract surgery, she can see well enough to handstitch with thick thread, an activity she hasn't felt comfortable doing for 20 years. Great.

My hands are almost at a point where I could try finishing the handsewn Stowe bag that uses sashiko-style stitching as decoration. It was absolutely correct early in 2022 to put the bag on hold indefinitely, and I don't need it except as a calibration tool; I could knit or crochet something more usable without buying anything. (A example of a useful bag pattern that isn't the endless string bags and netted shopping totes: Basket Bag.) I think I'd like to finish the Stowe as an art object sometime, when it'd be less of (sorry) a reach.

My main yarn project is almost stitch-complete. Because its knitted analogy to sewing twill tape into a seam or armhole-edge (applied icord, against stretch) is rather boring, I've begun not one but two projects meanwhile that may never see completion. I'm okay with it: the main project really is almost finished as a result. It's a knit-crochet hybrid that uses yarn left from the round blanket, and if I can photograph them, they'll be best done together. So very many yarn-ends.

The two infrastructural-support projects would be fine to make for real. It's fine if they're unreal, too, as garments that may not fit: Luminos and Cedarvale. Storebought cap-sleeved tees similar to Luminos were once my workaround for summertime office-casual wear or a stab at cocktail attire, depending on the fabric. Somehow, my shoulders have outgrown the cap-sleeved Boden top I wore in 2019.

(My left shoulder has untwisted in the past year from the last bits of childhood scoliosis/kyphosis. Just some full watering cans, occasional forearm-sink pushups, and gentle range-of-motion stretching to help that shoulder settle---even less structured than the standard pushups and forearm planks I did regularly in 2019. I dunno! Peri may be a factor for slightly bulkier deltoid muscles, via declining estrogen.)

When my hands can manage finishing the Stowe bag, they ought also to be able to handstitch the seams of a muslin/toile (modern sense, a test attempt) for a short-sleeved sewn top. They won't be happy with a sewing machine's vibrations for longer, if ever; tiny steps. But that's why the question in the other post came up---sewing a bit no longer seems completely impossible, and if I've outgrown sideways my tidy, non-bulky tops that were already the least bad outcomes from some rather clever shopping, I may need to make something.

(no subject)

( Homophobia )

Entry tags:

inquiry,
stitchery

stitching q

If you sew garments from others' patterns at all (even if it's been a while), which patternmakers do you like?

Some good-quality designers I'm aware of are Muna and Broad, Closet Core, Itch to Stitch, Merchant & Mills.

If we disregard niceties such as matching a print at fronts/seams, I'm low intermediate, not beginner; I can look at a line drawing and discard a pattern as not possible for a specific individual's shape. I last went looking for patterns 10-12 years ago! A lot of indie designers have entered the market since then, and the big four---Simplicity, Butterick, Vogue, and McCalls---are kind of dead.

(I'm not in a hurry to sew anything, either. Only asking for ideas.)

(no subject)

So in work I am trying to get month end done in 4 days, had to catch up from being out last week, have regular audit committe stuff to get together, and have an exam from the Division of banks. I said I was stressed because of all the things being due at the same time. This is what the boss sends back

8/14/25, 10:19 AM
Re: Check in - Debeneditto, Jennifer (BIDMC - Alpha Credit Union) - Outlook
Outlook
Re: Check in
From DeMeo, Joette (BIDMC - Alpha Credit Union) < jdemeo@bidmc.harvard.edu>
Date Thu 8/14/2025 10:14 AM
To Debeneditto, Jennifer (BIDMC - Alpha Credit Union) < jdebened@bidmc.harvard.edu>
No need to stress, this will teach you how to juggle and that we are never truly "over" worked. It all gets done and the accounting position is not one that requires overtime hours. I have actually lost people because they are not busy enough.
So no stress. Its a piece of cake. Let me know when you feel overwhelmed and I will step in.
sette DeMeo
ha Credit Union
Deaconess Road n MA 02215
hone 617-632-816

I didn't ask for overtime. I wouldn't want it now as I am busy. Ive been working since I was 15 years old...I know how to juggle. I think you had people leave because you talk to them like this. No one leaves because they are not busy. They leave because they can't see an opportunity for growth or money...or they want to work from home and the boss says no.

I clarified that I was stressed because I have not done the work for the division of banks before and I don't know if the data is correct and if or when they will come back to me.

Today was … a Day

So today was Meh.

I got up on time, no idea what I was going to work on when I met with my Field Engineer at 8:30 this morning. But he had to cancel due to [miscellaneous dumpster fire], so that means I have two more weeks to figure out what we’re going to work on next.

I sniffed the milk when I was getting my breakfast together, and it smelled OK. But when I put the first spoon of cereal into my mouth, it had clearly gone bad. Blech! So no cereal for you! And I was out of yogurt. So breakfast was a No Go because I really didn't have any other breakfast foods in the house. =(

My one meeting of the day, we didn’t have anything on the agenda, so it was just chatting with two of my coworkers for a half hour. That was nice, we don’t get to just chat very often. And then me running out for groceries, because when I told my tale of breakfast woe, Taylor seemed upset that I was out of milk. So milk and other comestibles were procured on my lunch hour.

Once I’d been fed, I managed to be reasonably productive in the afternoon. Got some stuff checked off the To Do list. Submitted four small docs updates. Go me!

After work I discovered that the spinner ring that I’d ordered had supposedly arrived. Checked the mail box and there it was. It fits perfectly. But doesn’t spin. At all. I can see that one of the raised flowers on the design is smashed (it’s a cheap ring from India, so I wasn’t really expecting perfection). But there’s also a tiny nodule of silver on the border between the ring and the part that’s supposed to spin, so I suspect the inner and outer rings have been accidentally welded together. Thus the not spinning. Now I have to decide if it’s worth complaining about, because India.

(no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

I’ve got a 14-year-old son and 9-year-old twin daughters. My son lives primarily with his mom, but has always spent plenty of time at my place, and the kids are all quite close. But there is a real problem with how he treats one of his sisters. The two of them share many traits and are quite similar in disposition, and when things are good, they have a very sweet relationship. They’ll go on walks together and chat and laugh the whole time. They also really enjoy play-fighting—e.g., hitting each other with foam swords. But at other times, my son will relentlessly pick at his sister, teasing her for things like not being as good at video games as he is, or questioning her abilities in other ways. It’s unkind, and although she sometimes claps back or does her best to ignore him, more often it sends her into a rage.

I’ve talked to him about it repeatedly (and yelled at him about it), and he has said he has trouble controlling himself. Maybe that sounds like a cop-out, but having observed it so many times, I believe him. It seems like an impulse-control thing, like the comments pop into his head and are out of his mouth before he can stop them. We have a good amount of neurodivergence in our family, and I strongly suspect that, like the sister in question, he’s got ADHD. I’ve wanted to get him assessed, but his mom—with whom I have a good relationship—is resistant, and he hasn’t had any issues in school yet that would offer more reason to push for it. I’ll tell him to knock it off and he’ll be chastened, but then 30 seconds later he’s picking on his sister again. What do you think I should be trying to do here? Yelling obviously isn’t the answer, and I can tell my son is feeling demoralized. I feel like this is about their similar personalities to some extent, because he doesn’t have the same issue with his other sister. But even if that’s the case, I want him to stop cutting his sister down, because she adores him and I’m pretty sure he actually adores her too.

—Bro, Chill

( Read more... )

Critiques of the ‘Critical Review’

Posted by group

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/08/critiques-of-the-critical-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=critiques-of-the-critical-review

https://www.realclimate.org/?p=26147

The first somewhat comprehensive reviews of the DOE critical review are now coming online.

First out of the gate is a nice interactive from CarbonBrief based on direct input from scientists whose papers were cited, sometimes in misleading or false ways. They have a nice color-coding for which is which.

There is a complementary effort from a group led by Andrew Dessler (sign up here to get notifications of updates). We’ll add the links here when it is released.

Meanwhile, the DOE is being sued by EDF and UCS on procedural grounds (turns out that there are actual laws about how you are supposed to get unbiased expert advice into government rulemaking – who knew?!).

There are multiple threads on Bluesky, or on blogs that address more specific points – for instance, Zeke Hausfather makes some salient points on the misuse of his work.

Importantly, the National Academies are setting up a fast track assessment process to provide input into the EPA proposed ruling (deadline is August 27th for submissions). This has the potential to be the most relevant effort, and so hopefully mostly everything will be funneled through this as well as the specific process that DOE has initiated for it’s report (which has no statutory standing on it’s own).

Stay tuned!

The post Critiques of the ‘Critical Review’ first appeared on RealClimate.

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/08/critiques-of-the-critical-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=critiques-of-the-critical-review

https://www.realclimate.org/?p=26147

Stamen of Flourish

The crankiness continues. I theoretically had a fair amount of sleep last night, but it was portioned out in segments, thus: went to sleep at 11:30, woke up at 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 6:30, and then woke up again and got up at 7:30. I visited my doctor, or rather, her NP, who is very nice and very elegant looking, to consult about my blood pressure, which has been quite out of hand lately. She decided that doubling my amlodipine dose would be a good first strategy. I had decided that myself, and considered just doing it, but thought I probably should be good and get medical approval first. So now I can do what I was going to do anyway, but I won't catch hell for it. I hope it works.

I supposedly had a meeting to go to tonight, but apparently our leader mixed up the schedule, so the meeting had to be cancelled. Thank goodness. I'm so glad. It has recently dawned on me that we're trying to create a bureaucratic solution to a problem that is not in nature bureaucratic. It's a natural human thing to do, but it depresses me. I was going to cook something, but the Sparrowhawk suggested buying a chicken and some green beans instead. We had some rice made already. We ate those things, and it was just right.

The plumber is coming back tomorrow, so in theory I should clean my bathroom until it's shiny and put away everything that might be in their way. But in practice, I'll do what I did last time they came, which is to maybe clean the sink and then stuff any untidy objects into the closet and shut the door. The theory was that I'd take everything I put in the closet last time and put it where it belonged and mend it and so forth. But in practice I will do what I did last time, which was to leave it in a heap in the closet until some future date when I get around to it. I hope I will actually fix everything before I die, but sometimes I wonder. My time limit gets closer, while the Dream of a Perfect Order, as my friend the Nonesuch calls it, continues to recede toward a hazy horizon.

okay, this is an anti-rec for Jeannie Di Bon

I am now well over halfway through the book, and spent most of chapter four screeching to anyone who would listen about the extent to which either she is deliberately and cynically misrepresenting approaches that aren't Her Personal Programme in the interests of selling the latter, or she's just incompetent.

The actual suggested movements -- the strength-building and the stretching -- are totally reasonable, and also totally standard. It's the surrounding framing that has my eyebrows crawling into my hairline; I... tried to summarise and rapidly discovered I was launching into the full rant, and it's past bedtime, so let's start with: while there's a References section it's a whole 15 items long, and she's blithely saying "X states" or "Y says" as though the fact that something has been published in a single peer-reviewed paper means that it's unquestionably true, and of those fifteen one is a systematic review of any kind and... Several... are under the aegis of an organisation specialising in complementary medicine.

More details tomorrow, probably. With excerpts.

Still alive and table is fab

This morning after volleyball my heart started racing. It happens from time to time but today I could not make it stop. I went on with my regular stuff, including hauling the heavy table bits up and then going back to return the cart I borrowed. Still it raced. So I didn't rush anything and rested a bit before I opened the table box.

I do have a handy but reliable??? ECG app on my watch and it wouldn't work because my heart rate was 141 and it can only measure under 121. Whatever. It slowed down a little and I got to work.

The table was a little more complicated than I expected but I took it slowly and got it all built. And the box tossed and the old C table put into the storage area and my stuff moved to the new table which, actually, I like quite a bit. It pops up to the perfect height for typing and eating but then down low enough to make a nice footrest and it has lovely storage.

My heart rate is down now but still wonky. If I die, feel free to pass on these dets to anyone who wants to know.

Next up. Vacuum. Table building is messy.

Current Mood: curious

Whose hat is this?

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

Entry tags:

Check-In Post - Aug 14th 2025

Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.

Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?

There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.

This Week's Question: Share your favourite crafting tip, if you have one.

If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.

I now declare this Check-In OPEN!

The Friday Five for 15 August 2025

This week's questions were suggested by

aforkintheroad.

1. What is your favorite experience in your life so far?

2. What motivates you to keep going every day?

3. Where do you want to go in life? What do you want to accomplish?

4. Is there anything that you regret? Do you try to change it?

5. What is your most cherished gift you have received? Why do you cherish it so much?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

Entry tags:

DC highlights [travel, food, art]

We've reached the middle of August, so it's basically Panic Time for fall teaching prep. That means, less time blogging, more time doing other stuff. Therefore, abbreviated DC adventure post!

Themes of the trip: food, sights, Scrabble.

( photos and details behind the cut... )

Entry tags:

Brushing

One of the best people I've found on fedi is Dan ifixcoinops@retro.social -- along with his classics about Home Assistant, the dick mousetrap, and how clothes shopping should work, he's just added another that I think will become part of my idiolect:

Y'know when you're doing this big multi-step DIY project that involves doing many things and getting parts and tools and materials and you're holding all this stuff in your head and you notice how much of a big noisy scrungly mess it is up there, all the thoughts and worries and tasks overlapping each other like spaghetti all going in different directions, and you grumble "This is ridiculous, a guy can't get anything done with all that yammering going on," so you start up the computer and the text editor and write out what's going on up there, not because you don't know what's going on but just because thoughts go wibblywoobly like gummy worms and writing goes left to right in a straight line and to turn your oh-I-need-to-do-this-and-that thinkings into a ah-I-need-to-do-this-THEN-that shaped Plan you need to untangle the spaghetti and make it go in the long straight writing-shaped hole

Do you ever think of that like brushing your brain

Like oh no my brain's all tangled I've gotta spend a few minutes giving it a nice brush and make it purr

My brain is all tangled. So much so that I haven't even been able to say it lately.

Today's job

I finally tracked down the coffee table that Fed Ex delivered yesterday. Most of Amazon's deliveries go into a set of lockers. I get a bar code when they are put into the locker. Easy peasy. Great system.

The rest of the packages do not have such an easy birth. They get delivered to the front hallway and then, mostly but not always, get moved to a locked room in another part of the building. From there, they get delivered in the afternoons, sometimes. Often as not 'ooops, the delivery guy was off today' or 'ooops the delivery guy forgot to pick up the second run of packages' or 'ooops we didn't have the staff'.

The system used to be that you could pick up your package at the front desk if you didn't want to wait for delivery. That was great. But, alas, that process got killed off. About a week ago, I wrote to the head guy and asked him to think about giving us a pick up window. An hour/half hour every day when, if we want, we could go get our packages ourselves.

Then yesterday my coffee table got delivered to Timber Ridge at 10 am and to me at ... never. After volleyball, I went by the office of the guy whose job it is to handle packages to see if I could get some info. He wasn't there but my package was! So I wrangled it up here.

BREAKING news! Just as I was typing this whole boring story out, I got a note from TylerThePackageGuy, saying they were going to institute a package pick up time from 1-2 every day! Woot!! And nice. Very nice.

So that's my day today - putting together this table. First I want to get dressed and return the cart to the front desk and get the Timber Ridge Times for our floor and distribute. Gotta get my chores done before work. Today's Mariner game is at 10. The Phillies aren't til 4. Both of them lost yesterday and not because they were playing better teams. Neither game was good. Hopefully today is better.

Oh, the annual car visit was the easiest, best yet. $150. No big issues. They were done before lunch. I swung into the car wash on the way home to celebrate. Now you need sun glasses in the garage. Most all the cars around mine are owned by people who no longer drive so they are covered in dust. Mine shines!

rescission

rescission (ri-SIZH-uhn) - n., the act of rescinding, the act of removing, taking away, or taking back; (law) the termination of a contract.

There's a lot of Latin in legalese, and this is one of them: this one dates from the early 1600s, from Middle French rescision, from Late Latin rescissio (interesting stem change there), from Latin rescindō, cut back, from re-, back + scindō, cut.

---L.