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who cares about my day

Success!

I managed both my flu and my COVID shots yesterday. I feel much better about the flight for the con now. No troubles doing flu but they wanted a prescription for the COVID and I had it scheduled before I knew of this change. As a result I ended up going to CVS to get my COVID shot instead. They were not asking for a prescription and getting one would have taken until at least tomorrow.

Thanks so much Mr. Kennedy. NOT.

My husband has lost 70 pounds over the last 3 years. He has only one condition and it isn't on the "approved" list for the COVID shot. We've got nearly 90 year old people we are becoming increasingly concerned about so looks like we are going to have to pay out of pocket for him to get a shot (assuming we can find one soon). If we have trouble on that front will likely post to let everyone know.

(no subject)

I'm out of practice at spinning, so it's not surprising that when I realized how little crimp the Shetland wool has, I decided to spin it on a hand spindle instead of on the wheel.

The surprise was when I went into the back room (tv room) where the wheel is and found the drive band in pieces on the floor. Someone, I suspect the younger kitty who is curled up right next to me, saw it as needing to be killed, and definitely killed it; it was in half a dozen pieces.

So now I will need to get a new drive band for it.

This is the same wheel that needed to have its footers replaced (the straight poly pieces that hold the treadles on) because they broke. It hasn't had a lot of use lately anyway because of that.

I don't know what he thinks the drive band is, but he definitely used some of his brains as well as claws to get it off the wheel, where it was set up ready for use.

sigh. cats. I'm almost at the point of braiding myself a drive band from hemp and soaking it in lavender oil, to keep him away from it.

Oh Yuletide

I'm having a much harder time coming up with nominations than in past years. Part of the problem is that I've mostly been reading nonfiction, and that I catch up with shows years after they first start up. I didn't expect Phineas & Ferb to have more than 4000 stories in AO3, and the number for Elementary (tv) is almost equally high. Forget writing Strange New Worlds.

So that leaves me with one TV series with not that many stories -- Dark Winds -- and one of the old Georgette Heyer novels that I haven't written about yet.

I always try to choose things that are easily available, more or less. *stares at bookshelves that need weeding.*

And none of the nonfiction I read is likely to have enough of a fandom. Or any, actually.

At least I have a few more days to come up with something...

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and now i want to clean my computer

don't say I never gave you anything...

At this link are Charlie Warzel's Atlantic story about Epstein's birthday book, and also links to the birthday book, the non-prosecution agreement, his will, and what appears to be an address register. You can read all of it for yourself if you want. Note that the address register was scanned sideways. All the documents are PDFs.

New Substack post

At some point within the last 400+ years your ancestors came to North America, and then (for many of you) to America. What do you know of their journey?

(no subject)

Is it possible for FB to choose specific accounts and slooooooooooow them down? If so, I'm a target. My FB constantly reloads, eats posts, and runs slower than when I used a 300-baud modem, back in the 90s.

sigh

... back to working on my list of nominations for Yuletide.

And then there's this

I sent copies of my exchanges with my former aunt to my cousin Susan, the only one on that side of the family whom I'm in contact with. She told me in response that she nearly snorted her coffee when reading them. She hasn't gotten along with that aunt for decades, and manages to avoid dealing with her by being the youngest of her sibs (the aunt likes the two older ones.)

She and I are now the Two Black Sheep of the family, which makes me happy.

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Life is being only moderately odd today

I seem to live between odd dichotomies these days.

It's hard to go to sleep, in part because of lack of noise. I have just enough tinitis that when I can't hear the traffic it's hard to sleep; think of permanent mosquito in your ear. I found a technique in FB reels for tapping hard on the bone behind the ear that gets rid of the worst of it, but it doesn't always work. So I use an app called Calm, which has 'soundscapes' including things like six different kinds of rainfall, waterfalls, forests of various kinds and white, pink and brown noises, find whatever works for me that night and leave it on all night. That helps. Or I could stay awake till nearly 4, when the noise from the Capital Beltway a quarter mile south of me cranks up to its general daily roar.

A friend suggested that I get a night light for the bathroom in the shape of a capybara, or in her words, 'an imperturbable capybara'. So I did get it, and have it set to the lowest level of light, but I am not yet used to any light there. Normally I have my Kindle nearby, and when I need to get to the bathroom I flip the cover open and use it as a night light. Last night, the capybara was sitting imperturbably on my toothbrush holder, but its light shone out on a wall that I'm not used to having lit, so I had to remind myself that I had a friendly and non-aggressive critter there shining the light (I need reminders when I'm almost asleep but my body discerns something different.)

That meant that I slept on my left side last night, with my face away from the lit wall. Which, for most other people, would not be a problem, but I have all my life had a slightly curved spine, leaning to the left. (During the 2000s, I was doing deepwater running twice a week and the supported floating combined with gravity straightened my spine out, but I have not done it in several years now bcC (because Covid) and it is leaning a little. When I sleep on that side it leans more. As a remedy my husband put up a bar in one of the doorways that I can reach up and grab and dangle myself from, and my own weight straightens my back out painlessly. A side effect of the bar is that my grip strength has increased a bit, so I could do better at pulling out vines yesterday.

Much more of this balancing and I may start thinking of Philippe Petit balancing on the rope between the Two Towers, long ago.

New Substack post --the unhappy bones are showing

What's behind the cruelty of this government? A lot of unhappy people whose lives have been cruel to them, who are feeding their addictions to stifle their pain? Sure looks that way.

COVID is back

This is the most complete resource I could find for dealing with it. Take care of yourself. None of you are replaceable, and I lost 40+ friends and relatives in the last five years already.