Dwarf Planet in Purple

Things are REALLY busy this month. Holy freakin' moley.

Let's start with this week. (Well, technically last week...) I had thought I'd be serving as a Prince George's County election judge only for the July 19 primary, but then I received a call asking me to work on the even-numbered days of the early voting period (July 7-14). No big deal, right? Easy money! Except ... I'm also madly working on my science-writing assignments (and not as far along as I'd wanted to be). AND we started a new church year, so the Board of Trustees (to which I belong, remember) must make some crazy-big decisions. AND Storvik's signature Novice and Unbelt Tourney was scheduled for July 9 instead of sometime in June.

AND my condo's HVAC system is on the fritz, and I won't have the money to get it repaired until after all this work is done.

AND there was a storm on the way.

July 8 and July 10 were OK days at the College Park early-voting site, the gymnasium at a recreation center. As the same-day-registration judge, I sat under an A/C vent and was really glad I brought a sweater. Brrr. July 12 was like that until dinnertime, when I heard a loud roar like a rainstorm of BB pellets on the roof, and then the lights went out. I was in the middle of updating a woman's address in the database when that happened, so I had to ask her to sit and wait about 15 minutes until the backup batteries kicked in and synchronized things. Some of us stepped outside and saw that trees were down everywhere and political signs outside the no-electioneering zone had gone flying. It turned out that the neighborhood had been one of the places where winds had gusted up to 85 mph, which is basically hurricane force. It wasn't a tornado or a derecho, though, but some other kind of meteorological phenomenon ("bow front" or something like that). Even the air smelled like fresh wood, filled with essence of living trees suddenly ripped apart.

I texted the boy toy at home and he said that we didn't have power either. So I grabbed a couple of bags of ice and some fast-food dinner on the way home from the early-voting site. (The commercial strip where I bought these items was chaos -- some of the businesses had power, some didn't, but the traffic lights were out, and people were driving every which way. Scary!)

Apparently the power came back on for my building in the early-morning hours of the 13th, but the College Park neighborhood mentioned above still was a disaster area. Somehow the polls opened, with a generator and two industrial-sized fans going. When I worked on the 14th, the last day of early voting, we had regular electricity until about 2:30 p.m., when the grid conked out for no apparent reason (the weather was sunny). The generator and fans had to come out again after it got stuffy in that gym. The ceiling had a big translucent skylight in it, but I started to worry that the light (both from the skylight and the little emergency lights) would fade just as we would be starting to break down the equipment and box everything up. Fortunately, the lights came back on around 7:30 p.m. Whew! But the last few voters took their sweet time to fill out their ballots and didn't leave until about 50 minutes after the polls closed. Aargh!

On top of all of this, I cut the cable-TV cord because it's just so damned expensive. I miss my CNN.

OK, any day on which a Red Sox player becomes a first-ballot member of the Baseball Hall of Fame has to be a good day. Congratulations, David Ortiz!!

Still, clouds loom on the horizon. Julia (the cat) has high blood and urine sugar and dilute urine (with a bladder infection), so she is getting (expensive!) antibiotics to treat the last. Once the infection is fixed, she is going back to the vet to have her sugar tested again. I may have another (expensive!) diabetic cat on my hands.

Church work continues apace, as we trustees continue to grapple with the reality of having a smaller congregation and an aging physical plant. We are making slow progress on our two biggest repairs: replacing the deck and improving the HVAC in the Meeting House. (The deck is not a luxury item; it's a raised wooden platform that connects the two buildings and in fact is the only way to get in and out of the Meeting House.) At least we are getting a couple of prezzies from the county government: it will fix our water runoff problem AND pave our packed-gravel parking lot properly. (The water runoff comes from the surrounding neighborhood, but it is digging a big trench on our property. Long story there.)

I really, really need another source of income. I know I've been saying that for years, but it is really obvious now that my lifestyle is not sustainable. Please think positive job thoughts for me!

Been a long time, been a long time...

In fact, it took me a long time to actually start getting emails from the Golden Dolphins. It didn't help that the current Order principal had a parent who had just undergone open heart surgery (and believe me, I know what it's like to be the adult child of such a patient). Finally I whitelisted the email address for the mailing list and, presto change-o, I received a huge pile of emails welcoming me to the Pod. So, all is well on that front.

My finances continued the same roller-coaster trajectory until I finished up my latest feature article at the start of December and received my payment for it a week later. Yay, I can finally catch up on some bills.

Except ... I ended up NOT going to Discon III, the World Science Fiction Convention or Worldcon. You'd think that, after hoping for Worldcon to show up in DC for three decades, I would have been first in line. However, I always seemed to be lacking in money for a Worldcon membership every time I went to another convention and saw a Discon III table or party. So I kept putting things off. And then the damned pandemic hit. R. kept dithering over whether or not he'd attend. Mike T. was abruptly diagnosed with Parkinson's disease earlier this year and abruptly moved to Pennsylvania over the summer (did I ever mention that?). Finally, the con was upon us, and even though I now have money in the bank, I honestly could not justify spending $325 on a five-day-long convention. Not when the last in-person Balticon, back in 2019, cost only $77 at the door for four days.

Fortunately, before Discon III started, I was able to spend a Saturday evening and a Monday with my friends Chris and Richard, visiting from Palo Alto. I had not seen them in person since their elder daughter graduated from Drexel University, and it was a total delight!! I received some of their camera and film shipments through the mail, so they didn't have to schlep it across the continent, and they saved some sales tax too (heh heh heh). I drove them out to the Udvar-Hazy museum, which is not on public transportation, and we had a couple of fabulous meals together at Asian-style restaurants. I was SO incredibly glad to see them again, possibly more so than any attendance at the Worldcon.

Let's see, what else is there for me to dish about?

The boy toy painted the "spare room" (the second bedroom), and I rearranged the bookshelves and released some books I'll never read again through Bookcrossing. Gaah, I still own so many books I have never actually read. I need to READ more.

I didn't go to Massachusetts for Christmas again this year. My cousin Tim's wife canceled Christmas Eve after Tim ended up in the hospital for non-covid pneumonia (he was in only for a couple of days, but still). With this new omicron variant of covid-19, I wasn't keen on a long road trip anyhow.

R. is having a prostate procedure tomorrow. Something about sticking microbeads in some of the arteries leading to the prostate to shrink it to a more normal size. It's supposed to be less invasive than regular surgery.

Over the Christmas holiday I have been taking care of a neighbor's three cats (at her house, not mine).

The boy toy and I seem to have avoided all variants of the coronavirus so far. We both have had our booster shots (Moderna, on top of Pfizer for the original two jabs).

I'm sure I'll think of something else once I finish this post. Ah, well.

Over and out.

Where to begin ... ?

I guess I should just start with the personal deets. I'm in good health. After nine and a half years of freelancing, I'm really used to spending a lot of time at home. One of my clients is taking a long time to pay me, though, and since the stock market is doing its ultra-roller-coaster thing, I am extremely nervous about the tiny little sliver that's left of my retirement fund.

I am getting very good at using Zoom for videoconferencing. Heck, it even enables me to attend two different meetings (barony meeting and Toastmasters club officers, or church budget team and Toastmasters club officers) in different towns on the same evening. In the "real world" or "meatspace," I'd have to choose between one or the other.

The boy toy and I are taking turns going out shopping (because that's a recommendation). Yesterday I went to the local food co-op (really, a small supermarket) to get a few things that were 5 percent cheaper on the monthly "patron appreciation day." I couldn't help noticing how bare the paper-products shelves looked.


Today was *supposed* to be Opening Day for Major League Baseball. Ha ha ha, COVID-19 had other ideas. So MLB came up with the idea of picking a classic game from each team's history -- a winning game, of course -- and streaming it. For the Nationals they picked Game 7 of last year's World Series (of course) and for the Red Sox they picked Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, which was a lengthy and hard-fought victory when our dear Sox were down 3 games to 0. So, yeah, I actually listened to large chunks of both games.

During disasters, people do things they don't normally do. The boy toy has been baking bread -- he made a very tasty loaf of rosemary bread -- and then he moved on to something non-edible. Since the last round of hair dye we used left our hair feeling drier than usual, he decided to make an all-natural "deep conditioner" out of pumpkin puree and honey. We have lots of frozen pumpkin puree and non-frozen honey. He blended some of each together and this morning we doused our hair with it. His hair, which is quite a bit thicker than mine, came out great, but mine came out ... gritty. I have *not* had a haircut in over a year and the little bits of orange pumpkin pulp got caught in the split ends. Or something. Bleah.

I have been giving the boy toy haircuts for several years now, and after today, he actually volunteered to give me a trim. At least a couple of inches. Another sign of the times. :-)

Finally, something that has not been covered as much as it should have been: Happy 80th Birthday, Nancy Patricia Pelosi! What a nice middle name you have. :-)

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart,
The secret anniversaries of the heart...
(from a poem by Longfellow)

Yesterday I had wanted to feel good, damn it. It was the 30th anniversary of my ending of a miserable relationship -- the day I started Life over again. As I wrote in LJ a decade ago, October 2, 1987, was the day that I had ended a particularly miserable relationship. A small group of friends helped me pick myself up, dust myself off, and move on with my life (which probably would *not* have lasted 58 years and counting if I'd stayed with that asshole).

Plus, the second of October is R.'s birthday -- he was born exactly the same month, day, and year as Gordon Sumner.

Like most Americans, I woke up yesterday morning to the awful news of the Las Vegas mass shooting. I am sad, of course, but also beyond angry with this country's inability to get a grip on its gun problem. I had CNN on in the background for most of the day while I noodled around on the interwebs. I exchanged emails with R. and wished him a good birthday, but it was nothing spectacular.

Ultimately, I guess I was trying to balance my gratitude for my last 30 years of living with the grief over so many other lives senselessly cut short.

Still trying to decide whether I can afford to go to my high school class reunion on Saturday (that involves a roughly 900-mile round trip of driving and a couple of nights in a cheap motel).

So, February. Poor little short month, robbed of its extra days (in most years) by those greedy Roman emperors.

In general, life is still good, except for the "lack of steady income" thing. Last week (two Mondays ago) I actually had a phone interview for an editing job at a software company in Beltsville. One of the other dancers in the Lithuanian dance group works there and said I should use her name. I *thought* it went well, but then late Friday afternoon I got one of those emails that said "thanks but no thanks, we went in a different direction." Wanna bet that that "direction" involves someone 20 years younger than yours truly?

What else happened this month? The boy toy and I checked out downtown Ellicott City to see how it is recovering from last year's disastrous flood, and we also went to Mount Vernon on Feb. 22, when admission was free. I even saw General Washington posing with kids and families. He looked pretty good for a 285-year-old. :-D :-D

Last week the boy toy and I finally got to see Rogue One. Probably we were among the last Americans to see it on the silver screen. But, hey, money had been tight for a while. And it will be again. It's amazing how fast I can blow through a big freelance paycheck -- when that involves catching up on the mortgage, utilities, and other bills.

Perhaps most wonderfully, I went to *two* SCA events: Bright Hills Baronial Birthday and Storvik Performers' Revel. I did some things that I haven't done for a while: at the former I shot three arrows (with borrowed equipment) and at the latter I played my bowed psaltery for a bit. Both events featured scrumptious feasts. I feel "back in the SCA" again, even though I obviously never left.

Speaking of the SCA, today I bought a twin bed -- for camping use -- at IKEA. I just happened to notice that today was the last day of a bed sale, and the cheapest, simplest wood bed frame was 15 percent off. Even with the slats, it's still cheaper than most of the heavyweight-capacity cots I've seen (yes, I am heavy). And it will fit inside Draco (the new-to-me car) if I put the back seat down and lay the side rails on the diagonal. FINALLY I will be up off the ground at long camping events!!!

For some reason, today I want to type "JL" instead of "LJ." I guess it's just that effed up. Well, once again, I'm not even going to try to cross-post this to LJ.

It's frustrating that I randomly/occasionally get glimpses of my LJ friends-list, but I can't stay connected to the site long enough to comment on anybody's post.

Getting a bit anxious about this feature article I'm working on, getting way anxious about finances too. I know, I know, I should be biting off little bitties of this project and focus on doing one step at a time until the project is done. But then I toss and turn at night and wonder about the big picture. How much longer will I be able to live like this, will I have to rent out my spare bedroom somehow, who would want to pay to live in this filthy condo anyway, how will I survive if my car dies, yadda yadda yadda.

I can hardly believe that I am supposed to be leaving for Pennsic a week from tomorrow. Hell, it still seems like a million years in the future. I am not sewing any new garb for Pennsic. That dress I was working on at Marilyn's house a couple of Sundays ago will be for the 30-Year event.

I just noticed today that I'm not listed as cooking on ANY of the nights on the Pennsic meal plan. Our meal plan is pretty simple -- every night, two or three people take their turn buying food and feeding everybody else in the camp dinner (except for the one family that keeps strictly kosher). I'm listed in the tent database -- what happened to the food? Oy.

My apologies for not feeling much like posting here. I wrote another short article for my ex-employer, did some laundry, and wrote up the outline for the class that I'm teaching on Saturday at the University of Atlantia. (Now I just have to boil it all down into a two-page handout.) I also did a catch-up post on http://ladypatriciaoftrakai.blogspot.com.

Last Saturday I had a fine time performing in a paid gig -- Maugorn wrote about it here. I *had* been planning to wear my navy blue Italian Renn dress with the white tie-on sleeves that I bought at Holiday Faire last November, but in the days before the event I was persuaded to wear my pink silk Cavalier outfit because of its higher "bling" value. I think it's a good thing that I heeded that, because the venue was a really nice "old money" hotel and the attendees were dressed to the nines (whether they were wearing "Venetian masquerade" costumes or evening wear).

Speaking of money, I can't believe how gasoline prices have rocketed up in the last week or two. The nearest gas station to my house is now up to $3.459 for regular. It seem as if it was $2.999 not that long ago. I hate to think what the prices may be like by the time Memorial Day rolls around.

1. It has not escaped my notice that the funeral Mass for 9-year-old Tucson shooting victim Christina Green fell on the 14th anniversary of my mother's funeral Mass. Of course, my Mom did not live to see Sept. 11, 2001. Christina's entire life came after hers.

2. After a hiatus between June and December, I started to update my LibraryThing again. Today I passed the 300-book mark, and I'm nowhere near finished. Have a look if you wish.

3. I know there's a Bardic Night in the barony tonight, not far from where I live, but I don't feel like going out tonight. Maybe it's the cold, maybe it's the lack of money for gasoline. I am really, really hoping that the check comes tomorrow. On Saturday, at the latest.

4. I'm still working on the boy toy's fingerless mitts. I'm almost halfway done the second mitt. I should really post a photo when I get a chance.

5. Note to all who are going to Arisia this weekend: Travel safely!

You know me -- I'm always looking for sources of Lithuanian history, particularly about the Battle of Grunwald, since this is its 600th-anniversary year. Lately I started poking around on Better World Books, which overall looks like a very good Web site.

So I found these books, but scattered among them I found stuff like this and this. And then I started to think ... hmmm, that cover illustration kind of looks like an American Civil War cannon, so what's it doing on the cover of a book about a battle that happened 450 years earlier?

And THEN I found yet another book -- again, with a fairly high cover price -- that said in the book description: "High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!"

Whaaaat?? So THEN I Googled the name of the publisher, Alphascript Publishing. You can tell that something bad is going to happen when you start typing "alphascript publishing" and Google automagically suggests the word "spam." :-P

Sure enough ... according to this Web site, Alphascript is a Mauritius-based "company" that is a subsidiary of a German thesis publisher. Its books are just agglomerations of downloaded Wikipedia articles with the same authors' names appended to the cover (one of these authors, "John McBrewster," gets 35,900 hits on Amazon.com alone, which makes me laugh). And these books -- with content you can get for FREE under the Wikipedia license -- sell for $50 and up a pop, sometimes as much as $120!

You can read this rant by rufftoon and other statements of awe and disgust here and here.

Oh, that company also goes by Betascript Publishing.

I cannot believe that somebody would be trying to make money by selling such poor-quality books, never mind abusing the "copyleft" provisions of the Creative Commons license.

I am not blaming Better World Books, Amazon.com, and other online booksellers. I doubt they can police every title, especially by the rapidly growing print-on-demand houses (which includes reputable players like Lulu.com). But we who are looking for books on fairly obscure topics need to stay on our toes ... and NOT subsidize this kind of effort.