elainegrey

I had the last antibiotic yesterday, so if that's been a drag on my system, it will stop. Might just be the waning of the light.  This morning was 51°F on the back deck, essentially balmy, and i sit on the lounge listening to the chorus of insects and frogs under the brilliant last quarter moon. The Moon is near Mars, which in turn is in line with the twins of Gemini. Jupiter is still brilliant in the sky. I've seem one bit of space junk predicted from Heavens Above website, one that wasn't (maybe starlink? maybe brighter than predicted?), and a streak of a meteor.

 https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/understanding-the-misunderstood-kessler-syndrome/

I sit out in the morning and see the space craft and space junk, listen to cars and trucks and planes, and set an opening of a novel in my mind -- some alien planet supporting human explorers and settlers -- what transit sounds? What movement in the sky? Other mornings i wonder about space junk and marvel so few space operas have touched on what battle residue over a planet might become -- partly because the clean up would be interesting to read about.

It's interesting how abrupt civil twilight can be. Suddenly light on the trees facing the east and birdsong. Sunrise is still a bit off.

We had the local telecom come down the road this summer stringing something i suspected was fiber. They left terrible ruts in the road verge near our driveway. I poked and it looks like they got a grant to string the fiber and then a few weeks ago we began being pelted with adverts to switch. I dread the process but look forward to the completion. The trenching is the most annoying piece as there are MANY barriers. And of course the process sort of skims past that in documentation. I don't trust the company at all, so the last thing i want is for them to be able to say we are connected (satisfying some grant requirements)  but the trenching not be complete. I'm also out lining worst cases, such as trenching cuts the copper wire and we're left offline (well, dependent on cell service) for a painful amount of time. Then someone shared how the process cut their power line and, bleep. I wish i could expect competence but this company has shown a passion for cost cutting that astounds.I swear half the people in this county spit at the name of the telecom.

Scattered thoughts:

When i went out to open the door for the cats Thursday morning the sky was bright with stars and the waning moon hid in the trees. I saw a satellite moving against the night sky and caught a bright flash of a meteor.  This Friday morning the sky was even more clear. Venus, which had been muted by clouds on Thursday, blazed through the trees, and the even smaller moon blazed. I sat down and reloaded the table of satellite passes and noted a strikingly bright International Space Station was passing overhead just then. Back outside i went and watched the -3.6 m approach the moon, so bright it was rarely blocked by the pine tops. It did not pass in front of the moon from my point of view. Back inside where i noted that now a 2.7 m was passing through the big dipper, so outside i went again. I decided to stop even though more were passing overhead and instead was distracted by the information about the satellite. I did not know there was a Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport.

The wildlife cam is not too time consuming yet for record keeping. It's such a struggle to motivate myself to delete original images! I still have negatives of my photos from college, grad school, and the early oughts: i'm keeping those. My point is that the lesson to preserve the earliest, best quality image for the future is so ingrained. But who wants to peer at (so far) fairly poor wildlife camera images of deer, a squirrel,  a lens flare,  and a rabbit? I've learned how to do a little editing and compositing on my phone now, so SIGH, yes, if i had kept the possum photos i could have cropped and composed something to preserve as "evidence" but, again, is that single observation really that remarkable?  So, i am making myself delete. It's clutter and future me will appreciate the organization of the observations into a database as well as not having  a gigabyte of boring images and video to go through.

It has been interesting to discuss with Christine what images she will find remarkable. So far deer and squirrels are in the uninteresting category. This weekend i will put up the other camera and move this one to have more a view of the ground since the opossum (interesting!) and rabbit (interesting!) have mainly been in the bottom edge of the image.

I'm testing an embed of the most curious video -- a lens flare? -- below the cut.

I'm framing this coming year -- by which i mean my natal year more than 2024, but i'll try ramping up in the next two months -- as a move from surviving to thriving. My way of addressing challenges has been to put other things aside and focus on the challenge. The first few years we were here we worked madly on clearing the underbrush and overgrowth. Then Mom's stroke and COVID. And subsequently some big things at work. My "surviving" has been with comfortable margins: i don't need to be in survive mode. It's learned. I need to learn to thrive.  I'm trying to frame my expectations and think about this like a myself a transplanted perennial that persists with little change for a few years and then bursts forth growth in the apocryphally third year ("sleep, creep, leap"). I want to transplant my mindset to thrive-mode.

The first change i am making is in my centering meditation that i have been using since the mid 90s. The first focus is on grace, which had been so important because of how disappointed i would be in myself. I have not completely stopped "beating myself up" but i am far far more compassionate and understanding . When i am disappointed with objective fact (for example, still coughing, although its much better, and the work of December still has not wrapped up despite some good long focus days in December) i am not making it my fault.  I've learned to accept grace and give myself and others grace. I am overlaying that focus with a focus on vitality.

This page - https://positivepsychology.com/what-are-your-strengths/ - has a "wheel of character strengths" that has six major classifications. It includes "Courage" at that top level, with Bravery, Perseverance, Honesty, and Zest as individual strengths. I took the https://www.viacharacter.org/ survey to "find my strengths" and   my "top" five strengths as defined fell into "transcendence" (two strengths, but the strongest)  and "wisdom" (three strengths). "Honesty" from the "courage" section shows up as #6, but "Bravery", "Zest", and "Perseverance" are at the bottom. The "Perseverance" strength is entangled with ADHD. I suspect the survey instrument likely does not address neurodivergent perseverance. (The cowboy song of "Purt Near Perkins" comes to mind this moment, as a  change of heart about completion of things - https://www.jeffstreebyauthorizedsite.com/6-classic-works.html .) ZEST though, that's what i want to chase. And maybe it takes bravery to chase it. I think hangups around perseverance may, indeed, be part of the issue. "I can't do zesty thing because must finish thing" -- but so often the finishing of a thing is ... unreasonable? It's too big a thing? I dunno.  Anyhow: exploration there.

In oops news: I associate elements with my age to label each year. This coming birthday i will be 56, which is barium. Barium is in a gem stone called benitoite, and i've considered getting a necklace that has a vial of some sort that has tiny tumbled benitoite stones inside. (Larger stones are pricey!)  But Sunday afternoon my mind skipped and i decided the element must be bismuth and -- lo! -- there are pretty things made with crystallized bismuth. So i bought a necklace and earrings and -- nope, different than barium. 27 years until bismuth.

Random: What the bleep is "magic spoon" cereal that the "deep discount price" is $6.97 for a 9.7 oz box??? Ah "keto friendly" "sweet" cereal. Wow.

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Written on Friday, Dec 22

Happy Solstice (a bit after). I'm hoping for health top return and for lots of yard work before the sun returns in full force.

Last night the moon shone so bright, i could see shadows. Jupiter dazzled close by. Coming home from the restaurant Kanki i gazed at the moon through the car's sun roof. When we passed by street lights i could see our entwined hands reflected in the glass. Moon, hands, moon, hands, as we drove the bypass around Chapel Hill. We had a party to celebrate our engagement 33 years and a few days ago at the Kanki in Raleigh. My family was living in Florida at the time and many of the people i had known had moved away (including me - -i was living in Philly), so most of the people were from Christine's radio life. I barely remember the event.

We now have matching  winter nightgowns from Lands End in a starry print with a cow jumping over the moon. Also not in my memory or in Christine's was the little rhyme about that.

This morning Arcturus shone through the clouds, but Venus was dimmed.

Today a plumber comes. I am 50% sure i could fix what's wrong with the toilet but it would be really nice to have it back soon. After the very long saga of the light above the stove, buying the wrong bulb and the jammed screw, I am ok with paying someone else deal with the clay coated tank and resolve the issue promptly. I suspect the company Christine picked is backed by private equity[1], with their shiny fleet of well branded vans and their excellent customer service. It's not just some single plumber with their cousin tasked to answer phones. I have mixed feelings about it -- about private equity buying up little independent companies like this -- but the professionalism is nice.

[1] https://www.themiddlemarket.com/news-analysis/why-private-equity-is-chasing-plumbers-and-lumber-yards

I asked the universe for a time line game and now have two. The first i found is  https://wikitrivia.tomjwatson.com/  and i find that the NY Times has had one (and has learned from the viral behavior of wordle how to let people share results without spoiling the game for others):

Flashback for December 17, 2023 24 points 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟥 Play here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/15/upshot/flashback.html

When i stepped outside this morning to open the deck door for the cats, the ISS (at apparent magnitude -3.4 m, which is very bright) was crossing the sky. Venus hangs very brightly in the east, and perhaps the bright star in the cherry tree's branches, high above the back porch, is a Arcturus. My recollection is that it was quiet, no frogs singing, despite it being fairly warm due to the storm that brought warm air and moisture up from Florida. It seems the storm left lots of rain, but the state has power this morning so any outages were few enough that they could be fixed quickly. There's flood warnings, but i hope the drought drained reservoirs will be able to hold back enough to keep the coastal river communities from floods.

I rested all weekend and hope i am better enough to take on the week. The cough is still productive, but i have at least restored my self for work. (And the 8:30 am meeting. Sigh.)

I hope that i can recover enough -- and Christine recover from a family induced distress -- that by Thursday night and our anniversary celebration we can be in a bit of a holiday mood.

Wow. Hmm. That is a long gap between writing.

We've gone from the crescent waning moon to the first quarter waxing moon. I've spent some lovely early evenings watching bats flit in the twilight sky across the waxing crescent. And, oh, the mesmerizing dance of the Spring Tree-Top Flasher (Pyractomena borealis) a firefly that seems to delight in our tall trees on the weekend evenings that were over 50°F. Just delightful to watch.

All the plants in pots are in the ground. I have transplants i would like to do before the surgery -- gladiolas, daffodils, and alliums from various places to a little bed that had the parasite dodder in it last year. Apparently, starving the dodder is a reasonable form of control. I assume i got it in that patch last year when i scattered a collection of random seed to see what would take; the dodder seemed to like the zinnias that came up. Moving poorly sited bulbs seems like a reasonable approach.

Dogwoods are opening their flowers. A few branches are offering the white bracted flowers to view from across the yard. The redbuds are fading. On Sunday i picked a bunch of redbud blooms from the one tree that has any in my reach. I assume deer nibble anything lower. The redbud blooms with violets and dandelions garnished the mixed green salad with smoked salad: a pretty dinner, but maybe there's some antioxidants of some sort in those petals that make them attractive to me to eat. Or maybe it's all in my eyes.

I've a kilogram of onion greens fermenting in two quart jars, since i like the first batch so much. It smells strong, and i ran across https://foragerchef.com/cheremsha-siberian-style-fermented-ramp-leaves-%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BC%D1%88%D0%B0/ describing fermenting ramps as "weaponized garlic". If i understand correctly, ramps are far more garlicy than my walking onion greens. My first batch went straight to the dehydrator, with no rinse, so the result after grinding to a powder, is a salty savory seasoning. It has an addictive quality i associate with processed foods, which is probably the salt. This next batch i will rinse before dehydrating in order to reduce the salt. I may try some freshly fermented in sour cream as a spread: adding the powder to sour cream has been decadently lovely. On top of a baked potato, on top of roasted sweet potato and brocollini (both from the garden)

Onion scapes are appearing and i know this year that i can pick them before they become woody and quick pickle them for a pleasurable treat. I've had the onion scape pickles in my packed travel lunches next to boiled eggs with delight. There's a jar in the kitchen acting as a vase to the first batch i picked on Saturday, the green curling tops lovely. If i don't pickle them, i will have enjoyed them visually. Another cooking project is doing SOMETHING with all the chicory that has made it. I saw a dandelion-cabbage sauerkraut i might try.

I am pondering the reading i do lately. I read a long list of comics and the New York Times, and yet i wonder where what i read goes in my head. Admittedly, when i slurp up novels they also go into my head and get forgotten very quickly. I would guess i am reading this short form because they are like a bag of potato chips and maybe i can just have one or two for a pleasurable distraction, and next thing i know i am reading the crumb articles about things i will never really care about.

I had a flare of cankers that are still causing discomfort, but after days of bland soft meals i'm craving more flavor. I did make a "cream sauce" with pureed cauliflower and nutritional yeast. Carrie and Luigi both thought it was yummy.

Christine is having another round of migraines. Work is being intense.

Work is just so much arrrrggghhhh. I was overbooked for this week and came back to work to find ten projects needing to be investigated, interrogated, and estimated. I am so bleeped.

Wednesday evening at 6:21 pm

I stand gazing through the pink veiled sky at the crescent moon. I'd hoped to see Venus and Jupiter with the moon but the scrim of pink is too dense for the planets to shine through. A bat flies in front of the moon. I am listening to the sound of people going home on the road. Frogs sing at the creek and a few birds chirp in the trees. My shirt is pulled up to hold my harvest: violets and red kale, bitter endive, lemony sorrel and lemon balm, parsley for my dinner salad. Going in the house i pluck two bright pink petals from the magnolia tree to add their gingery flavor and bright color to the salad.

Marlowe


The Starlink 2 satellite train as it passed overhead (the streak in the middle)



The Starlink 2 train was spectacular... and i wonder how commonplace it will be in twenty years. You might be able to see it tomorrow night or the next.

Progress made on one work thing.

This past weekend i bought much brighter LED bulbs and replaced some of the failing and dim fluorescent bulbs. Except for in the closet where the bulb had a GU24 "twist and lock base." I've ordered an adapter. Then i will be able to see in there too.

It is too dark: the lights are helping.

Fears: Carrie has now noticed the kitten and she gets so very exited. I fear Carrie's "activation" and worry she may chase even Edward, and Edward will run, and Carrie's instincts will prevail. And i can't even think about the kitten and Carrie.

Fortunately the kitten is very good about the carrier. We are putting her in the carrier so she can be close for a while in the evening and not isolated in the bathroom.

Luigi is very hissy about the kitten. However, Luigi is a grumpy old man and hisses at us, too.

Complaint: eBay's "saved search" emails no longer honor the size limit. I've bought one dress too small before i realized the messaging error. I'm going back to putting the size in the search and ignoring the filters.

I hope that the paint fumes in the room i work in will have dissipated by morning. Asthmatic couging has been triggered a couple of times today. But the mildew is covered up with a mildew-killing paint, so yay.