Working On Your To-Do List?

I found a great web site that helps you work on your to-do list, plus encourages you to build and maintain good habits and get over bad habits. Thanks to Jim Hines for the link a couple of days ago.

The site is called Habitica, and it's a gamification site. What that means is that it takes something in your life -- in this case, getting stuff done and building good habits -- and turns it into a game. Habitica has the form of a fantasy roleplaying game.

When you create an account, which is free, you become a character in the land of Habitica. You're a first level Warrior with basically no gear. The first step is to set up some things you want to do (or want to stop doing) in a fairly intuitive (sorta -- there is a learning curve, but there's also a very thorough wiki) Tasks page. I have a combination of personal and work tasks on mine, ranging from Write 1000 Words, to Walk 1000 Steps, to Eat a Piece of Fruit, to Call Mom, to Read a Chapter of a Writing Book. I have Eat Junk Food as a negative; if I do that, I click on the Junk Food button and my character takes some damage. :/ I haven't done that yet, but I suppose I will at some point.

You set up each task with a frequency (every day, week or month; three times a week, or just to keep tabs but with no set goal) and estimate about how hard the task is. You can set up a larger task with an internal checklist, so if your task is cleaning the kitchen, it could have a checklist that includes Load the Dishwasher, Clean the Stove, Wipe Down the Counters, and Put Away Leftovers. It's really very flexible once you get the hang of it, and the wiki is great help.

As you do tasks, you click to check them off, and the system gives you experience points and gold pieces for each one. Sometimes (after you hit Level 3) you get an item drop. You accumulate experience points and make levels. When you hit Level 10, you can change professions if you want and become a Mage, a Rogue or a Healer. You also get some skills, which are like special abilities, or spells if you're a Mage or a Healer. I haven't gotten there yet (I'm currently Level 4) but it looks like fun.

There are also guilds you can join. I joined The Wordsmiths, a writers' guild, and The Renaissance Man, which despite the sexism of its name, seems like an interesting guild with a broad base of interests.

Guilds can set Challenges, too. A Challenge is a collection of Tasks, usually around a theme and with a deadline. You click to join the Challenge, and the Tasks are added to your Task page. Usually there's some kind of a prize in gems at the end for a random person who worked on the Challenge. Gems are another (rarer) form of currency in the game; there are things you can only buy with gems. I don't have any yet.

You can also form a party. A party is a smaller group than a Guild, and Parties do quests together. I started a party all by myself, since I wanted to try the baby quest (I'm battling some rabid dust bunnies right now :D ) and didn't know anybody on the site. There are two kinds of quests, the Boss Battle quest and the Collection quest. The Dust Bunny quest is a boss battle quest, with some unknown (to me, at least) number of dust bunnies to be defeated. Every time I check off a task, I do some amount of damage to the current dust bunny I'm fighting. When you've killed them all, you win the quest, yay. If you're playing a collection quest, as you check off tasks, there's a chance you'll get an item drop that's a quest item. When your party has collected enough of each type of item, you've won the quest, yay. The whole party gets a reward when the quest is done.

As you accumulate gold, you can buy gear for your character. You also get some gear for checking in to the site a certain number of times. I have a cool set of Bardic Robes (which increase my Perception stat) that I got for checking in the second day I played. I also have a helm, a sword and a shield. Different pieces of gear increase different stats, and you can buy better gear as you move up. Your stats are taken into account as you "fight." For example, having a better weapon gives you more strength, so you do more damage to whatever you're fighting each time you check off a task.

Basically, if you're a gamer geek, this is an awesome way to motivate yourself to get stuff done. I've been amazingly productive the last couple of days. I even called to make a dentist appointment O_O which I'd usually have put off for weeks. [hides under keyboard] I'm sure some of the enthusiasm will wear off soon, but I'm hoping most of it lasts. :)

I highly recommend trying Habitica if you're at all into gaming. If you do, drop a note here and we can get together and go questing. :D

Angie

Musing About Childhood Games

I just saw one of those little margin surveys on a web site, and it got me reminiscing. :)

It asks, what's the best childhood game? and offers kickball, capture the flag, hide-and-seek, or other.

For me, remembering how we played those games, it depends.

In the daytime, it's capture the flag, hands-down. At school, we played capture the flag on the soccer field, with extra-large chalkboard erasers as the flags. The 50-yard line divided the field in half, and jumpropes marked out huge circles at either end of the field, two on each end, one where your side's flag hung out, and one as the "jail" where captured players from the other side hung out.

For anyone who never played, the point is to get over the border, through/past the other team, grab their flag, and then carry it back across the border to your side, all without getting tagged. This, as you can imagine, is very difficult and takes considerable cunning.

If you're tagged while on the other team's side (or if kids from the other side could lean over the border and grab you -- without moving both their feet onto your side -- and drag you over the border so both of your feet were on their side) then you were captured and had to go to their jail. I have a feeling the grab-and-drag part of the program probably wouldn't be allowed in today's elementary schools. [cough]

If you could make your way past the other team without getting tagged and get to their jail, you got a free walk back with some one person who was in jail -- you could "rescue" them. You had to walk back holding hands, or grabbing their wrist, or whatever your childish ego would allow. :)

An out-and-out win was rare, and when it happened it took cunning. One of my favorite tricks was to wait until nobody was watching me, then step over the border and start walking, all slumped down and dejected-looking, toward the jail. Most of the time, anyone who saw you were assume you'd been captured, and you might get some jeers, but rarely would anyone bother tagging you. When I got to the jail, it was all, "Hah-HAH!" and "Losers!" as I walked back with one of my teammates.

Alternately, I'd walk dejectedly to jail, but then stay there, as though I'd actually been captured, whether or not there was anyone from my team legitimately there. Rescue wasn't the point. Then from jail, where I was free to leave whenever I wanted since I hadn't actually been captured, I'd watch the other team. Most of their attention was usually facing away, toward the border and my side, as they watched for incursions from the front. I'd wait until some other of my teammates were making a push to get over the border, and when all the enemies were fully engaged elsewhere, I'd dash over from the jail to the flag circle, grab the flag and hotfoot it to the border, passing enemies from behind. I actually made it a few times, which was pretty awesome. :D

Out of school, the kids on my block played a sorta similar game we called British Bulldog. We played on a large lawn, the adjoining yards between two houses. Each house had a concrete walk leading from the front door, along the side of the garage, then a short jog back (away from most of the lawn) to the driveway, which continued on to the sidewalk and the curb. We played between Tommy and Jimmy Tousignant's house, and Jimmy Ramirez's house, because there were no intervening trees or bushes, just a big expanse of lawn from one walkway/driveway to the other.

Someone started as the Bulldog, and went in the middle of the lawn. Everyone else lined up on the walk or the driveway, which were Base, a safe zone. The sidewalk was out of bounds. The Bulldog yelled, "British Bulldog" (I don't know why, that's just what it was) and everyone tried to dash across the lawn to get to the walk/driveway Base on the other side.

While this happened, the Bulldog would try to "get" someone. They had to get the person they were after down on their butt on the grass. How they did this was up to them. Pretty much anything was allowed -- tackling, pushing, grabbing and arm and doing the swing-and-slam... whatever. Yeah, it was a rough game. I think that's why we liked it so much. (Yeah, I was the only girl playing.)

If the Bulldog successfully got someone down on their butt, they were captured, and they stayed in the middle. Now there were two people trying to "get" the kids still running across. The game continued until everyone had been captured except one person, and that person got to be the new Bulldog for the next game.

No flags or anything, but there are similarities, and it was one of our favorite games to play in the daytime. :) The fact that it required no equipment at all was probably a major plus.

At night, though, hide-and-seek was king. We played in the daytime sometimes, but twilight and after dark were the best times. The shadows were your friends, and you could be a lot more creative with your hiding places.

I'm going to assume everyone knows how to play hide-and-seek. In the daytime, you have to actually hide someplace where you're hidden. As the light faded, though, you could be sneaky. We played in the front yards of five or six adjacent houses along our street, so there was quite a lot of territory to go through. One neighbor had a row of loose bushes running down the border between their yard and the next; in the dim or dark, you could kneel down on all fours between two bushes and fade into the ragged row of foliage, whereas in the daytime you'd be laughably visible. And once (but only once!) I successfully hid by standing up, straight and still, against a neighbor's garage, along a line of tall, straight, juniper bushes that grew there, a few feet apart. The kid searching didn't notice that two pairs of bushes were twice as close together as all the others. [grin]

Ninjas weren't really a thing at that time in popular kid-culture, in the early- to mid-seventies, but we were totally ninjas on those summer nights, hiding from each other in the shadows and the dim-blurred yards.

What games did you play as a kid?

Angie

Birthday Muffins

So, today was my birthday. I'm 55, and finally eligible for some senior discounts, yay. :)

We didn't do anything really special, but I had a good day, which is the whole point, right? I didn't want to make a cake that'd sit there taunting me as leftovers for a week, so I made a batch of muffins. I've made them a bunch of times, and they turned out pretty good.

They're chocolate banana chocolate chip coconut muffins. They're very dark (from all the chocolate) and don't take a great picture, but they're seriously delicious. :) They're easy to make, too.

Chocolate Banana Chocolate Chip Coconut Muffins

3 brown bananas
1/2 stick of butter or margarine
1-2 tbs butter or margarine to grease muffin pan
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cup AP flour
1/4 cup unsweetened baking cocoa
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 bag (12 oz.) chocolate chips
1/2 bag (14 oz. bag, so 7 oz.) shredded coconut (flaked will work too)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

Melt the 1/2 stick of butter. I put it in a mug, cover it with a saucer, then microwave it for one minute on 30% power. Your microwave might be different, so be careful.

Grease the muffin tin. I like using margarine; it's softer and you get a thicker layer of stuff on the muffin cups, which makes them easier to remove once they've baked and cooled. Note that you can use either the 12-medium-muffin tin or the 6-large-muffin tin; I've used both, and they work fine, even the baking time is the same.

Mash the bananas thoroughly in a large mixing bowl.

Add the melted butter or margarine, the 1/2 cup sugar, the egg, and the vanilla extract. Mix thoroughly.

Add shredded coconut. Mix thoroughly.

In another mixing bowl (this one can be a bit smaller) put the 1 1/4 cup AP flour, the 1/4 cup unsweetened baking cocoa, the salt, and the baking soda. (I sift my baking soda in a small strainer to get the lumps out of it. If you're the kind of person who thinks baking soda toothpaste makes an awesome ice cream topping, go ahead and just dump your spoonful of soda into the bowl with the flour, etc. No, seriously, there are few "Yuck!" experiences in baking like biting into a muffin and finding that there's a little rock of baking soda in it. :P ) Mix thoroughly.

Add the chocolate chips to the flour mixture. Mix thoroughly.

Dump the flour mixture into the banana mixture.

Mix carefully, with a large wooden spoon or rubber spatula. The trick here is to thoroughly moisten all the dry ingredients, without over-mixing the batter. I find a folding motion, like when you're folding whipped egg whites into something, alternated with scraping the dry mixture off the sides of the bowl, works best.

Portion the batter out into the muffin tin. I like to use a disher -- one of those half-sphere ice cream scoop things, with a sweeper-arm in it -- but a regular spoon will work. Two spoons, or a spoon and a fork, will work even better. Once all the muffin cups are full, I use a fork to make sure the batter is distributed as evenly as possible.

Bake for 40 minutes.

Let the muffins cool for at least half an hour. If you used a good layer of margarine to grease the muffin tin, you should be able to get them out by hand, with a slow and gentle twisting motion. If they're stubborn, use a butter knife straight down the sides of each cup, all the way down to the bottom, then make a gentle prying motion. Do that 2-4 times in each cup, evenly spaced around the cup, depending on how stubborn the muffins are being.

Variations:

Regular Banana Muffins -- use 1 1/2 cups of flour, 1 cup sugar, and eliminate the baking cocoa, the chocolate chips and the coconut. This is basically banana bread batter; you can use it for either muffins or a loaf of banana bread. (The baking cocoa subbed for 1/4 cup of flour, and the shredded coconut is sweetened, and subs for 1/2 cup of the sugar.)

Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins -- make Regular Banana Muffins, but toss a bag of chocolate chips into the flour (and mix) before combining the wet and dry ingredients.

Other Fruit Muffins -- pretty much any fruit sauce/compote will work in place of the mashed bananas. Eyeball how much "stuff" you end up with in the bowl after you mash your bananas, and use about the same amount of other fruit. Chunky applesauce works well, although the apple muffins will be a bit moister. Other fruit compote (fruit seeded/pitted/hulled/chunked as needed, and cooked down with about half a cup of sugar) makes good muffins too. I've made great strawberry, peach, plum, and bing cherry muffins this way, taking advantage of summer fruits. If you use fruit compote/sauce, use 1/2 cup sugar when you make the muffins, to allow for the 1/2 cup of sugar in the compote/sauce. I've never added coconut to fruit compote muffins; I'd probably try them with no added sugar, because the 1/2 cup of sugar in the compote, plus the sweetened coconut, would probably be plenty of sugar.

Seriously, this isn't rocket science, or rocket fuel chemistry -- play with the recipe and see what you get. :)

Angie

What Was Your First Amazon Order?

So there's a thing going around Twitter, which I read about on a blog, about your first Amazon order.

Let’s play a game. Go to Amazon, to “Your Orders,” and with the year drop-down, find the earliest year listed… and then RT and tell us what the FIRST thing you ever bought on Amazon was. Bonus points for it being nearly 20 years ago. 🙂 #BabysFirstAmazon

We've been using Amazon for a while, so I went and looked up my first order. Unsurprisingly, it was a pile of books.


Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages edited by Carol Braun Pasternack


The Formation of the Medieval West: Studies in the Oral Culture of the Barbarians by Michael Richter


The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture and the State) by Jack Goody


From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 by M.T. Clanchy


The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretations in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries by Brian Stock


Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millenium by Patrick J. Geary

This stack of page-turners ran me $196.45 on 29 April 1999. I was a senior at Long Beach State University, studying (in case you can't tell) medieval history. I'd talked my way into a graduate seminar, and was writing a paper on literacy in the Middle Ages. These were books I wanted but couldn't get at the university library. Or at least, the ones that didn't cost $$$ each to purchase. There were a few of those, and I got some of them later on, but not with this order.

Looking at the covers now, I want to go upstairs to where all my history books are still in boxes from when we moved, dig some of these out and reread them. Or in actuality, read them through for the first time. While researching for my paper, I didn't read any of the books I used all the way through. I dug through the table of contents and the index to find the useful bits; I didn't have time to actually read all the books I consulted cover-to-cover. But I'm still interested in this topic, and seeing these books again makes me want to settle in and really read them.

I never did finish my bachelor's degree. I'd been having trouble most of my adult life with "getting sick" and losing days or weeks or a month off of work or school. I'm a good enough scholar that I can lose two weeks or even a month out of the middle of a term, and (if the instructor would let me, which was a coin-toss) make up all the work, get good grades on the exams, and pull a stack of As out of the wreckage. But my illnesses, which were a combination of nausea and exhaustion and general... yuck, were getting worse and worse.

Finally, after watching me spend a month lying on the livingroom couch alternately sleeping and staring at the ceiling, my husband dragged me to a therapist, who sent me to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed bipolar disorder.

There's another Amazon order from later that year that marks when that happened; my doctor told me to get some books and read about the condition. (The thing where you lie on a couch for an hour talking to your P-doc doesn't happen anymore. You see a therapist if you want to talk. Your P-doc manages your meds. Appointments after the first diagnostic visit were fifteen minutes, so he wanted me to educate myself as much as I could.) Here's my Amazon order from 22 November 1999:


An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison


A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic Depressive Illness by Patty Duke

I chose these two books to start with because the titles suggested the authors didn't BS around about their conditions. Jamison has a PhD in Psychology, IIRC (I'm pretty sure that's it, and that she's not a Psychiatrist, which is an MD specialty) and was diagnosed after she'd been practicing for a while. Patty Duke was an actress I'd seen in a number of things, so there was some familiarity there, at least on my part. I've always been a direct sort of person, and the lack of pussyfooting around in how they described their conditions appealed to me. I learned a lot from their books.

I wasn't aware at the time, but that diagnosis -- marked by the purchase of those books -- was the end of my scholastic career. I had plans to go for a PhD in History, and then teach and do research, and write books of my own. After a couple of years with my P-doc, during which I tried an array of different meds, different dosages and combinations, never with much improvement, I asked him straight out if I could go back to school. It'd been a while and I was getting antsy. He looked me in the eye and said that going back to school would be an expensive mistake.

Well. Okay then.

I was only a couple of classes short of what I absolutely needed to graduate. I spent a ridiculous amount of time getting an AA degree (and now I know why), and took a huge number of lower division history classes, many more than I needed, because they looked interesting. When I transferred up to Long Beach State, their registration system had me listed as a Senior from the day I set foot onto campus because of my transferrable unit count. Which was nice when it came time to get in line to register.

And although I only needed upper division courses, I spent three years at Long Beach State before finally crashing and burning out; the bottleneck was the Latin classes I needed in order to be able to work with primary sources, so I wandered around the history department, with brief forays into a few others, again taking a lot of classes I didn't strictly need, because they looked interesting. I know a lot about history, the European Middle Ages in particular, plus a few other areas that struck my fancy at the time, although I'll admit I'm a bit rusty at this point. I've always wished I'd gotten my scholarly act together sooner, so at least I'd have had my doctorate before everything blew up, and could legitimately write nonfiction on the subject, even if I wasn't up to teaching classes every day.

Although if I'd been able to do that, it would've been because I wasn't bipolar in the first place and I wouldn't have had the problems later anyway. Circular wishing, and all that.

I've written fiction most of my life, and I am published now. I enjoy what I do and find it fulfilling. Still, there's a wistfulness there, if I let myself dwell on it.

Angie

Fleeing Into November

So, October sucked and I'm very glad it's over.

About a week and a half into the month, my gastroparesis flared up, and off to the ER we went. This is bad enough -- having your stomach working at turning itself inside-out with enough determination as to require intravenous meds is pretty sucktastic. We got that straightened out, I came home and collapsed, and then took most of a week to recover. My stomach was mostly fine as of the next day, but being that sick sucks the energy right out of me, and it usually takes five or six days to get back to my old activity level, with enough energy to actually spend most of each day conscious.

[The upside of this is that it was my first ER visit in about eleven months. Two or three years ago, my husband worked out that we had to run to the ER on the average of every four weeks, for the whole year. Yeah, I'll take an eleven-month gap and be pretty happy about it.]

Then about a week before Halloween, I snapped an incisor. :/ I was chewing on something, then felt this SNAP! and one of my (thankfully root-canalled and crowned) incisors was just sort of sitting in its socket, not actually attached any more. Crap.

This happened to me before, a few years ago. (The other large incisor, the one right next to the one that broke off this time.) I just went to the dentist on Wednesday, because we'd cancelled our dental insurance (this has been a tight year financially) and had to sign back up again. The renewed insurance didn't kick in till the first of the month, so holding pattern until then.

Even if everything goes perfectly, this is going to take months to resolve. I'm getting another implant, which is fine, but it comes in several steps, with months between each step for thorough healing before progressing on. So I've got this hole in my face (again) and I'm going to be dealing with it until, probably, some time this coming summer. Late spring at the earliest.

I decided to skip the temporary, cosmetic not-really-replacement thing this time. Last time, I got an ultra-temporary fake tooth cemented in, because I was two days from dashing off to a workshop, and there was no time to do the long-term temporary replacement at that point. The ultra-temporary was so fragile, my dentist told me not even to brush while I had it. When your dentist says not to brush, that's Fragile with a capital F. :P And it fell out three days later anyway, so that was $800 wasted.

The long-term temporary thing was what's called a "flipper," which is basically a denture-y thing with only one tooth on it. You have to remove it to eat, and although they told me I'd get used to talking with it in, I never did. And after I got my implant post put in, the periodontist did some drilling at the base of the fake tooth in my flipper so it'd fit over the cap at the top of the post, but it never did fit right, so it was even more annoying to wear and I hardly ever did. I don't remember what the flipper cost, but it was somewhere in the $$$$ range. I've decided to bail on that one too. Way too much expense for a purely cosmetic deal that's non-functional and uncomfortable. Nah, I'll skip it. If people want to stare at the hole in my face, they're welcome to do so.

At least this time when I went to the dentist for the preliminary look-around (which was basically for the purpose of saying, "Yep, you need an implant,") she mentioned that I have a very deep bite, which means when I close my jaw, my upper teeth overlap my lower teeth almost completely. That apparently puts a lot of pressure on those upper teeth, which is why I've had the breakage problem. Okay, well, there's nothing I can do about it, but I guess it's good to know why this keeps happening. :/

So, that was October. Good riddance.

Now it's November, and I'm doing NaNoWriMo. I'm AngiePen on the site, if you're playing too and want to Buddy me. I'm working on a romance novel, and things are going well so far. I've had about 46K words of this one sitting on my hard drive for a couple of years now, so I've pulled it out to work on. I'm pretty sure I have 50K words of it left. If not, but I finish at some lesser wordcount, that's fine; I consider finished novels a win no matter what the wordcount. :)

If I wrap the current book with, like, 30K words or so, and still have at least a week left in the month, I'll probably pull out another partial project (yeah, I have a lot of 'em [cough]) and work on that, and lump the wordcount together for purposes of NaNo. No biggie.

I've been having a sucktastic writing year, though, so doing a couple thousand words a day for multiple days in a row has felt awesome. Now if I can only keep it going.... [crossed fingers]

Who else is doing NaNo this year...?

Angie

Delousing the Computer

Or, Explaining How I Was Recently An Idiot

So, I'm going along, minding my own online business, when I get a pop-up saying that Firefox urgently needs to update. Sure, whatever. I hate updating -- too often, something I like breaks, or crap I hate appears, or occasionally they'll reset everything to default which means I have to waste however much time trying to remember which options and customizations and whatever-the-bleep-else I need to go digging into to get things back the way I like them. So I blew it off.

It appeared again a while later, though. I wasn't as busy and figured they'd keep bugging me (as they always do) so I figured, bleep it, and let it update.

Except this "update" opened a DOS window and code started scrolling up.

I've never seen a Firefox update that looked like that. Not being completely stupid (although clearly I'm at least a little stupid, since I let this happen) I CTRL-ALT-DELed it's ass and stopped the process. Enough had installed, though, that I started to get the occasional credit card commercial playing on my computer. Audio only. There was no credit card commercial running in any of my browser windows, so clearly I'd let something nasty onto my computer. [sigh]

I Googled the "urgent Firefox update" thing, and saw that something had infected my computer earlier to make that appear. Which is weird. This is a new laptop, I haven't loaded much stuff onto it, or done much random browsing -- mostly I go to the same batch of websites on a regular basis. But I caught a bug somewhere.

Okay, so a web site that talked about the Firefox update malware gave instructions on how to deal with it. Go here, look there, search for these files or anything else that looks squirrely and delete them. Except there wasn't anything at all on my computer that looked weird. Like I said, not much there at all at this point. I sorted the file list by install date, and nothing -- everything looked legit.

Next advice was to install something called Malwarebytes. I Googled Malwarebytes just in case, and it had good comments and reviews on various industry sites, so okay, I grabbed the free copy, downloaded, installed... except it didn't seem to be completely there. :/ The web site giving instructions said it'd do this, do that, download, open up and ask you to do X and confirm Y and then it'd ask if you wanted it to do a scan and you should say yes... but it didn't do any of that. It seemed to download and install okay, but it never opened. Doubleclicking on it didn't open it. There was a Malwarebytes icon in my systray, and doubleclicking on that didn't open it either.

I finally figured out I could have it do a scan by right-clicking on the desktop icon. Nothing seemed to happen, but a few minutes later, a box popped up to say everything was fine.

:/

From that point on, Malwarebytes would periodically open a window (sometimes two or three or six in a row) to tell me that it'd blocked my OS from sending data to a website.

So much for Nothing Bad On Your System. :P

At this point, I got my husband, a retired IT pro, involved. He confirmed that Malwarebytes is well known and highly regarded. Okay, good. He/we worked on my laptop for the rest of the day, but he couldn't find anything either. He said the next step was doing a complete reset -- basically reformatting the hard drive, reinstalling software and starting over.

[headdesk]

I really hate doing that. I just got this damn machine set up the way I want it, figuring out which options and customizations and whatever-the-bleep-else I need to go digging into, in every freaking program I use, plus the OS, to get things back the way I like them. Sorry, I griped about that before. :( But you know? So I let it go for the rest of the evening, just closing the Malwarebytes notification windows whenever they popped up.

Until, late last night, I got a message saying that Malwarebytes couldn't run anymore, and Windows would let me know when that changed, closing now bye.

O_O

Ever since I installed Malwarebytes and couldn't get it to open, I'd been wondering whether the virus was defending itself. I had that happen before, when the laptop I was using some years back caught a bug after I spent a couple of hours on the free wifi at B&N. That particular bug wouldn't let us go to the Microsoft web site where my husband wanted to download a patch or whatever to solve the problem; no matter what browser he tried -- and I have three of them on each computer -- it just would not let him go to microsoft.com. My Googling had shown me that this Urgent Firefox Update thing has been around for about a year and a half, so I was wondering whether the version I got was designed to block Malwarebytes. And maybe they'd been battling all evening :P and the virus had finally won?

Whatever was going on, my only shield was gone. I did a quick backup of my Firefox bookmarks, and my writing folder -- everything else was still as it was on the backup I'd made when I moved to this laptop less than a month ago.

My husband spent the rest of the night reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling the OS and basic programs. I've spent several hours up to basically now re-customizing and -optioning everything [mutter] and getting backups replaced, hanging curtains and making sure the furniture is where I want it and all the books and files on on shelves and in cabinets. I'm sure I'll be stomping spiders and discovering missing nicknacks for weeks or months, but for right now I'm basically moved back in.

Major suck. On the one hand, having to do the re-install, re-customize, re-copy thing twice in less than a month is seriously aggravating. On the other hand, it would've been worse if it'd happened a year from now, after I had a bunch more stuff downloaded and installed and messed with to be replaced.

Be careful out there! :P

Angie

Anniversary

Today is my anniversary -- my marriage is now old enough to drink. :)

Jim and I have actually been together for 28 years; it just took us a while to settle down and do the ring thing.

We met playing GemStoneII, an online multi-player fantasy game, back in '89. (Yes, there were multi-player games back in the eighties. Yes, there was internet back in the eighties. Whenever I hear someone talking about how things were "before the internet, in the early 90s," I just have to eyeroll.) I played for a few months before meeting Jim, although we were both fighters, and he was the assistant guildmaster of the fighters; I saw him around, but it took a while for us to stop and talk. We hit it off pretty quickly, and before the game shut down to make way for the next generation, our characters, Swiftkill and Callista, got married in an event online, surrounded by friends in armor. Of course the wedding was interrupted by a monster attack -- that many players gathered in one spot attracted the ogre magi :) -- and Swiftkill showed why he chose that name by killing the thing with one blow before anyone else could even draw a weapon.

Later, in GemStoneIII, we were both brought on staff within a couple of months of each other (although I was first [cough]). We worked in GS3 together for a few years, then I moved on to another game the same company did. We came together again in another, newer fantasy game called DragonRealms, and worked there for a few years before leaving the company. Being a gamemaster in an online multi-player game is a high-stress job with low pay and a lot of burnout, but was mostly fun -- building areas, designing quests, coding puzzles and traps, roleplaying with the players. Seriously, watching the first batch of players find and explore an area I built, listening to them comment to each other about it, and have fun discovering things -- it's freaking awesome. :) Jim and I did that together for about a decade, first from a few hundred miles away, then after we got married in realspace, sitting on opposite sides of the computer room. That made it a lot easier to chat and kibitz back and forth, rather than having to type comments to each other, although we did that too, LOL!

I was basically alone for the first 33 years of my life. I had the occasional boyfriend, but never for more than a few months, and although I generally stayed friends with guys after we broke up, one or two ended pretty badly. It was never really serious until Jim, though. There were times when I just felt so incredibly lonely, and wondered if I'd ever find someone to be with for the rest of my life. It was worth the wait, though, because Jim is my soulmate. He's not perfect, but our flaws sort of complement each other, and at the end of the day we love each other deeply. I literally can't imagine being married to anyone else.

Love you, hon.

Angie, looking forward to another 21 years together

Neil Gaiman on Impostor Syndrome

Ever get the feeling that you're not really all that good at whatever you do? That people who praise you are just being nice, or they don't really get you, and when they figure out how ordinary you are they'll be angry and start sneering?

I feel like that sometimes. I think most people who've found some success do. Neil Gaiman does, and he talks about it in a really excellent Tumblr post. Check it out.

Angie

The Seattle Snowpocalypse of 2017

Okay, everyone in the Midwest or in Upstate New York or wherever is going to laugh or roll their eyes, but seriously, this is a metric buttload of snow for Seattle. O_O Jim usually volunteers to the Aquarium on Monday afternoons, but they've cancelled at least five busses already off the route he usually takes downtown, and he doesn't get off shift until after dark, so he's not going in today.

Last time we had snow like this was a day or two before Thanksgiving, a few years ago before he retired. He worked downtown and it usually took like half an hour, maybe forty minutes to get home on the bus. It took him over seven hours that day. He really doesn't want that to happen again, and I don't blame him.

We're supposed to get about a foot of it today, and it's got quite a lot to go. It's pretty, though.

This is out the front door, on the opposite side of the building, looking in either direction:

Yes, our neighbors across the driveway still have Christmas decorations up. I like it, actually -- it's cheerful. :D

And this is the view off our balcony. That's on the second floor, off the living room. (Yes, I know. Seattle's weird that way. It's hilly, like San Francisco, so there's not a lot of flat land left in the city. Newer construction tends to be tall and narrow. Our place is three stories, with the main living area on the second. When we were house hunting, we looked at one townhouse that was four stories. Kinda crazy, but it's what they do up here.)

This is what our little yard looks like, taken through the screen door because I was feeling calorically timid when I shot this pic:

I'm here in the living room with my laptop, bundled up under a blanket and with the heater going. I think I'll be staying here most of the day.

Keep warm, everyone!

ETA: a neighbor's kids built a snowman. :) It's pretty rare that there's enough snow here to do that.



Angie

One Year Later

On 1 January 2016 -- 1 January being National Start A New Diet and Exercise Program Day here in the US -- I started a new diet and exercise program.

A few months earlier, my arthritis got a lot worse. For years I've had problems with my knees, especially on the right side, but by October of 2015, it had spread to my hands -- again, especially the right, the one I use most. That's scary. It's bad enough to have a hard time walking (I'd been using a cane for almost ten years) but if it got to the point where I couldn't use my hands anymore, I'd probably start thinking about stepping out in front of a bus or something. And I'm not sure I'm kidding. :/

I went to my doctor, and rather than up my pain meds, she suggested I try an anti-inflammatory diet by a woman named Kathy Abascal; it'd been getting some good results among her colleagues. It's not a gimmicky, Hollywood-Champagne-and-Kumquat type diet, recommended by your brother's wife's hairdresser. This is a ridiculously healthy diet, endorsed by the Chief of Medicine at our local hospital, that my doctor urged me to try. As she said during that visit, after describing how it worked, "This is really how we should all be eating," -- so I decided to do it.

If you've ever hung out with anyone in the fitness or lifting community, you might've heard the term "eating clean." This diet is pretty much the ultimate in eating clean. It eliminates all processed foods, all additives, all added sweetners (among other things) and has you eating mostly fruits and veggies, with just a little meat/grain/beans/etc. I'll describe it more fully below, for anyone interested.

So I got Ms. Abascal's book, read it, went "Holy crap, this is restrictive!!" and faced the coming New Year. I honestly didn't think I'd be able to stick with the diet for very long, but my stiff and aching hands urged me to give it a really good shot.

At the same time, Jim and I got each other fitness bands for Christmas. We both could use some more exercise, although I was pretty sure I was doing a decent amount of walking. Not 10K steps a day, but I figured I was probably doing about half that. I used a pedometer for a while, but my last one had broken a few years earlier. I'd heard good things about fitness bands (I have a Garmin Vivofit) so we went that direction.

On 1 January of last year, I ignored the fitness band and just did my usual amount of walking. Umm, wow. I was just a bit over 1000 steps by the end of the day. O_O Yeah, definitely could use some work there. I started getting up to walk during the day, just back and forth at home, rather than going out. I can't walk very far at any one time because of my joint problems, and sometimes something will go "Sproing!" and I'll have a sudden need to sit down, right now. So walking at home felt like my best option. And it actually works very well. If you think, "Hey, 10K steps is like five miles! I can't walk that far!" then walking in shorter chunks is a great way of building up steps. Even miles. Getting up every hour or so and doing even just a few hundred steps adds up by the end of the day. I still can't walk five miles all at once, but after a year of working on it, getting my 10K steps in on any given day -- assuming my knees or feet aren't griping that day -- is now more a matter of time management than physical ability or disability.

Through January, though, I was still working on hitting 3-4K steps per day, and feeling like that was a pretty good triumph when I managed it.

Back to the diet. Since I started this diet hoping it'd help tone down my aching joints, rather than for weight loss, I didn't actually weigh myself on 1 January 2016. Ms. Abascal's book makes it clear that this isn't primarily a weight loss diet. She says that if you need to lose weight, you probably will, and if you need to gain weight, you probably will. That's not the main goal, though. So when I started this, I figured I might lose some weight, but if I did I'd consider it a great bonus; I didn't count on or plan for it, not wanting to be disappointed. I was mainly focused on my joints.

When I saw my doctor in mid-October of '15, my weight was 323. Knowing that I had a ridiculously restrictive diet coming up, I completely pigged out over the holidays. We spent a week at my mom's house around Christmas, and I seriously ate a plate of Christmas cookies for breakfast every day. [hides under keyboard] I felt like a bear getting ready for a long, lean winter. I kept going right up through New Year's Eve, then locked myself into Food Prison on the first.

By mid-January, I thought, Hey, maybe I've lost some weight. So I hopped on the scale and... 316.

Holy crap, 316! That's seven pounds less than I weighed before going crazy over the holidays!

Suddenly I wished I'd gotten on that scale on the first. I'd kill to know exactly how much I weighed then, because in just those two weeks I'd obviously dropped an insane amount of weight. I decided to pick something conservative and measure from there, just to have a number to look at, so I added ten pounds to my October weight, and assumed I weighed 333 at the beginning of the year. I've gained ten pounds before in a week of pigging out, much less six weeks -- I was probably at least 350 -- but I didn't want to overshoot and claim more of a loss than I actually had, so 333 is my official starting weight.

By the end of January I'd lost 32 pounds.

I started keeping much closer track after mid-month, and for the last week or so I was "only" losing about half a pound a day. Which means for that first week or so, I must've been losing more like two pounds per day. (And it was probably even more than that, but again, I'm assuming a start of 333.)

I checked with my doctor and she assured me that a huge weight loss is normal when you make a major change, especially with diet and exercise both. There was nothing to worry about unless it continued that fast. I was thinking I'd be okay with it continuing that fast for a while -- if I could get down to my goal, which is 180 (I'm 5'11" and naturally muscular), then we could fix whatever other problems rapid weight loss might've caused. [wry smile] But I did keep slowing down, drat. :)

By mid-February, I was down about 40 pounds, and looking at going to the Anthology Workshop in Oregon. Since I'd be eating three meals a day at restaurants, which aren't friendly to this diet -- even vegetarian meals tend to have way too much pasta/rice/beans bulking them out -- I figured I'd just bag the diet for the ten days or so I'd be gone, knowing that I'd regain some weight, but that I'd go back to dieting and losing when I got home. Ms. Abascal says that once you're firmly into the diet, you can have one or two cheat days a month, where you eat whatever you want, to satisfy cravings and such; I'd just have one big long cheat week-and-a-bit. But my stomach is kind of touchy (I have gastroparesis, which means my stomach doesn't empty as fast as yours, and sometimes it decides to run backwards for a while) so I figured I should find out how my stomach would react to going back to a normal processed/chemical-laden/protein-high diet while I was still in Seattle, 20 minutes from my local hospital and its long chart on me and my needs, rather than out on the Oregon coast, in a hotel that's not staffed after like seven or eight in the evening, in a town with only one taxi and a local ER I've never been to. So I picked a weekend and went back to eating normally, just to see what'd happen.

I'll admit I'd been dying for bread. I thought I'd miss sweets first, but actually, I don't eat many sweets on an everyday (i.e., non-Christmas [cough]) basis. And on this diet I eat a LOT of fruit. Once you've stopped eating foods with added sweeteners, it's like leaving a loud rock concert and slowly recovering your hearing -- after a little while without added sugar, your tastebuds sort of come out of hiding, and fruit tastes really sweet. What I miss most is breadish things -- sandwiches, bagels, big hunks of bread. I miss pasta too, although chewy bread is really my main craving here. Also cheese. And bacon. Mmm, bacon. But mostly bread. So I dove into bagel sandwiches, and mac-n-cheese, and we had pizza that night. My stomach was okay with it, yay.

The next morning, I woke up feeling like someone had dropped a piano on my head.

It's funny, before this test, I hadn't thought the diet was doing much for my arthritis. Which was the whole point of trying it. By mid-February, the weight loss was enough of a reason to keep going, but I was sort of disappointed that my hands still got stiff a lot. But after just one day of eating normal again, I was reminded of what stiff-and-aching really felt like. Oh, yeah, it could be a lot worse. I was also tired, even after a full night's sleep, and dragged around all day with no energy. These are all symptoms of inflammation.

I kept eating normal for that second day, and had actually planned to go for three or four days to see what would happen, but by the end of the second day I gave up. I felt so horrible, I had to go back on the diet.

It's funny, all that stuff we think is just age -- getting tired easily, lack of energy, minor aches and pains? Funny how much of that is inflammation caused by diet. I'd forgotten what it was like to actually have some energy. I thought it was just because I was fat and middle-aged. And I'm sure those were/are major contributors. But there's the food component too, and that's controllable.

I went to my workshop, and did my best to stay on the diet. I stocked up at the grocery store and had like 20 pounds of fruit in my room. I ate fruit for breakfast, plus a scrambled egg the hotel kitchen made for me every day, for protein. Then for lunch and dinner I went to restaurants but tried my best to stick to my diet. It didn't actually work very well; as I said above, even vegetarian entrees aren't really designed for this fruit/veggie heavy diet. I ate a lot of stripped down chicken caesars -- a chicken caesar salad with no bacon, no cheese, no dressing, no croutons. It's basically a pile of Romaine lettuce with a few strips of chicken. Technically within the bounds of my diet, but not at all within the spirit. The point is to be eating a wide variety of fruits and veggies, for the fiber and micronutrients. A big pile of lettuce doesn't really fill that bill. :/ I did my best, but ended up eating some white rice, and noodles, and whatever, here and there.

After the last day of the workshop, we all went out to dinner at a nice restaurant. I figured, "Screw this," and decided to eat whatever I wanted. The next day would just be the writers' lunch, then the drive back to Portland; if I was achey and had no energy, I could nap in the car, no big deal. And it turns out I felt fine the next day. So apparently I could have a cheat meal, but not a whole cheat day. Okay, I made note of that and kept going.

Home, and back to the diet. I actually plateaued for a while at -40 pounds, doing the gain-a-bit-lose-a-bit thing for weeks. I tried upping my walking to 10K steps a day (I'd been around 6-7K at that point) and it worked for a while, but after about a week of that, my knees and feet started griping at me, hard. Okay, can't do that yet. I backed down to 6-7K steps per day, but added intensity with 5lb hand weights. I can't walk with the weights for very long, but one or two short walking sessions per day with the weights adds enough intensity that I eventually started losing again. A few months later, I plateaued again at -70. More walking, more weights, I kept hovering around -70. I just stuck it out, and eventually I started losing again, slowly. But by then I was facing the holidays again.

What to do this time? I'd delayed starting my diet because I knew doing a new diet over the holidays would be kind of stupid, and a set-up for failure. What to do this time?

It was mid-October and I was down to -80, about 253lbs. I felt a lot better -- going up and down the stairs at home wasn't the huge, daunting chore it'd been before, and I can walk a lot farther all at once, and faster, than before. I was feeling great and looking forward to continuing my progress. But still, the holidays. Halloween candy, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas... pretty much all of December. Could I stick to it?

I decided that, again, trying to stick to the diet through the holidays would just set myself up for failure. At this point, the diet felt normal, as did the walking. It wasn't a "special" diet anymore, it was just the way I normally ate. I was confident that I could let myself eat holiday good stuff here and there, and still get completely back to my diet afterward with no problems. I didn't spend 2.5 solid months pigging out :) but I let myself eat good stuff when it was around, when I felt like it. I ate some Halloween candy, then back on the diet till Thanksgiving. I had bread and stuffing and gravy with Thanksgiving dinner, then after for as long as the leftovers lasted, then went back on the diet. December I pretty much let myself eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And yeah, I ate cookies for breakfast at Mom's again. But I also ate lots of fruit and veggies, and kept doing a lot of walking.

When I decided to ease up for the holidays, back in mid-October, I was down about 80 pounds from my official start weight. I figured if I regained 10-15lbs by 1 January, that'd be cool. Even 20lbs would be... not completely sucky. I knew whatever I gained, I could lose again, and then keep progressing in the new year.

So I've been "stocking up" again, watching 1 January approach. Jim and I got pizza the evening of the 30th, figuring it'd last me a couple of days. And I drank a few mugs of hot chocolate. And I ate a lot of fruit, and walked a lot. This morning I got on the scale.

I'd gained about 11 pounds. Woot!

So I'm back on my diet, and I'll get back down to -80 soon, and keep going. I'm hoping to hit -100 by the time we go to BayCon in May -- we skipped it last year because I got sick, so there are friends there who won't have seen me in two years. That should be fun. :) But even being eleven pounds up, I feel so much better than I did this time last year, I can't even describe it. When I'm on the diet, I have energy. I can move. I can walk for more than a few minutes at a time, and I haven't used my cane since April. With the arthritis, standing in one place is actually harder than walking; I couldn't stand for more than about five minutes before my joints started to ache. Hanging out with friends at conventions and workshops, which often means standing around talking, was really hard; I usually had to go find a seat somewhere while everyone else was still chatting. Which sucked. I was at a workshop in October and actually stood for over an hour one evening. I hurt, but just being physically able to stand for that length of time, even if it hurts, is pretty amazing.

And since you don't have to count anything on this diet -- no counting calories, cups, grams, nothing -- it's easy to follow. No math to do, nothing to add or track. And so long as you eat proportionally, and avoid the things you're just not supposed to have, you can eat as much as you want. I'm never hungry, and that's a huge part of why this works for me. The occasional cheat meal -- once or twice a month, during most of the year -- gives me something to look forward to, and makes it easier to do without things like bread and cheese and bacon. My favorite cheat meal, when Jim and I go out, is a bacon-cheeseburger; except for an occasional lettuce leaf, there is literally nothing in that sandwich that I'm usually allowed to have, so it's a great cheat. :D

I haven't blogged about this before because 1) I wasn't sure what the results would be when I first started, and 2) most people don't want to hear about other people's diets. :) But I've had some pretty awesome results, and figured posting once after a year wasn't too bad. Maybe I'll post again a year from now and do an update.

I hope everyone else is having a great New Year. :D

========================

Kathy Abascal's book -- The Abascal Way To Quiet Inflammation is available on Amazon. To summarize:

No chemical additives of any kind.
No processed foods of any kind.
No added sweeteners of any kind -- sugar, honey, molasses, Sweet-n-Low, Splenda, Truvia, nothing whether real or plastic.
No dairy of any kind.
No wheat or any derivatives -- also no oats or barley because they're related to wheat.
No dried corn or any derivatives, including corn oil.
No beef.
No pork.
No farmed fish -- only wild-caught, with a couple of exceptions for things like mussels, which are farmed in a way that results in their having their full nutritional value.
No peanuts, peanut oil, etc.
No canola oil.
No white rice, although brown and wild rice are fine. (White rice is processed.)
No dried fruit -- concentrated calories.
No fruit juice -- concentrated calories.

That leaves:

Eat Proportionally: (I'll explain what that means down below.)

Chicken and eggs -- preferred organic free-range, but if you can only afford regular then fine.
Turkey -- again, organic free-range preferred.
Fish and shellfish -- preferred wild-caught.
Lamb -- grass-fed.

It really does make a difference in the meat (or eggs) what an animal eats, BTW. With salmon, for example, wild-caught salmon has much darker orange flesh than farmed salmon. And eggs from true free-range (pastured) chickens have much darker orange yolks than eggs from factory-farmed chickens. The nutritional stats are very different between the two kinds of animal products.

Nuts and Seeds -- pretty much anything but peanuts.
Legumes -- beans that aren't green beans (eaten in the pod), plus lentils, whole quinoa, and soy products.
Whole Grains -- brown, black, red and wild rice, millet, amaranth, and white potatoes count as a grain.
Oils -- pretty much any plant-based oil that isn't peanut or canola oil.

Eat Freely:

Lots of fruits and veggies:

More veggie-ish veggies you can eat as much as you want -- spinach and lettuce and other leafy stuff, radishes, squash, cucumbers, celery, mushrooms, sprouts, broccoli, green beans, chili peppers, onions, tomatoes, garlic, etc.

High-glycemic veggies: carrots, yams, sweet potatoes, turnips, peas, pumpkins, beets -- you can have as much of these as you want, but always eat them with some "regular" veggies and/or fruits.

Fruit -- whatever you want.

Chicken broth -- remember, no chemical additives, and no added sweeteners. Most chicken broth from the grocery store has sugar in it :P so I just make my own.
Pomegranate molasses
Coffee
Chocolate, cocoa powder, cocoa nibs -- unsweetened
Chutney -- unsweetened
Salsa
Soy Sauce -- wheat-free
Salt and Pepper and other herbs and seasonings


Now, putting it all together:

Whenever you eat something, a meal or a snack or whatever, you want at least 2/3 of what you eat (by volume, just eyeball it) to be from the "Eat Freely" list, mostly fruits/veggies. The other 1/3 can be whatever you want from the "Eat Proportionally" list. So for breakfast pretty much every morning, I have a hard boiled egg (for protein) and a huge plate of fruit. The egg is a lot less than 1/3 of what I'm eating -- the 1/3 is a maximum. I eat a lot of chicken, so I might have a bowl of veggies with some chicken for dinner, or a bowl of root veggie mash (sweet potatoes, carrots, sometimes turnips or parsnips), with added chopped spinach, plus chicken or cooked pinto beans or brown rice or lentils. If I'm still hungry after dinner, or just want a snack, I'll usually grab some fruit. I eat LOTS of fruit.

If you get a chocolate craving, a couple of bananas mashed up with a heaping tablespoon or two of unsweetened baking cocoa turns into a sort of chocolate banana pudding. It looks a bit iffy -- you could probably smooth it out in a blender or something if you wanted to go to the trouble -- but it's very yummy, and calorie-wise it's just like eating the two bananas.


That's basically it. The book has complete lists of stuff you can have, stuff you can have with other stuff, and stuff you can't have, but if you want a cut down version, I'll bet just following the proportional eating -- at least 2/3 of fruits veggies to balance out other stuff whenever you eat anything -- will take your weight down, if you don't care about the inflammatory stuff. Although it's amazing how much better I feel -- fewer aches, not as much stiffness, more energy. Sometimes when I have a cheat meal, I'll feel awful the next day, all achey and tired. Obviously something's knocking me on my ass, in the foods I don't usually eat.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. :)

Angie

New Release -- Crucible: All-New Tales of Valdemar

Wasn't it November just, like, last week...? I guess not. :P My arthritis spread further into my hands late last year, which massively sucks. Then travel and Christmas and stress. I started a new diet/exercise thing, which I'm not going to ramble about here, but it's sucked up a lot of my energy and attention. Finally I stopped and thought, "Wait, I had a story come out. I blogged about it, right...?" Turns out no, I didn't [hides under keyboard] so here I am. I'll just smile and pretend I shouldn't have announced this a month ago.

I've never written a tie-in story before, but "Ghosts of the Past," published in Crucible: All-New Tales of Valdemar, ed. Mercedes Lackey, was a lot of fun to write. I've been a Valdemar fan for a very long time; I was a regular in the Modems of the Queen board on GEnie, and have always loved the world of Velgarth and its characters and history. Getting to play in Misty's sandbox was a great opportunity; thanks to John Helfers, who edited the book with Misty and who's bought a couple of my stories before, for inviting me to submit for the project.

Four people have vanished into the woods near the village of Rabbit Hole -- gone with no sign, no body, nothing at all left. Herald Arvil heads into the woods to figure out what's happened to them and stop it. He fights through his own fear to get to whatever's been taking people, only to find himself trapped in his own past.

Paperback on Amazon
E-book on Amazon
Paperback on B&N
E-book on B&N
E-book on Kobo
E-book on iTunes

Can This White Woman Get Arrested?

Apparently not.

Jessie Kahnweiler, a white comedian, tried to deliberately get arrested in order to demonstrate white privilege at work. She pretended to be drunk in public, went swimming in a public fountain, patted police officers on the back (which has been interpreted as assault and resulted in arrest before when the "perp" was a person of color) and even tried to sell drugs to a couple of cops. Number of arrests? Zero.

Read the whole thing, and watch the video, here.

Thanks to Alisha for the link.

ETA: Sorry for the humongous video. :/ Blogger's size-chooser-thingy for pics and videos has never worked for me.

Calvin and Hobbes

The very first Calvin and Hobbes comic was posted today, thirty years ago. It was an awesome comic, and it ended too soon. Read that first strip here.

Angie

Paris

Paris after 9/11.

Let’s keep these people in our prayers, who so graciously kept us in their prayers after one of the darkest periods of our history.

Paris, and everyone else affected by the attacks tonight, you are in my thoughts and prayers.

Beth Greene on Tumblr

I'm not a "prayers" kind of person, but I endorse the sentiment wholeheartedly.

Why Amazon Is Taking Over the World

So I finished my first square for the World's Biggest Christmas Stocking. It was fun, and when I finished I wanted to make another one. So I picked a new pattern and ordered yarn for it from Yarnspirations, the company that's donating some money to a charity whenever you buy a skein of yarn from them. That was the seventeenth.

It's now the twenty-second and my package still hasn't arrived.

I got a note from the company with a tracking number. Okay, cool, let's see where my box is.

I poke around a bit, and first thing I see is that it takes them at least two business days to just pack your box and get it out of the warehouse. Umm, okay. Two days after I order something from Amazon, it shows up at my doorstep about 90% of the time, and that's without expedited shipping. (And that's just two days, not two business days, unless the second day is a Sunday, and sometimes even then.) But okay, I live in Seattle; I'll bet not everyone gets service that fast from Amazon, and I don't know where Yarnspirations is shipping from.

I go looking for their tracking system. Clicking on the tracking number in the e-mail takes me to a general page where they're trying to sell me a bunch of stuff. Down in a lower corner is a big red button that says "View Order History." Okay, would've been nice to go there straight from the tracking number, but whatever. I click on the big red button.

I've ordered from them twice, and there's a line item for each one. The order from the seventeenth is on top, and... it says "Complete."

Funny, I don't consider that order complete, seeing as how I don't have it in my hands yet.

I click on "View" to, presumably, get more info about this order. I get my name and address, and what I ordered, what it cost, payment method, that sort of thing. Under "Shipping Method" it says "Shipping Option - US Standard Shipping." Wow, that's incredibly generic. USPS? UPS? FedEx? Ralph's Tricycle Fleet...? Anything? No clue. There's a tracking number with no-kidding twenty-two digits in it, but it's not clickable. And since I don't know which company they gave my box to, I can't try plugging that huge number into anyone else's tracking system either.

Oh, but there's a button to one side that says "Track This Shipment." Cool, that must be what I want, so I click on it.

It says:

Shipment #100024731
GM-SPE: 9261293250801316909589

and nothing else, with two "Close Window" buttons, one above and one below. That's the order number, which was on my e-mail, and the tracking number I got on the previous page, which makes this tracking page perfectly un-helpful.

And that's about it. Short of putting in some kind of help ticket, I have no way of getting any more info. I'm hoping that by the time they'd have gotten back to me, I'll have my package. [crossed fingers] Tomorrow, maybe? The seventeenth and twentieth are two business days during which they hopefully got my yarn packed, and tomorrow is the twenty-third, which would give three days for actual transit. I don't remember how long the first one took to arrive, so I can't make a comparison there.

Maybe it's my fault. I haven't done any knitting in at least half a dozen years or so, and starting up again has re-kindled my enthusiasm for it. I did most of my knitting while sitting here watching Netflix on my computer. It took me about ten days to knit my square, and apparently it only takes ten days to burn in that habit; it now feels weird sitting here watching TV online without something to do with my hands. That makes me a little more eager than I was before.

But still, seriously, if it gets here tomorrow, it will have been almost a week. And their order tracking system doesn't deserve the name; it just ticked me off. If Amazon does end up taking over the retail world, as so many hysterics keep screaming will happen, this will be why -- faster, superior service.

I for one will welcome our Amazonian overlords. I wish they'd take over this yarn vendor and whip them into shape.

Angie, listening with annoyed impatience for a knock on the door

Marriage Equality, Finally

The Supreme Court finally grants marriage equality.

Try as they might, people opposed to marriage equality haven't been able to come up with any rational reasons for their stand. "Because our god disapproves," is not a rational reason in a nation with separation of church and state. "Because the children," is not supported by any legitimate research. (In fact, I can't give a link because I didn't save it at the time, but I remember reading an article a few years ago discussing research that showed the best outcome for children, looking at emotional adjustment, behavior, and performance in school, came from having two lesbian parents.) "Because pedophiles," is a null argument because adults having sex with minors (ignoring the complications of what that means and where the lines are drawn) is still illegal. And that idiot in California who tried to get a proposition on the ballot requiring that anyone who commits "sodomy" be executed by whatever member of the general public got to them first (no, seriously) just makes the anti-GLBT side look even more whacked than it actually is.

I'm sure there are plenty of people moaning and gnashing their teeth today. But look, the sky isn't falling. If you think gay sex is icky, then good news: you're not required to have gay sex. Your kids are no more likely to be gay now than they were last week. And if your kid does come out to you, you're still free to disown him or her, and the people around you who disapprove would probably have disapproved last week, while people who would've agreed you did the right thing last week will probably still think that now. And if your church doesn't recognize gay marriage, your church still isn't required to marry gay couples. Nothing has changed for straight people.

Which is the whole point. Nothing has changed for straight people. We can go about our lives as we always have, because the world still treats us the way it always did.

And in fact, only thirteen states still banned marriage between same-sex couples yesterday. We were already mostly there; the Supremes just acknowledged the way society was moving.

Note, though, that this decision doesn't mean homophobia is dead in the US, any more than the election of President Obama meant racism is dead. There are still plenty of people who see straight as "normal" and gay as "deviant," and who want the laws of the land to reflect their views, some of whom are active on the political stage.

Ted Cruz and Scott Walker are two Republican presidential hopefuls who support a Constitutional amendment allowing states to ban same-sex marriage. Considering that the majority of states allowed it yesterday, and polls show a majority of Americans are in favor of it, I have no idea where these guys thought that amendment would come from. There's no way they'd ever get the two-thirds ratification required to pass it, so...? Marriage equality doesn't affect them, so it looks like either their own fears and squicks on display, or (more likely IMO) it's a flag-waving act, aimed at the very small but very loud radical-right voting pool. "Hey, look how conservative I am! Vote for me!" Of course, that tactic hasn't worked in the last couple of presidential elections, but if these guys want to give it another whirl, bully for them.

And others have already discussed Clarence Thomas's dissenting opinion against marriage equality. From Thomas's opinion:

The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

Seriously? Because being a slave, confined and beaten and raped, isn't at all undignified. Because being dragged away from your property (often losing it permanently) and locked up in an internment camp, declared a danger to the country of which you're a citizen, hated and reviled by your fellow citizens, isn't at all undignified. And having people sneer and snark at your marriage, telling you it's just pretend, and having your children harassed and mocked because their parents aren't really married and they don't really have a normal family, that's not at all undignified.

The fact that Justice Thomas, who's married to a white woman, clearly benefits from the results of Loving v. the State of Virginia, and yet declares that Obergefell v. Hodges -- which grants the exact same kind of marriage rights (and dignity) to a group of people who were discriminated against exactly the way interracial couples were discriminated against before Loving -- is wrong and pointless, is bogglingly irrational. It reflects a lack of compassion, and an "I've got mine so you all can go suck it" attitude.

There are plenty of people, though, even in conservative states, who are ready to jump right into getting gay and lesbian couples married, because "conservative" is not the same as "asshole."

Gerard Rickhoff, who oversees marriage licenses in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, has removed the words "male" and "female" from the licenses. He's prepared extra work stations and is ready to keep the office open late. He's planning to have security on site to deal with protesters, "so there's no possibility of discomfort or hate speech." And if same-sex couples are turned away by clerks in other counties, he has a message for them: "Just get in your car and come on down the highway. You'll be embraced here."

Props to Mr. Rickhoff, and others like him in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Michigan, mentioned in the above HuffPo article, and to people in all states, of all political orientations around the country whose action and support, however loud or quiet, let this happen.

I'll wrap with a quote from President Obama: "Today we can say in no uncertain terms that we've made our union a little more perfect ... America should be very proud."

World's Biggest Christmas Stocking

If you knit or crochet, or are willing to learn, this is an incredibly cool project for a great charity.

The Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation helps kids who've lost a military parent in the line of duty pay for college. Caron, the yarn manufacturer, is putting together a project to make the world's biggest Christmas stocking, and is asking people to knit or crochet three-foot squares and send them in to be assembled. They're going for an entry in the Guinness Book, which is also cool.

If you buy your yarn from Caron, they'll give fifteen cents per skein to the CFPF. If you just want to participate in the world's-biggest-Christmas-stocking project, you can buy your yarn from someone else, or use yarn from your stash, so long as it's worsted weight. There are knit patterns and crochet patterns you can download and print out. All the crochet patterns are Beginner or Easy, and the knitting patterns are mostly Beginner or Easy, with a couple of Intermediates that use mosaic colorwork. Even if you're just learning, you can find a pattern that'll work for you. It might take a while to do a three-by-three square, but if you use a Beginner level pattern, it won't be hard. If you have a favorite pattern you want to use instead, you can do that, so long as you end up with a three-by-three foot square.

If you're worried that you'll be too slow, note that they've been working on this since last November, as far as I can tell. They planned for it to go into this year, and sure enough, they're only 20% through right now. Looks like there'll be time for fast workers to do several squares if they want, and for beginners or people who are just busy to do one without knocking themselves out. :)

The main page, with a progress meter, is here.

Gardening Notes

I used to do a lot of gardening before I got married. I lived with my mom for a few years, and she had a yard with some empty space. Mom's into instant gratification, so she mostly bought plants and pots. I've always liked planting seeds; watching them push up out of the soil, get their first set of leaves, and another, and another, and grow into something that has flowers -- that's pretty cool.

Every spring (which in California is, like, February, or maybe late January) I'd start planting seeds in pots or trays or whatever containers I could get ahold of. I used the lids of paper boxes once, but they were really too shallow, and they dried out too fast, being cardboard and all. After we'd been doing this for a couple of years, I'd saved up a bunch of the plastic six-packs and pony packs and small plastic pots that Mom's plants from the nursery had come in, and used those. They worked much better.

Around March or April (I honestly don't remember anymore -- it depended on the weather and how I felt) I'd get out this ancient pickaxe we'd inherited from when my grandparents owned the house, and go over the beds. The soil in Cupertino is dry and sandy and gravelly, and it produces a fine crop of rocks, up to fist-size and occasionally larger, all on its own. No matter how I worked it, or what amendments we put into it (we tried peat moss, compost, actual potting soil, and various combinations) it was back to its dry, pebbly self by the end of the season at latest. I dug down about eighteen inches or so, then mixed in whatever we were adding that year with a spade, so we had great soil to plant out my babies.

By mid-summer, the yard was blooming with pansies and alyssum and baby's breath and yarrow and delphiniums and columbines and carnations and sweet peas and lobelia. All right, I'll admit I had great beginner's luck with the delphs, and could never get them to sprout after that first year. :/ But the delphs kept coming back, mostly, for a few years; I think the last plants finally gave up after four or five. They were gorgeous while they lasted.

And the alyssum and carnations and sweet peas smelled wonderful. Flowers are supposed to stink real pretty, you know? :)

I haven't done that in a long time, though. I planted some columbines in pots while we were in our first apartment in Long Beach, and some bowls balanced on the fence at the condo, but it wasn't the same. My health got worse, and I couldn't get out to tend plants every day.

But now we're in Seattle and I have a little yard, so I thought I'd try it again.

Mind, the yard gets like four and a half minutes of sun per day, and less if it's cloudy, which... well, this is Seattle. But there are plants that do okay in shade, so I'm giving it a shot.

I'm not used to gardening in an area where it gets below freezing every year, though, much less an area where it snows, like two years out of three, at least a little. Wait, seasons? What are seasons...? :P When can you plant seeds outside? I didn't want to get everything sprouted and then have it all freeze. My husband noticed a local community ed program had a workshop coming up for starting seeds, though, and that helped. I didn't go, but I figured if they were planting seeds on a particular date, then it was probably safe, so I decided to plant mine shortly after.

I ordered a bunch of seeds online, and decided to try those pressed cardboard type pots, the ones you can supposedly plant right in the dirt? Although I have no intention of doing that, because I read somewhere that although they do break down eventually, they maintain their rigidity long enough that the plants end up essentially rootbound anyway. But the site I ordered from didn't have the little plastic pots I'd seen in nurseries (basically the 4" pots small plants come in when you buy them; I bought some while experimenting with containers back in the '90s and they were like a quarter a piece). All they had were either shallow little seed trays that required a ridiculous amount of space, or these compressed pots, so there you go.

Bad idea.

The problem is that they dry out like crazy. I water every day, and they're still bone dry by the next watering time. With plastic pots, moisture can only evaporate through the top, but with these compressed pots, moisture can exit from all sides. Which I suppose isn't a major problem if you have an extra-humid greenhouse, or if you sit your pots in huge trays of water. I suppose I could do the latter, but I was born and raised in California, which has droughts with depressing regularity. A wide, shallow tray of water evaporates like crazy, which is a huge waste. So. :/

And about a week ago, I went out to find my plants all knocked around, and some of the pots were bent or broken. Someone's cat got curious. :/ I picked things up and put them back together as best I could, but I lost a lot of plants, including all of my pansies, which really ticks me off.

I've had cats crapping in my pots before, and this is a similar problem. If it happens again, I'll get some mousetraps. They're great -- they sting hard enough to make Mr. Kitty yowl, but don't do any real damage. Great deterrents; even the dimmest cat eventually gets the message.

In the mean time, though, I have a lot less to plant out than I was hoping. Losing all the pansies is really annoying.

I have about half the alyssums left, some Shasta daisies (planted for my husband, because he likes daisies; I've never planted them from seed before, so this is an experiment), about half the lobelia, and some snapdragons, which I've also never planted before, for whatever reason.

Somewhere in this process, my husband started talking about how he'd love to grow some tomatoes.

Umm, okay. The problem is that tomatoes need sun, and we don't have any in the yard. But then I noticed that our little balcony off the living room (which is on the second floor, because Seattle) gets some sun. Huh, that might work.

At that point it was too late to plant tomato seeds, so I told him to look through the online site I'd used and find a tomato plant he wanted to try. I'd order the plant and put it in a pot on the balcony. He was happy with that, but he's almost as good a procrastinator as I am. :P Finally, about a week and a half ago, I went online to order a tomato plant for him. He could live with whatever I got, and maybe next year he'd pick one for himself, earlier.

Except it turns out you can't order just one plant from this site. They sell them in threes only, and I really didn't want three tomato plants taking over our tiny (no, really, it's miniscule) balcony. They'll do a mix-and-match thing with three different plants, though, so okay, I could live with that. I set up a three-pack with a tomato, plus basil and chives, and went to process the order.

Oops, they apparently can't ship live chives to Washington state. No clue why. :/

I tried a couple of other herbs, and they all got bounced. Of course, none of the plant listings tell you ahead of time which states they don't ship to. [sigh] I finally gave up and got another tomato plant, different kind. We'll see which one works best.

The tomatos arrived the other day, which was pretty cool. I've never ordered plants by mail before, and was wondering how they'd be packed. Turns out they have these little three-cell plastic clamshell packs, inside a cardboard box. The root balls are pretty small, but the plants seem healthy, only a bit battered from shipping.

The next step is "hardening them off," which I've never done before, because see above re: California. Apparently you have to keep the plants inside for a day or two, then them used to being outdoors slowly, a few hours a day, until they're ready to be outside full time, like big, grown-up plants. Umm, okay. [bemused smile]

So I have two tomato plants and one basil plant living in the downstairs bathroom, in the sink (because the tub is used for storage -- boxes and an old printer and stuff -- with the light on 24/7. I just put them outside for the first time. I hope they don't, like, die of shock or anything, and that Mr. Kitty doesn't show up. :/

Angie

How Not to Be Awkward Around People With Disabilities

This is a fun video, with lots of great info and some laughs. Thanks to Lee Wind for the link!



Angie

Looking Forward

Yesterday was my birthday -- I turned fifty-one. Which makes today the first day of my second half-century.

It sounds pretty neat, actually. I've never had any age hang-ups, and thoroughly agree with this cartoon by The Oatmeal, but being fifty-one feels unusually cool. The Start Of My Second Half-Century sounds like a beginning, and it's a beginning to something pretty darned big. There's an excitement in that, like I'm starting a new slate and I can write whatever I want on it. The past is even more past than usual, and this is the first step into the future, like I've come to a whole, huge beach of fresh sand to leave footprints on.

That's what it feels like, anyway, and I'm looking forward to the next chunk of my life.

Angie