Sadtown, where Heebie U is located, is having a massive gas outage which is expected to last anywhere from a few days to two weeks. So none of the dorms have heat or hot water. Good times.
That reminds me of that scene in Red October where Fred Thompson says, "Russians don't take a dump without a plan." I guess it used to make me thing "Russians are meticulous and careful" but now it's more like "Otherwise they will forget to take down their trousers."
Day 8* of my son having COVID. He's going a bit stir-crazy now. Plus, my wife is not at home during the day, so I'm doing a full time job and trying to amuse him, and trying to keep him doing some occasional learning activities. It's fair to say I'm done with it now.
* technically, he's not supposed to return to school until 2 negative tests, and the little sod is still testing as strongly on the LFTs now as he was on day 1.
5: Does he have any symptoms? Did he ever seem really sick?
First day he had a headache and a fever, and was complaining about being thirsty. Maybe a very mild runny nose, too. By day 2, he was already basically back to normal with maybe a tiny bit of lingering sniffles. Except for that first day, when he had a fever of about 103.5-104, definitely milder than an ordinary cold.
My wife was more or less the same. She had about 2 - 3 days of feeling quite flu-y and then normal, but she tested positive on LFTs for 11 days.
Somehow I've not picked it up from either of them. Yet, anyway, there's still time for my son to pass it on.
First day he had a headache and a fever, and was complaining about being thirsty. Maybe a very mild runny nose, too. By day 2, he was already basically back to normal with maybe a tiny bit of lingering sniffles. Except for that first day, when he had a fever of about 103.5-104, definitely milder than an ordinary cold.
My wife was more or less the same. She had about 2 - 3 days of feeling quite flu-y and then normal, but she tested positive on LFTs for 11 days.
Somehow I've not picked it up from either of them. Yet, anyway, there's still time for my son to pass it on.
That's why I said "trousers" instead of "pants." To save editing by British people.
The deer are back outside my window. This time it is two large does. I was going to yell at them, but it's snowing and I think they found a dry spot. They're probably pregnant too.
4: One of my grandfathers used to note whenever he was making something for us that where he was brought up to "Measure three times, cut once", the saying in Russian was "Measure seven times, cut once".
Eventually someone said "Are they twice as careful or twice as bad at measuring?" which became a permanent part of the joke. Man, jokes like that, they stayed juicy for decades, you don't get jokes like that any more.
I've seen the Soviet-era workplace safety posters and I think it's that measurements are hard if you are drunk.
It's easier to live with the results though.
12.1: Isn't the canonical version, "Measure twice, cut once"?
And then there's my preferred version -- "Measure? Eh, it's close enough."
11: Step one of deer management is clapping. Step two is yelling. Step three is charging out at them (and yelling or clapping)*. Step four is hiring people to spray deer repellant all over the place. Step five is bringing in hunters. One may perform all of those in tandem, of course.
Step six is giving up, then repeat at step one.
*Make sure you are charging deer and not a pack of turkeys or a bear.
15: On the west coast, they need 50% more effort to get the same results.
17: We're going to put in some bushes to keep them back a few feet. There's no legal or practical way to hunt deer back there. You could kill one with an arrow, but you'd need the cooperation of a half dozen neighbors to do it without getting caught removing or burying the body.
I gave some more thought to the measuring question, and how this plays out in my actual experience. If you measure twice, and both measurements wind up in the same spot, then you're fine. But if they don't, you have to measure a third time, to decide which is right. If you're drunk, you're likely never to get two measurements to line up exactly, so maybe you try seven times, and then just use a spot somewhere in the middle.
19 You could just use cougar piss Moby, if you can't find it in the store maybe the corner bar would be an option.
Sorry not sorry.
15: not canonical in my family obvs!
This grandfather had been not only a Depression-era farm kid but eventually a exploratory geoengineer, used to working very far from depots let alone official repair shops, and he did not like wasting things. If he measured three times and they didn't line up on each other he'd probably stop to calibrate everything.
One of his life-framing stories was when the giant leaf springs did not arrive in time (wrt weather) despite having been ordered and verified a year in advance, and the crew got the vital stuff into one side of the jungle and out the other with heroic repair and cannibalization, and when they arrived at their destination harbor THE SPRINGS WERE WAITING. With a self-congratulatory note from home office that they had saved the crew the trouble of carrying them.
In revenge, he got promoted to head office in NY, promptly retired with ill health, and then lived much longer than he had worked with glorious Aramco-era health benefits.
21: Our local deer laugh at coyote piss (we don't have any cougars, at least).
I love 22. That's an excellent story.
Re: Russian quirks, I shared a lab with a Russian visiting scientist when I was an undergrad. He told this story about how their building had no ice maker, so when they needed ice, they would pour water into liquid nitrogen, fish out the ice, and use it. It seemed like a perfect encapsulation of the stupidity/silliness and ingenuity/tenacity I think of as the key characteristics of Russian science.
Everyone who lived near me that I talked to who didn't want Biden to win was Russian. Or least something eastern European.
Check-in: I've been hanging out here so much in part because I am just horribly, terminally lonely and I don't know what to do about it. It's one of these apparently widespread social problems that remains hard and awkward to talk about, since it implies that you're a loser whose company almost no one enjoys. Thank you all for putting up with my sudden logorrhea: it's an actual small kindness.
26: You're splendid imaginary company! If my geography ever becomes less dubious, I'd be happy to meet the non-imaginary you, too.
Aw. Sorry to hear you're feeling that way, lk. You are for real one of my favorite commenters, and I'm always momentarily perturbed by your frequent ineffectual threats to stop commenting.
Teo is right. Doug too. Take care of yourself please.
I hear you. With no kids at home anymore, a boyfriend who lives several states away, two years of working from home, and an in person social life that was never much and what there was of it severely disrupted by the pandemic, I am lonely as anything, and yes, it is embarrassing as anything to admit -- if I was more charming or a better person generally, I'd have more people around me. But this place is great for that, and you've been one of the best things about it as long as you've been here.
Having a teenager prone to periodically ranting about almost anything and then eating all the good food in the house is a good way to learn to appreciate silence.
With Newt back at college, I miss the ranting. Admittedly, it was a little wearing for the pandemic year when he was basically the only person I interacted with in person.
If my geography ever becomes less dubious, I'd be happy to meet the non-imaginary you, too.
Mine DID and I DID, and she was lovely.
Speaking for myself, I lean introverted, and when I'm on autopilot about people I wind up lonely. The pandemic has made anything but autopilot a lot harder, having this place and the chance of good conversations here is great for me.
26: oh please keep hanging out here! so enjoy you. also i think you have my email address? if not let's connect via heebie (she has my address) & get together irl. ❤️❤️❤️
Hey, it's also embarrassing to get compliments, but thanks and everything 27-31ish is reciprocated. Maybe the youth who now talk so freely about mental illness and neurodivergence will be able to smash up the awkwardness around this subject as they get older, too.
It was totally fun to hang out with heebie. And obviously I'm lucky to spend most of my time with an extremely charming social butterfly, whose various butterfly pals also deign to hang out with me, and with a charming if less talkative kid. It's just tough that my two closest non-household relationships have become less close -- in different ways and for different, unrelated reasons -- over the last year. It's easy to go overboard with the self-recrimination, and strangely hard to react by reaching out to other people who deserve more attention.
Didn't see 36, obviously. I'll drop you a line!
I'm sorry about the hard times, lurid. For what it's worth, I enjoy your logorrhea, and have from time to time stopped to admire the way you turn a phrase.
Lurid - I feel sort of the same way. I need to do more stuff, aside from work via ZOOM. and church. Tim is pretty introverted, so I don't have a social butterfly to pull me along. (I love him, but I do kind of wish I had someone who was outgoing and organized things.)
I also feel really out of practice, and I'. Starting to look for a new job, so I need to feel more confident. In my old neighborhood, I lived in an apartment building that was nestled among houses. The people in the houses didn't really talk to the apartment people. I knew some people in my building. Most bonds started when people complained about the landlord, butI never had anyone over for dinner.
My understanding, based on talking to the daughter of the previous owner, is that my new neighborhood is quite friendly when the weather is warmer. Tim has already started talking to the people who have dogs. Our neighbor cleared our driveway with his snow blower after the blizzard, because he saw that a snow lower did not come off the moving truck. Then they came over with cookies and introduced his kids. Another neighbor brought some stuff over the other day. These are nice people, and yet I'm not really sure how people engage with neighbors in a eighbirhiid of single family houses after 14 years in an apartment building with some long term tenants but a fair amount of turnover.
Also, so glad you are here. Have a good meat space life, but don't leave us!
Like, has anyone here ever joined a local newcomers club?
I forget why, but when we moved here, I joined the Junior League Auxiliaries. Then everyone had babies and nearly everyone moved to the suburbs or D.C. suburbs.
Still here. Work has been crazy for the past week or two. Not crazy busy overall, although a day or two was bad, but crazy with different random unpredictable shit coming at us. Random documents that are urgent with no warning, other documents that are intended to be printed on cardstock and handed out in person and we've never done either before, an edit to an existing document that seems relatively simple at first glance but on second thought probably doesn't belong to our contract at all... and all this happens to coincide with a big format change for the biweekly reports we're responsible for... definitely feel like I'm earning my pay these days.
As for introversion, I think of myself that way in general, but the past two years have definitely exposed the limits of it. I'd like to get more social interaction but I'm not sure how.
39: thank you! The phrasing-admiration is mutual, but it's still nice to hear, as I expect most people's response to my prose to be, roughly, "find someone who loves you as much as lurid keyaki loves adverbs."
40: neighbor-friendships can be nice, but also prone to ruts of dullness where you talk about home improvements and parking past the point where any reasonable person would politely stop. I think there are decent raconteurs in my neighborhood, but I missed the opportunity to ingratiate myself with them early on. Also, dogs help! I got (and gave) so much more attention when I had the dog, in part because one neighbor had a dogpelgänger for her and even we had trouble telling them apart.
I feel like you wrote that so that I would have to spend five minutes trying to make a joke about why your neighbor looked like your dog before realizing I couldn't make it work.
Everything was going fine until that awkward moment when you realized you were petting your neighbor's head.
But the antecedent was not unclear. You need to follow the rules.
Rules? The only rules I respect are "Be Excellent to Each Other" and the Analogy Ban.
At least they're going to start baseball now. I can always cheer myself up by remembering I'm not a Pirate fan.
48: You can't make an unclear antecedent joke unless the antecedent is, in at least a narrow technical sense, unclear.
OMG! A universal designated hitter! Has anybody checked on George Will?
I'm not looking at editorial pages this month.
Can a designated hitter fill in for anyone, but no one other than a pitcher is important enough to be allowed to suck at hitting or does it have to be a pitcher?
Can a designated hitter fill in for anyone, but no one other than a pitcher is important enough to be allowed to suck at hitting or does it have to be a pitcher?
I have a vague memory of on the Seattle radio hosts saying, "DH for Cirillo; make the pitchers hit."
Welp, the bill for New Hampshire to succeed from the union only got 13 votes in the statehouse, you guys are stuck with us.
I loved how one of the proponents of secession said "The country is going to fall apart, so we should get in on that early."*
*Freely translated from the NH-ese.
There was some concern that because NATO wasn't willing to defend Ukraine, the United States government might not be willing to defend New Hampshire. Defend New Hampshire from what, I'm not sure.
I know you all have been eaten up wondering if I'd ever locate the song that I couldn't place. It must have been driving us all crazy. GUESS WHAT! It was the moderately successful 2007 hit, Superstar by Lupe Fiasco.
Thanks. I've been commenting here for a while under it.
Speaking of new music, I just learned about Daisy the Great and I'm trying to figure out if it's worth it to see what other songs they have.
65: I just discovered (maybe it's new?) the updating Apple Music playlist Antidote, which is essentially current alt-rock type stuff (Florence & the Machine, HAIM, Arlo Parks, a million bands I haven't heard of). I don't exactly love it so far, but it's a sound I'm open to, and I bet I'll find stuff I like over time.
Most of their playlists are either not my thing (too poppy, too mellow, too electronic) or too much my thing (artists I already listen to, or 1 degree of separation). We'll see.
I'm not an elitist, so I use FM radio.
And because my niece uses my Apple account to FaceTime her remaining grandparent and I don't have the heart to ask for it back.
A dick joke, kind of.
A friendly acquaintance does (terrible) local theater. I went to see a musical he was in with a nephew before the pandemic. He's in a play, written by someone local, and he posted the information along with a website. The website is b a r e b a c k s t a g e .com. I cracked up, and went to sent the URL to AJ. To my dismay, it turns out, the link previewed with what I had NOT parsed correctly: Bare Backstage, plays requiring minimal staging and props.
Any play requiring minimal staging and props or just those plays about unprotected anal sex requiring minimal staging and props?
I'm watching Grandchester, which is like The Father Dowling Mysteries, except in England.
When will people learn. It's not the crime that gets you caught, it's the sending a heavy to follow Rockford.
There's probably worse ways to die than riding in a Firebird with Lindsay Wagner, but that's really reckless driving.
I don't exactly hate the process of take off/flying/landing, but I loathe the parking/airport/security/luggage on a level that really doesn't make sense and might mean that if that's the worst I have to deal with, I should be so lucky.
Very. I don't actually hate that part though. I like having plenty of time for a connection or to be rebooked if flights get canceled.
I hate it when they find the old tweets, but I just want to get home.
But plane can't. That's the problem.
All sight is plane sight. For those with two retinas it's biplane sight.
I'll miss his rendition of "She Bangs."
Bah. What a terrible choice.
Wordle 268 6/6
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86: Don't brag! /envy (Wordle seems to have specialized in words that my usual start word is nearly useless for.)
On another topic, why doesn't the NYT have a way to reliably get articles from YESTERDAY? To be specific, I thought it would be nice to read Rick Hasen's piece on mitigating disinformation "The Price of Cheap Speech." There's a picture of the frickin' page on Twitter, but searching or otherwise trying to find it in other than micro-elite type is a total fail.
Surely America's Newspaper of Record (tm) (aside from the Bee) provides this, and I will be embarrassed when some smart unfogged wizard tells me where it is. But until then...
Wordle 268 6/6*
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My third guess had a letter I should have known was wrong. I blame daylight savings time.
That is the same article as appeared in the March 13 print edition.