stoutfellow

When I lie down, even for a nap, Buster and Gracie like to join me. Buster lies near the head of the bed, curled into the crook of my arm, and Gracie crawls down to my lower torso, usually slipping under the covers. Buster's is kind of pro forma; after ten or twenty minutes, he jumps down and goes to his Safe Place, under the hassock on the other side of the bed.

Lately, Gracie's gotten a little testy. If she's already on the bed when Buster wants up, she'll snarl and even feint at snapping. I give her a little shove when she does that, but still, Buster (twice her mass!) has become reluctant to challenge her on this.

He has now taken to going to the other side, climbing up on the hassock and getting on the bed from there. That achieved, he then steps over (or on!) my head to cross to his preferred spot. I'm usually quick enough to grab the pillow and sit up so he can cross unmolested, but not always.

:shakes head:

This time, shipt came through; the only deviations were the brand of milk and the amount of orange juice (1/2 gallon as opposed to a full gallon). It also included two boxes of cereal, a bag of the special treats I only give the dogs once a day, and some potato bread.

I still hope the InstaCart strike is settled fairly and soon.

On my Kindle, I have a folder labeled "Current". The books in that folder are the books that I read on my bus rides to and from work; I read a section of one, then shift to the next, and when I finish a book I remove it from the folder and replace it with another.

Those bus rides aren't happening now, of course. For the time being, then, I've put dead-tree volumes on hold, and I'm reading only from the Kindle.

Currently, the setup is for nine books: three non-fiction, three genre fiction, and three non-genre fiction. Currently loaded:

Non-fiction: _The Life and Letters of Louis Agassiz_; Pliny the Elder's _Natural History_; Richard White, _The Republic for Which It Stands_. The first two are from Project Gutenberg. I remember reading about Agassiz when I was a kid, so I grabbed the Life and Letters when I saw it on PG. White's book is a fascinating history of the U.S. during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, tying together seemingly disparate threads (connecting, e.g., Little Big Horn and the destruction of the Pennsylvania coal miners' union).

Genre fiction: A collection of Russian folk-tales, Mary Renault's _The Persian Boy_, and (a reread) John Scalzi's _Redshirts_. The first is another freebie; I'm not sure whether I got it from PG or elsewhere. The OCR is dreadful, but the stories are amusing if predictable. I'm not quite comfortable with classing the Renault as genre, but the first book of the trilogy included Alexander's childhood visions of Heracles and other gods, so I'm hanging it there.

Non-genre fiction: Michener's _Centennial_; George McCutcheon's _Brewster's Millions_; George Eliot, _Daniel Deronda_. The first is a decades-later reread, and parts of it cross over with _The Republic for Which It Stands_. The second is a fluffy turn-of-the-century novel about a man who, having inherited a million dollars (in 1902, mind) has a shot at another seven-million dollar inheritance, provided that he squanders the original million. (He doesn't seem to know the proverb about birds, hands, and bushes.) I got the Eliot from PG, again; I haven't read anything of hers that I haven't enjoyed.

I am not close to finishing any of these, but by focusing on them I should make some headway this month.

I just gave myself a (partial) haircut, for the first time in my life. I kept getting hair in my eyes and even my mouth, and finally lost patience with it.

I didn't try to cut the hair in back, but lopped several inches off most of the hair in front, from the forehead and sides. I feel much better, and the mirror doesn't look too awful.

I did have to fight off an attack of mirror disorientation - getting the scissors tilted correctly, moving them *towards* my hair instead of away, and so on. But only once: most of the operation, before and after, went smoothly.

In the Questionable Content forum, there's some ongoing discussion of middle school (what we called "junior high" in my time and place) and bullying. I guess my experience was exceptional; I only recall two instances when someone tried to bully me. Both occurred in shop classes. One of them isn't particularly interesting, except that teacher intervention did resolve it. The other...

This was a wood shop class. There was a small classroom attached to the shop, and we would meet there for five or ten minutes before getting to work. On one particular day, the teacher not being in the room, Mitch Collins decided to pick on me. Mitch was plumpish, but had a fair amount of muscle, and I was a skinny little kid, an obvious target. We exchanged words, and he threw a punch - a light one, and I dodged most of it, but still a punch.

The teacher came into the room, and a few minutes later sent us into the shop. As we passed through, a guy named Alwin Holman - black kid, nobody I knew in particular, physically well-built - came over to me and asked why Mitch hit me. I mumbled something noncommittal, and Alwin walked away. I went to my station to work on my project, and a few minutes later Alwin came by again and said, "Mitch won't bother you any more." And he never did.

Alwin, if you're out there, I remember, and am grateful.

I mentioned that I was rereading the half-dozen Discworld novels that followed _The Fifth Elephant_, and that I felt they were connected. I just finished _Night Watch_, and noticed two internal connections I hadn't realized before.

The event that threw Vimes and Carcer back in time almost has to be the catastrophe at the center of _Thief of Time_. So here's a plot connection between books belonging to different subseries.

Also, there's a discussion of foreign affairs early on involving Vimes and, I think, Vetinari, concerning the possibility of war between a couple of small countries - the same two countries that actually did go to war in _Monstrous Regiment_ - a standalone, though Vimes and some other Watchmen, and also William de Worde (from _Truth_), put in cameos.

These aren't tight connections, but plot connections between different subseries or standalones are pretty rare in Pratchett, so these interested me.

Today, I made a batch of Rice-a-Roni, for the first time in my life. (I'm reasonably sure we had it on occasion when I was a kid, but I haven't had it as an adult.) I am now being earwormed by their old jingle ("Rice-a-Roni! The San Francisco treat!", complete with trolley bells). It was cheese and broccoli flavor, so I could eat it today; I ate half, and put the rest in the fridge for tomorrow.

I wouldn't call it delicious, but it met my three criteria: hot, filling, and tasty. I've got two more boxes, plus two more cans of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup and two cans of Bush's Baked Beans; each should provide me with two dinners, so another couple of weeks before I'll have to get more or similar.

I'll probably try again to get some milk tomorrow.

For no particular reason: I have Groove Music doing a random trawl through my music. The screen shows a window of thirteen songs. (You can scroll ahead or back, but thirteen is all you can see at one time.) For no particular reason, here's the current set, starting from the current song

Sly & the Family Stone, "Love City"
The Vogues, "You're the One"
Mike & the Mechanics, "Black & Blue"
Barbra Streisand, "People"
Lesley Gore, "Brink of Disaster"
The Seekers, "The Times They Are a Changin'"
Lesley Gore, "My Town, My Guy and Me"
Elton John, "Little Jeannie"
Tommy James, "Crystal Blue Persuasion"
Jackson Browne, "The Load Out"
Mary Hopkin, "Goodbye"
Gene Pitney, "Last Chance to Turn Around"
Diana Ross, "This House"

For whatever it may be worth.

I can't shake this cough; I wake up every morning with my mouth tasting, bizarrely, like chicken stock.

I can't get more than a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep. I go to bed at 8 or 9 PM, and wake up at 11, at 1, at 3.

Basically, I feel like crap, but I still have to prepare my online lectures. I'm currently putting together a PowerPoint slide show about mathematics in the Roman Empire and the following period of retransmission, leading up to the work of Fibonacci.

I haven't been able to add audio yet, but someone at IT pointed me to a source that may help me clear that up.

What I'd really like to do is just curl up in bed, and stay there until I start feeling better, but a) I'd starve and b) I still have a job to do.

Bleah, I say. Bleah!

I cannot begin to describe my frustration with Wacom. After a whole series of roadblocks to getting the tablet up and running, I asked to reset my password. I received an e-mail with a link to the password-reset page. I entered a password, repeated to confirm, and pressed "Submit". Nothing visible happened; when I went over to the login page, it rejected the password I had entered.

The e-mails suggest going to the Wacom support. All it has are links to a bunch of FAQs, none of which are relevant to my problem. There is no place to chat or state a specific problem.

Swelp me, if I have to fall back on PowerPoint with voice-over, I will be well and truly pissed. (Well, actually, I'm there already...)