Any World (That I'm Welcome To)

I have a huge mandarin orange tree in my backyard. After eating lots and picking bags and bags full for family and friends and coworkers, there are still probably hundreds of mandarins on the tree. Some of which I can't reach even with a ladder and a long-handled tool. (Yes, I'm planning to gradually bring the size down to something more manageable.)

So what could I do but pick bags more and start handing them out to strangers? It was a good reason to introduce myself to a few more of my new neighbors, especially the ones who can see my tree from their backyard. I even walked to the park, handing out oranges to anyone who would take them. This felt hilariously sketchy, and there are fairy tales about strange women trying to give you fruit...but it's a friendly neighborhood and everything was fine. Several nice old ladies and dads with little kids got unexpected snacks. Lots of people smiled.

When so much else is stressful and so much isn't within one person's power to fix, it's nice to have at least one small, concrete way to make people's day a little better. And it makes it easier to believe that other little things will add up and matter too.

I am hoping for good things for the world this new year, despite the many reasons for pessimism. All we can do is keep trying and hoping.

Desk job-induced muscle strain has been giving me arm trouble for some months, which has made leaving work to log onto my own computer for more mousing and keyboarding unappealing and occasionally too painful to contemplate. However, I got an ergonomic keyboard at work like the one I already have at home to go with my ergonomic mouse, which is helping a bit, and I recently figured out that I might also be sleeping on my arm funny in addition to everything else. Not sure how to stop doing that but I will try!

The keyboard is the Kinesis Freestyle 2 with palm rests and tenting and the mouse is the Anker vertical mouse, in case anyone is interested. In addition to letting your wrists sit at a more natural/less twisted angle, the keyboard's split lets you keep your arms at a position where you don't have to turn your shoulders inward to reach the keys either. This particular vertical mouse is exactly like a regular mouse, only on its side so you don't have to torque your arm to use it. I thought there would be a learning curve with both and was presently surprised to discover that it was almost nothing--I could use pretty much all the same movements I've learned over the past decades, only with less strain. I'd recommend looking into these if anyone else has similar strain! The mouse in particular is a very cheap investment, too.

I was able to visit some much-loved family members for Christmas, which was wonderful. I made it home safely before coming down with Influenza A. The flu is less wonderful, but at least it has been a relatively mild case (hooray for flu shots). And I have been more or less able to manage for myself with the benefit of grocery delivery and relatives dropping off homemade muffins on the porch; when I had Covid, I could hardly get out of bed for a month, so this is vastly less terrible. Still, do try to avoid getting the flu! "Mild" still includes headache, vomiting, crushing fatigue, and a fever of nearly 102 degrees, among other symptoms. You do not want this. Also, there was a local Tamiflu shortage and I very nearly could not fill the prescription. I definitely wouldn't have been able to get it if I hadn't had a relative able to drive to a pharmacy an hour away on my behalf in the hopes they would still have some when she got there. I don't know if this was a local blip or if it's a more widespread problem, but if you too would be prescribed Tamiflu, keep it in mind.

Anyway, I have spent the last week on the couch rewatching favorite movies. There could be worse things. Query: in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, are we to understand from that one little flashback scene during the letter that Darcy and Wickham were college roommates? Because that sounds hilarious. Well, not for Darcy, who looks like he's about to say, "Wickham, we talked about this. Tie a cravat on the doorknob when you have company." Also hilarious: the way Darcy spends an increasing amount of time fiddling with his pinky ring as he is more and more tempted by matrimony. His feelings will not be repressed! I also appreciate the way his reaction to being caught wandering around wet and half-dressed like he's preparing for a Hanes His Regency Way photo shoot is panic, like a normal person. "Do I have pond weed in my hair? I bet I have pond weed in my hair oh my god she must think I look like a complete idiot. A weedy, muddy idiot. Okay, play it cool. Ask something normal and socially appropriate. Like...um... 'And are your parents in good health?'" I wonder how he managed to change that fast, cravat and all, to be able to return and greet them properly. You also have to wonder where that convenient servant came from to lead his horse away given that he didn't tell anyone he would be arriving that day. Is the staff accustomed to him showing up a day early and taking a swim or what? Questions for the ages.

Here's hoping for a good 2025.

I keep trying not to let my hopes about The Rings of Power get too high, and it keeps surprising me by being supremely good at most of the things I like about a show. Do I have nitpicks? Sure, but nothing critical yet. And it does some things so well. ( Minor spoilers. )

The Terror: A Mystery is a novella by Arthur Machen published in 1917. All over Britain, mysterious deaths are occurring: a whole family people running straight into bogs as if in terror, factory workers somehow pecked to death, a whole family bludgeoned, horses suddenly freaking out and stampeding right over people for no apparent reason. The story focuses on how a little Welsh town the author says he'll pseudonymize as "Meirion" handles this mysterious terror. Is it some horrifying new weapon of war, a mind-control ray the Germans are using to make people and animals panic from a distance?

I'm only about halfway through, and found the scariest part yet. One of the hypotheses the villagers develop is that "German panic ray" idea, the invention of which someone attributes to a Swedish professor named Huvelius. He's apparently an incredibly kind person, practically a saint--but also deeply cynical about humanity. He wrote that people are terrible and therefore war is inevitable, and the best way to handle this is to win as quickly as possible so the fewest people die. Just the kind of person who might invent a panic ray to demoralize the enemy.

But here's the really scary passage, part of the description of the cynical writings of Huvelius:

So the prince will make himself friends in the very councils of his enemy, and also amongst the populace, bribing the wealthy by proffering to them the opportunity of still greater wealth, and winning the poor by swelling words. “For, contrary to the common opinion, it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth; while the populace are to be gained by talking to them about liberty, their unknown god. And so much are they enchanted by the words liberty, freedom, and such like, that the wise can go to the poor, rob them of what little they have, dismiss them with a hearty kick, and win their hearts and their votes for ever, if only they will assure them that the treatment which they have received is called liberty.”

It's like a big flashing neon warning from 1917.

Just in time for spring planting, I suddenly acquired an entire front yard and back yard! Both modestly sized but plenty big enough.

The back yard is currently mostly lawn, which will fall victim to a sod cutter and a layer of wood chips as soon as I can manage it. There's already a mature mandarin orange tree, and I hope to put in a few more small fruit trees and shrubs, some pollinator-magnet underplantings, and maybe some vegetables if I can squeeze them in. The back yard planting may have to wait until fall, though.

The front yard already had no lawn, hooray. I am not wild about the pea gravel, which gets everywhere and can get quite warm despite being light-colored, but it will stay for now. The landscaping fabric underneath will come out in chunks as I plant things; weeds just grow right through it, so all it accomplishes is popping through the gravel to look ugly and leeching plastic into the soil. And probably baking the soil a bit, which is not great for the microlife down there. I will have to be careful planting because of all the pipes and conduits running across the yard. But currently, there are nice safe holes in the spots where I'm digging out the old shrubs which would require me either to constantly hack them back or let them grow into a looming hedge (no thank you). Well, safe-ish holes -- my dad discovered at least one had a bunch of cobbles about a foot down when he helped me dig up a stubborn shrub, like maybe the yard used to be covered in those and someone decided to just put a layer of dirt and gravel on top. Hopefully it was only in select spots...

I've already put in a few plants and will have more soon! My plan is to hand-water them for the first year or two, and then after that they should be fine being watered maybe once or twice per summer, so I won't have to deal with a fiddly irrigation system. One of the new plants (well, two, and I'm getting a third) is 'Pozo Blue' sage, a hybrid of Cleveland and purple sage. It smells amazing. Fingers crossed that the plants will like their new home!

I also dug out two of my herb pots and refilled them with fresh potting soil before sticking the plants back in. The alpine strawberries, chives, and green onions should be fine, and I'm sure the spearmint will bounce back because I'm not sure you can kill spearmint as long as it has at least a smidgen of dirt and water. I added small ollas to the pots, which I think those will be easier to handle than the ceramic watering spikes with wine bottle reservoirs I had before. One more herb pot to do -- more alpine strawberries, plus I'm adding a Vietnamese cilantro, which is a new plant to me. Maybe some basil to each strawberry pot too. Then I just need to re-pot Grandma's jade plant into a bigger pot, which I already have, and get the 'Little Miss Figgy' fig tree into the ground once its spot is prepared...

This is so much fun.

Somehow, work is doing ALL THE PROJECTS at the same time. They're almost all great projects (only one exception!), but we're all walking around with glazed eyes from trying to keep track of it all. And attending all the meetings. My normal weeks usually include our brief security check-in meeting (did anything bad happen last week/here's an update on what happened last week) and maybe one other meeting. The last three weeks have been pretty much back-to-back project planning and update meetings. I had three meetings yesterday alone.

Between that and keeping up on life admin, I've been on serious computer time overload. Which means arm and shoulder pain (mild for now, and I'd like to keep it that way) and lots of time when I can't bear to look at a computer screen for one more second. I've managed to catch up on a few comments recently, but I am still behind on longer stuff. But I will get to it!

After I deadhead the yarrow and calendulas and fertilize the herb pots. And fold some laundry and put away the dishes. All the non-computery things.

I finally got a new laptop, since given how long it takes to get electronics these days I thought I'd better make sure I got a new one before the old one finally dies. The past six years apparently erased my memory of how long it takes to configure everything. There has been a lot of NO, MICROSOFT, STOP THAT and swearing. And not a lot of anything else I wanted to be doing. It's taking even longer because Windows 11 is new to me. (Why are so many "updates" apparently nothing more than moving controls around? Did you like that button in the bottom left? Cool, now it's in the middle! Which accomplishes nothing useful but makes us look productive!) I think I'm getting there, so...better luck tomorrow?

At work, the hard drives of the shared workstation computers are critically full. IT asked us all to clear our downloads folders and browser caches. Between us all, that freed up maybe 300 MB. Yet many of the user accounts are showing huge numbers of files and many gigabytes of space used--even though they don't appear anywhere! Our working theory is that we've spawned an AI which is hiding itself in the shared computers. We can only hope it is a friendly AI.

I've been turning over a quote from Miriel in The Rings of Power and the way it encapsulates so much of the whole season's meaning.

"My father once told me that the way of the Faithful is committing to pay the price even if the cost cannot be known and trusting that, in the end, it will be worth it."

The narrowest meaning applies this only to the Faithful and being friends with elves. That makes it sound almost cult-like: the elves might be quasi-immortal and generally wise, but they're still people, and committing to pay an unknown price to stay loyal to a bunch of people regardless of their actual behavior is not a great plan.

But if you take it as a broader commitment to forging relationships outside one's own circle and helping others? Now that is probably what Tar-Palantir was trying to express. Or maybe the original meaning of a teaching he only dimly understands himself. And it's very much what this season was about. ( Spoilers for ROP. )

So, while I really liked The Rings of Power overall, there are definitely some issues, some bigger than others. As I mentioned, I disagree with some criticisms--I think it has a clear theme and isn't at all aimless. But others are sound. Bret Devereaux at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has some good ones. I'll briefly summarize some (not all) of those plus a couple of my own for anyone who wants to either join in griping about them or get a preview to see if the show hits a pet peeve. Some spoilers. ( Read more... )

Another book series recommendation, as spoiler-free as possible. Science fiction, partly near-future dystopian murder mystery and partly alien planet colonization mystery-ish, and notable for its nuanced treatment of mental illness. The books in publication order are Planetfall, After Atlas, Before Mars, and Atlas Alone.

The setup: the Atlas project took a thousand of Earth’s best and brightest off to seek God on an alien planet, leaving behind a time capsule to be opened forty years after its departure. Shortly afterward, a lot of Earth governments collapsed amidst massive riots. Now many areas are controlled by corporations which have taken over government functions, nearly everyone has artificial intelligence implants in their brains, and those implants are useful tools for the gov corps to control the unwillingly-indentured servants they’ve invested in training.

Interestingly, the reading order is flexible. Planetfall-the-book follows the colonists on the alien planet, while After Atlas and Before Mars happen at roughly the same time on Earth and Mars, and there’s no contact between the colony and our solar system. So you could read Planetfall first or last, and could potentially read Before Mars before After Atlas — which would change which book you would read knowing a looming Event was about to change the characters’ lives in drastic ways. Atlas Alone is really the only one you couldn’t read first, because it continues the story of some characters from After Atlas. If anyone reads the books in a different order, let me know what the experience is like!

The books all have mystery elements, especially the latter three. After Atlas is a straight-up mystery with a detective protagonist, while Before Mars kicks off with the main character discovering a warning in her own handwriting which she doesn’t remember writing (oh, and her wedding ring has been replaced by a fake, and there are footprints where no human should ever have walked…). Atlas Alone has a mysterious figure who communicates only via neural implant, a virtual reality game which somehow causes a real death, and ship’s crew who are probably up to no good. But the books are strongly character-driven as well, because you can have it all: plot and character and cool worldbuilding! The characters need to face their traumas, learn to have emotionally intimate connections with other human beings, and survive or improve their circumstances if possible. Not that this is easy or that they necessarily succeed on all counts…

( Read more... )
If this sounds at all like your cup of tea, please borrow the books from your library or buy them if that’s an option and improve the odds of a Book 5 a bit.