quietann

There's this Utah murder case I just found out about, with this woman who killed her husband with Fentanyl, who then wrote a children's book on grief and loss called "Are You With Me?"

I tried looking this up on Amazon, and presumably the listing's been taken down due to the, you know, murder parts, so the first result in the search currently leads to another author's book...

There Are Moms Way Worse Than You.

No, no, I don't... quite think so.

( Are You With Me? looks syrupy but perfectly fine. Meanwhile, There Are Moms Way Worse Than You looks quite fun.)

julian

I did manage to lose my wallet after Ny's thing, at/near Moruichi in Arlington, because I am Good Like That. I likely tried to put it back in my purse and it fell out.

Found out after the place closed, when I stopped for gas, so I couldn't even call them to see if they found it. (Will tomorrow, just in case.)

On the bright side, I'm going to be near my main bank tomorrow anyway, due to visiting my parents, so I can just get a new ATM card then. And I had to get a new driver's license anyway due to address change and not getting around to it yet, so, again, not a big thing.

Just, as usual, I liked that wallet, and I annoy myself. Harumph.

julian

Went to a memorial Thing, for

minoanmiss. (Speaking of, apparently her parents are getting told soon, so we're cleared to go posting in the clear.) Meant to get there early enough to help with cooking for the Watertown Free Fridge, but I didn't, or rather, I got there late because I hadn't had coffee and got some, and then discovered I had forgotten my seltzer I'd gotten as an event thing, so I waffled and came down on the "bringing something is important in a symbolic way" and stopped at Trader Joe's to get lemonade.

I did get there theoretically in time to cook (which we were doing as a memorial thing because Ny did buttloads of cooking for the Fridge), but I kept getting happily lodged in conversations and/or hugs instead, so, well, it was what it was, and it was good.

(I will donate to and/or volunteer at my local Food Pantry in her honor, methinks.)

Stickers, fans, poetry, food, pictures, recipes, music, people, laughter, sadness, occasional sudden memories popping up for people. Because of someone else's story, Eggplant Caponara will now be associated with Ny for me. And when I was outside taking a people break,

katarik sang what turned out to be an Episcopal mourning hymn but which to me (before I asked) was someone with a very nice voice singing something that works very well for her voice, which was steeped in sadness yet joy and beauty. It spoke to and of the afternoon.

I took enough fans that I can use some of them as Kid Prizes at work. (And buy some more later. The stickers aren't quite my thing; Ny gave them to small people she met in the subway and doctor's offices and so on, but I think I'll leave that as a thing to smile about about Ny, not as a Thing To Adopt.)

Saw someone from High School I literally have not seen in what, 30 years? (I mean, we read each other's journals, but it's different.) Honestly, haven't seen most of these folks in at least 15 years, because school eats my brain and then my work schedule is peculiar and family stuff is what it is, but the point is: was good. Even though I felt like I was hyper and a little off balance.

(Thanks to the Cambridge Commons co-housing folks for hosting. And thanks to the snowdrops there, too. First of the season for me!)

The Virtual Memorial, I have just learned, will be on April 12 at 1 pm Eastern, via Zoom. I assume the link will be shared on the Google announce list. (If you're not on there yet, just follow the link and explain how you know Ny to the nice friendly info-boxes.)

Also, more info on Things Ny Related, including vague but pertinent info on who her organs went to, here.

gingicat

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cz_unit

So I should write about this while I remember everything. As always I do key elements so I can remember whole sections....

Bec and I went on a trip to Norway and Sweden. And this.... was a seriously long one. About 14 days total and it was an incredible amount of fun. Definitely one of the longer trips I have taken and something I have wanted to do for about as long as I can remember...

So... We started by flying into Oslo, got to the hotel, reservation was for the second day not the first. I started to flip out, then realized I had a tool to fix this problem: MONEY! So I asked them for a room for the first night and everything just worked out for like $150 total. No worries, no problem, took care of it in 5 minutes as opposed to going bananas.

We crashed out, then did a bit of exploring that day and the next. Went to an amazing Ballet performance at the Oslo opera house the second evening, then on the third started the real trip with a flight out to Trondheim to meet our Vacations By Rail group. The ballet was experimental, we had front row center seats, and I could just reach out and touch them. I like classical, but I also like the experimental aspect including the "what does it MEAN" sort of thing. Ballet changes, it evolves, and if you just see Giselle and Swan Lake you're missing the evolution and it becomes stuck in time.

Anyway, about 14 or so British people and 2 other Americans were in the group. Nice enough, we discussed how insane the US was and I reminded the Brits that they did similar dumb things with Brexit. It's an opportunity for the rest of the world to stop looking to the US and being smothered by us and start charting their own destiny. I have thoughts on that, but will keep this to the trip.

Then from Trondheim it was off to Bolo via train, an 8 hour trip went by in no time. Then on to the Lofoten islands with rain, some snow, oddly kind of warm, really pretty place. I LOVED the electric ferry to the islands, an hour cruise on total battery power. They use what amounts to a huge magne crarger to charge the boat, and it works. So silent, went on deck, pretty....

From there we went to Narvik, which had an amazing war museum. It was.... timely... and interesting to remember how a few nazi traitors allowed the Germans in and supported them. That's one of the points to remember, about 20-25% of the population fully supported the Nazis, helped them, let them in, and got to be puppet leaders for years. And they are still there. They are always there... People did protest, and many of them died, but it's a lot better to die for what you believe in than be a simp and have to live out the rest of your long life as one. More on that another time.

Then off to Kiruna where we did camping in cabins (totally upscale) and got to see the Northern lights. Remember looking out to the horizon, then having someone tap your shoulder and point you UP? Yeah, it was beautiful, across the sky, amazing. Got two nights of that....

We did dogsleding, puppy playing, saw a local village, tried the local cuisine, did some shopping in town, got to see the ice hotel (the original one is amazing, the replica is a beer cooler), guided tours of the countryside, the whole nine yards. Bec was a great travel partner as well, it could get lonely without someone with you and she was a lot of fun to try new stuff with me. We had a lot of fun!

Finally after 3 days there it was time to come "home". We flew back to Stockholm and since we had an extra night there we dumped our baggage at the airport and grabbed the local train to go see the Vasa....

Now I remember the story of the Vasa when I was a kid. They brought up a 400 year old warship from the harbor and were restoring it, a process that in 1973 would take till "the next century". Well here we are, so we zipped down to the museum and SAW it.

Yeah, it was every bit as cool and amazing as I thought it would be. Felt like that 5 year old kid again, thinking "yes, this is the future I thought about" as I toured the exhibits.

Then we had dinner at a ramen noodle place (tasty) then flew home the next day. No problem with the flights, no problem with customs, no problem getting home.

And... Now I am home. Thoughts and observations will be another time, but it was good to get out of this stupid country and go someplace else for a bit. Weird to see how other people are, what they do, reflect on who I am and why. This weekend was the Pi party, then clean up the house and yard and prepare everything for spring. Which is coming and will come.

Oh also the US had to go to war while I was gone with Iran. I am so sure that will work out well, already gas prices are hitting the ceiling and I am sure energy prices will blow through the roof as well. Glad we have the truck, the Volt, and working solar panels.....

cz_unit

Went to Laurie's PI party last night, it was *fun*! Got to see people, say hi, talk about science stuff, and of course the host had a number of amazing pies to eat and enjoy. The family is veg, but they make such great stuff I was stuffed by the end of the evening.

Good to go out. Her last party was 6 years ago right as COVID rolled in. I think there were five of us total, everyone else cancelled and it was that night we went out to the grocery store to fill three shopping carts full of emergency food to augment the stuff we keep around. I still remember the checkout girl looking at us and saying "is something wrong?"

Um yes. Didn't leave the house for 3 months after that if I recall, glad we had the option and ability to do so.

So last night was fun!

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

vvalkyri

So my current plan is to stop off at Best buy tomorrow when I'm kicking around in Baltimore, and say hey, it feels like everything about this phone is wrong. I am getting texts half hour to an hour after they're sent, texts I send aren't necessarily even going through, everything refreshes weirdly, the system UI keeps crashing, it's unconscionably slow, and if I'm listening to audio on sub stack it sounds like it's underwater and YouTube is no longer willing to play in the background even though I pay for it.

The text thing is especially problematic because it's already a miracle if I notice email that comes to me on my main accounts because I have so much other random stuff that I mean granted it's partly because sub-stack adds you to emails all over the place and I need to figure out how to undo that.

This post brought to you by my having happened to notice a reference to something I thought there was a possibility I was invited to and so I went searching through my email and eventually found something at the end of January and then had to look up whether it conflicted with something else I'm committed to and found that date from an email near the end of January...

And also hopefully I haven't pointed poison to myself with overly old tortellini.

Anyway, I'm really hoping that showing up at a Contra dance doesn't count as moderate activity in terms of avoid moderate or strenuous activity the day before this particular study thing because I would really like to get to Contra tonight up in Baltimore.

So very tired.

Anyway, a pretty good rule of thumb is that if you haven't gotten a reply from me for something it's quite likely I have for whatever reason either not gotten that message or not seen that message or maybe saw the message meant to get back to it and didn't. I will never be upset with getting something like a.. or a question mark follow up. Somehow double ?? Follow up gives me a stress response.

dianec42

The first crocuses and snowdrops are blooming! I couldn't get a good snapshot of the snowdrops. Here, have some croci:

The shaded bits of the yard are doing their best to pretend it's not 70 degrees out:

It's going to be cold and wet again in a few days so I'm enjoying this while I can.

gingicat

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Current Mood: grieving

gingicat

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totient

Relative to my Iron Butt superpower, a very fast drive from Boston to DC yesterday. I picked up the car in Harvard Square instead of Somerville and brought my luggage with me, so I got to the Mass Pike quickly and easily saving at least 10 minutes and maybe more like 15. The car was unremarkable but got decent enough gas mileage not to need refueling, as neither did I. I hit 10 minutes of traffic total for NYC and another 10 minutes south of Baltimore. Total elapsed time 6:51 which is not a record but it's close, and I think only the second time I've made this drive in under 7 hours. The other time, in June 2020, is not a fair comparison.

For 24-hour one-way rentals like this I get an AYCE toll pass and it finally dawned on me that this made the I-95 express lanes north of Baltimore free. They probably saved me about 45 seconds. Not worth the buck and change it would have cost me a la carte.

dianec42

After seeing numerous recommendations, I finally got the book Atomic Habits from the library. As is my way, I have made extensive notes and am trying to apply it to everything in sight.

I have also been giving some thought to changing habits in retirement. Some existing habits bear revisiting: for example, did you know, Mr Diane & I have been getting up at staggered times... which is a remnant of when we only had 1 bathroom, over 20 years ago. Some new habits are also available now, such as doing grocery shopping on a weekday or ACTUALLY WORKING ON THAT DAMN QUILT.

One habit I've successfully tweaked: I had been lifting weights twice a week (doing basically the same 2 at-home routines I came up with during lockdown) but recently started struggling to get it done. I decided to simplify and make it totally boring/mindless: I stole a short list of exercises from an NPR article in January, took out a couple that I hate, added in some more upper body and should PT exercises, and have been successfully doing this routine THREE times a week since the beginning of February.

It'll be interesting to see what else I come up with. March is utter chaos, so I'm keeping my expectations low. Maybe the chaos will shake some things loose in my brain and open up new possibilities.

Needless to say this is the year I officially ~~gave up on~~ took a break from bullet journaling, and now I actually understand how habit tracking is SUPPOSED to work so I may need to start again.

vvalkyri

Entirely impromptu: I texted around to a few different people to say I was going to be out Bethesda ward and ended up getting together with high school friend and his three teens at California Pizza kitchen at Montgomery mall and then there was wandering around the mall and his teens are cool and it had been too long and the selfie as we were partying was deemed adorable by my other friend, his wife.

And then I sent another friend a happy birthday and our messaging history looked like we hadn't talked in like a year and I said I was going to have about a half an hour drive home and care to chat and then we did chat about all sorts of different things for about 4 hours past both of our bedtime and she's on the other coast and it was lovely almost like going to visit as I did several years ago before she moved across the country.

But Joe was going to be coming for lunch at 11:00 and I'm realizing if I also want to possibly be galavanting around in an inflatable frog suit at Stand Up For Science (noon to 3 near Hirshhorn) at noonish I should probably tell him to show up earlier than 11:00 if possible.

Eep ;)

gingicat

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gingicat

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vvalkyri

Which before I explain I should offer condolences to those who knew the person in Bostonish who recently died. I did not, other than somewhat by reputation and very much in passing, but she was very special to many people and seemed like someone it was yet again my loss to not know.

But this post is inspired by my mild befuddlement at just how much Rusty Old American Dream by David Wilcox makes me cry.

Some of us on the mutual Aid group are meeting at dew drop inn later tonight for a planning meeting. And someone referenced a song called Uneasy Rider that mentions a Dew Drop Inn (its lyrics are quite the ride) and something about the first lines gave me the earworm.

So I brought up the YouTube and I was singing along and started crying. And then later grabbed the lyrics to drop back into that chat and sang it without the YouTube and was back to sobbing.

I certainly didn't get enough sleep last night. But come to think of it I kind of remember this song has often done this. It's probably easy enough to figure out which lyric.

In other news it's been nice out today and I was up till 6:00 a.m. because someone called at 3:00 when they saw I was up because I sent something to a group chat and I guess that was helpful because I did actually almost finish unpacking from Presidents Day weekend. But it was less helpful because when I finally managed to get off the phone at 5:00 I was quite awake.

I had had tentative plans with happy that I had forgotten about and then remembered and then sent him a note at 5:00 saying hey I'm not in bed yet even and then his meeting ran late enough that he messaged right about the same time I actually opened my eyes and then we made our way to falafel and came back and I'm sad that falafel Incorporated is no longer carrying their vegan shawarma because they've started doing chicken shawarma and they had already had chicken shawarma but I think they're just trying to keep their menu very narrow. But I expressed my dismay and then someone else came in and is vegan herself and doesn't like falafel so she left and did not buy anything and I noted that maybe the people behind the counter might want to keep a running tally as to how many people Express dismay and how many people then leave without buying something. Their vegan shawarma was amazing.

But the falafel salad was also good.

And then somehow the last two and a half hours have gone poof. Some of it has been trying to follow up on maybe getting some kites made since No Kings 3 is the same day as the Cherry blossom kite festival and one of the events will be pretty nearby.

And then there was trying to signal boost a call for people to call their Congress critters and complain about dismantling department of education and trying to shove special education in with like department of Labor.

And then I'm not even sure.

I'm kind of tempted to go to Blues tonight because I like both of the people DJing but then that complicates matters for the earlier part of the evening.

And I'm also just so exasperated with kind of everything of late.

And how is it March?

vvalkyri

So I scroll back 14 days but if anything's important with you from before 14 days then I couldn't easily scroll back.

I don't even remember when it was I last posted. There's all sorts of things I've been highly annoyed about lately but haven't really been posting here. I just got back from steel City Blues which I'd sort of been debating whether I was going to or not and eventually decided literally the night before possibly even the day of.

I had a couple weeks of my leg being highly annoying and that finally finished in the aftermath of President's Day weekend, which was also very very good.

I bought a new phone right before President's Day weekend because my normal phone was busy rebooting itself constantly. And I hate this phone so much. Nothing is where it's supposed to be it's incredibly slow the system UI keeps crashing and I didn't come to the conclusion that I wanted to try to return it to Best buy until after the two weeks window for doing so and besides they were going to charge like a $50 restock fee. So bleh. I also am pretty sure that even though nominally I got all my messages to transfer they did not in fact transfer because I sent some birthday greetings to various people and I was like wait a second there should be some sort of message history there and indeed at least with one of them she had messages history...

Drove back from Pittsburgh yesterday and boy howdy was it not hugely clever or two opt for the not toll road. I spent time driving through clouds in the dark. On one lane needs direction roads which every so often actually had reflectors. Do not recommend.

I managed to host some acro in my lobby tonight, with the guy who's nice enough to let me base him and my next door neighbor.

I had done a very little bit of acro over President's Day weekend and otherwise it had been weeks and weeks. And I probably will be doing a blues class instead on Sunday and a friend who lives only a couple blocks away is moving to Alaska so I don't see myself going up to Laurel for acro on Saturday and besides there's the March for science and maybe I'll be there in a frog costume because oh right yeah I was part of that state of the Swamp Thing and I'm quite happy about it.

Last week was I went up to the Wilson building to be part of the free DC filling the hearing room for the MP d oversight hearing.

By the way, DHS is trying to buy a big Warehouse in Maryland where there's a number of different ones. Other places have been successful so far at making that not happen.

I really need to do better at not doing things by dictation

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quietann

March 2026

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Page generated Mar. 18th, 2026 04:56 am

Reading

fun with errors

irritatingly

that was weird

virtual memorial for Minoanmiss

And more travel: Norway/Sweden

Pi party, take II

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Phone woes. Email woes. Texting woes.

Happy Second False Spring!

a portrait of Minoanmiss

states with pending privacy/censorship regulations

smooth sailing

Habits, atomic and otherwise

Excellent evening

Minoanmiss' art

oh yeah

Surprise tears

Oops I seem to have gone forever again

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March 2026

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