feminist50 | Member Posts

Books
Very little progress.

Crafts
Dyed a 36x45cm piece of white 14 count aida cloth purple, for Secret Reasons. And now I know that I can get a reasonable result doing that with a large storage box and hot water, winging the quantity of Rit dye. Shenanigans may result.

Food
My parents' Christmas present to me, a new frying pan, just made it to me today. I haven't test-driven it yet, but it looks nice. And like it should heat up easier than the cast iron one my stove can't really handle, much as I love it.

Weather
Finally cooling down. Good.

Other
One of the Discord servers I'm in had a PowerPoint night. I didn't present, but I contributed a very unserious set of slides for someone else to present sight unseen. This was a heap of fun, and I recommend this form of grownup show and tell to other nerds. I am already working on my next such document.

In a different Discord, a discussion of linguistics prompted me to make a series of noises which in turn made Dorian give me a very funny look. If you would like to provoke yourself to make a series of noises that will make your cats give you funny looks, here is the chart.

vass

What if, when you went to a nonprofit/charity/etc website because you want to donate money to them, you could add ?nomarketing on the end of the link, and it would bring up a barebones version of their donation page that would JUST LET YOU MAKE A SINGLE DONATION.

It would not sign you up to their newsletter.
It would not give them permission to contact you.
It would not ask you to share their link on social media.
It would not ask you how you found them.
It would not show you a thank you letter written in the first person by a composite version of one of their clients.
It would not show you tragic and distressing photographs or descriptions of the horrible things happening to the people you HAVE ALREADY DECIDED TO GIVE MONEY TO HELP.
There would not be any animated banners or carousels.
There would be no popups.
Required fields on the form would only be information they genuinely cannot accept your money without, and they would have checked both the law on what information they actually need and their assumptions about names and titles (e.g. not everyone has a first name, not everyone has a last name, not everyone's name is short, some names have spaces or apostrophes or hyphens, not everyone belongs to one of the four genders Mr, Mrs, Miss, and Dr.)
It would not give you a menu with three choices: make your one-off donation a monthly amount, make your one-off donation a monthly amount but more money, or (deselected and in a duller colour) "keep your one-off donation" before letting you donate.
Or after you donate.
Or both.

I understand they have a job to do, but do they understand how aversive this experience is? It is the biggest thing about charitable giving that I dread, when I have enough to give. "Hi, I'd like to give you some mon-" "CAN YOU GIVE US MORE? CAN YOU GIVE IT EVERY MONTH? KIDS ARE DYING, VASS, ANIMALS ARE DYING, THE PLANET IS DYING, MOREMOREMOREMORE CAN WE TEXT YOU, CAN WE CALL YOU UP AND TELL YOU ABOUT THE DYING KIDS CAN YOU TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO GIVE US MONEY TOO-"

If they made it less stressful, I would not have to psych myself up to do this. And by definition this is how they are treating people who already want to help them.

briarwood

Title: Selmak’s War (Phoenix-verse)
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Category: Gen, AU

Summary: Separated from Jacob, Selmak forms an alliance with a disgraced Jaffa. When his host is taken by Anubis, Selmak must stay hidden, or die.

Link: Selmak’s War - all chapters on AO3

Chapter by chapter
Chapter 1: Jaffa Separated from Jacob, Selmak’s new host is a disgraced Jaffa. When Anubis attacks the planet where they are imprisoned, their attempt to escape does not exactly go to plan.

Chapter 2: Reunited The Tok’Ra are scattered following Anubis’s attack; as Daniel and Entar try to plan their next move Selmak finds his way to the Free Jaffa homeworld.

Chapter 3: Alliance Sam proposes a mission that might put an end to Anubis.

Chapter 4: World Enough and Time When the mission takes an unexpected turn, Daniel takes a risk with lasting consequences.

Sorry to take so long finishing this story. I really struggled with this last chapter. I always knew how it had to end, but it was hard to know how much of what’s in my head to include. I hope I struck the right balance.

redbird

Things were looking significantly worse this morning, so the three of us are going to London tonight on a red-eye.

I may not be reading much, or I may be spamming everyone's reading pages.

vass

Books
Still reading Freya Marske's A Restless Truth.
Gave Maxine Beneba Clarke's poetry book How Decent People Behave a go, but so far it hasn't grabbed me. I'll give it another try before I return it to the library.

Food
Made a second attempt at making ice cream met. The first attempt wouldn't freeze properly. I had made the fatal Just A Few Alterations to the recipe.
My hypothesis was that in fact it wasn't my alterations but rather that the custard wasn't chilled enough. I found a product review from someone claiming it needed to be chilled not "in fridge for 4-6 hours" as the manual claims, but in the freezer until "chunks start to form".
I intended to test this hypothesis by making the basic vanilla recipe from the manual the ice cream machine came with, without alterations. But I was out of caster sugar and vanilla and didn't want to wait, so I swapped in brown sugar and cinnamon.
Success: perfectly cromulent ice cream. A little bit too rich, maybe, but definitely acceptable.

Links

via rydra_wong, US politics phone scripts
UK heritage crafts at risk of extinction
Community colleges are facing a wave of bots registering for class to steal financial aid.
Hannah Montana Linux, a (old and I don't think it's been updated in a very long time, so be careful if you want to actually install it) Hannah Montana themed Linux distribution

redbird

I just got off the phone with my brother, and don't need to dash off to London. This is the current situation:

There are treatment options for the cancer, but they know it's not curable: the goal is to get my mother more time, and make her more comfortable for however long that is. Mom definitely wants to fight this.

The immediate problem is that there's fluid around my mother's lungs. The pulmonologist described the problem, and said there are two possibilities for dealing with that, and he will come back tomorrow and ask Mom for a decision. Given the hospital schedule and what the choices are, if the first doesn't work she can have them do the other.

The pulmonologist doesn't think the oncologist will want to start treatment until after the fluid is drained, but the cardiologist will also be back tomorrow.

Given all this, I'm not planning to travel before Saturday [three days from now], and Sunday or Monday might be better in terms of both having my and my brother's visits overlap, and giving Mom company for longer. Mark will call me again once they talk to the specialists, to fill me in and maybe discuss travel plans based on what they learn. and decide, tomorrow. In the short term, knowing we're not traveling immediately is helping the three of ust deal with logistics like what to make for dinner, and Adrian picking up a prescription. It also means Cattitude can try to decompress a little, and wait until tomorrow to do laundry.

The other open question is how long I will want to stay in London. One possibility is that the three of us are all there there for a few days, after which they fly back to Boston and I stay longer.

redbird

Apparently the reason I hadn't heard from either her or my brother yesterday is that she fainted, went to the emergency room instead of her doctor's office, and then waited hours to be seen.

A CT scan found lung cancer, in both lungs. They're still waiting to talk to an oncologist, and my brother is on his way to London now. The three of us will be going to London in a few days, possibly as soon as Thursday, or maybe Saturday. My brother has a long layover in Charlotte, and is going to spend part of it looking at airline tickets for us, possibly using my mother's frequent flier miles for one or more tickets.

I spent some time this morning looking up travel-related things that we may not need, but will do no harm, and wondering about Oyster cards is better than doomscrolling. I also called my doctor's office and asked whether there were limits on where the patient can be for a telemedicine appointment. The receptionist said she thought that technically, I have to be in Massachusetts; we agreed that I can call back if I need to postpone that.

My gut was bothering me earlier, which is almost certainly from anxiety, but still has me a little nervous about this trip. (It's been just over a week since I saw the GI doctor.)

Current Mood: worried

redbird

My feet hurt because I decided to go for a walk with Adrian and Cattitude, even though one hip and my feet were hurting before we started, and even with an NSAID. I went anyway because I didn't think walking would make things much worse, and tomorrow's forecast is less appealing. It was sunny and 69F/20C outside, with a bright blue sky and delightful spring flowers, including two kinds of maple flowers, red and the underappreciated light green of Norway maple flowers.

We went to the supermarket, and bought ingredients for Passover-suitable lunches that we can make ahead of time. This morning/early afternoon was difficult because I slept later than usual, and Adrian and Cattitude got up later than that, and we didn't have plans for lunch, or useful leftovers.

That was on top of worrying about both my mother and the world situation. I was expecting to hear from my mother or brother by this afternoon, and haven't. I realize that bad news would be, and be treated as, more urgent than good or ambiguous, but I still worry. The time zone difference doesn't help any (it's five hours later in London than here).

Current Mood: worried

redbird

The advice the GI doctor gave me on Monday seems to have done the job: my gut has been behaving since the visit, which is five days so far:

The doctor told me was to take the imodium (anti-diarrheal) twice a day whether or not I have symptoms, and start taking psyllium (metamucil). I was surprised, because psyllium is generally referred to a laxative; I suspect that's why Carmen didn't think of it. Assuming I'm still fine on Monday, I'll be sending her a MyChart message

I've taken one/day for five days, which seems to be enough. The package instructions are not to take it within two hours before or after other medication, because it can interfere with absorbtion. I'm already taking other medication on something resembling a schedule, which means this one has to be at or a little after 6 o'clock, unless I want to fiddle with the timing on something else. The schedule includes "right after I wake up" and "after breakfast." )

redbird

My brother and I are both worried about our mother: she's a lot weaker than she was a few months ago, and apparently hasn't been eating much. So far, the doctors she's seen haven't found anything specific, and/but she has a follow-up appointment on Monday, by which time the doctor will have more blood test results to help him figure things out.

I'm not jumping on a plane tonight, but I will likely be going to London soon, with Cattitude and Adrian. Even if she's feeling a lot better by Tuesday, I haven't seen her in a while, and want to. Mark is probably flying to London in a few days, in any case, even though she visited him for Mardi Gras.

I've done some planning and preparation: we all three have valid passports, and I now a UK Electronic Travel Authorization, which they started requiring a few weeks ago. It took me about 20 minutes to apply, much of that spent repeatedly trying to get their iPhone app to read the RFID chip in my passport, and about two minutes for them to approve it. So I can visit the UK anytime in the next two years, as frequently as I like.

I emailed our catsitter yesterday, and said that I might need them soon but I didn't know how soon, and she assured me someone would be available. (The person I talked to has a small team of cat-sitters.)

Fortunately, the very simple instructions the GI specialist gave me on Monday seem to have resolved my problem (I've been fine since Monday afternoon). Thank goodness for that last-minute appointment.

feuervogel

So, with the situation in the US absolutely terrifying and the German one also looking not so great (the new government wants to get rid of a lot of things that the old one made), I'm hoping to get my citizenship application in before they scrap the thing that lets me apply now (3 years with good integration measures).

The problem is that I seriously thought the visa office guy was going to make me leave in October because I don't make enough money, and that hasn't really changed. I have a few more potential clients, but that's the biggest problem with being freelance. You can't completely predict your annual income.

So I need to a) get my income up, b) get my rent down, or (ideally) c) both. But I have a lot of factors working against me in trying to find an apartment, mostly the fact that I'm freelance and don't make a lot of money. Officially, landlords won't rent to you unless you earn 3x the total rent, which means I'm looking at 400-425 a month, and in Berlin, there's basically nothing at that price point, and what there is has a lot of people who ALSO want to live there. So I've contacted people about at least 100 apartments since December, and I've had 2 showings. One of them (the later one, weirdly) I already got a rejection from, and the first one is still pending.

I really don't want to move into another roommate situation, especially not with a stranger from the shared flats website. I have a friend (American) who would be ok with getting a place together and splitting the rent solidarisch (where I pay as much as I can and she pays the rest, because she has a real job with a real salary). But that still necessitates finding an apartment that's big enough and in a place we can both agree on and doesn't cost an obscene amount and that we actually get a showing for and so on.

So I'm begging whatever supernatural forces exist that I get the first apartment I looked at, even though I have about a 20% chance of getting it (there were 4 other people at the showing, and the state-owned companies make their selections by RNG).

I'm also looking into minijobs where I can earn up to about 500 a month; a derby friend just started at one and she's giving me the info to apply.

I've also gotten into the copyeditor pool at one of the Big 5 publishers, and I got my first editing job offer today (due April 22), though with the dollar in the shitter because the felon in chief is a literal petulant child, it's gonna be a lot less into my bank account than I would like. And there's a potential book translation in my future (me translating someone else's book into English), and of course my Kickstarter book is going to go on sale eventually, so hopefully that'll get me some income, too.

The citizenship process is extra expensive because I'm freelance. I can't just supply a bunch of pay stubs (because I don't get them), and invoices aren't exactly valid to prove that I received the money, so I have to pay a tax accountant to do a specific form that they require, which costs 500 €. Delightful! I also have to get my divorce judgment translated (115 €) and maybe my marriage license (which I don't have, and I have no idea if the register of deeds still has it, but I'm going to have to pay to get a copy and pay to get it translated, if I need to provide it). I've got an initial consultation with a lawyer next week (225 €) to talk about my chances and find out things like whether I need to give them my marriage certificate even though I'm divorced and if my assets in Germany (savings) count for anything in the process. Then there's the citizenship test (25 €), and the application fee is 255 €.

But because I can't submit the application until I have the test score and I won't have the test score until ... the future, I can put off the expensive tax thing until the future (at which point I'll have several more months of earnings and maybe a minijob), so that's definitely for the better.

But getting my own apartment is a priority; getting a different roommate situation is the alternative.

(Ugh I also have to file my American taxes, even though I'm only going to owe for the interest on my savings account. Fucking bullshit, that is.)

vass

Life
I'm still reading my reading page here, but not every day, and I'm very behind and missing a lot. Please ping me if there's something you'd like to call my attention to.

Books
Still reading Freya Marske's A Restless Truth, at the rate of chapter every day or two because I'm just not that excited about it, unfortunately.

Read Andrew Sutherland's Paradise (point of transmission), a book of poems related to seroconverting while living and studying in Singapore and therefore losing his visa and needing to move back to Australia because people living with HIV are not permitted to hold long-term visas there. He was still reckoning with this loss, and with his life with an incurable chronic illness, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. I liked this one a lot.

Read Cameron Reed's novelette, 'The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For'. It is very good to see new work by her. I'm not sure whether this story landed for me or not. The worldbuilding was cool, it's the ending I'm not certain about.

TV/Movies
Watched Pixar's Inside Out (2015). Generally I liked it.

Spoilers:
( more )

Garden
I tried the basil seedling in some potting soil and it started wilting. I suspect not enough water or too much, and I can't tell which. It's still alive, but it's not looking good.

redbird

A couple of notes on Consider the Fork, by Bee Wilson, which I read a couple of weeks ago. This started as a belated reply to

anne's comment, but I want to post it where other people might see it. (Apologies for any fuzziness, it's past my bedtime.)

I liked it. There's some overlap with the book I read a while ago about the history of refrigeration, but mostly the emphasis here is different. Despite the title, the author starts by talking about wooden spoons, and that they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Having started there, the book ends by discussing some kitchen tools that are younger than most people realize, such as good vegetable peelers.

As

acelightning2 alluded to, the Chinese approach, where food is either cut up into small pieces before cooking, or cooked and then cut up in the kitchen, means diners aren't holding anything pointier than a pair of chopsticks.

Something that stuck in my mind: one 19th-century home ice cream maker made ice cream in only a few minutes, faster than any of the ice cream makers you can buy today. A few of these machines still exist, but their owners aren't using them: it turns out that the zinc-lined bowl leaches toxic zinc into the ice cream.

redbird

I have done several useful things this afternoon, including two of the three things from today's list. Unfortunately, the one remaining is the one I'm least looking forward to.

I don't usually have a to-do list anymore, but enough things had piled up that I grabbed some scrap paper and wrote a reminder that I would definitely see when I sat down at my desk this morning.

The two list items were to make appointments for the cats to have their annual veterinary exams, and to get an itemized bill for my last couple of dental appointments. The appointments are made, using the veterinarian's app; it's part of a small chain, so the first question was which office I wanted appointments at.

I called the dentist's office this afternoon and explained what I wanted (itemized bills for the last couple of visits, for insurance purposes), and the receptionist said they'd send me the bills. I actually had an itemized bill for one of these, but didn't keep it, because I didn't expect to need it. But Aetna has sent me a patient reimbursement form, and it asks for the date of the visit, what they did, and the amount, which has to match the itemized bill. So, I need an itemized bill, not just "on X date they cleaned my teeth and charged me Y dollars."

After talking to the vet's office, I paused and did some useful things that are routine enough they weren't on the list: taking out trash and recycling, and a little PT.

The remaining item is calling Aetna yo ask about colonoscopy coverage, since Mt. Auburn doesn't appear to be in-network for this. Whether or not it's in-network, I am hoping for some idea of how much I'll be charged. I don't expect to like the answer, but that's partly because the answer may be "we don't know," and is more likely to be that they pay X percent of total, which the hospital won't tell me in advance.

Current Mood: productive

redbird

For people living in the United States: Bona Fide Masks has sent out email saying they will not be raising the prices of the Powecom KN95 masks they import from China, and gave a discount code, SPRING25, good for 25% off through April 20th.

Separately, I just ordered a bunch of tea, because I expect the price to go up, and realized after placing the order that while we think of the Formosa oolong as Chinese tea (rather than Indian or Japanese), Formosa is another name for Taiwan, so those ridiculously high tariffs may not apply.

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The Feminist Fifty

May 2010

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The Feminist Fifty

Member Posts

Things

Daydream

Phoenix-Verse - Selmak’s War (Stargate SG-1) Now Complete

Mom

Things

Mom health update

bad health news about my mother

It's a nice spring day, and my feet hurt

some good (health) news

worrying about my mother

Remembering to use this thing to keep track of things

Things

Consider the Fork

a productive afternoon

Mask and tea prices

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May 2010

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