the_rck

We just got back from an afternoon trip to East Lansing. We took Cordelia out to a Panera that has outdoor seating. Unfortunately, there was someone smoking nearby, but they left not too long after we sat down. No one else was in the seating area, so the smoking thing seems less inconsiderate to me than it might otherwise. They were sitting at the table furthest from the entrance to the restaurant.

After we ate, Scott and Cordelia walked a couple of doors down to get some things at a Kroger. She needed tissues, granola bars, and some beverages. She's been putting off buying things because her dorm room this year is much smaller than the room she had last year. Her bed technically can be set up as a loft, but there are pieces missing, so she has to wait for maintenance. She's been waiting since 27 August and has called more than once, but they keep saying that they will call her to tell her how to set up an appointment. This sounds suspect to me, but she's the one who'll have to do whatever pushing is involved.

She's finding her archaeology class less interesting than she'd hoped which, I think, is more about her expectations than about the class itself. She's bored by learning all of very specific terminology while also admitting that an intro class needs to explain all of specialized vocabulary that will be assumed in later classes.

I did not get to see this year's dorm room. It's on the 4th floor, and the elevator only goes to the 3rd. My ankle is not up to that flight of stairs (particularly not given that there's laundry to do here at home today which requires me to deal with stairs). I suspect that the room is fundamentally like other dorm rooms. Apart from the fact that my daughter lives there.

Cordelia wants to start some new crochet projects, but she doesn't currently have space for yarn in her room (a third of the stuff from last year's room is still in the basement). Part of wanting to do new projects is that she's joined an unofficial knitting club that meets once a week, and part of it is that she's starting to get that she can make gifts for people. She made herself a laundry bag last year and another this year. This year's is a different pattern that addresses the problems she found with the first one over months of use.

I played some Ingress as we drove. I commented to Cordelia that everything on campus was green, and she told me that no one at Michigan State would dare play blue on campus given State's colors (white and green). She laughed a little and said that you can find State fans in Ann Arbor but not University of Michigan fans in East Lansing. I am not 100% convinced by this explanation, but who knows?

I don't get the impression that Ingress is nearly as active as it used to be. Part of that is just that the game is old, but also participation fell during the early days of the pandemic and hasn't bounced back. Because I can't really walk right now, I'm not doing much but drone hacking on a day-to-day basis. I do other things while taking the ARide to appointments and back, but that's very sporadic.

The drone was introduced early in the pandemic to let people play without leaving their homes. Most of the time, a player can move their drone at 1 hour intervals. Other times, the interval can get as short as 8 minutes. It's most helpful for people who, like me, live in an area with a lot of portals. I think the original idea was that drone hacking would let people continue hacking streaks toward badges without taking undue risks. Hacking 365 days in a row is hard under normal circumstances, and people who were close-- or even halfway-- there didn't want to have to start over.

At this point, I have more unique drone hacks than I have unique hacks (that is, I've visited more unique portals by drone than in person). I'm actually keeping a list of where I've been because otherwise I'd go in circles and/or skip over places I haven't yet been. There are a lot of portals with similar names and, sometimes, clusters of portals with identical names. A park with multiple entrances might have a portal for each but have all of those with the same name; it becomes confusing. This is not helped by the fact that the program won't display the entire portal name. It cuts off at different points depending on which screen I'm looking at.

But I am vastly amused by the existence of a portal called 'First Church of Christ Baseball.'

Based on the photo, I'm quite sure it's a baseball diamond on a church's property, but... That's not how my brain parses it when I see the text. Scott was vastly amused when I showed it to him because that was how he read it, too.

Scott has to go in early tomorrow, so he's already in bed (it's 8 p.m. as I write. He'll be getting up around the time I usually go to sleep.

I've got a test scheduled for the 7th of October to see whether or not I have full on carpal tunnel. It involves needles and electricity and sounds thoroughly unpleasant. I'm not looking forward to it with any sort of pleasant anticipation.

I had energy today, so I did a lot of cooking. Nothing fancy, just dumping things into the instant pot and shoving pans into the oven. I cooked some cod, two types of chicken (I can't eat chicken thighs without reflux issues; Cordelia hates chicken breast) with potatoes and mushrooms. I found some brussel sprouts in the fridge, so I steamed them in the instant pot. I microwaved two ears of sweet corn (I don't eat it, but Scott and Cordelia do). We had a huge sweet potato in this week's Imperfect Foods box. I washed it, wrapped it in foil, and shoved into into a corner of the oven while the chicken cooked.

We got food delivered from Evergreen Wednesday because we had a Firefly session that evening. I still have leftovers and might eat them later this evening.

The Firefly session was fun. I was feeling reasonably good and awake, so I was able to think. My character was trying to investigate an artifact we'd found. She lacks the skills to do any sort of testing, but she could explain what she was looking for and why she wanted to know. The characters who can actually do the testing weren't quite sure why she wanted to do it, not at first.

Today, I mixed a can of Zevia ginger ale with a can of carbonated water and about three tablespoons of lime juice. The goal of this was to make the Zevia palatable to me, and I succeeded. Previous attempts haven't gone really well because they've usually intersected with migraine days. I was almost certain that the migraines were't caused by the Zevia because each occasion had other fairly clear explanations and because there's nothing in the Zevia that ought to give me trouble.

I did wonder if I had an upper limit for the amount of stevia I can handle in one day, but it seemed improbable.

( UCon related )

Cordelia's had a week of classes now. Most of the instructors are still figuring out how to make things work and are finding their planned lessons either much too short or too long for the scheduled time.

Cordelia's really missing the social interaction. It's not just the between classes chatting. Normal classes include some time when the kids can talk to each other or, at the very least, exchange glances. Right now, Cordelia's crocheting during some lectures. She's done some classes in bed (which is apparently common) and some in the dining room (also common).

The dining room had the downside that the chairs are all terrible, so she and Scott went and bought a new chair. Scott put it together last night; Cordelia used it today and gives it two thumbs up.

Choir is going to be an issue for me because I wake up and want to make tea halfway through the period. I can be in the kitchen during choir, if I'm quiet, but I can't use anything that whistles or dings.

Skyline Blues poses a similar problem to food preparation because the rehearsals run two hours and put the kitchen off limits. For Blues, Cordelia wants us in our bedroom, the bathroom, or the basement for the duration because being reminded that we're in the house increases her anxiety about doing well.

I think the Skyline Blues stuff is mostly a matter of me and Scott adapting. We can make sure we have food before practice starts. I'm less sure about choir. The classes run just short of two hours, and I need 10-15 minutes to be able to make my tea. If I set an alarm and get up at 10:00, I can do it before choir. Otherwise, I can't do it until after 12:10. I'm mostly waking up between 11:00 or 11:30. Sometimes, I sleep as late as 1:00 (having gone to bed between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.).

I keep meaning to work on shifting my schedule to an earlier bedtime, but my body keeps wanting me to stay up later every successive night. I think my internal clock might be expecting a 24.5 hour day or something.

I've leveled up in Ingress. Almost all of the points involved in that came from recharging portals since I haven't gone out much in the last several months. I need one badge in order to attain level 16 (currently working on 15, so it will be a long time). At the beginning of this year, I assumed that I'd be getting the 4th level in Trekker for distance walked sooner than any of the other options, but I think I'm going to have to try for one of the others (I think it's called Sojourner), the one for playing daily for so many days in a row. I hadn't wanted to commit to 360 daily treks to the nearest portal, but I'm more than halfway there because of how they shifted what counts toward it.

I'm just concerned that I'll miss a day and have to start over. 360 consecutive days is a lot. I'm at 184 days now, and it's something I'm currently capable of doing, but...

I've put in a grocery order for pickup. I'm not sure whether the substitution thing was toggled on or off because the state wasn't marked in either position. The last time I ordered for pickup, I said no substitutions, so I'm hoping that will hold.

In many cases, it's better to get nothing at all than to get whatever the Kroger employee thinks is the closest match. I mean, the half and half would be fine, but the wrong hummus cups would mean I couldn't eat them. I picked a loaf of bread that didn't contain anything that would make me sick, but some other whole wheat breads do and so do other breads from the same company.

Last night, we went to Kensington Metropark so that Cordelia could get some driving time (and some night time driving time!) and so that Scott and I could walk a bit. There were a few people exiting the trail when we were in the parking lot, so we loitered until they passed.

There were a number of unclaimed Ingress portals nearby. We probably didn't spend even 20 minutes walking, and a lot of that was us standing and placing resonators. Scott also recorded the sounds from one of the ponds we passed. I'm assuming those were frogs.

That was about as long as Cordelia was willing to wait, and it was true dark by then. Cordelia took the long way out of the park (the road's a loop).

I wish that I had a way to get to some of these places on my own. I'd like walking new trails, both for the novelty and for the Ingress portals.

Right at the moment, Niantic, the company that runs Ingress, has changed the rules so that it's easier to play without going outside. They're counting recharging resonators, which can be done from a distance, toward the Sojourner badge in place of hacking portals which requires getting within a certain distance of the portal. They've decreased the length of time between hacks of a single portal (usually 5 minutes) to 90 seconds and raised the number of hacks a person can make on a portal before it burns out to 16.

( Food frustration and allergies )

I ended up not going to Cordelia's concert on Wednesday because I had a migraine with nausea that was coming and going in waves. I'd taken the meds, and I knew I'd get worse if I went but might feel better if I didn't. She had said it was okay if I didn't. I still feel bad about it, though.

Scott's parents and his sister and our niece all went, so he had company.

( Christmas plans negativity )

( Ingress lunch )

We still don't know when (or if) Scott will go back to first shift. I'm kind of assuming that it might be months. They haven't hired anyone for the job he left in September, and it's possible that they're hoping he'll go back to that. I'm torn because it was much better for him, physically, but really wrecked him mentally and emotionally.

Scott's concerned about the duration of being on second shift because him taking time off every time Cordelia needs transportation isn't sustainable. He could manage all of the concerts, but there's too much else, and much of it isn't scheduled anything like far enough in advance.

I have access to Scanner [Redacted] again. Apparently there was some sort of unannounced 'maintenance downtime.' During the period when Scanner [Redacted] was down, the App Store rating for Ingress Prime dropped a full point. At least one other reviewer complained about the accessibility barriers in Prime.

At any rate, I'm wondering if there are any other games out there that have the features I need without the features that make Ingress Prime inaccessible. Other Niantic games are less accessible to me than Ingress Prime is, so I'm not heading that way. I really can't.

The appeal of Ingress for me, to begin with, was that I could treat it like, say, Animal Crossing but with walking. If I got something done, great. If I didn't, nothing bad happened. I might end up repeating things, but it was like picking fruit or fishing in Animal Crossing-- There'll be something available later, and the repetition is part of the soothingness.

Possibly, I've been using a food processor as a blender. Niantic might be trying to optimize for food processor users.

The team aspect is nice because I like having at least the potential for social interaction around it and for cooperation, but I don't actually care about the competitive side. If there was more emphasis on the competition, I would never have kept playing.

(This is not to say that other people don't focus on the competitive aspect. Some do. Some really like the global, two team thing with 'our team' and 'their team' and score tracking.)

Scott's currently looking at the App Store to see if there are alternatives to Ingress. I tried and got frustrated. My criteria don't translate into easy search terms because they're mostly negatives. I can probably manage to translate them eventually; it's just beyond me at the moment.

( Cut for discussion of teeth and of joint movement )

After I left the dentist, I walked for a couple of hours and visited a park I hadn’t been to in a while. I submitted some locations as possible Ingress portals and captured some uniques. When I started getting tired, I walked to Washtenaw because the #4 comes frequently, every 15 minutes. There are already streets blocked off for Art Fair, so most buses are detoured, but they still all go to the transit center near the library. I got off the bus near Totoro and had a late lunch. Then I walked more.

Totoro was emptier than I expected, even given that it was near 2. The manager told me that they lose a lot of business during Art Fair. That surprised me because I had always heard how much local businesses benefit from Art Fair. She said that they don’t get tourists coming in and that the regulars stay away because Totoro is hard to get to through the crowds. She also says that various businesses have petitioned, as a group, for rescheduling Art Fair and have been told that it can’t be done because the artists follow set itineraries. None of them could come a different week because they’re already committed to fairs elsewhere.

I need to remember to tell them no soup the next time I get carry out for Cordelia. It always leaks. I need to carry the bag for blocks, and I can’t keep everything flat. Apparently miso soup doesn’t stain, so there’s that. (At least, I can’t see a stain on the shirt I was wearing.

It rained hard enough this evening that there was deep water on some streets in town. I didn’t think it had come down that hard, but I wasn’t looking, just listening. Our neighborhood is at the top of a hill, so I don’t think about this as an issue. Scott said FB had pictures of city buses in water deep enough to cover their wheels.

Today was two appointments and a lot of walking. I feel like I got very little done. I still haven’t finished the paperwork, and at least one thing that’s due this week is still only in bus pass condition.

For Ingress, I’m getting closer to the badges I need. I need one to make 12th level. Then, all I need for 13th is a single additional gold badge. I have the necessary points already.

As far as PT, I really wish that I could see this woman once every month or every three or six months. It would help with management and mitigation. These aren’t fixable problems. It’s just that me on my own means I don’t have a way to tell when things slowly change for the worse. It’s the boiling frog thing. It’s also hard to tell which gradual changes are just normal aging. I realized today that the hand issue is more about that bone not being anchored at the bottom than about joint pain. When I’m not careful, the bone tries to go away from whatever presses on that part of my hand. This doesn’t affect movements that only need the knuckle joints of the thumb. I’m pretty sure that surgery is going to be my only hope for improvement.

Yesterday I made myself cry by removing pillowcases for washing. I had to ask Cordelia to put the clean ones on.

Yesterday, I did a lot of Ingress because I had four hours between appointments. I managed enough missions to get my gold badge for Spec Ops. I had meant only to get closer to done than I'd started. I knew there were six missions in the cemetery between the hospital (where I had PT) and central campus. There were also a lot of portals back there that I'd never hacked or captured.

I spent about two hours wandering the roads there. I think there was only one portal that needed stepping onto the grass (I was avoiding doing that mostly because the ground was seriously soggy. I really didn't want to fall), and I probably could have found an approach to it that wouldn't have needed that, but it would have been a lot of extra walking.

I'd intended to catch the bus to downtown from in front of the cemetery, but I just missed it. Instead of standing for 15-20 minutes to wait for the next one, I walk a couple of blocks to the main campus bus stop that has lots of benches (about a dozen different routes intersect there, some city buses and others university buses).

When I got downtown, I bought a late lunch before my appointment. I considered not getting anything, but I was hungry. The things I'd brought with me were simply what I could pull together without opening the fridge or cooking anything. I got a sandwich at Which Wich.

My psychiatrist wants me to keep experimenting with the CBD lotion. She said that I may find something more systemic more useful but that most of the common delivery methods carry risks for me because of my food/additive sensitivities and asthma. She thinks it worth trying, though. She just wants me to bear in mind that the label information may not accurately reflect what's in the product. Sometimes, things will say that there's no THC but still contain enough of that to make someone high.

The appointment finished at 4:15, and the bus I wanted was leaving at 4:18 with the next one at 4:48. It probably would have been sensible to go to the bus station and sit to wait, but I did two more Ingress missions instead. I still caught the next bus; I just caught it several stops away from the station.

I still need one more gold badge to get to 12th level in Ingress. I have the points for 13th. That will require earning an additional gold badge, but I'm very close to a couple of those, both of which just need me to go to downtown or central campus or some place similarly portal dense, over and over and over.

By the time I got home yesterday, I was very stiff, and my joints were wanting to set like concrete whenever I stopped moving. I showered not long after I got home (the timing was bad for doing it immediately). That helped a little bit but only while I was under the hot water.

I ended up not doing my lying on the floor PT exercise because I was completely certain that I wouldn't be able to get back up again. I haven't decided about it for this morning yet. I'm better, but I'm not sure I'm that much better.

We've lost power twice in the last couple of days. It was out when we got back from lunch at Palm Palace on Sunday, and it went out yesterday morning while I was trying to take care of some things before heading out to my appointment. I had a good hour and a half before I needed to leave, but most of the food preparation I'd wanted to do fell by the wayside. I packed some food, anyway, but it wasn't what I'd hoped for.

The DTE website showed the same map for the outage yesterday as it had for the one on Sunday, so I'm assuming that it was the same problem. It was kind of a flat triangle that, on its longest side, went a block or two west of us and a block or two east. It's possible that the reports were skewed because it went in the direction of the school and a church, neither of which necessarily had people inside to notice.

Today's mammogram day. I'm about to take an Ativan and get dressed. I've got an hour and a half before I need to leave, but I also need to find my bathrobe. The robes they have there scratch horribly enough that I'd really rather just sit in the waiting room topless. Once I've done that, I'll decide whether or not I have time to cook the chicken burgers (I meant to do it before PT yesterday). It would be nice to take a lunch with me since I'll be there for at least three hours (two appointments).

Scott and Cordelia tried to do most of the birthday stuff for me on Saturday, the day before my birthday, because we were scheduled to spend Sunday with Scott's parents and his sister and her family (minus the kid at college). We had lunch with everyone on Sunday at Scott's parents place, and then most of the group watched the Indy 500 while Cordelia and I read our books.

Monday, my lower back spasmed. I needed help with standing up and with getting out of bed. I couldn't stand for very long, either. I remembered the stretches I needed, but they only help incrementally. The first time I did them, I couldn't get up off the floor without Scott to help me. I weigh enough that I don't think Cordelia could have.

Tuesday, the spasmed had decreased enough that I could do things if I was careful, so I took care of some chores. Yesterday, I was still hurting enough that I took a cab to my appointment instead of taking the bus the way I'd meant to. I ended up walking around a bit after that because walking didn't hurt and then took a bus to central campus. I walked to the South University post office and finally mailed my hair to the charity that does wigs for kids in Michigan.

I got bubble tea for myself and for Cordelia, and I played some Ingress. I misread the details of one mission enough that I ended up going a couple of blocks out of my way as I headed for the bus home. I also ended up detouring to the library when I realized that my water bottle was empty and that it was time to take my thyroid medicine. The bus I wanted was pulling up to the station at about the time I went inside the library. I don't think I could have made it even if I'd skipped both the Ingress mission and the medication.

At least the timing worked out so that I could drink my bubble tea as soon as I got home.

We had a session of Scott's Firefly game last night. It had been a while, so we all had to remind each other of details from the last couple of sessions. It'll be at least a month before we can play again because two of the players will be at Origins next time. The rest of us will keep going with the Betrayal Legacy game.

I was awake and functional during the game session which kind of surprised me given all of the walking earlier in the day. My back was semi-okay until I lay down on the floor to do PT after our guests had gone home. I'm not sure if that's just when my muscles decided to announce that four-ish hours of walking is not what's good for a spasming back or if it was entirely me trying to do the stretch for my neck which involves tennis balls under my head for a minute or three, but it spasmed again as I sat up.

I managed to stand up on my own anyway (I wanted to be able to test that before trying it while at home alone this morning). This morning, I made Scott and Cordelia manage without me so that I could get a little extra sleep. I needed it pretty badly. My lower back is still twinging, off and on, but it's not as bad as Monday or even last night.

I'm hoping that I can make Scott clean out the dryer vent today in spite of the rain. He washed his two winter coats on Monday and didn't manage to clean out all of the pockets. Those coats have a lot of pockets, so that part doesn't worry me. The part I'm cranky about is that he found bits of tissues all over the coats and the inside of the washer and still put the coats into the dryer.

There were a lot of paper scraps when I opened up the dryer on Tuesday. I'm not running the damned thing until Scott cleans that duct. We're due for it anyway, and there was so much of it that there has to have been a good bit that got past the lint screen. We have four loads of laundry stacked up and waiting. Because I'm short, I can't get at the dratted thing, even if my hands would do the work, and Cordelia's no taller than I am. I don't like the idea of her standing on the dryer to try to get at things.

My state i.d. arrived in the mail, and my goodness my shortened hair is floofy. When it's not wet, the ends spread a pretty long way out from my head. Measuring with my hands at ear level, it goes a bit wider than the length of my middle finger. It's still flat above the ears, probably due to the weight of the hair.

Ingress has rejected Robert Hayden's grave as a potential portal. The acceptance process seems to be pretty random as to what they'll take and what they won't, and they just send a rejection form without specifying why they rejected the place. Out of the eight potentials I sent in last week, two have been accepted. Three have been rejected. The others are still pending, but none of them are things I think are very likely to be accepted.

Today feels very weird because we did the library run yesterday. That made yesterday feel like Sunday. Right now, I feel like it's much later in the day than it actually is. Scott and Cordelia are supposed to meet her friends at the movie theater at 3:30. They'll pick up one friend on the way, and another is already here so that she can ride with them.

I gave Cordelia's friend the package of hair rubberbands that I bought 2-3 weeks ago. I used three of them before I got my hair cut, but I don't expect I'll use them again. If I do, it won't be for months into years. Might as well buy new at that point.

Scott and I are three episodes into season 2 of She-Ra. Scott remembers seeing episodes of the original, but I don't think I ever did. My younger brother watched He-Man occasionally, but I didn't have a TV between fall of 1985 and some time around 1990. When I did get one, I mostly watched videos.

I have banana bread in the oven. I had just enough resources to manage it and just enough time while Scott was out getting bread and while Cordelia and her friend were out getting bubble tea.

I nearly didn't, though. I kept finding additional things that needed doing that I hadn't expected. One of the loaf pans I needed didn't get entirely clean last time it was washed, but it got put away as it was. There wasn't enough sugar or all purpose flour in the bins. We had a bag of sugar, but I had to open it. We also had an unopened bag of bread flour; again, I had to open it. I also had to open a new container of canola oil. My hands are very unhappy with me now.

My intention is to send one loaf home with Cordelia's visiting friend. Her mother sent us spring rolls for lunch and gave us some canned goods that they don't expect to use. I'd have wanted to anyway because I like her family, but giving food is one of the few things I can offer.