Reading For Our Times

     While many people have read and enjoyed the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, his "Space Travel Trilogy" is less well known.

     The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, is, at first sight, a straightforward space adventure of its day: our hero stumbles into a secretive mission departing for the planet Mars and is abducted.  Arriving at Mars, he and his captors are separated, have various adventures and are reunited.  --But all is not as it seems.  Like the Narnia books, there is considerable Christian allegory at work.  It's entertaining fiction, and is probably the most widely read book of the trilogy.

     The next two are...different.  Perelandra is a fairly overt struggle between Good and Evil, in which Lewis treats in some detail the banality and pettiness of evil.  I was reminded of it when I read Adam Serwer's 2018 essay "The Cruelty is the Point" in The Atlantic.  While C. S. Lewis devotes considerably more wordage to the topic and addresses it within an explicitly Christian context, the parallels are indeed striking. Professor Weston, the villain of both Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet, has many counterparts in current politics, willing and even eager to commit cruelties both great and small, allegedly for the greater good but in fact, largely for their own sake, artifacts of a corroded soul.

     The third book, That Hideous Strength, is a cautionary tale and one the years have brought into ever sharper outline.  Combining elements of Arthurian legend with the mythos established by the preceding two books, it investigates both the risks of reducing of the human experience to a series of algorithms and the perils of AI simulating human behavior.  You do not need to share the religious spin Lewis gives these themes to follow along -- and the entire story is set within the exciting tales of a young academic who is drawn into and the ultimately rejects the machinations of the antagonists.  I won't spoil the story with too many details, but it's well worth the read, full of tension and excitement.

     Lewis saw trends well in advance of his time.  He filtered his impressions through his own education and religious beliefs, but his unwavering belief in the value of the dignity of the human soul shines through his work in a way impossible to ignore.

     Those three books offer a perspective sorely lacking at present.

DEI Didn't Do It

     Elon Musk and others on the Right have decided to blame "DEI" for the California wildfires getting so out of control, or possibly for happening at all.

     That part of California has fires every winter.  They've got native plants that produce seeds that won't even germinate unless they're been through a fire, so you can't claim it's not normal.  And every so often, there's a winter there in which the Santa Ana winds aren't the usual 25 to 35 mph, but much higher.

     If there's any kind of white guy special knowledge and skill, or secret science, or for that matter magic, voodoo, prayers, incantations or handwavium that can counter fires being pushed through dry vegetation by winds of 80 mph and up, in a region of scarce water, I'm pretty sure California firefighters would like to hear about it.  But there is, in fact, no level of training, staffing or demographic adjustment that amounts to a hill of beans against what firefighters there are facing.  What they need is water, far more of it than any fire-hydrant system can deliver, and the way they usually get it is from airplanes and helicopters.  You can't fly 'em in 80+ mph winds; you can't scoop up water in winds that high and you can't drop it with any accuracy in winds that high.  Wind speeds have fallen a little and they are now dumping as much water on the fires as they can, as quickly as they can, and nobody is downchecking pilots for being too pale, too dark, too butch or too femme.  It's tricky flying and they'll take anyone who can do it.

     So some fire departments in LA County spent their downtime looking at demographics and trying to recruit firefighters from groups presently under-represented in the firefighting staff?  So what.  If they ended up with a few more who spoke the various languages spoken in their districts, or more familiar with the neighborhoods, great.  Fighting fires is hard work, and it doesn't pay all that well for the amount of risk and effort it involves.  If you're worried some nice white Christian boy is missing out on those sweet, sweet fireman jobs 'cos a dark-skinned pagan lesbian from across the sea edged him out, you're nuts.

We Invented Our Way Out Of It

     Humans are clever primates.  Faced with a problem, we invent our way out.  As hunter-gatherers, we lived in small bands, with everyone a general specialist.  When we learned more things, we started figuring out some people were better at chipping flint, others at hunting, collecting edible plants, building shelter, cooking or guarding our homes through the long night.

     We befriended dogs and they befriended us.  We invented cities and agriculture not quite side-by side: many hands make light work.  Cats showed up, hunting the mice in our granaries.  We learned to preserve leather, spin thread, to knit and weave.  We developed pottery.  We started working metal: copper for tools and utensils, humble and dangerous lead, rare silver and gold,* useful bronze, brass and iron.

     And we learned about plumbing and sewers -- not once, but over and over again.  We learned about illness and epidemics, too: a bug that would wipe out a mostly-isolated hunter-gatherer band and stop, stymied by a lack of hosts, could smolder and flare in our cities, sweeping through like a wildfire.  We invented isolation, harsh and fairly effective.  We learned about cross-contamination the hard way (yet again!) and the lesson didn't stick.

     Eventually, we invented vaccines.  Vaccines are how you stuff a few hundred thousand, or a million, or millions of clever primates in a tight-packed city and avoid -- or at least control -- epidemics.  Ever since the first smallpox immunizations, some people have been skeptical.  It was gross, they cried; or it smacked of magic; or who knew what else might happen...?

     We know.  We've been running the experiment at scale, over and over, since the 19th Century.  We know what happens with communicable diseases we don't have vaccines for (epidemics), we know what happens when a sizeable segment of the population doesn't get vaccinated (outbreaks), we know the side-effects of vaccines, and they are evaluated and re-evaluated for safety and effectiveness.  Don't take my word for it, and don't follow internet memes and rumors, either -- you can go look this stuff up on Wikipedia, in the abstracts (summaries) of articles in reputable scientific journals or full articles in mass-market science magazines.  This is not a matter of debate except out at the weirdo fringe: vaccines work.  They're safe.

     Putting a "vaccine skeptic" in charge of this country's Federal health infrastructure is insane.
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* Speaking of humble and dangerous, and of gold: the ancient Egyptians apparently worked out the use of mercury and fire in refining gold, a job with such grave consequences for the people doing it that it was usually assigned to slaves taken in war.  "Mad as a hatter" (also the result of working with mercury) had nothing on an Egyptian gold-smelter.  Eventually we invented our way around that, too.

A Frustrating Pair Of Eyes

     In October, I had my regular eye exam and, of course, my vision had changed.  I own three frames (four counting sunglasses) and it was time for the round ones that I really like.  I left them with the eye doctor and they told me my glasses would be ready in three or four weeks.  My lenses require a complicated, multi-prism grind.  It's never fast.*

     Three weeks later, I picked them up, put them on and looked around the store, enjoying the sharpened vision.  I thanked the tech and clipped the matching sunglasses on.  They didn't fit as well as they had, but hey, new lenses.  Went out into the sunshine, drove to work and didn't take a good look at the new glasses in a mirror until I was washing my hands a couple of hours later.  One kind of round lens, one egg-shaped lens, the frames forced around them with some buckling for the least-round side.  They looked awful.

     I called the eye doctor immediately and took the glasses back the next day, where at first they saw only the frame damage, then realized neither lens was the right shape.  They sent the glasses back to their lab -- a different one than the one that has made my lenses for over a decade; the practice was sold some time ago and the new owners have their own lab.  That was almost a month ago.

     Monday, they called me.  "Our lab says they can't fix your glasses.  We're sending them to a different lab. Those frames are so old, you know, it's hard to put lenses in them...."  My round frames are maybe five years old.  There have been no major changes to the way eyeglass lenses for into frames in my lifetime, and hardly any in the last century.

     The frames are probably ruined.  My trust certainly is.  The "one-hour" place I went to when I needed vision correction in a hurry did okay and while I like the guy who has been doing my eye exams, I won't trust his employer to make me glasses again.

     My vision was terrible when I was a child.  I successfully faked it until third grade, when my teacher figured out that I couldn't read the blackboard at all, and that I thought it was just a cruel joke that everyone got except me.  (Mom: "So that's why you sit so near the TV!")  My world looked like an Impressionist painting, seen too close, all fuzzy blobs and smears.  It matters to me to be able to see clearly.
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* After cataract surgery, I had a "one-hour eyeglasses" place make up a pair of glasses that only corrected my greatly-changed nearsightedness, while I waited for the astigmatism to settle down.  A month later, I went back to have lenses for my full prescription made and the technician told me, "Okay, come back this afternoon and..." before doing a double-take at the prescription and apologizing, "Oh.  Sorry.  This will be two or three weeks.  We can't make these here."  Yep.

Heisenberg's Not Sure

     What if one observer determined the position of a particle while another observer measures its speed, and then they compare notes -- would the Universe cease to exi

Dishwasher Safe, Hand Wash Preferred

     Storage-solutions company Tupperware has filed for bankruptcy.  A group of creditors have proposed a novel approach to resolution, in which the company's assets would be placed under an air-tight seal, burped, and left in the back of a cold-storage warehouse until almost everyone has forgotten about them.

     (Seriously people -- we broke Tupperware?  I went looking for a sealable  32-ounce beverage container last weekend, preferably an unbreakable plastic one with graduations down the side like Tupperware made for decades, and there was nothing of the sort at our nearest big-box retailer, not even an imported clone.  I ended up buying a fancy metal thermal water (etc.) bottle, kin to the Stanley mugs that had their day not too long ago.  The future is awkward.)

True Wisdom Comes From Within

     After over twenty-four hours of fasting, contemplation and the use of powerful drugs, I was administered even stronger drugs and with the help of an experienced and highly trained adept from a distant land, looked deep within for true knowledge.

     Here is what I have learned:

     I should keep on with the high-fiber diet.  It's working well.

     Ten years until next time.  Maybe they'll have something less awful by then.

Resilient Wheat -- Chickens And Eggs

     The weather's highly variable these days.  Few people dispute that, however much they disagree over causes.  Weather becoming more variable is a problem for farmers -- and when farmers start to have problems, the rest of us has better worry: nobody's growing corn or cattle in a factory, at least not yet.*

     One problem is that cereal grains are nearly monocultures,  There's not a lot of diversity within each type.  Specific varieties of corn, wheat and so on are bred to be disease, insect and whatevericide resistant, to grow to a uniform height, and to grow under specific conditions.  (The late "Farmer Frank" James waged a long fight with commercial seed companies, since he grew his own stuff from his own seeds gathered the previous year and they were sure he was cheating; he wasn't.  What he was, was stubborn.  As farmers often are.)

     It wasn't always that way.  Prior to (highly) mechanized farming,† there was a lot of genetic variation even within the broad varieties of grain.  It gave the plants as a whole better odds of getting through droughts or prolonged wet weather, cold spells or baking heat.  But that variety wasn't so great for harvesting equipment, nor for maximizing yield for a given situation.

     But we're human beings.  Our species lives in the space between chaos and order, bouncing from one to the other.  When enough of us face a challenge, we'll try all the possibilities.  Up in the Pacific Northwest, small-scale "artisanal" farmers and bakers and a university lab full of bread enthusiasts are trying things -- like greater variety.  Like whole wheat.‡

     And these days, you can grow that more-varied stuff with commercial equipment.  Farming machines are better, smarter, more able to deal with randomness.  --At a price.

     Greater variety means greater resilience.  But it also make it more likely farmers will need new machinery.  It means seed companies are going to have to look for a broad spectrum of resistances and introduce new and more internally-varied lines of crops, and they do so love their matched-up seeds, weedkillers and pesticides that work together as smoothly as a key in a lock -- and are locked into tight genomes that will fall in lockstep unison if a new bug or plant virus emerges, or if growing conditions change too much. 

     As a culture, we can get there from here, moving from vulnerability to resilience.  And if the past is any guide, we probably will.  But it may not be especially easy, and it sure won't be cheap.  And there's the chicken-and-egg: it's not going to happen out of the blue.  Events drive changes; changes drive events.
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* They are growing chicken, at least on a small scale.  State governments have not reacted well to Chicken Of The Beaker, and if you were hoping to try a platter of chicken nuggets that never clucked, don't be in a hurry.
 
† Let's not kid ourselves: farming has always been about mechanization.  Rows replaced random planting; Sharp sticks replaced poking holes in the dirt with a finger, plows replaced sharp sticks and underwent continuous improvement.  Oxen replaced people; horses replaced oxen -- but only after a proper horse collar was invented; horses gave way to steam, steam to internal combustion, and some bright guy has already shingled the house and barns with solar cells to keep his electric tractor charged up while laughing at diesel prices.  In dim prehistory, it was apparently sufficient for early farmers to see a wheeled wagon from afar to spur them making their own versions.  Humans have been cheating Malthusan limits for centuries by getting better and better at growing food though better technology.
 
‡ I grew up in a household where there was always whole wheat bread -- usually Roman Meal -- next to the white bread, and most of us preferred it.  It'll hold up to a proper sandwich better than store-bought white bread, and it tasted better, too.  One driver of this was that Mom would occasionally bake white bread from scratch, and that'll ruin you for the store stuff; commercial whole wheat is much closer in taste and texture to scratch versions.

I Don't Care....

     You can call it climate or you can call it weather.  Either way, it's too darned hot.  95°F* or more yesterday and the day before, and today?  More of the same, with thunderstorms.  Thursday, the meteorologists are calling for a cold snap, probably no more than 85°F at the worst.  I'd better break out my winter coat.
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* That's like, what, 355° Centigrade or 356° Celsius (old style), right?

The Lessons They Learned

     Medical labs are their own industry.  I have a long history of minor medical mishaps and as a result, I've had a front-row seat to the change from "labs" being a matter of going off to Local General Hospital for them, to your doctor's nursing staff drawing a few vials of blood and something happens offstage, to in-office labs run by a third party (still a lot of that around), to needing to drive to one of the lab company's many locations and walking in.

     The pandemic hit the labs hard; they needed to do a lot of testing while keeping their staff and patients healthy.  Office staff jobs were cut to the minimum and made remote or at least moved well away from patient contact; phlebotomists worked alone or in teams of two and they encouraged making appointments, so waiting room occupancy could be kept down.  They rolled out a sleek automated check-in process that used a touchscreen kiosk that scanned your ID and insurance card like something out of a sci-fi film.  As Covid transitioned from being pandemic to endemic, the number one lab company (at least around here) bought the number two lab company.  They kept all of their offices as long as social distancing was mandated, and then--

     Then they did the obvious thing.  They started shutting down the least-used locations, consolidating offices in close proximity, moving out of high-rent locations to cheaper spaces.  They kept the electronic check-in and never brought back human receptionists.  And they consulted efficiency experts on just how many patients a staff of two or three should be able to process per hour, what number of no-shows and walk-ins could be expected, and how much annoyance patients would tolerate.

     --I don't know for sure about that last one, but it seems likely.  If you work the system by its own rules, current medical labs aren't too bad; I signed up online two days in advance, arrived at my appointment time and was in and out in about forty-five minutes.

     Forty-five minutes?  Yeah, I'd be a little irked, too; a half-hour would have been okay, but nearly an hour?  Except for one tiny little thing: the efficiency experts didn't count on human nature.  Three lab techs (one of whom was, I gathered, stuck on the phone, trying to untangle a terrific mess involving scrambled logistics before it became an even bigger mess), nobody on the front desk, two kiosks -- and a lobby full of unscheduled people who were hoping to walk in and get their labs without any effort.  Many of them interrupted the tech as she opened the door to summon the next patient; a few would just pry it open (no handle on the outside)  and walk in, peering into blood-draw stations until they found someone with an employee ID badge and slowing down the work.  Why, their draw would only take a minute and then they'd be out of the way, but that darned machine was telling them to come back in two hours!

     The phlebotomists are not in charge of the kiosk system; it assigns walk-ins to the next available slot, with an option to take the next no-show if that happens any sooner, and that's all there is.  There's no slipping someone in -- the test-tube labels are printed up when your assigned time arrives and the tech has them at the blood-draw station when she calls your name.  And she's working at a pace that leaves very little room for distractions and pointless conversation.

     It would be easy to blame the lab staff, but they're on the same treadmill as the patients; it's easier still (though less immediately satisfying) to blame the lab company, only we'll probably find they bled money through the Covid years (profit margins aren't great and everything shifted under them) and the suits making the decisions are layers and layers (and miles and miles) away from the point of human contact at the lab -- where people are still arriving, wanting to chat with the long-gone nice lady behind the desk and conveniently sneak their quick blood draw in between Pilates and grocery-shopping.  Ain't gonna happen and you might as well think of it as being right back to the time when you had to drive to Local General Hospital and patiently wait your turn.  Look, if you need lab work, you might want to treat that as more important than popping into the Rexall for a roll of Lifesavers.

     I found myself apologizing to the tech for people's behavior while she struggled with my rollaway vein (the obvious one inside my right elbow is uncooperative).  She sighed as if a weight had been lifted and said, "It's like this all day, every day.  They hate those kiosks."

     Might want to start figuring out how to get used to them.

Living In A Glass House

     There's limited room on the airwaves.  Digital TV made it easier to get more signals into the same channels -- and the FCC promptly stacked stations closer together to make more room for police radio and commercial users.*  Mostly-analog FM and AM† is even more pressed for space, with an array of technological fixes helping to find and fill in available slots anywhere there's enough of an audience to turn a profit.

     Radio and TV spectrum is a limited resource.  You can run out of it.  It's not like newspapers (just print more!) or cable TV (filled up one wire?  Run another -- or use fiber-optic for more bandwidth) or the Internet (make more webpages, run fatter data pipes!).  So the government regulates it via the FCC and one of the things they have required since early on is transparency: stations have to ID themselves with every transmission and you've always been able to go look up which owners go with what call letters. 

     Broadcasting is a big megaphone, and broadcast stations have to prove they're of some use to their community.  The way that happens is by a thing called a "Public File."  It used to be an actual file at the studios that anyone could show up during business hours and leaf through; now it's an electronic file, accessible through the stations website and the FCC's as well.  In it you'll find the current license (including ownership information) and any applications pending with the FCC, agreements the station has made with citizens (usually advocacy groups), contracts, complaints, details of political broadcasts, a copy of the FCC's guidebook The Public and Broadcasting, a list of issues and of programs that address them (including children's programming), and so on.  "And so on" has for years included EEO requirements: equal opportunity in employment.  There aren't any hiring quotas, but the FCC wants stations to make sure they're reaching out to all qualified applicants when they have job openings.  And they used to require stations keep track of staff demographics, and post that information in their public file.  Twenty years ago, that requirement was dropped (at least for radio stations) due to a court case, but time marches on and they were able to reinstate it recently.

     Of course a station owner objected.  Remember, there aren't any quotas; the FCC just wants that data out there so the general public can see it, along with all the other information about how the station has addressed matters of public interest and who's running the place.  But that's too much for the folks who run "theDove" and they've filed suit to block it.  The NAB loathes the notion, too, and have filed their own lawsuit. 

     I don't know.  Over-the-air radio and TV stations are using a scarce resource, and nobody's keeping them from making money; but since they're getting to use the public's airwaves (and at a pretty cheap price, too), the public deserves to get some direct benefit, and the public ought to be able to check how the sausage is made, too.   It doesn't seem out of line to include demographic data not linked to names.  NAB suggests it may enable doxxing individuals, and I will leave it to readers to decide if that's a genuine concern or a legal stratagem.

     Radio and TV stations are allowed a disproportionately-loud voice, and subjecting them to a greater degree of scrutiny in return is about as close to fair as we're going to get.
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* Yes, it's true.  UHF TV, which used to end at channel 83, now stops at channel 36, just shy of the channel 37 spot that was never used: radio astronomy finds 608 - 614 MHz useful and above that, it's all cops, military, Feds, fire departments, ambulances, phones and so on.
 
† There is, kind of, available room on the AM band these days, but it's more like vacant buildings than wide open spaces -- and decrepit buildings, at that.  An AM radio station is a big pile of sunk costs, especially the antenna tower(s) and ground system, costly to build, expensive to maintain and vulnerable to theft.  But AM listenership has been declining for years and advertising revenue has followed.  If you ever wanted to own an AM radio station, now's the time; but the way to make a small fortune with an AM station is to start out with a large fortune and be very, very frugal.

Dipping A Toe In

     The headline was interesting, combining two facts: more than forty percent of the U. S. population lives in coastal counties, and sea level rise is accelerating.

     People have differing opinions about climate change.  That's normal for our species -- in an age of space travel, people have differing opinions about the Earth being a sphere or flat, after all.  But while only twenty-four people have ever been far enough into space to get a really clear look at the big blue marble we live on, well more than a third of Americans can ride a bicycle to the sea shore and have a look for themselves, year after year.  Far fewer will find themselves under water in the near term -- in many places, the land rises quite steeply from the shore, after all.  Storm surges will be more of a problem, from the southernmost tip of Texas all the way around to New York City once in a great while, depending on the whims of hurricanes, themselves getting stronger and more frequent.

     Call it climate; call it weather.  Either way, the graph of water level over time says it's coming.  Does the name matter when your beaches become scuba sites or you're sloshing around the ground floor of your house in gumboots, salvaging what you can from the storm?

     It's certainly going to have an effect on the discussion.

     Of course, we said that when men went to the Moon, and we're not out of flat-Earthers yet.  Still, it's a lot harder to breathe water than to pretend geosynchronous communications satellites or the GPS and Starlink constellations are fake.

Back To Conditioning Air

      The techs stopped by this morning and swapped out the coil and expansion valve, a not-inexpensive process (though it could have been much worse).  After a week of managing the system while it was supercooling, "set and forget" will make a nice change.

Oh, Of Course

     Every once in a while, I'm reminded of the extent to which we are still all wandering around in the broken remains of Roman civilization.  I was looking at some interesting engineering that included a few very old dams in Spain -- really old: the Romans built them.  Several are in what is now the Zaragoza region -- which (according to a machine translation) the builders knew as the settlement of Ceasaraugusta.

     Put that way, it's pretty obvious where the modern name came from -- as obvious as the remains of an ancient dam.

Not Too Cool

     In the first few days of the Spring heat wave, the air-conditioner coil in the furnace here at Roseholme Cottage froze up.  (I've been calling it an A-coil, but it's got one more section, so it's really an N-coil.)

     That wasn't too great. I managed to catch it early: air was still flowing but the cold side of the coolant line was frosted up nice and white where it's exposed as it goes into the box where the N-coil lives.  I turned the thermostat up several degrees, left the fan running and added a floor fan over the register in the dining room -- that one's only six feet away from the return dust grill, and the system works better if I can loft the cold air up and displace warm air into the floor-level return.

     Tam had out-of-town stuff to do over the next week and a half after I found it and I had several projects at work, so service had to wait.  I figured the system was just low on coolant, which (for abstruse reasons I have neither the time nor the crayons to share my limited understanding of) can make the N-coil tend to get much colder than it it should and freeze up.  In the meantime, I could probably manage it by not cooling the house any more than the bare minimum needed to control humidity.  You have to pay attention to the outside temperature and if the ducts in the basement are sweating, but if the system's not too messed up, it works.  I fired up booster fans in the bedrooms and it worked through a couple of weeks of bad heat.

     Then we had the flea explosion.  I had scheduled service by then, but Tam had to go out of town again and the house was a mess with bags of to-be-de-flea-ed stuff all over, so I cancelled it -- I thought.

     A few days later, the tech knocked while I was in the shower and we had a short, unhappy conversation.  That was early last week.

     After rescheduling and apologies all around, he showed up yesterday morning and worked his magic.  Yes, the system was low on coolant -- but after topping it up, it was still acting funny.  I'd drawn the newest tech; he spent some time on the phone with his more-experienced peers and came back to tell me that either the high-tech self-regulating expansion valve was shot -- or the coil was.  The latter was going to be costly and even the valve would be painful because it's labor-intensive (or time-intensive, at least: they have to empty the system, but refrigerant's too expensive to waste, so it gets pumped down and saved, and that's not a quick process.)

     He left and I called his office for an official quote.  They reminded me that the bill would be less if the system happened to be under warranty.  I asked them to hold that thought, I'd call right back after checking.  Turns out I had registered it back in 2017, and yes, it was a ten-year warranty if you bothered to register.  I called back, and now the service outfit wanted to send another tech out to make sure the problem was as diagnosed.  (I can't blame them for that.  The parts markup on a coil is a nice chunk of change and some or all of that is now off the table.) 

     Early this morning, the previous tech returned, skeptical senior in tow, and they did another round of measurements.  The original guy was vindicated (and happy about it.  It sucks to be the new kid -- BT, DT), and I'm waiting to hear back on scheduling the replacement.

     Meanwhile, we're in another hot streak and I'm managing the thermostat.

He Loathes Travel

     Poor Holden Wu!  His yearly vet visit was this morning and despite getting the relaxed-kitty drug, he does not relax.  He went into the carrier without much trouble, but began to complain on the way to my car and through most of the short ride.  He had more to say, all of it sad-sounding, when we arrived at the vet.

     Once in the exam room -- and they get you right in -- he wasn't interested in leaving the carrier and had to be lifted out.  Once out, he couldn't decide at first between hiding in the little shelter they provide and huddling at my side, between me and the carrier.  Eventually, being next to someone familiar won out, and he stayed put until it came time to be carried to the exam table.

     The vet had brought along a spare towel for him to hide under and it helped.  He got through the exam without panicking, had his shots and was headed for the carrier again when she decided to take a closer look at some of the parts cats are embarrassed to have inspected.  But he got through that just fine, and climbed inside the carrier with visible relief, only to cry again when I left him for several minutes to pay the bill and sort out upcoming appointments.  It turns out he hasn't been brushing his teeth, so he's probably going to get dental work next month.

     He rode back home, not without complaint, and became impatient when I carried him through the garage and into the house, rushing back and forth inside.  Home at last!  safe on the kitchen floor, he emerged from the carrier with a happy burble and followed it with a longer sentence when he was sure he was really home. He was sprawled on the floor in the library surveying his kingdom when I went to the office to write this.

It's Raining!

     It's not much of a rain, but it is raining, listless from the heat like everything else right now.  I'll take it; it will cool things down a degree or two, and every bit helps.

     The air-conditioning here at Roseholme Cottage is keeping up, barely; we have to chase the outside temperature up and down a couple of degrees at a time so the cooling doesn't freeze up, but it's doing the job so far, controlling humidity and keeping us from melting.  It will run better after service, but that'll be awhile.

     Having grown up without air-conditioning, it continues to be something of a miracle to me.  Summer nights used to be a dark and sweaty misery haunted by the roaring of fans, laying awake on top of the covers until you conked out from sheer exhaustion.  Having cool, dry air pumped out of the floor vents is amazing.

So Much Stuff

     I didn't post yesterday.  My first day back at work after a week off, after dealing with the flea mess (relief is underway, but I have bags and bags of pillows and quilts to wash, most of them marinating in a spray of cedarwood oil flea destroyer) was too much distraction, especially with Tam out dog sitting for most of last week.  She's back today.

     The flea issue prompted me to replace the curtains and Roman blinds on the windows the cats enjoy sitting in, and what a change it has made!  I didn't expect it would be so striking.  I wanted more opaque blinds in the library and wow, did the place end up darker.  And the complicated, Victorianesque triple curtains (light floral-pattern sheers facing out with heavy green-brown Arts & Crafts-pattern tapestry curtains on the room side and a matching valence) in the living room have been replaced by simple Roman blinds with a striped pattern; I was sorry to take them down and the cats loved them, but they were a flea circus -- a Dry Clean Only flea circus, at that.  The old curtains kind of pooled on a couple of windowsill-high cabinets; I added a pair of washable cat beds on the cabinets instead and that's working out.

     It's been a lot of work and expense I wasn't expecting.  I haven't been quite able to zero out my credit card since the pandemic began, and it's not going to happen this month, either.  Clearly, I need to finish and sell a novel.

     Of course, I also need to keep working on bookshelves.  That's what I had planned to do last week.  It didn't happen.  Bookshelves and other types of shelves -- I have ambitious plans and have gathered prices at the lumberyard.  I've got wood for a small bookshelf for one end of the window seat and the other projects all need to be budgeted.  I have found that drawing software is a huge help; Visio and LiberOffice Draw let you work at scale and I can figure out raw materials and minimize left-over pieces right on the screen, creating a shopping list as a part of the process.  (I have mentioned the book Nomadic Furniture in the past, James Hennessey and Victor Papanek's 1970s book on DIY furniture; the ideas and especially the principles they wrote about have been a huge influence on how I think about and build furniture.  It's still in print -- use Tam's Amazon link for brownie points -- and has aged far better than bellbottoms.  My first copy, forty-plus years ago when the book was between printings, was a bootleg photocopy.  I have since made that up by buying the genuine article.)

N. B.

     "You're just as sweet as paint chips," might not be a compliment.

Knocked Out

     Oh, not literally, but dealing with the flea infestation is really taking it out of me.  This week was supposed to be a relaxing vacation.  Tam is away most of the time dog-sitting, and all I had to do was sleep, eat, and breathe (etc.)

     Instead, I'm not getting good sleep, I've got laundry running most of the time, and I need to hang multiple new curtains -- after I take down and bag up the old ones.  Which will happen after I have stripped the bed, bagged the bedding and pillows and treated the mattress.  I've bought curtains, a pillow, and various flea treatments.

     I've been through worse; when Tommy the cat and his sisters were little, well over thirty years ago, my well-carpeted duplex was swarmed with fleas; my next-door neighbor was just short of being an animal hoarder and the little black cat who was Tommy's mother had been feral (and ran away to that life as soon as the kittens were weaned).  Back then, I slept with flea collars on my ankles for a month (don't do this now, they've changed the chemicals), while cycling everything washable through the laundromat at least twice.  But it's no fun to deal with, even with my very own washer and dryer and no next-door source of replacement fleas.