hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

This infection has been kicking my ass, I'm glad I finally feel a bit better today. I picked up my lumber order and am planning to make a raised bed tomorrow. Carrots (because idk I just always wanted to grow carrots and had clay soil that didn't allow it) and greens (because nutritious and likely to have supply problems this year) are my main targets. I also picked up some pole bean seeds, because I'm all about growing food right now aaaand we have an ongoing problem with too much sun making the upstairs into an oven. Rather than spend more money on awning ideas that we're not really happy with, I decided to try and replicate the huge cone o' bean plants that my university used to grow every year. We'll see how this solution goes.

Here, have a week of reading notes!
( Fiction )

( Politics/COVID-19 )

I'd love to say I'm okay after my long-ass hiatus, but, well. What I am is (1) stably employed in a job that was always performed remotely, which is both great and annoying, since I feel I'm missing out on the true social distancing experience, and (2) reading a lot. Most recently, M.C.A. Hogarth's Dreamhealers series for hard-core comfort purposes and a free novel called Widdershins that is definitely someone's adorable gay Call of Cthulhu campaign in novel format. (Too gross in places, but amusing overall. I appreciated the badass academic woman.) Lots and LOTS of free stories are being posted (one source is here), so hopefully I will keep from feeling quite as bonkers by writing about the ones I read.

Harvard stopped paying me on May 31, and my new job didn't start until the following Monday, so I took the chance to finally go to NYC with grad friend A the way we'd been talking about for months! It was perfect weather, sunny and cool, and we had an excellent time.

Thursday
We agreed that getting there early wasn't worth getting up super early, so we met at the bus station at 9. It's nice to be comfortable enough with someone that you can just read and listen to music together for a few hours.

First New York meal: a corned beef reuben at the Starlight Diner. It's near the bus wasteland, and we needed food. A had gyros, and both our dishes were good but extremely large! I ate the other half of mine for dinner.

First activity: the Met! They were having a Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons fashion exhibit, which was amazing. We only had an hour and a half, story of my life when it comes to the Met, but honestly that's about all my joints can take of museum time without being able to sit and rest a lot. The fashion exhibit was glorious and made me even more disappointed in the basic bitches who went to the Met gala without even touching on the theme. There were plenty of ways to look sexy and interesting while still being avant-garde in Kawakubo's collections.

A kept trying to stop and look at paintings. No, if we don't go directly to the thing we want, we will be looking at everything else forever. We look at permanent-collection paintings after the limited exhibit!

She did have a brilliant idea afterward, though. We needed to eat New York cheesecake. Two Little Red Hens had good reviews and was reasonably nearby, and turned out to have excellent cheesecake, plus somehow 100% perfect lemonade. We didn't try the cupcakes, but they looked good too.

We checked out our hostel after that, which was a weird one -- there had been a deal on hotels.com, so we'd booked a king-size private room. In a hostel. Well, it did turn out to be a private room with its own bathroom, and rather nice though entirely without appliances, but the mattress was very clearly a full size. Good thing neither of us is a wild sleeper.

A went out for a walk to admire the sunset, I rested and took aspirin and read a Courtney Milan novel. (Books on my phone, so much easier to carry around all day.)

Friday
In the morning, A's tamagotchi woke me up at 7. Thanks for that. More reading time! A got up at 8 and we headed off to find breakfast at Bagels & Co. I had a sesame bagel with cream cheese and fresh orange juice, and it became very clear why they charge so much for cream cheese: sheer volume. We also each got a rainbow-colored egg bagel (pride-related?) to take home; mine is in the freezer awaiting suitable toppings.

We had thought of going up to NYBG, but it's pretty far really and A can probably get sent there for work at some point, so we stayed in Manhattan instead. First stop: the Natural History Museum. We looked at very many dinosaur and mammal remains, and near the cool drawings of animals whole/muscled/bones-only we met a security guard. He complimented my spaceship shirt (based on this design) and asked if I was a pilot. No, I said, a scientist. He asked where we were based, and when we said Harvard he asked if we knew Neil deGrasse Tyson. We do not! But he does. He, in fact, gets into a Michael Jackson dance-off with him every year. Sadly, it didn't happen while we were there.

Next we took a walk along the High Line, which was much longer than last time I was in New York, absolutely hipster-saturated but a really lovely aerial park. We got pretty hungry during this but failed to find actual food in the area, so we headed off toward the Strand. My phone had run out of data (Twitter autoplay, RIP) so A was navigating, and she found that at our bus transfer point there was a Sushirrito. This is apparently a Bay Area chain, and it was highly amusing and delicious. They have a machine that makes the nori-and-rice wrapping, which is really clever, then the humans apply fish or whatever (A had chicken katsu, I had yellowtail), plus veggies and other good things. They are very tasty but less well thought out than burritos as to what happens at the ends of the cylinder.

We went to the Strand, which was actually the first time I'd been. A good bookstore. I got The Star-Touched Queen and a souvenir magnet. We left in good order with just enough time to get the obligatory Jamba Juice, which has considerately moved to be more convenient, at Penn Station, and dash to the bus.

The last adventure was at the Burger King at the bus rest stop in CT. A got not only chicken fries, which cost twice as much as chicken nuggets for being long and skinny and better spiced, but also... mac n' Cheetos. The latter is horrifying and hilarious, it's Cheeto-shaped deep-fried Kraft dinner, I do not understand who came up with this.

I made it home by midnight and then my knee hurt for four days, but oh well, it was a very good trip. :)

I woke up in a good mood on Friday (sushi aftereffects?) and then had therapy. Therapist is onto me, as I have complained to Twitter already -- she refuses to hear only about the things that are going well now and directs me back to how the one terrible thing is getting its miasma everywhere. So that was hard but probably a good idea.

Saturday I had pottery as usual, and while the kiln is getting a lot slower since it's the end of the quarter I did get my Hallucigenia bowl back! It's ridiculous and great. I glazed the trilobite-stenciled bowl and another one, so hopefully those will be done by next week, and threw a couple more bowls that I was very happy with. One quite big, with lovely thin walls that really wanted to buckle downward, and my teacher was finally not being monopolized by Miss Working-On-Commission for the entire period and showed me how to save it and a less accident-prone way to do shaping. Always nice when I get instruction from my instructor!

Then genarti picked me up for our small hiking trip. It wasn't warm at all, but dry and clear was good enough for us. We drove out to Rocky Woods Reservation, which turns out to be adorable and very well maintained, with nice flexible trail options that don't doom you to an hours-long loop if you don't want to commit. There was an orienteering event that we both agreed we probably would've wanted to join in if we hadn't come at the end, but instead we had quite good sandwiches and a giant pickle from an aggressively quaint deli in the nearby small town. (How quaint were they? So quaint they had three kinds of store-brand soda bottled for them, bearing labels printed with an image of their storefront, complete with printed sign pointing to it in case you forgot who and how cute they were.)

Hiking with Beth is great. We climbed rocky hills! We saw a beautiful vista! We got distracted by trees and rocks! And also a weird nut (diagnosis after rock-based dissection efforts: one of these bare trees is a young walnut). And part of the trail being paved with compressed shredded roof shingles.

Then we joined a bunch of people downtown to watch Mermaid, which was hilarious if disturbing in parts. The cops! The shoes! The ceiling fan! The slingshot! The cranky assassin auntie! The badass magical grandma! (We could all have done without the teppanyaki scene.) We got food at a good Vietnamese place, which I'm about to have leftover clay pot rice from, and went by a bakery on our way home too.

Then I came home to find that pretty much everything we needed for our Flight Rising event was done to my satisfaction, and got a lot of very nice sleeping done. This morning (now that the push has started and we have some dragon data to play with) I made spreadsheet wizardries happen, took another nap, and have had time to just relax. I'm reading the weirder novels of Andrea Host, and can definitely recommend The Pyramids of London for wacky steampunk vampires and gods. Very eventful days are fun, but my health is still not great, and lying down a lot today has also been excellent. I also watched a bunch of Leverage, and I'm working on a music mix for a friend.

Well, maybe it does take being knocked on my ass by illness to make me post. Or to make me read slowly enough to think about books as I go, or something. My thoughts are too long for Twitter reviews, so here are longer and less coherent musings for you.

Commitment Hour, James Alan Gardner. So this is what a gender exploration novel looks like with essentialism turned to MAXIMUM. Post-diaspora Earth, different areas with different tech levels, rural town in which every child swaps sexes every year until commitment at 21, when they choose male, female, or "neut" (actually a perfect functional hermaphroditism, i.e. the most impressive technology in the book including star travel). Guess which of those the Patriarch who set up their society hated worst. There are interesting moments here, but I got really tired of the main character being a thorough ass and frequently being "possessed" by their opposite-sex "soul" when they needed to briefly not be. The ending is the weirdest thing I've read in a long time, and I'm not just talking about the murder spree.

A College of Magics, Caroline Stevermer. I always remember how much I enjoy this book, but I always forget how sad it makes me. Jane is wonderful; Faris is fine; her adversarial relationship with her uncle is fantastic. The school hijinks are fun and charming; the magic of Greenlaw is frustratingly mysterious but still works for sense-of-wonder; the other magic of the world is never adequately explained. Slut-shaming the villain does not endear anyone else to me, including the author. And Faris gets adventure and competence and heights of magic, but her unbelievable romance is not worth what she gave up to get to it, and I feel like Stevermer workshopped creepy body-swap concepts with Andrea Host.

THERE IS NO BOOKSTORE

I WOULD HAVE PRIORITIZED THIS OVER ADDING TOURISTS

1. Accomplished much sewing today with happy sunbeamish cats.

2. Last night my new textbook for my new job came: feeling like I am doing what I should, having good enough health to do it with, and enjoying the material. And I aced the pretest. :)

3. Another shipment came too, including some heavier lotion that I like the smell of and some probiotics to try to get my tummy all the way in gear.

4. Some fun nerdiness with spreadsheets occurred.

5. Good meeting yesterday with my boss and fellow postdoc where I had an analysis they wanted before they asked for it!

YES THANK YOU. Why I Lose My Mind Every Time We Have the Name Conversation

I are competent adult. I navigates annoying health care system. Slowly, but it happen. (Finally decided to try Mirena, but it turns out not to be as easy as just saying so. I have to enroll in some different program to see a gyno at all, and of course I have to go chat with them before they'll even make an appointment to actually do the thing, never mind that I already talked it over thoroughly with my GP.)

Anne Ursu is amazing. (We knew this.) The Great YA Debate

So I saw this giant isopod iphone case on Twitter, and I sent it to Wim of course, and he responded with... the MOST AMAZING giant isopod iphone case. I just. WOW. [N.B.: If you think you may not want to see this, you are really, really right.]