eve_prime: (Default)
Okay, I now have an appointment to get the new heat pump installed on July 28-29, and the duct cleaning on July 30. Lots to do between now and then. Today's experiment involved putting a small fan into the bedroom window and letting it run for hours, once it was cooler outside than inside. It did reduce the temperature in here from 87 to 79, which is something. Meanwhile, it was cool enough outside, where I was reading in the evening, that by 8 pm I needed a jacket.

In other news, I should report that J's parents' home is okay, after the big storm Chantal hit Chapel Hill. His mom had to do quite a lot of cleanup for someone who is 82, but it sounds like she's okay too. The restaurant where they normally get food to go every Tuesday is now closed, however, and a photo of its flooded condition appeared in the New York Times. I think the pool where they swim is closed as well.
eve_prime: (bachelor buttons)
Today I “signed” the paperwork to get the new heat pump, but it may take 3-4 weeks… also they have to schedule a “permit” person and someone to double-check the measurements between now and then. Last night it only got down to 78 in my bedroom, although outside it was in the mid-50s, so today (given that it got up to 85 in here when it was 91 outside) I decided I would sacrifice the pollen-free status of my bedroom and open the window for a couple of hours before bedtime. It's around 63 outside, and I had imagined it would cool the room right down. Well, without a cross-draft, that’s apparently not going to happen. At 1:30 am it was 83 in here, and now, at almost 3 am, it’s dropped to… 82. I should find a fan tomorrow and see if it helps.

(Yesterday I bought a handy digital ambient temperature thermometer. I also can report that it’s 3-4 degrees warmer upstairs at J’s house than it is downstairs.)

Given that we’re going to have at least a week of 90+ weather, starting Friday, I had better accelerate the project of figuring out how to sleep in J’s guest bedroom. I should measure the window so I can start doing more to make it dark enough in there for me. (I can’t possibly sleep in his own bedroom – he needs it light in there so he can wake up, and he needs to wake up about four hours before me, which seems pretty disruptive.)

Oh right, I was going to report about the costs. I had two options: a standard model like I have now, which is either on or off, and an “inverter driven” model that is more energy efficient and goes at various speeds. The base price for the standard model plus installation is around $13K, and I’d get a discount for paying cash, so it would be $12K. The base price for the fancier model is about $17K, but there are various rebates and tax credits for that one, so although I have to pay more than $14K up front, the net cost to me is about $15 less than for the standard model (assuming the standard one doesn't also qualify for the tax credit? Maybe it does?). I just have to wait on the rebate from the manufacturer and the tax credit. My electricity bill should drop a bit, too. I went with that one.

Even though my sleep was a bit messed up last night, I did get enough rest that I was able to join them downtown for dinner. Our friend JC was visiting from Iowa!
eve_prime: (Default)
The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I had procrastinated reading this book for a great many years – I had the idea that it was dark and stressful. The first few pages had me anticipating something along those lines, too. But soon I couldn’t put it down! It’s short and satisfying, and an especially fun (for me) aspect is that it’s set in Portland. Another thing I appreciated was that a book published in 1971 was certainly anticipating a lot of problems we’re familiar with today. I liked it very, very much.
eve_prime: (Default)
Redwall, by Brian Jacques. I hadn’t read this book in a very long time, so it was interesting to find out what I thought again. My memories had been that the food sounds more delicious than I’d actually think if someone set it down in front of me in real life, the books seemed pretty formulaic, and especially the stereotyping bothered me, as in, why couldn’t there be any good rats, ferrets, weasels, stoats, or martens?

Now that I’ve read it again, though, I’m thinking that if you’re going to write children’s military fantasy, and if you’re going to be so violent and kill off quite so many people, it’s probably vitally important, ethics-wise, to characterize the bad guys as inherently, fundamentally bad, and to make all of the characters who die be animals of types that in real life are considered just fine to have die (via one’s cat, for example, if not more directly by humans). Otherwise it could be just too traumatic for the younger readers. There is, in fact, one species where individuals might be either good or bad, with the latter being worthy of death – the sparrows. And again, real-life children are unlikely to become personally attached to individual wild sparrows. (The foxes are bad but treated ambivalently by both sides).

So when we extrapolate from the story to the implied real-life-relevant messages, we get “enemies are generally unredeemably bad – a person’s goodness or badness is generally determined by their category rather than their individual actions” (which is not a message most of us would want kids to apply to humans) and “it may be sad to have animals die but don’t forget, these are just animals” (which does require some reflectiveness on the children’s part, since within the story they are hardly “just animals,” they are people).

Anyway! The parts of the story I most enjoyed were where Matthias leaves Redwall to go find the sword – visiting the sparrows at the top of the abbey, meeting the shrews who were thoughtlessly “democratic,” and exploring the quarry, which was far more beautiful than any real-life quarry I’ve ever heard of. I am still pondering over the decision not to name Constance’s friend the beaver – every time he appeared in the story he felt more like a strange mysterious animal than the person, because the author was making such a point not to name him. Strange!
eve_prime: (Default)
J went to Cottage Grove today to try to qualify for a Magic tournament in November, and D and DG (who had already qualified) went along to help. There were only 14 players, and they easily qualified for top 8. Then it was set up that if J won his quarterfinals match, DG would concede to him in the semi-finals and D would concede in the finals, and he'd be set. So he was pretty frustrated to lose his quarterfinals match, given that the other two had gone to so much effort for him. He's even thinking he may go to the November event anyway and try to qualify in a "last chance" event.

The Fourth

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:55 pm
eve_prime: (fireworks)
Today we celebrated the Fourth with our usual grilling and our usual guests, D&S and DG&AA. We met at 6 pm and were still chatting outside after 8:30 pm, but it was rather cool by then (and uncharacteristically cloudy). I was quite tired before and after, but had fun with our friends and family. Didn’t see any fireworks this year.
eve_prime: (poppy)
Today I met an engineer who does all the specs and bidding for heat pump installations and replacement, and we looked at my house and its existing system and discussed what needs to be done. Unfortunately, the space for the indoor part of my current system was designed too narrowly; they now make the equipment wider. Also, after 30+ years of cats, etc., in the house, it’s high time to get the ducts cleaned. I’ll have to do tons of work to get ready for that, especially as there are some ducts that aren’t particularly accessible now, like the one under my bed and a possible one beneath the livingroom bookcases.

After that, J and I did some errands together then sat outside eating a wedding anniversary dinner. Unfortunately, Azalyn ate the wax paper that had been under my lasagna – I hope her little digestive system can cope with it.
eve_prime: (Default)
Here on the Edge: How a small group of World War II conscientious objectors took art and peace from the margins to the mainstream, by Steve McQuiddy. I’ve owned two copies of this 2013 book by a local author for years (quite likely since 2013), and this month it was my self-assigned reading. I’m fascinated by the premise – a conscientious objectors camp dedicated to the fine arts and located on the Oregon Coast, just 30 miles north of my home town, in the small community of Waldport, and whose residents and activities helped inspire the Beat poets of the 1950s and the activism of the 1960s. The book gets off to a slow start, and when I was approaching the midpoint I was thinking that I’d probably have been fully satisfied with a ten-page synopsis. Things do become quite interesting after that point, though, and it’s easy to see why. If you put together a bunch of artistically inclined people, many with strong personalities and principles but also tendencies toward anarchism, along with others who may not care about the arts but have strong religious beliefs, then require them to work long hours at physically dangerous jobs for no pay while encouraging them to be creative together in the evenings, all packed into a communal living situation often far from their families… that seems like a recipe for a lot of interpersonal drama. And sometimes it was. I’m glad I finally read it.
eve_prime: (bachelor buttons)
I was quite fortunate today. In the afternoon, I went over to Hideaway Bakery to meet with SDH’s grad student, E, who is about to start their dissertation. I met with them once before and had a lovely conversation, and today went likewise. We chatted for two hours! We have lots of common interests: narrative psychology, cats, books, etc. Then in the evening, J went on a bike ride, and when he was headed homeward I texted BHW, who has just switched back to a non-night-shift work schedule and asked if she’d like to borrow a couple of books. She agreed, so I walked down to the park to meet J then headed back up the hill for a block to her house. We sat outside and chatted for another two hours! J was envious.

HVAC update

Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:10 am
eve_prime: (bother)
The heat pump technician came just over two weeks ago and let me know that it actually worked – it was just very low on fluid. He added a bit and gave me two options: They could refill it fully, including an ultraviolet dye that would help them identify the leak, or they could have someone come and give me an estimate for a brand-new one. I asked for the estimate for the replacement, and they didn’t get back to me about that until 10 days had passed; they’ll come on Thursday. Meanwhile, it’s been working so well that I was leaning toward the leak detection, but as of yesterday it stopped working properly again, so maybe the leak took away the coolant or maybe the fact that it’s finally back in the 90s overtaxed it. In the evening, when it became cooler outside, I decided that coolness outranked pollen (grass pollen levels are still high), and I opened up the windows in the main room. Unfortunately, I can’t easily open the bedroom window, nor, with Ajani, can I let the air circulate around the house, so it may be a very unpleasant night. It’s still nearly 80 in here. At least we expect cooler weather tomorrow – low 80s – but this weekend it may reach the upper 90s.
eve_prime: (Default)
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, by Zoë Schlanger. I’ve now read several books about the surprising capabilities of plants, and this one – carefully researched and informed by credible scientists doing cutting-edge research – is by far the best. I made a point to read only one chapter at a time, because I wanted to take time to assimilate what I was reading. If we were to consider a simple animal that had a long list of abilities – it can communicate, possibly hear, and even possibly see; it can recognize its kin, its neighbors, its allies, and its enemies and treat them as such; it can remember its experiences, form preferences, and make future decisions accordingly – we would recognize that such an animal has awareness and at least a rudimentary form of intelligence. However, suppose the living being is different from animals in three main ways: It’s anchored to the ground, its perception-and-response system is distributed throughout its body (no brain, but as if the entire body were a brain), and its food source is neither plants nor animals but light. Suddenly we no longer see awareness and an appropriate level of intelligence; we’re more likely to think it’s basically a living machine. This is a major bias on our part! But note that it hasn’t been all that long since animals, even familiar ones like dogs, were seen as living machines too. It’s absolutely fascinating that so many surprising things have been discovered about our plant neighbors, and I encourage everyone to read this book.
eve_prime: (Default)
The book I assigned myself for June was There, There, by Tommy Orange, which I read quite early in the month. Later I started on my book for July, Here on the Edge.

I didn’t start a new game, and I didn’t eat any lentils.
eve_prime: (Default)
A Drop of Corruption (Ana & Din #2), by Robert Jackson Bennett. This is the second fantasy mystery set on a world where there’s a vast “science” of human enhancement and biological engineering fueled by strange chemicals from undersea leviathans. It starts as a locked room mystery set in a strange building in a land that the empire plans to annex, and we get more character development both for young investigator Din and his exceedingly quirky and brilliant boss, Ana. So many extraordinary things to learn about! I appreciated the brief afterword of real-world political commentary too.
eve_prime: (poppy)
Today I finally got to meet my online friend P, who knew J briefly in high school and more regularly in college. I knew them both from the same online game but was friends with P first. We’d somewhat lost contact with him – we knew he was living in Hawaiʻi and doing volcano-related work, and that he was married and had kids. We didn’t know that his wife is from Oregon and that they regularly visited her family in the Portland area, but this year he had time to come down to see us! We spent about eight hours in conversation, catching up, and we ate Thai food for dinner and took a walk and introduced P to the Hollow Knight game. As it happens he’s become locally famous in Hawaiʻi for his work on volcano preparedness and emergency community response – he’s running an online site with 160,000 followers – so the anonymity of visiting Oregon is quite welcome.

Azalyn, who has been very shy of visitors in the past, apparently decided she could cope with yet another new-to-her person within days of the last two, although she was wary. Ambrose, however, was horrified – he had evidently maxed out on JM and NW – and not only refused to come inside while P was here but got into a great loud howling fuss directed at his friend Oberon, who was quite bewildered. He was making such a racket that we thought he might be sick or injured. However, when P headed down the driveway to go back to Portland, Ambrose let J pick him up and was calm and normal thereafter.

Now we expect things to be back to normal for an entire month! J will be home, and we won’t have any special guests. It should be quite relaxing.
eve_prime: (Default)
As I’ve probably mentioned many times, I’m supporting not only my own cats but the ones who used to eat at my late neighbor Hiram’s house, many of whom were born there. One of the cats has been especially troublesome, as he’s not part of Samantha’s family (despite probably fathering many of its members) – rather, it turns out, he was an early kitten of Bella’s, making him a much older brother of Ambrose and Azalyn. I named him Derwood, as Samantha made it clear from the start that she cannot stand him. He’s made it hard to feed the others, being more feral than the rest of them, and hostile – at every meal he’d be more interested in attacking them than settling down to eat. I’d always have to serve him extra food, very carefully, and first, on one side of the porch, and then all the others would huddle on the other side and try to eat as much as they could before he tired of his own plate and went to see what they had. All this is by way of explaining that when we discovered today that the poor fellow had passed away (in his favorite cardboard box, on J’s porch), my sadness that his life wasn’t better than it was is offset by my relief that the other cats’ quality of life will be much improved. (We hope whatever was wrong with him wasn’t contagious.) So now I have six porch cats, plus Ambrose and Azalyn (who spend most of their days inside J’s house though they do come out to socialize), plus the three “kittens” who live in my extra bedroom, plus of course Ajani.

Derwood was so much more aggressive than usual this spring that I was wondering if there would be any point to going out and buying a trap, to get him neutered, or if he was so old (8-9) and set in his ways that it wouldn’t help. (The others are all spayed/neutered except for Twobacca, but I was able to get them each into a cat carrier, although it did take two hours with Blitzen.) Thankfully he never attacked me, but he certainly could swipe at me when I was putting the food out for them. He sure made Parker and Blitzen miserable, and was even more aggressive toward Oberon, who is the biggest, and sometimes Theo and Twobacca wouldn’t even try to eat; they’d just watch from afar. Only Samantha, who knows she’s entitled to food, would go ahead and eat regardless, and she wasn’t thrilled that he was always hanging around. Now they can relax.
eve_prime: (Default)
The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, by George Lakoff. This excellent book presages the rise of Trump and MAGA, as well as the recent general collapse of the Democratic leadership, even though it was published more than 10 years ago, as an update to a book published 10 years before that. The Democrats don’t understand how to communicate. Lakoff points out that the Republicans invested heavily in understanding the psychology of communication, so they know how to put together winning messages, while the Democrats tend to spend their money helping the needy and thus don’t have the same type of think tanks. He hopes his book can help make up the difference, although obviously it didn’t have the impact one might have hoped, since here we are. It’s a quick read, and useful information – I only wish he cited the academic papers on which many of his points are based.
eve_prime: (Default)
By the Book, by Jasmine Guillory. Yes, I read it again. It's even more fun the second time through, because the allusions to the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast are even more obvious. Great bedtime reading.
eve_prime: (poppy)
Today I picked up Ajani’s new meds, then we did some grilling and had a nice outdoor lunch with JM and NW, with great conversation. Soon after 4 pm J drove them to the airport for the next stage in their summer vacation. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing outside – it was 80ish with a strong breeze. I read bits of three books, and he curled up on his big lawn chair and looked at his phone; then we took a walk. Tomorrow is “off,” then we’ll have another friend visit on Monday. After that, it will be about a month until our next out-of-town guests.
eve_prime: (poppy)
Tonight I attended the opening concert for the annual Oregon Bach Festival; this time the theme was Beethoven's first “Akademie” with music taken from a 1800 concert he promoted where he showcased some of his early work and introduced his first symphony. He put posters up around Vienna, and interested people had to go to his apartment to buy tickets from him! His actual concert lasted about four hours, whereas our event was two-plus hours of music from his event and an intermission. I went with my new friend CH, who had an extra ticket as her other friend wasn't able to go. I hadn't sat up in the balcony at the university concert hall before, and other than the excessive heat it was a pretty nice place to be; I saw several other people I knew up there too. Meanwhile, J took our friends to the sword school's "fight night" and then out to dinner at a restaurant in Springfield.

Hmm tired

Jun. 26th, 2025 11:58 pm
eve_prime: (poppy)
I must have really worn myself out the past few days, as today I was unaccountably tired. I mostly just rested at home and worked on my paper. J took our friends to sword class, and after that the four of us played a computer game together that lasted three and a half hours, but it was fun. I can also report that Ajani seems to be feeling quite well now and hasn’t even started the medicine yet.

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