An Organizing Homebody

[hrj]

 I didn’t quite manage to compete yesterday’s to-dos, since I didn’t do any LHMP reading. (I can count working on taxes because my to-do was to *think* about working on taxes.) I did make significant progress on organizing the desk, so one of today’s to-dos will be to move my dayjob workstation over there.

I have decisions to make about all sorts of computer peripherals, cords, etc. Once upon a time, I backed up my laptop on a series of rotating external drives. Now that I have Time Machine with most of the writing project data also backed up via Dropbox storage (as well as being far more data than any of those drives could handle) I have no real use for those drives. Besides which, the last time I went to use them I discovered that they no longer talk to my Mac. And it wasn’t worth the trouble to sort it out. But I don’t want to give them away randomly because not being able to talk to them means I can’t wipe my old backups. And I hate to just throw them out because...because.

I also have peripherals that I used at some point then stopped using for some reason. A Wacom drawing tablet. Maybe I could still get it to talk to the laptop? Maybe not. It may be too old to be supported by current OS.

I have a LiveScribe pen and several associated unused notebooks. This is a device where you write on the special paper and it records and interprets your writing and then Bluetooths it over to your computer. For a while I was using it to do the LHMP note taking. It worked ok, though not great. But uploading the data to the computer used Evernote as an interface and I got tired of Evernote’s awkwardness and dropped it. So I’d have to figure out how to sync it. It also requires writing very precisely -- sort of like stylus writing on a Treo was back in the day. And when I moved back to note taking on actual post-its, I didn’t have to simultaneously juggle a book I was reading and a notebook I was writing in. Tech is not always the solution.

Anyway, more stuff like that.

Most of the paperwork that was piled on the desk is irrelevant. (No, I’m not going to carefully file the business cards of people I met at conventions. My brain just doesn’t work that way.) At any rate, the desk itself is now empty and clean. I need to pull it out so I can vacuum behind it before loading it up with equipment again and threading all the cords into out-of-the-way places.

Breakfast today was fresh raspberries (not Estates -- we aren’t anywhere near berries yet) and yogurt, with a drizzle of Seville orange syrup to check the Estates box. (I don’t usually sweeten my fruit & yogurt.) Lunch was a light tea (literally) with home baked bread and marmalade while on a Zoom chat with some DISTAFF friends (the dress/textile research group that are my Kalamazoo peeps). The main meal will be something with more of yesterday’s roast lamb, but I haven’t decided yet. I may make a mint-sorrel sauce this time for the Estates touch.

The other thing I need to do today is plant the plants I bought yesterday which means doing some more weeding and tidying in the herb garden. (Bermuda grass is the devil.) The green can is already full so I don’t need to worry about large-scale work.

One of the peculiar features of how my virtual community is dealing with self-isolation is realizing just how isolated I am under ordinary conditions. Here are the regular things I do that I’m not doing: physically appear at work, go to coffee shops, ride public transit, have Wednesday dinner with Denise, go to the gym. (I don’t include “shopping” because although I’ve greatly reduced it, I’ve still done some.) All the people out there who are scrambling to set up ways to interact socially without physical proximity? That’s my normal life. Not saying I prefer it that way, not saying I don’t; just that it’s normal for me.

I’m also not scrambling to find ways to occupy my time and be productive. This is directly related to my joke about trying to have three full-time jobs (the dayjob, the blog/podcast, the fiction). And I’m still doing all of those. What I *am* having time for (and not having to scramble for) is yardwork and cooking -- which, incidentally, are among the top items I’ve said I’m looking forward to having time to do in retirement. (Assuming the stock market recovers enough so that I *can* retire.)

Go out to a movie with friends? I rarely mange to find the intersection of available/interested when there’s something I want to see. Just hang out and socialize? Honestly, I’ve never really figured out how that works. I’m on some regular invite lists for specific things and prioritize saying yes, but random casual socializing? Can’t miss it if I’ve never really done it. I regularly try to get in the habit of inviting people over for dinner, but the coordination is stressful. I don’t know whether I’d have developed different patterns if I hadn’t spent all those decades when the SCA was my automatic casual-socializing context. Possibly not, since that’s where I met most of the people I’m likely to socialize with now.

[Later] Well I got all the plants into the ground, which meant tearing at some of the bermuda grass that infiltrates everything. I took a brain break in the late afternoon doing keyword searches in JSTOR for LHMP-relevant articles and cross-checking against what I already have in my database. (I can’t download from JSTOR since my alumna library access doesn’t include off-campus access, but it isn’t like I have any lack of publications to be processing in the near future.) When I was heating up the lamb for dinner, it occurred to me that surely I must have some mint jelly in the fridge somewhere. Sure enough I still had a jar from 1997, when I was growing a dozen different types of mint and did some experiments to see if they produced noticeably different flavors of mint jelly. For that batch, the apples weren’t home-grown, but the mint was, so it counts. This particular jar is pineapple mint. Fairly mild in flavor, but it’s the thought that counts.

Comments

[hrj]

SDD11: temperature = 97.7 (still), not that I actually expected any different despite having skipped recording yesterday. Any potential fallout from yesterday’s excursion into society wouldn’t be expected to show up for several days.

Didn’t leave the property at all, not even vague proximity to anyone.

[evil_macaroni]

I'm now reminded that I have a large box of electronic junk I need to offload, as well as an ancient Mac that needs to get sent to a farm upstate (or to e-waste)