tbonejenkins | Reading

One of the downsides of working from home (also not having a car but that's more about convenience in this particular case) is that getting to church for Ash Wednesday is more of a struggle for me. When I still went into my office, I could take a longer lunch and go up to the church closest to me for the noontime service. Last year, I was able to go since it was on the way home from a training and figured at the very least I could get ashes on the corner if I didn't make the service over at St. Paul's. As luck would have it, I made the service. I don't go to church regularly much anymore but St. Paul's is a good place to go when I do.

This year, my time is stacked because I've to to leave work early for something else and I didn't necessarily want to take the whole day off. I did do the readings for the day, which conveniently come in email (yay, technology). Also, I have chosen a saint for Lent Madness - this is new for me but hey, having saints duking it out in a March Madness style bracket cracks me up. I am pulling for Marina the Monk, who wanted to join a monastary rather than get married (her dad was going to marry her off and join a monastary himself and she said nope, let's be monks together) and dressed as a a young man to join up.I was previously unfamiliar with her story but the Episcopal Church added her to the liturgical calendar in 2022. She's been long venerated in Easter Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox Churches.

I love saint stories. They start out pretty tame but then you run into something like, "Oh, by the way, there was that thing with the snakes and it was pretty amazing."

jazzfish

I made English muffins ("or, as they say in the UK, muffins") yesterday, so I can make more frozen breakfast sammiches. Today I decided to have a proper Eggs Halifax, which is like a Benedict but with smoked salmon instead of back bacon. In the event the hollandaise broke. This has been the usual fate of my attempts at hollandaise for the last N years. It's frustrating because it -used- to work. Still tasted okay but the texture was way off.

Since making tricky food was going so well I decided to turn the egg whites from the hollandaise into divinity. (If you're not from the South, divinity is the answer to the question "what if meringues were candy?" It is somewhat nougat-like and somewhat fluffy and usually involves pecans, though I haven't had much in the way of pecans since the death of my great-uncle who had a pecan orchard.) This involves cooking a bunch of sugar to hard-ball / 260F and then adding it into a running mixer with whipped egg whites. After an hour my sugar was stubbornly refusing to go over 245F. I turned up the heat a little more and the sugar boiled over. Thankfully I grabbed the pot so it did not boil over onto the burner, just onto the stove top, but while I was salvaging that the sugar crystallized. I swore and tried again: added more water and some additional sugar and stuck it back on the burner to re-dissolve and re-cook. This time careful additions of heat got it up to 250F and more threatened boiling over, so I called it good and poured it into the mixer. Adding injury to insult: while scraping the last quarter or so of the sugar into the mixer I managed to splash some of it onto my hand. Molten sugar is a nasty business: it glues itself to your skin and keeps burning. Thankfully my mixer is right next to the sink. No permanent damage done but I ended up with several blisters, some of which had the tops ripped off when I tried to remove the sugar.

I used to hate and avoid dealing with candy-making / molten sugar. Now I seem to have reached a point where it is my nemesis, and I will conquer it or get really annoyed and minorly scorched trying. Anyway, the divinity is in its pan and setting; should be edible sometime tomorrow.

Twenty-seven and a half boxes of books (down one and a half from last time), and what looks to be about twenty-five boxes of games (down three or so from last time). Plus one box of CDs and two-plus of DVDs. My obsession with the Arrowverse means that DVDs no longer fit neatly into two boxes. Oh well.

Now to pack up all the random miscellaneous stuff that doesn't need to be out while the place is on the market, which will take probably less than ten boxes and probably twice the time. At least I have plenty of time: my preferred movers aren't available until early-mid March.

boxofdelights posting in

wiscon

Panels Suggestions are open! So, far we have 42 suggestions, and yeah, we want more! Let your voices be heard! What would you want to hear discussed at WisCon this year? Give us your wild, your feminist, your rage, your joy, and your curiosity!

PANEL SUGGESTIONS ARE CLOSING SOON!

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#WisCon #WomenInSFF #FeministConvention

ladyjax

So, there are things and then there are Things. The big thing is that over the past few years I've been having intermittent pain in my right leg and hip. It started when I was rounding a corner at the Oakland Marathon 5K back in 2023. The only way I can describe it is that I stepped wrong; suddenly my hip got real twitchy and I was thinking, "Well fuck, what is this?"

Cue me not really thinking about it that much until I started having moment's where the muscles in my right leg would go slack for no good reason. i could still move my leg and what not but it just felt like the muscles went dead and then would come back online with everything feeling super tired and the like. But I kept on with doing what I was doing: walking, biking. Also sitting because I work from home. I sit a lot. Probably an unhealthy amount.

Anyway, fast forward to last year: my legs hadn't been great which meant I hadn't really been training like I usually do. On a good day, I can knock out 3 miles (my house to downtown Oakland and back) and not even think about it but it was becoming harder to do. I walked the Oakland Marathon 5K, San Francisco Marathon 5K and Berkeley Half 5K. The Berkley Half was where I finally realized that something might really not be okay. The last part of the course takes us into the campus, past Sather Gate and then an incline up towards the Campanile. I absolutely detest that section but I know it's there and normally I bitch in my head about it but I do it. Last year I had to stop. Really stop. My hip was barking and so was my leg. Not good.

I finished but I was also meeting a friend who was doing the 10K so I had to walk down from the Crescent to Civic Center Park where all the festivities were. Not a problem but I could feel my leg twitching and my brain was trying to suss out what I was feeling. While waiting for my friend, i had a chance to talk to one of the PT folks who was there doing post race assessments (mostly to drum up business), but she did give me some good advice - i.e. it might be this thing but go talk to your primary doctor, which I did; she thought it might be sciatica. I had some preliminary imaging done; right hip, knee and my lumbar spine. And got a referral to PT at Berkeley Community PT.

So, the upshot is this: my lumbar spine is compressed like whoa and things aren't real happy which translates to the issues with my hip and leg. I have some degenerative things happening but that's mostly due to age. I've been in PT for just over a month which means I have homework.I also now have a referral to orthopedics at UCSF. They'll probably do more imaging and make a recommendation for next steps.

Right now, as much as all of this is a pain in the ass, I am thankful I have full insurance to cover it. Shirley is also feeling the aches and pains of her job but trying to get her to go get some body work done beyond seeing our chiropractor is a lot. I make vague noises like, "Hey, you know, the acupuncturist has some time."

The biggest thing in all of this is having to acknowledge that I am getting older (we both turned 60 last year) and my body is changing into a newer configuration. None of what is happening is insurmountable but how I engage with sport and exercise are changing. Right now, I'm not doing a lot beyond PT because I don't want to aggravate anything. My Garmin sits there and accuses me of not getting enough steps in.Lol. I do have new trekking poles and I use those for walking for the extra support but I also have a touch of plantar fasciatis right now so I'm not doing a lot of that.

It rains, it pours. I remain salty about it.

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Cafe in the Woods

A writer's journal In Touch With Yours Truly

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Ash Wednesday

as he hits the floor he sighs: 'what a morning'

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June 2019

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