elements

For reasons not worth ever really delving into, ever, I tend to forget about the existence of over-the-counter medicine to treat symptoms. Leading to the many occassions of me saying "I don't have to put up with this! I'm rich!" and then taking pepto-bismal.

Today I remembered about the existence of cough drops.

I am here to report that Ludens wild cherry cough drops taste exactly the same as they did the last time I took them, whoever knows how long ago it was. I do know why I stopped buyihng them: because I ate too many and got stomach ache from it. But oh wow, these didn't change at all. The packaging sure looks different, though. I suppose that's to be expected.

lannamichaels

Developing a test called the Maurice Lamm Test: does your first person POV fiction book have as strong, and as specific, a POV as The Jewish Way In Death And Mourning, a fairly standard widely accepted (and non-fiction) guide meant for a lay audience, published in 1969?

Project Hail Mary, by the way, fails this test. R' Maurice Lamm has a stronger voice on one page than Ryland Grace does in the entire book.

(As I was saying to someone, "R' Lamm has opinions and he is going to tell you exactly what they are". But honestly, this would not be a high bar for first person POV books to jump over.)

pegkerr

I am not troubled by boredom very often. Part of the reason is that I can be pretty satisfied with a book at any time.

For some reason, that has been working a little less well lately.

It seems exceedingly strange to experience cabin fever in the summer, but that's what I've been feeling. In the past week, I have found myself repeatedly pacing around my living room, muttering under my breath, I gotta get out of here.

Part of the difficulty, I think, is that I want to be out on my porch when I'm reading, but the air quality has been keeping me inside more than I would like.

This collage is going out late this week--again. Last week, the difficulty was technical. This week my difficulty was conception, and I floundered a lot as a result. How do you convey restlessness visually? I usually do these collages while I am Zoom chatting with several of my friends on Fridays every week, and I do often ask them for suggestions, advice, and reactions as I work on each collage.

naomikritzer suggested a tiger in a cage could help get the idea across. I chose a choppy sea as the background.

Image description: Background: choppy restless sea. A tiger behind a fence paces forward. Top: the word "Restless"

Restless

34 Restless

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Current Mood: restless

ruric

My annual leave 7 days in has not quite gone to plan. There's been a lot of rest and recuperation and not much action in terms of organising flat, garden and allotment. But I do feel rested so that's something!

And then this week Dolly Parton and Tim Curry shuffled off this mortal coil - and I've not seen a bad post about either of them. My Threads is filled with touching anecdotes and stories of meeting them which shows they were both exceptional humans.

And then this afternoon the footage from Nepal. *hands* I just have no words.

It's raining in London at the ridiculously early hour of 5:28am - much needed but it also feels oddly muggy. Hope the rain will clear that up.

I have a plan for today which involves a bit of cooking, some light tidying and a tip run followed by blitzing my bedroom. Wish me luck!

siderea

A long-time reader asked if I have any wisdom to share about getting one's first set of hearing aids, and I don't. Maybe some of you do?

He just had a hearing test showing hearing loss – almost perfectly the same in both ears, IIRC starting around 1000 Hz and tanking in a straight line on the audiogram as pitch rises – so he's been referred to an audiologist consult on hearing aids. He'd like to know more about whatever there is to know about hearing aids before talking with someone with a financial interest in selling him something. Definitely interested to hear from any hearing aid users who have strong and informed opinions about the market.

Also – this being the US – he's still working and has excellent health insurance coverage for hearing aids through his present employer, but hopes to retire in about a year, at which point he'll be on Medicare, and doesn't know how good his hearing aid coverage will be. So if there are decisions to be made that might make the most of his present insurance situation, he'd like to know about it.

I also have some questions of my own. I was surprised to learn that standard hearing tests don't go below 250 Hz and go up to 8000 Hz, and the justification is that that covers the range of human speech. Which:

1) The hell it does? You know what 250 Hz is? Middle C on a bad day in the Baroque. That is: a slightly sharp B3 under A440 tuning. Middle C is so-called because it is in the middle of human sung vocal production ranges, where below it is the bass clef, traditionally for men's voices, and above it is treble clef, traditionally for women's and boy's voices. The standard audiogram starts above any note a bass singer ever typically sings, and above 2/3rds of what tenors sing.

1a) Worse, sung vocal production is usually (always?) higher than spoken vocal production in the same person – that is, speech is lower than song. According to this at VoiceScience.org, the typical men's speaking range is ~93–135 Hz with a mean of ~116 Hz and the typical women's speaking range is ~162–238 Hz with a mean of ~205 Hz. There are no human beings whose speech production pitch range is typically above 250 hz. A hearing test that starts at 250 Hz and goes up starts higher than the entirety of typical human speech production, all genders.

2) The C above middle C is only 523 Hz. Who talks at 8000 Hz? Dolphins? Bats? Hell, 1000 Hz is just under the second C above middle C.

3) You know what's even lower than human speech? Traffic. Garbage disposals. Engines. Thunder. Rushing water. Tornadoes. Why are we pretending to only care about hearing correction for understanding human speech when hearing is also necessary for safety, and the pitches of things you might want to hear in the environment can be low?

4) No, really, they triaged everything below middle C? Like fuck music entirely? Doesn't matter if you can enjoy a rock band or a symphony orchestra any more, that's not a medical problem?

Is there some way any of this makes any sense? This all seems completely insane to me.

I had a hearing test back in 2005 because I noticed I was having trouble parsing speech at my internship. I got an audiogram, but at the time I didn't even notice what the starting pitch on the chart was. I was told that my hearing was fine – better than average for my age, actually – and that it showed no reason I would be having trouble. But in retrospect, they... never actually tested my hearing in the range of speech? WTH?

ETA: A picture's worth a thousand pitches. Here's my understanding of the situation:

Ranges of speech, song, and audiograms vs piano keyboard

Note that the ranges I specified for sung voice types is the typical choral expectations; virtuousic soloists can and are often expected to exceed these.

celli

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the_shoshanna

For a variety of reasons -- travel, weather, air quality, workload -- we haven't been kayaking all summer. But this weekend we finally made it out for the first and second times! On Friday we just puttered around on Lake Ontario, but yesterday we went a little ways north to one of our favorite launch spots; it feels like a huge lake but it's actually a calm part of the St Lawrence River (there's no palpable current). We saw a lot of wildlife, and for the first time, I took pictures! Click through for full-size photos if you like.

A turtle on a rock!

I think we saw three in all.

The view across the lake from there, i.e., what the turtle could have been looking at:

Our first pair of swans:

We saw a ton of ducks and geese and cormorants, and I wouldn't normally bother with pictures, but I liked this sight of cormorants in a tree:

Our second pair of swans, this time guiding half-grown cygnets across the water:

We were lucky enough to see at least half a dozen herons and either one osprey several times or several ospreys, but I didn't think I'd get photos because it's not like I can fumble my phone out of my dry bag in time to snap a bird in flight -- but then the osprey perched in a treetop just above us, beside its nest!

a kayaker observes an osprey in the treetop

(It's a bit hard to see in the photo unless you zoom in, because everything is so backlit; the osprey is at the top right of the tree that's second from the right, and the nest is in the crook of the same tree just below and to the left of the osprey.)

Our second pair of swans, guiding seven cygnets across the water:

And a heron politely posed for a portrait:

And just as we were almost back to our launch point, we saw a third pair of swans nesting at the edge of the reeds, with three cygnets! I very carefully and quietly inched as close as I could, snapping photos all the time; this was the closest I could get before the adult on the right roused itself to get in the water and begin warily eyeing me, at which point of course I backed off.

I even caught a glimpse of a deer on the shore, but it was gone in an instant.

It was a lovely afternoon.

celli

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kass

For reasons that don't bear exploration at this juncture, the 2005 Vividcon intro vid came up in conversation with

sanj and

kouredios this evening. We went looking for it, but it doesn't seem to be online anywhere that we could find anymore. This is the "Llama Llama Vid" one made by

tzikeh -- also showed in the History of Intro Vids vidshow that

renenet VJ'd in 2014. Can anyone point me to a place where it's still available online?

neotoma

Crab dip, a cheese biscuit, dark chocolate walnut cookies, an arnold palmer made with watermelon lemonade, grapes, 4lbs of peaches, figs, salt-&-pepper pistachios, and my friends' CSA box because they are out of town this week: 5 ears of corn, a beefsteak tomato, a pint of cherry tomatoes, a watermelon, some other kind of melon (or maybe squash?), a zucchini, a bell pepper, two large jalapenos, and some bagged salad -- that was all from a 'medium share' box that is intended for 1 to 3 people for a week.

I might cut up the watermelon for lunch this week, and I will roasted the corn in the oven tonight, but I'm going to have to think about what to do with the rest of it.

Current Mood: humid

ruric

On Thursday we hit the part of the year where I had to take my remaining leave or lose it.

If you've been here since May/June you'll know following my 6 weeks off with ill health I ended up with 20 days leave I needed to take before 31 August.

Which meant

1. I've only worked Monday to Thursday since returning in July (long weekend are fab)

2. It was impossible to take it all so I booked time off and

3. Carried 5 days over into my new leave year (using 4 of those 1-4 Sept)

4. Booked an extra 5 days off in the 2 week run up to 20 Aug but worked those from home and will use them as flexi days in Sep-Dec - done with management agreement because there was no special circumstances to carry them over and you can no longer sell back unused leave. Bah. So even more extra days off before then end of the year!

But since Thursday I'm officially on 2 weeks and 2 days leave - though I did work Thursday morning to clear up a few things and will put in a few hours next week.

Thursday was also young

ravurian's birthday so off we went to see the current interation of The Car Man at Sadler's Wells - which was magnificent. Will Bozier's Luca and Henry Onrak-Wright's Angelo were breathtaking. Fun times. Also note seat E18-E22 are very good seats.

Yesterday was a day of sleeping late, crochet club and pottering around.

Today I'm planning the next 2 weeks which are mostly focused on sorting out the flat, garden and allotment. It looks like there's going to be a lot of rain which sucks in terms of what I wanted to get done outside (but garden and allotment desperately need rain) but at least it means I can focus on getting my bedroom and living room sorted.

( Saturday's To Do's )

In other news the temps have finally dropped to the more usual British summertime range of low to mid 20s and after the hell of ridiculously HOT May to mid August temps it feels positively cool!

Note to self - I'm absolutely buying a aircon unit when they're back in stock - the cats and I will not survive another summer of 39-40C in the flat during the day and 30C overnight temps with no breeze.

pegkerr

When you're a parent, there's a strong cultural assumption that, of course, the parent is the more knowledgeable one, the teacher, the guide.

But honestly, if you're a really good parent (which I've always wanted to be), you have to accept that sometimes your children are the ones to show you the way.

Last Sunday, I went over to Fiona's house to see her and M, and to my delight, Delia was there, too. The four of us went out for a breakfast of delicious pastries and then, after we put M down for a nap, the three of us sat in Fiona's living room and talked. It was a warm and trusting conversation. But I happened to ask a question at one point that opened a discussion that surprised me, and frankly took me aback.

It was as if the girls, in answer to my opening up a topic, took the opportunity to -- carefully, gently, respectfully -- hold up a mirror to me and reflect back something about me that made my heart sink. The sort of thing that makes you suck in a breath and sit through a wave of mortification before you can find your voice and speak again.

And you know what? I was grateful. I was so incredibly grateful. It was something that I needed to know. And I noticed how kind they were being, how carefully, lovingly, and reassuringly they chose their words. At the end of the conversation, I was damned proud of all three of us.

I thought about that for a long time afterward. First of all, I realized that this had been modeled for me in my own family of origin. I have never had any doubt that if I needed to go to either of my parents to bring something to their attention that I thought they needed to hear, they would listen.

And in the family I created with Rob, we did the same.

Of course, going through years of therapy, including family therapy, helped.

Having healthy family relationships can be so very challenging. But I truly do believe the power to have respectful conversations is worth it.

This collage was really quite tricky to make, with at least five layers and I used about six different online tools. It's going out late because I put in a good hour on it this morning and thought that I just wasn't going to be able to pull it off. But I came back to it tonight, thought of a few other tools I could use, and I'm pretty satisfied with it. The conversation, as I said, took place in Fiona's living room, but I didn't take a picture. Instead, I found a recent picture of the girls sitting on the couch in my living room, and edited M out (who was sitting between them) and then started putting in layers to add the mirror and my reflection. I'm proud of it, not just because of the subject, but as a technical achievement.

Image description: Two women sit on a couch in a living room, holding up an ornate mirror between the two of them. In the mirror is the reflection of another woman, looking slightly startled and troubled, with one hand raised as if in surprise.

Respectful Conversations

33 Respectful Conversations

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Current Mood: contemplative

celli

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celli

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"I don't have to put up with this! I'm rich!" - Princess Vespa, Spaceballs (1987)

Been thinking about this easily for a month now

2026 52 Card Project: Week 34: Restless

Annual leave and goodbye icons

Hearing aids advice and questions? [healthcare]

I did the thing!

kayaking!

audiobook progress

A long shot: looking for a vid

Farmer's Market -- 22 August 2026 (Salmon Day, 6th of Fruitful, Year 234)

Holiday or rather time off work

2026 52 Card Project: Week 33: Respectful Conversations

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