pygment | Reading

Tomorrow I have the great luxury of choosing between many well-qualified, progressive candidates. It took a while to decide how to vote and I thought I'd share a little of the logic behind my choices.

I will be voting for Ed Markey because of his steadfast support for trans rights. There's never an excuse to throw people under the bus and now is an especially bad time for such things.

Among the many unopposed state-level candidates I will be voting for Diana DiZoglio and none of the others, in hopes that her important work might benefit from a higher vote count for her relative to the various people she's trying to audit.

I will be voting for Ayanna Pressley so that I can proudly tell future generations that I did.

I will be voting for Diann Baylis for Governors Council because she is an immigration lawyer and that's critical to things the Governors Council does like recommend judges and people to pardon.

I will be voting for Erika Uyterhoeven for State Senator because I think she'll be effective at prioritizing and implementing her policy positions, which don't really differ from those of the other candidates. Christine Barber would also be effective, I think, but if I squint it seems like Uyterhoeven is a little better on a few of those positions, particularly transparency, and that was a tie breaker for me.

I will be voting for Ben Ewen-Campen for State Representative. I wanted to like Olivia Gilligan-Corsett and she knows what the important issues are named but I just don't get the impression she really understands what they are, or what to do about them.

Finally, I will be voting for Marian Ryan, who was the first person in the country to get an injunction against ICE in courtooms and who, like most sane DA candidates, doesn't accept endorsements from police unions. That her opponent has all of those endorsements is reason to doubt his willingness to prosecute cops.

flexagon

The slush reading got ridiculous -- having gotten through a final 20 or so today, in the end I took an initial look at an even 100 stories. Equivalent to about five books' worth. Most of them were bad; some were in Arabic, broke the rules, or just had such awful grammar that I felt okay with an early exit. A few are good! I believe that only one story is going to win in each of two categories, so I'm fairly convinced that the final winners will be high-quality. I liked this sentence from one of today's, even though I probably disagree with it: “The human mind is just electrical repetition convincing itself it has a soul.” Fits in with my very enjoyable reading of A World Appears, which is all about consciousness.

Because it was the Week of Spreadsheets (apparently), I also had a little party yesterday in which people wrote 200 postcards to swing state voters -- this program. I'm always worried that it's way too many postcards, people won't come, etc, but it worked out perfectly. With nine people coming and going, they all got written in just over the time allotted. They'll be mailed in a few weeks.

It was also a Week of Working Out Too Much. Three days in a row of actual handstand coaching is a lot for your girl here. Postcard day was, at last, total rest day, following a chill date with the bug in which we finished watching Widow's Bay, and I needed all that. My shoulders were pretty sick of my bullshit.

Some things were more reasonable. I had a fun dinner with some ex-coworkers. I also attended a lovely game night in which I did my first actually enjoyable storytelling game; I played a lovely young lady who was about to marry the local lord but had fallen in love with a travelling merchant, and also was part owl-fairy without knowing it. Being me, of course she went through with the marriage. For the money! My young lady was no idiot. But she arranged to see her merchant occasionally on the side, too. I'm still laughing at that.

Birdie is back from Spain, ready to plunge into her final semester of her MPH degree, and I have tickets to Spain in October! Lay your Barcelona recommendations on me. I am ready for them.

redbird

With just over a day left, I have completed a column on the regular adult reading bingo card (about ten days ago), and one on the "more reading" card (this afternoon).

On the main card:

Staff recommendation: Shut Up and Read, by Jeannine A. Cook (I borrowed this from the library because of BPL summer reading.)
Learn a Boston fact: Allston is named after a painter (I spent some time wandering around Wikipedia to find a Boston fact I didn't know.)
Orange cover: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell
Learn a new word: "bisonoric," describes a kind of accordion that has two tunings at the same time. From a conversation on the Scintillation Discord.
Page to screen: Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand

More reading card:

A love story: Harmonic Pleasures, by Celia Lake
Transgender author: What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed
From your to-be-read pile: "It's Classified," by Ardes Shea (I read this several months after I got it, because of the summer reading bingo card)
Reread a favorite: A Few Figs from Thistles, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (An old favorite, which I just reread for the summer reading)
Set in New England: The Sheltering Fire, by Ruthanna Emrys

That's two books I read, and one I reread, because of the summer reading challenge. I also read some things that would let me check off other boxes, sometimes more than one per book. I don't think it led me to read more, in total, than I otherwise would have in the last three months. As I remarked to rysmiel, the library keeps the lists of recommended books for different categories online indefinitely, and I sometimes look at previous years' lists for ideas if I don't know what I want to read next.

adrian_turtle

Thanks to everyone who recommended using LibraryThing for the cataloging problem I posted about back in July. I am enjoying it tremendously. Putting a book on the correct shelf, in the correct order, was already satisfying, but being able to enter it into the database with all the cross-references is even better.

We started referring to our LibraryThing as the Thingee. Affectionately, of course. I only spend one day a week in the library (well, sometimes two. It really does soothe my anxiety better than most things.) I can still peek at the database from home and see how its growing when one of my comrades is entering data. I can even tidy up some of the tags, as "dialog" and "dialogue" should NOT be separate categories. Neither should "2nd floor kids" and "2nd floor kids room," though "2nd floor little kids" should have its own tag.

When I was first looking for database systems, I was put off by what LibraryThing calls "collections," as they are both fixed and useless to us. The Thingee just ignores all that and has everything in "My Library." My comrade started putting periodicals in a spreadsheet, while I was figuring out how to deal with the books. I don't want to enter each item into the Thingee one at a time, as there are 573 of them. (I probably don't want to? It might be more soothing than Tetris, as a project for after we deal with all the books.) Is there a way to transfer the information over all at once? Or should we just put cards on the physical shelves saying something like "see periodicals database?"

redbird

I've been trying to note things that work for the BPL summer reading bingo, and I think I have a bingo on one card, after looking online at the covers of ebooks that I read on my (black-and-white) kindle.

Eleanor Norton, Life Lessons from Historical Women: a collection of short biographies and online-style lists like "ten Roman women not to cross." Some of it was funny, though less than the cover blurb promised; some of that may be that I'm missing UK references. I already knew about some of the women she writes about, notably Artemisia Gentileschi and Inayat Noor Khan, but some were new to me.
Cameron Reed, What We Are Seeking: science fiction with good, interesting world-building, and a viewpoint character I enjoyed reading about. The ending felt abrupt, but there may be no better stopping point unless Reed wants to write a sequel.
Celia Lake, Silent Circuit, another book in her Albion universe. I liked it, but if I'd been reading for the romance I might not have; an afterword promises that the character will get her happy ending in the next book.
Seanan McGuire, Butterfly Effects: an InCryptid book, what happened after Sarah saved the world. Fast-moving, but it felt a bit thin.
Natalie Zina Walschots, Villain: this is a sequel to Hench, good but not funny the way that was. The main character has an impressively dysfunctional relationship with her boss, and sort of realizes that.
John Wiswell, The Dragon Has Some Complaints. I liked this fantasy novel, but didn't make any notes. (It did let me check the "orange cover" box.)
Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter, The Norm Chronicles: a chatty discussion of probability, risk, the differences between them, and how much of this is subjective, because it depends on whether someone cares about an outcome.
Ruthanna Emrys, The Sheltering Fire: a fantasy novella in which three old friends move into a house that can be a magical refuge, but only as long as the residents offer shelter to anyone who asks, on the condition that the newcomers respect rules of hospitality. Good.
Ardes Shea, "It's Classified," a short memoir of a year working at the Hanford site during World War II, by a woman who knew only that she was working on a classified military project. This was part of my Groundhog Day gift exchange, and counts for "from your TBR pile."

chanaleh

Well, I thought my next post would be about our DC trip (July 31 - August 5). You can see pictures here, anyway.

But then 6 days later, northwest Indiana was hit with a derecho (90+ mph winds) plus tornadoes on Tuesday, August 11. I was at work at the time and let me tell you, that hour was one of the scariest of my life.

Over 300,000 utility customers lost power - the largest outage in NIPSCO history - including our home in Merrillville and my work in Griffith, both of which adjoin the city of Gary to the south and southwest. Ours was not restored until Saturday evening, August 22, a full 11.25 days later. Some people here STILL do not have their power back.

The first day and a half were the spookiest. We've had localized outages before, but the whole highway (US 30, the business route that runs just north of our house) being dark for miles was post-apocalyptic horrifying. It was honestly not so bad once there were some stores and restaurants open; we are in the very privileged position of being able to eat out any time we need to. Relatedly, I guess, I was working 10-hour days the whole time from my boss's house (where SHE had power) trying to serve our print customers from offsite locations, so I racked up 8 hours of overtime for the week, go me.

Mercifully, my mom's apartment complex on the other side of Merrillville had power restored by Sunday afternoon the 16th, so Ms. A spent most of the intervening week camped out at Grandma's with power, internet, and people to play cards with. Her first day of 6th grade was supposed to be Wednesday, the 12th; they postponed school to the following Monday, then Tuesday, then to "closed until further notice" until the emergency was past, and finally started this past Tuesday the 25th.

I knew before we went on our trip that August would be over before it began; I just didn't know we would lose two weeks quite like THAT.

PS: Rosh Hashanah is 2 weeks away, which merits its own post, and this Sunday I am vending at the 2nd annual Indiana Jewish Festival in Carmel (just north of Indianapolis, about 2 hours south of here). My prep is wildly behind schedule due to the power outage, so it's just going to be what it will be.

Current Mood: relieved

chhotii

I am signed up to volunteer with the Election Protection coalition on primary day (September 1st). There were two shifts available at a polling place that's really, really, really, really close to where I live, even though it's in Boston. (I live almost literally a stone's throw away from the Boston line.) The first shift is from 6 am to 9 am; the second shift is from 6 pm to 9 pm. Long day! Whew! I am taking the day off from work that day, maybe I can nap somewhere in the middle. The very next day I have an allergy shot before work, meetings at work, and a bicycle advocacy subcommittee meeting after work, as well as it being Vic's first day back to school (not that that's my problem); so that will be another very long day.

We don't fight fascism because we needed a hobby. Our lives were already full before the fascism showed up.

adrian_turtle

Today I went into my local bookstore, as I was seeking What We Are Seeking (as we all should seek it. It's wonderful.) I saw a sign on the door: A Romance-Friendly Bookstore. Brookline Booksmith is not a romance specific bookstore, such as they have across the river in Cambridge. They were just making it clear that their idea of a general all-purpose bookstore included romance.

It reminded me of an incident in Ann Arbor, the morning after I stayed up all night reading my first book by Gillian Bradshaw. It was Kingdom of Summer, the middle book of a trilogy, so I was at my favorite bookstore when they opened, looking for the rest of the story. The store owner said with a sneer, that they "didn't carry romance novels." The sneer was memorable, as you can tell by the fact that I have remembered it for 35 years. I had been buying used SF and other fiction from this store since stumbling into it when I was 15.

My first reaction, as a young genre snob, was embarrassment that I had failed to recognize the book as a romance at all. I had thought it was just historical fiction, maybe fantasy-adjacent. With more mature judgement...what the hell was he thinking!!! How dare he have such contempt for a whole genre! Not to imply any obligation to sell any particular genre he did not enjoy or find profitable, but "we don't carry romance books" should be no more loaded than "we don't carry math books."

I'm glad to see my local bookstore doesn't have that contempt. It's still sad that the lack of contempt needs to be stated explicitly, that it doesn't go without saying.

flexagon

Some opportunities came up early in the week, and I enjoyed being able to jump on them. One of these was small -- helping to set up the new small studio space for my circus school, for a couple of hours. The other turned out to be a lot bigger: helping to read the slush pile for the inaugural Protopian Prize in science fiction. The idea being: let's publish stories showing an achievable, optimistic future characterized by continuous, incremental progress (in other words: realistic optimism). To date I've read 59 stories -- a few of which were good, although most are not. I like it! I used to read slush in college, and this seems like a good cause.

Circus: I had a good backbend lesson with a new "best", and then a good acro lesson. The teacher pointed out a couple of things my partner could do to make my life easier, and with those changes plus good-faith jumping on my part we got our hand-to-hand back out of lines at last. I wonder how many times I'll need to learn that partner acro is a two-person endeavor and that it's rarely all my fault? Anyway, that felt great, and now all the closures and break weeks are over with. Hopefully my handstands can be fixed soon too. And to lower the stakes a little, I've signed up for juggling 101 with

apfelsingail; that should be fun and I am not setting any goals related to it.

I spent a bit of time on houses, including mine (fine, I just installed new key racks) and stayed on top of email. Much of which came from my dad, who whined all week about his virus and coughing; but he seems to be on the mend now. This weekend I had extra time because there was no open studio, and I'd been feeling some discomfort around my wardrobe and other stuff; so I spent those couple of hours going through books, clothes, earrings and nail polish. Getting rid of stuff is wild -- even when I feel like I've cut pretty deep, there's always so much left.

Floof: saw Perse in a series of one-act plays! She was in two of the nine (?) plays, which were overall better than last year's and was a stone-cold killer in both. And speaking of that family, I finally got to curl up with my squirrel for the first time since Montreal, which was... five weeks ago? Dates with the bug have also been fun; we're watching Widow's Bay which is more comedy than I usually like in my horror, but which is entertaining.

adrian_turtle

I spoke to a young punk* at the grocery store this afternoon. They were wearing a jacket with "Serve/Remember/Carry Nalaxone" in big letters across the back, and I was moved to compliment it when we were waiting in line. There was a pause while we put things on the conveyor belt (because "great jacket" and "thanks" form a complete conversation.) Then they turned and asked if I carry nalaxone. And offered to help set me up with some and show me how to use it, which was very kind of them.

I do not have my act sufficiently together to carry a first-aid kit around. I can't even remember to carry my own migraine meds these days, as the last time I had effective migraine meds I wasn't carrying a cell phone, and I used my 20th century shoulders to carry a backpack with ease and comfort. But there were a couple of occasions last summer when I encountered strangers who...weren't doing well in the heat. I wanted to ask "are you ok?" but what could happen after that? I was in no position to actually help. I started carrying little bottles of water around just in case, but the added weight of a pint of water was a bit of a strain.

Then again, nalaxone doesn't weigh much.

*using "punk" in the descriptive, not derogatory, sense

fenicedautun

I'm looking for a local PT to help me devise an exercise routine for my arms/shoulder to maintain mobility (showing signs of frozen shoulder) and possibly even help with my ongoing tendon issues in my arms/hands. If you have a PT you've really liked, give me a rec?

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pygment

September 2026

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Perpetual

A million thoughts run through you, concentric circles always greater

Reading

Endorsements

Things taken a smidge too far

Summer Reading Bingo 2026

update on the Thingee

recent(ish) reading

Derecho, or, the great Gary, Indiana blackout of 2026

election monitoring

Book shopping, past and present

Slush and other opportunities

talking to strangers

PT recommendations

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September 2026

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