Tales From An Alternate Reality

I am so old...

2026-05-19T23:44:33Z

that I can't reliably tell the difference between skunk stink and marijuana smoke when I'm out biking along the parkway. Now I know why people used to call it "skunk weed"!

I biked out in the world just 2 days last week because of heat and wind, and today might be it for this week? Temperatures will drop to more reasonable levels by Saturday, but that could be due to windstorms again. Ugh. Spring in Sacramento is always like this. :(

In book news, I'm currently reading the last of the Station Eternity series. I really enjoy the characters in it, and I'll be sorry when it's over. I recently finished Night Film, which was good but somehow a lot of work (it took me nearly 2 weeks to read it), and These Summer Storms (which I'm going to call a beefed-up romance novel— not one of my genres). Next on the list is Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?, since my hold on it came due. At some point, I'll get back to the Dungeon-Crawler Carl series, but I was hoping to improve my Goodreads stats a little, since the books in that series take awhile. I'm afraid Night Film just made everything worse!

Hobby-wise, I have begun building the Not-A-Hobbit-House set. The Amazon reviews have some complaints about the bricks imploding, so I'm trying to be careful. I hope the main issue was with the indoor tree (!), which is structurally not very sturdy. :O And there's always the question of whether all of the pieces will actually be included, especially since this is a knock-off set...

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Mother's Day Redux

2026-05-15T22:37:45Z

Our daughter's Mother's Day present finally arrived, and it was a complete surprise! Also very creative, and true to her snarky sense of humor. It's our family, in LEGO people!

She and our son were on the same wavelength: "Do you know what would be funny?" he said during the individual figure unboxing, and it turned out she had thought of the same thing. The short person with the child-sized legs is ME. Because I'm only 5'6" in a family of 5'10", 6'2", and 6'4" giants. :O

The accessories were well-chosen. Our daughter has a camera, our son has a cat, I have a computer, and my husband has a banana. She apparently was laughing herself sick over picking out that banana, too. :D

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Once more into the garage, dear friends...

2026-05-14T21:23:19Z

We've barely crept out of the weather where I have to bike in the garage due to rain or wind, and now we're into the stage where excess heat gets added to the mix. :( By August, a 90- to 94-degree day will not stop me from going outside, but this time of year? I just can't do it.

I managed to get out yesterday (and hit another snake!), and I got out 3 days last week. The first two days went well, Friday not so much. I got a flat tire, and discovered that I could not change it myself! In fact, I had to get help from two different guys working together just to get tire irons under the beaded tire rim to get the inner tube off and replace it with a new one. /o\

This is bad. Everyone knows that Continental tires run tight, but this is on a whole other level. My current ride is a gravel bike that used to have 32c tires on it. I had the shop put on 28c tires a few months ago, because I don't go off-road at all and I'm using it like a road bike. BUT... I now remember that the reason I stopped using 25c tires and went to 26c on my previous road bike was because I couldn't get the 25s on and off without breaking the tire irons. The wheel rims should be the same circumference for ALL of these bikes--only the width should be different. But I wonder if Continental applies some different kind of logic, and shrinks the tire slightly with the decreased width?

I really like the 28s. I'm able to ride faster on them than the 32s. In fact, I had a ride this past month that averaged 16.9mph, and that's the fastest I've ridden in YEARS. Am I going to have to go back up to a larger tire size now? Or can I buy a wire-beaded 28 from a different vendor and see if that works?

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Mother's Day was great

2026-05-11T23:13:20Z

My son and I went to Scandia Fun Center and played a couple of rounds of mini-golf before it got too hot. We were both unpredictable and relatively bad, as usual. He got a hole-in-one and shot a few holes under par, but also got a 7 on a couple of them. I managed par or under on a few, but also got 9 on one of the holes, so he managed to beat me. Putting is my nemesis. :O

We were done outside by about 1pm, and went inside to use the free arcade tokens that came with admission. Then we came home, and I got caught up on a couple of chores. Late afternoon, HalfshellHusband and I watched The Proposal, and then all of us watched Moana and ate takeout Thai food for dinner. Our son was the only one who'd seen Moana before. "Meh" to all of the main character's songs, but The Rock's "You're Welcome" was fun and catchy and I loved the crab's Bowie tribute number, "Shiny". Also, the deranged chicken sidekick was hilarious.

Our daughter called in the evening, and it was nice to talk to her (she lives about 12 hours south of here). Then I opened presents, which included a LEGO-style set titled Dwarf Cabin. It is actually a hobbit house, but you have to love the technically non-copyright-infringing name choice. I hope to start it today!

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The Friday Five

2026-05-10T21:20:32Z

Late, again, but who's counting? This is mainly for my newer friends.

1. What do you consider your current main fandom? (This can include hobbies and collecting. Anything you feel fannish about!)
Nothing right now, though I love LEGOs and have quite a few of them!

2. What was your first fandom?
Prison Break and Supernatural happened pretty much simultaneously. Though before actively participating in fandom, my first might have been Star Trek TOS. I even bought paperbacks people wrote in that universe.

3. Do you have any favorite headcanons or fan theories?
Apart from the brothercest vibes in both of the above fandoms? Ummm... since I'm more visually driven, in my headcanon the original Rhodey from Iron Man was never recast after the first movie.

4. Have you ever created fanworks?
Have I ever! Probably more than 50-60 stories for Prison Break, more than 100 stories/drabbles for Supernatural, and then there's Iron Man, Die Hard 4, Justified, Chuck, Burn Notice, and White Collar. Plus some 1-3 fic fandoms, mostly due to participating in past Yuletide challenges.

5. Are you still active in any old fandoms?
Not at the moment, though a future Yuletide could change that at any time? I still subscribe to the Yuletide pinch-hit list, as a way of paying forward the gifts I got from my first year of participation. I have a couple of unfinished Battle Creek slash stories I'd hope to finish someday, but I never even look at them anymore. :(

I do miss the excitement of fandom (though not the wank), but my writing has been channeled into LJ Idol for many years now. \o?

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Jackhammer Nation

2026-05-06T19:59:08Z

They've been tearing up the streets in our neighborhood to install a new metered water system for about three years now? There's the jackhammering to break the concrete for the installation, then they patch, and then after months and months they come back and scrape off the street surface (loud) and repave. In theory. The main street in front of our house still only has the patches, and it badly needs repaving.

The side street has been completed through the repaving, but today we're in our second post-completion jackhammering episode. The first time was a couple of weeks ago, where they opened the pavement around pipe accesses (who knows why?), and then repaved. Now they're back again. WHAT are they doing over there, and why aren't they ever done?

I got very little accomplished this weekend apart from my ongoing project to cull pictures from our 7-8 photo albums. This is because we HAVE so many albums, and also because I haven't been adding things to them since I started taking pictures with my phone instead of a digital camera (about 10 years now). I need room so I can print out some of those cloud photos and add them. I finished albums 2-4, removing probably 160-200 photos from before we had kids. So, that's progress. The next project will be to buy full-sized photo albums for the kids, and move the pictures over from their mini-albums. I made a series of small albums for both when they were little, so they could have their OWN photo books and stop messing with the family ones. We have about 10 of them, and they're taking up a lot of shelf space. Better for the kids to have their own grown-up versions.

TV-wise, I rewatched Barbie recently (still love it!) and finally saw the first Avengers movie. So much Loki! Then we watched Avengers 2, which we also hadn't seen. NO Loki. :( And HalfshellHusband and I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2, which was a surprisingly worthy sequel. The fashion was more weird than swanky this time around, though. The tassel jacket! The long, heavy tweed dresses! The runway ridiculousness! But Meryl Streep still looks fabulous. I honestly think that bright silver hair is more attractive than her usual blond color, certainly at this age. It's really striking.

Back to the salt mines now. Not getting enough done this week, just nebulous investigation and idea-rejection. :(

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Friday Five on Monday

2026-05-04T19:37:58Z

The Friday Five
1. Do you like to spend time outdoors?
Oh, yes. Providing I have sunscreen!

2. What is your favorite flower?
I really like roses, but I think it's a toss-up between the blue iris and the stargazer lily.

3. Any favorite warm weather activities?
Biking and hiking, ideally only in warm-ISH weather (it gets horribly hot here).

4. Have you ever kept a garden? If so, what did you grow?
Yes, many times. Tomatoes grow well in this climate, and we have cherry, orange, and mandarin trees. I've grown canteloupe in the past, as well as zucchini (eh). But ever since we moved to this house some 26 years ago, nothing but the zucchini has grown well (and it goes from thumb-sized to baseball bat seemingly overnight). The soil in our garden area appears to be really crappy. :O

5. Do you know how to swim?
Yes. Not in an impressive way (I hate to put my face in the water), so I usually dog paddle or do the breaststroke with my head up. OTOH, I can backstroke for days...

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Wildlife 2.0

2026-05-01T05:39:18Z

I managed to avoid running over a snake today, which is a plus. It was around 83F, and they tend to come out in the heat... and then lie on the pavement in the shade. Most of the time, I wind up running over them because I think they're a stick and it's too late to avoid them anyway. :(

This one was not a rattlesnake, thank goodness. And it was a chonk! Wow.

I also saw some turklets. It's that time of year! These were young enough to be cute (which doesn't last long). And I spotted the aftermath of a fish hoping to chomp a black butterfly that was hovering over the river.

Being early May, the wild grape buds are out. They have a sweet, peppery smell that is nothing like actual grapes. The cottonwood trees are also releasing fluff into the air, and that can come and go for a month depending on how often we transition back into winter weather. Soon, squirrel mating season will be running full tilt, and I'll have something else to dodge while biking out there. But in the meantime, I hope the sweetness of spring lingers a little bit longer. :)

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Wildlife

2026-04-28T23:48:21Z

I saw a turtle at the edge of the bike path on my ride today. I'm not sure what it was doing there, though turtles have been spotted in that area before. But it's a crawl of maybe half a block to the river, where the water supply is. This was a decent-sized specimen, about 7" in diameter, though they can get bigger.

I dodged a fair number of fuzzy black caterpillars out there, but it was nothing like 20-30 years ago, when they were everywhere! We also don't get clouds of orange ladybugs anymore. I spotted one in flight last week, and I've picked up hitchhikers before, but there are so few of them now. The enormous increase in turkeys, egrets, and Canadian geese in the intervening years seems a likely cause.

I occasionally get actual red ladybugs at the house, probably because we have so many roses (50-60 plants). People buy them for aphid control and release them in their yards, and they migrate to our house. ;) The ones that occur naturally in our yard are more of a yellow-brown color, and sometimes they pinch. Rude. :D

Speaking of plants, I got ZERO daffodils this year. The shoots came up, the same as always, but no flowers. I have a clump near the front door (where we can see them from inside), and another across the walkway. That second group has never flowered. I planted them maybe 8-10 years ago, and I even dug them up once and replanted them at a more shallow depth, but Nada. I'd like more daffodils, not less. Maybe it's too shady where I have them? Or maybe it was that endless fog earlier this winter?

I hope to get out this coming weekend and do something about the weeds and all the roses that need dead-heading. I would have liked to do that last weekend, but it rained again. I didn't get much of anything done, TBH. A lot of my TODOs involve dealing with the extra framed family pictures that we don't have places for now. It's as much an emotional task as a physical one, which is why I can't seem to do it. Give me strength!

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Another day...

2026-04-26T19:46:11Z

another staged assassination attempt. :( What's really at issue? Distracting peole from the war in Iran and the Epstein files. Not to mention grift and treason, but who's counting?

In lighter news, Sacramento is still in the off-again/on-again rain cycle. A few days of biking outdoors, a few days in the garage. This is keeping the summer heat at bay, though, so I'll take it. May is coming, and that can be the start of hell. Or not. We got married on May 20, some almost 37 years ago. It was a beautiful day, about 80F. On our first anniversary, it poured all weekend. Other years? 90-100F. There's no way of knowing until you're in it.

We watched Beckett last night with The Boy, which was entertaining but another reminder that Denzel Washington's son will probably never have a huge career because he looks like his mother rather than his father. Pleasant, but not distinctive. Then HalfshellHusband and I watched Happiness For Beginners, which I always thought was a Simon Pegg movie. It was not— different flavor altogether— but we enjoyed it. Gorgeous scenery.

( Books )

Speaking of which, there are ads now for eyedrops you can use to temporarily remove the need for reading glasses. Ullhhhh... That seems kind of risky to me. I used to have daily contact lenses that would sharpen my right-eye vision and make my left eye work for short distances. But I always wound up taking the left lens out when I biked, because otherwise I couldn't see the traffic behind me clearly enough to know if it was safe to merge left. And most of my reading now is either computer screen or Kindle, and the Kindle lets me adjust the font size up and down!

The medical miracles I want have to do with weight control (currently ineligible) and shedding less hair. I've seen a little improvement on that last issue. My sister bought and then didn't use about 6 months' worth of Nutrafol, which she passed along to me. AFAIK, it isn't helping the corners of my lower eyelashes grow back, but it HAS reduced the amount of hair that comes off in the shower. Possibly due to the extra iodine— added to my multivitamin, I'm at 250% RDA. \o? My doctor won't raise my thyroid levels (which I think would help BOTH issues), so maybe this is a small workaround? It may also be helping my energy levels and mental clarity a little, both of which can suffer with low thyroid.

What's everyone been doing this weekend?

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Project Hail Mary

2026-04-21T21:14:21Z

What a fantastic movie! We finally got to see it, and absolutely loved it. Funny, heartfelt, sad at times, and really, really good. I was glad I hadn't read the book beforehand, because that made the entire story a surprise and I enjoyed discovering it. I've became a late fan of Ryan Gosling, thanks to his work in Bladerunner 2049 and Barbie. Who would have thought?

We also watched a Netflix preview screening that I can't talk about. This is the third one, though, with the first one being about 8 months ago. Do they ever rework those movies based on beta-group feedback? Or just scrap the projects? :O

Saturday, we saw My Oxford Year, which we both liked quite a bit. Romances are really hit and miss, but this one was good. Our son was out of town this weekend, so this was a good opportunity. Romances and romantic comedies are not his thing.

In TV series, I've been watching an older detective procedural called Blue Murder on BritBox, which I quite like. But I've veered off temporarily to binge-watch Our Flag Means Death on Hulu. What a bizarre show. Kind of cracktastic, really. I'm mainly in it for Taika Waititi and the weird minor characters. :O

We had quite a bit of rain and wind last week, so I've been biking in the garage more than I'd like. More thunderstorms and lots of rain today, so I'll be in there again in a few hours! There will be a river or two running through the garage, and now that the floor is epoxy instead of the concrete it used to be, it's really risky to go in there on bare feet. The floor always looks wet, which means you can't see when it actually IS wet, and it's as slippery as glass. :(

Time to start a new hour-long series in there, now that I've finished another Harlan Coben thing. Will it be Season 2 of Beef? Season 3 of The Night Agent? Or will I go back to Hulu for Euphoria, despite having to deal with the long commercial breaks?

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Gluten-Free Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

2026-04-12T20:27:36Z

Soft Ingredients
3/4 cup plus 1 Tbsp Jiff Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter (214 grams)
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temp., cut into large pieces (1 stick; 109 grams)
3 tablespoons milk, room temperature
1 tablespoon vanilla, plus extra if desired
1 whole egg plus 1 egg yolk and 1 egg white, room temp., lightly beaten in stages
Dry Ingredients
1¼ cup packed brown sugar (248 grams)
1¾ cup gluten-free baking flour plus 3 tablespoons (280 grams)
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 (12-ounce) bag semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream peanut butter and butter together thoroughly in a large bowl. Combine milk, vanilla, and egg in a separate bowl, then add to peanut butter mixture. Cream thoroughly
3. Whisk the dry ingredients together thoroughly in a separate large bowl.
4. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the creamed ingredients. Mix thoroughly, but do not over-mix. Stir in chocolate chips.
5. Let the dough rest for 30 to 60 minutes, preferably refrigerate overnight.
6. Drop the cookie dough onto baking sheets, but do not roll or flatten. Edges may be molded to form circular shapes.

Baking time for 60 small-sized cookies: 9-12 minutes.

For 60 cookies
1 cookie: 100 calories. 43 mg. sodium.
For 36 cookies
1 cookie: 166 calories. 72 mg. sodium.
Total calories: 5,961. Total sodium: 2,561 mg.
1 tablespoon of dough: 68 calories; 29 mg sodium.

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We use Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free 1 to 1 Baking Flour (blue bag). Other gluten-free flours may produce different results.

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KaBOOM!

2026-04-11T20:37:19Z

We're in the third day of a string of thunderstorms that could last through tomorrow. This isn't really the time of year for them-- they're more of a winter or summer event. The last time I lived somewhere where this was common, I was in Illinois. And thunderstorms were the beginning of the tornado season. SO glad to be back out West again.

This weather means I'm back to biking in the garage again. I'm about to finish Run Away on Netflix (I swear, James Nesbitt is everywhere), and I've started re-watching Arrested Development as my "early" entertainment for the first 30 minutes or so. I bike for 85 minutes plus warm-down, so I need a LOT of distraction out there. I should return to Season 2 of Euphoria (Hulu) again, despite the commercials. There are a couple of things on Amazon that look worthy too, but the commercial breaks just about kill me, so I mainly watch stuff on Netflix. Season 3 of Night Agent is ready, so maybe that next?

On the plane ride back from San Diego, I watched the remake of Rebecca. Armie Hammer was as handsome as ever (one of the few blond men I find attractive), though not sufficiently brooding enough. Lily James was good, though, and Kristen Scott Thomas was bracingly chilly as Mrs. Danvers. You can see why Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series always has people in the book world employing armies of Mrs. Danvers clones as agents of ruthlessness. :O

I'm still trying to get caught up with my friends-list. There are so many new people that even when I get near the end, I refresh and more posts come up! But I hope everyone had a good Easter, and that those both near and far will be seeing an end to winter soon. It has boomeranged here for a bit, but better that than an early summer.

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San Diego!

2026-04-09T18:44:52Z

Apart from the hotel snafu and leaving my meds behind, we had a great time in San Diego.

We started Saturday off by going to a cute little French cafe. Then we went to the Zoo. Sticker shock: Adult admission to the zoo for one day is $80! Holy cow! We rented a wheelchair to push HalfshellHusband around, but he'd still had enough after 3 hours, which was too bad. We covered about half of the zoo— it's huge! But we saw most of the birds, monkeys, and the African section. We never quite found the red pandas, and had to skip the giant pandas because you either pay extra or wait in line for more than an hour to see them. We missed the fossa, which was either indoors or hiding, but saw the serval (which was larger than I expected). We also saw the orangutan baby, the tiny Chinese alligator, and watched hippos snoozing underwater (but didn't realize we missed the chance to see a pygmy hippo! *cries*). The exhibits are large with really nice habitats, and the landscaping is beautiful. I could have spent the entire day there.

We went to dinner at BJ's Brewhouse, and had a monster pizookie for dessert. It was delicious, though our daughter shunned the blue ice cream. I can't really blame her.

Sunday, we went to the La Jolla Shores beach. Parking was a nightmare because EVERYONE was there, both local and people visiting for Spring Break. SO crowded, which was completely new. This doesn't happen in Oregon or Northern California— the weather at the beach is colder, so fewer people go there to hang out all day. Our daughter joined us, and we watched the waves and the little kids and enjoyed the sun.

Dinner was at La Cesarina, our daughter's favorite Italian restaurant. Sticker shock again! But really good food. I had ravioli with mushroom sauce, and HSH had (as usual) the lasagna.

Our daughter had to work quite a bit of Monday, but mid-afternoon we went to a cafe on an ocean bluff where people board hang-gliders to sail out over the beach. That was really neat!

Then we went to see the Padres/Giants baseball game. The stadium was really impressive, with lots of different types of food available. HSH and our daughter opted for hot dogs (what). I passed due to ongoing queasiness. The Padres' fans love them, and it was a great experience. I had qualms during the national anthem, though. The crowd near us was largely Hispanic and very patriotic, and it hurt to see that and know how badly we're treating them.

I'm not much of a baseball fan, so one of the biggest surprises for me was the number of left-handed batters. It seemed to be about 1 in 5, which apparently matches the MLB overall. Interestingly enough, my profession (embedded software engineering) also tends to have that same, higher proportion of left-handers. The new Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge system is in play now. The Padres invoked it for one of the pitches, but the umpire was ruled correct. The Giants ultimately won that game (HSH was happy about that), though the Padres got their only two runs in the 9th inning, so it was close!

Our last morning there was Tuesday, and we had brunch at a New Zealand cafe(!) in the heart of downtown. It's our daughter's favorite place for French toast, and we all ordered it. SO good, though I wasn't expecting the cinnamon.

Then it was time to say goodbye, so we could get to the San Diego airport ridiculously early. It's always hard. We really wish our daughter lived closer. After the farewells, we had a slightly convoluted trip to the car rental facility, thanks to a couple of Google Maps glitches. That was a first! But the return went smoothly, and we got to the airport in time to spend about 2 hours sitting at the gate. \o?

It was great, but over much too quickly!

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Back again

2026-04-04T23:41:15Z

We got back from San Diego on Tuesday night. It was a great trip overall, and wonderful to spend so much time with our daughter. But it got off to a rocky start.

There's a lesson in here about touching bases with your hotel early, though I don't think it would have helped us. When we got to our hotel at 10:00 on Friday night, the desk clerk informed me that they had cancelled our reservation. This was because they had overbooked by 6 rooms, and the manager told her to cancel anything that wasn't pre-paid. Late at night in a strange city is not the time to find yourself without a hotel! The clerk suggested the next hotel over, which fortunately had a room. But ugh. More than the price of my carefully arranged lodging, and we were hit with the smell of mildew smell as soon as we opened the door to our room. By 11:30pm, I was searching for another place to stay for the remaining 3 nights of our trip.

I found one, which was listed as having breakfast and a fitness room. Yay! But no. When we got there on Saturday, a sign noted that they no longer served breakfast and the desk clerk informed me that the fitness room was being renovated. I could not win for losing. Also? More mildew smell when we entered THAT room.

Friday night was also when I realized that I had somehow forgotten to pack my meds. They were all in the 7-day organizer, ready to go, but it was still sitting on the bathroom shelf at home. /o\ It wasn't worth it to hunt down replacements for just 4 days, so I went without instead, but what a stupid mistake. I was also envisioning being ragingly hungry for the duration, since one of the meds and a supplement both suppress appetite and I am otherwise always hungry, so I was dreading that.

Surprise! That didn't happen. Instead, I spent each day feeling swimmy between the ears (vague-headed and with a sensation almost like having my ears randomly pop), getting sudden hot flashes, and riding the border between nausea and hunger. My blood pressure was also low for 3-4 hours each morning, and it was like I couldn't fully wake up. I wondered what I was taking that normally addressed that-- thyroid meds? Antidepressants? It wasn't until a couple of days in that it occurred to me that those might be withdrawal symptoms, rather than part of my base unmedicated state. IDK. But the lack of hotel breakfast also meant I had no coffee! I had to make up the difference with caffeinated diet soda, which... Ullllhhhh. On the plus side, we got to try Blackberry Dr. Pepper! On the minus side, I also stopped enjoying it by the second day.

More on the actual trip in a separate post. I've been busy with work and trying to get caught up with my friends-list now that we're back.

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I dreamed...

2026-03-26T02:03:06Z

I dreamed that I was in a group of adults being taught as first graders by Mariska Hargitay. She was making us diagram sentences, which seemed REALLY inappropriate for that age, even though we were all grown-ups who should have known how to do it. \o?

I finished Dungeon Crawler Carl, which was lots of fun. Now I'm reading the second book. There are several of these, so I might have to take a break from the series here and there.

Viewing-wise, I mentioned a while back that we'd added Ashes to Ashes (Amazon and Britbox) to our list of TV series to watch. It's a follow-on to Life On Mars, and is really just an excuse to let the Gene Genie and his sidekicks run riot in London. We are all on board with that idea, and have just started Season 2. :D We also finished Continuum (Amazon) a couple of weeks ago, and the conclusion was satisfying even if that wasn't necessarily the ending we were hoping for. But it made sense, and was consistent with the series. Always an important factor, especially for shows involving time travel.

And finally, we're flying to San Diego to visit our daughter this weekend. Nervous about what's happening with the TSA and wait times, but very excited about seeing her! \o/

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The bike is back!

2026-03-19T22:34:23Z

The repair shop finished late on Tuesday, so it was gone almost a whole week. That's the longest I've been without a bike apart from vacations and when our garage burned up.

When I got it back, the seat post was jacked up about 3/4 inch too high. The mechanics never put it back after testing the gears, in spite of the blue painter's tape that shows exactly where to set it. The rear tool kit was also upside down (?), and they'd returned the handlebars to the neutral position. The shop had previously advised tilting them up a little to reduce the reach and the strain on the nerves of my left hand. I'd wondered if that had helped at all, but yesterday's ride produced numbness sooner than before, so clearly it did. I've restored the tilt again.

The ride itself was kind of brutal, due to the sudden jump in temperatures. I had to cut it short by 3 miles, and it was getting pretty tough by the end. It was only 87F, but that is a LOT until I start to get acclimated. My maximum temperature starts at 88F early in the season, and by August it's at 94F— and I will actually start a ride at 89F if it's not going to get too much hotter. But yesterday? Much too soon.

I finished watching Doctor Foster. Not terribly happy about the ending. Then I tried and rejected a bunch of BritBox comedies that were 1) unfunny and/or 2) too stupid to tolerate. One even had a laugh track. So I started Without Motive, a police procedural set in Bristol. Interesting mystery, but the characters are unlikable and it features a Welsh DCS who is incompetent and a drunk. May not finish it.

Bookwise, I've started Dungeon Crawler Carl. It was recommended to me, and so far so good. An alien species comes back to Earth to make good on the minerals/elements claim they filed (in a galactic office) 50 years earlier. All of the buildings/structures are flattened, so the only survivors are people and animals who were outside. They're eligible to play the Dungeon Crawler game, an 18-level challenge with increasing difficulty and reducing eligibility. The sole winner gets... to live? I think opting out (or not getting one of the limited admission slots) also equals death, so playing is advisable. Carl is accompanied by his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, for added fun. Also? Level 1 contains goblins. \o/

I need to line up my next book. I have some free Amazon thing, but the quality is never guaranteed.

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Misery Train

2026-03-16T22:13:08Z

HalfshellHusband is in the throes of prepping for a colonoscopy tomorrow. The process has changed, and I don't know why.

It used to be a day without solid food and a lot of fluids and laxatives to clear you out. It's similar now, but it starts 48 hours pre-op with a day of really restricted food choices (applesauce, chicken, rice, yogurt). The day before the procedure is 8 ounces of water every hour, followed by starting the laxative liquid stuff at 6pm the night before surgery. WHAT? That'll keep you up all night! Why not do that during the daytime?

HSH called Kaiser to make sure he couldn't start the laxative early, and they confirmed and made things worse: since he has an early morning surgery, they want him to stop the laxative liquid briefly tonight, then get up at 2:30 a.m. and start again before ending it at 4:15 a.m. How is that good for the patient? He'll be exhausted from sleep deprivation. :(

Right now, he's using his typical method of coping with misery/recuperation, AKA watching the LOTR movies. I expect more of the same tomorrow, after his procedure is done.

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Taxes are done

2026-03-15T20:07:32Z

A big relief, as always, and the California state returns are in a manila envelope, waiting to go to the post office. The combined federal and state returns are the size of a substantial pamphlet now. I mentioned earlier that we had significant capital gains this year. I don't know what gets into our financial advisor sometimes (though she's really good at her job), but every 5-6 years this happens and our AGI suddenly balloons. This year? We owe about $2500 in federal taxes and $2300 in state, and that triggered a need to pay estimated tax payments in 2026. What a pain! Note that if the government(s) owed us this much back, we wouldn't get interest on the extra withholding, so why the panic?

I tried to go to our company's website to adjust my W-4 instead, but none of the links were working yesterday. Might be under maintenance. I also wanted to use the employee benefits webpage to rent a car for our upcoming trip to San Diego, but it was misbehaving too. More crap deferred onto my never-ending TODO list!

I finished reading Terminal Chaos, the second book in the Station Eternity series. That was fun— and only took me 4 days, as opposed to the 11 days to read Adventures In Calamity Physics. I knew Calamity was taking a long time, but geez! And now I'm a third of the way through the second book in the How To Become A Dark Lord And Die Trying series. It's also fun, though with way too many footnotes. My main complaint is a common issue for a lot of male authors writing female main characters: the women are highly sexed and also bisexual. It's like they're fanficcing their own creation. \o?

My bike is still in the shop, where the earliest I could possibly get it back is late tomorrow. Feeling antsy! But I got some errands done Friday and Saturday that I would normally have to split across weekends. Friday, I bought Easter candy. Saturday, I took my broken violin bow in to have it repaired and rehaired, and saw that I was near a Home Depot, so I went there afterward. I bought some CLR for the hard water stains we get, some of which showed up about 4 months after we moved back into our house. I also got a new salvia plant for the one in the front yard that 1) Died last year and 2) Whose replacement the gardener killed with Roundup. Plus some morning glory seeds (to replace the plants near the garage we lost in the fire), and a houseplant to put in the clay pot our daughter hand-painted for me as a gift. That means I have some gardening to do this afternoon...

I've been staying up too late watching Doctor Foster on BritBox, because it's an addictive train wreck. Need to get back on DST newtime again.

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Suck. Age.

2026-03-13T01:58:50Z

Well, yesterday's bike ride didn't go so well. :(

Newer bikes often have the gear-shifter and brake functions embedded in the same part of the handlebars. Pull toward you, and the bike brakes. Push sideways, and it changes gears. But... push just a tiny bit on the diagonal and it starts to chew through the derailleur cable.

So, I started to have trouble getting into the top gear a few days ago, and sure enough... I was trying to shift down for a hill yesterday, and there was a "zzzk!" sound followed by the bike going into the top gear and becoming a one-speed. :O

I had to stop and turn around, and then bike almost 5 miles home in the hardest gear. Worse yet, the bike shop is really backed up, so instead of getting my bike back today, they will not be able to even start working on it until Monday. That's forever! *cries*

I absolutely hate this handlebar design. I break a derailleur cable about once a year because of it, whereas the shift levers on my bike from 20 years ago never let me down. :(

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Finished!

2026-03-11T01:26:45Z

I finished reading Adventures in Calamity Physics yesterday. There was a major plot zig around 85% of the way done, and then a zag after the 90% mark. Did not see either of them coming! Now I'm on Terminal Chaos, the second book in the series that starts with Station Eternity. I like the characters in it— especially the rock-like aliens.

This weekend, I photographed a bunch of stuff and posted it for sale on Craigslist. It included a damaged antique Victrola cabinet, which I thought I'd be lucky to give away for free. Hah! I probably should have charged something for it, just to cut down on the number of flaky people messaging me about it all weekend who couldn't seem to actually follow through. But! It went to someone who is going to strip it and restore it to its former glory, and I couldn't have asked for a better recipient.

Saturday night, HalfshellHusband and I watched Letters To Juliet, in which Amanda Seyfriend was woefully miscast (too callow) and Vanessa Redgrave made up for it. \o?

Sunday afternoon, I went for a bike ride out on the parkway. BIG surprise there— they have finally opened the rest of the lower parkway after closing it for 3 1/2 years while they, IDK, added a lane or two to the Business 80 over-crossing there? It's really nice to have the rest of that downriver option. There are always fewer people there, and I can't go very far upriver on weekends because of the increased amount of idioting that makes biking there (in clip-in pedals) dangerous. This means I don't have to do a bunch of tight loops over and over again to get my 20+ miles in on downriver days anymore. \o/

Not looking forward to the summer heat, though. Two weeks ago, we had our random 53^o day. Next week? It's supposed to hit 89^o. NOoooooooooo!

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More -ish than LEGO

2026-03-08T20:59:43Z

Guess what I found at Amazon, while looking through Book Nook-style LEGO and peudo-LEGO sets? A Tardis set for all the Whovians out there. This is a wooden model-kit rather than being made of LEGO-style bricks, but it's still neat. There are a bunch of other Book Nooks offered by the same company, which include a variety of Steampunk-themed things and zodiac- and tarot-related sets. \o/

I did our taxes this weekend, and even with Turbotax it was more of a pain than it needed to be. We actually owe money this year, thanks to a bunch of capital gains that I didn't even know had happened. They typically get automatically reinvested. I.e., we often don't actually see any real money, just the changes in investment account balances. And yes, I realize that's a problem most people probably wish they had. Given all this, you'd think I'd be more sold on retiring this year. But I'm leery because of Trump and his effect on the affordability of healthcare. HalfshellHusband is a high consumer of health services, so having to get independent coverage makes me nervous.

I'm 3/4 of the way through Adventures in Calamity Physics, a coming-of-age novel about a high school senior who suffers a catastrophic trauma. She has an insufferably erudite Casanova of a father, and a rather pretentious friend group she was pressed into joining by a well-meaning teacher. Despite how it sounds, it's an amusing and mostly (drily) humorous read. It's work, though. Much of the prose includes references to books or films as passing supplements to descriptions or situations, so it's full of citation notes. And you find yourself reading every one of them.

Movie-wise... we watched Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning on Netflix last weekend. Ulllhhh. The inside-the-situation-room scene was particularly bad, with some of the worst and needlessly wordiest dialogue ever seen in Hollywood. None of the actors seemed to believe in what they were saying. Plus, there's the endless over-reliance on rubber mask disguises, which wasn't believable in the first film. :( There were some fun car chases, but a lot of the movie seemed like noise and flailing trying to disguise a lack of conviction. \o?

Now, in the throes of the spring-forward bleariness, I need to get ready to go bicycling. Today will be outdoors, after three days of being stuck in the garage because of excessive wind. Welcome to spring in Sacramento. :O

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More pseudo-LEGOs

2026-03-03T00:41:30Z

I don't think I mentioned that HalfshellHusband got me a fantastic Lumibricks Time-Rift Library set for Valentine's Day. I'm really looking forward to putting it together!

In the meantime, I just finished a Starry Night set I got 2-3 years ago and never put together because of all the time spent on the house rebuild or (after moving back home) because it was still in an unopened box. I picked this set out as a birthday present however many years ago, partly because of the Starry Night theme (I have a LOT of Starry Night "merch") and also because it includes a Van Gogh minifigure with his painting. \o/

What I failed to notice at the time was that it was a mini-brick set. I haven't worked with those before, and the danger of something rebounding off the other pieces (or just falling) is very high. The smallest pieces are extremely hard to find on our Oriental-patterned rug. I didn't lose anything permanently, though the set had a few missing pieces (I improvised) and a LOT of extra pieces. The instructions were all pictures, with the number 1, 2, and 3 being the only non-Japanese (Chinese?) parts, and one of the blues was REALLY hard to make out on the diagrams— I had to get out a flashlight. This was a super-challenging build. :O

Midway through the build:

Three-quarters of the way done:

Final product with mini-artist:

I would recommend this set, except that it's no longer being made. There are other Starry Night sets, but the resulting "pictures" are usually less accurate than this one. Someone did a very creative job designing this! But if you're tempted, there's the original LEGO set (expensive!). And also these three knockoff sets at varying prices (all of which have a mini-painting, and you could add your own made-up mini-figure)! That last set is actually pretty good. All are mini-bricks, though, so be warned.

In other news, I put the coffee table together. That amounted to screwing in the legs, which were in two pieces to accommodate a flat lower section. The biggest challenge? Breaking down all that styrofoam to get it in our garbage can. It'll probably take 2-3 weeks to get rid of it.

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I now own this...

2026-02-27T01:33:29Z

In fact, I own two of them! I purchased a random LEGO Harry Potter minifigure from ebay, and it also wound up being this: Professor Sprout with mandrake. How cute is that?

It is, of course, all about the mandrake. Because I love absurdity. AND I just discovered that there is also a Sirius Black minifigure with ball and chain! Ahahahahaha!

After our random winter day last week (53^o), we're now having more springlike weather. A little TOO springlike—Saturday's high is supposed to be 76^o, which is awfully warm for the end of February. It makes me worry that the summer temps will come early, like in March or April. Please, no!

I finished Station Eternity recently, which was a fun read. It's a combination of comedy, mystery, and sci-fi. The main character is a young woman with an uncanny gift for solving murder mysteries, who notices that a LOT of those murders involve people who are somehow connected to her. She pleads with a sentient space station to grant her refuge, so she can get away from humanity and stop triggering more murders. There are only two other humans on the space station with her... until the station decides to invite a human contingent for a visit. More murder ensues!

I also finished T. Kingfisher's Hemlock and Silver, which is kind of a desert-based light fantasy with loose ties to the Snow White fairy tale. The main character is a poison expert, which is unusual. An enjoyable read over all. Someday, I'll get around to reading The Raven and the Reindeer, which I forgot I bought on Kindle at some point. This is good, as our county library still refuses to buy the digital version of it.

This weekend: I'll be building the coffee table, gathering some more items for Goodwill, and I might finish my pseudo-LEGO mini-brick Starry Night set! \o/

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German Anti-Trump Opera

2026-02-25T00:59:00Z

You've probably heard of "theater of the absurd." Well, someone has extended that idea into an anti-Trump opera. With Vampires. And other weirdness. All in German:

And yes, I would totally go see that!

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