Diary of a Carrion Eater

A good friend of mine invited me to Eid Mubarak last night*, and another good friend was willing to be the driver, so I went and was grateful for the chance to join a community to celebrate the breaking of the day's fast at the end of Ramadan.

This was a similar idea to other sorts of interfaith dinners. Food can be an important way of bringing people together, and this is the sort of thing we need to do to continue the challenging work of finding common ground with people different from ourselves. I really appreciated eating the first date after the sun went down, even though I did not fast the way my friend does/did.

There were henna artists in our midst! I've never had a henna tattoo before, so it was time to see what it's like!



Showing off our henna art as it dried:






I have a number of Muslim students, and it can be helpful to convey a visual sense of support, too.



*My understanding is this isn't quite the right conjugation of words here, but this is how I want to write it.

I've reached that stage of the semester where it feels like I do little else besides teaching and sleeping exhaustedly.

I generally don't use the living room for much, aside from sometimes playing with George or for sitting down in a chair momentarily while grinding coffee beans in the morning. On Monday morning, when I walked over to the living room, I noticed a new source of flashing light (ugh, video short so I can't embed):

https://youtube.com/shorts/wNbGotTv_wc?si=5Ot627re8zZF9cGX

That is one of the monitors in scrottie's office. He has been in California since November. It wasn't doing that the day before. Maybe the recent power outage caused this? Regardless, I dug out the key to his office door and went in to turn off this monitor again. The cats were briefly entertained by the opportunity to poke around in a space they haven't been in lately.

Speaking of possessed electronics, this darn document reader in the classroom where I teach REFUSES to behave.

https://youtube.com/shorts/XOfzN8CHTN4?si=KyggBAjMfkk1zSPB

I keep having to record videos of it because apparently our IT folks can't reproduce the issue. Their most recent hypothesis has been that something about the OS on my computer is causing interference when I have my computer plugged into the HDMI input. But in this instance, my computer is totally unplugged from the system. So.

A silver lining to my inability to function in the evenings is that George likes to come and snuggle. I've been putting on birdwatching videos for him, but decided last night to try out a cat documentary instead.



The cat documentary did manage to hold his attention for a good 20 minutes before he heard some noise and decided he needed to run off.

In the midafternoon, as I came out of the grocery co-op with groceries for the week, I noticed something in the co-op's gardens:



I don't actually have any crocuses planted at the house, and maybe I should, just to help extend the spring fireworks show. I am seeing more signs of strawberry plants returning to life, and the very tips of the daffodils. Still, signs that winter WILL end eventually.

Another sign: we put what we call our "bubble dock" back in the water this morning.

That was not completely without adventure. I was originally planning on going to morning rowing practice with the team, but had the complication that I'd brought along a bike trailer so as to bike to the farmer's market later on. With people messing with the stuff in my bike basket when my bike's parked downtown, I was leery about leaving the trailer and storage bin outside the fitness center. Eventually I realized I should just change my plans: I just headed straight over to the boathouse, dropped off my trailer there, and used most of practice time to get a head start on pinning the bubble dock pieces together.

Ultimately I think this was a wise decision. Our coach had everyone do a "Pi Day" workout, and if I'd participated I could easily have overdone it and prolonged the issues I've been having with my hips and lower back (Old Punks Never Die Ow My Back). I did join them for coffee after practice, where everyone was really busy doing a lot of post-practice math:



Then, to the river!

Even with the more involved reassembly, the bubble dock went in much more easily and far faster than the main dock will.



Each of the pieces has labeled tabs at each corner that are supposed to stack in a particular sequence to create a fully interlocked surface. Most of the pieces were assembled correctly, but we did discover a row with a fairly major assembly issue, so we had to take it completely apart after having floated the dock out into the river. This was basically fine, except for some moments where the two sections started drifting apart. At one point I told a teammate, "Grab my foot!" to pull the sections back together, heh. One individual piece also tried to go on some sort of side quest, but was quickly recovered.



It looks so good now!



Even the seagull flock agreed.



With that finished, I biked to the Troy Farmer's Market and picked up the maple syrup bottle prizes for our 5k run/walk event in 2 weeks, along with some of the usual farmer's market staples. After dropping off the maple syrup at the boathouse, I headed home and then back out on the aforementioned grocery trip.

Now I am baking a couple of quiches (pi-adjacent, at least? Except they're square?), roasting some beets, and cooking up some black lentils. Foods for the week are mushroom-asparagus quiche and roasted beet, lentil, and arugula salad (with toasted hazelnuts and cheese, too).

Tomorrow will be really busy with an entomology conference in the town north of here, where two of my students will be presenting their research posters and I'll be running a table at a Bug Expo. So hopefully I can manage to squeeze in laundry, litterboxes, and the cooking of breakfasts for the week in there somewhere.

The cats are now at 4, I am still at zero, according to my arbitrary scorekeeping method.

I had the hypothesis that maybe George had managed to squeeze out through the catio's doorway, so I propped a paving stone against the door. But when I went to check on the cats, there he was, right outside, vigorously rubbing up against the neighbor's juniper tree (marking territory, is my guess).

That means he might have figured out a way to climb out.

He was not very happy when I let Martha stay outside for a bit longer by herself. She was content to sit on the foundation ledge near the window and watch things.

This week wound up feeling pretty hectic, I think because it's the start of registration advising season, and also because I needed to help one of my research students finalize their poster presentation for a regional conference happening on Sunday (on top of wrapping up lab report grading, which was accomplished eventually). I have two students presenting their research, and we are also participating in a Bug Expo event. Good and fun, but busy.

aka Go Home March, You're Drunk.

The subject line was a friend's name for the March weather we're having today, and I am amused. I wound up wearing a jacket instead of my rain cape, because of the wind gusts in the forecast, and so far that seems to have been a prudent decision.

Not much else to report. Yesterday evening, I was tired, so after washing dishes, I sat down on the bed to poke the internet for a couple minutes. Then George came along and curled up next to me, purring away, so I put on his favorite internet video (All Birds, All the Time) and nodded off. When I eventually woke up I figured I should just brush my teeth and go to bed. At 7:30 pm. I think I needed the sleep.

I think it was maybe Saturday where I let the cats out on the catio, then came back later and observed that George was clearly NOT inside the catio but rather just outside, nosing around in the grass like he does. Hmm. I was able to call him over and hauled him back indoors, but didn't have the time or wherewithal to figure out how he'd escaped this time. Had the extra layer of netting made it easier for him to climb the bush and up and out somehow?

I found my answer this morning:


The staples that had held the bottom of the chicken wire to the ground had pulled up. This should be simpler to remedy, at least! The cats will be glad; they have been frantic to go outside again and have been charging all over the house and yelling about their discontent.

We finally have the first sign of spring at the house: the snowdrops are up. This is them yesterday:


This is them today:


There are flower and leaf buds appearing on a number of things.

We're still going to dip back down below freezing again on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, but it's a start.

I need to trim the raspberry canes.

It is interesting to observe what's happening globally in response to the abrupt closure of a major global oil shipping channel. The impacts on fertilizer prices and ultimately food prices may wind up being pretty terrible. Of course, at the moment, most people are just thinking about prices paid at gas pumps, and are watching global markets fluctuate wildly depending on incoherent statements made by someone who might not have fully thought through the consequences of the decision to attack another country.

I appreciate the person who created a short video highlighting how much money gets incinerated every time military weapons are fired and/or military assets get destroyed, and contrasted that with the financial justifications used to gut public support programs in the U.S. over the past year and a half. Friends who help with domestic food aid efforts are reporting terrible increases in the numbers of people and families seeking help now.

But suddenly I know so much more about which countries are most heavily dependent on foreign oil imports. I don't know that anyone seeking to get people to decrease reliance on fossil fuels would have imagined this sort of scenario as a way to do that. People REALLY don't/can't do well with abrupt cutoffs.

I had a restless sleeping dream last night that was definitely derived from the awareness of the wanton violence and destruction the United States is inflicting on people in other countries. It was a dream where the violence and destruction had reached the US as people sought revenge. One of the hardest parts about the awareness of this horribleness is feeling powerless to do much about it*.

I thought about that when filling up my dinosaur car's tank yesterday, the first time I've filled it since November. I think about it when I get on my bike to go places; much of the large-scale destruction paid for with taxpayer money is many orders of magnitude beyond what I could ever hope to personally mitigate by biking instead of driving.

But on Friday on social media elsewhere, someone posted an article about the adoption of clean energy by countries in the global south, and that gave me hope.

I haven't revisited the numbers in a while, but my understanding is that more than half of the carbon emissions associated with cars are from their manufacturing and transport, prior to anyone actually driving them. This is a big part of why I bought a used dinosaur juice vehicle instead of a shiny new electric one, even though it leaves me directly dependent on the fossil-fuel industry.

Within the article, it was interesting to read about Nepal, which found itself so dependent on India for fossil fuels that when India cut off the supply, it led to dramatic adoption of electric vehicles in Nepal, far above and beyond what's currently seen in countries like the US. Apparently Uruguay also had the realization that if the country went electric, it would reduce ongoing dependency on foreign oil imports. With the decreasing costs of manufacturing solar panels and batteries, it just makes sense to switch over!

And here is another thing that got me looking at the world a little differently: a video by someone who made a plug for charging his ebike from car charging stations. That's in the UK, but it got me realizing that it is stupidly one-dimensional to think of car charging stations as just for charging cars.

That might sound a little silly, but I'd point out that I often encounter people out clustered at the small handful of unguarded public electrical outlets on the streets and sidewalks of this city. Also think about how many airports have modified their seating to provide "free" device charging stations. Right now, the most predictable electrical sources available to someone while out and about in public are those car charging stations.

One other thing I appreciated from the article was learning that the carbon emissions associated with manufacturing solar panels can typically be offset within the first year of panel use. And many panels have decades-long lifespans - from what I understand, often longer than many people originally anticipated. Compare *that* to the balance sheet for motor vehicle manufacture and lifespan.

My brother has pointed out that large-scale solar operations are often preferable over rooftop (his house in California is adorned with a botched install), but the point still stands.

Anyway, in the midst of it all I got to thinking back to "No Impact Man," a guy in NYC who spent a year trying to live a net-zero-impact lifestyle back in 2009 or so (approximately the same time period as friends of mine spent an Arizona summer with their home a/c turned off). I don't remember all the specifics of No-Impact Man's electrical situation for the year, but I think he had some sort of balcony solar setup going, and it was definitely a challenge for him to juggle household electrical demands. For example, he shifted over to non-electric food storage methods, and indoor lighting also involved a lot of strategy. I don't remember what he did about cooking.

In contrast, 17 years later, my workplace has just now finalized contracts to get all of its electricity from solar sources (offsite for now, but with options to change if on-campus solar installations become desirable). Even with this country's current regime furiously back-pedaling on any and every unfinished alternative-energy project, we just won't be going back. I mean, why would we?

And still - the needless human suffering must stop.



*We are not powerless but the actions we need to take are not fast or easy.