Beowabbit

Had a wonderful weekend with plumtreeblossom.

Saturday early evening we went to see The Town, a Ben Affleck movie set in the Charlestown section of Boston. We both really really enjoyed it. (I enjoyed it as a movie, but I also really enjoyed seeing so many places that are part of the backdrop of my daily life in a movie.)

Then we came home to Quincy and made quiche for dinner. plumtreeblossom was really tired, so she took a nap while I made quiche and then woke up for what turned out to be a very late dinner. It felt good to be eating a home-cooked meal; we don’t do as much of that as we’d like to.

Today we were both really tired, and we slept very late. More quiche for breakfast (it’s the perfect food that way), and we ended up snuggled up in bed watching another episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos miniseries.

(We’ve been working our way through that on Netflix over the last few months, and it’s very nice and slightly weird to re-watch as and adult this series that I first saw as a child on my family’s little black-and-white TV when it was first broadcast. Seeing with plumtreeblossom as an adult this show I watched with my family as a child gives me a wonderful sense that my family is knit together, a sense of connection and continuity across decades and states — or as Carl might say, through space and time. I get a little bit of that feeling, too, when we’re driving and a Prairie Home Companion monologue comes on the radio, reminding me of happy times listening to the news from Lake Wobegone with bcat1, silverlibre, and ka9sqb.)

Anyway, as I said, we were both inexplicably sleepy, so we had a very lazy afternoon puttering around the house, and ended up grabbing dinner at IHOP on my way to walk plumtreeblossom to the T station (we were aiming for Outback Steakhouse, but their Quincy location has closed). And since seeing plumtreeblossom off, I’ve had a very sleepy but pleasant evening at home.

Yesterday it was uncomfortably hot and humid. Today the temperature, the breezy energy in the air, and the piles of dry yellow leaves all say autumn. (And the temperature, in fact, says late autumn.) But the whole weekend has been beautiful.

So plumtreeblossom and I (and docorion and many other people we know) were quoted extensively in a great story on polyamory in today’s Boston Globe magazine. The print edition has photos of me and docorion as well as the photo of Alan and Michelle that’s on the online edition. The online version (linked above) has a video that docorion and Alan (W.) and Michelle were interviewed for which is, if possible, even better than the article — at any rate, I think it does a great job of presenting polyamory effectively to non-poly people in a way that lets the warmth of the relationships and lives described shine through. I am really pleased about how it all turned out.

PS: Alan M. discusses the article at his blog Poly in the Media, and Kamela reviews it favorably in her Boston Open Relationships Examiner column.

So there’s this wonderful family photo of me at around two years old playing in Hyde Park. My mother made a copy for me, which I have somewhere very safe, I’m sure. But my sister also has a copy, and while we were down there last weekend I scanned it in. So here I am:

Me as a toddler 'dowsing' in Hyde Park, London, summer 1968. My parents spent three years in England for my father’s graduate work. This picture of me was taken by a family friend while we were in Hyde Park in London sometime in summer of 1968. My parents always called this my dowsing picture, although I sort of think it looks more like I’m ploughing. I was a cutie, wasn’t I?

I’ve seen this in zillions of people’s journals. ( The privilege meme. )
I agree with the criticisms lots of people have posted about this meme; lots of the items have to do with education more directly than with privilege (although of course they’re very closely related). And my own particular answers are often affected by geography more than social class (although again there’s some degree of correlation). Still, it was kind of interesting.

(By the way, silverlibre and ka9sqb, you should feel free to correct anything I’m misremembering or misrepresenting.)

So this “ten things you’d tell your 16-year-old self” meme is really interesting, and I’m learning a lot about people from it, but I’m having a hard time putting myself in the right mindset to come up with interesting answers. The point of the thought-exercise would be to change the past, but if I change the past, I would risk losing people who are very very important to me because what led up to my meeting them didn’t happen. For instance, Boston would have been a better place for me to go to school than New Haven (and I say Boston rather than Harvard because I think UMass or Tufts would have gotten me into the same urban setting), but if I hadn’t gone to Yale I wouldn’t have met beetiger, among other people, and I wouldn’t want to give her up. And if I’d found myself in Boston several years earlier, I would have found a different social circle and the community dynamics would have been different when all my actual friends and sweeties showed up in Boston (if I’d even meet them), and I might not have those relationships.

However, for the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to ignore all those issues and pretend that shuffling the deck and dealing a new hand is something I’m OK with. Otherwise it would be all “Make absolutely sure you go to this party that your friend invites you to, and be really certain you say yes when this other person asks you if they can bring a friend to your party, and don’t be late to this event, but make sure you’re late for this other one”.

So anyway, here’s some information for my 16-year-old self:( Some things I’d tell myself at sixteen, if I were going to tell myself stuff at sixteen. )

There are many things I should be doing right now instead of posting to LJ, but I’m a sucker for interview memes and I’m feeling slothful. :-)

Put the seven deadly sins in your personal order of preference (your favorite first, most despised last).

I had to look them up to get the list. In order:

1. Lust (but not the original luxuria ‘extravagance’) — I’m all for this one!
2. Gluttony
3. Sloth
4. Envy
5. Avarice
6. Pride
(in the sense of ‘hubris’, not in the sense of pride in a job well done)
7. Wrath

Is there a new skill you hope to acquire this year?

( answer )

How long can you go without checking your email before you get antsy for it?

( answer )

What scares you?

( long answer )

Can you think of any wrong that someone's committed to you or a loved one that you're unable to forgive?

( long answer )

I’ve had lots of wonderful stuff going on since I posted last, and I’m not going to bother trying to catch up. But I wanted to post about seeing plumtreeblossom last night, which was lovely. I brought over dinner in my crock pot, a pre-marinated turkey tenderloin which I had cooked according to a recipe cathijosephine had come up with: cooked for about 5hrs in soy sauce and apple juice, along with lots of quartered small potatoes. I threw in a few spices, too, but I don’t remember exactly what they were. (Pretty sure there was some ginger.) I cooked it on high and it came out amazingly tender, and the potatoes sucked up all the soy-sauce and turkey flavour and were quite yummy themselves. For dessert we had the remainder of a cheesecake plumtreeblossom had made the last time I was over and it was still yum-m-mee. And we had some red wine (don’t remember what kind). Lovely, lovely dinner.

I stayed over at her place last night, and it was the first time we’d tried that on a “school night”, and also the first time I’d taken my CPAP machine away from home. Success on both counts! I admit, waking up at 6:00am is not exactly something I’d just happen to do on my own, but I didn’t complain, and plumtreeblossom made me coffee. :-) I’d been worried that without my humidifier in the room (which makes a huge difference) I’d get completely dry the way I did a few times the first week I was using the machine, but plumtreeblossom has a really pretty lighted ultrasonic humidifier (sort of a cross between a humidifier and a decorative fountain) that she had brought into her room, and it seems to have done the trick.

I’m going to take this opportunity to comment about how much of a difference the CPAP machine has been making. A couple days recently at work I’ve been able to start working on a project in the morning, and just keep working on the same project for the whole day, and not get sidetracked, and not get overwhelmed, and remember what I was working on even when somebody comes in my office and asks me a question. I remember being able to do that! And it’s so good to be able to do it again. The same thing is going on, to a less dramatic because less easily quantifiable degree, in the rest of my life. There are a lot of things (like finishing unpacking) that I’d basically been stalled on for a long time that I’m seeing myself start to make some progress on again. There are all sorts of things — often trivial little things — that I used to think of and think, well, maybe I’ll do that someday if I have the energy, and now I think of them and (sometimes, anyway) I just go ahead and do them, or at least start them. And I’m still absent-minded and spacey sometimes, but my memory (and especially my ability to keep track of things) is clearly much improved. And my alertness and sense that I’m catching what’s going on around me is better. Yay!

Oh, and tonight’s Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci’s was well-attended and full of interesting conversation. (For instance, I learned a lot about the history of Islam, and about particularly flammable radio transmitters.) I think I may make that a monthly thing, since it seems like a venue that works really well.

First of all, my mother does not have a blood clot. She does have pneumonia, and might have something else on top of that, but the scariest thing has been ruled out. Still in the hospital, but doing generally OK, for someone who’s in the hospital with pneumonia.

Secondly, my sleep-specialist appointment today went very well. Both the resident (?) who spent most of the time with me and the attending were very, very friendly, helpful, and informative. And the resident said that what sent me to the ER a couple weeks ago was almost certainly hyperventilation, which is a word I wish I’d heard from the staff who saw me (not docorion, in case anybody was wondering). I was aware of having trouble breathing that morning, so I was making a conscious effort to get enough air, so that makes perfect sense.

Anyway, they say that it’s pretty much guaranteed that I have obstructive sleep apnea.

The sleep center had an appointment available tonight for a sleep study, so I get to sleep with the fishes electrodes tonight. Given how bad my apnea is, the specialist I saw today said they’d probably be able to determine I had it quickly, and fit me for a CPAP machine tonight as well. Then my appointment for a follow-up isn’t until December (unless there’s a cancellation earlier), and I’m guessing that would be when I’d actually get one.

They told me that my energy level should come back right away with treatment, but the memory, learing [EDIT: and speling and typeing], cognition, and attention problems will probably take something like six months to go away, because that’s basically brain damage that has to heal once I start getting enough oxygen at night. Six months or so to get better from something that’s been getting worse over at least the better part of a decade doesn’t sound so bad, but it can’t start soon enough for me.

I’m pretty sure I must have been on the subway in Chicago, but it would have been a long time ago. I’m pretty sure we rode on the subway when I was in Amsterdam, but not 100% sure. I may have been on the subway as a child the summer we lived in Baltimore, but I think the chances are less than 50%, so I didn’t put it on here. Oh, and I’m sure I’ve been on the San Francisco Muni; don’t remember whether I’ve been on the BART as well. [Thanks, sionnagh!]

Here are some odd interview questions from ironrose. (The even ones will be filtered.) ( Interview meme. ) Let me know in a comment if you’d like me to come up with five questions for you. I don’t promise to come up with them in a timely fashion, but I’ll come up with them eventually.