a wolf angel is not a good angel

Hartz, which didn’t quite succeed in killing my cat with their flea and tick pesticide in a “put this on your small animals” bottle — don’t use their stuff! — has reiumbursed me for the vet bills. Thankfully. (They do not, I am told, reimburse if your pet actually dies.)

As soon as I deposit it, it’ll be time to go to all those “do you have a story?” pages and say yes, I do. Matilda is fine now, but she still has residual twitches, and I suspect that some of the common long-term problems from phenothrin will one day come up.

Do a search for Hartz killed my cat, Hartz flea killed my dog, anything like that, and you’ll see thousands of stories. I was lucky because I noticed jsut as she started to show symptoms; lots of owners aren’t so lucky.

Don’t use Hartz! I keep saying this because people just don’t know. How could they?

I’d say they’re going to pay for my airfare to Mexico, but really they’re just covering vet bills I already incurred.

We all know the obvious rule: every year divisible by 4 is a leap year (Julian calendar, still in use in the Russian Orthodox church): it gets ahead 1 day every 128 years. We also know that centuries aren’t, unless they’re divisible by 400, too (Gregorian calendar, which we use): it gets ahead 1 day every 3289 years.

Since these are not quite right, there have been rules proposed to keep the calendar even closer:

• years divisible by 4000 are not leap years (John Herschel, an astronomer, suggested this): it gets ahead 1 day every 18,519 years.
• the 400 year rule is dropped; years that have a remainder of 200 or 600 when divided by 900 are leap years (Greek Orthodox church, also in use in Russia): it gets ahead 1 day every 41,667 years.
• years divisible by 3200 are not leap years (a group in the US Navy proposed it): it gets behind 1 day every 117,647 years, so leap seconds are added every so often (3 out of 4 years, more or less).

I had to do the dull leap year program in some programming class or another (probably several). Wouldn’t've been more exciting if you also got to choose which calendar you wanted? Or got info on all of them?

I bought my plane ticket to Mexico. Beaches, I will see you in a month. I’ve been putting on buyign this for ages. But now I’ve started working again (3 hours a day, more or less, so a few hundred a week, on top of my stipend, which is just over half that), I feel less guilty abou tit. I had to buy it, since the person I am going with already bought hers. I’m staying an extra day because the flight’s cheaper, or just because why not stay an extra day? Beach!

Incidentally, I have time because: I am not taking any classes for credit this semester, I have no kids, and I have no life. I am fairly depressed, so I don’t even lose time making meals, I just have lots of toasted things. This is also why I can watch more television than I ever have in my whole entire life (though I do work in front of it, I am being quite literal: I have never watched this much television regularly) and read a few books a week.

But beaches! And ruins! And then, shortly thereafter, Europe. Where I won’t hit beaches, but I’ll be with my best friend.

I’m very glad I have a camera now.

Mike Liberman at Language Log posts about people’s inattention to unexpected changes when doing a cognitively difficult task. This is also a problem for kids with learning disabilities, for whom[1] things like sounding out words is so difficult that they can’t pay attention to the content. This is well-discussed.

What I thought neat were the other videos: the person-change ones were amusing, but I was trying to catch the adding/removing of objects in photos, or the changing of a colour. It’s hard. Go look (Gradual changes to scenes is the subtitle) — they’re pretty fast. You can only watch it once, because starting it over makes the change too abrupt. (I got 3.)

I also can’t catch all 9 of the intentional cut changes in the second video.

[1] Only place I use it is after a preposition, but otherwise it sounds so wrong.

I just read a very cute book: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper FForde.[1] It’s clever, in a sort of silly literary way. It features Thursday Next — how can you not like a protagonist named Thursday? — as a sort of literary detective, in an alterna-England where literature (and art) is a very very serious business.

Except it’s not, because they have a Rocky Horror-esque production of Richard the Third. Just as the play begins, the audience yells out “When is the winter of our discontent?”

I’m reading the second one, and the library is ordering the third for me as we speak. They’re light; they’re fun; they made me feel more well-read than I am. And now I will have some toast.

[1] How do you pronounce his name?

Update: I decided he’s Welsh, so ff is pronounced f.

Because I want to be cool, too, I just spent the last 2 hours figuring out how to cast on. I get it now!

Next up: how do I actually knit? That’s for tomorrow. I am having trouble finding good instructions online. Not that I actually got it when my grandmother tried to show me, either . . . and she’s in Florida, so I can’t go bother her about it.

It’s nice to think I’m actually making an effort to get back into anything crafty. I miss stained glass. Maybe this summer. I have enough glass to work with for a while.

I’ll consider this a continuation of this post.

Cindy mentioned that the culture here is to leave your family — go away to school, go away for a job, go away in general. I don’t want to do that, obviously (neither does she). And it does make it hard. How can you be expected to want to live somewhere just for your parents? Maybe, if they’re sick, if you need to take care of them, but if they’re healthy? (My grandparents are all still healthy, even.)

I speak to my mother almost daily. I don’t speak as often to my father, because he & I don’t converse well on the phone. But we meet halfway a few times a year, just the two of us, to spend time together. We go out for meals now and then just the two of us . . . when I move back home (unless the political situation there explodes, but I plan to live there permanently, linguist or not) I’m sure that I will have dinner with them (and my grandparents) regularly. My mother is not my best friend; she’s not my friend at all.[1] She’s my *mother* (I find the new thing of “my mother is my best friend” incredibly icky, somehow, though it’s nice that people are close). But I love her and I talk to her about things and I tell her things and when I win that holiday to the beach (I plan for things like winning lotteries and contests) I will go with my family. I like my family.

A friend of mine (26) and his sister (24) both still live at home and plan to for the foreseeable future. Their parents are happy about it. My mother admits to not really ever wanting any of us to leave, and, as part of my plan to live back in Canada City as of my fifth year, I plan to live back home. My sister will only be 13 then,[2] anyhow; I won’t be moving in with just my parents. (This is a financial issue, since I may or may not get funded in my last year: I am unwilling to teach basic essay writing to freshman for the honour of living under the poverty line here. Yes, it’s something good to teach. No, I don’t want to be the one to do it.)

I don’t understand why it’s considered so strange to want to be with your family. It’s a middle-class kind of thing, based on my fairly unrepresentative sample. The poorest people can’t afford to go off, the richest can, but they come back to work in the family business. Sure, you can like your family, but isn’t it time to grow up and live on your own? No.

I want to live on my own, yes; but near them. I want to be part of their daily lives, and vice versa. I want to get all the time I can with them, and with my grandparents,[3] because these are the people I love, and you never know what might happen.[4]

[1] I do have friends; I try not to talk about them much here. But I am often surprised at how lucky I am, in them.

[2] Maybe I shouldn’t. Living with a teenaged girl? On the other hand, it will probably give me incentive to finish my dissertation and get out.

[3] Who are all, as I mentioned, healthy. But my grandmother’s siblings and parents all died young, and my grandfather’s older brother has Alzheimer’s, and his older sister is not well, and they’re all in their 80s (my grandmothers both turn 80 this year; I’m rounding). I admit to being not particularly close to my paternal grandparents, who I see a few times a year. I *was* close to them until I was 11 or 12, when they stopped wanting to spend as much time with me. Since I was just at the age to be very hurt by this, I was. There are other issues, like the fact that they’re miserable to spend time with. My other grandparents aren’t.

[4] I’ve been morbid recently. It’s probably because I’m so unhappy.

In the gym today, I was asked out of the blue if I was going to see the movie. Apparently I was supposed to figure out somehow which movie I was being asked about (I didn’t, but it was The Passion, as you probably guessed). After we resolved that little issue, I said no. Indeed, I am not planning to see it.

She looked shocked. Shocked. I said I wasn’t a fan of Gibson or of gore (or Gore), and there are inaccuracies (which piss me off regularly); this seemed reasonable to me — I am not, recall, Christian — but somehow all wrong to a few people nearby. It’s apparently all sold out around here.

I didn’t mention being Jewish. It seemed unnecessary at first, and then I was just uncomfortable after. I haven’t felt like that about religion in a very long time.

A grand total of 5 hours here, and I am already unhappy again. This is why my going back has moved from Wed to Mon to hey maybe Friday, but definitely Sunday. I don’t usually like to go on Sundays because of coming-home-from-a-weekend cross border traffic, but it’s tempting this time.

I really need to figure out how to fix this; things are just not working here. (Things like me.)

You’re Love in the Time of Cholera!
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Like Odysseus in a work of Homer, you demonstrate undying loyalty by
sleeping with as many people as you possibly can. But in your heart you never give
consent! This creates a strange quandary of what love really means to you. On the
one hand, you’ve loved the same person your whole life, but on the other, your actions
barely speak to this fact. Whatever you do, stick to bottled water. The other stuff
could get you killed.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

or, possibly:

You’re A Prayer for Owen Meany!
by John Irving
Despite humble and perhaps literally small beginnings, you inspire
faith in almost everyone you know. You are an agent of higher powers, and you manifest
this fact in mysterious and loud ways. A sense of destiny pervades your every waking
moment, and you prepare with great detail for destiny fulfilled. When you speak, IT
SOUNDS LIKE THIS!

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.