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Boston's Orange Line, by Andrew Elder and Jeremy C. Fox. This is a collection of black-and-white photos, going back to the start of the old elevated orange line, with captions. This was for the "explore Boston history" square on the BPL summer reading bingo. If I'd noticed the "images of rail" series title, I wouldn't have borrowed this book. The captions are just about enough to confirm that there's more than enough to be said on the subject to make a book, but this isn't. This has a disjointed discussion of the lengthy "realigmnent" of the orange line to its current route, and a couple of paragraphs on the decision not to run an 8-lane interstate through the middle of Boston and Cambridge, and no suggestion that anything similar had happened elsewhere. Ah, well.

There are suggestions on the library website for some of the squares (including "with a green cover"), but not this one. Searching the catalog for "Boston histpry" got me this, along with, among other things, a book about the Big Dig, a book about the Great Molasses Flood (which is at least mentioned in this, with a picture of damage to the orange line), and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

runpunkrun

One of those thrillers that splits the narrative between two women—both twenty years old, working at the same grubby motel and living in the same apartment, one in 1982 and the other in 2017 trying to solve the mystery of the first one's disappearance—and their stories run so parallel they're basically interchangeable and you start wondering if maybe the author should have only told the story once. It certainly would have cut down on the amount of clunky exposition and awkward dialogue.

The thrills were not thrilling, but the mystery might have been interesting if we weren't getting it from both ends. As it is, not worth the time.

Contains: References to rape, domestic abuse, and child death; descriptions of dead bodies; ghosts.

rmc28

Regrettably, we have to go home again this afternoon. I am packing with the intention of leaving our luggage at the hotel while we do one last amble along Southsea beach.

Swag count:

11 pens
9 commemorative guidebooks (to the various ships, museums, and the dockyard as a whole)
2 notebooks
2 postcards
1 travel mug
1 fridge magnet
1 birthday card from the Spinnaker Bar staff

Also some chocolate from the Lindt outlet store. My suitcase was fairly full when we came. I'm sure I can make it all fit ... somehow.

The seed for choosing Portsmouth for this getaway came from seeing a sign for "Explosion Museum" while driving a bunch of hockey players to Gosport rink back in May. I'm very glad I went with that impulse, it's worked out well.

fred_mouse

Today's annoyance with YouTube auto-craption:

"Current university"

Locals, who know what the tiny set of options are, can possibly identify what 'Current' is relatively easily. In my case, given that I was watching this from within Curtin University, it was even easier, once I worked out that that was what is going on.

But oh! it annoys me that people don't review the captions for even that level of obvious mistake (I'm not calling that one egregious. The ones that mess up the name(s) of Country included in an Acknowledgement of Country are egregious. I've never seen the same error for a Welcome to Country, which I assume is because the Indigenous people associated with the production of such know too well how badly it can be messed up).

redbird

Today's trip to the farmers market was successful and satisfying.

I left the house as soon as I'd had my morning tea, and went to a market that opens at 10 on Sundays. I got there at about 10:20, before they'd sold out of anything I wanted, or might want.

What I particularly wanted was raspberries, and I bought two small boxes of those (totalling about a pint).

Busa Farms had a bin full of nice-looking shell peas, and I bought almost two pounds, because Cattitude is very fond of fresh peas. When I got home, he told me that he'd thought he had missed the local pea season this year. I also bought a bunch of red radishes, because they caught my eye while I was in line to pay for the peas. (Busa had both red and purple radishes, which somehow made them more appealing than if there'd only been one kind of radish.)

Hi-Rise Bakery was there, and I bought a small loaf of their concord bread, which is the right degree of crusty for the three of us. (They also have a thicker-crust "luce.")

The raspberries are from Kimball's, where I also bought a few diva cucumbers.

Stillman's Farm didn't have lamb sausages, but when I asked about it, the vendor said "probably next week" and asked what kind I liked. She is going to report back that they had a request for merguez sausages. I don't know whether we'll get to the same market next week, but it sounds like there will be lamb sausages at the other local farmers markets soon.

A lot of other things looked good, but I decided I didn't need lettuce (multiple varieties), cherry tomatoes, or fish.

Current Mood: satisfied

fred_mouse

Now that I've written up the six month summary of how my 2025 New Year's Resolutions have gone, I'm looking at what I want for the next six months. Which might turn out to be a 12 month set of goals; I'm kind of being flexible with whatever works.

But!

One of my intentions is that I have goals for each of the areas of my life that are important to me--there is no rating of how big that area has to be, just that I see it as an important circle. Two of these I did not manage to get a coherent goal for across the last six months. I'm not sure that it is possible to have coherent goals, but that might be me looking from the wrong perspective.

Which is where my question comes in: what suggestions do people have as to goals for 'Family' and 'Social'? I'm okay with drive by commentary from people who aren't familiar with the limitations of my life, because not knowing those details might be an important part of different perspective.

fred_mouse

Given that the last three weeks have been a completely different pace, and my expectations of my self for the rest of the year are quite different to where I was at the beginning of the year, I'm going to close out the set of goals I set myself at the beginning of the year (Note: I'm not working from that page, but from an offline edited version). The last update I did was May 20th. I contemplated writing a new set of resolutions in this post concurrently with wrapping up these, but have decided instead to create an offline document of Mid-Year Resolutions. I might get around to posting that, but chances are low.

( Lots of details, possibly only interesting to me )

tl;dr: great progress for work; good progress on craft, reading, physical - exercise and health; not great on house, organisation, decluttering, writing, garden, learning, money. No goals to compare to for family or social. Having a list continues to be useful.

redbird

I learned this morning that

acelightning has died. She was one of the people I only know online, but feel like friends because we have real conversations (in her case, here on Dreamwidth and previously on LJ).

rmc28

Friday:

Mary Rose, worth the admission fee all by itself, thoroughly absorbing exhibition of the many many objects found within the wreck, and amazing to see the preserved timbers themselves from lots of different angles.
lunch
dockyard boat tour, including a good look at the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier currently in dock (I cannot look at aircraft carriers without Danger Zone playing in my head)
HMS Victory, audioguide version with dramatic retelling of the battle of Trafalgar. Very absorbing, impressive amount of the ship available to visit even while restoration is ongoing, very tiring.
back to hotel and flop for a little
walk, ferry, bus to Gosport ice rink, disco skate, bus, ferry and walk back to hotel; ice is rather worse than Cambridge, but ferry+bus beats 2x Cambridge buses any time

Saturday:

sauna and swim for me
walk to the dockyard, waterbus to the Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower
lunch
walk ~2 miles to Submarine Museum
walk through of HMS Alliance, also a look around HMS Holland 1 (the first ever Royal Navy submarine)
my body in full rebellion against "museum walking" by this point, we took the waterbus back to the main dockyard, got cold drinks, and got back on the dockyard boat tour - different guide, different focus, well worth it
little wander around Gunwharf Quays and a little shopping in the outlet stores; having forgotten to bring my ereader, I resorted to buying a newspaper and we sat quietly ignoring each other in a curry gastropub for a while. Eventually we ordered some curry, which was really rather good, and then toddled back to the hotel
I decided I'd had enough moving for the day, so now I'm lying on the hotel bed with Glastonbury on the TV, life is good

Tomorrow I think we'll do a couple of brief museum things at the historic dockyard, and then perhaps go for a wander through Southsea. I'm going to watch England v Jamaica tomorrow afternoon (I think R has less than zero interest in football, women's or otherwise) and we've a reservation in the Spinnaker Tower for sunset cocktails tomorrow evening.

physical issues

My leg muscles, especially the ones that stabilise hips, knees and ankles, have been giving me some grief since I went clubbing after the Kodiaks won playoffs at end of May. I'm reasonably sure it's muscular fatigue and not joint/ligament damage. Rest helps, but so does gentle movement: if I sit still too long everything has seized up a bit when I stand up, but loosens up again as I start moving. Skating and hockey are fine once I'm warmed up. Yoga and general stretching seem to help, as do hot baths and sauna. Steady walking is a lot better for me than the stop-start of museum walking, as the last two days have made clear. I love museums but right now the spirit is willing and the flesh has Had Enough.

rmc28

I have been resisting buying a number of great hoodies from the assorted Historic Dockyard museum shops, on the grounds that I already have More Than Sufficient Hoodies, related to either ice hockey or musical theatre. R said obviously I need to wait for an ice hockey musical and get that hoodie.

Suggestions welcome for the topic / plot of such a musical.

fred_mouse

thestory inside is doing July signups. I'm not taking on any extra commitments, not even suggested reading, at the moment, but I have very much enjoyed the suggestions I have had from this group. If you have a TBR list you can share, you too can have this excitement in your life!

It works on a buddy system - they pick three books from your list for you to read, you pick three books from their list for them to read. Sign ups close on the 1st July.

duskpeterson

A long, windowless corridor leads into the royal sanctuary. The corridor's entrance is next to a walled-up gateway that originally led directly into the courtyard of the royal residence. The corridor itself is kept deliberately unlit, to recreate the circumstances under which captives were led here before being enslaved. Just walk toward the light at the end of the corridor to reach your destination.

[Translator's note: A chase takes place in that corridor during Death Mask.]

rmc28

Uni buddy R and I made it to Portsmouth last night, despite the best efforts of signal failures to scare us off. (Half the trains were showing as cancelled around 3pm; by the time we actually got to Cambridge station at 5pm things were looking better; by the time our train got to Finsbury Park it looked like service was nearly restored and we continued to change at Three Bridges as originally planned.)

I was working up until about 4pm, with a couple of colleagues very amused that a) I didn't start packing until a gap between meetings at 2pm, and b) my "girls weekend" consists of naval museums and ice skating.

We had an easy walk to our hotel in the midsummer twilight, and settled in to our respective rooms. I'm doing admin until R texts me she's ready for breakfast. And then: the Mary Rose! (who else has formative childhood memories of watching it being raised?)

redbird

One book finished in the past fortnight: Aftermarket Afterlife, by Seanan McGuire, the 14th volume in her InCryptid series of fantasy novels. I was disappointed by this one: there were too many ghosts and too few cryptids, and the ending seemed abrupt, even given that this is number 14 in a loose series. I'm not a big fan of ghosts, and the book is narrated by Aunt Mary, the Price family's ghost babysitter. The ebook also contains "Excerpt from Mourner's Waltz," about a bit of Verity's life, as the superintendent and only human resident of a Manhattan apartment building. The novel and short story both contain massive spoilers for at least the two previous books in the series.

I gave up on Twelve Trees (mentioned in the previous post) because the printing was hard on my eyes, and since it's a hardcover rather than an ebook, I can't change the font or print size, and I have to take it back to the library.

runpunkrun

I will read anything Adrian Tchaikovsky writes, and I read this, where a robot valet makes a decision his programming can't account for and is then thrust out of the safety and predictability of his manor home and into the chaos of the unknown, but it's a book that can't seem to commit to a perspective or tone. I mean:

Inside his decision-making software there were two subroutines in the shape of wolves, and one insisted that he stay, and the other insisted that he could not stay.

Is this robot valet on Tumblr? Nothing in the text justifies such a distracting choice.

This is not a page turner. At one point, I swear to god, Libby predicted it would take me 23 years to finish reading it. But it's Tchaikovsky, and so finish it I did. Even when dealing almost entirely with robots, his science fiction is humanist, concerned with individual choices, with no one person or group being the big bad. Instead the friction comes where systems overlap without comprehension.

Charles, House said at last. We are only following instructions.

This book is a world-building slow burn that examines the overlap of automation and humanity, and comes to a dire—but logical—conclusion.

There's also a short story set before this book that you can read at Reactor: Human Resources by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Contains: the collapse of human civilization, robot harm and death.

fred_mouse

in the paper I'm reading right now, I found the sentence

"All these models end up being specific cases of a generalized stochastic differential equation."

and actually laughed out loud (it helps that I'm working from home today; specifically from bed, so that maybe my lower back will stop hating me. I can read just as well in bed, having spent a lot of the last year training to read from the laptop in exactly this position :) And thus laughing is not disruptive)

Why did I laugh? As I explained to artisanat, that is the first jargon filled sentence where I've understood every word and what it means. And then I was asked for examples of words I don't know, which at this point I can think of 'constructivist framework' and 'epistemological' (I'm starting to get a feel for the latter; the former I have zero idea)

ETA: the next sentence read

"We cannot provide a detailed account of these models since they require a certain level of mathematical expertise."

redbird

Cattitude took the cat in for her follow-up appointment, and the nurse said she's doing just fine, and cleared her to start eating crunchy things (which include her favorite cat treats). She hadn't been eating much in the previous few days, so they sent Cattitude home with two medications to improve her appetite. The cat has her appetite back, and headed right for the bowl of kibble, and ignored the bowl of wet food. She also informed us at dinner, when offered Greenies, that those were her proper treats, thank you very much. The other cat, Molly, is also pleased that we are once again giving them kibble and the familiar treats; there was no practical way to give Molly kibble and Kaja only wet food, so neither cat got anything crunchy for ten days.

We may be going to London last month, to sort through some of Mom's stuff, including papers and photos. (Mark needs to be there, and I want to, even though it will mean a lot of time masking, and probably a lot of takeout meals eaten in a hotel room. I emailed the cat sitter,

I checked this afternoon, and my inherited share of Mom's Vanguard account is in my account. Separately, there's a life insurance policy that seems to have asked for another form after my brother sent in what he thought was everything they wanted. In addition to the Vanguard account, there are some UK bank accounts, which Mark thinks will take several months to go through probate. All of this is a little weird, and I want my mother, not her life insurance.

Boston (along with much of the eastern United States and Canada) is in the middle of the sort of heat wave where they advise everyone to stay indoors if possible, not just people who are particularly sensitive to the heat. Both the NWS warning and the Boston heat emergency are only through this evening, but they're predicting that tomorrow will also be hotter than I find comfortable.

redbird

We just had an unexpected visit: Adrian asked if I'd be willing to either mask or sit in the study with the door closed, so one of her comrades could sit in our air conditioned apartment for a little while. Adrian asked because Simcha is less heat-tolerant than I am, and at least as covid-cautious, so I said yes. It was good to talk to them; I'd met Simcha but only in passing, and Adrian hadn't met them at all, but Adrian talks about them, and Simcha is the person we recently gave our loveseat to.

That was fun, and now they have left and I have taken my mask and clothes off, and am drinking tea. I ended the visit when I started getting uncomfortably warm despite the AC, as well as it being time for me to have tea.

rmc28

You may have noticed it's been hot in England. So a lot of this week has just been the extra routines to cope with that (airing out the house at night / early morning, extra hydration, more naps).

It was a three-day week at work for me, with Monday my travel day back from Prague, and Wednesday a multi-errand day. Tuesday was a hectic day at work, but a rare evening with very few plans, so I actually rested. Wednesday had EHCP review for one child; a lunchtime skating lesson for me; a school bowling trip, hospital appointment and shopping all with the other child; and then Kodiaks practice in the evening.

( lots of ice hockey )

This week and next are 4-day weeks at work for me; I am having a long weekend away in Portsmouth with one of my oldest friends from university. Probably my only trip away this year that isn't directly about ice hockey. (But there is a rink in Gosport and both of us skate.) We plan to visit the Mary Rose, and I at least want to visit both the Submarine Museum and the Explosion Museum. I have been intrigued by the latter since I saw a road sign for it on the way to Gosport rink last month, but haven't yet found anything else about it apart from name and location. No spoilers!

fred_mouse

Between one thing and another, I haven't been keeping up on dreamwidth. I'm spending the next hour or so attempting to clear out - there were 317 tabs open in the dreamwidth window when I started; it will be interesting to see where I get to. So many posts from mid-May I was going to reply to; giving myself permission to abandon. And then I'm going to do the same thing with the backlog of my inbox.

And how do I get to 317 tabs? By every day or two scanning my reading list, and opening everything longer than a paragraph that I expect to want to read. This means I can get 'caught up' over breakfast, even if not everything gets read!

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Wednesday reading

The Sun Down Motel, by Simone St. James

Packing

'Typo' of the day

farmers market

Goal setting question(s)

New Year's Resolutions - close out

acelightning has died

Holiday fun

Hoodies

Signal boost

The Royal Sanctuary: The corridor (Tempestuous Tours)

Girls weekend: ships and skating

Wednesday reading

Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Things that make me laugh

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