Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Wednesday morning things

1. Sewed the shoulder seams on Hagrid, started the collar. I might finish this tonight, I don't know...there's still an awful lot of sewing to do and as of this morning the "stacked up sleeves" still felt every so slightly dampish.

2. Am very tempted to just say "bag being disciplined about finishing" and wind off the Heliopath Vest yarn and start that, and also start the Augusta cardigan. Part  of this is out of a desire to hurry along the cooler weather of fall but I admit part of this is out of the slight existential dread that has come up surrounding geopolitical news.

Oh, I know - as I said on Twitter, regardless of who was in the White House here I think we'd still have problems with North Korea, and either it's not a solvable problem, or it's one that's been allowed to fester for too long and now we're kind of in an ugly spot...

I also am trying to do two things:

a. "Give it up to God" as people in my church sometimes say: this is literally one of those situations where all I can do about it is pray. And anyway:

b. Maybe this is the current generations' Cuban Missile Crisis. Or 1980s face-offs with the Soviets. I wasn't around yet for the Cuban Missile Crisis (my parents were relative newlyweds and I wouldn't make the scene for a bit less than 7 more years). But my mom has talked about it - I remember when I was havering at her around September 11, 2001, she just quietly said that "I thought the world was going to come to an end THEN" implying that it didn't, so....I don't know.

I also think of the excerpts from Mass Observation diaries I read from Britain in WWII and how there was a point, early in the war, when they thought that they, like Poland and other nations, were going to be invaded. (That's the era the famous "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters originated - they were propaganda to try to keep the populace's morale up in the face of a Nazi occupation, which always makes me shudder a little when I see the modern, light-hearted takes on them. And now I wonder how one says "Keep Calm and Carry On" in Korean or Japanese - seeing as South Korea or Japan are probably the likely first targets)

It's impossible to take an objective eye to history when it's history you are living through.

3. I am not amused by the fact that the very day I all-but-decide to sign up for Netflix, Disney announces they're pulling their content (some sources say next year, some say 2019) to make a competing service.

Yeah, great.

Eventually I fear streaming services will be just like cable: there will be dozens upon dozens of channels, each one shows exactly one program you want to watch, and so you have to decide "which of these do I really want to pay for to accept all that other drek along with the thing I want" And it will be JUST AS EXPENSIVE AS CABLE if you want enough of them to see most of what you want.

And probably they'll also have the same content-decay thing as cable, where they start out with high quality and unique programming, but eventually every channel has its own variant on:
a. a show about a pawnshop or "antique pickers"
b. some kind of food competition show
c. a show about "tiny houses" with impossibly cute couples talking about how "great" it is to trade their big house for what's essentially a stationary RV
d. some kind of freakshow think about medical conditions
e. a fighting-family show, where either the family's weirdness is the hook, or the fact that they all work in the same industry
f. some kind of show that maybe claims some kind of "anthropology" cred but is really voyeurism like all those shows about the Amish a couple years ago.

And of course with streaming services you also need a password and login information for each one, so that makes it even LESS convenient.

Maybe, maybe for now I stick with Amazon Prime, which I get "anyway" for the free quick shipping, and just buy dvds of the things I want that they don't offer - I can get my own copy of Lilo and Stitch for about what a month's Netflix subscription would cost.

(That said: it does look like some of the Netflix "original content" is potentially interesting. And they do have some cartoons - apparently they are where the Care Bears migrated to. And say what you will, but Care Bears are actually pretty good for calming down a cranky upset adult, or at least THIS cranky upset adult)

4. I have been coughing worse these past few days. (Apparently that's one way my asthma manifests itself). I don't know if it's mold (I've also had bad hives) or air pollution - just south of me, much of North Texas is in an "air quality alert" probably for ground-level ozone (known to be bad for asthma) so that could be it.

I dunno. It's not bad enough that I can't just live with it, and I'd rather not go on yet another med, especially not a shaky-making inhaler (I was on a theophylline inhaler for a while 20-some years ago and it was not pleasant. I ONLY used it when I was really having breathing issues because it made me anxious and shaky)

But I do keep a bottle of water around, though I won't have to do that much longer - today the broken water fountain on my hall is being replaced. Yes, I am surprised, but I wonder if there was some kind of health and safety requirement saying that we have to have x number of water fountains available, or in a certain proximity to where people are working.

5. My syllabi are done but I have to motivate myself to do a bit more reading and filling-in-from-other-books of information. I figure next week is mostly a lost week: Monday I have a checkup at the doctor, Wednesday and Thursday are "symposium" days meaning all my brainspace is going to be taken up with stuff like compliance to new Federal mandates and CRASE training, and Friday morning is our start-of-the-semester faculty meeting.

I am thinking of taking Saturday next week and going antiquing, as one last before-the-year-starts fun thing. I don't know. (There also will be New Pony but there are also other places I can see it).

I may also - I say with some regret - go back to the old model of getting up at 5 am and working out before breakfast. Hopefully my stomach issues are long-gone enough that doesn't reactivate them but this trying-to-get-home-with-enough-time-to-work-out thing is a drag, and will be worse when school starts. I don't know. (That also means, likely, no more late-evening Bob's Burgers re-runs, because to rise at 5 I really need to be in bed at 9....)

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