Miser family update: pockets

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household. This week we're rich with deep pockets.  Pockets and pockets full of richness, that's us!

Here's what we say about our pockets (in age order, not photo order, so you can have fun playing matching games if you want).  

• My guy:  "Bike shirt pocket. Phone in left pocket in addition to the headphones"  (Also pictured: bike tire repair kit, wallet, mask).
• His sister carries a very different set of objects:  "My keys, my lipstick and a hand sanitizer. . . . I use a lot less lipstick thanks to my mask."
• Me:  "sunglasses (found a decade ago in a highway rest stop parking lot), newspaper for dog poop (because Prewash is trained to poop on top of the paper on command, for easy clean-up), chapstick, and a spare mask."
• L1:  "Dog treats, that’s what’s in my pocket. To take for maximum compliance when visiting the vet."
• The dogs entered a photo in protest, saying "we have never had and won't ever get, pockets. We find this borders on dogscrimination and we plan to meet with our wuffattorney and file a pawsuit on the matter. "  I say, "Take it up with the kangaroo court, guys!"
• I-daughter:  "Things I keep in every coat/jacket: a pair of mittens or gloves, lip balm, and a mask.   Things I keep in my favorite coat (which has an internal pocket): pad/tampon, lotion, ibuprofen, a napkin, cash, and a nail file"
• L2: out of pocket, this week.
• K-daughter:  "My checklist goes as follows: Phone Keys Wallet Babies .... Mask. And lately I've had lip balm because my lips (And A-child!) Get chapped lips. In my [job] badge pocket there's 3 quarters and crumbs from a "snack" A-child packed me one day. (The snack was a quarter of B-child's freeze dried banana biscuit...)"   
  [Before I realized the first part was a checklist, I scratched my head a lot, wondering how she keeps babies in her pocket!!]
• and . . . "David has his wallet and key (one key, not on keychain) but look he also has this! [photo of us] "   Awww . . . 
• Y:  "In my pockets this month... Medical Spanish cheat sheet, highlighter/pen to contrast our B&W clinic schedules, stickie notes to write down stuff I need to look up later, hair tie for patient encounters."
• N-son: "What I keep in my pockets are tools, not shown in picture, and in my pants pocket I keep my headphones and and mask"

I have a deep and abiding appreciation for pockets, actually, maybe because so many of my clothes growing up didn't have them.  My daughter loves that I tell people, "Freud only had it kind of right.  He didn't realize that when women were staring at men's pants, what they were thinking was, 'I wish *I* had pockets!' ".  

Vaccination is happening only in pockets of the country right now, and in my particular county, it's really really slow coming.  But at least, there are more indications that the vaccines are coming.  Our newspaper is full of stories about how an old department store is being converted into a vaccination center, that will open up maybe next week.  My guy and N-son (over 65 and with a qualifying health condition, respectively) have registered and are now in the system, which is kind of like being "pre-engaged". That is, they don't yet have appointments, but they are on the list to get appointments.  So that's good.

N-son is, as I write this, on his way back to town after living super-healthily with L1 these past few weeks.  She's been doing such a good job of giving him great (nutritious) food and good exercise that his blood sugars have come down a bunch, and in fact, he's had his first two incidents of low glucose warnings.  The first time, he'd given himself insulin but the delivery place was slow getting food to the house; the second time, he was out working hard on a job.   The awesome news about that is that, both times, his glucose monitor let everyone know the heck what was happening, and he ate some quick food, and then some slow food, and then he was fine.  So he's getting good at taking care of himself.  (The bad news is that the glucose monitor has since gone on the fritz again, but he can do finger sticks for a few days until we get it fixed once more).

One of N-son's guardian angels from afar in his new diabetes adventures is someone who has long been a guardian angel to me and my sisters, Angela [not her real name].  Angela was one of my mom's grad students in physics, who then became one of my mom's best friend, and who has been a big part of the life of me and my sisters.   Here's a photo below of her and my mom, a while back.  

One of my sisters and several of my kids asked me to do an interview series with her, and so here's what Angela has to say about her life these days.  

1.  What things were you doing a year ago that you're not doing now?

A little over a year ago I was either in hospitals or rehabilitation nursing facilities sitting in a wheelchair trying very hard to walk with a walker. I have made a lot of progress over the year.

2.  What occupies your days now?

I am in a fairly strict COVID bubble.  I try to keep up with friends on the phone or Facebook, reading a lot, and looking at cat rescue websites.  I plan to adopt a pair of bonded cats when I'm walking with a cane.

3.  Tell me a bit about your hobbies.

Reading mysteries, especially cozy mysteries (no blood or guts), watching British mysteries on PBS, and jewelry making.  Jewelry making has been on hold for a bit but hand movements have calmed.

4.  When you treat yourself to a bit of "me" time or special indulgences, what does that involve for you?

Since I can't drive, I have discovered Grub Hub and Door Dash and have been helping local restaurants during the pandemic.

5.  In the future, what kind of things do you hope you'll be doing that you haven't done yet or aren't doing now?

DRIVE!!!  I have always been fairly independent and not being able to drive is driving me crazy. I've been driving for 58 years and not being able to go when and where I want to, is very frustrating.

6.  Describe some of your favorite household gadgets or treasures.

My Kurig coffee maker and different coffees and my seascape art work.

7.  Are there any questions I should have asked you, but didn't?

No.

It's good to hear this encouraging update! Earlier, she'd told me this funny/happy story:

Last week when my physical therapist came I asked him what were our goals. He said he wanted to eventually get me to walk with a cane at which point I stood up and without walker or cane walked across the living room and back. He then said maybe I was further along than he thought. He isn't going to sign off on only a cane until I walk outside on uneven surfaces. Unfortunately Mother Nature has not been cooperating giving us snow and ice and I don't want to practice on that.

 

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.  

Hunkering

 Our cheese slicer is broken.  

It broke a month ago, or maybe more, I don't exactly remember.  The wire snapped, which might be repairable, but there was also a metal rotating cylinder between those two screws that broke off, and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to figure out how to repair that.   So, for a few months now, we've been without a cheese slicer.  

It's hard for me to feel sorry for myself if one of the biggest hardships I'm facing as we head into the one-year-anniversary of Hunkering Down is that my cheese slicer is kaput.  Oh, and our wooden clothes-drying rack has a bunch of dowel-rods that have rotted out and need replacing, so that's put a damper (so to speak) on our life style.  

I honestly can't tell if the reason that I haven't fixed/replaced these things yet is because (a) the pandemic is keeping me out of stores, or (b) my teaching load fills much of my available time, or (c) I hate shopping and buying things even in Normal Times.   It's probably all three.  I'd like to have a working cheese slicer again, and I'd like to fix that drying rack for my husband (aka the Lord of Laundry), but not enough to actually get in a car (or on a bike, if the snow melts a bit more) and go to a store.  I'll use the pandemic as an excuse, but there are probably more permanent personality traits at play.

At any rate, this is all to say that I am perfectly willing to follow the advice of numerous health experts, and to continue to Hunker Down for a while longer.   A year ago -- when the incredibly fraught news of the world shutting down and colleges going remote started filling up our email inboxes --- there were all kind of speculations about how long it might last.  (My college, for example, initially proposed that students should stay home from spring break for 2 weeks before eventually we'd let them return to finish the 2020 spring semester.   Clearly, that was an underestimate.)   

In those days, public health historians predicted it would be 18 months before the vaccinations made life relatively safe again;  I've tried to Hunker (in my head) until September 2021 because of that prediction.   So far, that's been a good mindset for me.  Not for my cheese slicer, mind you, but I think we'll manage somehow anyway.

Miser family update: Doin' like grandpa

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household.  This week, we're particularly rich in celebratory remembrance and imitation.  In particular, we're celebrating my Dad's birthday.   Happy birthday dad!  

So the theme for this week is . . . doin' like grandpa. 

My sisters joined in this week a bit:  middle sister sent two pictures showing that youngest sister is standing like grandpa. (It's kinda uncanny).  My sister-in-law sent along her husband to be like Grandpa (oh-my-gosh, he even has a hat like my Dad!)  My husband says he's loving well-educated women, like Grandpa.  L1 is "Traveling like grandpa". (She's got my sister-in-law and her husband with her . . . my dad loves traveling with family, too!)

Which is a bit of a theme. K-daughter says she's "Traveling- like grandpa! Our (spontaneous) trip to Niagara falls three weeks ago."  I-daughter offers, "Here we have [her cousin] doing something *with* grandpa" And she herself is "Reading like grandpa!"

In the next line down, N-son does circular saws like Grandpa (and under his supervision); they were breaking down an old fiberglass pool that had seen better days as a turtle tank.  I have my own contribution:  "fixing things around the home like Grandpa! . . . (True story: my guy called me for help, because the basement toilet was making a terrible whining noise. It wasn't the toilet; it was the water pipes behind the toilet. I went outside and turned off the outside faucet, which was running for some reason I don't know. "Fixed" it!)"  And Y (who hasn't actually met my dad), says she's "Enjoying La Boheme by Puccini, like grandpa, or so they tell me :)"

In the fourth row, I-daughter says, "I'm dancing like grandpa . . . I'm the one in red and white (maybe even with him? Hard to tell in this crowd) . . ."   And L1 is "Cooking like grandpa"  (mmm . . . waffles). 

Oh, man, I have so many pictures that I realized I forgot to stick this one in the collage, so I'll add it now: my niece is doin' her thumb like Grandpa.   
 

Happy birthday, Dad!  

I continue to plug away at my teaching and also to re-sanguinate slowly, hoping that my hemoglobin levels will return to adequate by the time the snow melts, my classes end, and I can throw myself into training again.  I got to tell my students a very groan-worthy calculus joke (What's the antiderivative of 1 over cabin, d cabin?  It's "houseboat"!  Because it's log cabin + C . . . ).   I love that joke because it's so goofy, but it does remind my students about the "+C" that they so often otherwise forget.   I didn't give any quizzes this week, so I didn't have any cheating.  So, yay?!?

N-son is still down with L1, and my guy is still riding his bike all over the place, and so life is chugging along here.  Our campus has changed its Covid Alert level from "High" to "Moderate", so I brought Prewash to campus to say hello to a few students in m class who are actually on campus, and it was nice for everyone involved to meet (outdoors, masked) in person, although I guess technically Prewash was "on line".  

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

Three thoughts on . . . zippers

 Three thoughts on . . . zippers.

1.  Teeth aren't shaped like teeth.

Despite their name, the teeth of zippers aren't really shaped like teeth. Each one is more like a spoon or a ladle, and they sit, one inside the other, like spoons whose handles alternate left and right.  

It's as though you're making those Matryoshka dolls, those nested Russian dolls, but instead of stacking the different sizes inside each other, they're all the same size and you stack them like a totem pole: each one sitting on,  and fitting into, the head of the one below it.

2.  Knitting with zippers.

A few years ago during Sock Madness, my daughter learned how to add zippers to knitted socks with no sewing involved. The technique is to make loops with yarn in the fabric of the zipper, carefully matching your stitch size (so I guess actually that part is like sewing), . . . so then when you're knitting the socks, you just knit the zippers right in, using the loops. I think that this is so clever, that it almost makes me want to pick up my knitting again.

3.  I love my saved zipper stash.

New zippers can be pricey, but old conference bags and cheapo backpacks often have really decent zippers that are perfectly usable for other good projects.  And the cheapness of the construction means that it's usually really easy to get that zipper out with 5 minutes and a good seam ripper. For some reason, this reminds me about old jokes about the "Yugo" brand cars; you can double the value of the car by filling the gas tank. When it comes to those cheap conference bags, the zipper off of the bag is often worth more than the bag with a zipper still in.

Three thoughts on envelopes

Me, I am some kind of a lucky person, in that I keep getting showered with riches of envelopes. People . . . . well, actually, companies  . . . send me all sorts of mail with return envelopes inside, even though I mostly pay my bill online. Not one to let these riches go to waste, I offer up three thoughts on envelope use.

Thought 1.
"Back of the envelope calculations" are famous for a reason.  Envelopes are really perfect for making lists: they are not too wide, so they force me into the column format, and they don't distract me with vast swaths of blank space or make you feel like a failure for not filling that space.  I use envelopes to keep track of attendance at office hours (my students get credit for visiting me early in the semester).  Apparently, sometimes I use them to jot down ideas for blog posts, too.

Thought 2.
Return envelopes are lovely for sorting smaller pieces of paper.  Historically, people have used them for budgeting; me, I use them to store receipts by month (for example, February 2021).   I don't need to go back and find receipts often --- in fact I can only think of, like, three times in the past three years when I needed to --- but those few times I've needed to find a receipt, it's been super easy to find them.

Thought 3.
Envelopes have this over phones or computers: they don't distract me by pinging me with texts or pointing me towards websites. I never look up from writing something down on an envelope and say to myself,  "Wait! where did that last hour go???"   Better yet, when I put an envelope down someplace, unlike emails or texts, they don't move around to make way for the next incoming envelope; so it's easy to go back and find them later.

Miser Family update: 32 version

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family household.  This week, we're celebrating 32 years of L1: someone who seems to always have a huge smile on her face, who loves to play hard and get dirty, who cleans up real nice, and who is ferociously loyal to family and friends.   

In binary, L1 ticks over a new digit: she's 100000 (base 2) which makes her seem really, really old.  And yet, as someone who's really really older than her, I can assure her that amazing surprises will continue to delight her for years yet to come.   So happy birthday, and many more, L1!

Here was one of my surprised delights this week:  soy-sauce hummus.  I was making my homemade no-tahini hummus recipe, and realized we were completely out of garlic.  I tossed in a splash of soy sauce instead on a whim and yummmm.   Score one for improvisation!

Here's another first for me.  I happen to have a lot of cows . . . and by "a lot", I mean "no really, a lot".  I have cow toothbrushes and cow staplers; I have cow mugs that moo; I have cow Christmas ornaments, cows made from leather, folded from paper by origami masters, fired in ceramic and cuddly plush toys.  I keep thinking I'm reaching the limit of cow creativity,  . . . and then along comes a new-to-me cow creation.  

This latest one is a cow that a student of mine 3D-printed as a thank you gift for me.  He dropped it off at my home.  He said he'd remembered that I said I live on [such and such] street, and that my front porch had a lot of cows.  He said he drove along the street looking at the porches to see if he could figure out which was mine, and "Professor MiserMom, you weren't kidding!".  Well, now I have a lot of cows plus one!

What else is going on?  I forgot last week to update you on recent political sock gossip; I-daughter just finished a pair that she modeled for me in a color called "Im-peach-ment"; she is particularly pleased with the timing of finishing these. 

I don't have pictures of this, but N-son and my guy have been bonding at protests; my husband says they were the two youngest protesters outside of Scott Perry's offices in Harrisburg yesterday.   Sock it to 'em, family!

At another extreme, one of N-son's friends very helpfully removed all his hair and poked holes in his ears.  The earrings lasted something like 14 hours; I think both the ears and the hair will return to the way they were before, but who knows?  Here's a bald hole-y N-son for your viewing pleasure.

And on the topic of hair removal,  K-daughter reports,

"A-child got a super cool hair cut! (See pictured) she picked it out herself- it's a side shave. Lookin fly! . . . A-child has mastered making scrambled eggs by herself. She is now helping me tonight in making the Indian dish, Chicken Masala (last pictured) "

And I'm sure you're all wondering how my half-marathon training is going.   Actually, I'm pretty sure you're not wondering about that, which is part of why I decided --- when the giant snow blew through our city this past week --- to go ahead and give blood.  I knew I wouldn't be able to get out on the roads to run, so might as well save a life.  Last Saturday, before giving blood, I'd had a delightful and strong 8-mile run.  Today, mildly de-sanguinated, I headed out for an easy 10-mile run that ended after 5.4 very slow miles.   Eh, N-son's ears will come back and so will my hemoglobin.  

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be 100000 wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.  

Four paradoxes of snow

Four paradoxes of snow . . . musings arising from this week's weather.  

Light and Heavy.

Snowflakes are so tiny.  So tiny and and so light.  But when they fall like they did earlier this week, they make so much, heavy work.  It's a bit of what I teach my students in calculus class: there are these tiny things we study that are so small that we call them "infinitesimals" (epsilon, dx, dy), but when you add them all up, they make ups something really big.

Dark and Light.

The storms that bring in the snow roll in on huge clouds that block the sun, and at night they block the stars and moon, and yet the nighttimes are brighter than ever because of all the reflected light off the snow.  I often wake up in the middle of the night after a snowfall, thinking it must be morning already, because the nights just luminesce with the snow on the ground.

Cold and warm.

Snow comes in because of cold weather storms, but it traps air to become one of the best insulators around.  I grew up loving to see the snow on my roof: it meant the attic insulation was working (so heat from the house wasn't melting the snow away), and the house underneath was staying cozier than ever.  And snow piles, with their amazing insulating abilities, can last months into warmer weather.  

Rigid and Free.

Snowflake Bentley was the most prolific early photographer of snow, and his fascinating pictures have always made me marvel.   It's amazing to me that a snowflake, starting with a grain of who-knows-what, picking up random water molecules as it falls through the air, remains so incredibly six-fold symmetric.  How do the water molecules on the north side of the flake know to match the ones on the south side?  There's so much variation from the center outward, that it makes the symmetry along the edges that much more stunning.

And yet, if you remove the freedom of falling through the air, and if you force snow to form under constraints (like frost on a windowpane), then you get structures that look almost alive: like ferns, or feathers, of things that can blow and move.  Snow that falls freely forms rigid shapes; snow that forms under conformity seems to finally have a will of its own.  

It makes me feel like there ought to be a metaphor in here somewhere, but I can't pull it together quite.  Mostly, I just love how snow up-ends the world (and my thinking) for a little while, until it melts away again.