Three thoughts on . . . Sudoku puzzles

Thought 1. 
In general, I prefer Crossword puzzles, mostly because crossword puzzles can go meta and have themes and be puzzles-within-puzzles.  And because, if I make a mistake in a crossword puzzle, I can figure it out from surrounding clues, but if I make a Sudoku mistake, I basically have to scrap the puzzle and start over, which seems . . . like bad management, I guess?

Thought 2. 
Which might explain why I'm fond of BrainFreeze puzzles (and am a huge Laura Taalman fan, in general) -- because she and other mathematicians create funky variations on Sudoku that make me think hard.  Like this puzzle by David Nacin I started yesterday.  The pink squares have no clues at all, and the white squares have clues between squares iff the sum of adjoining squares is prime.  Ouch, brain hurts in a good way.

Thought 3. 
That all being said, Sudoku is a lot easier to do communally on a chalkboard than a crossword puzzle, because it's so self-contained, so it's more fun to do with other people --- provided you happen to have a chalkboard in your dining room, of course..   I've been getting N-son hooked on the Monday & Tuesday newspaper Sudokus, and having them up on the board makes it easier for us all to work together.  I'll suggest hints, or warn him off of errors, or what-have-you.   It usually takes him a few days, but it's some good back-and-forth entertainment for us.  

The Mountains of Instead

I kinda have a love-hate relationship with the poetry of W.H. Auden.  I almost wrote that I have a love-hate relationship with Auden himself, but I actually have no idea what he was like as a human being, so I'll zoom on to his poetry . . . which I think is beautiful, or pretentious, or obscure, or maybe all three.  

This is the little blurb I'm mulling over right now:

Clear, unscalable, ahead

Rise the Mountains of Instead

From whose cold cascading streams

None may drink except in dreams.

It's toward the end of a poem about beloved people who aren't here anymore, but also about trolls in the forest, and it hints at being deep and . . . mostly, I really don't like this poem.  But I keep coming back to the Mountains of Instead.  

For some reason, this keeps reminding me of airports.   So many times in my life, I've gotten to experience the dubious blessing of delayed flights -- bad weather, aircraft maintenance, unspecified snags.  And every time I get grounded, I play the game of trying to be the most cheerful person in the airport, which let me tell you, is way too easy to win.  

Part of the way that I play is to imagine in my head that I am in an alternative universe.  There was the other universe, the one where we passengers all got to board the plane, which took off on time---but then the storm hit, or the loose bolt came unfastened, or the over-tired crew made crucial mistakes, and as our plane plummeted toward the earth we all screamed and prayed and wished that the airline had decided not to let the danged plane take off in the first place . . . and now here I am, safely on the ground, in the universe where all those screaming passengers got their wish and the plane was delayed, and we grumbled about it but survived.

It's not like this is a perfect universe, the one that I screamed/prayed/wished my way into.  The pandemic is horrendous, and racism eats away at our society like acid, and my kid has diabetes, and my students are cheating on my exams more than ever.  But in that other universe --- the Universe of Instead --- my kids and my husband would still be facing pandemic-racism-diabetes, and my students would be cheating on someone else's tests, but they'd be doing it without me.  And I'm so glad, when I think back to the airports that have given me so much danged practice at the danged cheerful game, that I'm here to be a bit of a touchstone for my family in these crazy times.

There are so many other Mountains/Universes of Instead.  In 2014, I got two miles into the bike leg of my IronMan Triathlon when my tire popped.  I'd never successfully changed my own tire before, and I'd even thought about not bringing along a spare . . . but a good Samaritan ran over to me to help, and we got my new tire on and (mostly) pumped up, and about 3 miles later I found someone with a pump who got the tire fully inflated.   In the Universe of Instead, my tire popped and I'd spent months and months training just to stall out 4 miles into a 140-mile event.   But in the Universe I get to wake up into now, kind people fixed my tire for me and I get to think, wow, I did an IronMan Triathlon.  I did it.  I really did.  It's something I'm so grateful for.

And yet other Universes of Instead:  My husband crashed his bike in 2007 and broke his neck in three places (plus a few other bones to make a matched set), but somehow we both made it into the Universe where he didn't become a paraplegic, and so we have a house with stairs and we go for walks holding hands, and I think about how I could have been in the Instead Universe where stairs and walks don't happen; but I'm not, I'm here.  There's the Universe where I was too busy to join the book group on "an academic reading of the Old Testament", and my life would have been just fine in that Instead Universe; but actually I'm in the universe where I joined the book group, in which I met a person who introduced me to volunteering for Hospice, where I met a gravely ill patient who had a young child, and then that young child eventually became my own daughter; and it's so much better than "just fine" having her in my life.  

So, Wystan Hugh Auden: thanks for the poem.  And also for the one about How well they knew suffering, those old masters, that tragedy hits in one place while others keep toddling along doin' what they be doin'.  The poems are kind of depressing as all-get-out, but they do, in their own obscure, beautiful way, remind me about the many, many reasons I have to be content in the midst of gloom and hardship.  

Miser Family update: the weekend of Christmas

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household. We had a very chilly (meeting out on the front porch in spite of the brrrrrrisk weather) passing-of-the-gifts, and it was good to see each other, even if we didn't get hugs.   K-daughter has been especially full of crafting lately, as you can see by this stocking she made herself, and texted to the family a few days before the holiday, . . . 

. . . which started this thread.  Below.  You might recognize the poem a little bit.

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a dog;



The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;



The children were nestled all snug in their new mermaid blankets;

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

And mamma in her face mask, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,


When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.



Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.



The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snowman made of TP,
Gave a lustre of baby Yoda to objects below,

When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,
With a little old driver so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.


More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!
 . . .


And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.




As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,

And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;


A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!



. . .

Except for reading "Ferdinand" via Zoom, he spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;



He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Three thoughts on . . . dog ears

The backdrop for these thoughts:  Prewash's ears are soft and floppy and I love them them.   

Thought 1.   

Back in 1986, a dude named Robert Wayne published a paper in Evolution about dogs, wolves, and foxes that I've used in a couple of my classes.  One funky takeaway from this paper:  you can only alter so much about the shape of a dog through selective breeding, even when you've got Chihuahuas and St. Bernards somehow cohabiting the same branch-let of the vast and branch-y species tree.   One of the things you can't alter is the snout-to-skull ratio; pugs and Bulldogs don't have short noses; they have wide faces. 

Another takeway?  "In dogs and other domestic animals, morphologic diversity among adults seems to depend on that expressed during development."  Said more simply, we've bred dogs to be more like puppies than like adult wolves or foxes.  Dogs have big, dote-on-you eyes.  They behave more like young wolves than like "Fang".  Annnnd . . . they often have big, floppy ears.  (Which are soft, so soft.  Adorbs).

Thought 2.

And yet, some people crop dog ears (shudder).  I grew up with Great Danes lumbering about my home; my dad said he liked to have a dog "that you don't have to bend over to pet".  Great Danes naturally have big, floppy ears, but for some reason that I do not understand (and do not want to understand) the powers that be decided that Great Danes should have pointy ears, like the Dane on the left, below.

To get the ears pointy like this, the owners first have to do what you might gently call "surgery", but which really is "mutilation".  And then, to get the ears to do the BatMan thing, you have to bandage and bind the ears with a rack for a bunch of months; and let me tell you, puppies do not like having racks on their heads.

One of the Great Danes I grew up with was named Otello (after Verdi, not after Shakespeare; I grew up thinking Shakespeare had stolen his play ideas from opera instead of the other way around, but that's a different thread of conversation).  Otello was a black Dane, like the ones above, and his breeders cropped his ears before my parents could convince them not to, which left us to try to deal with the bandage/rack apparatus.  The sticks that hold the ears upright dug into Otello's head and created wounds which festered, and we eventually took pity on the beast and stopped using the racks early.  This meant that one of his pointy ears stood mostly straight up, and the other one flopped off to one side, and he looked ridiculously lopsided for all his life.  

But also, y'know, he'd had his ears chopped off.  Which is just many kinds of awful.  Because dog ears are wonderful.
 

Thought 3. 
It is not just that dog ears are soft and so much fun to pet, it's also that they point in so many directions.  Here is Prewash, asleep last night, imitating Ferdinand the Bull. 

Yes?  Look at those horns!

When she chases a ball, she is so happy running that her ears flap up and down like they're wings; she's Dumbo flying through the air with her favorite tennis ball in her mouth instead of Dumbo's feather.  In fact, I look at her ears to tell when she's had enough exercise:  when her running slows down enough that her ears aren't beating the air anymore but instead are kind of jiggling along for the ride, we'll do another good throw or two, but then I can put the leash on her and lead her happily home.  

Where I can pet her ears to my heart's content.  Because they're so soft.  And floppy.  ahhh.

Miser Family update: cozy version

 Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family.  This week, we're particularly rich in coziness.  Behold!

We've got  Y, "Cozied up in my lopipesa--a traditional sheepwool blanket from Iceland (purchased several years ago in Reykjavik)."  (Looks so comfy, Y!)  I'm snuggling up, eating soup, under a fuzzy blanket my mom sewed with/for me before I went to college, and Prewash is wanting in on the action.  L1's dogs have their own cozy xmas sweaters but of course.  My sister-in-law says, "Christmas shopping finished yesterday, got all the gifts wrapped today, now I rest with my dog Nixon under my weighted blanket.  L2, you could use one in Minneapolis!"  Meanwhile, with her unicorn pillow under her head, "A-child is cozycozcoze"!

And that's just the people cozy-ing indoors.  Some of us are appreciating warm clothes for cold weather:  I-daughter declares, "I am the coziest polar bear ‍".  B-child stays cozy outdoors in her penguin hat (and rosy cheeks!  Aw, man, I miss holding her so much!).  L2 bundles in her fur coat, while N-son shows he can hack it in just his t-shirt (although K-daughter points out, "Yall are both in camo pants and white sneakers that's so cute hahaha").  But when he's in arm's reach of his mom (and while Prewash photo-bombs yet another picture), he dresses warmly in a coat his buddy gave him and hat that came from L1, who has her own warm poofy black coat.  

The L1 driving photo leads nicely into this next one of our car this evening, two days after the snowstorm blew through:

This week we celebrated, as I'm sure you are ALL aware, the 51st anniversary of my husband's driver's license.  To celebrate this, we got our car its very own coat, as shown above.   I-daughter and I celebrated further, pedestrians that we are, by going for a walk around the neighborhood and scoffing at the poor drivers who had to dig out their cars: a snow emergency is no emergency for a walker.  And my husband, he celebrated by renting a car and driving to Chicago with N-son to see L2, because . . . well, apparently because when there's a lot of snow and there's a pandemic, what you really need to do is drive a car that has cruise control to another state.   That's why.  (Happy Driver's License Anniversary, darling!)

Not so much snow in Chicago, apparently. 

What else did we do this week? Well, we had to adapt our traditional Christmas bowling night because of the pandemic.  (As I write this, I'm acutely aware that the "Driver's License Dinner" and "Christmas Bowling" aren't exactly the norm in most families, but I can tell you that we here in Miser-land grieve the loss of these traditions this year, while doing our best to adapt somehow).  So, anyway, "Christmas bowling" became "Christmas Boggle".    And I-daughter would like it to be known that

1. she beat me in the majority (4 out of 7) of our rounds;
2. although when I did win a round, I trounced her but good, so the overall win went to me; and yet
3. she always had at least half as many points as me, so that I never doubled her score.

As such, she is super proud that she is competitive against her mom at Boggle.  (And her mom is delighted to have someone who doesn't run in terror when I bring out the Boggle board).  Also, I'd like to point out that N-son had some great, great finds in the Boggle board of his own:  he now owns "ego", and I-daughter and I bow down to his "loft" (how did we not see that?!?)

Even though I don't have a telescope, I'm looking forward to Monday night's view in the early evening sky.  Whoop! On Io! on Callisto! on Europa and Ganymede!  We're getting our Christmas star just in time for Christmas, and I'll take any good signs we can get. 

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be cozy in our adventures.  May you and yours snuggle, too.

Three thoughts on . . . floor mats

1.  Floor mat gratitude.
Last summer, we had bedbugs, so we had to launder and bag up all extraneous cloth stuff.  When the bedbug situation was resolved and we (eventually, cautiously) brought back out the throw pillows, floor mats, etc, I was struck by how incredibly grateful I was to have bathroom floor mats again.  Stepping out of the shower onto something not cold  -- that was a welcome sensation.  Having a squishy floor thing to catch water so the floor wasn't slippery -- nice.  A bit of extra color in the room -- cheery. 

I'm pretty sure I'd been influenced (brainwashed?) by a post on Raptitude on the power of negative visualization (How to Create Gratitude), and  in particular his description of imagining no socks (my feet get cold super easily because of circulation issues down there).   At any rate, I didn't just visualize the absence of bathroom rugs, I lived it, and while it wasn't a devastating tragedy by any means, I was struck by how much more grateful I was once the rugs came back.

2. Floor mats to save work.
A few decades ago, for some reason I was on a kick where I was joy-reading books on how to clean things (like, seriously, I read pretty much every book on this in our public library).   One of my faves in the series was a book by Don Aslett called "Make your house do the housework" -- basically, a book on how to design spaces that need less cleaning, and that are easier to clean when they do need it.  One of the takeaways:  use really good floor mats at the entrance to the house.   A "really good" floor mat is something that is rubberized on the bottom (so it doesn't slip), large (so people actually step on it a bunch), and textured on top (so it grabs shoe debris).  Entrance rugs make a big difference, he says, in keeping a house clean.  I have one that I found at a yard sale, about 3feet-by-4feet, on my front porch.  This mat, too, makes me happy.

3.  Floor mats of imminent disaster.
I have family-in-law member who has a bunch of very small floor rugs, in series, that lead from her front door toward the living room.  You come in the front door, and you traipse across the floor and the little rugs and floor and rug and floor and rug.  Those rugs, I have to say, are pretty and scary.  They're pretty scary.  

When my sisters and I visit this home, we mutter together against this particular family-in-law member, and the rugs are part of the muttering.  The rugs are slippery on the wooden floor.  They are tripping hazards.   We do worry that these particular rugs will someday be complicit in the fall of a person we love.  

So it's not like I'm an unconditional floor-mat-o-phile.

Miser family update, clowning around version

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household.  This week, we're rich in clowns.  And in clowning around.  Observe!

I'm so proud of how my family came through with the silly!  My sister-in-law, who got to meet Puddles Pity Party in person, proposed the theme (say that three times fast!) Puddles is a clown of considerable stature (he’s 6’8”) and appeared in an America Talent show.  Whoop!  B-child and A-child aren't quite as tall, but they're even more adorable, and even Amelia-the-dog sports her happy hat.  Three decades ago, my then-boyfriend dressed as a jester to my princess at the Renaissance Fair, and he bequeathed his costume to I-daughter, who wears it to demonstrate that she can juggle skeins of yarn.  

The next row is inspired by my Great Uncle Herman, whom I never met.  My very favorite picture of him is this goofy one of him "rowing" a canoe through the snow, wearing a full-length fur coat and a fedora, and carrying a giant bottle of (maple syrup?  beer?  not sure).  Prewash helped me stage a Santa version, and N-son decided to "row" around the world (that's a globe) in my husband's army footlocker, using a baseball bat, transporting a djembe drum, and sporting his bike helmet.  

L2 is head-over-heels in a tree, and Y used her head to carry a spoon. Long before it became fashionable, my husband and his fellow army buddy did a dance in their face masks (okay, gas masks), and A-child "clowned" around with her mom's camera, and snapped a picture of K-daughter.  Nice photo, A-child!

Do you want more of the one who inspired this all?  Here's some Puddles for you.  

N-son continues to do well adjusting to the new normal with diabetes.  This week he got to meet with an endocrinologist who gave us machines that we have yet to have lessons on how to use, so N-son is still doing many needles.  His endocrinologist says that whatever he's eating now is doing the right stuff; his glucose levels are coming down slowly, as desired.  There's more learning in the future, but for now at least, all is good.

One of the ways that our family is very fortunate is that we have amazing friends and support structures.  One particular example is the "god family" to many of my kids.  (Some people have "godparents", but in this case, my kids seem to have godparents and god brothers, so I'm pushing the category out a bit more broadly here). 

Today's interview is with Terry, the godmother to three (but kind of to even more) of the kids.  One way to recognize Terry is, you look for the person with the warmest smile in the room . . . and that'll be her.  For example, can you figure out which one Terry is in the photo below?

Yup, she's the one holding little baby N-son, who is giving her a loud "Amen".  She's standing next to her husband Stanley and then his mom.  

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

Last year this time, we were enjoying rich fellowship times with our Church family and enjoying Christmas cookie exchanges.

At N-son's recent birthday party at L1's home.

What occupies your days, nowadays?  

Now my days seem to be occupied with "should I or shouldn't I go out?", or "Do I have Covid and don't know it?";  "No, Stan, don't kiss me; I've been coughing!"   Trying to work through all this to possibly get things accomplished. 

Stan went back to school and is now a pastor,
which is fitting, since I've always found
him to be a source of deep faith and comfort.

Tell me about your hobbies.

I love to read! Stan and I are listening to the audio book "Brothers Of Karamazov"! It is the PERFECT winter time book. [My guy] turned us on to Russian Novels when dropped off a little book called The Death Of Ivan Ilyich". We've been turned ever since! 

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

When I treat myself it is with a Keto Fat bomb and a Wawas coffee!

 

Five years from now, what kinds of things do you hope you'll be doing that you haven't done yet or aren't doing now?  

In five years from now (and I have to sing this song in my head by the Zodiaks: "If Man Is Still Alive"), I plan to be either back in my house with it all fixed up or in St Louis in a shared house with my daughter husband and grandkids!! Also plan to pursue my Drawing skills to illustrate the poems my granddaughter has written and books my daughter will write! 

 

Describe some of your favorite household gadgets or treasures.  

My favorite gadgets: my food processor and my coffee pour over!! 

Mmm.  I love to hear from Terry, that's for sure.  

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