desh

Current sitting on the train waiting for it to leave. I was just having a discussion with people about how America's train network is bad, and to be fair a lot of it is extremely bad (if you're not a freight container), but at least in Chicago I can take the L from my home downtown, take the bus from the L stop to the train station--well, I could have, I walked--and then take the train from Chicago out to the suburbs to visit my family. Not owning a car saves our family quite a lot of money, which is good considering how much we spend on health care even with good insurance.

The weather continues to be awful. Today it's 31°C (feels like 36°) with 81% humidity, about the temperature it's been all week and the temperature it's going to be until Monday. We kept getting threats of a thunderstorm and it kept not happening, except for maybe a few drops of rain here and there. On Sunday, Laila had a make-up swimming lesson and literally right before I was going to leave, I checked my phone and there was a warning about a massive thunderstorm sweeping through with winds up to 45 mph, possible tree branch falls, and a note to seek shelter immediately and not to go outside. I broke the news to Laila, who had been eagerly shouting about going swimming, and she got quiet and walked over to her room. When I asked her if she wanted me to hang out with her in room or read her a story, she looked up at me, said, "No" and shut the door.

She ended up taking an angry nap. I told that to the other dads at the Jewish dads meeting I went to and they were very impressed--one said it was a better way of dealing with her frustration than they managed sometimes.

It turned out that we did not get anything more than a few raindrops, but that's because the rain went north of us. Ravinia got multiple inches in an hour.

Train's moving. Time to get back to reading.

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: Kygo - Out of This Town (feat. Sasha Alex Sloan)

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Yesterday, after binging it over the course of a week and a half, I went to a discussion about チ。―地球の運動について― (chi. chikyū no undō ni tsuite, "Orb: On the movements of the Earth"), a series about the progress toward the Copernican Revolution, and talked about it for an hour and a half. Summary: ★★★★★

Discussion below spoils the entire show:
( Orbpilled )

( Notes I took while watching )

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Elliot Berger - Diamond Sky (feat. Laura Brehm)

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When

belladonna shares a tweet that got screencapped and put up on Insta:

@ madisontayt_: imagining a vegan who won't drink nyc's tap water because of the microscopic shrimp
@ TheWappleHouse: The what now

and I was like "Yeah! There was this whole thing about NYC's tap water possibly being not kosher because of copepods in the water supply a few years back. Which might've meant that NYC bagels, whose lauded taste and texture were credited to the tap water used to boil them, were potentially treyf. But then other rabbis weighed in and said as long as the proportion of these microscopic crustaceans was less than 1/60th of the total volume, it was okay by the principle of בטל בשישים (bitul b'shishim/beteil beshishim), thank you Shabot6000."

... and then I realized "a few years back" was 21 years ago.

Current Mood: silly

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hyounpark and I wrapped up our extremely concert-filled June last weekend with two shows in Wine Country, backing up Andrea Bocelli and friends. Three rehearsals in ten days with almost entirely new-to-me repertoire - it felt good to have that kind of intensity of practice again. It's different from regular rehearsal, where we have a month, two, sometimes even three to slowly, steadily polish a single piece. Harder to cram into daily life, but always worth it.

Saturday was also Hyoun's birthday, so I was highly amused when the sound check opened with La donna è mobile from Rigoletto. Because I originally learned that melody in fourth grade as a birthday song!

( Archiving the lyrics here because I know I was able to find it on the internet at some point in the past, but no longer. )

( the rest of the Bocelli concert experience )

And now, my Wednesday nights are free for a (very) few weeks! (Summersings start July 23, and then after that we're right into rehearsals for Verdi; I hope I'll be able to cram in one or two Wednesday night Friends With Bikes rides during the time off, but we'll need to see.)

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: ride e canta nel sole l'infinita nostra felicita // gloria a te!

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The icon is an anti-icon because I actually haven't had insomnia in a long while, and I even got enough sleep last night! I managed to finish all my nightly chores--prepping for breakfast tomorrow (cook fish, set rice in the rice cooker to cook overnight), make lunch, exercise, clean up a bit, take a shower, check on Laila and make sure she's sleeping--by 10:45 p.m., and then I read for a bit and lights went out by 11 p.m. My watch tells me I got three hours of deep sleep and six and a half hours of quality sleep, all of which ended when Laila took a flying leap onto mama and abba while we were both sleeping. I was in the middle of a dream about...something. I don't remember it anymore. That's pretty standard for me now.

"When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key to the gate of dreams."
-H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

I used to have dreams that stuck with me for hours, at least long enough to write them down, and some that remained no matter what. I still remember recurring dreams from my childhood, like the one where I was in a cabin on a peninsular cliff over a raging ocean under a clear blue sky, or the one where my friends and I were hunting vampires through a weird dream version of my hometown. Now I basically can't remember any dreams at all. I had already forgotten most of the details of my dream within a few minutes of waking up and now I can't remember anything.

sashagee tells me that sometimes I'll be thrashing around and muttering and she'll wake me up and I'll thank her and fall back asleep and I have no memory of any of this ever happening.

I used to have real trouble falling asleep in any reasonable amount of time but waking up to take care of Laila fixed that. Now I can fall asleep usually in fifteen minutes or so--not as much as my father or my sister, who are "head hits the pillow and lights out" people, but still way better than the thirty-minutes to an hour of previous. My worst night ever I lay in bed for seven hours until eventually giving up, but nothing like that happens anymore. On the other hand, I don't remember my dreams anymore either, and I wonder if the two are connected? Looking it up it should be the other way around--poor sleep quality is connected to fewer dreams--so maybe I just need to put a journal next to my bed or grab my phone and jot down notes if I have any dream memories on waking up. That's hard when nowadays we're usually woken up by a very enthusiastic Laila though, but it should at least be worth trying.

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: Heather Dale - Mordred's Lullaby

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It's currently 27°C but the weather report says it feels like ‎35° and it's only 9 a.m. Fortunately, it's supposed to start raining this afternoon and that will drop the temperature 10°C, which, well, every little bit helps. Our poor aircon was struggling over the weekend to keep up with the sun hitting the bricks and streaming into the windows of our condo and it's probably up there trying its best now. Next month we'll need to have someone out to check up on the HVAC to make sure it's working well--it's one of those things that you're supposed to do every year but money has been tight.

Speaking of money, I have finally decided to crack down and go iron-handed on the budgeting.

sashagee has given me the go-ahead to put her on a strict budget--on our shared money at least, she can do whatever she wants with her monthly salary that I pay her--and since I've been using Quicken (and Microsoft Money before that) for decades at this point, I finally downloaded the app and synced it on both of our phones so she can see our budget at a glance. We'd been going over budget for a while and this will let us figure out where the money is going...or would if I didn't already know where it's going. It's going into healthcare costs and food.

It's always going to healthcare costs and food.

I finished a book recently--Delta Green, the RPG that's a mix of the X-Files and Call of Cthulhu--and when I looked at my Goodreads account I saw that I'm fourteen books behind on my reading goals for this year. I used to read eighty books a year before the Plague Years, but everything got thrown for a loop after that. After Delta Green I picked up Surprised by G-d by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, which I've had in my 積ん読 (tsundoku, "Buying books without reading them") pile for a while. I'm a third of the way through and my big take-away at the moment is that it's weirdly similar to one of those evangelical "I used to be a sinner but I Saw The Light" memoirs. Rabbi Ruttenberg was a punk kid who hung out in Chicago going to shows--she namedrops The Alley on Belmont so props for that--and thought that G-d and Torah were dumb old traditions with no meaning in modern times. But she took a trip with her father to the camps in Europe, and then later her mother died of cancer and she started going back to shul, and I haven't gotten there yet but I'm waiting for the part where she Sees The Light. I mean, she's a rabbi now, I know where this is going. It's not affecting my enjoyment of the book, it's just surprising to me how well it maps onto The Standard Narrative. But there's still seventy percent of the book to go, so we'll see where the road leads.

Current Mood: hot
Current Music: WoT Spoilers Podcast

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Train, train, take me away

Based and Orbpilled

(no subject)

the squirrels are in the tree

"Dreams are older than brooding Tyre or the contemplative sphinx or garden-girdled Babylon.."

"G-d created Arrakis to train the faithful"

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