adrian_turtle

There’s a transit app called City Mapper, that I used to use. (For values of “used to” ending very emphatically this morning.) It showed a variety of transit routes based on where you were, comparing them with each other and with biking and walking. It plans a route based on the schedule and then uses GPS to say how far away the next buses are coming. Useful for “this bus is crowded, I’ll take the next one in 5 minutes” or “the next one won’t be for half an hour.”

This morning I got up early to get to Somerville because there were things I wanted to do in the attic before meeting people at 11. Thanks to City Mapper, I just wasted an hour trying to make a bus connection that does not exist. The bus is not going through that neighborhood today. That’s fine, I hope it’s enjoying itself at the block party on the other end of town, but I want the transit app to know where it is. It is not fit for purpose.

Boston has a city council election today. It's a "preliminary" election, which is like a non-partisan primary, for a bunch of at-large seats. It's easy to find out which candidates approve of bike lanes and which want them ripped out. It's not that much harder to find out which one supports Trump. It's remarkably hard to figure out how any of them regard ICE or sanctuary-city policies. I did find a candidate who wants the city to clear snow and ice from old people's sidewalks as a safety measure, but Vicki is sure that's not a figure of speech.

I know it's rude to talk to strangers, but I was provoked. I was waiting for a trolley this afternoon. Somebody near me was either recording a short video, or facetiming with a friend, while I maintained the polite fiction that I could not hear her. I've heard lots of people object to illegal immigrants or refugees, in these parlous times, but her objections were to tech workers with H1B visas. And once she got going, she objected to student visas. When somebody is on the phone, bystanders are supposed to pretend they can't hear...but it was pretty awful.

Then she turned to an Asian man on her other side. She asked where he was from, "I mean, were you born here? were your parents born here?" He pulled away, just a little, but said, no, he was only here for a few years. He had a child with him. She challenged him to justify what he was doing here. He sounded like he was treating this as a normal social interaction, politely answering her questions about his wife's academic work. I tried to get a word in edgewise. The bully found his answers satisfactory, and said people like them deserved to come here.

Maybe he didn't need my defense? He had successfully defended himself? I still told her not to go up to people and demand to know where they were from. This was my neighborhood, my community, and what matters is that people behave decently, not where their parents were born. I didn't think to ask if she was raised in a barn or what. I felt foolish and clumsy that I only called her out for rudeness but not bigotry. And that I didn't say anything sooner. But most of it was so undirected, with no handle, no excuse for an interruption. And then when it escalated it went fast and loud but not dangerous.

When the trolley came, the man and his kid went to the far end of the car and the bully went to the opposite end. A young person I hadn't seen before nodded at me in passing and said, "Fuckin' MAGA assholes." I said, "Yeah, what can you do?" and felt better.

(ETA: What the tall young person said on the trolley was, "Fuckin' MAGA assholes, eh?" I forgot to include that last detail, and it's worth remembering.)

I have remarkably strong opinions about airports, considering how seldom I travel. Heathrow does several things right. Their line management is excellent; better than anything I've seen in the US. Chalk one up to national stereotypes.

They have what they call "repacking stations" right before security. Those are little places to step out of line, put your carry on bag on a table and rearrange things. It's like they know you want things packed differently when you're standing in line for half an hour (perhaps managing small children), or when you're proving everything fits in a standard-size bag, than when you need to dump your water bottle and display your toiletries and electronics and empty your pockets. So they put the stations after the line, as well as setting them a bit aside so people can do that rearranging without blocking traffic. I'm not sure what you call the people who do this kind of work (it's not exactly urban design or wayfinding), but somebody did a very good job.

Then security itself. Gevalt. You take one of those plastic bins, put your bag and coat and shoes and everything you were supposed to take out of your bag into it, and shove it from the table onto the conveyor belt. (Fortunately, they allow you to get help, because it's a hard shove at an awkward angle.) After they come out of the scanner, the bins continue on the conveyor belt and you pick up your bags. Travelers are supposed to pick up the empty bins and put them on the stack of empty bins a few inches away. This is extraordinarily bad design, socially and physically. Everyone in that line is picking up a bag, usually a bag + a coat + a little quart bag of liquids. Until very recently, they were also picking up their shoes and looking around for a place to put them on. What hands were they supposed to use to pick up the bin? It's only a few inches, but you can't just slide it over with your elbow or hip; you have to pick it up before sliding it over to where it drops onto the stack. As I was putting on my belt and reloading my pockets, one of the airport workers came by with her arms full of bins and called us all rude, bad people for not putting our bins away.

Redbird and Cattitude and I just had a delightful night out, watching a play downtown. We reserved front-row lawn chairs at the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company outdoor production of As You Like it, which was just plain fun. Great chemistry, not just for the lead couple but between Rosalind and Celia. The fight scenes at the beginning were a wonderful mix of dancing and pro wrestling tropes. The show runs through August 10 and I recommend it.

Compared to the usual theater in the park, sitting on a picnic blanket and throwing some money in the collection basket, it was hideously expensive. But it was so much cheaper than the years of theater we've been missing out on because we were afraid to spend 3 hours in a crowded theater with lousy ventilation and a bunch of people with covid. It was even cheaper than the park performances we missed because not all the hips and knees in the family were up for sitting on the ground or in the kind of folding chair we could carry to the park.

I used to think the law of driving on the right side of the road was completely arbitrary. Socially determined, with no particular basis in any level of reality, but of course once it has been determined it becomes very important to abide by it. In a community where most people are right-handed, the choice is NOT arbitrary. When a right-handed driver is startled on a right-driving road (by, for instance, a bird hitting the windshield), their stronger arm tends to pull them off the road. On a left-driving road, that panicky flinch tends to pull them into oncoming traffic.

On my recent visit to London I learned the people there drive on the left side of roads and walk on the right side of sidewalks. I know such conventions don't have to make sense. The increased danger of driving cars on the left is pretty small. If cars and pedestrians both kept to the left, I suspect I would just chalk it up to Foreign Customs Are Different and it wouldn't itch my brain like this.

I will be in London next week, July 14 to July 20, with Redbird and Cattitude. Might any of you fine people be interested in getting together there? We are covid-cautious in the sense of masks or outdoors, and of course we'll mask outdoors if anyone else wants. We will have a garden in Finchley and I hear tell there are other pleasant outdoor spaces in London.

I'd also be delighted to hear of interesting places one might look at. Especially ones that don't require too much walking. I'd love to see Kew Gardens, but there are joint limitations to be considered.

I noticed something when I used public toilets in London a couple of months ago. For years, I've been seeing UK TERFs absolutely freak out about the possibility that a transwoman might be in a stall next to a ciswoman. So I somehow thought they were less private than the stalls here. Or at least no more private. The standard I'm accustomed to is that the doors come down to about knee height, maybe a little lower. (Plenty of space to run a mop under them.) The public toilets I used in London had doors that almost touched the tops of my shoes! And the doors closed with proper hinges, without big gaps on the hinge side.

I've always known the TERFs were outrageous bullies, but it was so weird to see this particular wrongness. It's like they've been saying they hate people because it's raining outside, and then it turns out it wasn't even raining?

The admirable Redbird went down the hill this morning in search of supplies to make me a birthday cake. She went to the small Shaws (regional supermarket chain, like a Krogers or Wegmans) which is only half a mile away. It's down a moderately steep hill with lousy pavement, but still only half a mile. There's a Whole Foods a third of a mile away, but they usually don't have regular granulated sugar. They have organic sugar, turbinado sugar, coconut sugar, date sugar [1]...they are all too coarse for the recipe we wanted to use, so she braved the hill to find the sugar of our ancestors.

The sugar was essential for the cake. The cocoa powder was on the "nice to have" list. We usually bake with cocoa powder, and we had enough left for our usual birthday cake, but it would have been nice to have some dutch process cocoa and try a different recipe using that.[2] I expect any grocery store to have natural cocoa like the Hershey's powder in the brown box, but the dark dutch process stuff is more of a specialty item.

They don't sell cocoa powder anymore. It's not sold out, with a shelf tag saying the little brown boxes are supposed to be there, and how much they cost before everyone bought them. The shelf is full of other things. The person stocking the shelves doesn't know of any place for such a thing. When I stop and think about it, I suppose I shouldn't be shocked. There are only so many places on the shelves, and they need them for boxed cake mix, and pre-mixed syrup for making hot chocolate. Most people who bought the plain Hershey's powder (or their competitors) are more likely to use the pre-mixed stuff.

[1] They also have agave syrup, brown rice syrup, stevia, monkfruit, and molasses, which would all have been wrong in different ways.

[2] Note to non-bakers. Both are unsweetened powders, just processed differently to get them from bean to powder.

I have bifocals now. After more than 10 years of changing back and forth between reading glasses and distance glasses, I have to learn a whole different set of reflexes for looking at things. When to move my eyes. When to move my head and NOT my eyes.

I was fine with carrying reading glasses with me, even though it meant I couldn't just go out with what fit in my pockets. But it's tricky to change glasses while wearing an N95 mask and a broad-brimmed hat, especially when I don't have a table or even a lap where I can put down the pair I'm taking off. So I spent a lot of time in the wrong glasses. Unable to read the bus schedule on my phone or unable to see the bus stop sign telling me which direction the bus is going. Unable to find my way into the supermarket, or unable to read package labels. I appreciate how labels are color-coded and otherwise designed for the convenience of people who cannot read! But it's frustrating how often I bought the wrong thing, or had to ask for help.

Adjusting is ... not great
I woke up with a migraine 5 days in a row.
I stumbled and fell on a trolley platform yesterday. I very nearly fell off the trolley platform, so it was much more upsetting than it might be. I wasn't really hurt, but it was scary. It wasn't even one of the transit stops where the footing is particularly bad.

But the bifocals are great! They're great in the ways I had thought they would be. Even better, because my old distance prescription wasn't right. I can read my phone and read the labels on groceries and also see street signs. I can even see leaves in trees!

The problem is that I don't know how to look where I'm going, literally. When I wore plain distance glasses, my eyes were often aimed at the ground I was about to walk on. Especially when I was walking on rough ground, and most of the pavement in this neighborhood counts as rough ground. The line of the bifocals hides that "3 steps away" ground, and the "next step" ground I can see through the reading window feels harder to focus on than when I just walked around in reading glasses. Is this a solved problem? I presume some of you wear bifocals and look where you're going...do you tuck your chins or something?

When there are 2 people wearing masks on a bus, sometimes the other one will mention it to me. When I'm the only person masking on a bus (as is increasingly the case), sometimes a person will ask if I'm masking because I'm sick, and I'll usually say I'm just being cautious. I usually don't want to go into details.

I had several quick and pleasant interactions with strangers on the trolley and and at the bus stop with strangers who liked my hat. I believe they appreciated my idea of sewing a progress pride ribbon over the hatband, or perhaps meant to express solidarity. It was even possible they recognized the low crown and broad brim makes it the most flattering hat I've ever owned. In any case, I wasn't expecting an unpleasant interaction on the bus.

Stranger: Why are you wearing a mask?
Adrian: I'm being cautious.
Stranger: Why are you wearing a mask? Nobody else is wearing a mask!
Adrian: I'm being cautious. I had a bad case of Covid and I really don't want to get it again.
Stranger: Nobody else is wearing a mask! There is no Covid. You can't have Covid. What are you doing wearing a mask?

I stopped talking. There's no point trying to reason with nonsense. A few minutes later a nice person offered me a seat.

In retrospect, I wish I had told him "I'm a weirdo. I dress like a weirdo. You had better get used to people who dress like weirdos pretty quickly, because this bus is going to Cambridge."

I was about to gripe about limited storage space in this apartment, but I'm not sure that's the right word. There's the storage space where you put stuff you aren't using. The extra toilet paper and soap and hair stuff we stocked up on. The first-aid supplies that just sit in a drawer until something goes wrong. The tube of toothpaste you use every day needs space on the counter, or space somewhere, but it doesn't feel like "storage" space. But the 3 of us like 3 different kinds of toothpaste, and this apartment has no counter in the bathroom, so it gets a little tricky.

We have a narrow little cart beside the sink, with toothpastes and shaving creams and sunscreens and dental floss, all placed so we could reach it when we need it, without walking across the apartment. So I reached for a tube of toothpaste, noticed it was white (Cattitude and Redbird both use toothpaste from green tubes), and failed to notice that it was sunscreen. I failed to notice that it was sunscreen until I put it on my toothbrush and started brushing my teeth with it.

I don't care if it wears off in 80 minutes. I threw away the toothbrush.

The first night we were in London, we stayed in a thoroughly unsatisfactory hotel. It wasn't an expensive hotel, so I expected we might have to put up with some inconvenience. The bathtub surpassed all my expectations. It wasn't just the kind of badly-made thing I expect from cheap materials or sloppy labor. It was worse than it needed to be. This was bathtub design worthy of Bloody Stupid Johnson.

The side of the tub was high enough to make it difficult to climb in (higher than the bend of my knee, and I'm not short). It didn't look high to a casual glance, because the tub itself was so shallow. At the end away from the faucet, it was barely ankle deep. I don't mean you could have water 6" deep; I mean the tub itself was 6" deep. It sloped to be deeper at the faucet end, a steep enough slope to be a problem for a person with a dodgy hip who finds it painful to stand on hillsides.

The tub was also narrow. Cattitude found it difficult to stand in it because it was so narrow. The grab-bars protruding from the sides of the tub were low enough to bang my ankle bones. Who puts a grab bar that low? WHY? It is at best a trip hazard. In this case, they were on both sides of an already narrow tub, further constricting it. There was a sign on the wall warning that surfaces are slippery when wet, but not warning that the floor of the tub sloped.

I like to adjust the water temperature before getting into an unfamiliar shower, so I stood outside this one and tried to aim the water downward and into the tub (away from the shower curtain.) When I couldn't reach the showerhead, I thought it was just really high, for the convenience of tall people. Two knobs, the closer one with blue markings, the farther one with markings I can't see but can deduce. Twiddle, twiddle, soak the bathroom, WTAF? By trial and error I eventually get clean without seriously scalding myself. And, perhaps more significantly, I manage to get out of the tub with only minor bruises. It turns out the near knob controls temperature and the one on the wall side (without markings) controls flow rate. It would not be an unreasonable way to do things, if it were labelled. Cattitude was in the room next door, and rather liked it. His shower had the temperature control on the wall side. If one is not going to label controls, I think there is an obligation to arrange them consistently.

It has been a terrible week. I went to London for the first time. I saw my mother-in-law for the last time. I discovered how much of modern life depends on having my cell phone. I hope to post more about all that, but I am demonstrably not very good at following through on "I'll post about that later."

One afternoon, Cattitude and I went out in search of a cell phone. We left Redbird in the hospital room where her mom lay gasping for breath, too weak to sit up by herself. It would have been better for one of us to stay with Redbird, but none of us trusted my ability to find the store and find my way back to the hospital, especially with no map or way to call an Uber.

Cattitude has long legs. For decades, he has walked behind our hobbit, moderating his pace. It unsettles him that I need him to walk in front, because I have no sense of direction (and can't read a map and a street sign with the same glasses.) And I want the option of hiding behind him in case of strobes. Anyway, he worries about outpacing me or otherwise leaving me behind. So I said, "Turtle here. Not lost yet."
And a block later, "Turtle here. Not lost yet." Good to know.
And later on, "Turtle here. Not lost yet."

We found a place to buy a phone and found our way back to Redbird and her mom. We all talked about how much we loved one another. Now she's gone. We came home so Vicki could do the rest of sitting shiva not in London.

Turtle here. Not lost yet.

Please recommend comforting books for reading aloud. The 3 of us are going to London for what promises to be a difficult trip. We are almost finished with "Return to Gone-Away."

Other books that have worked well for us to read aloud have been the Sarah Caudwell books, the Armitage stories, and Cold Comfort Farm.

We may be rushing off to London. Vicki's mom said she was starting to feel her age, which is 94, so we were thinking maybe we would go visit her this summer, or maybe fall. But then she fell ill and we are looking to travel much sooner. It brought home that feeling of needing to leave with no time for your bread to rise. It's not literally that urgent. There will be time for laundry to finish drying, time to call the catsitter. Still nerve-wracking

This is not a good time for international travel. We have passports, and we all just applied for the new Electronic Travel Authorization the UK started requiring for visitors from the US. But the...the lawlessness at the border, makes it all feel frightening and out of control. Advice? Lawyer recommendations? We don't have anyone on retainer, or even anyone to call if something were to go wrong.

Last night, the three of us had a tiny little seder that used up every spoon in the apartment. It was good. I love celebrating holidays with Redbird and Cattitude. I like the patchwork haggadah, even though I always seem to spend the day before the seder putting it together, where "together" means only a cover sheet saying things like "2p urchatz readings" or "Gates of Freedom p.18-20" or "Angels of Bread" and a stack of printouts hopefully in the right order.

I like being able to celebrate Passover in a way that feels right to me. I love both a non-Jew and a thoroughly non-religious Jew, and I study with people who are awfully frum. Finding the right balance has been very peculiar indeed. Discussing it with Andy who knew so very little about Passover observance made it clearer to me what I cared about and why. (Rice and beans for lunch? No thanks, I don't eat kitniyot. Margarine? I respect that some people care but I do not.) I used to think about whether anyone else would be willing to eat from my kitchen...since Covid, I know that nobody will, and that makes me sad.

I resent that Covid stops me from being hospitable. "Let all who are hungry, come and eat!" Last week I learned of a lonely person who wants a seder to go to, and didn't feel safe inviting them to join us in this home where we don't let people in without masking. Not even a stranger, but someone I like. Yet another way Covid makes me sad. Immune disorders make me sad. Lack of public health makes me sad. Part of our patchwork haggadah is from HIAS, and I think that's the part that urged us to overcome our fears when we open the doors, to let everyone in.

I just got email from my friendly neighborhood hospital network. They've been monitoring the local levels of contagious viral illness, and found they are decreasing. (Happy spring! Yay!) They have reached a low enough level that "employees are no longer required to wear masks during direct interactions with patients," though they will continue to monitor conditions.

If a patient wants a clinician to wear a mask, feel free to ask. Remember they don't have to if they don't want to.

If patients or visitors want to wear other masks or respirators, they are required to wear surgical masks on top of them in order to impair the fit. Layering masks only causes the underlying N95 to leak 13% of the time, so it's not a reliable way to cause leakage. It's just so annoying, because the hospital is not requiring everybody in the room to mask. You can walk around unmasked, wearing a surgical mask, or wearing a surgical mask over an N95. It's only the safest option, the N95 alone, that is forbidden. I don't expect the new rule to be enforced, but it still distresses me.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-wearing-surgical-masks-over-n95s-can-cause-dangerous-leaks

At the Hands-Off rally in Boston on Saturday, somebody climbed up on one of those concrete benches dividing the street from the City Hall Plaza. He had a flag on a flagpole, and he waved it back and forth a few times. Then he started belting out the national anthem. After a few lines, people joined in, and cheered at the end. It was great--an inspiration for those of us who are shy about not being able to sing, and a wonderful statement that protesting against Trump is protesting FOR America.

I wish I could link to a picture, but of course I didn't take one. I saw a video Saturday night and didn't save it because I thought it would be easy to find again. Hah.

I still had the image in my head, and on Sunday I put it together with another picture. The one called "The Soiling of Old Glory," of a Bostonian using a flagpole with evil intent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soiling_of_Old_Glory#/media/File:Soiling_of_Old_Glory.jpg
I remembered that the guy with the flagpole was protesting court-ordered busing to integrate public schools. I didn't know he was prosecuted for assault with a deadly weapon, which is vaguely reassuring, even though he got a suspended prison sentence. And I really didn't know it happened right next to Boston City Hall on April 5, 1976. Exactly 49 years ago.

49 years is special, even if nobody has ever seen a real jubilee with release of prisoners and forgiveness of debts. Maybe now.

I have carefully avoided eating in restaurants for more than 5 years now. I remember the last time I casually got a cup of tea and a macaroon in the library cafe (in early March of 2020. That was the trip where I checked out a doorstopper of a short story collection that sat on my headboard shelf for 10 months.) After the 3 of us were vaccinated in 2021, we went out for lunch, rejoicing. We didn't know how little help the vaccine was on somebody immunocompromised, nor how little it helped with the new variants. That was probably when Vicki got Covid. And pneumonia. And she's coughing yet.

For a long time, I've heard some people saying Covid has been thoroughly suppressed already and we can go back to doing what we like. The economy needs it, or everyone is exhausted, or it just isn't necessary to be cautious anymore. And I hear others say common courtesy requires stringent precautions: masking everywhere, not eating in restaurants, etc. Brunch? You would risk everyone's health for something as trivial as brunch? Yes, I am taking stringent precautions, but it's a loss. And it has been a real loss that I have not been able to have a festive meal in company. That I have not been able to invite someone over for dinner. That I have not been able to stop off for a sandwich as part of a long day of errands. It's not trivial. (footnote) I've missed it.

I spent most of last week at a shiva out of state, eating meals at restaurants. Cousins very kindly drove me everywhere, as I can't drive. There are restaurants that one or another of my relatives really like, so all eleven of us went together. Sitting under flickering lights, in a large group that contained Cousin Shouty, it did not seem feasible to keep my mask on OR ask detailed questions of waiters before each meal. Are the eggs cooked in butter? Is there beer in the fried mushrooms? I took a lot of LactAid, but it wasn't for dairy foods that I enjoyed. I ate in restaurants without masking, but they weren't foods that I enjoyed, and they weren't experiences that I enjoyed.

So now I am wearing a mask at home. To protect Vicki, in case I caught something from all that unmasked running around Ohio and eating in restaurants.

(footnote) I do eat outdoors in company in good weather, but I live in Boston and good weather for outdoor dining is not predictable, and just doesn't happen for much of the year. Especially for those of us who can't tolerate serious heat and don't have our own comfy backyards.

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adrian_turtle

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