heliopsis

I wanted to post about this earlier, but the weekend was busy and it didn't seem like the sort of thing to post on April 1. Friday evening, Frankin proposed, and I accepted. We went to Bistro 5, and after we sat down and started looking at the menus, the waiter brought over two flutes of champagne and a Tiffany box and card. The card asked the question, and I accepted. It was sweet, and fully expected, though Frankin was nervous anyway. The box contained a lovely, practical, stainless steel ring:



We haven't set a date yet, but I'm thinking maybe this October: New England is pretty at that time of year, and not sweltering.

I had my interview yesterday with the Department of Homeland Security. They could find no fault in me, so I will become a US citizen in a few weeks, at a ceremony to be scheduled.

I like to read the comics every morning with my breakfast, and I have subscribed to the Globe for twenty years for that privilege. When delivery became unreliable, I switched to a digital subscription (which confused them, poor dears. They kept pushing me to get a digital subscription, but when I finally said I wanted to switch my subscription from paper to digital, they got all flustered. Apparently they thought I would pay for *both* paper and digital, which is just—silly). So I've been reading my comics online for the past couple years, and mostly it works fine.

A minor annoyance is that certain links never worked on Sundays. Red & Rover, Bizarro, and a couple other strips were offered on the Sunday comics website, but the links always failed. Shoddy QA, but I learned to skip over those links and enjoy the rest. But when Richard Thompson ceased publication of Cul de Sac, which was the best comic strip of the past decade, it galled me to see the link on the comics page day after day with no strip to link to. So I wrote to complain. I told them that Richard Thompson's illness saddened me, and that the Globe's lack of attention to their comics page also saddened me. I told them that they should get rid of the link to the no-longer-published Cul de Sac, and they should also review their Sunday page which had many reliably broken links.

I got a reply, and the next day the Cul de Sac link was replaced with a blank spot on the comics page. A step forward, at least. But that Sunday, the comics page still had four broken links. So I catalogued the broken links and wrote another complaint, listed which ones did not work and asked them to please curate their pages better. I made the mistake, though, of starting this note with a reference to my recent communication re: Cul de Sac.

I got a reply telling me that Cul de Sac was no longer being published because the author was ill and giving me a link to a Globe article on the subject. Also, I was told that Big Nat had been added to the comics page, and wasn't that swell.

But there is no link to Big Nat from the comics page. And the response didn't mention the four other strips whose links never work. So I replied to ask them to please read the second paragraph of my note, and further to point out that the new strip was nowhere to be seen. Immediately, I got a reply:

Your recent incident update was from an email address not associated with the incident. [OK, I know how that happened.] In an effort to maintain the security of information, [security? Of my complaint about your comics page?] we cannot update the incident using this email address. [feh] If you are the incident owner and your email address has changed, or you want to be able to update the incident using this email account, please update your contact information using the following link, then resubmit your update.

and that's all. No link was provided.

To be clear, I'm not looking for a Solution to my comics problem. I can find comics online, and I tried reading my comics that way for a while; but the pages were cluttered and ugly and slow, and I had to look on several sites with a lot of distractors I didn't want. I suppose I could have written a script to extract the comics I wanted from their several sites and build a page, but really I would rather pay someone to do that for me. I thought I was paying the Globe to do that for me, but I guess they don't want my money anymore.

I have an attractive, queen-size, cherry bed frame to give away. I'm giving it away because it squeaks, and I bought a new bed. Someone handier than I could probably figure out how to make it stop squeaking, but I've lived with the thing for about 15 years and I'm done with it.

Alternatively, I have a small pile of cherry lumber to give to someone who'd like to work with hardwoods. There are some odd bits of hardware you'll need to remove, but other than that it's ready to go.

Failing that, I have some firewood to give away.

I have a 27" CRT television, a little over 10 years old. Still works well, but of course it's as outmoded as an Edison Victrola. I'm in the process of replacing it with a projector, so some time in the next week it will be redundant. You can have it for free, if you'll come get it! If I don't get any takers by this weekend, I'll freecycle it; and if they don't want it, Medford will take it away for $25.

The Little Engine That Didn't Feel Like It

My solar panels were activated just over a week ago, but I was too busy with the Caroling Party to post about it. On a sunny day this close to the solstice, I produce over 10kWh of electricity, and I'll produce lots more than that on the longer days of summer. There's a website where you can look at the production of my solar installation, and it's quite nifty: you can see how much power each panel is producing right now, and a time lapse of the past 24h, and track productivity in the preceding weeks and months the system has been active.

Inexplicably, the site requires a password. There's no data on this site that anyone could use, as far as I can tell. It's not like you could sign onto the site and steal the energy my panels are producing. I can't imagine why anyone but me would want to look at the site twice, so it's not even worth sharing the password, really. It's just another example of spurious "security" on the interwebz. Everything has to have a damn password, even if there's nothing to protect.

I see that there's an API reference on the site, so perhaps I can write a script to extract the super-secret information and make it public. Maybe wikileaks would like it.

Anyway, I'm pleased as punch with my new solar panels, and I'll show you the website if you're interested.

This reminds me of something. I drink a cup of Yogi tea almost every morning, and each tea bag has a little snippet of wisdom from, I suppose, the yogi. One of the snippets I see regularly is "you will feel fulfilled when you do the impossible for another." Every time I read this, I feel a bit depressed: it sounds awfully difficult. So I've decided to settle for feeling smug when I do something nice for myself. Hence the solar panels.

Many of you have visited my home for the Caroling Party or for post-show parties from Theatre at First. You may have sat on my sofa, a sturdy, grey-brown Jennifer Convertibles from about 2001. It unfolds into a reasonably comfortable, queen-size bed. It's been a good, sturdy sofa, but I just bought a new sofa from IKEA and I need to get rid of the old one. Oh, and I've never had pets, so it's free of scratches and allergens.

Here's a picture:


Would you like a sofa? If so, come and get it!

I got the stitches out yesterday (Friday) at noon, and it looks pretty good. There's still a ridge along the side of my face, but it's right up against the hairline. I expect once my hair grows back and the incision heals a little more, you'll never know it was there. I'm still kind of inflamed on the side of my face, though. Since I stopped taking the steroid, I have definitely had both more pain and less energy. It's disappointing, because I was doing so well; but it turns out that much of what I was experiencing was a false sense of health thanks to the steroid.

I asked the nurse practitioner who removed my stitches about my burst of creativity, and whether it might have been related to the steroid. "Oh yes," she said, "it has quite a variety of side effects. Some people get very anxious when they wake up in the night, it's nice that you found it such a positive experience." I also read in Wikipedia that a novelist claimed one of his works was written under the influence of the same steroid.

On the one hand, I'm disappointed: I wanted this creativity to be entirely autochthonous, merely unleashed by an unusual circumstance; to know that it was a side effect makes me wonder whether anything I produced was worthwhile. I know the math I worked through amounted to something, because it's math, you can tell if it's right. So I know my critical faculties were not dimmed, I was able to self-correct. I haven't re-read anything I wrote yet, I shall have to do that. On the other hand, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could turn on that sort of creative energy like a switch! A little pill, and bam! I'm up in the morning, writing. And if I need to save my energy for the office, I can skip the pill and sleep. It sounds too convenient, but I shall give it a try one of these days.

It also occurs to me that perhaps I can cultivate the attitude of enthusiasm I wrote about on Thursday, that capacity for pursuing my idea uncritically. Maybe that's what I need more than anything, and maybe I can do that without drugs.

I have an elderly, energy-inefficient CRT television. I don't watch much television, and disconnected the cable a while ago, but sometimes it's nice to watch a movie. And Frankin likes to unwind at the end of the day with a few minutes of broadcast TV. So I'd like to get something a little more satisfying.

The problem is that I don't really have a good spot for a television. I have lots of windows, and lots of art, and I don't want to give up either by hanging a TV as a work of art on the wall. What I'd like is to have a pull-down screen that would unscroll over one of the windows, and a projector in the ceiling, probably attached to a Mac Mini or maybe an AppleTV. That way the TV would vanish when I wasn't using it, and would be a simple pull to activate. Another option might be to install a flat-screen TV on a mount that would flip right up to the ceiling, but I haven't seen any such thing. TVs remain status symbols.

(My neighbour across the street has such a large, bright TV that I coined a new verse to an old song for him:
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a flat-screen TV?
At least 5 foot wide, so the neighbours can see!
It will light up my life, and my yard, and the street—
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a flat-screen TV.
I do not wish to emulate him)

The problem my problem is giving me is that there are many many options for projectors, and none that I have been able to actually look at in person. It makes me queasy to buy expensive electronic gadgets in the vague hope that they will satisfy me; I'd like to at least see what the projection looks like. And I'd like to talk with someone who knows something; but who would that be?

If you know a place where I could get help with this, or if you are such a knowledgeable person, and particularly if you can help me discern what device(s) I want to attach to the projector, please let me know.