SIM card and library mystery

Another cold day today, overcast, expecting some rain, high in the mid 40s but at least it isn’t getting below freezing again. We’ve had nearly a week of this weather with three nights below freezing, even in the 20s. It’s not slated to warm up until Monday. 

As mentioned the SIM card on my phone died Wednesday morning, removing it and putting it back in had no effect, but the weather was not conducive to going out and I didn’t think I would die from not being able to make or receive calls or text or get on-line (which I could do on my desktop) so I figured I would go Thursday afternoon after SHARE to the Verizon store and get it taken care of. Except it was 27˚ when I left for SHARE Thursday morning and it barely made it into the 40s during the day. OK, I won’t die from another day without my phone. Still cold but I finally went yesterday after breakfast driving the 30 minutes or so to the nearest Verizon store in Rosenberg where they replaced the SIM card. While there the guy told me we were eligible for a better plan, unlimited data (which we didn’t have) and for $20 less a month and Marc was eligible for a free iPhone 16 with a trade in (we have 13s) so it was a win all the way around. He didn’t know why only Marc’s number was eligible for a 16 but thought maybe they would offer it to me down the line. Which is fine. I don’t need to have the latest and greatest.

I’m not spending any time outside, have no pictures to take or show except for this, the game trail that cuts across the back end of my property. It emerges from the wild space on the east, passes right by the compost pile, and disappears into the overgrowth behind the Wicked Bitch of the West’s little storage buildings. I’ve never seen anything cross using it except for one time when I caught a quick look at a couple of foxes crossing to the west but it is definitely a well trod path.

And here’s some narcissus that bloomed before this last frigid cold spell.

And a mystery of sorts. I’m currently slowly getting through Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits, a selection of his work, some of which I remember reading way back when and some I don’t think I’ve read before. Before that I checked out two books, The Book of Elsewhere co-written by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville about the 60,000 year old immortal warrior which I gave up on before getting even halfway through and a new collection of short stories by Stephen King. Marc returned both books for me. When I dropped by the library to return a book he had checked out since I was driving right by there I told the librarian I had a book out that was way overdue but was almost through with it. She looked up my account to renew it and there was no record of my having it, it showed it was there in the library. It was one of the other librarians that scanned my card and we even talked about the book as she had just finished reading it herself. So weird, right? But the other thing was that the brand new Stephen King book came back damaged, the first endpaper when you open the cover was all torn up, and it was on my record as having been the last one to check it out. I have no idea how it got torn. I didn’t open it when I pulled it off the shelf and when I got home I put it on my desk and there it stayed until Marc picked it up to read it. Now this was a couple of months ago so our memories are foggy. I assured assured her I didn’t damage it, that I never even opened it the whole time it was in my possession. When I got home I asked Marc if that page was torn when he opened it and he recalled that it was and I think I remember him telling me that and he says he’s pretty sure he mentioned it to the librarian when he returned it. So I may be on the hook for replacing a book I never even opened.

 

tech problem and other miscellania

Monday when I went out to cover a few things in advance of the hard freeze tonight this white iris was blooming confused by the unseasonably warm weather earlier.

This morning my iPhone was functioning perfectly. I turned it off to go clean up the kitchen after breakfast and then thought of a text I wanted to send my neighbor first. Turned the phone back on and now I’m getting a SIM failure message. Instead of showing wi-fi at the top it shows SOS. So I did a search of possible causes and fixes. Restart didn’t work. Other possible causes is damaged SIM card or dirty SIM card tray which seem unlikely since it was working less than a minute previous. Software is updated. Check for carrier setting updates. So I went to setting and to cellular and there are no settings. Instead the screen says ‘set up cellular’. WTF? I can migrate the settings from Marc’s phone but that would also migrate his phone number. I don’t want his phone number. Right now I trying to get my long dead old phone to charge enough to see if I can migrate the settings from it to my new one. If that can’t work I guess I have to call Verizon and see if they dropped my phone number off our service. So right now my phone is a very expensive paperweight (didn't work, OS on old phone too old). Any advice on what happened and what to do will be appreciated.

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I was looking over the text edit page I compose on. I’m in the habit of jotting down thoughts or paragraphs for posts and most don’t ever go any further. So here’s five random musings:

Aging is weird and weird things happen to your body...the wrinkles and creases on your face, the crepey skin, every scar you ever had that faded shows up again, weird scaly patches and dark spots from sun exposure, wrinkles on other parts of your body that look like those sandstone canyons in Utah, whiskers on women, weird pains that just zap you and then go away, and rogue eyebrow hairs that just keep growing.

The weather is beautiful; days sunny and warm with cool, clear, star-filled Milky Way nights. Up at dawn, quiet contemplation before breakfast and breaking camp. Finally we are loaded and I push off with a sigh as I feel the first tug of the current pulling us into the river, carrying us on through the quiet beauty of the canyons. We are in no hurry as we quietly dip our paddles in the river. We come upon a blue heron at the river's edge and it spreads its wings and flies downriver as we approach. Again and again we chase the heron downstream until it reaches the end of its territory and turns back flying over us upriver.

I was listening to a segment on NPR this evening about language and art, neanderthal vs modern human which still painted neanderthals as somehow less than equivalent to us, the modern human. Everything we think we know about the abilities and capabilities and cultural expressions of neanderthals is viewed through the lens of homo sapiens superiority. Here's another interpretation…modern humans, a more violent and warlike species emerges and commits genocide against a successful peaceful thriving culturally rich population even as they interbreed with them. We can't even coexist with the different variations of our own race much less affording another human race equality.

I've always been a science fiction fan and I've read many books about possible futures on earth and the ones that horrified me the most were the ones where we made the surface uninhabitable and humanity went underground in order to survive, never breathing fresh air, never seeing the stars or a planet teeming with life of all kinds, living like tunnel rats. Doesn't seem so impossible anymore. How sad is that?

I don’t consider myself an atheist, neither do I consider myself a theist, not in the traditional understanding of those words. What I think is that we are incapable of understanding or knowing the totality, however smart we think we are, anymore than a cell in our body can know the totality of where it exists. We are a cell in a body and that body is the universe. Treat every part of creation as if it were you because it is. 

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And last, here’s something I read this morning on SM while having breakfast:

OP: Attention dog owners! Serious question! After letting your dog(s) out, do you wipe them every single time when they come in? I’ve got a serious ick about it and there has to be a sane solution.

Commenter: Their BUTT? are you being serious rn? I have never ever in 50 years wiped my dogs ass and I promise on sweet fat baby Jesus I won’t be in any future.

OP: I’m talking about paws..

I laughed so fucking hard I almost fell out of my chair. (And I have to admit that wiping the dog’s butt was what popped into my mind too.)

new acquisition, new growth, same ole pettiness

As a working artist all of my working life; well, I did have a series of jobs before I started my etched glass studio and you can read about those here if you are so inclined; I like to support artists and so I have a small art collection that I have been in the habit of adding to once a year more or less. Generally I buy a piece of art for my birthday or holiday gift but it’s been a couple of years I think since I bought the last piece which is a print of a drawing of a bumble bee. But this year I bought a new small sculpture. It’s the second piece I have bought from artist Jennifer Tetlow, a stone sculptor who lives in the UK. I follow her blog on which she posts pictures of her work. Awhile back she posted a picture of two small birds which she calls hedge birds which I loved. I waited a month or so before I contacted her if they were still available and if so how much. Of course, they had already sold but she offered to make more and in January I got an email with pictures of four little hedge birds. I selected two and they arrived Friday. Here are my little hedge birds, so called because they were inspired by the little birds that inhabit the hedges that line the countryside in the UK.

I consider my art collection to be one of my objects and I could easily fill a big chunk of ‘my life in 100 objects’ if each piece counted as one object so my dilemma has been is my entire collection one object, in which case I would post a selection of pictures or is each individual piece a separate object or maybe I’ll divide it into categories, each category being one object. Anyway, I’m due for another ‘object’ post.

Saturday was warm enough and dry enough to work out in the yard so I pruned back the four roses in front of Pam’s house, worked on the wild mass of stuff on the east end of the shop, and in my yard cut back the rock rose, the clump of fall aster by the driveway, and the bigger area of wild Mexican petunia. That leaves one small patch of the wild petunia, which I may do today (or not as it’s cold and windy out), and the banana trees and my yard will be done. Audra and the great grands were across the street visiting Robin while Mikey worked in the shop so I got some baby time.

Monday and Tuesday nights are going to be well below freezing…again, and so I will have to cover the ponytail palm and a few others and bring in those pots that I have moved outside. Covering the ponytail is a two person job and a pain in the butt. I had a welcome surprise earlier though. I used to have a nice bunch of toad lilies in the ground outside my back door that would bloom every fall but the last four years or so that we have been getting these arctic blasts fewer and fewer have returned in the spring after dying down for the winter so last fall I dug up the five or so struggling roots I had left and put them in a pot and brought them inside. All but one stem died down but I watered them regularly and the other day I saw that those roots have sprouted new growth.

I’m having to fill the bird feeder twice a day, granted it’s small, probably only holds half what my old one did. Cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, titmice, house finches, sparrows, white wing doves but the most abundant right now are the goldfinches tanking up for their flight north.

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Three items today out of the many, from the Department of Petty Vindictiveness:

Trump and Musk illegally retrieved $80M in congressionally-appropriated FEMA funds from New York state’s bank account because they don’t like what it was being used for.

The Missouri attorney general is suing Starbucks because he thinks too many women and people of color work there accusing them of racist and discriminatory hiring practices ie not enough white males. “Such practices force Missouri consumers to “pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services,” he argued, because making hiring decisions “on non-merit considerations will skew the hiring pool towards people who are less qualified to perform their work.”” As Jeff Tiedrich puts it “here we go again with this inane fever-swamp insistence that women and people of color can’t possibly be qualified to do the jobs for which they’re being hired. it’s fucking Starbucks, you imbeciles. they’re pouring coffee into a cup and putting a lid on it.”

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be arrested for informing undocumented immigrants of their legal rights.

In other news, the Finding Out part of FAFO is in full swing. Trump voters are surprised to learn that that leopard is an equal opportunity face eater. They are also losing jobs, benefits, relatives, and federal grants. "I didn't vote for this!" Yes, yes you did vote for this. We warned you but you wouldn't listen. You just thought it would only happen to the people you don't like.

miscellania and the way

I still have not started on the rest of the painting though now I have some direction on how to start. Maybe today. I’m feeling sort of in limbo, unmotivated, spending too much time watching streaming or playing games on my phone, not even reading the book I have more than about 30 minutes at a time when I’m not working outside. It’s all mindless. I go to the grocery store, I go to SHARE, I walk the dog, I feed the cats. Wednesday was another overcast wet day with a cold front blowing in so no working outside again. Thursday and today overcast and cold. Winter is back.

We finished watching all five seasons of Eureka on Prime. It’s really very good. The average IQ sheriff in a town of high IQ individuals pushing the limits of science and invention where things inevitably go haywire is the one it falls to to fix things and save the town. Jack always comes up with the idea or solution that the scientists then figure out how to implement. Running for five seasons you get invested in the characters and their relationships and the way they wrapped it up when it was canceled during season 5 was very satisfying.

Now we’re watching the new series Paradise on Hulu. Five of the 8 episodes are out with the remaining three of season 1 being released on Tuesdays. It’s a political murder thriller based in a time after a catastrophic event the 25,000 (previously chosen) survivors of which live in an underground city. The secret service agent in charge of protecting the president finds him murdered and conducts his own investigation when the true power lies about it. We’ve seen all five released episodes so far and it’s very good. It’s planned for three seasons but it remains to be seen if it gets renewed. Most recently we’ve watched 3 episodes of season 1 of Psych on Prime which has 8 seasons about a man trained by his cop father to be extremely observant who passes himself off as a psychic to help the police solve crimes and decides to open his own detective agency with his friend. It’s kind of dumb but entertaining. Cat sprawled across my leg Wednesday night while we watched tv.

My daughter who is the floor manager of Copy.com, a print shop in Houston has one of their people working on converting my selected colored pencil drawings into notecards and prints for framing. The drawings have been scanned, the files cleaned up, the card stock selected, and now we are working on getting the colors and values as close as possible to the originals. So slow progress but progress.

New neighbor update - after meeting them on January 5th, two guys were there working on the house every day for the next two weeks but I haven’t seen anyone over there since the Sunday before the snow, 3 1/2 weeks ago. The contents of the bathroom…vanity, sink, toilet, and bathtub are in the yard outside the back door which faces my house.

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My email inbox is overflowing with newsletters from the various independent media I follow, days worth, all mostly unread. Wednesday morning I just deleted it all, only skimming through a few of them. Politicians, well democrats and independents, and pundits are finally understanding that we are in a constitutional crises and no one seems to know what to do about it. Court orders are being ignored and there is no attempt at enforcement so far. Turns out democracy only works if all parties want it to work and abide by the rules and apparently republicans are content to let the Constitution be shredded despite their oaths to protect and defend. The unelected destructor and his minions thumbing their noses at us, lying to us. Musk slashing/freezing funding, not to end fraud, of which there is very little as these agencies go through regular audits, but to redirect the money into his pocket, hence his new nearly $39M contract to SpaceX granted this week and has either appointed himself in charge of the agency that oversees and places safety regulations on his companies or shut them down. Republicans released a draft budget cutting $2Trillion in social programs slashing healthcare, food assistance, education funding, and tax credits benefiting low income communities even though these programs are very popular, including with republicans, in order to extend the tax cuts for corporations and high income households which will still add trillions to the national debt.

Our only recourse is to just resist, to flood congress with phone calls even when it falls on deaf ears, to protest, to demonstrate, to refuse to obey. If the president and his administration think the law doesn’t apply to them then why should it apply to us? Civil disobedience. Support those groups doing defense in the courts and on the ground. Do not give up, do not give in regardless of how hopeless it seems right now. Groundswells take time to build but eventually they become tsunamis.

As one poster wrote on SM “I’m going to continue living my best life, to laugh, serve, learn, rest, travel, create art, pursue joy. I’m going to joyfully resist. I’ll practice hope. I won’t give the bastards power over my mental health...I’m not going to shut up. I’m going to encourage you to join me, to stand up and speak out…I’m going to agitate the hell out of anyone who tries to normalize this. It’s not normal. It’s not justifiable. It’s not ok.”

This is the way.

wedding pics, mini bouquets, bird skull report and other miscellania

Also the weekend Vickie was here we were going through some of the old photo albums Pam had that were still here for her to look through to see if she wanted any of the pictures. Everyone else had gone through them previously except for me and Vickie and much to my surprise there were a couple of pictures of me in my wedding dress from the first time I got married. There was also a picture of my first husband, a profile view, who my daughter had never seen a picture of. Is that him she asked me. I had a small photo album of pictures from my first wedding which I had kept because it had pictures of my friends from the year I lived in Chicago while going to the Chicago Art Institute and was living with my ex and who had all come down to Texas for our wedding. It disappeared at some point while my kids were growing up but not because I discarded it. 

Anyway, I’ve mentioned before that I made my dress. I had wanted shirred sleeves which have a line of gathers from the shoulder to the hem of the sleeve. I couldn’t find a pattern for that so I just sort of created my own. I also made the macrame choker and my ex made the pendant that hangs from it. I think the flowers were probably fake since this was the formal picture that was published in the paper so it was taken before the wedding. I don’t remember if the flowers were real at the wedding and I also had a wreath of flowers on my head instead of a veil. I don’t look happy because I wasn’t. I was only getting married to get out from under the thumb of my father, about the only way women could back then, and I already knew that I would divorce him one day since no fault divorce had recently been made legal. Marrying a guy I was already detaching from seemed infinitely better than remaining at home at the time. My divorce was final 3 and 1/2 years later but the last six months or so we were not living together. So here’s the picture.

And just to show the difference in my first fancy wedding and my second casual one five years later here’s my wedding picture from it, which I've posted before, the one that has lasted. We were already a little tipsy by the time his dad got around to taking pictures. That's beer in our champagne glasses.

Sunday, Audra, my grandson Mikey’s SO, came over with Paisleigh and Harrison while Mikey worked on a vehicle over at the shop so I didn’t get as much done as I planned, mostly just hauling Saturday’s debris over to the burn pile and then after they left, starting on the big pink rose bush and made it halfway through that. Paisleigh picked two little bouquets of henbit, oxalis, wild onion flowers, dandelions, and anemone and insisted on putting them in the ‘peacock’. She was happy with the little vases so I guess that’s what she meant.

The goldfinches arrived en masse this weekend. I had seen a few earlier in the week but now they are hogging the bird feeder. Last week I unearthed the white wing dove skull but what with all the cold weather the ants hadn’t made much progress. I couldn’t find it just digging around so I had to hose down the ant bed to find it. I let it lay on top of the ground as I was busy doing other stuff reminding myself to stick it back in another ant bed before I went in for the day and of course I forgot. The next morning I went out to look for it and could not find it, even hosing the area down again. Some creature got it during the night…a snake, possum, or raccoon; a snake or possum most likely. I’ve had that happen before so I was rightly pissed at myself. But then the next day I went out to look again and there it was in plain sight. It is now snugged in another fire ant mound.

I had a dermatologist appointment Monday morning about a half hour away, a place I’ve been going to since before covid. I got there on time and all five chairs in the tiny waiting room were filled. When I was checking in at the desk I asked how long the wait was. The conversation went like this:

me: how long is the wait?

her: can’t say.

me: an hour?

her: can’t say.

me: if it’s over an hour I’d rather reschedule.

her: your choice but it will be the same.

me: then why do you overbook?

her: we don’t overbook.

me: if it’s over an hour wait, you’re overbooking.

her: that’s your opinion.

me: I’ve been here many times and never had to wait more than about 15 minutes.

her: the person you see is on maternity leave and we have someone else.

I scheduled another appointment for next week but I’m going to call back in a few days and find out when their earliest appointment is and reschedule for that. I don’t care if I have to wait a month. I'll wait over an hour or longer for certain doctors, ones who perform surgeries that may have unavoidable delays for various reasons or emergencies, but I’m not waiting over an hour for a dermatology appointment especially when there is no place to sit. And really, why the fuck does having a fill-in dermatologist cause there to be a big back up??

After I got back I finished pruning the big pink rose bush in the back so now all that’s left in my yard is the rest of the wild petunias and the rock rose, both of which will be quick, and the banana trees which will be a major chore. And then, oh goodie, I get to start on Pam’s/shop yard…her roses, the morning glory bush, the pink trumpet flower, the rangoon creeper, the yellow bells, the hummingbird bush, the confederate rose, the white orchid tree/bush, the purple orchid tree/bush which has never bloomed because it freezes to the fucking ground every winter, and the banana trees.

But all that will have to wait as it’s raining today so maybe I’ll start on the zucchini on my painting which I’ve been avoiding because, yard work, but also because it sort of intimidates me. Getting started, putting that first stroke or wash down, is always the hardest part.

 

more yard work and still not through

Finally got a good picture of the 10 petal anemone which are popping up everywhere along with the dandelions. 

Last Saturday when my great niece was here getting the last of Pam’s things we got to talking about the things mothers save when their kids are growing up like every piece of ‘art’ scribbled on paper, locks of hair, report cards, special article of clothing, shoes, little mementos of achievements that get squirreled away in a chest or a desk or a storage tub. Eventually we forget about these stashes only to rediscover them decades later when the kids are grown, when we are going through old chests. My mother had stuff like that from me and when I traded my hope chest for hers, I got possession of all that because moms just don’t throw that stuff away. So it was when I was giving the hope chest to my daughter I sorted through all the stuff I had kept and gave her a box with all her little keepsakes and passed my son’s stuff to him as well. What am I supposed to do with this stuff she asked me. Whatever you want I told her. So Sarah was telling Vickie about me keeping all these things…locks of hair, drawings, old report cards, etc…and giving them to her, and what the hell mom, and that one day she was sorting through some storage tubs and found all those very same things she had kept of her own grown children. So what did she do with it all? Put it all back for her children to deal with in time. Because that’s what we moms do. Vickie admitted that she too was keeping a lock of hair from her son who is only about a year and a half. So it begins.

More pruning back of roses. I said I had 5 more roses to prune but that’s not really true. I had five more in the front which I cut back yesterday but there are four small and two big red ones along the fence of the little backyard and the big pink one in the day lily bed and the red and pink climbing roses intermingled with the crepe myrtle by the garage but I don’t prune those, just cut the dead canes out every year or at least the ones I can reach. I don’t know who the rose aficionado was who lived here previously. The only one I planted here is the heritage red rose that I brought cuttings of from the city house, the sister to the monster rose over in the shop yard. I don’t prune them back every year, usually just every other year, and some of them only every three or four years, like the big pink one in the daylily bed. Anyway, I did the last five in the front and worked on the monster in the shop yard and then worked on all the wild growth on the east end of the shop. This time instead of taking it all to the ground I’m trying to save the dewberry bushes for a crop later, just focusing on cutting the leafless virginia creeper and wild grape down to the ground and pulling that out. 

Earlier today I took out the rest of the cosmos, cut back the plumbago, the morning glory bush and the confederate roses (you can see I’d already started before I thought to take the picture and you can see the big pink rose bush on the right in the middle in the background), 

and then came in to cool off and rest. It’s already very warm and humid and besides, Jade and Autumn were here for the day so Mikey could finish working on Jade’s car and Paisleigh was here too. She and Autumn and Jade made good use of the sidewalk chalk with Paisleigh while I finished up and then we came in. 

I pulled out the box of costume jewelry that I no longer wear and Paisleigh wanted all the bracelets and necklaces on.  

Then she took this picture of me.

After everybody left I went over to the shop yard and finished pruning back the monster rose bush which is now basically just stumps, so no longer a monster, but it will be covered in new growth in a couple of weeks.