tiny_turtle | Reading

Boy Scouts Handbook - First Edition

The first edition. A hodgepodge perhaps chiefly of interest in what is included. Games. Short history and civics lessons. Discussions of wildlife and tracking. First aid. How to earn badges.

Some articles show that science has marched on from the day.

Sayings from Indians are invariably in crude English, but also invariably are to teach wise things to the boys.

I noted that in the fire section, they discussed the danger of wildfires, but didn't mention that first of all, you ensure you build your fire on bare earth. Anything burnable will carry the fire away, and roots are particularly dangerous. So, health and safety information may also be out of date.

marycatelli posting in

books

Something of Myself by Rudyard Kipling

An autobiographical account.

( Read more... )

petra posting in

fucking_meds

( Fun with hormones )

Current Mood: vexed

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

mdehners posting in

fucking_meds

This is a bit different because I'm not complaining about my meds, I'm complaining how difficult in the last couple of months it's been to GET THEM.
1st, it was filling delays. They were either out, on order or some other excuse but it never was more than a couple days without. Supply chain issues. Now, it's getting worse. This month I've run out of Cardiac, Diabetes and HIV meds(the latter still hasn't been filled. "Backordered"). Thankfully, the Diabetes meds that were out were the oral so I could titrate with my Insulin.
Last month, after going through Withdrawal symptoms when my Lyrica was out I started weaning myself off it. I'm down to once a day and no more withdrawal. I'd been doin my BP meds every other day until it got filled. Now, it's been almost a week since I've been out of 2 of my HIV meds. 1st time since the late 90's I've missed ANY doses.
A positive situation is that my Partner of 30 yrs is in a nursing home and our last cat died of Cardiac insufficiency so no one depends on me. Well, I feed the neighbor cats but I'm pretty sure they're indoor/outdoor cats so they'll be ok when I'm gone.
I used to joke that when Chuck and the cats were gone I'd just go on Comfort Measures but it looks like it might not be a choice.
Sincerely,
Pat

Current Mood: drained
Current Location: Lenoir City(Nevermore;>!)
Current Music: Sigr Ros Radio

rocky41_7 posting in

books

Last night I wrapped up another Julia Armfield novel, Private Rites. This novel is about three estranged sisters who are pushed back together when their father dies.

Very sorry I can't give this one a higher rating (I gave it a 3.25 on StoryGraph), because I loved the last Armfield novel I read, Our Wives Under the Sea, and this book shares a lot of similarities with that one. Our Wives Under the Sea was a meditative, slow-paced exploration of an evolving grief which hit me quite hard, but Private Rites comes off, if I can be excused for phrasing it this way, like it's trying too hard. Private Rites obviously really wants the reader to think it's Deep and Thoughtful and Literary, and it shows this desire too clearly for it to work, for me.

What does succeed in Private Rites is the frustrating and heart-breaking portrayal of three estranged sisters struggling with the legacy of a complicated and toxic father. Isla, Irene, and Agnes are not particularly likeable people, and even they muse over whether this can be tied to their strange and un-childlike childhood, or if it's just natural to them. Armfield so captures the feeling of being trapped at a certain age around family, the notion that they are locked into their view of you at ten or thirteen or seventeen and never update that view to reflect who you are as an adult and how you may subconciously regress to fit that view around them. She also catches the frustrating feeling of knowing you are reacting irrationally to a sibling and not being able to stop yourself and how much emotional history undergirds these seemingly outsized responses.

The slow apocalypse happening in the background of the story feels like it ties in well with the emotional state of the three protagonists; a drowning of the world that takes place a little at a time over many years until things become unlivable.

However, as mentioned above, the book ultimately does not succeed to me at being engaging. It is incredibly introspective in a way that comes off as navel-gazing. The "City" portions of the chapters felt especially like Armfield begging us to find the novel artistic and creative, which was unnecessary, because there's plenty here to stand on its own.

The ending also felt like a complete non-sequitur. The seeds for it were sown throughout the book, but not prominently enough that I cared when it came about. Instead, I felt cheated out of an emotional denouement among the three sisters, which is cast off in a coup by this last-minute, poorly-explained plot point.

I also felt like Isla gets an unfair share of grief, and it wasn't clear why she among the three of them was singled out to be exclusively miserable.

Do love the queer representation here; Armfield continues to excel in that.

On the whole, there is a lot of good meat here and it approaches grief from a completely different angle from Our Wives Under the Sea so that it doesn't feel at all repetitive if you've read that one, but it also drags more and I found the ending unsatisfying.

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

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Working On It

Reading

Boy Scouts Handbook - First Edition

Something of Myself

HRT cream issues - refills needed much too soon

Database maintenance

Frustration....

Recent Reading: Private Rites

AWS outage

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June 2011

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