Unsolicited Advice

  One tequila, two tequila.... Man, what a party. The Fate of a Squash, starring Cheddar.

Did you think I would let an eating holiday pass without decorating the cage? Hahahaha, no. Behold, the results of a trip to the Dollar Tree and way too much unmonitored daydreaming time at work. A pair of purple skeleton hand shot glasses (plastic!) full of hors d'oevres for Les Fromages. We've recently discovered Cheddar doesn't care too much about sweets, so I gave the candy corn a miss (also wouldn't have given them enough to fill the shot glass -- there are limits, much as they hate that thought), so instead they got banana chips and toasted pumpkin seeds. Where did I get teeny pumpkin seeds, you ask? Just wait. A view from the floor, showing a black photo box for nesting, a Halloween bowl of off-brand cereal for snacking, and a PIDER BASKIT for lurking! The plastic spider baskets are the perfect shape, basically the base of the perennial-favorite sputnik, but need to be covered with fabric so the rats don't get their wee toeses caught. Les Fromages' cage f...

For those who may have missed it over on Instagram, I took in two younger rattos in August. A nice young lady on one of my message boards had lost her housing and had to re-home her critters. Cheddar and Cheese came all the way up from New Jersey to meet me in Providence, and take an interminable train ride back up to Boston, where they were installed in the top floor of Schloß Ratter. Les Fromages seemed not terrible fussed by the move, and downright excited by all the rain that weekend, and mostly ignore Casper's attempts to annoy the neighbors from below. (Mickie does not care. Mickie cares about very little, other than hammocks, snacks, and getting proper scritches right behind the ears. Mickie is very happy with his life, and we would all do well to learn from this.) A few weeks ago, Les Fromages started making snoof  noises. This, like most other rat malfunctions, is pretty easy to diagnose. Itchy rat? Probably mites! Bathe rat, clean cage, apply kitten Revolution. Somebody g...

I recently had to explain to a couple of people that if I try to work more than about half time, I lose the ability to take care of myself. But what does that really look like? Well, for starters, my living area descends into unbridled chaos. I do most things from a nest of blankets on the bed. My room isn't big enough for a full ergonomic computer desk setup, and I wouldn't use it if I had one. Sitting in a chair like a grown up gets really painful. On the bed, I can stretch out or lay down or type all spidered up with my knees by my ears if I need to. I tend to force myself to work until I can't anymore, at which point everything I've been working on gets shoved onto the TV/rat desk or the nearby floor. Picking it up is not a high priority. Dirty clothes pile up on the floor. I don't put on real clothes unless I'm leaving the house, and I change right back into pajamas as soon as I get home. My day clothes stay where they fall. Again, picking them up is so far...

This is the pile of pills I knock back every morning to keep myself more or less functional. The long white 5500 pill and the two blue ones are painkillers: 500 mg acetaminophen (paracetamol outside the US), and 440 mg naproxen sodium. This is combining analgesics from two different families with two different mechanisms of action. They're both non-selective inhibitors of cyclooxygenase, but acetaminophen, a derivative of coal tar, seems to work mainly on the central nervous system, whereas NSAIDs like naproxen have a more peripheral action that includes anti-inflammatory effects. I try to be conservative with the Tylenol, as I like my liver and I do occasionally drink. Naproxen, I am more cavalier about, as it doesn't cause me any GI issues, and I rarely exceed the '3 pills in 24 hours' box instructions. Prescription naproxen for osteoarthritis is 500 mg q8-12h, which puts my usage well within standard therapeutic range.  Starting out with two naproxen instead of one i...

You may have noticed I've been AWOL a lot lately. This is because the roommate configuration of the apartment has changed, and I've had to pick up a lot more work. This sucks. Aside from taking up a lot more time, it means that even when I have free time, I tend to spend it staring at the wall, because I'm not really capable of doing anything else. Why am I so blank all the time? Observe the Tiredness/Fatigue Scale to the left. One of the symptoms of connective tissue disorders like Ehlers-Danlos is chronic fatigue. I don't think anyone noticed anything when I was a child, mainly because nobody was paying any attention, and when they were, they were busy approving of the way I camped in the corner with a book and had no discernible needs. It got pretty prominent when I was a teenager and people started trying to force me onto a more conventional 'adult life' schedule, which not coincidentally was when I started pushing back against people's expectations and ...

The studio tech director sent me up to do inventory last week. We've been in that building since 1991, so it was exactly as much of a hairball as you'd expect. I figured I'd find a lot of odd, slightly-outdated tech, but I really didn't expect to dig around in a cable bin and pull these guys out of the bottom: This here is an omnidirectional desk microphone that might be 40 years old. Or possibly 60. Google is not altogether helpful. The print is mostly worn off the plastic end, but what I can decipher seems to say "Superscope" and the mic matches pictures of the Superscope EC-1 for sale on eBay and elsewhere. One of the auctions said it was from the '60s, but I also found a photo of it in a scan from an equipment catalog dated 1984. The logo design itself reeks of early 1960s "wooooo space age!", but that doesn't necessarily mean it's from that era, just that the manufacturer hadn't updated the logo since then. Companies that have a ...

The somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor  reminds me of me a lot. It's a mix of "huh, so that's what that looks like from the outside," and "there, but for the grace of God..." I've told him this, too. It's not the sort of thing I'd usually voice -- you never know who will take it as a compliment and who won't -- but he made one too many comments about being a space alien, and I couldn't quite tell from context if it bothered him or not.  It's mostly entertaining. Every time I start a conversation and have to watch him drag himself out of whatever's happening in the back of his own head, I smile a little in sympathy. He is emphatically not bothered by me "knowing" things out of nowhere, because he can follow the deductive process that got me there. I commented on the age gap between us once. Mind you, he's never told me how old he is. What he did do was put the year he started at our studio in the bio he gave us for th...

Last week, I lost the old man rat. Tseng told me he was done on Thursday morning, and I took him in that afternoon. My beautiful monster is gone. Tseng was a lucky rat. He was originally destined to be snake food, but the snake got picky. Snake Mama had nowhere to keep live rats, so she offered him and his female cagemate around on Facebook. I got on a commuter train in the middle of a pandemic, rode all the way up to Lowell to meet some random lady for two minutes, and got right back on the same train to come home, two rats richer. My then-roommate took the girl, and I got the boy.  I had two other older rescues that I'd re-named Rude and Reno, so the wiggly little Siamese was christened Tseng. Snake Mama told me he was six months old, which was patently impossible; he might  have been four months old, but unless he was a dwarf variety, he was far too small for six. I was vindicated later when he grew into an absolute behemoth. The girl was, predictably, already pregnant, so ...

A couple days ago, the somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor had a guest instructor in. I don't usually bother to go when he does that; I'm too old to waste time taking classes with anyone whose choreography doesn't make me desperately want to get up and dance. But the SOJD was going to be in class with us, and I thought, my, wouldn't that be an interesting thing to see? I've never seen him as a student before. So what the hell, I signed up. The lady he had in is a successful commercial dancer, who was actually scouting for a performing arts academy the week she was here. She can fuck all the way off. She said we were going to start class with a warmup. We did not. We slammed straight into a lot of high-speed, high-impact cardio. I have a mild case of asthma that can be triggered by sudden bursts of exercise in an unfavorable environment -- I've done it by suddenly running to catch my bus in August -- or just by excessive heat and humidity. We're still stuck ...

So, aside from the battery issue -- we achieved a 1% charge after sitting for about 48 hours untouched, hooray -- the MacBook Pro seems to be perfectly okay. I still feel like I'm smashing all the keys Shrek-style, and persistently reach for a delete-things-to-the-right button (and Home/End/PgUp/PgDn...) that isn't there, but that'll go away eventually. The touch bar is pretty neat, although wholly unnecessary, and my brain keeps telling me that virtual Esc key is a colossal single-point-failure waiting to take out the entire keyboard. How am I supposed to communicate my displeasure to the computer if I can't bang on Esc/Break/three-finger salute it when it hangs? Oh well. Step One when I get a new computer is always to factory reset the OS (or install another one, if it's completely hosed) and then wade through like twelve hours of updates and rebooting. Macs have a hardware (firmware?) restore mode, and will happily nuke the boot drive for you if you're sure y...

The apartment lost a roommate this month. Nice guy, but a bit of a hoarder. He left us seven laptops when he moved out. Seven . We had a stack of six up by the TV and we thought we'd found them all, but then he came back for another load of stuff and another MacBook Pro appeared on top of the pile. Yes, MacBook Pro. Yes, "another".  They were all Macs of various stripes; another roommate took the Pro that just worked right off the bat, but this one seemed slightly more recent and had nothing obvious the matter with it, other than it wouldn't turn on. I did some poking about and finally got it to boot by digging up a 100W power supply. I'm not sure it's supposed to need a brick that hefty. The model number says it's of early 2018 vintage, which in theory would have come with an 87W supply. That already blows my mind, as the chonkiest brick any of my Windows/Linux laptops needs is 19V at 2.5A. But 100W did get it to turn on and work flawlessly, except for a ...