Author: Laura Conrad

How I post these entries

There is a problem with all these web-based communication
tools (websites, webmail, twitter, facebook…) for people who
learned to use computers back in the good old days. The easiest
way to type information into a computer is to use emacs, and many
of the people who design these things don’t seem to understand
that.

Of course, the people who use emacs are very clever at getting
around this problem, and there are by now good solutions for the older
tools:

  • Gnus will read and
    write email with any mail technology that uses standard POP or
    IMAP interfaces.
  • Tramp will let you
    edit a file on any computer that you can get to via any normal
    protocol.
  • Psgml is pretty
    good for editing html pages.
  • SQL
    mode     will let you manipulate a database on any machine you can
    get to.

Blogging isn’t as old a technology as the things above, and
while there’s been some work on packages that will let you open
a buffer and then post its contents directly from emacs, I
haven’t made them work successfully. I’m not alone — this
post by a frequent contributor to the emacs newsgroups
suggests that he ended up with the same solution as I did, after
much the same problems with the packages.

Of course, there are lots of other ways to work posting besides
doing it directly from emacs. For a while, I was invoking an
emacs client from firefox via a program called mosex, which is
hard to find on google because the Museum of Sex in New York
uses mosex as a nickname. But I think mosex stopped working on
some firefox upgrade, and having emacs clients hanging around
was a bit of a nuisance.

So what I do now is just open an html file on my own computer,
edit it using psgml, and then mouse the results into the normal
WordPress admin page, trying to remember to set the category and
the keywords every time.

MBT Shoes

I bought these
shoes a couple of weeks ago, and thought I’d tell you about
them.

The hype for MBT
shoes is pretty aggressive, but at least some of it is
true. I haven’t lost thirty pounds in two weeks, or gotten to
really like standing in one place for hours at a time, but I
do feel there’s less strain on my joints when I walk and I
have better posture and I can
stand for a few minutes more easily.

Before buying them, I worried whether the rocking back and
forth would make me feel unbalanced. This is in general not
the case, but it is a little harder to walk on really uneven
terrain.

I also worried about whether the oddly shaped sole would be a
problem for driving. It isn’t, but the first time I went to
stop at a red light, the extra height at the middle of the
sole did make the stop more sudden than I wanted. It’s easy
to get used to, though.

Some people have reported aching all over after their first
long walk in their first pair of MBT’s. I haven’t taken a
really long walk, but 2 and 3 miles doesn’t seem to do this to
me.

I also thought they might look wierder than they do — the
oddly shaped sole isn’t really obvious from above, which is
how most people see your shoes. I never wear high-fashion
shoes with heels anyway, and there seems to be a fairly wide
range of styles and colors if you don’t need women’s high fashion.

It’s probably a good idea to find a place to try them on before
buying them cheaper by mail order. I didn’t do that, and I’m
not absolutely sure that a 38 wouldn’t have been better than a
37. In US sizes, I take a 6 1/2 women’s. This seems to be
much better standardized than most sizing — some 6 1/2’s fit
me better than others, but a 6 1/2 always seems to fit better
than a 6 or a 7.

However, if you convert to European sizes, I take a 37 in a
Birkenstock, which many sizing charts claim corresponds to a
US women’s 7. So I ordered a 37 for the MBT. It fits really
well through the heel, but is a little bit tighter than I
really like in the toes. So before I order another pair, I’ll
go somewhere and try a 38.

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Memorizing Poetry

This
essay by Jim Holt about memorizing poetry in the New York Times Book Review reminded me of the way
I got through all the standardized tests when I was in high school.

The advice about test taking skills said to never go back and
have second thoughts, and I was a fast enough reader that I would
often have as much as 10 minutes after I’d gone through and
recorded my first thoughts. My family was impressed when I
memorized poetry (not to the point of paying for it), and I’d been
at the tail end of when you could impress a teacher by doing it,
so I knew several fairly long poems by heart, so I would use the
ten minutes to recite them.

I knew The Raven and The Bells by
Edgar Allen Poe, and The Man against the Sky by
Edwin Arlington Robinson, and lots of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson.

I don’t do this often enough these days that I can still keep
the order of all the similar but different stanzas straight, but I
do remember enough to while away a few minutes waiting for a train
or bus.

Jim Holt says he now memorizes a couple of lines of poetry a
day, and has learned lots of good poems since he started doing
this. I briefly considered doing that, but my life still hasn’t
settled down from trying to post to this blog every day (the house
cleaning and the publishing are both suffering), so I won’t take it
up just now.

But if you’re someone who’s worrying about your memory
declining with age, this seems like a better way to exercise it
than some of the games people play for that purpose.

Following up

This is from the spindle; I’m in Fall River celebrating the
ancient Slavic fertility rites.

Dune

I posted a review of the
movie Dune
a couple of weeks ago, and said I wasn’t competent to review the
book
since I hadn’t read it for too many decades.

The tor.com blog has recently
posted a fairly good review
of the book, if you were looking for one of those.

In general, tor.com is a good place to go for literate
discussion of science fiction, although it’s a pity that they
don’t usually put out electronic editions of their books.

Baseball

Last Wednesday, I posted about opening day,
and what a good baseball game it was. Unfortunately, I’ve
watched at least pieces of all the games since, and they
weren’t anything like as good:

  • The Red Sox haven’t won any of them.
  • Their pitching hasn’t been particularly sharp.
  • They’ve been doing their usual amount of hitting, but
    leaving lots of men on base.

It’s early to give up on them, but it would have been nice if they’d
continued how good they were on Tuesday.

Other signs of Spring

In the opening day
post, I wrote about all the different ways you decide it’s
really Spring. The sartorial one happened for me on Friday: I
cleaned out the pockets of my winter jacket and moved the
essential stuff to a lighter jacket and put the winter one in
the laundry. Of course a major reason the lighter jacket feels
lighter is that I put only a normal amount of change in the
pocket, instead of the amount that had accumulated all winter in
the winter jacket.

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Pauline Bonaparte

I read Pauline
Bonaparte, Venus of Empire by Flora Fraser last week.

It’s the kind of biography where you’re surprised at how much
material there is, but a little sorry that more of it didn’t get
edited out.

But the picture that emerges of the Bonaparte family life is
really pretty interesting. Especially how much better the
siblings got along after Napoleon was sent to Saint Helena than
when he was Emperor and could give them money and jobs.

I was also interested in the details of living with 19th
century medical care. Of course, Pauline was troubled for most
of her adult life by illnesses that could have been fixed by
antibiotics or a hysterectomy.

On the other hand, she was lucid almost to the minute she died, which I don’t
think very many people accomplish with high tech medicine.
She might have opted for modern painkillers over lucidity if she’d had
the choice, but she presumably did have some choice, and she
went with revising her will in detail:

…in the night of June 8, the doctors reported that the end
was at hand and she should be given the last rites. But
Pauline, ill though she was, said, “I’ll tell you when I am
ready. I still have some hours to live.” Not until eleven the
following morning did she agree to receive the priest who had
been hovering outside. And even at the moment of communion,
when the priest wished to speak a few words, Pauline, on easy
terms with the Church to the last, stopped him, and spoke
herself. It was a discourse, wrote Sylvie d’Hautmesnil, who was
present, most touching in its piety.

…

From her bed, dressed “as ever” with elegance, Pauline
dictated the terms of her will. It was a lengthy document, for
thre were many family members of whom to make mention.

…

“I die in the middle of cruel and horrible sufferings,” she
declared, and indeed her bedchamber woman wrote that Pauline had
not been free from pain for over eighty days, her liver, lungs,
and stomach all causing her torment.

…

Having signed the will, Pauline handed the pen to Sylvie to
place back on her éscritoire, and the notary
exited, leaving the princess to say a punctilious good-bye to
the members of the household. To Sylvie, Pauline gave cool
instructions about the toilette and the parure in which
her embalmed corpse was to be attired. Apparently she called
for a mirror to inspect her appearance. More certainly Pauline
Borghese’s last act before she died was to hand her keys…to
the prince. Her affairs were in order, and she died at one in
the afternoon on June 9, 1825. The cause of her death…was
given as a scierro–or tumor–on the stomach.

It’s also interesting to read about the life of a Princess
whose every whim gets catered to. There’s one story about her
staying at a house on a journey. She had informed them in
advance that she would need a milk bath, and they had laid in a
large supply of milk. But it turned out that she needed a milk
shower after her milk bath, and they didn’t have a shower. So
she ordered them to cut a hole in the ceiling and have the
servants pour the milk over her through the hole. The whole
house smelled of sour milk for weeks afterwards.

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Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope

This time, I’m really looking forward to the upgrade on my
desktop system.

For those who don’t follow such things, Ubuntu Linux has two
releases a year, in October and April, and they’re numbered by
year and month, and also have an alliterative name with an
animal and an adjective. So last Fall’s release was 8.10 and
was called Intrepid Ibex. The one that’s in beta now will be
9.04, and will be called Jaunty Jackalope. The names are
alphabetical, so the next version will start with a K.

I usually upgrade my laptop, which I use mainly for reading the
morning paper over coffee, as soon as the new release is in beta.
This was about two weeks ago.

The upgrade from Intrepid Ibex to Jaunty Jackalope fixed a
couple of really annoying bugs:

  • The -# option to lpr didn’t work.
  • I couldn’t make sound come out of Audacity, although other
    sound programs worked as usual.

Of course, I don’t do as many things on the laptop (when I’m
not traveling) as I do on the desktop, so I always wait until
it’s an official release to upgrade the desktop. But still,
I’ve tried out a lot of stuff and only found one bug, which got
fixed yesterday:

  • Rhythmbox wasn’t being able to see the music in the exported
    folder on the desktop.

Last time, the upgrade from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex on the
laptop made Firefox unusable and I think screwed up some other
things. I was only able to get a usable Firefox by doing a fresh
install, which isn’t a problem on the laptop, but would be a real
pain on the desktop. Whatever problem the upgrade had got fixed
by the time I got up the nerve to update the desktop, but it was
with real trepidation I did it, and as you can see above, there
were a couple of nasty bugs that never got fixed in that
release.

But this upgrade I’m really looking forward to. The computer
should count how many times to print; you shouldn’t have to. I
worked around the Audacity problem by using ecawave instead.
Ecawave is really a nice little program, but it doesn’t have
anything like as many features as audacity, and there aren’t as
many people on the internet who’ve written good advice about how
to use it.

Pain d’épice

I got this recipe from the WildYeast
blog. I baked it yesterday morning, and fed it to dinner
guests last night. We all enjoyed it.

I don’t cook with a scale, so I converted the grams to cups of
flour and water. The dinner guests are vegans, so I converted
the grams of honey to cups of maple syrup. And I used whole
wheat flour instead of all-purpose.

I also threw everything into the bread machine and baked it on
the quick bread cycle instead of
making syrups and adding ingredients a quarter cup at a time.

The result was a pretty thin batter, that baked into a very
moist loaf, not the hard dry one that needs to be dunked in
coffee described in the post.

Another subtle flavor I ended up adding was coffee – I didn’t
have an orange to zest, but I did have some hard-as-rocks
bitter orange peel with my brewing supplies. My little mortar
and pestle wasn’t doing very well turning the rocks into
powder, so I used my coffee mill, so some coffee grounds got
into the recipe along with the anise, mustard, cinnamon, maple
syrup and
orange peel.

In any case, it was a fine combination of subtle flavors. I
was interested in seeing how the mustard went with the other
flavors – I don’t think I could have identified it if I hadn’t
known it was there.

If I weren’t cooking for vegans, I think I’d use the honey
instead of the maple syrup – I think it would go better with
the anise and orange peel.

Opening Day

There are lots of events that can signal the start of
Spring:

Astronomical Spring, or the Vernal Equinox,when the Sun is
overhead at noon on the Equator. The news media tells you about
this, but the actual lengthening of the day has been evident for
some time when it happens. This happened a couple of weeks ago.

Local astronomical, when the sun gets high enough while it’s
still in the east to peep
through my northeast bedroom windows. By the calendar, this has
probably happened, but it’s been cloudy enough, and I’ve been
waking up late enough, that it hasn’t actually bothered me yet.
(This is an unwelcome sign of Spring — I love having sunny rooms
once I’m up and about, but I prefer the bedroom to stay dark until
I’m ready for sunshine.)

Local bureaucratic Spring, when the Cambridge Department of
Public Works starts picking up yard waste in specially marked
bins. This starts this week; tomorrow in my neighborhood.

Religious Spring, Easter in my case. Next Sunday. Less useful
than some of the others for complaining about the weather being
cold this year, since it’s a movable feast.

Athletic Spring, here in Boston Opening Day for the Red Sox, or
in particularly bad years, the Boston Marathon a couple of weeks
later. Yesterday was Opening Day, and it was a good one.

The game was a particularly good one, with the right team
winning, but the other team playing well. All the things you were
hoping for from the Red Sox players happened:

  • Josh Beckett, the ace pitcher, was the dominant force of two
    years ago instead of the experienced but struggling pitcher of
    most of last year.
  • Mike Lowell, whose injured hip made him painful to watch the
    end of last season, hit a standup double and didn’t look
    uncomfortable at all.
  • Jason Varitek, one of the games great pitcher-handling
    catchers, hit a home run. He was struggling offensively all
    last year, and was batting ninth.
  • David Ortiz hit a single and drew a walk, and looked like he
    was having fun hitting again. Most of last year, he was
    struggling with an injury, and didn’t.
  • Dustin Pedroia hit a home run. After being rookie of the
    year two years ago and MVP last year, he still looks like he
    can’t quite believe he’s in the big leagues.
  • Jed Lowrie, the new shortstop, made several good plays.
  • Jonathan Papelbon did his usual thing, getting three outs
    quickly in the ninth inning.

The winning margin would have been even bigger if Tampa Bay
hadn’t made some good plays — I particularly remember one by the
the first baseman, Carlos Pena, stabbing a hard-hit ground ball on
the way by him for an unassisted play at first base.

The ceremonies are always fun — the planes fly by in formation
just at the end of the National Anthem; this year they had Senator
Kennedy throw out the first pitch. He also looked like he
couldn’t quite believe he was in the big leagues.

The Boston classical music establishment hit what seemed to me
a sour note — Keith Lockhart, in a Red Sox t-shirt, directed
members of the Boston Pops and Tanglewood Festival Chorus in
concert attire. They would have looked more like a team (and like
their audience) if they’d
all been wearing the t-shirts. What I like about Keith Lockhart
is that he does always look like he has the job he always wanted
when he was growing up.

Timeline of Bonnie’s death

One of the things I mean to do at some point during this year
of blogging every day is write a series of posts about what it was
like when a close friend suddenly became ill and died, and I ended
up with her health care proxy, power of attorney, and being the
executrix of her will. I felt unprepared for all these roles, and
maybe writing about how I did them will help someone else who has
to do it.

I’ve mentioned this in a couple of posts, but not started
organizing it in any way. So I thought the first step might be to
write about the timeline in which things happened.

October, 2007
Bonnie mentions that she’s sleeping about 14 hours a
day. I didn’t think anything about this until much later, but
if anyone else ever tells me something like that, I’ll remember
that it was the first sign that something was really wrong with
Bonnie.
November 11, 2007
Bonnie tells me that she’s having trouble breathing, as in
getting out of breath when she walks across a room. I urge her
to go to the doctor and have it checked out.
December 2, 2007
Bonnie arrives at rehearsal at my place, and sits on the top
of the front steps for a while to recover before going up the
flight of stairs to my apartment. If she had been a child, I
would have called an ambulance for her right then, but she not
only rehearsed, but went on to another meeting after the
rehearsal.
December 3, 2007
Bonnie has appointment with doctor, who suspects pulmonary
hypertension and schedules tests for a couple of weeks
later.
December 4, 2007
Bonnie fails to make a rehearsal (very unusual), and at
about midnight calls to say that she fainted in the bathroom,
has called the ambulance, and can I take care of her cats the
next day. She ends the conversation by saying, “If you don’t
hear from me, assume the worst.”
December 5, 2007
What I actually did this day is probably a full post, but
Bonnie called me very early in the morning saying that she was
at the Salem Hospital, had been diagnosed with blood clots in
the lungs, and could I get the cats taken care of and bring her
some stuff from her house.
December 28, 2007
Bonnie released from hospital, with a prescription for a
blood thinner and appointments with oncologists.
January 5, 2008
I had total hip replacement surgery on January 4, and Bonnie
visited me in the hospital on January 5. This is the last time
I saw her when she wasn’t in a hospital. I was getting a blood
transfusion, so I was probably actually in worse shape than she
was, although that’s debatable. She had stopped at my place and
dealt with the stairs, and then dealt with however many hospital
corriders there were to get to my room, so she looked pretty
tired.
January 7, 2008
This date is approximate; I was in the hospital and not on
email, so I don’t have a good record. But it was certainly
within a day or two. Bonnie was bleeding from the GI tract, so
she took the cats to the vet to be boarded and checked herself
into the Lahey Clinic hospital in Burlington.
Some time between the above and January 23
Bonnie was in the hospital without email, and I hadn’t yet
set up the list for regular updates to her friends, so that’s
why this date is so vague. They decided to treat the blood
clots by installing a filter in a major blood vessel so that
clots that formed in the lower half of her body wouldn’t reach
the heart, lungs, and brain. Almost immediately, the filter
clogged up, so the lower half of her body swelled up and it was
impossible to move her. Essentially she never left her bed
after this.
February 9, 2008
Several really upset phone calls from Bonnie. The medical
thing that happened apparently was that the cancer had eaten a
hole in her intestine and stuff was leaking out into the
abdominal cavity and causing infection. So they weren’t letting
her eat or drink, and she was pretty scared about the dying
thing. It is about this time that she rewrites her will and her
health care proxy and power of attorney, naming me, with Phyllis
as an alternate.
February 15, 2008
They tell Bonnie that she’s about to die, if she doesn’t
have risky surgery to fix her leaky intestine. She asks for the
surgery. This is the last time I talk to her on the phone. She
goes in for the surgery at about 3 PM, and at 10:30 the doctor
calls me to tell me that she came through the surgery, and that
they’ve removed some intestine and fixed the leaks, but that
there’s still a lot of cancer in there.
February 19, 2008
The lawyer and I agree that I should take power of
attorney. Bonnie is under heavy sedation and expected to
continue to be unconscious for at least a couple of weeks.
March 5, 2008
Bonnie seems conscious and may be trying to talk, but is
unsuccessful.
March 12, 2008
Phyllis and her husband and I meet with Bonnie’s doctor, who
tells us that she has a small number of months to live, and will
never be able to live independantly again. She is clearly able
ot understand what people say to her, but not to talk, or to
move her left side. The oncologists do not consider her a
candidate for further chemotherapy, but if the motion problems
are due to cancer in the brain, they might be able to do
radiation.
April 1, 2008
Bonnie bleeding from GI tract, needs transfusions. The
doctors want to know whether they should do an endoscopy or just
stop the blood thinning medication and hope that works.
April 4, 2008
Discussion of hospice care with palliative care doctor and
social worker. Several friends visit and play recorder
ensembles; Bonnie clearly enjoys this. The cats are delivered
to their new permanent home.
April 11, 2008
The Cantabile band meets at Bonnie’s room in the Lahey
Clinic and plays for over an hour. Bonnie is clearly enjoying
it, and asks (by gesture) for more several times. This may be
the last time she is really able to react to a group.
April 15, 2008
Bonnie moves to hospice. We have a conversation with the
hospice social worker about what she expects. She is quite
alert, and writing very clearly.
April 19, 2008
Bonnie is no longer strong enough to write legibly.
May 3, 2008
Group of shape note singers come sing for Bonnie. You can
imagine that she’s enjoying it, but she isn’t really responding
much.
May 9, 2008
The hospice nurse and I agree to discontinue the tube
feeding.
May 18, 2008
Bonnie dies.
May 24, 2008
Funeral

I’ll write another timeline about the executrix and POA stuff.
And of course lots of the above could be expanded. But usually
these posts take me less than an hour, and that was over two hours.

Bok Choy recipe that didn’t work

I posted a week ago about my bok choy
with tofu, tomatoes and coconut milk. I didn’t use the whole head
of Bok Choy in that stew, so I found another recipe for the rest
of it.

Most people who write about their cooking concentrate on the
successful recipes. This can be intimidating for the beginning or
otherwise insecure cook. So I decided to tell you about one of my
failures.

I think the basic recipe (Bok Choy tofu goulash from Mark Bittman’s
How to cook everything Vegetarian) is ok, but
some of my improvising didn’t work very well:

  • I didn’t have fermented black beans, so I just left them
    out. This made the broth seriously underflavored. I fixed this
    after my next trip to the grocery store, and it went from
    something I wasn’t sure the dog was going to help me with to
    something I mostly finished myself.
  • I overdid the chile flakes, so in addition to being
    underflavored, the broth was unpleasantly hot. This also got
    better after I added the fermented bean sauce. It also got
    better as the soup cooled, which exacerbated some of the other
    problems, which would have been less bad in a really hot liquid.
  • The worst problem was the tofu. I usually buy firm or
    extra-firm tofu and just cut it up into the right sized pieces
    without further processing. But they claim you should drain or
    press or freeze it, so this time I tried freezing. Then if you
    freeze, you’re supposed to take it out two hours before you use
    it so you can slice, dice, or crumble it. My problem might have
    been that I did this and then decided to eat something else that
    night, so I made the goulash the next day. In any case, the
    frozen, thawed for a day, and then crumbled tofu was an
    unappetizing brown color, a rubbery texture, and as described
    above, didn’t have any very interesting flavor to absorb. I did
    give a bit of the last mug of this stuff to the dog, and he lapped up the
    broth and ate all the bok choy and other vegetables, and waited a while before he helped
    out with the tofu.

As I said, it got better with more bean flavor, but this isn’t
a recipe I’m going to repeat, at least without doing something
very different with the tofu.

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