Category: diary

I was having a bunch of people over last night and had promised
to make them coffee and tea. This isn’t my usual mode of
entertaining — I usually put a mixed six pack of beer and a
bottle opener on the coffee table and everyone gets the glass they
want from the glass cabinet and if they prefer water they get it
from the filtered water pitcher.

I decided to leave the the get your own mug or glas from the
cabinet mode, but of course I didn’t want to be fussing with
brewing coffee and tea after the guests arrived, so I decided the
right answer was to boil a large pot of water and brew coffee,
decaf coffee and two kinds of herb tea all at once just before the
arrival time.

I decided to use my 10 gallon brewing pot with the spigot for
boiling the water. This was a mistake. Since I boiled less than
two gallons of water, most of it was below the level of the
spigot. So it worked fine for filling the one and a half litre
french press coffee pot with the decaf coffee in it, but after
that, I had to tilt it to get the water out of the spigot.
Eventually I worked out a way to do this with oven mits on both
hands, but I did get a minor burn on my wrist before I figured
that out.

But eventually, the decaf coffee was brewed in the french
press, the coffee was brewed in the one liter thermos with a drip
filter on top, and my two large teapots had chamomile and something
called “rote grütze” (which I labeled as “fruit and spice”) in them.

Actually, everyone had wine with the food and decaf coffee
afterwards. The decaf would have benefitted from a thermos, and I
had ground it on the same setting I do the drip coffee on, so the
bottom was a little dreggy. So I’m thinking about getting a
larger thermos for decaf and just doing tea or caffeinated coffee
on demand. I’m drinking the herb tea instead of making coffee
this morning. I had my co-hostess take the caffeinated coffee
home with her, since I don’t drink it.

I should have pictures of some of this, but I’m still not used
to just whipping out my phone when I’m in the middle of
something.

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting article.
The headline writer calls it an article about why so few women go
into science, but it isn’t the dry statistical kind of article —
it’s about some women’s real experiences of being physics majors.

I was a physics major who didn’t go on to become a professional
physicist. I think a lot of both men and women who left school in
the 70’s found it easier to become computer programmers than to
get graduate education in science or math and then compete for a
diminishing number of jobs.

The story I’ve always told about why I didn’t go to graduate
school is that by the time I was a junior and senior, I and
a lot of my friends were dating graduate students, and most of the
ones I knew were pretty miserable. The exceptions were the ones
who had done something else for a while and decided that research
in a particular field was what they really wanted to do with their
lives.

Then after I was out of schoool for the first time in sixteen
years, I was so deliriously happy not to be in school I never
really considered doing anything that would require going
back.

The two reasons for women dropping out that the article (as I
remember it from two days ago) goes into in detail are harrassment
or actual discouragement in and out of the classroom, and lack of
encouragement by faculty of further study of even the most
successful female students.

I don’t think either of those reasons applied to me. I
remember one remark by a professor that I found a bit sexist. Of
course in 1971 none of us had really had our consciousnesses
raised very hign. But this is pretty mild by the standards of
other women’s harrassment stories. We were doing a lab experiment
about radiation, and the preliminary discussion had emphasized how
careful we should all be about the hazards, and then the moment
came when someone had to press a button that would actually
release some radiation. The class hung back, until I (the only
female) volunteered, and the professor said something about all
the men being willing to let a woman take the risk for them.

I wasn’t a particularly brilliant physics student, so it isn’t
surprising that none of the professors encouraged me to go on,
although one of them gave me a surprisingly good reference for a
job a couple of years after I graduated. (It turned out to be a
terrible job.) But I did have a math professor who was very
disappointed when I told him I wasn’t applying for graduate
school.

I”m sure the stories people tell actually heppen, and I’m sure
that science would be better off if there were more diversity of
people doing it. I’m just saying that just eliminating the horror
stories or even raising the consciousness of the power structure
isn’t going to do it.

I just rearranged the appliances on the counters.

One problem with my kitchen is that there’s a counter that goes
around a corner, leaving a black hole both in the cabinets and on
the countertop that’s a lot less useful than you’d like it to
be.

I thought that would be a good place for the microwave oven,
but there’s no way to work without taking up the space that the
oven door would need to open there, so instead I have the microwave on
the counter between the fire escape door and the dining room
window. This makes that counter, which you need to use for
loading and unloading the refrigerator, a lot smaller than you’d
like.

I’m not currently using the toaster as often as I have in the
past, both because of my greens for
breakfast discovery, and because a good bakery opened up down
the street, so I sometimes go buy croissants when I would have
formerly made toast.

So my current idea is that the dead area in the corner is used
for small appliances that are used often but not daily, and is
flanked by the knife rack which is still a bit improvised but
doesn’t fall apart too often as long as you don’t try to use the
giant chef’s knife, which I only use for cutting pizza. It’s a
franken-knife rack — I combined the magnetic strip I never
managed to affix to anything with the rack of vertical slots which
I snarfed from Bonnie’s kitchen. On the
other side, the smaller appliances are held in place by the slow
cooker/rice cooker/pressure cooker, which is used several times a
week.

Right now the toaster, the stick blender, and the hand mixer
live there. I’ve been sharpening the knives on the arkansas
stone, so the knife sharpener went into the appliance cabinet,
along with the waffle iron which I haven’t used very often since I
bought it.

This makes the appliance cabinet more crowded than it should
be. The obvious thing to do about that is to discard or donate
the bread machine, which has seen better days, but I’ve been
trying to decide whether

Obviously one of the advantages to doing something like this is
that you move everything out and clean under it. (I cheated and
didn’t do the microwave, yet.) So some spiders crawled out and
were very annoyed at me, but I assured them I wasn’t going to be
doing this every week. I pointed out that there were some
housekeepers who do something like it every day, and they wouldn’t
want to live there at all.

This xkcd cartoon is why I
never worry about inviting people to my house. If they don’t
invite me, I assume it’s because theirs is even worse. If they
do, they apologise for the glass of water they left out, and I figure
they need to see the real world.

I don’t know anyone who’s been killed by it yet.

One of the band memebers arrived yesterday saying that his SSI
payment wasn’t going to come. This isn’t what I get
from google, but certainly even if he’s wrong, if lots of
people believe that, they’re probably pretty upset.

The other consequence I’ve heard of was in this
post by Phil Greenspun. The short version is that because
the office he needed something from was only doing that ID, and
not all the other stuff they usually do, he got his ID much faster
than he normally would have.

I guess this probably shows that I live a pretty sheltered
life, at least on Tuesdays. And of course my not knowing about
any serious short-term consequence doesn’t mean that there aren’t
some, and certainly doesn’t mean there won’t be serious long-term
consequences.

And it also doesn’t mean that I agree with a system that allows
one man to single-handedly shut down the government. (I know the
House Republicans who elected John Boehner as speaker, and could
presumably elect someone else if they didn’t like what he’s doing,
share the blame, but really it wouldn’t be happening if he hadn’t
decided he wanted it, and it will stop as soon as he decides to
stop it.)

I went to the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts on Saturday.

I was going to write a deep essay, but it would take too much
time, so here are some random observations:

• The flow of the European painting galleries is currently
  very confusing. You walk out of the 14th century chapel into
  19th century French art. There used to be a fairly logical
  progression from Medieval to almost-twentieth-century art, but
  if there’s any logic to it now, I couldn’t find it.
• There was a similar problem downstairs in the Art of the
  Americas gallery — we were in the American Revolution, and then
  all of a sudden we were in Peru, and then we were in early
  nineteenth-century Boston. If there were rooms about other
  places in South America, I never found them.
• I did manage to find the Turner Slave
  Ship. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the presence of any
  work of art that’s so immediately affecting. I have seen the
  Mona Lisa and the Pieta, but this is
  just hanging there on the wall and you can walk right up to it.
  It is listed in the brochure as one of the 12 greatest hits, but
  otherwise it’s treated just like any other picture.
• The Rembrandt etchings were interesting, but to really see
  them, you’d need better light and a magnifying glass.
• The other current exhibition I enjoyed was the Loïs
  Mailou Jones one. My favorite of her works was a painting
  called My Mother’s Hats — her mother was a
  successful milliner.
• The most memorable new-to-me work I saw was a Japanese print
  of a daemon who committed suicide after flunking the civil
  service exam. It’s in red.
• You shouldn’t even try to see everything in one afternoon —
  we should have left and hung out in the pub across the street
  about an hour before we did.

My sister, who bought the tickets, got an email request to fill
out a particularly annoying survey about her experience. For
instance, they asked what the purpose of the visit was, and “To
see the art” wasn’t one of the choices:

Which of the following statements best describes your reason for 
visiting the MFA? *This question is required. 

* I went to see a specific exhibit and/or learn about a specific 
  topic

* I went to have a new experience and just follow whatever sparked
  my curiosity and interest

* I came to spend time with friends and/or family and help them have
  a meaningful experience at the MFA

* I went to attend a specific program, lecture, course, concert,
  class, and/or film

* I like to seek out interesting things to do and the MFA is
  considered an important institution in Boston

* I went to relax in a peaceful setting and contemplate the art 
  and/or myself