It's common grounding for an introvert
Thing I did not appreciate about today: having to walk over the Longfellow Bridge after dark in nineteen-degree weather that with the wind chill felt like five-degree weather because my alternative was waiting fifteen minutes on an elevated platform for the next train from Charles/MGH and at least if I was in motion, according to the first law of thermodynamics, I was generating heat. Operating by the rules of irony, I fully expected the train to pass me on the bridge. It did not. I reached Kendall/MIT with no competition. I squashed my way onto a Blitz-crowded but mercifully underground platform with a lot of people who had been waiting much longer than I had. We waited some more. I was attempting to return from an appointment to which I had been more than half an hour late because the train had slowed, and slowed, and eventually just stopped between stations, without any announcement of the delay. All during rush hour, in case I did not mention. The MBTA is a shonde. Big news at eleven. I got home late and chilled and very, very sick of Charlie "Not a Virtue Signaler" Baker. I find it easier to believe he doesn't ride the T to work because if recognized by his fellow commuters he'd be removed in a bucket.
Things I did appreciate about today: a couple of useful doctor's appointments, even if I was late for one of them. I am very much enjoying Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Flint Anchor (1954), which I am reminding myself I cannot steal from the library even though it's dead out of print. I caught![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_reasonable_man for half an hour at his office and he gave me a present of Nancy S. Seasholes' Walking Tours of Boston's Made Land (2006), which looks like a whole lot of the things that interest me about this city in exactly the way I like to get to know them. I had a ginger-lemon-honey from Burdick's. I am supposed to spend as little time as possible out in the cold right now, but at least winter is a time of year when I can walk at my top speed without overheating. When I finally did get home, spatch and I made a sort of chili with black beans and ground beef and fewer tomatoes than ideal, but plenty of cumin and cayenne and brown sugar; we ate it over English muffins and next time will bake cornbread. He went out later and brought me home a pistachio gelato which I was able to eat without any interference from little cats at all, a minor miracle since I had practically had to pick Autolycus out of my chili. (He successfully got a bite and then attempted to bat the serving spoon out of my hand, whereupon he fled into the bedroom to prove his innocence—must have been some other cat!) Plus I learned that fungal self-healing concrete is a thing.
I am extraordinarily tired, though.
Things I did appreciate about today: a couple of useful doctor's appointments, even if I was late for one of them. I am very much enjoying Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Flint Anchor (1954), which I am reminding myself I cannot steal from the library even though it's dead out of print. I caught
a_reasonable_man for half an hour at his office and he gave me a present of Nancy S. Seasholes' Walking Tours of Boston's Made Land (2006), which looks like a whole lot of the things that interest me about this city in exactly the way I like to get to know them. I had a ginger-lemon-honey from Burdick's. I am supposed to spend as little time as possible out in the cold right now, but at least winter is a time of year when I can walk at my top speed without overheating. When I finally did get home, spatch and I made a sort of chili with black beans and ground beef and fewer tomatoes than ideal, but plenty of cumin and cayenne and brown sugar; we ate it over English muffins and next time will bake cornbread. He went out later and brought me home a pistachio gelato which I was able to eat without any interference from little cats at all, a minor miracle since I had practically had to pick Autolycus out of my chili. (He successfully got a bite and then attempted to bat the serving spoon out of my hand, whereupon he fled into the bedroom to prove his innocence—must have been some other cat!) Plus I learned that fungal self-healing concrete is a thing.I am extraordinarily tired, though.
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And your meal sounds excellent. And having stood for 20 minutes in the blistering cold last night waiting for a bus, I applaud your decision to walk to the next station.
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It makes me really happy!
And your meal sounds excellent.
It was delicious and hot and full of protein and did not take hours to make. It was a good thing.
And having stood for 20 minutes in the blistering cold last night waiting for a bus, I applaud your decision to walk to the next station.
Thank you. It was just too cold to be stationary. I'm so sorry about your bus!
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I understand the fear! I think it is frankly a bad sign about the MBTA that its trains can no longer be summoned by irony.
Re: Thermodynamics
Cold? I'll tell you cold: When the heat of friction of wind blowing across the snow becomes significant - that's cold. Yoww.
Re: Thermodynamics
That is cold. I still prefer not to be out in weather that's bad for me, even if I don't have to describe it on the Kelvin scale.
Re: Thermodynamics
We complain sometimes of hard Winters in this Country; but our Winters will appear as Summers, when compar’d with those that some of our Countrymen undergo in the most Northern British Colony on this Continent, which is that upon Churchill River, in Hudson’s Bay, Lat. 58d. 56m. Long. from London 94d. 50m. West. Captain Middleton, a Member of the Royal Society, who had made many Voyages thither, and winter’d there 1741–2, when he was in Search of the North-West Passage to the South-Sea, gives an Account of it to that Society, from which I have extracted these Particulars, viz.:
…
The Walls of the Houses are of Stone, two Feet thick; the Windows very small, with thick wooden Shutters, which are close shut 18 Hours every Day in Winter. In the Cellars they put their Wines, Brandies, &c. Four large Fires are made every Day, in great Stoves to warm the Rooms: As soon as the Wood is burnt down to a Coal, the Tops of the Chimnies are close stopped, with an Iron Cover; this keeps the Heat in, but almost stifles the People. And notwithstanding this, in 4 or 5 Hours after the Fire is out, the Inside of the Walls and Bed-places will be 2 or 3 Inches thick with Ice, which is every Morning cut away with a Hatchet. Three or four Times a Day, Iron Shot, of 24 Pounds Weight, are made red hot, and hung up in the Windows of their Apartments, to moderate the Air that comes in at Crevices; yet this, with a Fire kept burning the greatest Part of 24 Hours, will not prevent Beer, Wine, Ink, &c. from freezing…
https://www.southernrockiesnatureblog.com/2011/01/you-think-its-cold.html
- It's all over, public domain, but that's the fastest and most immediately readable link I've found.
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It was a beautiful black-glass clear night, but I could have observed it from a train window and nothing very bad would have happened except that someone would probably have been standing on my foot.
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I'm inexpressibly relieved.
(I hope you are keeping some of the money for yourself, it being such a rare commodity these days. You could put it on the mantel and look at it.)
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And if you let a thought form about owing or deserving, I'm giving him an otomatone on his own winky tiny impostorish scale and teaching him Pachelbel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmVm4elbLKI
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I've never heard an otomatone! Why did I have to hear an otomatone?
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