howrawhowrue

I’m going to Longwood Gardens for the day later this month and I needed an appropriate Little Old Lady Who Likes Looking at Gardens outfit.

I am happy to report that my new passport just arrived today, and lacks an image of the current occupant of the White House. That recent threat worried me out of proportion and was why I renewed it as early as I was permitted to.

I finally found the Pineider store in Manhattan, and so of course I have another pen, a Rock with an XF nib. I filled it with Iroshizuku Take-Sumi to enhance off the nice flow of the fine nib. I am fortunate that my only real vice is fountain pens.

#FountainPens.

Uncle Louie working hard. #caturday #cats

Rich people should just stop pretending they’re working, and invest their money in opium, slavery, libraries, and museums, like the respectable people of the last few centuries.

The Calder fountain in Logan Circle is back on after the renovations and repairs. #philly

Philly, the primary is basically the election, so vote! #philly

I am apparently in the minority, but I love spoilers. If there is the least bit of conflict or threat in a story, I want to know what happens in the end. Right now. Before I even start. Otherwise I'm not watching or reading. I have enough to worry about in my real life, thank you.

I'm glad I'm not teaching any more. It was already daunting dealing with the relentless socialization of students to make them produce bullshit, even without the availability of text generators. I used to be able to recognize Wikipedia-speak at a distance, and once gave a kid's father an F for what he did to the young man's paper (he was a magazine publisher, and apologized, and I gave his son a good grade on the replacement).

It is actually not a completely new phenomenon; I myself passed some of my college courses with relentless pages of nonsense, even though I was writing it by hand on lined paper without the aid of anyone else's text. The difference is that now, it's really easy to generate the stuff. It used to take work.

The heart of the problem is partly that we don't actually want real human writing in most classes. We want something plausible. And ChatGPT and its cohort produce plausibility--plausibility and gloss.

Teachers have a hard time accepting that real human beings, whether they are middle schoolers or graduate students, write awkwardly and with many errors. I learned to love that kind of writing, because I knew it was real and because the writer had been thinking as they wrote.

Oh, to have unlimited money for tulips. #longwoodgardens

Just finished reading a great book about the sanitation department in New York City (PICKING UP by Robin Nagle) and I hope like crazy that Mamdami knows how important it is to keep them happy.

Via Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade/s/U7wLBTrTZ7)

I use an unscented grass cat litter from Chewy for Uncle Louie. He tracks it around a bit more than the clay, but it's not as terrible for trash disposal as clay, and it's lighter.

The sanitation guys dragged the trash bag along the sidewalk yesterday, ripping it and leaving a trail of grass litter.

The birds are out there eating it today.

I would love to figure out a way to recycle that stuff even better, but I have a concrete back yard.

It is very strange to visit a museum that was also a place where I went to college. Several paintings are in the permanent collection by people I knew personally, one of them a friend who gave me a little oil sketch as a wedding present. Other paintings were in my American Art History textbook. Even weirder was looking down a hallway and thinking, oh, that’s how I got to the auditorium for some of my critiques and classes. No I haven’t been there for many years. #pafa

They say it out loud. At rush hour on 8th Avenue. #fuckai

My basement continues to approach nirvana, that is, emptiness.

Today I put out on the sidewalk a little carpet/floor cleaner with a "free" sign and the manual taped to it, along with a Kallax shelf unit I don't need. I hope the neighborhood brownies spirit them away, or at least that the trash collectors decide to be charitable.

My neighbor Charlie next door similarly put out an artificial Christmas tree in its box, with a "free" sign saying all the lights work. He may take the cleaner and/or the shelves, because he has done things like that before. If he does, I hope he doesn't tell me.

Uncle Louie approves of hot weather and doesn’t know what I’m fussing about. #cats

Ah, spring, when the ants appear out of nowhere on my clean kitchen counter and a rat scurries out of the big soil bag in my little potting shed. The joy of wildlife!

A guy was coughing wetly and sniffling behind me in class; he informed me that he has COPD and also his nose was running and I did not ask him why the hell he wasn’t wearing a mask. I myself mask in indoor settings even when I’m not infectious, because for sentimental reasons I don’t want to get sick, and because I have asthma.

I finally got fed up and left early, only to find a marvelous and enormous American cockroach on the floor in the bathroom. Like most bugs, many pets, and human beings who don’t wash their hands or mask when they’re sick, it can spread diseases, but it honestly didn’t squick me out as much as the Wet Cough Guy.

Here’s a photo of a very fine cockroach.

I am in senior citizen French class listening to the slightly deaf teacher correct people who either made no mistakes or made different mistakes OR have a different edition of the text.

It is a delight. Especially when you know that this program pays its teachers nothing except the permission to take other classes for free.

There is nothing so joyful as the feeling I get when I delete 1,136 (already deleted) text messages at one fell swoop.

Which I do regularly.

The Phillies are going to give me a heart attack.

Knitting Bullshit.

https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2026/04/29/knitting-bullshit/ (via Metafilter https://www.metafilter.com)

RE: @TarkabarkaHolgy@ohai.social

The disgruntlement over the Odyssey film has been steadily persuading me to add it to my must-watch list - and I don't see that many movies any more.

That and Sheep Detectives.

The last movie I saw was Hail Mary.

By which you can detect my taste.

RE: @rightsprung@c.im

A friend was complaining her dad was worth a million dollars and wouldn’t give her any.

“I’m worth a million dollars,” I said. She knows I live on Social Security and savings, and don’t own a car, so she looked at me with eyes wide.

“I own a paid off house,” I said.

“Oh, that,” she said dismissively because “million” clearly means something bigger to her.

A lady on the bus made me pick my LL Bean tote bag off the floor because the floor was dirty. I did not understand at first and another lady had to explain it to me.

“I grew up with these things,” I said. “They’re for carrying firewood or tools.” But I picked the bag up and put it my lap to be polite.

I am an atavism.

I have now made the opthalmologist appointment I have been putting off making. It's for the mildly blurry vision I have in my right eye, due to side effects from cataract surgery a long while back.

I have been to this doctor before, but not for seven years, the last time they tried to fix the blurry vision with some very modern laser zaps I could actually feel detonating my floaters.

The process involved the usual:

1. a prolonged wait on the automated telephone line.

2. providing my birth date and my various health insurance numbers to confirm I am who I say I am.

3. Getting an appointment for three months from now.

3. Receiving an email that I should join their new patient portal. Going to the patient portal.

4. Creating a new and fiendish password.

5. Fielding four more emails informing me (a) I have an appointment (b) I have a code for getting on the patient portal (c) welcome to the practice (d) I forget what.

6. Scanning my ID and insurance cards, and uploading them as if they did not already know I am who I am and have insurance that has not changed.

7. e-signing two documents by typing my name, which appears in a sort of vague cursive font as if I had, in fact, signed something.

8. informing my friend Rebecca that I made the damn appointment and they don't have to nag me any more,

Perhaps the office will have some new, fancier lasers by the time I go.

@peachfront@toot.community Muji!

My washer instructs me to clean its filter every two months. Every ten years is also just fine, I found out today when the warning light went on for the first time.

In other tech news: My wireless mouse battery died and I had to restart my computer because everything locked up. These facts may not be related. Who knows.

I am informed that my bus to the gardens has been suddenly transformed into an Uber, by which I infer they didn’t sell a lot of tickets for today. How sensible of them. Last year they had a whole intercity bus for four passengers, and I wondered if we even paid for gas.

I used to live right there and boy I’m glad I don’t any more.

For a lot of reasons, this being the latest.

https://share.inquirer.com/AxP8Bz

Kinda sad seeing Ranger Suarez pitching against us. I really liked him as a Phillie, and it's weird to see him with the Red Sox.

https://poets.org/poem/mercury