The News from South Philly

For kazzy_cee, especially. Look who I ran into this afternoon!

( “here_be_images” )

The daffodils of Madison Square are ready for spring

Several Facebook friends have noted that the Equinox begins at 5:24 p.m. today. In celebration, I've brought the winter mugs (snow scene at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park) upstairs for storage and brought out the spring mugs (red tulips from a Flower Show display some years ago) for use.

Yesterday was pretty ordinary: two loads of laundry, a quick walk to the Triangles to pick up an Amazon order (wrong kind of orchid food, oops, so I'll have to return it), and an afternoon spent chopping and stewing vegetables for a ratatouille-adjacent dinner that used up a pound of superannuated ground chicken that I exhumed from the freezer. I am playing catch-up on a number of Tolkien-related podcasts that I let slide while in the throes of Flower Show prep and attendance. Speaking of that: I have finally solved my little Google login problem on my iThingies, to my considerable embarrassment. What was wrong? The login screen requires scrolling down below the visible portion to click a blue "submit" button. Sheesh....now I'm good to go, two weeks too late to edit the tour-guide info sheets from the show floor but I'm glad I'm back... I note with even more embarrassment that I'm making a lot more mistakes with interfaces than I used to. Attention must be paid!

I'm "shopping" for some new LJ friends, as you may have noticed. One by one, the old LJ cohort has dropped by the wayside, many in protest of our Russian overlords' execrable human rights violations. Although that makes perfectly good sense to me, I have a lifetime membership so my presence isn't exactly lining their pockets, plus I like being able to archive a year's worth of journals as a pdf using Bookblogger. But I miss having a community. I recently read a piece by Cory Doctorow on the "enshittification" of several social media platforms and I am increasingly noticing this on Facebook. ( https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ )

halfmoon_mollie has suggested a couple friends-of-friends, and I've dutifully subscribed. I didn't see an "add friend" option. Maybe that option has gone away? In any case, I suspect that I will only see the public content and not anything restricted to friends. I assume the reverse is true for those who have subscribed to me in turn. That has me re-thinking my usual practice of friends-locking everything. Really, who cares what my daily weight and step counts are, other than me? So this one will stay public. It's a pretty fair sampling of my usual daily recap.

In celebration of the Equinox, I'm traveling up to the Temple University library this afternoon for a talk-and-walk on forgotten women of horticulture, beginning at the library with the talk and special collections show-and-tell and including a campus tour. It's Temple's Ambler campus, some miles to the northwest, that is actually the former women's horticultural college and the current arboretum, but I'm sure there are lovely things to be seen on the main campus as well. And the Ambler campus's archives and special collections were brought to the main campus after much of the Ambler library was destroyed by a freak tornado that also laid waste to a lot of the arboretum...


STATS: Morning weight: 149.8. Yesterday's steps: 8,439. Workouts: Marching With Meredith (15 min senior aerobics), twice.

Random shot from last week's trip to the BioPond

I went shopping with Sybil on the early side and was back by 11:45. I sliced up the second loaf of bread from Sunday's bake in preparation for freezing, and decided I needed, nay deserved, a bread-and-butter binge, so I ate four heavily-buttered slices. (The scale had Opinions this morning but I don't care. I'm still below goal weight.)

I also decided that I needed, nay deserved, an afternoon with no Stupid Little Daily Walk, so I stayed home, worked on Pennsylvania Abolition Society awards paperwork, and watched another episode of The Wheel of Time while knitting.

After dinner (meatloaf with oven-roasted potatoes and carrots) I took myself upstairs to join a Lord of the Rings read-along via Zoom. This is going to be a weekly thing, every Tuesday at 8:30, and I have mixed feelings about continuing. It runs until well after the time I'm accustomed to retiring to bed.

Today I will have an Adventure. It is the PACSCL annual general meeting; it's in person at the Wagner Free Institute of Science, a favorite place that I don't visit enough, and I have been tapped to give the testimonial to the retiring chair. Tomorrow I will have another Adventure: said retiring chair has invited a select group of us to a farewell dinner at the Caribou Cafe. And Friday Roy and I are planning to visit the Athenaeum so that he can see the exhibition of Philadelphia photographs before the Athenaeum closes down for a summer of renovations. Meanwhile, Roy walked almost a mile yesterday and is quite pleased with himself.


STATS: Morning weight, 147.8. Yesterday's steps: 3,005. Workouts: none.

Kukuli Velarde, "Corpus." On display at the "New Grit" exhibition, Philadelphia Museum of Art, July 2021

Last summer I made repeated visits to the installation of Kukuli Velarde's "Corpus" sculptures and banners -- an evocation of the ways that indigenous peoples in the Americas (especially in Peru) subverted the Hispanic culture that suppressed them. Penn's Wolf Humanities Center is sponsoring a talk by the artist on February 25. In person. In my old stomping grounds, the Kislak Center for Special Collections at the Penn Libraries.

So exciting! Here's hoping that omicron will have well and truly faded by then and that nothing new has shown up on the horizon -- and that neither Roy nor I have health adventures. (And that it doesn't snow...) Penn is pretty draconian about proof of vaccination, masks, etc., so it's low risk.

Yesterday was a day of small chores, including the first feeding of the herd. I also did a little housekeeping. Speaking of the herd, the H. striatum "nugget" that worked its way to the surface of the pot and came loose has finally deigned to send up a leaf after squatting in its pot since mid-October. I will be glad to have another instance of this plant as backup.


H. striatum nugget

Other highlights of the day included baking brownies for Roy's desserts and starting the set-up for reviewing this year's crop of applications for the small grants awarded by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. I've downloaded all the apps, extracted the cover pages and reassembled into one file, and am about to do a spreadsheet with the relevant information. Then I circulate to the committee and sit back and wait for our chair to organize a date for the meeting.

It was very cold for Philly yesterday, so I set myself the challenge of bundling up and going for a Stupid Little Daily Walk. It was pretty little, all right -- about a mile -- but I did not freeze. My toes are a little cramped in all of my shoes when I deploy my neoprene toe covers, though, so I've ordered an inexpensive set of sneakers one size larger. Once they have the million dollar insoles inserted, they'll be just like expensive ones, but cheaper. I expect that the new sneakers will allow me to wear not only the neoprene covers but two pairs of thick socks. I could, of course, just hustle the two blocks to the Y and use the treadmill, but that's no fun.

Today is forecast to be much warmer and the sun is shining. I told Sybil that I'd prefer to take myself to the ShopRite on the bus so that I can get some steps and sit in the park and feed the squirrels. I will do so as soon as I throw a load of wash in the washer.


STATS: Morning weight, 153.4. Yesterday's steps: 3,598. Workouts: pt exercises plus a 60 min upper body workout. Neither workout went as well as I would like.

I have it on good authority that birthday cake has no calories or carbs when it’s your own.

Happy birthday to meeeeeeeeee.....

This is a very early birthday present to myself, inspired sadly by the recent death of Ian Holm. It's a 13-CD set of the audio version of Lord of the Rings, adapted by Brian Sibley and broadcast in 1982. It has gone out of print, and I thought I should grab a used version before other Tolkienistas were similarly inspired. It arrived yesterday and I have ripped the CDs to iTunes and added to my iPhone. Ian Holm, who played Bilbo in the Peter Jackson films, played his nephew Frodo Baggins in the audio version.

How is this related to the Coronavirus, you may ask. I need to fill my ears with something while I'm on the exercise bicycle. Otherwise I get bored. Thirteen CDs will keep me pedaling for awhile.

Another Tolkien audio thing to note: I posted at some length a few weeks ago about the Donald Swann song cycle, "The Road Goes Ever On," in which he set several of J. R. R. Tolkien's poems to music. I found a lecture/recital of a young tenor who sang the full cycle. Now I've found the playlist of the original recording, piano by Swann himself and vocals by William Elvin. A final track on the YouTube playlist below is Bilbo's Last Song, played and sung by Donald Swann.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyXYyeDNdJ1V4AGF7taf9xDzlOWOIzSse

Hippeastrum striatum, doing something stupid

Hippeastrum striatum is my Christmas bloomer, putting on quite a show from mid-December through late January. After that, it's supposed to rest, although it's an evergreen. So I'd been watering it sparingly in anticipation of a possible modest re-bloom in July or August.

Instead I got...this. I went into Roy's office to give its green occupants a little drink and was immediately struck by a flash of orange at soil level, where no orange should be. Plus, it's a mere three and a half months since it last bloomed. So what's going on? It could be a disease, it could be a pest that made its life miserable, or it could just be One Of Those Things.

Whatever. I cut off the anthers, put them in a centrifuge tube, and popped it in the freezer. Just in case Mandonii gets a hankering to bloom... I don't have the Really Good Desiccant, but a frost-free freezer is a bit of a desiccant itself, isn't it? The centrifuge tube (open) is in a container full of silica gel. I will close up the tube in a couple of days and hope for the best.

Many of our neighbors have "adopted" us as the only seniors within striking distance. So we have a cadre of almost a dozen willing personal shoppers, etc. So that's one thing.

Our local supermarkets and other vendors have instituted curbside pickup. I haven't tried it yet, but I could theoretically order online and pick up a small order on my bike. That's another.

And I'm riding a tiny bit longer every day. That's a very big other.

We have been social distancing since March 9 and totally quarantining since March 21. I did ride my bike to a supermarket that was supposed to, but didn't have a "seniors only" aisle on March 21. Another eight days and we should know whether Coronavirus is lurking in our bodies anywhere.

Yesterday I read a recipe for homemade sanitizing wipes: 3 Tbsp of bleach to 2 cups purified water. The recipe called for hacking down a roll of paper towels to the size of an empty wipes container, but I don't think I'll do any of that foolishness. I'll just dip a clean rag in the solution and swab.

There is still no flour of any kind on the supermarket shelves. I have fifteen pounds, which will let me bake bread for another six weeks. I hope the situation will resolve itself by then -- the flour situation, I mean. I have no idea when the big situation will resolve itself.

The woman who gave me the starter told me that I can dry it in a thin sheet on parchment paper, put it in an airtight container, and it will keep for years. If I get really low on flour, I'll do that for insurance.

And so it goes...

Those seedlings have been busy! I only have two Hippeastrums in my collection (mandonii and striatum) that aren't seedlings, and only one (Dama de Rojo) that is a seedling that was grown from pondhopper rather than one of my own breeding. Most of my babies come from four parents: fairytale (aka Trader Joes), apple blossom (aka Pathmark), 'gervase,' and 'striatum.' I am hoping to introduce two more into the mix: mandonii, if anything will take its pollen; and Dama de Rojo, for whom I have two targets planned.

( Hippeastrum parade )

Their algorithm only counts the quantity

In other news, the Mummers are marching today. I will be able to leave the house without tripping over The Scamp and having another ambulance ride (which is what happened last time I tried to walk up there). Also, the Y is open until 3. Imagine that...