This year, I decided…
That I should stop feeling guilty about abandoning books and should stop sooner if I’m just not into something. Even if everyone loves it. 
Crime shows / police procedurals I’ve been watching on Britbox
I’ve been on a binge watching spree of Crime shows / police procedurals on Britbox/Amazon Prime. Some of these are 2021/2022 and have diverse casts with lots of female leads. Of these, I particularly like Sherwood, The Tower, Eleventh Hour and Karen Pirie. Shetland and Vera are a bit gloomy, both in setting and in mood.
- Karen Pirie (Emer Kenny plays a secondary character; I’ve liked her on other shows)
- The Tower (I really like Gemma Whelan)
- Redemption (which has Siobhán McSweeney in it!)
- Murder in Provence (Nancy Carroll is lovely)
- Sherwood
- Shetland
- Vera (I need to read some Ann Cleves novels, apparently)
- DCI Banks
- McDonald & Dodds
- Grace
- Eleventh Hour
- Bosch: Legacy (Yes, I know Bosch is not on Britbox)
- Line of Duty
- Time of Death
- Endeavor (Inspector Morse as a young man)
- Traces
- Suspect
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans (Beautifully done Agatha Christie)
We’re getting a new stove. Finally.
We’ve had a Kenmore oven with a glass electric cooktop since we moved in our house 18 years ago. We’re pretty sure it’s a very early flat electric cooktop. There was a manual in the pantry for it when we moved in that looked like it was from the late 70s.
This stove/oven has been terrible the whole time. It’s incredibly hard to clean because it was from an era before they knew to design things without nooks and crannies where grease would lodge. I have spent hours scraping tiny crevices and degreasing this stove that I resented. The burners take forever to heat and then get really hot suddenly. It’s very easy to burn things. And the oven heated unevenly so one side of the oven is always a little crispier than the other.
We hate this appliance more than any other. And it’s the very last one we have to replace. Water heater, air conditioner, boiler, dishwasher, refrigerator, microwave – all of them were newer than this ancient oven, and all of them died first.
Finally, finally, the oven stopped heating. Stephanie could hardly contain her delight. She tried to act dismayed, but I could tell there was a bit of joy in how quickly she gave up on troubleshooting. I was a little more diligent in trying to figure out if there was a repair that can be fixed by a tube of Sugru by tesa. Not much more diligent, but I did try several times. She already had plans to go shopping.
The stove we have purchased: GCRI3058AD – Frigidaire Gallery 30″ Freestanding Induction Range with Air Fry.
It is a convention range with air fryer capabilities and an induction electric cooktop. One that will hopefully be easier to clean that the old one.
This new range is free-standing, where our old one was a drop-in. Which was weird, because it sat directly next to the refrigerator, meaning that there was a three-inch strip of countertop on the left side of the stove between it and the fridge. They had to have a bit of counter and a side panel to enclose the stove. Not enough counter to actually *do* anything with, but…
So this weekend I demoed out the section of counter between the fridge and the stove and the part that wrapped around the back. For something that appeared to be a flimsy and insubstantial piece of cabinetry, it was surprisingly hard to get out. But I did it, finally, and we just finished painting the wall behind the two appliances, which has needed to be done for years. Once we had them both away from the wall, there were three different colors of paint behind the stove. If you’re tackling home improvement projects, both inside and out, consider the expertise of a seamless gutter company that services Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida.
I’m so excited to finally have that wall painted that I sat down and wrote a blog post about it.
Partition
This is a post about a small thing that’s really a big thing.
The small thing is that Beyoncé changed the lyrics to a song – she removed the word “spaz” from the song “Heated” on her newest album, because it’s derogatory to people with neural issues. This is following a similar move by Lizzo, who did the same out of respect for people with disabilities. It’s a nice thing to do.
Regarding this story Monica Lewinsky observed on her twitter feed:
Partition is a 10-year-old rap song by Beyoncé where she uses a well-established rap euphemism that uses Monica Lewinsky’s name. Monica has been referenced in 125 rap songs, as she mentions occasionally on social media.
Look at the lyrics for the 125 rap songs where Monica is mentioned – they are particularly brutal towards all women’s sexuality, with Monica as a stand-in for that brutality. The rap songs are referencing men enjoying a sex act without giving anything to a woman in return. In the songs, the rapper’s visualize themselves as Bill Clinton, the woman performing oral sex on them as Monica, and enjoying the feeling of power of taking sex & pleasure without giving it. That’s what Monica’s name symbolizes in rap. A power act of taking from and denying women.
When Beyoncé uses it, it’s out of sync, because Beyoncé is referencing that rap history in a song celebrating her own sexuality, using a derogatory reference. It’s a bit of a whiplash. I think Beyoncé is reasonable enough to see, looking at her own life, and at the women around her, to see that might be an issue to use a woman’s name as a sex act.
The reason this is a big thing is because we are at a political nexus where women enjoying their sexuality is now a criminal act. We’ve taking the United States back to 1850 and that book with the red letter on it.
Women are not now free to enjoy their sexuality. Which is what several generations of women have been doing successfully since Roe v. Wade. Which means men are not now free to enjoy their sexuality either. It’s a drastic sea-change in how we engage as sexual human beings. And it affects both men and women, but only women appear to be bracing themselves for it.
The fall of Roe v. Wade
Obviously, I’m crushed. Outraged. Livid. Repealing that basic civil right after 50 years is a crushing blow to women’s rights. It’s a crushing blow to democracy. But it’s not just that. The hood has come off the GOP complex, and they have revealed unmistakably the misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic, anti-democratic foundation of Republican’s beliefs.
Right wing officials are starting to speak those beliefs out loud.
And not just tearing down same-sex marriage, relationships and contraception. Also integrated schools.
And the white supremacy is open now.
Night Flyer – Allison Russell
Night Flyer by Allison Russell
Outside Child Album
This song just blows me away. One of the best country music songs of the last 10 years.
Lyrics excerpt:
I’m the wounded bird, I’m the screaming hawk
I’m the one who can’t be counted out
I’m the dove thrown into battle
I can roll and shake and rattle mm-hmm, hmm
I’m the moon’s dark side, I’m the solar flare
The child of the earth, the child of the air
I am the mother of the evening star
I am the love that conquers all
Yeah, I’m a midnight rider
Stone bonafide night flyer
I’m an angel of the morning too
The promise that the dawn will bring you
Vego Modular Raised Beds
We are replacing the garden beds I built in 2012 with steel modular raised beds by Vego Garden. There will be four of 4′ x 8′ beds (replacing the three we have now) and they will be 17 inches tall, which means they will be much easier to plant in now that we are getting older.
I’ve been trying to get them assembled. Stephanie and I started together this past weekend, but only got the first bed partially assembled. (It was a busy weekend.) It has been unhelpfully raining the past several days so I haven’t been able to get any further. And judging by the forecast, it won’t get much better so I should probably suck it up and work in the rain.
For nostalgia purposes, here are photos of the beds I made back in 2012 when they were new.
Neighborhood Mailing Lists
I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday trying to find the old Yahoo Groups site our neighborhood used to use as a mailing list. I wanted to search up (as Scout* phrases it) some of the past inter-personal squabbles for a writing project. The group was at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ONSneighborhood/ but has been archived and as far as I know is completely inaccessible, and can be retrieved if you are a data wonk who can parse comma delimited files and such. It was far too much work for what I wanted to do with it. But I went down the rabbit hole anyway, because apparently social media has left me with the inability to focus on a single task for any length of time.
Until this morning, I had forgotten that all those old squabbles were in my actually email account. The old one under my past name, of course, but all still accessible to me. Oh, the treasure-trove of human foibles it is, too. The casual racism. Good grief.
It appears we officially shelved that mailing list in 2015 and turned to the Nextdoor site for our neighborhood sharing, which is a shame. Lately the folks on our street have started a group WhatsApp to contact one another and it feels a little closer.
I’m counting all this past reading as research time for my writing project but really it’s just fun.
I do need to actually write something in this project, though. It’s one I’ve had around for a long time but lost interest in because I couldn’t work out how to make the plot go. (I have a lot of trouble making the plot go, if that’s not clear from everything I’ve written here about my own writing.) I’ve picked it back up again realizing a different angle on it. I hope I can capture something now that it seems fun again.
I remember when I was reading about Agatha Christie’s notebooks that she would scribble an idea on a piece of paper and years later return to the idea and complete it, her brain having noodled out the problem over the ensuing piece of time.
[*Scout is the child of one of our friends and is preternaturally smart for a 6-year-old.]
Respect
Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority.” And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person” and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.
quote from @stimmyabby