Guess where I’ve been this morning?

I had a blood vessel pop in my eye a while back, and I had a follow-up check-up today. My eyes are still there. I still have an annoying blind spot in my right eye, just north of center, and it’s never going to go away, right up to the day I die. Oh well.

My eyes are still good enough that I can see that annoying tuft of hair rising up vertically front and center in my scalp. I’m turning into Tintin. An old, bearded, gray Tintin. So it goes.

Now I have to stop for a while — I got the usual pupil dilation eyedrops. Everything is blurry with bright star-like fringes around it, and it hurts to look at the screen.

The blizzard is over. Talk amongst yourselves.

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I think you’ll have no problem comprehending this.

Relatively speaking, Minneapolis is Birmingham, while I live somewhere in the Irish Sea off the coast of Dublin. We do have far fewer dialects over that distance.

It’s time for my traditional holiday activities. I have to cycle the fruit fly stocks. I need to feed the spiders. As a special treat, I’m setting up a pair of black widows for breeding, I hope. And then…the washing of the lab ware. There are many vials and containers that must be scrubbed.

I will get all that done today so I can slack off on Christmas Day, which will not be celebrated. We did not put up a Christmas tree, or any decorations. There will be no children in our house and no presents. The Christmas feast will be a simple casserole. Hell no, I’m not going to church.

I hope you all get to celebrate a mid-winter vacation in the manner of your choosing!

Last night, I was going to clean up a junk drawer in my office — you know, one of those places where you toss all the odds and ends you don’t quite know what to do with, and over a decade or two they accumulate a terrifying quantity of doodads and knick-knacks and geegaws that need to eventually be sorted. This is a perilous job because the drawer is stuffed with distractions, making it nearly impossible to make any progress in cleaning it up.

This time was no exception. First thing I found was a sheet of 35mm color slides, taken in 1988. Slides are annoying, I don’t know why I was shooting in that format, because the image is so small that you can’t really see anything that well, unless you have a slide projector and screen. I do not.

But the second thing I found was an old cheap slide scanner (I tell you, this drawer is full of strange things from an enchanted universe.) It wasn’t a great little gadget. I bought it once upon a time for cheap thinking I’d be able to get rid of those stupid 35mm slides, but it didn’t produce great output, so I gave up on that project and hurled it into the void of my junk drawer.

So. I’m standing there with a bunch of old slides and a slide scanner while I was trying to defeat that cluttered void. You know what happened next…I had to sit down and start feeding slides into the scanner to see what I had.

I was sucked back into 1988, when I had finished up grad school, was transitioning into a post doc in Salt Lake City, and all my beloved relatives were still alive. These slides were shot on a vacation to my parents’ home, while I was oblivious to what I was going to lose in a few short years.

This was my uncle Ed.

Ed was a bachelor who was full of stories. He was an MP in Germany at the end of WWII, which involved far less gunfire and far more shuttling around the country on trains. He then signed up for the merchant marine, and sailed around the south Pacific, collecting tattoos and bad habits. When he finally settled down with our grandmother, he was incapable of holding down a job, went on frequent benders, and threw away most of his money at the racetrack. Our parents warned us that he was a bad influence, and my father in particular was sometimes furious with him for his wastrel life style, especially when he showed up falling down drunk at our house.

But his nephews and nieces loved him (and so did my dad, actually), and he loved us back. He was the uncle who would take us to the drug store to buy comic books, or to the cheesy awful horror movies that our parents had no interest in wasting their money on. On weekends we’d spend the night at Grandma’s house with Ed, and we’d stay up late sprawled on the floor, reading comic books and watching Batman or The Avengers until the late night horror host would fire up some delightful Godzilla flick or something with Bela Lugosi or an unnaturally large creature, while Ed would fall asleep on the sofa. I can’t watch a Hammer film without once again hearing Ed snoring in the background.

And now he’s long gone.

This is my maternal grandmother, with my boys, Connlann and Alaric.

Grandma did not have a particularly happy life. She was trapped in, I think, a loveless marriage with my grandfather, who was a dysfunctional alcoholic who spent his days slurping down cheap beer and puffing constantly on cheap cigars. The cigars eventually killed him, giving him a bone cancer that required removal of his jaw, and grandma stood by him and tended him through an agonizing ‘recovery’ in which he was going through the screaming DTs and chemo. She was good to me while I was growing up, and I felt so sorry for what she was going through.

She lived for her grandchildren and great grandchildren. We should have visited her much more often, because as you can see even in this terrible photo, she lit up when the kids came to visit. We’d all go out for a treat — either to Arby’s for roast beef sandwiches, or to Dairy Queen for soft serve ice cream. She had a lot of great grandchildren, so I hope she got lots of visits and attention. We lived so far away it was rare for us to get up to Kent, Washington, but we always made a point to drop in with a couple of kids to cheer her up.

Grandpa did not survive the cancer, and Grandma is also gone now.

The junk drawer is not empty, not anywhere near it. I think it’s mostly cables and obsolete computer gear, but I fear that it has acquired a survival instinct and knows to bubble some terrifying nostalgia to the top if ever I should try to remove its contents. That’s how it has survived as long as it has.

It’s unpleasantly cold this morning, and I was reminded of this old photo from the early years of the 20th century. That’s my great-grandfather Peter on the far left, with his sisters Karen and Marie, and his brothers Ole and Iver. I’m just impressed with their coats; I’d take any of the men’s coats right now. They knew how to dress for a Minnesota winter!

I’ve got all these spiders getting to a size where fruit flies don’t cut it anymore, and unfortunately, my mealworm colony crashed, I tried buying live critters online but they’re expensive and half of them died en route thanks to the bitter cold, so I was panicking that this new generation of black widows might go hungry. This is not good. I was planning to start breeding in the next week or so, and hungry females are more likely to feed than to…ummm, mate.

Ice fishing season to the rescue, just in the nick of time! This time of year a popular bait is the lowly wax worm, so I was able to get a few dozen quite cheaply at the local bait shoppe.

Spiders love these things, but I can only get them during ice-fishing season. Fortunately, that lasts until April/May, so by then my mealworms should be back on track.

Little Marco Rubio has taken decisive action and ended an oppressive policy.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
…
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.

Yay! I feel lighter and freer already — Calibri is a woke font, after all.

Unfortunately, Calibri is a Microsoft font that isn’t automatically installed on Mac systems, so I guess I won’t be sending any diplomatic messages in the near future.

Got a new rug for my office…actually, it’s an old rug, used to be in our bedroom, it got relocated when we put in a new bed. My wife has stopped by this morning three times to let me know it ties the room together.

The cat better not pee on it.