Yay! I have an appointment for an MRI next Tuesday! My insurance company finally approved it.

Cool. This means that it only takes two weeks to get an informed diagnosis of a catastrophically debilitating injury, before we can get around to actually treating it. Not looking forward to growing old in America.

I recently bumped into another archaic photo from the family collection. It’s from sometime in the 1920s, and the attractive woman shepherding her kids is my great-grandmother, Nellie Berg, in Norman, Minnesota. It’s kind of awesome because I remember her in the 1970s, when she was the first in our family to get a color TV, and I discovered that she was a fanatic about roller derby.

One thing that jumped out at me were the names, which sounded familiar and normal to me, but are distinctly old-fashioned and not that common anymore. I like them, they have good associations, but I haven’t seen these appear in my student lists in quite a while.

That’s Nellie in the back. The child on the left is my grandmother, Nora. Next to her is Claude, and then Muriel, and Arlene in front. The father of that brood was named Clarence.

There’s nothing wrong with those names, I’m just interested in how whenever I look back on the family tree, I see so many names that are totally out of style nowadays. All you Nellies, Clarences, Noras, Claudes, and Muriels, speak up in the comments and let me know that the good ol’ names haven’t totally faded away.

Also, I should mention that all of these names came from families with purely Swedish and Norwegian ancestry. I’d be curious to know how these markers changed in various other cultural groups.

Everyone needs a home to come back to, even us space pirates. Chatter among yourselves, tell us a few tales of interstellar adventure.

Previous Thread

Yesterday, I published a video. Looking at it after the fact, I got worried about myself — even though I don’t appear in it, I could see myself clearly, and in particular, the effects of a few days of ill health. I was slow and halting and thin-voiced, and failed to express my enthusiasm for the topic. My apologies to everyone.

I haven’t taken it down because it made me appreciate the privilege of health and mobility. I’ve been brought low by an abrupt and seemingly spontaneous break in a lateral ligament in my knee capsule, which means I can’t bend my right knee without severe pain, and I can’t put my weight on that leg. This has been devastating in multiple ways. Obviously, I can’t walk. The world beyond my front door is suddenly unreachable — there are steps! But then there were other problems. I spend about 4 hours a night trying to precisely bend my leg to minimize pain, which never works, until I fall asleep in exhaustion, and then I’ll be awakened at random times with bolts of agony running up my leg. I’m feeling permanently worn out.

Then I’m currently malnourished, and it’s my own fault. Chronic pain kills my appetite, and I’m beginning to feel the effects, but I can’t be motivated to do anything about it. Mary has been doing her best to supply me with something to eat, but I hate to say it, but she has no sense of taste and minimal skill at cooking. She leaves me these horrible sandwiches — two slices of bread with nothing but a little peanut butter between them — and I have to be desperate to choke them down. That’s what I’ve been living on since Thursday, and it’s not good (she’s at the store right now getting some canned soups that should improve my diet). I’m beginning to think this is a drawback to marrying a woman of Scandinavian descent.*

I’ve been fantasizing about sneaking into the kitchen and whipping up a lazy bachelor’s sandwich. A couple of slices of bread toasted in a little olive oil, some chopped onions and garlic, scrambling an egg, and adding a slice of cheese, some salt and pepper, and adding a splash of hot sauce to wake it up…that would be fantastic. Except then I have to imagine prying myself out of a chair and straightening this painful limb and hobbling into the kitchen to stand on one leg for the three minutes it would take to make it, and then staggering back to my office chair, and somehow lowering myself into it with my right knee sending alarms for every degree of bend I subject it to, and then my appetite evaporates.

I have an appointment with an orthopedist this morning, and I’m hoping that will put this stupid leg back on the road to recovery, before I starve to death.

I’ll get back to trying to do more science outreach once I’ve restored my flesh and am able to get around again. There are spiders right outside my door and I can’t go to them now!

*My grandmother, in her final years, would just go to Arby’s, buy 20 or more roast beef sandwiches, freeze them at home and thaw out one a day for dinner. I cannot imagine living like that, but food was just fuel to her. My mother was skin and bones when she died, because she had so little interest in food, I think my sister kept her alive as long as she did by doing all the cooking. I’ve acquired this bias that my peasant ancestors probably just lived on chunks of dried salt cod with an occasional boiled turnip until they got so tired of it they decided to go Viking.

A person named Elise has compiled a spreadsheet of responses from neurodivergent people about their jobs and careers. I learned something from browsing through it. Most of the respondents seen to favor jobs that don’t require extensive interactions with people, but there was on grade school teacher there — they liked the strict schedule. There was a PhD researcher in the mix, but they seem to have lucked into a position with no teaching, just field and lab work. One paramedic says, “Dopamine dump in intense situations feels normal to people with ADHD.”

It seems neurodivergent people are diverse. Who knew?

I have been enlightened. I know exactly what my role on this Earth is.

Yesterday, my wife found a dead rabbit in the shrubbery in our yard. You couldn’t miss it — the odor was horrific. So of course she sent me out to dispose of it.

It had been disemboweled and left to rot for several days. I found spoor nearby, and I suspect the killer was a dog, since cats tend to be more fastidious and don’t leave large lumps of poop nearby. I scraped it into a garbage bag, and noticed that the entire body cavity was a writhing mass of maggots.

I did not take pictures of that, even if I was impressed. You can thank me for that.

I put the body in our garbage can. Fortunately, garbage pick up was the next day, that is, this morning. I figured I was done.

My wife interrupted me again this morning. She’d gone to bring the trash can into the garage this morning, only it wasn’t empty. She told me it was “insect related,” so it was my job.

The trash can was covered in maggots. They were in masses on the bottom, had crawled up the sides, were covering the lid, and were dripping off the container into the grass.

I will share a photo of the lid.

The rabbit was gone, and we’re talking tens of thousands of homeless maggots crawling everywhere. Everything was covered with maggots, which I guess explains why Mary hadn’t brought the garbage can in.

I used a garden hose to clean it up. There is now a patch of our yard that has been enriched with a wiggly mass of protein, I hope the birds appreciate it.

It’s been raining non-stop for the last few days, just an ongoing drizzle, cool and wet.

No spiders. Spiders are not fans of the excessive water falling out of the sky. I’m missing my little friends.

The good news is that the vegetation is going mad, and I expect once it all dries out a bit and the sun warms up the place, we’re going to be swarming with insects, and the spiders will be joyous again.