Even in Kyoto

After that one year where the big Lake Effect Snow + Southwest Airlines meltdown caused me to lose a week of time with family in Minnesota, every holiday season I'm just relieved if the planes actually go where they're supposed to.

Yesterday's flights wound up being kind of interesting, mostly in that a friend and I discovered at the last minute that we were on the same initial flight to Las Vegas! It was really nice to have the company of her family in the airport while we waited (not to mention, great to carpool with them to the airport). And then, I wound up arriving in SeaTac at almost the exact same time as sytharin and slydevil, so we had each others' company for the light rail trip home. By that point it was nearly midnight in Seattle and I'd been up since 5 am EST, so I can't claim I was particularly GOOD company on the train, heh.

And now, Seattle, and the house I grew up in, with all its artefacts, old and new. Lots of things to think about.

I miss the cats already.

All I can say is that I really hope ya'll like your Christmasolstihanukkawanzaa gift! It is going to be given in stages, snail-mail stages first.

Whew.

Anyway.

Today I am also FULL OF RELIEF because I managed to secure excellent cat-sitters for George and Martha! They are two of my animal care student workers, so I already know they know how to take very good care of animals.

Now, time to sleep.

I am trying to get caught up on the various things I can't get to in the middle of the semester, but they don't make for particularly interesting blog posts.

So in the meantime, here are photos of Martha keeping me company at home yesterday. She seems to be annoyed at George, so the two of them haven't been cuddling much. Instead, they have some form of joint custody agreement, where George gets some snuggles in the early evening, then Martha snuggles for the early part of the night, then George comes back first thing in the morning.

Anyway, George has been the primary user of the newer cat heating pad, but Martha was so cute sleeping on it yesterday.

The next item on the mending list after bike jerseys was bicycling gloves. I have a pair of relatively thin Smartwool gloves where the palms and fingertips have been wearing out, but I really like the gloves so I thought maybe I could reinforce the palms with some material similar to what's used on actual cycling gloves.

I spent a little while trying to figure out just what that material was, for the Specialized "Grail" gloves I've come to favor, but everything I found suggested that it's a synthetic material that isn't available to retail markets. Eventually I wound up talking with a rowing friend whose daughter is working on a degree in fashion, and she gave me a small piece of scrap goatskin leather of the appropriate sort to work with.

Of course, I don't have much experience with sewing leather. The full extent is the one time I sewed a piece of leather onto the bottom of a pannier, to reinforce it. So it seemed like a good idea to approach the project in stages.

I started out with the realization that I have a second pair of cycling gloves in need of repair. I had enough scrap leather that I could use some for the purpose, and learn a few things about stitching this particular thickness and type of leather (I think it's maybe?? goatskin??).

Here you can see George "helping" me with the first bit of stitching:



The end result certainly has a handmade look, but is far better than the worn-out material it's now covering!



One thing I discovered during the first repair was that it was tricky to hold the material together, just so, while stitching. After doing some poking around on the internet, I came to understand that it can be helpful to at least tack-glue pieces together first, before sewing down the edges. But I didn't have any contact cement or rubber cement on hand for the purpose. So for glove #2, I just grabbed some double-sided sticky tape, and it did indeed help the process go more smoothly.



But I noticed the double-sided sticky tape was a bit stiff, so my quest for rubber cement continued. Because of various constraints, I checked a couple of grocery stores and a CVS only for rubber cement, but came up empty-handed. I'd asked S if he happened to have any, and he didn't, so he instead suggested a small bottle of a type of Gorilla Glue he'd gotten not too long ago and had used to glue some leather.

Anyway, here I am last night, getting ready to glue:


And here I am this morning, learning that unfortunately this glue is way too stiff and won't work because it has ruined the inside texture of the gloves (I'd put in nitrile gloves in case of any seepage, and some of the nitrile is now glued on, too).


So now these gloves are ruined, argh.

The real trouble is that I don't think my ideal glove of this sort actually exists as a thing that a person can buy. What I want is a wool liner glove with a reinforced palm, so I can wear them on their own OR wear them inside my ski mittens when it's 4 degrees out. Smartwool was on the right track with the reinforcement of the palms of these gloves, they just aren't as durable as they should be.

And now I've used up all of the goatskin leather scrap and don't know whether/how I can get more (it was just BEAUTIFUL material, setting aside the point that it is leather).

And I'm pretty sure that this Gorilla Glue is permanent can't be removed with a solvent.

So anyway, hopefully your morning has gone better than this.

I hear there are lots of things to look forward to as one gets older. One of those things is, apparently, trying to figure out all sorts of interesting financial juggling acts. (this gives me flashbacks to the year my mother spent trying to unsnarl the insurance SNAFU from my dying father's broken leg emergency)

Anyway, in that realm, my mother-in-law (so to speak) is at a point where she's going to need consistent care, but getting her to a place where she can receive such care is complicated by her current financial status: she receives social security plus a small pension that are collectively insufficient to cover the costs of survival and care, but she is not currently legally eligible for certain forms of financial assistance due to the structure of her finances. As best I understand it, this is tied to the pension and social security, plus also having a very small amount of retirement savings/investments (< $30k total).

Anyway, all of this is in Minnesota, and a social worker there suggested getting legal help for navigating the situation. Which leads me to the lazywebs question of how to find appropriate legal help in that state. She's in the Minneapolis area. It seems to me that some of you might have ideas on how to approach the task that could be helpful, so I asked S if he would be okay with me asking around, and he said yes. So, any suggestions would be appreciated!

I kind of also look at all this from the standpoint of figuring that at some point I'll have to figure some of these things out for myself, too.

The end of the semester and the end of the year always bring up a host of thoughts and reflections. Today, while I proctor my General Biology students' final exam, on a cold, dark December Saturday, I'm remembering that occasion when I was living in Nebraska where I happened to catch Terri Gross interviewing Toni Morrison on "Fresh Air" .

I did eventually read God Help the Child, when dealing with a summer case of COVID that kept me locked up in the back bedroom. And as before, time spent reading Morrison's stories was worthwhile.

I'd love to ask Toni Morrison that question. She was not one to shy away from difficult subjects, but in a lot of ways she didn't have a choice, either. And she still stands out to me as someone who figured out that a powerful voice can have persistent impact over the full span of one's life.

I should listen to that interview again. I have conflicting feelings about what teaching entails. I don't always get to know the full impact of my actions on students. And there are many aspects of teaching that are tedious and unrewarding, that require time and mental energy that could be allocated elsewhere. (but let's just ask, would I really be satisfied by something like bus driving, which is a job that is demanding in completely different ways?)

I was talking with some rowing teammates the other day about the bicycling class I teach every spring, about how it can be an amazing experience for many of the students just to learn how to change a bike tire.

I didn't really know how to change a bike tire, when I was in college. I knew enough to understand that bike tires needed to be kept full of air. I had one particularly embarrassing occasion when I attempted to change out a tube by myself, but then lacked a pump, so I wound up at a bike shop in Somerville, MA where one of the mechanics was less than pleased when the (incorrectly) newly installed tube exploded. That mechanic was ultimately exceptionally generous about helping me get back on the road. But really, how was I supposed to know?

A precursor to that episode was that at some point in high school, my brother was given an opportunity to take a basic bike repair class through REI. I was never given the same opportunity, and I really don't know the reason(s) why not. Perhaps I did not seem to be as much of an aspiring bicyclist as my older brother. Perhaps my parents asked and I declined. Some of the backwardness of how I learned to fix bikes is a part of why I try to teach bike repair skills now.

I don't really want to be riding my bike everywhere from some position about the injustice of it all. So I'm not sure I can motivate myself to consider going back to France again just from the standpoint of being present on the behalf of the global status of women. But I'm still not sure how else I might think about the undertaking, if I were to go and attempt it again. There's a lot about randonneuring that can be very selfish, so if I keep doing it I want to be conscientious about it all.

Okay, I want to preface this by saying I'm not sure whether what's in this post is ready for primetime or not. So later on I might decide to take it all back.

The book Lysenko's Ghost begins with the author going to visit the farm where the Siberian silver foxes were domesticated, because some of the people involved in that project were geneticists who managed to escape Lysenko's reach in the period while Lysenko was suppressing alternate scientific viewpoints by having his rivals imprisoned and thereby murdered. So Graham was naturally curious to talk to people who had escaped the purge, and tell us about their perspectives across it all.

Anyway, none of what I am going to attempt to say is to say that we're currently living in Stalinist Russia.

But the discourse is shifting.

I can tell this is happening when I utter the phrase, "Climate change" in my classes. The phrase is received differently now.

In many respects, changes to the discourse don't actually matter all that much; what matters more is a willingness to continue working on ways to reshape society for the betterment of all. As in the case of continuing to study genetics in a relatively remote outpost in a relatively unimportant study system.

larryhammer recently posted about an economics blogletter (among other topics) that outlines fundamental problems with how the poverty line is currently defined in the US of A. The blogletter also points out that this discrepancy between the "official" poverty line and the functional experience of poverty might be part of why there can be hostilities between poor people; anyone who is just above the poverty line but definitely not able to afford much of anything might naturally resent anyone below that line who is receiving support.

Anyway, I'm pointing that out because it is exceptionally hard to think or talk about "the betterment of all" when it takes everything one has, just to try and scrape by, seeing no reason to have hope for anything better than that.

And so there can/will be a breakdown in efforts to think and care about marginalized groups, as fallout from this.

And there is at least some truth to labeling some things as "woke mind virus." That does not mean marginalized people/groups should be thrown under the bus, nothing of the sort.

But it does call for continuing to reframe how we think and talk about helping each other out.

And it is necessary to continue remembering that in the past, some people have done some terrible, awful things because they somehow thought those things WERE in the interest of the "betterment of all," or at least they thought it sounded good to say as much.

But here's a better example, from ysabetwordsmith: Uruguay has managed to shift over to 98% renewable energy sources. The thing to note is buried within this commentary: What makes Uruguay’s example compelling to policymakers is not just environmental performance—it is economic rationale. Méndez Galain repeatedly emphasizes that renewables became dominant because they were cheaper and more stable than imported fossil fuels, not because of carbon targets. That economic lens, he argues, is essential if countries want sustained adoption of clean energy.

And now I want to go visit Uruguay.

6 degrees Fahrenheit when I woke up this morning, which is, granted, better than the 2 degrees originally predicted.

It just takes so much energy to breathe during my bike commute, even with a balaclava.

I am thinking it might be nice to upgrade from ski pants to ski bibs for these sorts of temperatures.

And I should probably look into some double-walled ski goggles at some point, too.

I finally finished darning the current wear holes and moth holes in this wool cycling jersey.






Wool jerseys can be pretty expensive, not to mention many of them are one-time special-order items. A long time ago, when a friend organized for an order of wool jerseys for members of the Car Resistance Action Party, S put his jersey in the wash and it shrank in such a way that it became instantly unwearable. My CRAP jersey has fared better, but it's next in the jersey mending pile.

I lost the jersey size lottery with that one for the New England Randonneurs (but of course that meant threemeninaboat got lucky!!), not to mention, wool jerseys also actually vary quite a lot in how heavy/thick they are, and heavier isn't necessarily better.

Hopefully these repairs keep this particular one in service for a little while longer, maybe even long enough for another trip to France? I'm really not sure about that at this point (going to France again OR survival of the jersey).

The thermometer on the back porch said 5 degrees Fahrenheit when I left the house for work this morning. I skipped rowing practice and used the machines on the front porch again because I was up too late grading papers again.

I managed to do fairly well with remembering how to dress for that sort of temperature.



I don't remember what to do about any temperatures lower than that, though. My main recollection is that for temperatures lower than 0 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature doesn't matter quite as much as the windchill does, in terms of the experience. And I might just not have the right gear for temperatures much further below 0 degrees, anyway.

This has felt like a long week.