Stumbling Through Adulthood

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHpcK18RXkO/?igsh=MWlram94dXc4cWVjZg==

ETA. I have no idea why I posted this, I was trying to post a video of Linnea rowing!

My shoes are still going back and forth, back and forth....

Click to make it bigger.

And to follow up from my rant on difficult to find and often almost expired ff milk.

I sent Perry to Safeway to buy more milk yesterday, a local "premium brand". He grabbed half gallon of ff milk on 19 August. This morning, 20 August, after pouring it in my tea, I realized that... it expired 16 Aug.

Really, Safeway selling expired milk?

Why has it become so difficult to find fat-free milk, and when I do find it, why is it almost always very close to its expiration date?

Costco has stopped selling it around me (but keep white-liquid-fake-drinks that are shelf stable in the dairly cooler, wtf is with that?). TJs is often out of ff, Safeway as well.

I bought the last qt at TJ's on Sun Aug 11. Didn't realize until I got a mouthful of bad milk in my tea on the morning of the 12th that it... expired the day I bought it. That should have been pulled.

Found a half gallon -second to last one- of Safeway's store brand last night, they were all out of Dairygold ff, which is not unusual. The milk I bought? With the furthest out expiration date? 19 Aug. The Dairygold usually lasts a bit longer.

It's really getting old. I know a lot of people swear by whole milk and the like, but I find them disgusting, the "mouth feel" of dairy fat squicks me out. I do eat butter, but not "premium" ice cream, and will not touch the higher "crème" Bries, LOL. I prefer my yogurt or skyr ff as well, though 1% is ok, and yes, I can tell the difference. It's truly a texture thing.

Maybe it'll be three things. Maybe it'll be more. I don't know.

1. This past week was... interesting. Worked the full week, mostly doing training. From only mentioning "neuronal cell culturing" I'm now finding out there is a lot of mouse work (*), something he'd mentioned during the second interview, but implied was a lot less than it's going to be, and some work with -no I am not kidding- monkey brains. 😐 (*) Basically, the implication was that I'd have to do some mouse euthanasia. I interviewed for a job that required that a while back and read up a bit on it. I didn't feel totally happy with the idea, but I figured I could euthanize mice with CO2, which seemed to be, from my reading, a common method. Well, no. It's mouse pups with scissors, and yes, I'll have to be trained but I'm not sure even then I've got the guts. So this job may go not further than me crying in front of a case of mouse pups. We shall see. And tbh, I don't think he was trying to hide the info. It's just that he was really enthusiastic about another aspect of the job, as was I, and we were both focused on that. So.

2. White fonted for weight loss Well. Alas, this is bad data collection. First full week on Zepbound, I was up 1lb. Second week, this past week? Down almost 3. Is it the meds, or is it the in a lab all day with only the food I've brought it? It's going to be hard to tell. I think I'm dealing with less "food noise" but is that data or placebo? I probably won't know. But I'll take the weight loss and hope for more!

3. Linnea and team were at a regatta yesterday, she was bow in the Varsity 8, yay her! They came in second, which is fine, and the boat looked really good.

Here are the last 30 seconds or so of the race.

4. Seems like Anne-Chloe is the youngest or one of the youngest lab directors they've ever had at Fred Hutch. Yay, but she still really needs to get a freaking PhD or MD. I've only spent a week at UW and I'm already feeling strangely uneducated and dumb.

5. As if things weren't bad enough... My sister brings my mom up on 14 Mar. She leaves 16 Mar, comes back 30 Mar. 31 Mar is Easter Sunday. We leave Friday 5 Apr for Louisiana before we drive to TX to attempt to see the 8 April Eclipse. This was all going to be a bit stressful what with me being gone all day, but then the folks helping my aunt in Vancouver BC decided that... they want to put the house on the market early April and JoAnn agrees. That's nice. When we suggested those dates, they all said no, we can wait until late spring or early summer. Now it's a crisis to go through everything she has left there and figure out what we want -a lot of her stuff is -thank goodness- at the assisted living place with her, but the last two or three times we were up, everyone (including me) agreed that no, we should wait, it wasn't like the house was going on the market right away. My sister was the only one who'd initially pushed for an earlier time to market and to go through JoAnn's stuff. Now I have no idea what we're going to do. I guess dh and I will have to go up at some point, leave my mom at the assisted living place, and start to weed stuff now. Tbf, the folks up there promised to box of anything we wanted/thought we'd want and store it for us in one of their garages, but really, just fucking no. Sigh.

6. Drove Linnea up to Bellingham today and then went on a hike at the Stimsom Family Nature Preserve. About 3.5 miles on well maintained and graded hiking trail.... in the pouring rain! We looked like drowned rats at the end, but smiling drowned rats! Only iffy moment: tree over the trail. No way to go off trail easier to go around, it was too high for me to get easily over and too long for me to easily get under. I had to do under. At one point, I was essentially in a plank trying to move sideways. At least it was dh, and not the kids... they would have taken video, I'm sure, not to post on Instagram but to show either sibling not present.

Not totally obsolete, of course, but what with 90% of the books -wait, I can calculate that- make that 89.89% of books I read last year being e- or audio books, I don't turn a lot of page. 9 books worth, most of those graphical novels, out of 89 books read.

What I miss?

Bookmarks.

I loved -love- bookmarks. I rarely had "official" ones, but pieces of found carboard, boarding passes and train tickets, postcards, a few rectangles cut from greeting cards, things like that.

Never intentional, always found, bits of carboard falling into the role of bookmark as I needed them.

Used for a book or two, put away somewhere, usually between two books on a shelf, to be discovered or retrieved later.

I miss that. I miss going through my little pile of found cardboard and picking one for a given book.

I have a physical book right now and I could use a bookmark, but umm... I can't remember between what books my stash is! I remember moving it probably over a year ago, because it was interfering with my putting something away and I don't feel like going through my shelves to find where I put it right this moment. They'll turn up.

In the meanwhile, I'm looking around for a new suitable piece of cardboard for the paper book I'm reading right now.

Flourless chocolate cake = chocolate omelet. No thanks!

This one made me laugh, and cry a bit.





It has stopped raining and now I must get off my ass and... go on my walk. 🙄

Some mushrooms from my morning ramble through the woods. Aren't they cute?

The House is a mess. Still no speaker, bunch of losers. And they're out there blaming the Democrats? Why the fuck should the Dems vote for McCarthy? And like any of the Rs would have voted for Pelosi if she'd faced a revolt in her ranks? Also, Repubs? Don't be pathetic. Count your fucking votes before you go out to the floor.

OK. That said.

One of the things the media keep repeating that is driving me batty: that "Americans like divided government" and this is "what Americans wants".

That's cheap reasoning, ignores systemic issues, public opinion, and is said to give cover to the Republicans for being incomps whose goal it is to dismantle government, not govern.

(Or, as dh said, if they're in government, they want to rule, not govern.)

So. Divided government.

Leaving aside the stolen seat on the Supreme Court, that's not where I'm headed, though clearly the Court is much more rightwing than the country and does not reflect the opinions or desires of the American public.

The presidency. We don't elect via a popular vote. We have had two elections where the winner of the most votes, ie the choices of most American voters, did not win the presidency. This is problematic and will always be. It is probably going to get worse over the years, with more and more Republicans winnings office by benefitting from the very clear undemocratic institution of the Electoral College.

The Senate. Wyoming, population 576851 (*) gets two senators. California, population 39512000 (approx) (*) gets two senators. (*) 2020 census numbers.

This creates a situation where small, often rural, often red states have more influence than they should, engendering a tyranny of the minority. This is, btw, going to get worse over the years, as more people pack into blue states, and those still still only have two senators. This will probably mean, sometime in the next decade, if not before, a permanent Republican majority in the Senate. Despite, of course, fewer people wanting that.

The House. At this point, gerrymandering is responsible for much of the repartition in seats in the House. Yes, in the past election, more votes were cast for Republicans than for Democrats, but the difference is small (*) and pales compared to how many seats gerrymandering determines. Yes, both sides do it, but the Republicans have taken it to an art, and often put out maps that don't even pretend to be fair. The SCOTUS has slapped a few down (Alabama comes to mind) often thanks to Mark Elias, and some state courts are going to push for fairer maps (NY, which struck down a Dem gerrymander, only to have a map favoring Rs be imposed by the courts, but that map is, iirc, currently being appealed which should result is a more fair maps, and more seats to Dems).

(*) Seats with no competition reduce voter participation. This is true in both blue metropolitan areas and deep red Trump +35 districts.

So, no, as a general rule, the current (pathetically incompetent) Republican majority in the House does not clearly reflect the will of the voters. It reflects instead like a distorted mirror, some bits taking on larger proportions than they otherwise should.

There is not general will by the American people to have divided government. There is, instead, the poisonous racist intent of the Constitution spilling forward 250+ year forward to amplify some voices, and muffle others. The result may be divided government but there is not much evidence that this is what people want vs what we get, given the constraints of the Constitution.

The lofty stated goal of preventing the "tyranny of the majority" is instead going to entrench the tyranny of the minority, where a smaller number of backwards voters in a bunch of shithole states get to impose their will on the majority of people who would prefer to live otherwise.

This is not tenable.