Month: March 2025

Coins, earworms, puzzles

Posted on by Liz Henry

In 1978 I got a little pocket coin pricing book, the sort of thing they used to have in grocery store magazine and book racks, and 9 year old me was somewhat obsessed with coins either because of that or before that. I had some penny books with all the slots to pop them in by date and which mint they were made at (San Francisco, Denver, maybe Philly?).

I have a strange memory of walking to school with my friends who lived on the block (Shea and Crissy) telling them some coin facts that I am sure they did not care about, but tolerated, and then a really foul bully (Ronnie Parsons – sorry… I remember you….) riding by on his little bike and circling us while mocking my penny price updates in a fake British accent to indicate that I was stuck up. He was one of those people who would be like “Reading the dictionary, Henry?!!!” A real asshole! Hello you’re in 4th grade. Chill! But no. I think I remember it because it is one of those rare moments that it dawned on me that perhaps not everyone wanted to hear me tell them interesting facts.

I also used to sit on the floor of my grandparents’ closet (the one that had a door into their room and a door into the hallway) dumping out their milk bottle and (bear shaped??? some animal) glass bottle full of pennies and sorting them. So many indian head/wheat penny / buffalo nickels! Wish I had that now!

I started some new penny and quarter books at some point as an adult and in parallel my parents were doing ALL THE COINS including the state and national park quarters, probably as a holiday activity, keeping two sets so that there would be one for me and one for my sister.

I also have crazy envelopes full of different international coins and bills (carefully sorted and labelled, in a big envelope) Which actually comes in handy sometimes when someone is about to travel and I remember we may have that exact currency.

None of these are valuable as they are not “mint condition” or even particularly nice. They are all greasy and worn down. I don’t mind, it is just fun to look at them and feel dragonish.

ANYWAY the point is, my parents (who moved here last fall) handed over the coin books and I found my old 1978 book! Memories! And the 1970s era penny books (not very complete). AND a lot of coins and bills from more different countries from my dad’s business trips in the 80s and 90s and a lot of Venezuelan money from when they moved to Vz in the 90s for a while. I just sorted those into envelopes because I impulsively dumped them out on the table last night and I need the table today to work on!

Observations:
* The (king?) of Belgium looks very much like a frog
* Simon “the nose” Bolivar is so easy to pick out
* Brasil, France, Greece have the nicest art.
* Oh, and Argentina also has great art and design. Very clean and modernist looking. Also a cute bird (a rhea I guess)
* Mexican coins also totally rule
* WTF, the UK, why do you change the coins so often and why, when you changed them, did you make the sizes so weird? Why make the 5p and 10p coins the SAME SIZE AND WEIGHT. Why suddenly make a coin of one value the same weight and size as some older coin of a different value (I have forgotten which one that was, but what the hell!) Make up your minds.
* I found some old shillings and coins with king .. uh… the guy before Queen Elizabeth … george?) Neat!
* Spain, your coins suck, they feel really chintzy, do you not have actual metal? Also I felt very creepy even touching a coin with Franco on it.
* Speaking of creepy and sad, the million peso notes from 80s Argentina. Fuck la dictadura!

I promised an earworm in the title and I hope this does not curse me further but it has lasted for DAYS. A few nights ago in my sleep I acquired “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” and it is truly cursed. Listen if you dare! And it keeps coming back into my head. Oh, my god. For some reason it is mixing itself with The Smiths, Still Ill. Someday I will have to actually create the mashuups that get stuck in my head. (Especially the Satyagraha / Sister ray one – 20 years, at least, of that. )

As I continue recovering from my arthritis flare up and have to lie down a lot with my feet elevated I have been trying out the 20 years ago NYT Sunday crosswords. I mentioned earlier the 30 years ones are nearly impossible for me to complete without looking things up. The 20 years ago are just a tiny bit too easy or annoying sometimes. But 1999 seems to be a sweet spot. They are a little bit difficult, but in a nice challenging way and I can reliably finish them.

Sat. was Milo’s birthday and we had a nice relaxing time at my parents’. The weather didn’t cooperate for the plan of having a pool party but that was ok actually because I had no energy and my ankles and low back are not good enough for me to really swim. Laura and Jack made a delicious lemon cake. We looked at our old model horses. I plan to take at least the small Andalusian family (Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus) but ended up realizing I still felt attached to several others. I do not need 10 model horses and yet –––

My dad also gave me his pelo ‘e guama that he got on his way to work at I think Hato Mata de Barbara in 1966 or so. I can check his memoir. It used to hang on the wall with his spurs and cuatro and I coveted it…. so soft and velvety (it is some sort of fur – beaver? shaved close rabbit?). He explained it was not the fanciest kind (Borselino, with the number of Xs indicating quality) but was from maybe switzerland (actually, austria) and was the 2nd nicest kind but it also turned out to be slightly too fancy for his actual position as incredibly junior cowhand and was more like what the ranch manager would wear. More about the hat later. It turns out he … donated the spurs to goodwill! omg? Why? omggggg. “Because they were not useful really because they are for wearing while barefoot.” OMG. Just like with my grandma’s frying pans (her cast iron pan, and HER GRANDMA’s cast iron pan). Oh well!!!! Anyway, I am gloating over the hat. It is fun to loot my parents’ junk drawers! When they aren’t throwing away the very things that I said I wanted!

I was able to stand up more yesterday though, which was great, and so I put up my grandma’s mirror, and a little bathroom shelf for my cup to take pills with, and a small towel bar by the sink for a hand towel. Some of these installs did not come out quite right so I also shoved some spackle into the unfortunate mistake-holes. The hand towel bar is slightly too large and also rattles but I may just fix it with a little superglue rather than try to re-do it. All very satisfying!

More mysteries, and some unrepentant bitching

Posted on by Liz Henry

I read another Mavis Hay detective novel though the Oxford one turned out to not be very good. The subway one wasn’t really good either. They both had tiny bright spots that made them amusing or unique, but I conclude fiction was not her forte. I can’t quite recommend them! Though I am very curious about her art & craft books, like the one surveying quilting techniques of Britain. (I am not a quilter but that sounds interesting!)

On to the next one on my e-reader, Skull Castle. I hadn’t noted the author at all but was immediately struck by the punchy and exciting style. It is super gothic/romantic, atmospheric, feels like “action” even though they are just like, on a train or in a house party, characters all memorable and interesting. The Duchess is especially great so far. Then I went to look at who wrote it – oh! duh. John Dickson Carr. A known fabulous writer but somehow I have only read a few of his more famous locked room mysteries on some journey through a long list of famous locked room mysteries.

As I mentioned yesterday I am feeling irritable from pain and high steroid doses. One thing that really chaps my hide is when I get officiously lectured about some shit that doesn’t require a giant lecture from someone fucking ignorant or simply being a dick for no reason. Or because they hate their job and hate me. They should keep the hate close and save their breath because I’m not having it.

Examples.

Bus drivers who pull up at the not correct spot and then give me a lecture (yelling, over the sound of the ramp and beeping, to the entire bus and street, to tell me how i am in the wrong place, when i’m not, i’m in the little BOX that is PAINTED THERE for wheelchair users to know where to wait)

Hospital valet parking loading zone guys with little hats on, blocking my way off the ramp into the loading zone while they tell me officiously that I need to WAIT and NOT GO INTO THE STREET MA’AM you need to WAIT you CANT GO INTO THE STREET.

(OMG I must be ESCAPING!!)

Me: Excuse me. My van pickup is right there. Pardon me. (BARRELS BY HIM)
Hat guy: MA’AM
Me: *** dirty look side eye *** (ignores him completely)
Hat guy (chasing me into the loading zone, which is 2 cars wide, my van being in the 2nd lane) MA’AM!!!!!!!
Me: (Misgendered) (gets into van as van driver, thankfully, smirks to himself)
Hat guy to Driver: YOU CANT BE HERE YOU CANT BE IN THE ROAD
Van driver: Just loading my passenger! (emitting cheerful fuck-off rays) (I love him) (Great conversation with amusing driver then happens on my ride home)

Office phone answerer at the rheumatologist where my doc faxed a referral a week and a half ago who keeps telling me to wait for a call back to make the appointment, but then when I find out they NEVER GOT THE FAX (a fax…. fuck me….. i hope my doc sent it FROM THE BEACH) and I call to get the info again to double check it (which we all had correct in the first place) they lecture me again, then I call back to make sure they got the damn FAX and receive yet another exasperated lecture from office lady with a shitty job who has to deal with people like me.
Me: “I sincerely apologize for the annoyance but I will have to keep calling back at least once a day until I can confirm you GOT THE FAX.”
Her: (angrily) that isn’t how it WORKS you ahve to wait for us to call YOU once we receive the fax.
Me: Yes but I was waiting for almost two weeks and i’m not doing that again!
Her: Well I dont know what to tell you. We didn’t receive it.
Me: Yes. I know. This time, I’ll make sure you do get it. In a timely way.
Her: ** more cloud of lecturing **
Me: None of it is your fault and I’m sorry but I’ll be calling back tomorrow….

Everyone can fuck off… also I realized that the super bad van driver yesterday acts like that because he is normally a paratransit driver, who can act demeaningly to his clients because they have no other options, and who is super annoyed that I have any sort of boundaries and don’t let him do things like TOUCH ME OR MY CHAIR (it is utterly insane to act like you are going to do anything by “pushing” on the back of a power chair on a gently sloping ramp, for example) I hate a power tripping person, i am sorry, i’ve had shitty jobs too but always figured out a way to cope and not take it out on people!

The flare-ups will continue until morale improves

Posted on by Liz Henry

That’s how it works if you are Pollyanna! I am trying to be a little more active but I still can’t really leave the house except for doc appointments and I am using my manual chair inside the house for everything, still. Today I cheated and got a wheelchair van from the doctors’ office to my favorite cafe (Poesía, at 18th and Castro) for a nice sandwich in the sun at a table outside, wrote in my notebook a little, and went to Cliff’s Variety before taking the 24 home. That was actually too much but I am now in bed with my feet up for the rest of the day. My pain levels are high and I am irritable as fuck (also from the steroids), have no energy or creativity or mental oomph, can’t sit up for very long, and need to keep my feet elevated and keep icing both ankles.

This all sucks but it is also something I know how to cope with. Mostly.

Goal: get better asap and don’t end up in the CAM boots.

Smaller goal: get back to where I can do little physical therapy exercises from bed.

The construction on our house continues. We got a nifty new front gate that makes the entrance to our place more easily wheelchair accessible (at least to the back yard) and the iron worker guys are also finishing up some last touches on the handrail and footplate that goes alongside my fabulous new wheelchair ramp to the back patio and yard. It all looks fantastic. I already have been reaping the benefits of the ramp since I stopped really being able to walk at all, I can still get down the half flight of steps out front, get into my powerchair which lives in its little hidey hole and charging den under the bay window, and roll to the back yard where i can lie on a blanket in the sun. And because of the downstairs bathroom also being wheelchair accessible I can stay there all afternoon. All of that is amazing and I feel so lucky we were able to do it.

I’ll be very happy when I don’t have to deal with contractors several times a day! It has been a whole extra part time job.

One of the interesting things about the experience has been just how much I have had to argue and sit on everyone to make the accessibility work. It was never going to be actually ADA compatible but I wanted to get as close as possible. And yet every time there was a decision to make, someone would make The Absolutely Opposite of Accessible decision. No, I will NOT accept just a little inch and a half bump at the threshhold! omfg! Things like that. I had to (and am still!) pay daily attention to everything to have it not end up with access ruined unnecessarily. I guess that makes me appreciate having ADA standards more.

Reading – I re-read the first two of the Freya Marske magical Victorian smut series so that I could be caught up for the new (to me) 3rd book. They are good!

Now reading Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay. It starts out a little bit girls’ school jolly chums feeling, but then gets a little more complex. So far I have most appreciated how annoyed the characters are at how the newspapers refer to them as “undergraduettes”. The terrible (but very fancily printed) poetry book scene was also funny.

You can read a bit more about Mavis Doriel Hay:
https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtrainees/tag/mavis-doriel-hay/
https://promotingcrime.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-golden-age-mavis-doriel-hay-1894.html

I was unable to find a photo of her to add to her Wikipedia entry, alas.

I noticed a while back in this British Library Crime Classics spree that people often say “All my eye and Betty Martin” which I assumed was some sort of cockney rhyming slang. Oblomovka took offense and claimed to have never heard it before – and it turns out to be really old and strange slang!!

All my eye and Betty Martin
“In Britain during the 1700s, the phrase was a common claim of dismissal (similar to ‘nonsense’, or ‘hogwash’), or a way to declare disbelief of an absurdity. It possibly originated as the punch line of a joke (though this is likely a folk etymology). Most variations of the joke involve a British sailor visiting Italy. He overhears a Latin prayer, “Ah! [Da] mihi, beate Martine” (which translates to “Ah! Grant to me, blessed Martin”, referring to St. Martin). The sailor mishears the prayer, and later uses the phrase as “All my eye and Betty Martin”. ”

Why it is popping up in countless 1910s-1940s british detective novels, I can’t say. Maybe it never went away, or maybe it became oddly popular around then, or maybe it was a fabulous in joke of The Detection Club, which I believe Mavis Hay was part of.

Another good thing I had to look up: “tamasha” which seems to be used to mean “hullabaloo”.

I am also passing time and enduring by doing old NYT crosswords and playing the game Roots of Pacha. Roots of Pacha is like neolithic Stardew Valley, without combat and with more “puzzles” in the mines. There is also a mini game where you play the flute to wild animals to tame them & then you can breed better quality domestic animals and try to collect all their colors. The storylines and social aspect of this game is good – I am dating every romanceable villager, am married, (Poly is OK in game!) and have an infant for the first time. I have read that the children in this game actually grow up, go to “school” which probably means they will take care of some animals or crops, and then choose a profession. It is very good, and very playable.

Nothing is quite as good as Stardew though!

I may play some more breath of the wild/Tears of the Kingdom if this flare up goes much longer. Punkgeek tries to suggest new games to me which ARE good clearly but which for one reason or another I just can’t roll with (like subnautica)

I have tried my hand at most of the 30 years old sunday crosswords and then skipped up to 20 years ago. Either way it is painfully like having to inhabit The Mind of Boomers. The best bit of it, other than actually solving an entire puzzle (MUCH harder than solving today’s Sunday puzzles!!) is getting obsolete computer terms – pre-web, for the 1994-1995 puzzles, and pre-smart-phone, for the 2005 puzzles. Compounded by the east coast flavor of cluelessness about either which is always hilarious.

Oblomovka and I watched a compilation of the “Have you ever sent a fax from the beach? YOU WILL” ads from or so.

@artiv3rse

#computer #technology #history #historyoftechnology #ai

♬ original sound – Artificial World

At at the time we sneered at these so hard (at least where I was sitting) for being goofy or, I don’t know. It’s hard to explain why they were cringy, but they were. For one, you are not going to want to send a fax from the beach and if you do want to, fuck off. For another somehow they were just “off”. They didn’t actually think hard enough on it, they weren’t informed enough either by the things imagined by actual computer using nerds or by science fiction things that had already been talked about for the last 50 years, etc. (which is odd because of course AT&T was full of knowledgeable nerds and researchers, though their marketing dept maybe was less so). Now, of course it is even funnier to think that not only do we do all these things but many of them are humorously obsolete as if they had predicted we would be sending morse code telegrams via Dick Tracy 2-way wrist radio from our commuter zeppelins.

I hope we really do get commuter zeppelins, still.

Other things:
* Missed going to CSUN, which I had a non refundable registration for 🙁
* helped a cousin with geneological research
* did a tiny bit of actual work last week and this week
* had a good long talk with dossie about her 2nd edition of Radical Ecstasy and am looking at her draft of a different book
* watching the end of Gilded Age with Oblomov
* Oblomov reading me bits of book 3 of Dance to the Music of Time, and bits of Hazlett “Plain Speaking” which is brilliant out loud
* talked with the waymo people about their wheelchair van service software problems
* missed several musical concerts I had tickets to and really wanted to see
* looking at my sister’s draft of some writing
* afternoon with yatima who brought me some groceries and did the dishes and was such good company
* spent a nice afternoon with my mom doing GOAT archiving work.

Last Binding and Witness for the Dead series

Posted on by Liz Henry

I had Katherine Addison Witness for the Dead book 3 on pre-order, so when it magically arrived on my Kindle I went back to re-read from book 1 and churned through all three books in a day. This was well worth it as the series (writing, plot, characters, world building, all of it) is subtle and beautiful. I was also in the right mood for a long suffering stoic protagonist and a moody atmosphere. Anyway, that third book was fantastic, and I love this entire series.

I also am in mid re-read for the Last Binding series by Freya Marske — charming queer Victorian magical romance novels, a bit smutty in a good way. Now about to finish my re-read of book 2 and jump into book 3. I recommend them, if you like that sort of thing! The writing is good, the magic system is interesting, and the characters delightful. I’m actually busy this afternoon (!!! yay!!) but still, will be done with book 3 probably before I fall asleep so I need to line up something else for the evening and to tide me over if I wake up in the night.

I’m still thinking about the not-yet-published book I read recently and seriously cannot WAIT for it to get published and for everyone to read it so I can talk about it. Oh, my god! Its initials are T.S.B. Sorry to be mysterious/not sorry!

More British Library crime classics

Posted on by Liz Henry

I’ve been plowing through more of the British Library Crime Classics series and finding some real gems in there. I think my favorite so far is Somebody at the Door (1942) by Raymond Postgate, which has a dreamy, sort of postmodern style, told from about 8 points of view – all the people in a commuter railway car. The stories and the structure feel like city life in a particular way – that I think about while riding the bus or train myself – just that all the people around me are going somewhere and for their own purposes and are the central characters in their own stories. I liked Postgate’s characters – they felt like people with their own lives.

Postgate turned out to be an interesting character himself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Postgate

Shortly afterwards I read The Division Bell Mystery (1932) by Ellen Wilkinson and enjoyed that too. After I finished I looked up the author and found she was an MP herself – thus the (fairly minor) self insert character who was a Labor Party MP – She was a Fabian – And also she wrote A Workers’ History of the Great Strike – cowritten with Raymond Postgate! The conservative young MP protagonist of Division Bell has amazing moments where he thinks “Oh…. maybe these labor party people have a point after all” Because of the Bread Marches, which I had to look up but of course Danny didn’t.

The epigraph to Somebody at the Door was really good,

How often I have smiled to see, in a story which pretended to show me the life of Paris or of London, five or six persons, always the same, meet by chance in the most varying places. “From their box the Mortevilles suddenly saw the Duponts sitting in the stalls”; next, “on entering the enclosure the first pretty woman Jacques Dupont met was Alice Morteville”; next, “from the surging crowd of demonstrators Pierre Morteville saw rising the energetic head of Jacques Dupont.” The author may work as hard as he chooses after that in describing to us the immense surging crowd, the brilliant attendance in the enclosure, and paint in the background as much as he can; the poor man does not realize that his Duponts and Mortevilles, as soon as they “meet” and because they meet with such deplorable ease, annihilate all immensity around themselves, prevent me believing that Paris or London are anything enormous, where one may be lost, and make these cities suddenly little places like Landerneau…

The reader will not see this vast work arrange itself, according to traditional artifice, around a miraculously chosen central figure. He cannot count on a rectilinear action, whose movement will carry you along without troubling your laziness, nor even on a too-simple harmony between multiple actions, which in its turn becomes a convention. He will guess that very often the thread of the story will seem to break, and the interest be suspended or scattered — that at the moment when he begins to be familiar with a character, to enter into his cares and his little world, and to watch the future through the same window as he does, he will be suddenly requested to transport himself far away from there, and take up quite different disputes.

(Extracts from the Preface to Men of Good Will
by Jules Romains, restating the principles of Unanimism.)

The book didn’t disappoint.

I’m still in this autoimmune flare up and not very mobile, not working a lot of hours and not leaving the house — so let me know your book recs! I have some time to pass! I am in week 3 or is it more… of not walking at all and barely able to stand up. It is very frustrating when just recently I was walking so well and even thinking about bravely foraying out to the nearby cafe (a block and a half away) with only a cane or a walker. I was traveling confidently by myself, driving my car, walking with total freedom inside the house and going up and down stairs with barely any limp, feeling full of energy. Now I am slammed flat on my back. Actually it is too painful to even be on my back much of the time and i flop from side to side like a gasping fish. Low back, ankles, are just unspeakable and I am still on fairly high steroid dose which isn’t great either. It will pass, but It makes me so sad right when I was doing so well and getting so strong, to slide back into a giant flare up.