randwolf

We got a call from Temecula Healthcare Center after 2300. Dad's blood sugar tanked very low (again?!), but they got it back up without an ER trip. Dad does go below 20 on occasion, where normal is roughly 80-130 mg/dl. That's not good.

Bear is doing well. No seizures, and Chris doses her with phenobarbital in a bacon-flavored paste that she really likes. Achilles still scares her at times, and he tries to look nonthreatening to soothe her. She let him sniff her rear, but sniffing noses is a seldom thing with them. She gets too nervous. Monroe misses sheet fight with Dad.

Current Location: In the recliner
Current Music: NHK-World Newsline

sartorias

This replacing of the floors is turning out to be a long project, since most of the grunt work has to be done by us, two olds. It's basically packing to move sans truck. I'm doing more culling, noting my own inconsistencies in regard to what I keep and what I toss. What seemed a ream of letters from one person went out, except for a slim batch of early ones when X visited a country they felt strongly about. But the rest had begun so well, with many book and writing discussions, then became a long downhill slide over the years until I reached the point when I dreaded seeing their handwriting on an envelope. Out those go--those letters served their purpose at the time, but are not worth keeping to revisit.

And yet, I cannot toss old letters from relatives, which are largely reports on their daily doings. Some of those letters are more than fifty years old, so they've become curiosities, little reminders of what life was like in the late sixties/early seventies. But mostly I won't toss those letters because to do so is to silence those voices forever. Sorry, kids, you'll have to toss them when you toss whatever I leave behind.

Not much time for reading as I tear this place apart, and also cull more books. So far I've completely emptied three tall bookcases, and there's a lot more to go!

I've begun reading Emily Eden, whose writing shows influence from Jane Austen. Also, there's the monthly Zoom discussion of Anthony Powell's twelve volume roman fleuve A Dance to the Music of Time; I missed the August live discussion due to conflicting appointments, but they record it, and I'm listening in pieces. So far the talk re this book, The Valley of Bones seems to be circling around how much it's a roman a clef.

asakiyume

I let a lot of milkweed grow in my yard. In part it's for the monarch butterflies, in part it's so I can harvest the fibers, in part it's because I like the scent of the flowers. I've also enjoyed eating the young pods (carefully cooked) sometimes.

This year, the milkweed's been afflicted by a bright orange-yellow aphid called the oleander aphid.

( beneath a cut in case seeing a whole lot of aphids isn't your thing )

My approach to minor infestations of things has been to try to wash them off, but these guys had determination and numbers on their side. I looked at online communities, and it was interesting: the people who grow milkweed aren't farmers growing it for a living; they're by and large people who are growing it for the butterflies. And if you're growing it for the butterflies, you don't want to do anything that's going to endanger the butterfly eggs or the caterpillars, so you're not going to use pesticides or even indiscriminate washing. So most people were saying they just left the aphids alone. "They don't kill the milkweed," someone wrote. "Predators like ladybugs end up finding them," someone else said.

Do nothing is my favorite advice, so although I didn't like the look of the aphids on the plants, that's what I did. Sure enough, ladybugs appeared.

( a suite of three ladybugs )

The aphids have most definitely not disappeared. This live-and-let-live approach wouldn't work for something you're depending on for your own survival--your own subsistence crop or your livelihood--but that's not my situation, so it's been interesting to see it all unfold. The milkweed hasn't died, the ladybugs did arrive, and the monarch females have been floating around, visiting lots of plants and, presumably, laying eggs. And hopefully the fibers still end up being good, in spite of the aphids.

Current Music: Os Mutantes: Hey Boy

solarbird

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 2.0 – 4 August 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 2.0.1.

Mostly small updates this time, but one in particular is very important, and another is pretty important if you’re in Shoreline:

ADDED: Alaskan Way Connector linking Elliot Bay Trail to Waterfront Trail with fully separated bikeways. Decades in the making, finally here (MEGAMAP only)
ADDED: Painted bike lanes on Meridian Ave N in Shoreline between 155th and 175th streets (both maps)
ADDED: “Commonly used” markers on Meridian Ave N throughout Shoreline (both maps) – this is somewhat aspirational, as there has been use of this road as a secondary to tertiary bike arterial but not quite enough to justify marking it as such until now. I am fairly certain that the new bike lanes in the middle of the route will increase its utility enough to justify it (both maps)
ADDED: “Commonly used” makers on a section of Fremont Ave in Shoreline, because that section is used a little more than parts of Meridian which now carry that marking, and one should be consistent (both maps)
ADDED: A weird little section of bike path I found in Lynnwood north of 196th at Wilcox Park. As 196th loses its sidewalks in that area, even this standalone oddness serves a useful purpose if you’re having to sidewalk-bike on 196th, say, to get to Gregg’s Cycles (MEGAMAP only)
ADDED: A few more street names in City of Seattle, along with a couple of small adjustments on difficult streets (both maps)
CORRECTION: REI Lynnwood’s icon was placed very slightly left of its actual location, and has been adjusted (MEGAMAP only)

Screen resolution preview of MEGAMAP 2.0.1 - 4 August 2025

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because honestly it doesn’t.

Enjoy biking!

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

sartorias

On their ongoing mission to reserve the entire national treasury to themselves and their suck-ups, the orange excresence and fellow scumbags have axed PBS.

But! For a few bucks a month (before they thieve those, too) you can view PBS's entire backlog, plus other goodies. And do some general good at preserving our culture while at it.

Okay, back to dismantling this entire house so we can replace the disgusting floors.

asakiyume

"Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird," read the beginning of a Bluesky post that linked to a 30-minute Youtube video about birdsong and starlings' capacity for mimicry. A guy drew a picture of a bird in a spectral synthesizer, which then will produce the sounds that the lines indicate.** The guy played those sounds for a starling, and lo and behold, the bird copied it--such that when you look at the spectrogram, you see a picture of a bird that's very close to the picture the guy had drawn.

So it's in that sense that the guy saved an image to a starling.

I'm charmed that this involves translation from a visual medium to a sound medium. "We can save your picture, but only if you sing it." --This concept of translation is familiar to us, of course. Data that's stored digitally is translated into zeros and ones, then translated back into something we can understand--words, images, sounds, formulae.

... If we were going to use starlings to save our data, we'd have to beg not individual starlings but whole murmurations.

Imagine if you had to sing or say all your data to save it. Imagine going out and standing on a hill and taking a deep breath and just singing out, hoping that the murmuration would deign to listen and retain what you were singing. It would be like an incantation or an invocation or a prayer.

**A spectrograph of a bird's call looks like, for example, this:

(Song sparrow spectrograph from this web page)

So the guy drew the bird below and then played the sounds that this set of lines makes...

white line drawing of a bird on a blue background

And the starling sang back this:

pink-purple bird on an a black background

(Images are screenshots from the Youtube video.)

solarbird

Seattle Cider dropped a cosmic-crisp single variety cider, so I had a sample this weekend at their booth at the Lake Forest Park Farmer’s Market.

My expectations were pretty low, honestly, because the cosmic crisp is what I think of as an adequate apple, but no better. It functions as an apple, it fulfills the role of apple, the texture is reliable and the flavour is acceptable, but there are many which are better at being what it tries to be. Fuji and honeycrisp both come immediately to mind as similar but better cultivars, but which are not as durable in shipping.

(This isn’t to condemn the cosmic crisp; the last apple to occupy its particular market slot was the loathsome red delicious, a mealy, tasteless apple-shaped object which fulfilled the function of looking like an apple, but not that of being an apple. The cosmic crisp is far superior, something I will eat intentionally and – in the case of a better example – actually enjoy.)

So after saying more or less all the above to the Seattle Cider rep, and adding that making a cider from it seemed fairly unlikely, I gave it a try.

It’s the pilsner of the apple cider world – but it’s a pretty decent pilsner.

I don’t mean to say that it tastes like a pilsner; it doesn’t. I don’t even like beer, and pilsners are not exceptions. But I know some of the roles of different beers, and this cider lands right in the same spot. It’s light, but in defiance of my expectations, it’s not empty. It has a presence. It’s the sort of cider you’d actively enjoy in the shade during a very hot day, probably after you’ve been doing something athletic.

In that way, it reminds me a bit of Growers, made up in BC, which lands in roughly the same weight location.

Like the cosmic crisp isn’t a great apple, this isn’t a great cider. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a pleasant or enjoyable cider. Kind of like – and yet moreso than – the cosmic crisp, I think it’s a cider that has an actual role, one other than doing a good job at surviving shipping.

It’s supposed to be hot this week. If not this week, we’re heading into August.

I bought a bottle. We’ll see.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Cut that out!

Some reading!

a tiny ecosystem

Maps Release: Greater Northshore Bike Connector, MEGAMAP 2.0.1

PBS

saving to the murmuration

a baseline apple and a speciality cider

Profile

August 2025

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags