Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Judy Anderson (yduJ)'s LiveJournal:

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Thursday, May 31st, 2012
8:10 pm	bicycled home! It's really noticeably further. 2:40 riding; 15 minute stop for peeing and snacking. So, almost 3 hrs overall. I think I'll bring a granola bar next time; it took forever at the grocery store to get checked out for my one item. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
7:56 pm	traffic suckage I gotta figure out a better way to get home from work. I can SEE the freeway from my office. I got up from my desk at 5:07, then diddled about for 12 minutes getting my motorcycle clothes on, getting to the parking garage, and starting the bike. It was 5:19 when I turned out of the parking lot. It took 13 minutes to go the about 1.5 miles of the interchange area to get onto the freeway. It then took another 7 minutes to go the 5 miles between there and the entrance ramp from my old office (which, admittedly, is not so bad at that time of day.) But the entire experience is 20 minutes longer than my previous commute, and that really stinks! I tried Bear Hill Road last time, which entailed quite a large percentage of the 13 minute bit. Then I flew along for a couple of miles... THEN I came to the end where there is a traffic signal, and there were OTHER PEOPLE waiting for the signal. It is a short signal. There were many other people. It took at least 10 minutes sitting at that signal. So that's not any better. Next time I'm going to try Totten Pond, and see how horrible that gets in the depths of Waltham getting to Route 20. Unfortunately there aren't any other routes. Maybe I'll leave a bicycle on the other side of Prospect Hill Park and ride to and from through the park... It's a fair distance over a steep hill, so it wouldn't save any time. It would be more fun than sitting in traffic, though... Not sure where I could park. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 24th, 2012
10:30 pm	Bicycling to my new workplace! Took 2 hrs 24 mins for 26.6 miles. About 3/4 of the route is the same as to my old work; at the turnoff I was on target for 1:50 to old work, which is a decent but not record-breaking time. The new work has several hills in that last 6 miles which slowed me down a lot. There are a large number of possible route variations. I'll do something different next time. Surprisingly, one that I thought would add an extra 3 miles only adds 1/2 mile. And some others reduce the total by about 1/2 mile. We'll see how badly urban Waltham center is some time. I don't like urban riding. Then, once I got to work, there was a blood drive. I knew about this, and wore a tshirt from a competing hospital. The blood drive people liked it anyway. I waited a couple hours after my biking adventure before donating to make sure I was all recovered. So, I didn't get much work done today. And I'm tired... (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 19th, 2012
4:12 pm	First waterskiing injury of the year... I smashed up my finger on the ladder. But that was AFTER two nice runs. Presumably it will be healed enough that I could go again tomorrow if I wanted to. Certainly it will be OK with a waterproof nexcare bandage... Still wetsuit weather for me, but hardy souls would not need one. The temp was 64 yesterday morning; it's probably 2-3 degrees higher than that now. We'll see what next week's rain does to the warming of the lake. Maybe it'll be swimming season soon. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
12:06 pm	My office moved. We are now in Waltham, 77 4th Ave. There are many worse things about the new location for me. It is 5 miles further, so that means bicycling less frequently because it'll take 2.5 hours instead of just under 2. Those 5 miles take me to the other side of a nasty interchange, so that means quite a lot more than 5 minutes longer to get home (I usually go home during rush). I haven't figured out a place to charge the electric car, and it would require me to stick around for an extra hour than I usually do to acquire enough charge to get home (it being that much closer to the range limit). The cubes are smaller. Since I hardly have any stuff this isn't a huge problem, except that there isn't space to store a guest chair, and I frequently want to sit with someone in my office (or me in theirs) to go over something. Instead we have little rolling cabinets that push under the desk and can be pressed into service for a guest. The cube walls are lower, 4.5 feet instead of 5.5 feet, and the top foot of the cube wall is frosted glass. This allows for more natural light (of which there is more in the building, which is good), BUT, it also allows for more penetrating sound waves. We've already noticed that when someone's on a conference call everyone in the 24-cube open area can hear every word clearly. When I'm on the same conference call as one of the other people, the 1/2 second delay between them talking and the noise coming out the earpiece is thus more annoying. But there is one really cool thing, which is the wallpaper. I took photos. Click to see them. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
10:10 pm	Dick Tracy comes alive, and so does a mouse Ken ordered a new watch. Er, no, really it's a wrist-mounted cellphone with camera. Can you say "Two Way Wrist TV"??? He now has to spend the next week understanding how it works and programming it with his alarms and appointments. The excitement of tonight was Jocelyn calling down on the intercom, "Tiptoe has a present for you..." I went upstairs, expecting to clean up cat barf or a dead mouse (she had earlier been spotted carrying something in her mouth). But no, it was a live mouse! It was trapped behind the door with Tiptoe on guard. I grabbed the mouse-catching can and the chase was on! But this time it was in the kids' room, which has way more heavier furniture, and way more crap on the floor, and was quite the struggle to flush the mouse out from under dressers, beds, etc. Finally I caught it, not with the can, but with a cardboard box, because the can is round and I kept missing when the mouse was huddled in a corner. I think I'll have this box be the official mouse catching container in the future. By the time I got it caught and transported outside it wasn't moving very quickly, so it probably will not survive long out there. (I did not consider putting it in the cage with the Petco mice.) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
10:11 pm	I had a dream It was a really strange dream. The toilet was clogged. While investigating, I discovered it was Tiptoe clogging it! I retrieved her, fortunately in this dream she wasn't dead or even injured, just wet, and not even dirty. Then I discovered that the toilet clogging had been a replicator, and I now had a wet bedraggled cat (somehow I knew this was the copy) AND the original dry clean cat running around. I also seemed to have Chloe (just one of her), and a ferret. I became concerned about the toilet replicating Tiptoe again, so I went around the house making signs that said "FLUSH" and "CLOSE LID". I spent a lot of time making sure that the five letters in "FLUSH" filled the sign and were evenly spaced. Then I woke up. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 21st, 2012
9:53 pm	Oh, ow! But let's do it again! First windsurfing day of the season. I am SORE! I didn't go as far as I was going at the end of last season and I can still barely move. The cure for this is clearly MORE WINDSURFING! Unfortunately it is going to rain and stuff, and next weekend I'm going to a gaming thing all weekend (which will be fun and hopefully Perry will behave), so it'll be about two weeks before another opportunity and who knows what the weather will bring. If it's a month all these sore muscles will have atrophied into nothingness again. In addition to windsurfing, today there was an Earth Day celebration in Sharon. I suggested to the kids that we bicycle, but Jocelyn wanted to go on her razor scooter. Since we seemed to have three scooters, off we went. I hadn't scootered any distance before. Hey, that's kind of exercise! The gluteus maximus in particular gets a workout. (Maybe I'm not doing it right.) About three miles round trip. So my butt's sore in addition to my arms and shoulders. I'm not sure I care enough about that to keep it up, though. Bicycling is more efficient and more fun. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2012
1:36 pm	concert Last night we went to a Peter Yarrow concert (of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame). Small venue, a coffeehouse series at the UU church in Franklin, maybe 300 people. We were surprised when we got the mailing for the concert series that they had him. So we got tickets. It was sold out, no surprise. Most of the audience was aging hippies like us. Peter spent a fair bit of time reminiscing, alternating with songs we all knew, us encouraged to sing along. Sometimes on the 3rd chorus he'd just accompany and let us do all the singing. He wanted to talk to the audience and kept telling the lights guys to bring up the house lights. Which they'd dim after the next song, and he said the lights crew were just like a dog who was supposed to stay in one place. As soon as you stopped talking to the dog, off he snuck. We all laughed, and I think the lights crew got it after that. "Leave the lights ON!" He seems to be truly upset at how badly U.S. society has regressed since "The Movement" in the 60s/70s, and his new focus is on raising the next generation to have less hate in their veins, through an anti-bullying organization called Operation Respect. It was a nice evening, full of song and agreeable rhetoric. Don't know if the current politicians in our land would agree with the rhetoric, which is of course the problem. He changed the words of a few song verses to be relevant to today's issues. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
11:47 am	bicycling adventure This weekend it was quite windy. So we took advantage of this and rode our bikes to Providence (with the wind), and took the train back home! 26 miles to the Providence station, and then 3 miles back home from the Sharon station. It took 2 hrs 45 mins to get to the station including a couple of rest breaks. The last few miles were very slow, first because it's urban riding and there are stop lights, and second because Providence is hilly. The hill that is no problem at all in the 5th mile of a trip is quite a different story in the 25th mile... It's no wonder the T is going broke: They didn't bother to collect many people's fares. Also, interzone is ridiculously cheap. They should raise interzone prices. It only cost $3 to go from zone 8 to zone 4; it costs $5.75 to go from zone 4 to Boston! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, April 9th, 2012
9:08 am	sad news I just learned that my square dance friend Gail Oliver passed away this weekend (she's been ill but it wasn't expected to be terminal this soon). She was a fun person and she will be missed at all the dance weekends I attend. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
12:01 pm	My body is a hormonal battleground ( TMI ) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 24th, 2012
11:26 pm	It's spring! Put the boat in the water today -- and went waterskiing! With a wetsuit of course. First time ever skiing in March. That makes nine months we've skied during. (November was stupid, some years ago. It was way too cold. I won't do that again. Early October and I hang it up.) Somehow I doubt I'll ever ski during December, January, or February, no matter how unseasonable it gets... Today it was nippy, but not too bad. 60 degrees! How did that happen??? Well, no ice to melt and keep it cold, I guess, combined with last week's eighty degree days. It'll be back to seasonable weather this week so the lake might cool back down. If tomorrow's predicted rain does not amount to much perhaps we'll get the first third of the dock in. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012
10:39 am	Vacation update Had a nice, if abbreviated, visit with family in Yakima. Went on a hike that ended up being pretty muddy, so there was some shoe remediation afterwards. Played board games with friends of family, including Power Grid, which we'd brought by downloading and printing the board and bringing the components in little plastic baggies. It's amazing how small a space you can put a board game in if you try. Jocelyn played with the little kids; Perry was his usual cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face self about some of the activities that he didn't originate. It's getting a lot less acceptable now that he's almost 10 to howl when he doesn't get his way. The other day we were there Jocelyn went with relatives to Yakima Valley Community College where one of the adults works in the biology department and got to play with a large snake, some walking sticks (these are large insects), fiddle with plastic models of the human body that come apart in various ways, and observe the demonstration beehive. It was kind of like a trip to the science museum. I stayed home with Perry, who had declined to come in favor of computer games. At one point I threw him off the computer to read my email, and after a bit he said "it's boring here, there's nothing to do." I pointed out that he had refused to go on the "thing to do" and thus it was his own fault that there was "nothing to do". I made him go on a walk with me, at least, so he got outside. No problems returning to Seattle. Sunday we spent the day with a high school friend of Ken's, who has a daughter just our kids' age. We went to a public swimming pool that has some kid play things. We had tried to go to a really awesome public pool in Lynwood WA but it's so popular you have to get there 1/2 hr in advance and stand in line. At least they have an employee stand with a "pool full" sign so when you get there 10 mins in advance (as we did) you don't have to stand in line only to be disappointed after the wait, but can make other plans immediately. So we went to Mount Lake Terrace instead. Had dinner with memegarden, who I've known online for years but had never met in person. I enjoyed it, and Jocelyn had a good time with their 5 yr old. Perry was a bit of a pain, but does not do well in such situations. Uneventful flight to Sacramento. Rentawreck claims to have credited me for the insurance for four of the days. I should check my credit card statement... Laundry when we got to my mom's house, and hanging out. Grandma played Frank's Zoo with us. We might go on a hike today, maybe including geocaching. We brought Perry's GPS with us but kind of forgot that in Yakima. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 16th, 2012
1:02 am	Not the vacation I planned Arrival at Seattle in good time; not exactly 3:14 on 3/14 but around then. Shuttle bus to Rent-A-Wreck, where they treated us badly: They required us to provide our insurance policy number. I've never been asked for that before, in 25 years of renting cars more often than once a year. Naturally I didn't have the information. Naturally it was after business hours in Mass. We were annoyed. They were intransigent. They told us we could go back to the airport (they'd even give us a ride), or we could buy their insurance for an extra twenty bucks a day. We called them frauds and liars. (OK, so that's not really smart.) Eventually we asked if we could buy the insurance for one day while we discovered the policy information. They said this would work. But of course they made me sign a form that said I accepted the insurance and the total bill including insurance. So we did find out our policy number and we did call them today, and they did say they would do the appropriate adjustments, but I can't say I'm confident in what I'll find on my credit card statement ... But then the real trouble started. We headed up to Snoqualamie pass, moderately successful in dodging Seattle rush hour traffic. Did we get over the pass? No, we encountered snow. And the requirement for any car to have 4WD or chains. We got worried about our ability to survive this in a rental car of unknown handling quality. (It's a Chevy Malibu.) We turned back and got a motel at a truck stop in North Bend. Looked at the weather reports; sounded like things would clear up today with the snow level rising above the pass elevation. Got up this morning, looked at the reports. Well, chains still required. So off we go to the auto parts store, and drop fifty bucks on the cheapest cable style chains and up to the mountain for the second time. We come to the tail end of a traffic jam. Well, really a traffic complete stoppage, because the road was closed for "avalanche control". Which isn't exactly control -- they shoot guns at the mountain to cause avalanches -- but at least it's when nobody is on the road! The radio tells us they'll be letting cars through starting around 10am. Gah. Well, I take a little walk up the road, see a flashing sign saying chains are still required. So, heck, we're just sitting there anyway, we put on the chains. More sitting. 10am comes and goes. No motion. Radio changes to saying they don't know when they'll start letting cars through. We sit some more. 11am and suddenly cars ahead of us are moving!! We go. Uh oh, now the radio is suddenly saying they're going to let cars through at 1pm and that flashing sign has changed to "PASS CLOSED". Aaaaa! Back we go to North Bend. Restaurant and bathroom, it being noon by now. Try to get wifi at the restaurant but it doesn't work; find out the number for road conditions from the wait staff. Still claiming 1pm. We dawdle at the restaurant (aided and abetted by slow service.) YES! 1pm it is!! Off we go. Oops, there are 10000 trucks trying to get on the road from the truck stop, so it takes a while to get onto the highway. Then there are 10000 trucks ON the highway so we aren't exactly going fast. But we get over the pass! 3rd time's the charm! We are finally in Yakima, having arrived only 20 hours late... A little hanging out with relatives, playing Settlers of Catan, feeding goats and chickens, home cooked dinner, yay, relaxing. Can't get one of our laptops on their wireless cuz it's WEP and the laptop's Win7 which is so hand-holdy that it doesn't give you the opportunity to do anything when things are awry. Oh well, at least one of them's working, so you get this report... Hopefully the rest of our trip will go more smoothly. p.s. the Prius check engine light turned off after 191 miles. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
8:18 am	Oh, wait, never mind "Buy a rename token for $15, click here" It's not free. I don't care THAT much. Instead, I'll focus on freaking out about our family trip to WA and CA that starts tomorrow morning. With the Prius driving around with its check engine light on -- hope it doesn't choose "on the way to the airport" as the time to call it quits. We had the stupid "don't put the gas cap on properly and have the check engine light go on" problem. They said it would resolve after 40 miles. But it didn't. But we didn't have time to deal before the trip. So we hope it doesn't die at an inopportune moment. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 12th, 2012
11:04 pm	OMG I could be "yduJ"! From: "LiveJournal" <lj_notify@livejournal.com> Subject: The username 'yduj' is now available! Hi nosrednayduj, Another set of deleted accounts have just been purged, and the username "yduj" is now available. You can: - Rename your account http://www.livejournal.com/rename/ Should I do it? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
7:48 am	microwave update I tried the lemon water treatment. Not sure if it helped. Left it open for another day or so. Then just started using it. The smell did not apparently transfer to the food, and reheating tea is apparently a lot like the lemon water treatment. You can still tell that the microwave smells a little off if you stick your head in and breathe deeply, but really, it's just kind of normal now. Someone at work has decided I have a brain and assigned me work that requires thinking. In my advanced age I've kind of gotten used to just drifting and doing easy tasks, so this is being a stretch. I seem to be making progress, though, so perhaps I'll finish before I go on vacation next Weds. Unfortunately of course I'll be rewarded with more thinking-based tasks. I suppose this is why they pay me the big bucks. (Well, the medium bucks, anyway.) (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012
9:41 am	smelly microwave Last night I made a squash pasta sauce for a potluck. It calls for roasted garlic. Normally I take a few cloves of garlic, put them in a tiny baking dish, cover them with oil, and stick them in the oven for 20 minutes while the squash bakes. But I was using frozen pumpkin, and didn't have time to do the 20 minute thing before we had to leave. So I thought, well, I'll just toss it in the microwave for a couple minutes. Great idea! Uh, except that it turns out that 30 seconds would have been more appropriate timing. I looked over at about the 1:30 mark, and saw smoke curling up from the dish. Uh oh! Turned it off quick, dithered briefly, turned on the stove fan (10 feet from the microwave, unfortunately, so not very effective), grabbed a potholder and extracted the dish, slammed the door to the microwave, ran out the door to the house and dumped the contents under a bush. Well, a lot of smoke got out into the house anyway, but at least the smoke detector didn't go off. Besides, where else was it going to go? So we left the fan on for a few hours hoping it would clear. When we got home, I attempted to clean the microwave, figuring it was going to stink. Yeah, sure enough, burnt garlic is not all that pleasant. Washed it with soap. Hm, still smelly. So I put some baking soda in a bowl and left it in the microwave overnight. Hm, no apparent improvement. So I dissolved some baking soda and wiped down the insides. Hm, still stinky. Dang! Now what do I do? Any ideas? We're leaving it open today, since the smoke from last night seems to have dissipated and so maybe the house can absorb this smell too. Fortunately we have an older microwave we can use while this one is incapacitated. (Which is why I know that 30 seconds would be more appropriate -- I used the old microwave to roast the garlic, and this time I watched carefully!) The sauce is pretty yummy and not too hard, if you don't burn down the house: ~1 quart pureed baked squash (butternut is best) ~1/2 C white wine ~1/2 C toasted pine nuts (another opportunity for burning down the house) ~1/2 C grated parmesan cheese 4-5 cloves garlic, roasted and crushed, and its oil Some more liquid, maybe some spare pasta water Heat in a pot until all are nicely combined. Add liquid until it is a nice consistency. I put the parmesan in too early and it kind of melted more than it should (but I was busy burning down the house so it was in there for longer). (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
2:56 pm	revenge of the abused body So I stayed up til 11 PST three nights running, and of course had trouble sleeping past 8EST. I don't do so well on 6 hrs of sleep, so I had a lot of mountain dew. When I got home I valiently tried to get to bed before midnight, which didn't work very well (the sleeping part, anyway). My body rebelled and this morning I woke with a runny nose and scratchy throat. I'd had the scratchy throat yesterday, but had been kind of hoping it would turn out to be airplane air dehydration instead of an incipient cold... No such luck. I went back to bed instead of getting up and going to yoga. Blood drive at work tomorrow. Don't think I'll be participating. Besides, if this snow amounts to anything I might not want to be driving and I'll stay home. Maybe I'll feel up to x-country skiing. Despite having the cold I went for a quick kayak this afternoon with the snow falling all around me. Lovely, dark, and deep. Er, make that "lovely, kind of grayish, and shallow." (1 Comment |Comment on this)