I apparently live in a place where there are are a lot of indoor/outdoor cats. I'm not quite sure why I see so many cats. I guess there are just a lot of people with indoor/outdoor cats here (oof - mixed feelings). I live in an apartment with no yard (the building itself occupies the yard) but since I live on the second floor, I look out over multiple neighbours' yards. I love this. I look at my yard constantly when I am home. First thing in the morning, all day if I work from home, with my desk set up so I look out, one last time before bed - primarily for birding and just general enjoyment of the outdoors but, increasingly in the last few months, also for cats. I guess I am outside all the time because I walk to and from the train station, I bird all the time, plus I play ingress, I get groceries on foot, etc. Also okay yes I do randomly pspsps on the street sometimes. I see so many that my friend suggested I start a bingo of cats.

Here is a list:

Calico cat, mostly white with scattered orange and tabby spots - Jenny - very friendly, learned her name via tag and also a poster on the street
Big plush grey cat - no idea, often plopped in the yard now
Big fluffy orange cat - probably lives down the street - this cat I have seen for the longest but have no idea who he is
Small white cat with tabby on head & raccoon tail - Luna, owned by the convenience store
White-and-orange, orange saddle - Noisy
Fluffy tabby-and-white, very thin with age, now deceased - Sarah (learned her name bc she only hung out right by her home and I actually talked to the humans who lived there on occasion). She lived till 18!!! but I miss her and when I pass by her place I still reflexively look for her under the bush she liked. I petted her so many times because she would trot to the pavement and let you admire her.
Fluffy large black cat - probably lives near park
Tabby with white paws and white sliver on back - new, I only started seeing them a week or two ago
Dilute tortie/calico - new within a few months, don't know name

This is Jenny:

This picture is so cute I could die

This is how I learned Noisy's name, though I actually saw Noisy after the poster was put up:

But yeah a few days ago I went to get groceries and as I was walking by I distinctly saw Noisy disappear into someone's yard.

Then there are the cats in windows:

Ollie & Luna, the asymmetric and symmetric tuxies in the window (also learned from talking to the neighbour)
A nondynamic duo of a tortie and a tabby tuxie, always sleeping in a bed in the window
White-and-orange shorthair cat, plopped in the window

I have no conclusion for this entry. CATS. (Please keep your cat indoors!)

This is today's freebie. It was inspired by a prompt from gs_silva. It also fills the "Ambiguous Situation" square in my 6-1-26 card for the Hazbin Hotel Fest. This poem belongs to the series Schrodinger's Heroes.

( Read more... )

... is repeating itself.  This post compares Washington, D.C. with occupied Berlin from the perspective of someone who's seen both.

Never forget.

While my colleague and I were speaking about Srs Bsnss with our industrial partners last week, we heard a roaring noise outside the window. The 250th anniversary flyover displays by the fighter jets had begun.

We grabbed our hats and sunglasses and went onto the roof to have a closer look.



It ended up being a very close look indeed. (I would like to point out that none of us were the ones clapping.)



This was a more comfortable view of the formation flying.



Here they are coming from t’other direction.

This continued for around 10 minutes before they all zoomed off, presumably to base for a little rest from the heat.

Got down another 250 words last night and the story is finished. I'm going to give it a couple of days of rest then I'll go in and look for the usual grammar errors, perspective shifts, and repeated words.

Tonight is movie night with the GF so I may not get any words down but we'll see. Sometimes I can't go to bed right away after walking in the door. (But heaven help me if I open a bottle of wine. 2000 words later and I'm thinking, well if I go to bed now I can get four hours of sleep before my next meeting tomorrow...)

Day 7 Tally
ysilme

Day 6 Tally
sanguinity badly_knitted sylvanwitch trobadora cornerofmadness dswdiane shippen_stand ysilme the_siobhan

( past tallies )

Let me know if I have missed your name at any point. And don't forget you can jump in (or out) at any time.

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "Don't add to the casualty list in an emergency." I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

I picked this theme for today from the selected list of themes, because of the violent storms that swept through central Illinois in late June. Here's my post about Tornado Alley moving from the Great Plains through the Midwest to the Southeast.

Among my previous poems that mention tornadoes or other violent storms are "A Tornado of Thought," "Windswept," "Know What You Stand For," "Better to Meet Danger," "In Growth, Reform, and Change," and "Nature's Great Masterpiece," and "The Pequot War."

Established settings in Tornado Alley: Omaha Reservation and Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska (Polychrome Heroics), Stillwater, Oklahoma (Polychrome Heroics), Waxahachie, Texas (Schrodinger's Heroes), River City and Ava and Bluehill, Missouri (Polychrome Heroics), Onion City and Urbanburg, Illinois (Polychrome Heroics), Easy City, Louisiana (Polychrome Heroics), Ninovan, Tennessee (Daughters of the Apocalypse), Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Center
for Elephant Conservation in Florida (Daughters of the Apocalypse).


I'll be soliciting ideas for first responders, troubleshooters, activists, rebels, Women Who Run with the Saberteeth, explorers, refugees, runaway youth, housemates, siblings, parents, teachers, clergy, police, soldiers, leaders, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, failure analysts, ethicists, other people who get into dire situations, running into a fire while others are running out of it, rescuing people, protesting, rebelling, planning, panicking, throwing in the towel, escaping, running like you stole something, adventuring, divorcing, teaching, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, expecting the unexpected, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, war zones, disaster areas, wastelands, trails, sailing ships, distant lands, the forest primeval, prehistory, liminal zones, schools, homeless shelters, prisons, hotels, churches, sharehouses, campfires, laboratories, supervillain lairs, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, stores, farmer's markets, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other places where disasters happen, cataclysms, natural disasters, climate change, the end of the world, S-risks and X-risks, unhappy relationships, PACE your planning, protest rallies, travel mishaps, sudden surprises, the buck stops here, trial and error, supplements that turn out to be mutagenic, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, lab conditions are not field conditions, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Currently eligible bingo card(s) for donors wishing to sponsor a square:

Hazbin Hotel Fest Bingo Card 6-1-26

Winterfest in July Bingo Card 7-1-26


Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One has some serious challenges between the Galactic Arms.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, in hopes of preventing genocide.

A Conflagration of Dragons features the Six Races struggling to survive as the dragons take over more and more territory.

Crystal Wood is about how the mass death of trees can wreck civilization.

The Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find enough resources to survive, when former cities are unsafe.

The Moon Door explores a women's chronic pain group and lycanthropy.

Not Quite Kansas deals with demons, magic, and other mayhem.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks after quitting as the God of Evil. Addiction always has the potential for disaster.

Path of the Paladins includes some really awful situations due to divine politics and mortal foolishness.

Peculiar Obligations deals with Quakers, pirates, and organized crime.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all trying to get along and figure out how to make a functional society. Among the more relevant threads are Berettaflies, the Big One, Dr. Infanta, Iron Horses, Officer Pink, Shiv, and Trichromatic Attachments.

Schrodinger's Heroes has a lot of situations that can destroy things, up to and including whole dimensions.

The Wandering is a series about fantasy time travel where people loop back within their own lifespan.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

( Read more... )

I was having a great dream where I had the superpower of speed like The Flash. I looked out over a large field of short grass that led to a large body of water like a lake, and I was thinking I was going to run across that field and then across the water. I tensed my body in preparation--

Instantly awake with a horrible pain in my leg because that moment of tensing had activated a leg cramp.

She's fine, no worries - well, not fine fine, she's at the hospital, but it's nothing to worry about.

Taking the bus back from the hospital always gets me thinking about Hurricane Sandy. They named a corner after those two boys. They'd be in high school now, or even entering college. It's easy to judge their mother - and don't get me wrong, I do judge her, because she made every possible mistake from before the storm even hit, starting with not evacuating - but people do dumb stuff all the time and it usually works out just fine. People don't usually die because they did something stupid, they don't usually lose their kids over it.

It's been rainy too. It's really just a maudlin way to start a week.

But I still think, every time I take that bus from the hospital, that those kids should've gotten to grow up, and instead they didn't even get to go trick-or-treating that year.

The moral of this post, inasmuch as there even is one, is that if your area is under an evacuation order, or ought to be, fucking evacuate. Or if you've decided to shelter in place, shelter in place. Don't try to evacuate after the storm is already upon you. That's how it all goes wrong.

Today is cloudy and warm. We got a little rain yesterday.

I fed the birds. I haven't seen much activity yet.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 7/7/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I've seen a gray catbird splashing in the big red birdbath.

EDIT 7/7/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 7/7/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

Sparrows and house finches are eating from the hopper feeder.

EDIT 7/7/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I also walked around the yard a bit. Cosmos are blooming in the east-west strip of the prairie garden. Sunflowers are up in several places but not blooming yet. There are some zinnias too. :D

EDIT 7/7/26 -- I cracked 6 apricot pits and got 4 usable seeds, which I bagged in damp sand to cold-stratify in the refrigerator.

Fireflies are out. Cicadas are singing. I saw 2 bats swooping over the house yard.

I am done for the night.

100 STRING ACOUSTIC GUITAR SOLO

Such amazing sound. <3

Jolene (H.P. Lovecraft Version) - Michael Kelly - (Dolly Parton filk)

A truly splendid filk song. :D

It turns out that I was wrong about Aisleriot lacking an auto-build feature. If you double click on a foundation pile, it will move any cards it can from tableau to any foundation. You can also apparently get the same effect by pressing the space bar with your mouse hovering over a foundation pile.

This is preferable to the online solitaire I used's habit of always auto-moving pretty much any card to a foundation if possible. That interferes with play, as you may want it left on the tabeau so as to build down on it. I've regularly had to unbuild foundation piles in that game, and sometimes had to use "undo" for the purpose, as there was nothing left on the tableau which could receive the cards. And if you moved a single card while in that undone state, without thereby making the cards ineligible for the foundation pile(s), they'd be immediately moved back.

What's not so great is how I found it. A misclick had triggered auto-build while I was playing. This told me the feature existed. I didn't know what i had done. There was no relevant menu item or icon, or explanation in the help menu. The man page tells me that you can doubleclick on a single card to move it to a foundation, but I saw nothing there about moving all eligible cards at once.

I finally found the information in a thread about an enhancement request. This functionality was not what the enhancement had asked for, but overlapped enough that someone mentioned it.

Per the man page, there's also "excellent Gnome documentation", which may be the same as the documentaiton quoted in said man page, complete with version number. But my search for this specific feature didn't provide a link to this documentation.

FWIW, the Gemini LLM bot in Google search agreed the functionality existed, but gave a description of how to use it that lacked the key detail that you should doubleclick on a foundation rather than on the game in general, or on the card to be moved. Possibly it was actually telling me what I already knew - that you can double-click on a single card in the tableau to automatically move it and only it to a foundation if it is eligible - having conflated two related questions.

[Update: the method involving hitting the space bar while the mouse points at a foundation does not work. But OTOH, the description just said one needed to "hover", not any particular place where the mouse should be hovering. I had guessed "over a foundation card" to match the doubleclick behaviour. So there may be some arcane recipe that actually works - or not. Bad documentation availability; no biscuit!]

Wildflower meadow returned without planting a single seed

A patch of farmland left to its own devices for over a decade has quietly transformed into a thriving wildflower meadow. It didn’t take expensive seed mixes or heavy machinery. Recovery required only patience, a yearly hay cut, and letting nature do what it does. The find could reshape how governments approach one of conservation’s biggest and most expensive challenges.


This is worth trying anywhere that has at least some seedbank left (that is, the topsoil hasn't been killed or hauled away) and where you have a large amount of land to cover (which can make other options cost-prohibitive). In places that used to be scrub or forest or something other than grassland, it needs mowing at least once a year. Otherwise succession will take over and turn it back into whatever it was. Ideally, mow late enough that nesting creatures have finished and decamped, but early enough to permit regrowth before fall, so there will be winter cover for wildlife and erosion protection for the soil.

( Read more... )

but at least it's cooled down!

(I always picture all this rain after a heat wave like somebody reaching up and literally wringing out the damp air.)

********************************

( Read more... )

Honeybee queens protect themselves from pesticides, but their colonies pay the price

Early on, the workers did their job well. In the first day they stripped out about 95% of the pesticide from the food before it reached the comb.
[---8<---]
But the filter began to slip. By day 10 the workers were removing only 86% of the poison, and it started to build up in the food stored in the cells. The bees’ bodies told the same story. Over 10 days, workers took on 55 times more pesticide than the queen did.

That delay will make pesticide problems difficult to detect and solve. Outside of a study like this, by the time you notice something wrong, it already has a lot of inertia baked in.

( Read more... )

Today we went out to Mattoon so I could attend a permaculture club meeting at Douglas-Hart Nature Center.

( Read more... )

I talked previously about a new online writing software/word processor called Skrib. I have since tried it out. What I liked about it was the search function, being able to toggle between documents from the sidebar, and having the planning/brainstorming board right there alongside my draft. However, I decided it's not for me based on a suggested edits feature that will literally give you suggestions for what to do with your sentences. Skrib purports to be anti-Gen AI and granted, the editorial suggestions feature isn't generating sentences. But telling you what you can do with your sentences comes too close and makes me uncomfortable. I know people use Grammarly or ProWritingAid for the same thing, but I personally don't like it. And it's not useful to me. My editing process is very gut-checky and vibes-based.

So I'm going to stick to Ellipsus. They've recently introduced a premium plan on top of their free one. Their free plan is great: I can have all the projects/documents I want and sync them to the cloud automatically, which covers the basics for me. And I can use timers, focus mode, and add collaborators. The premium plan introduces custom themes and something opt-in called 'emboss' which is like your writing fingerprint (it shows how many sessions you wrote the document in, typing speed, and other stuff meant to show you wrote it yourself, without using AI checkers). I'm irritated that our writing tools now are having to help writers prove they didn't use AI.

I've been incredibly lazy over this five day weekend. I took Friday and Tuesday off, and I get Monday off for the holiday. (Yes, I know everybody else including most of crazy org got Friday off, but the Railroad got Monday, because we always get the following business day whenever a holiday falls on a relief day or weekend, regardless of the day.)

I did clean part of my bathroom today, swept a bit with a dustbin and brush, and did laundry. In the laundry room - I met a guy who was about 34 years of age, in commercial real estate (independent with a buddy), who was about to move with his fiancee (they are getting married in April of 2027). ( Read more... )

***

My cousin has discovered a new writing program: Living Writer, which is supposed to be more user friendly than Scrivener, but she's struggling with it. And the Youtube videos aren't helping. She's doing a two week trial. I tried Scrivener and ended up back in word. I've also tried Obsidian - but that's geared more towards organizing research notes, than it is a writing or journal program. I was hunting for something to back up this journal, and ...well, can't find it? So gave up. (No, I won't do LJ again, been there done that have the battle scars - that's why I'm here.)

She spent the weekend outlining her novel. I don't outline. I outline in the same way that I keep lists. I do it then forget about it. Also I get lost in the outline. I learned how in grade school. It made no logical sense to me.
( why I don't outline - kind of a mini-rant? )

***

Now that I've finished The Bear, Vox Machina and Mighty Neine - I'm trying to move on and not rewatch all three multiple times, until I've memorized them. I fell in love with all three. Hard. Well done, character driven television series are a rare breed. Particularly series in which I like 90% of the characters and they all have interesting arcs, and are flawed.

I'm watching X-Men '97 - finally got to S2, and have seen the first three episodes that dropped. I'll give it this? The second season of X-men '97, or the first three episodes at any rate, is possibly the best season to date of the X-men series. ( Read more... )

From One Surviving Male Bison, Azerbaijan Now Has 25 Calves Born Wild in 7-Year Success Story

As has been the case with other animals, a West Europe zoo held the last remaining male member of the Caucasian bison population. He was bred with several European bison as part of an effort to restore the animal to Azerbaijan, which began in 2012 and culminated with the release of the first animals in 2019.

In Shahdagh, WWF Azerbaijan has slowly watched over the herd as it grew through the additions of 25 calves born wild so far.


It's a valiant effort, but that genetic bottleneck will cause problems.