Shallow Thoughts : : misc

K is for Knitting

Seems like during the lockdown, everyone's taking up new crafts -- sewing, bread baking, or whatever. I was a little ahead of the game. Last winter I learned to knit. I'd crocheted a little when I was a teenager, but I'd always seen knitting as much more complicated.

It started because I couldn't find a decent headband. I'm not a big fan of hats, because migraines, but sometimes my ears get cold on hikes. I was dissatisfied with the headbands I found in outdoor apparel stores: they tend to be too narrow to cover my ears, too tight, overpriced, and don't come in many colors either. I bought one but wasn't happy with it. I decided I could probably learn to knit my own headband before I found one I liked.

Los Alamos has a great knitting community, as it turns out. (I suspect most communities do). Doris, a friend from Toastmasters, is an avid lifelong knitter (I knew that from her Toastmasters talks, of course), and she steered me to some good beginner books and gave me hints on which size starter needles to buy, including a set of circular needles since everything I was interested in making lent itself to knitting "in the round". But Doris also gave me a list of four different times the local knitters met in person, including one very convenient weekly meeting at the White Rock Library just a few miles from home.

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G is for Gabion (and a nice hike in Upper Pajarito Canyon)

Last week we hiked Upper Pajarito Canyon, a trail I mostly hadn't seen before (I'd been on parts of the trail once, years ago, on a hike I mostly don't remember except as "try not to slide off the slippery rainy hillside).

It turned out to be a beautiful trail. Early on, there are imposing stone cliffs that reminded us all of the moai on Easter Island. The trail wound through a rocky canyon, then up along the hillside where I was able to indulge my hobby of arboronecrophotography, eventually climbing out to a viewpoint.

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Plane Fishing

White Rock has a "glider port", which is just an informal spot along the edge of the canyon where sometimes people fly R/C sailplanes. On days when the winds are right, gliders can get some pretty good lift.

Last Sunday wasn't one of those days. The wind was coming from every direction but east, so the gliders were having to use their motors periodically to climb back up to altitude.

I was mostly trying to stay above the canyon rim, but I noticed all the other pilots were flying down below, so I decided maybe it wasn't that dangerous to let my plane get a little below the edge for a while before starting the motor. Wrong! Below the edge of the canyon, there's a risk of catching some evil rotors off the cliffs. One of those rotors caught my glider's wing and tossed it into a spiral. I was able to recover and get the plane flying straight again -- straight toward the cliff. It smacked hard -- I saw parts flying everywhere.

I didn't expect that the plane itself was salvageable -- it's only styrofoam, after all -- though it looked surprisingly intact. In any case, Dave and I hoped to recover the components: battery, motor, receivers, servos. Hiking to the plane proved difficult: you can get fairly near there on the Blue Dot trail, but then you need to climb three levels of cliff to reach the place where the plane sat. Coming down from above definitely would have required rapelling gear.

But Dave had an idea: let's go fishing!

It took some experimenting to figure out what sort of hook, line and pole you need to fish for a thirty-ounce plane that's fifty feet down a sheer cliff out of sight from the cliff above it. Dave did the fishing and I acted as the caller, sitting some hundred feet away where I could spot the plane through binoculars and shout out which direction he needed to move the line. But we got it in the end! I shot some quick snapshots while I wasn't busy spotting, which you can see here: Plane Fishing (photos).

Amazingly, the plane was almost undamaged. The plastic spinner was destroyed, but the motor seems fine. The nose of the plane is very slightly askew but not broken. The battery, after being plugged in to the receiver for 48 hours, was down to zero volts, but when we charged it carefully, it took a charge. The canopy went flying off at the moment of impact and is down there in the rocks somewhere, so I have a new canopy, spinner and collet on backorder, but in the meantime, the plane is probably flyable. I'll find out this weekend -- but if we fly at the gliderport, I'm not letting it get lower than cliff level, ever!

Snowy Views and Giant Curling Icicles

And the snow continues to fall. We got a break of a few days, but today it's snowed fairly steadily all day, adding another -- I don't know, maybe four inches? Snow is hard to measure because it piles up so unevenly, two inches here, eight there.

The hiking group I'm in went snowshoeing up in the Jemez last week -- lovely! The shrubs that managed to stick up above the snow all wore coats of ice, which fell by afternoon, littering the snow around them with an extra coat of glitter.

And it was lovely here too, with a thick blanket of snow over everything. (I need to get some snowshoes of my own, to make it easier to explore the yard when conditions get like this, otherwise the snow would be thigh-deep in places. For the hike last week, I borrowed a pair.)

And, of course, there's the never-ending fascination of watching icicles, snow glaciers moving down the roof, and, this time, huge curving icicles growing downward above the den deck. They hung more than four feet below the roof before they finally separated and fell with a huge THUMP!, leaving a three-foot-high pile of snow that poor Dave had to shovel (I helped with shoveling at first, until I slipped and sprained my wrist; it's improving, but not enough that I can shovel ice yet).
Images of the snowstorm and the showshoe hike: Snowstorms in January 2019.

Keeping track of reading

About fifteen years ago, a friend in LinuxChix blogged about doing the "50-50 Book Challenge". The goal was to read fifty new books in a year, plus another fifty old books she'd read before.

I had no idea whether this was a lot of books or not. How many books do I read in a year? I had no idea. But now I wanted to know. So I started keeping a list: not for the 50-50 challenge specifically, but just to see what the numbers were like.

It would be easy enough to do this in a spreadsheet, but I'm not really a spreadsheet kind of girl, unless there's a good reason to use one, like accounting tables or other numeric data. So I used a plain text file with a simple, readable format, like these entries from that first year, 2004:

Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions, Charles Gallenkamp, Michael J. Novacek
  Fascinating account of a series of expeditions in the early 1900s
  searching for evidence of early man.  Instead, they found
  groundbreaking dinosaur discoveries, including the first evidence
  of dinosaurs protecting their eggs (Oviraptor).

Life of Pi
  Uneven, quirky, weird.  Parts of it are good, parts are awful.
  I found myself annoyed by it ... but somehow compelled to keep
  reading.  The ending may have redeemed it.

The Lions of Tsavo : Exploring the Legacy of Africa's Notorious Man-Eaters, Bruce D. Patterson
  Excellent overview of the Tsavo lion story, including some recent
  findings.  Makes me want to find the original book, which turns
  out to be public domain in Project Gutenberg.

- Bellwether, Connie Willis
  What can I say?  Connie Willis is one of my favorite writers and
  this is arguably her best book.  Everyone should read it.
  I can't imagine anyone not liking it.

If there's a punctuation mark in the first column, it's a reread. (I keep forgetting what character to use, so sometimes it's a dot, sometimes a dash, sometimes an atsign.) If there's anything else besides a space, it's a new book. Lines starting with spaces are short notes on what I thought of the book. I'm not trying to write formal reviews, just reminders. If I don't have anything in specific to say, I leave it blank or write a word or two, like "fun" or "disappointing".

Crunching the numbers

That means it's fairly easy to pull out book titles and count them with grep and wc. For years I just used simple aliases:

 All books this year: egrep '^[^ ]' books2019 | wc -l
 Just new books:      egrep '^[^ -.@]' books2019 | wc -l
 Just reread books:   egrep '^[-.@]' books2019 | wc -l

But after I had years of accumulated data I started wanting to see it all together, so I wrote a shell alias that I put in my .zshrc:

booksread() {
  setopt extendedglob
  for f in ~/Docs/Lists/books/books[0-9](#c4); do
    year=$(echo $f | sed 's/.*books//')
    let allbooks=$(egrep '^[^ ]' $f | grep -v 'Book List:' | wc -l)
    let rereads=$(egrep '^[-.@\*]' $f  | grep -v 'Book List:'| wc -l)
    printf "%4s:   All: %3d   New: %3d   rereads: %3d\n" \
           $year $allbooks $(($allbooks - $rereads)) $rereads
  done
}

In case you're curious, my numbers are all over the map:

$ booksread
2004:   All:  53   New:  44   rereads:   9
2005:   All:  51   New:  36   rereads:  15
2006:   All:  72   New:  59   rereads:  13
2007:   All:  59   New:  49   rereads:  10
2008:   All:  42   New:  33   rereads:   9
2009:   All:  56   New:  47   rereads:   9
2010:   All:  43   New:  27   rereads:  16
2011:   All:  80   New:  55   rereads:  25
2012:   All:  65   New:  58   rereads:   7
2013:   All:  59   New:  54   rereads:   5
2014:   All: 128   New: 121   rereads:   7
2015:   All: 111   New: 103   rereads:   8
2016:   All:  66   New:  62   rereads:   4
2017:   All:  57   New:  56   rereads:   1
2018:   All:  74   New:  71   rereads:   3
2019:   All:   3   New:   3   rereads:   0

So sometimes I beat that 100-book target that the 50-50 people advocated, other times not. I'm not worried about the overall numbers. Some years I race through a lot of lightweight series mysteries; other years I spend more time delving into long nonfiction books.

But I have learned quite a few interesting tidbits.

What Does it all Mean?

I expected my reread count would be quite high. As it turns out, I don't reread nearly as much as I thought. I have quite a few "comfort books" that I like to read over and over again (am I still five years old?), especially when I'm tired or ill. I sometimes feel guilty about that, like I'm wasting time when I could be improving my mind. I tell myself that it's not entirely a waste: by reading these favorite books over and over, perhaps I'll absorb some of the beautiful rhythms, strong characters, or clever plot twists, that make me love them; and that maybe some of that will carry over into my own writing. But it feels like rationalization.

But that first year, 2004, I read 44 new books and reread 9, including the Lord of the Rings trilogy that I hadn't read since I was a teenager. So I don't actually "waste" that much time on rereading. Over the years, my highest reread count was 25 in 2011, when I reread the whole Tony Hillerman series.

Is my reread count low because I'm conscious of the record-keeping, and therefore I reread less than I would otherwise? I don't think so. I'm still happy to pull out a battered copy of Tea with the Black Dragon or Bellweather or Watership Down or The Lion when I don't feel up to launching into a new book.

Another thing I wondered: would keeping count encourage me to read more short mysteries and fewer weighty non-fiction tomes? I admit I am a bit more aware of book lengths now -- oh, god, the new Stephenson is how many pages? -- but I try not to get competitive, even with myself, about numbers, and I don't let a quest for big numbers keep me from reading Blood and Thunder or The Invention of Nature. (And I had that sinking feeling about Stephenson even before I started keeping a book list. The man can write, but he could use an editor with a firm hand.)

What counts as a book? Do I feel tempted to pile up short, easy books to "get credit" for them, or to finish a bad book I'm not enjoying? Sometimes a little, but mostly no. What about novellas? What about partial reads, like skipping chapters? I decide on a case by case basis but don't stress over it. I do keep entries for books I start and don't finish (with spaces at the beginning of the line so they don't show up in the count), with notes on why I gave up on them, or where I left off if I intend to go back.

Unexpected Benefits

Keeping track of my reading has turned out to have other benefits. For instance, it prevents accidental rereads. Last year Dave checked a mystery out of the library (we read a lot of the same books, so anything one of us reads, the other will at least consider). I looked at it and said "That sounds awfully familiar. Haven't we already read it?" Sure enough, it was on my list from the previous year, and I hadn't liked it. Dave doesn't keep a book list, so he started reading, but eventually realized that he, too, had read it before.

And sometimes my memory of a book isn't very clear, and my notes on what I thought of a book are useful. Last year, on a hike, a friend and I got to talking about the efforts to eradicate rats on southern California's Channel Islands. I said "Oh, I read an interesting novel about that recently. Was it Barbara Kingsolver? No, wait ... I think it was T.C. Boyle. Interesting book, you should check it out."

When I got home, I consulted my book lists and found it in 2011:

When the Killing's Done, T.C. Boyle
  A tough slog through part 1, but it gets somewhat better in part 2
  (there are actually a few characters you don't hate, finally)
  and some plot eventually emerges, near the end of the novel.

I sent my friend an email rescinding my recommendation. I told her the book does cover some interesting details related to the rat eradication, but I'd forgotten that it was a poor excuse for a novel. In the end she decided to read it anyway, and her opinion agreed with mine. I believe she's started keeping a book list of her own now.

On the other hand, it's also good to have a record of delightful new discoveries. A gem from last year:

Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore, Robin Sloan
  Unexpectedly good! I read this because Sloan was on the Embedded
  podcast, but I didn't expect much. Turns out Sloan can write!
  Had me going from the beginning. Also, the glow-in-the-dark books
  on the cover were fun.

Even if I forget Sloan's name (sad, I know, but I have a poor memory for names), when I see a new book of his I'll know to check it out. I didn't love his second book, Sourdough, quite as much as Mr. Penumbra, but he's still an author worth following.

A Post-Christmas Snow

The morning after Christmas we woke up to a beautiful white world, with snow still coming down.

Shoveling is a drag, but still, the snowy landscape is so beautiful, and still such a wonderful novelty for ex-Californians.

This morning we awoke to much the same view, except the snow was deeper -- 8-12 inches, quite a lot for White Rock.

We also had the usual amusement of Roof Glaciers: as the mat of snow gradually slides off the metal roof, it hangs off the edge, gradually curling, until finally the weight is great enough that it breaks off and falls. Definitely an amusing sight from inside, and fun from outside too (a few years ago I made time-lapse movies of the roof glaciers).

And then, this being New Mexico, the sun came out, so even while snowflakes continued to swirl down we got a bright sunny sparkly snow vista.

Yesterday, the snow stopped falling by afternoon, so Raspberry Pi Club had its usual Thursday meeting. But the second storm came in hours earlier than predicted, and driving home from Pi Club was a bit icy. I wasn't looking forward to the drive up to PEEC and back tonight in a heavier snowstorm for our planetarium talk; but PEEC has closed the Nature Center today on account of snow, which means that tonight's planetarium talk is also canceled. We'll reschedule, probably next quarter.

Happy Holidays, everyone, whether you're huddling inside watching the snow, enjoying sunny weather, or anything in between. Stay warm, and walk in beauty.

A Splint for "Trigger Thumb"

It's been a while since my last blog post. Partly that's because I've been busy with other things, like a welding class, learning a lot of great new techniques. But it's also because I've been trying to keep typing to a minimum (not easy for me) because of a thumb problem.

It's called "trigger thumb" and apparently is caused by a tendon that gets stuck in its sheath. It can be caused by repetitive motion, but in my case I just woke up with it one day, after a day when I hadn't been doing anything particularly hand-intensive.

Cortisone injections and surgery are the usual treatment. I may yet try cortisone, but the number of such injections you can get are severely limited (like, twice in a lifetime), and the surgery didn't sound appealing, so I wanted to try other approaches first.

Some discussions I found mentioned splinting. I tried splinting it with a popsicle stick and tape, but a straight splint made it much worse: keeping it straight made it want to stay straight, and after removing the splint it was quite painful to try to bend it. For weeks it just kept getting worse.

But I finally found something that helped: a bent splint. I glued two pieces of popsicle stick together at an angle, and at bedtime I taped them to my thumb so it stayed a little bent overnight. That helped quite a bit. But it was a pain to set up and tended to come loose. I wanted something I could just slip on and off, without going through all that tape, that wouldn't come loose. Preferably with an adjustable angle.

So I cut some strips of steel, got out the welder and made myself a bent splint. It's tough to weld thin pieces with the MIG welder, and I melted it in places. But it worked amazingly well. I lined it with some Moleskin, and after a few days with it, the thumb definitely started to feel better. The tendon was still popping, but it hurt a lot less and I could start using my hand again. And the metal splint let me adjust how much my thumb was bent, which wasn't true at all with the popsicle stick approach.

Plus, it had a neat sort of Spanish Inquisition/Hannibal Lecter look. It looks like a torture device, but really, it's amazingly comfortable.

The only problem: it was heavy. I could feel it dragging down on my thumb all the time. I wished it was a little lighter.

The hardware store sells strips of brass that looked like just the ticket. But you can't MIG weld brass, only steel. Good thing I was taking that welding class! I asked the instructor, and he brought in some carbon-bronze filler rod and showed me how to "TIG braze". It's difficult and fiddly: brass melts very easily, and the trick is to get the base metal hot, then bring in the filler rod and blip the TIG pedal just enough to melt the rod so it flows in without melting the base metal. While my instructor made it look easy, when I tried it myself I always ended up getting the temperature too hot and melting some of the brass.

So my splint looks a bit ragged in spots. Still, the finished product works wonderfully, and it's quite a bit lighter than its steel cousin. Dave thinks it still looks Hannibal Lecterish, but that doesn't bother me. I skipped the Moleskin this time: it's comfy enough without it, and it's a lot easier to slip the splint on and off.

I'm still trying to spend less time typing until my thumb heals completely. But with the splint, and occasional ice packs, it's improving, doesn't hurt any more, and I'm hoping I can get by without cortisone.

And besides, isn't it more fun to weld up your own medical equipment? (Don't tell the AMA!)

Pot Sherd

Wandering the yard chasing invasive weeds, Dave noticed an area that had been disturbed recently by some animal -- probably a deer, but there were no clear prints so we couldn't be sure.

But among the churned soil, he noticed something that looked different from the other rocks.

A pot sherd, with quite a nice pattern on it!

(I'm informed that fragments of ancient pots are properly called "sherds"; a "shard" is a fragment of anything other than a pot.)

Our sherd fairly large as such things go: the longest dimension is about two inches.

Of course, we wanted to know how old it was, and whether it was "real". We've done a lot of "archaeology" in our yard since we moved in, digging up artifacts ranging from bits of 1970s ceramic and plastic dinnerware to old tent pegs to hundreds of feet of old rotting irrigation tubing and black plastic sheeting. We even found a small fragment of obsidian that looked like it had been worked (and had clearly been brought here: we're on basalt, with the nearest obsidian source at least fifteen miles away). We've also eyed some of the rock rings and other formations in the yard with some suspicion, though there's no way to prove how long ago rocks were moved. But we never thought we'd find anything older than the 1970s when the house was built, or possibly the 1940s when White Rock was a construction camp for the young Los Alamos lab.

So we asked a friend who's an expert in such matters. She tells us it's a Santa Fe black-on-white, probably dated somewhere between 1200-1300 AD. Santa Fe black-on-white comes in many different designs, and is apparently the most common type of pottery found in the Los Alamos/Santa Fe area. We're not disappointed by that; we're excited to find that our pot sherd is "real", and that we could find something that old in the yard of a house that's been occupied since 1975.

It's not entirely a surprise that the area was used 700 years ago, or even earlier. We live in a community called La Senda, meaning "The Path". A longtime resident told us the name came from a traditional route that used to wind down Pajarito Canyon to the site of the current Red Dot trail, which descends to the Rio Grande passing many ancient petroglyphs along the way. So perhaps we live on a path that was commonly used when migrating between the farmland along the Rio and the cliff houses higher up in the canyons.

What fun! Of course we'll be keeping our eyes open for more sherds and other artifacts.