A Moveable Garden

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)

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• Weather

We did not have our January thaw this week. High temperatures ranged from 36.3°F to 5.0°F, averaging 19.6°F, while lows ranged from -8.5°F to 16.9°F, averaging 3.5°F. We had a little snow, 2-3 inches, overnight on Sunday into Monday the 19th, and this Sunday, the 25th, we started getting snow around 11 a.m., part of the big winter storm throughout much of the U.S., including the deep south (which got ice). Our totals from this storm, which will continue through tomorrow, will appear on next week’s Liminal Living.

The big coronal mass ejection from the sun on Sunday the 18th resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis throughout much of the U.S. We don’t have a great vantage point north but we did see some colour on Mon and Tues nights (including around 2 a.m. one morning).

• Beginnings/Firsts

We pulled out the tabletop and ping pong paddles and balls for the first time in a few years on Tuesday, and during the course of the week played about 3 hours of ping pong, in chunks of mostly about a half-hour at a time. The cat got into it occasionally, too. He likes to perch atop my office chair to officiate.

• Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post

Lots of bird activity at the feeders this week (top row: downy woodpecker; 2nd row: goldfinch and American tree sparrow having words + purple finches & goldfinches; 3rd row: Carolina wren; 4th row: goldfinches; 5th row: two male purple finches + a female purple finch; bottom row: arrival of the mourning dove) …

… and so many birds all day on cold snowy Sunday (top row: goldfinches and male purple finch, male purple finch, tufted titmouse; 2nd row: blue jay, female red-bellied woodpecker, female cardinal; bottom row: goldfinches and a pine siskin, male purple finch and goldfinch)

I enjoyed watching this goldfinch contorting itself to eat fruit from the weeping ‘Red Jade’ crabapple tree on Monday.

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• Wandering 

I walked in town on four days (Mon, Wed, Fri, and Sat — brrr) and wandered up to Norwich, VT to King Arthur Bakery/Store & Café on Tuesday to meet up with five permaculture friends (three of whom live between 1.5 and 3 hours away in VT and NH) for a few hours of shopping, eating, and catching up. Afterward I went to the regional co-op to shop.

in town pics – quite blue!

King Arthur Bakery/Store & Café

Curiosity & Discoveries

I’ve been asked twice in a week about my “current involvement in a nursing education program.” So far as I know 👀, it’s non-existent.

Even odder is “(Chamberlain)” after “Current Student.” I don’t know of any meaning of chamberlain that’s a synonym for or related to being a nursing student — it can mean an officer in charge of managing a royal household, or a treasurer — but there does seem to be a Chamberlain Univ. that has multiple locations around the U.S. The way it just says “Chamberlain” without “University” seems to assume that the person doing this survey is familiar with the name. I guess now that I spent one minute researching this and another minute writing about it I’ll get more of these, which is fine at $0.10 to $0.20 per survey. (As I’ve mentioned, doing these opinion rewards surveys adds up and every year it pays for some apps, like an enhanced version of Flight Radar, and for extra Google cloud storage space.)

• Creating

February is coming …

• Repairing and Maintaining the human(s), the cat, and the cars

Human: I worked out four times this week (4 hours) and walked more than 9,000 steps on five days, including 3 days more than 12,000, two more than 14,000, and one day (Friday) of 20,346 steps due to several walks in town. No treadmilling this week since we’re ping ponging so much. My dermatology pathology from last week’s visit came back benign, whew.

Cat: My husband repaired and replaced the rope on the cat’s condo/scratching post this week. Happy cat!

• Nesting

Cleaning/Maintenance: I think I forgot to write down some tasks I did this week, but at the least I watered the houseplants on Monday, vacuumed the kitchen on Thurs, and did a load of clothes laundry on Sunday. My husband did a dump/recycling run on Saturday and he did some snowblowing today (Sunday) to keep up with the snow storm. As mentioned above, he also repaired and replaced the rope on the cat’s condo/scratching post.

Financial/Admin: My husband walked to the town hall on Friday to pay the registration fees for the two cars due this month. I backed up my laptop on Thursday.

Supplies: Ordered some new dryer balls and some large bandaids on Tuesday. Our electric power (which is also our heat) was out for a little over two hours on Wednesday due to “power equipment damage”; we reported it and started a fire in the woodstove — didn’t need the generator for an outage that short but we were glad we had a lot of propane in case it was a longer outage.

Food: Monday’s dinner was a current favourite of mine, roasted root veggies (in this case, beets, celeriac, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, shallots, garlic, dill, parsley, & rosemary) with jasmine rice and Old Bay shrimp. On Tuesday we both had more roasted root veggies and I had beans and rice with a little cheese while my husband had some of the prepared meat lasagna I bought him at the co-op on Tuesday. He finished that lasagna on Wed and I made cacio e pepe with artichoke hearts for me and we both had more root veggies. Thursday we had cacio e pepe with additional artichoke hearts (and he added roasted chicken to his) and, you guessed it, root veggies. (I just kept making more when we ran out.) Friday I made that Martha Stewart potato & herb risotto (with sage, parsley, and our thyme) (to which my husband added chicken) and sautéed fresh local spinach and our garlic. Finished most of the risotto on Saturday, along with some sautéed broccoli, and homemade bread, and Sunday we had roasted root vegetables and rice (and chicken for him). I like roasting root veggies in winter: it’s simple, it warms the kitchen, it’s tasty, it’s filling, and it’s healthy.

• Sleeping & Dreaming

Sleep was pretty good this week and super dreamy on Sunday. My time sleeping varied quite a bit, from 6 hours 27 mins to 10 hours 11 mins, with my average exactly at 8 hours per night. REM sleep accounted for 13 hours 45 mins and deep sleep for 8 hours. My average sleep score was 90.3 this week.

• Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching  

Reading

I finished On the Calculation of Volume III (2022/2025 transl) by Solvej Balle this week. It’s the third in the 7-part series about a woman (Tara Selter) who’s become stuck in time, specifically the 18th of November. She’s now met a few more people who are also stuck in the 18th November, though for different amounts of time. Together and separately they are trying to understand their situation and how to respond to it, including two who are arguing about whether their role is to intervene to prevent all the particular crises and “critical incidents” that occur on 18 November or to use their experience as an opportunity to find the root cause for the world’s problems and to completely change the foundation of society, of the underlying structures that lead to hunger, assaults, accidents, fires, collapsed buildings, car crashes, suicide, poor living conditions, et al. There’s a lot more but basically, you’re either all in on these novels or you’re not; the experience of reading them is not really something that can be summarised well.

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Interesting essay and not as technically formidable as it might seem: On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other “Alien” Intelligences) by Melanie Mitchell in her newsletter AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans. First she lists reasons why an AI model’s performance on benchmarks may overestimate its real-world capabilities, and then she summarises six cognitive-science-inspired principles for more rigorous evaluation of Artificial intelligence: 1: Be aware of your own anthropomorphic cognitive biases; 2. Be skeptical of others’ (and your own) hypotheses (using the example of Clever Hans the horse as well as a flawed case study that determined that infants prefer prosocial behavior; 3. Design novel variations of stimuli or benchmark items to test robustness and generalization; 4. Be curious about mechanisms underlying performance (i.e., even if a result is accurate, does the AI understand why and how it is as well as humans do?); 5. Consider performance vs. competence, i.e., “does the system possess the capacity under study (competence) but cannot demonstrate it due to unrelated task requirements (performance)?” She uses the probably mistaken idea of object impermanence in infants from psychology to illustrate this one. 6. Analyze failure types, and embrace “negative” results. If your model gets 88% accuracy, one of the best things you can do is look at the 12% of items the model got wrong to determine why.

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Scott Sumner’s Not one penny: Greenland, moon landings, asteroids and other worthless ideas in his newsletter The Pursuit of Happiness is worth reading. “[B]ig cold places are a fiscal drag with little military value, manned space flight is mostly a waste of time and money, and the minerals in asteroids are of little value. … Real value comes from talented people working together on mundane projects in well-functioning countries, not seeking vast resources in polar regions or distant planets.”

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Listening

Some Shazam’d songs this week

Watching

We finished the Lynley series this week, the 24-episode version starring Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small that aired from 2001 to 2008. We also watched the NFL football playoffs on Sunday.

• Connections &  Community

Local Support: Had lunch with friends at King Arthur Bakery & Café (Norwich VT) on Tuesday and shopped at the regional co-op after that. Bought capers at the local co-op on Thursday. Ate at a local bakery on Friday and shopped at the local farmstand that afternoon (Rustic Bakery’s crackers, Harvest Maine celeriac & red pepper dip, picking up Xmas gift cards family had bought). Had breakfast at a local bakery/café on Sat.

Relationships: Ran into neighbour (PA) and her new puppy (B) on a walk on Monday and chatted a bit, and on the way home my husband chatted with another neighbour (JL) for 25 mins. As mentioned above, I had lunch and shopped with some permaculture group friends (ED, SD, MAB, DK, & KKT) at King Arthur on Tuesday. A friend (ND) called on Wed morning. Emailed with a friend (DLP) and chatted with an acquaintance (MB) for about 10 mins on Thursday. Permaculture group (6 of us) met on Thursday morning via Zoom for an hour. Salon met in person on Friday with seven of us, and also on Friday chatted with a friend/catsitter (DO) while walking. Ran into a friend (JC) at the café on Sat. Our neighbour (SL, and dog O) brought us some scones on Sat. afternoon that she and her granddaughter had made at King Arthur Bakery (coincidentally). Usual texting, social media connections.

• Endings/Harvest 

I harvested thyme from under about 10 inches of snow on Friday (for the risotto)!

• All This Useless Beauty

snow field, cloud field

sparkling snow

the art of the puffed-up downy — that careful smudge of a red patch and the repetition of white brush marks on the feathers (bonus: mourning dove in flight in sunlight)