It’s not just this aching knee that’s making me feel dismal, it’s the dearth of spiders. I limp around the yard, and no spiders. I just got back from the lab, fed the spiders, and they were all hiding — they snatched up mealworms, but really didn’t want to visit. I’ve got an incubator full of egg sacs, but nobody has hatched out yet (maybe next week?).

Even the black widows are hiding in the vegetation, behind veils of silk.

I’m supposed to be out spidering, goddamnit.

Oh well, I’ve got two grandchildren on their way to visit this weekend. I suppose they’ll have to do.

My prize is a lateral meniscus tear.

I talked to the doctor today, and she didn’t express any urgency. I have an appointment for a consultation two weeks from today, and until then I’m supposed to take it easy and rest. I’ve been getting restless already, I’m going to be going stir crazy for two weeks, and I have no confidence that there will be anything to do once I get in.

In other sad news, we just learned that our family doctor, Cara Nachbor, has died. Both Mary and I liked her very much — she was a warm and cheerful person, almost 20 years younger than us, and although we’d heard she was having some health problems, she never let it show in her dealings with her patients. Rather, she always seemed energetic and enthusiastic, so it’s a shock that she died so suddenly.

I’m not going to complain about having to lie about for two weeks.

This biologist does not complain about larval infestations.

My son Connlann, his wife Ji, and our grandson Knut are making the long drive from Tacoma to Morris, traversing the long, long road of I90, just so we can spend the weekend with our big little guy, before Connlann flies off to his new station in Korea for a year. We are eagerly looking forward to it, while fully aware that we’re going to be exhausted afterwards.

I got out of the house this morning on my way to get an MRI. I saw an arthropod!

As for the MRI, I don’t know. I fell asleep during it, in spite of the obnoxiously loud industrial music hammering through the headphones. It might be a few days before it’s analyzed and they can tell me what’s going on.

The good news is that the pain is greatly diminished, replaced with soreness and fatigue. I’m mainly feeling like I need to lie down and sleep while the cartilage/ligaments/whatever carry out repairs.

A sudden, vivid flash of memory:

It’s summertime. I’m 9 years old, I’m clutching a couple of quarters in my hand, every day I’m checking the posters outside the Vale Theater in Kent, and I’m eagerly going to the Saturday afternoon matinee, to see this movie. It was awesome. This was high cinema in the 1960s — it had two rubber monsters, Martian invaders, and a bikini beach party.

Watch the trailer here, or you can watch the whole thing for free on Tubi. There’s also going to be a watch party on Mastodon this evening. It sounds like a great way to spend an evening.

Yay! I have an appointment for an MRI next Tuesday! My insurance company finally approved it.

Cool. This means that it only takes two weeks to get an informed diagnosis of a catastrophically debilitating injury, before we can get around to actually treating it. Not looking forward to growing old in America.

I recently bumped into another archaic photo from the family collection. It’s from sometime in the 1920s, and the attractive woman shepherding her kids is my great-grandmother, Nellie Berg, in Norman, Minnesota. It’s kind of awesome because I remember her in the 1970s, when she was the first in our family to get a color TV, and I discovered that she was a fanatic about roller derby.

One thing that jumped out at me were the names, which sounded familiar and normal to me, but are distinctly old-fashioned and not that common anymore. I like them, they have good associations, but I haven’t seen these appear in my student lists in quite a while.

That’s Nellie in the back. The child on the left is my grandmother, Nora. Next to her is Claude, and then Muriel, and Arlene in front. The father of that brood was named Clarence.

There’s nothing wrong with those names, I’m just interested in how whenever I look back on the family tree, I see so many names that are totally out of style nowadays. All you Nellies, Clarences, Noras, Claudes, and Muriels, speak up in the comments and let me know that the good ol’ names haven’t totally faded away.

Also, I should mention that all of these names came from families with purely Swedish and Norwegian ancestry. I’d be curious to know how these markers changed in various other cultural groups.

Everyone needs a home to come back to, even us space pirates. Chatter among yourselves, tell us a few tales of interstellar adventure.

Previous Thread

Yesterday, I published a video. Looking at it after the fact, I got worried about myself — even though I don’t appear in it, I could see myself clearly, and in particular, the effects of a few days of ill health. I was slow and halting and thin-voiced, and failed to express my enthusiasm for the topic. My apologies to everyone.

I haven’t taken it down because it made me appreciate the privilege of health and mobility. I’ve been brought low by an abrupt and seemingly spontaneous break in a lateral ligament in my knee capsule, which means I can’t bend my right knee without severe pain, and I can’t put my weight on that leg. This has been devastating in multiple ways. Obviously, I can’t walk. The world beyond my front door is suddenly unreachable — there are steps! But then there were other problems. I spend about 4 hours a night trying to precisely bend my leg to minimize pain, which never works, until I fall asleep in exhaustion, and then I’ll be awakened at random times with bolts of agony running up my leg. I’m feeling permanently worn out.

Then I’m currently malnourished, and it’s my own fault. Chronic pain kills my appetite, and I’m beginning to feel the effects, but I can’t be motivated to do anything about it. Mary has been doing her best to supply me with something to eat, but I hate to say it, but she has no sense of taste and minimal skill at cooking. She leaves me these horrible sandwiches — two slices of bread with nothing but a little peanut butter between them — and I have to be desperate to choke them down. That’s what I’ve been living on since Thursday, and it’s not good (she’s at the store right now getting some canned soups that should improve my diet). I’m beginning to think this is a drawback to marrying a woman of Scandinavian descent.*

I’ve been fantasizing about sneaking into the kitchen and whipping up a lazy bachelor’s sandwich. A couple of slices of bread toasted in a little olive oil, some chopped onions and garlic, scrambling an egg, and adding a slice of cheese, some salt and pepper, and adding a splash of hot sauce to wake it up…that would be fantastic. Except then I have to imagine prying myself out of a chair and straightening this painful limb and hobbling into the kitchen to stand on one leg for the three minutes it would take to make it, and then staggering back to my office chair, and somehow lowering myself into it with my right knee sending alarms for every degree of bend I subject it to, and then my appetite evaporates.

I have an appointment with an orthopedist this morning, and I’m hoping that will put this stupid leg back on the road to recovery, before I starve to death.

I’ll get back to trying to do more science outreach once I’ve restored my flesh and am able to get around again. There are spiders right outside my door and I can’t go to them now!

*My grandmother, in her final years, would just go to Arby’s, buy 20 or more roast beef sandwiches, freeze them at home and thaw out one a day for dinner. I cannot imagine living like that, but food was just fuel to her. My mother was skin and bones when she died, because she had so little interest in food, I think my sister kept her alive as long as she did by doing all the cooking. I’ve acquired this bias that my peasant ancestors probably just lived on chunks of dried salt cod with an occasional boiled turnip until they got so tired of it they decided to go Viking.