I’ve long wondered how any woman can bear to stay with the selfish scum of the right. There’s no accounting for taste, and some of those women are probably sleazy themselves, but sometimes we can see lines being crossed and spouses just plain giving up on their terrible men.

Case in point: Angela Paxton is divorcing her slimy partner, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. I’m happy to applaud her imminent independence, but she stuck with him for forty years — what was she thinking?

Some gossip we’ll have to wait on is the rumors that Katie Miller and her rat-faced evil partner, Stephen Miller, are on the outs. She’s rumored to be shifting to Elon Musk, which is the one choice that debatably is not an improvement in her situation.

I know I’m being petty, but I enjoy seeing these people suffer.

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.

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