Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

As bad luck would have it, I had two simultaneous meetings on Saturday at 11 AM PDT. As I'm the Secretary of the SFSFC Board of Directors, I had to prioritize that.

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After the SFSFC meeting, I went over to the Montreal in 2027 Worldcon Bid Committee meeting, which was mostly over, but those people who wanted to talk after the actual meeting about various SMOFfish topics hung around for a while since they had their WSFS rules expert there. I find that there are many things about WSFS that people think are required but that are not, when you actually read the rules. Conversely, there are things that are required that some people, including some Worldcon committee management, do not in my opinion think they should have to do, and sometimes they simply won't do them because there's nobody out there who will compel them to do so. No, I'm not going to go into specifics.

I'm glad I went to the Wigwam for a big breakfast on Saturday morning. Between the emergency firewood unloading and two longish meetings, I was a bit tired and hungry when I got done with everything. Furthermore, Lisa wanted to go grocery shopping on Sunday early morning, so I should have gone to bed much earlier than I did. As it was, I only got three hours of sleep before the alarm awakened me just after midnight.

Lisa and I drove to WinCo Foods in Reno, leaving the house at about 1 AM and getting home around 3:45. A fairly routine trip, with (not surprisingly) no traffic to worry about and the only challenge being dodging forklifts, pallet jacks, and aisle full of staff stocking shelves.

This morning, Lisa hitched up the utility trailer to the Small Orange Pickup and we went over to Big R shortly after they opened at 7 AM and collected what we hope will be the final pallet of Pres-to-Logs this season. This pallet was not in the best of shape, and despite Lisa being very cautious on the slow drive home, things didn't go that well.

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Measuring only based on the large wood box, we are now at 105% of capacity on firewood, as the small box on the front porch and the ready supply of up to 24 logs in the living room were also full. We pulled the pallets out of the trailer for later reduction to kindling (the pallets are untreated wood, so we consider them safe to burn), I put the plastic wrap into the trash, and Lisa put the trailer and pickup away. She then went to bed, having been up all night working on a project. I'll see her again in the wee hours of Sunday morning as we plan to go grocery shopping.

I was very glad to get all of that wood put away, as the wind came up this afternoon, and it looks like it might rain. I would have been very annoyed to have spent all that money on firewood only to have it make like the Wicked Witch of the West.

I didn't post anything yesterday because I mostly took the day off and Kayla was very busy. If you're subscribed to her journal, you'll understand why.

Lisa and I plan to go pick up a pallet of firewood from Big R tomorrow morning and get it unloaded sometime this weekend.

It's funny that being able to get to bed early is a highlight of my Friday evening.

Today was my monthly chiropractic appointment. I told the chiropractor that he might have saved my life by telling me to do to the ER a month ago at my previous appointment, although I do hope that I would have done so when the pain got worse. I'm feeling vastly better than I was a month ago, and took no pain from the chiropractor doing his normal work on my back.

I am aware that I haven't finished the backdated entries to tell the rest of my hospitalization story. Much of it was a blur, but fortunately I did take some photos that will help me remember what happened.

I don't understand why the DST time change disorients me much more than traveling (and crossing time zones) appears to do. For the past couple of days, I've been falling asleep in the late afternoon, sleeping for several hours, then being up for a few hours, then going back to bed. I think I'm getting the same total number of hours of sleep, just in two separately stretches.

Kayla bought us a new pair of earrings on Friday.

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Although I'm past the initial three-week period of "don't take them out at all and treat them three times per day with our cleaning solution," I am continuing to treat them once a day. We also bought a travel size of the treatment solution in order to take it along with us when we go up to BC later this month.

I did my income taxes today. As with last year, I owe about $300, primarily because the pension income attributable to XPO Logistics having spun off GXO and nominally retired me. I haven't been able to figure out a way to have the retirement plan withhold some of my monthly pension payment to cover this, but it's not a hardship, and it's not enough to trigger an underpayment penalty.

I have a number of things that would nominally be tax-deductible, but not enough to make it worthwhile to itemize deductions.

The History Guy takes up the subject of why Nevada is a state.



Nevada does have a strange history, and THG doesn't have time to include the oddities like when Nevada assumed that California wouldn't mind giving up parts of Lassen and Modoc Counties, and when the state carved out a county from Nye County that would have no residents (Bullfrog County) in order to collect money from the federal government related to the nuclear waste disposal site.

THG's video does include the story of The Most Expensive Telegram Of All Time.

This morning, when I looked out the front door, I got a surprise.

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By the end of the work day, all of the snow had melted, and the day continued chilly, but otherwise dry. I'm glad we still have plenty of firewood.

Yesterday it rained most of the day, and last night the temperatures were below freezing, making for an icy porch and sidewalks. Today we had intermittent rain and wind. Now I know the weather has been much worse for many other people, with blizzard conditions back east, but it's really unusual for us to get this much rain over a day or two. Or if we do get that much rain, it will happen all at once, with 20% of our annual precipitation falling in an hour.

During a break in the rain, Lisa moved wood from the large wood box to the small one on the porch and also filled up the smaller box in the living room. I offered to put on my work clothes and help, but she said she'd do it, as I'm still not supposed to do heavy lifting for a while. I've been carrying only two logs at a time rather than four, and that's still up from one log (they weigh around 3 kg each) when I first came home from the hospital.