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Heat spell finally broke.

Hal-lay-LOOL-ya.

I have lived through heat spells before, but I can't remember any as bad as this past three days. (That's probably due to my incredibly bad memory more than climate change.)

Since yesterday was supposed to be marginally cooler than the two preceeding days, I went over to the New Paltz community garden to water the seedlings I'd planted last week.

I was expecting to find the seedlings had all died. And maybe some did, but not all: Dried grass clippings turn out to be a very effective mulch.

Place was like the asylum grounds of Hell—completely deserted with a kind of pitiless stark white HD light. It was weird to be the only person present in that vast garden! Maybe I walked 50 yards total, and so much sweat poured off me, I looked as though I'd just come out of a shower.

###

My stomach is still not 100%. I've been sleeping badly, and never more than five hours a night. I remind myself that it is these factors—and not the inherent Evil of the Universe—that are responsible for the pissy mood I'm in. And these factors are controllable. When DonkeyBody ([personal profile] smokingboot™) is back to optimal functioning & I can sleep eight hours, the Universe will once more go back to being a pleasant place filled with laughter & magic.

At least, that's what I am telling myself.
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Not a great day, yesterday.

Getting ill—verifiably ill with no part of it due to some subliminal desire to feel sorry for myself—makes me feel fragile, and when I feel fragile, I get depressed, I get lonely.

But nobody I wanted to talk to wanted to talk to me.

J___ L_______ didn't pick up the phone. He probably saw it was me, I thought. And who would want to talk to me?

My other phone-buddy of choice may be dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Imagine! I thought. He's letting a cancer diagnosis interfere with talking to me.

I still wasn't feeling 100%: My stomach was lodgy, my appetite nil. I felt exhausted, and with that kind of exhaustion comes a deep brain fog. I had work to do, & I was doing it but neither happily nor easily.

And it was fuckin' hot out—like that Twilight Zone episode where everybody is melting because the Earth is veering into the Sun only it turns out they are hallucinating because the Earth is really veering away from the sun.

###

When I get depressed like that, I put off doing errands.

Like my car needs an oil change.

But what if in mucking around with the car, the mechanic finds that it needs $5,000 worth of work or it will explode on the Mid-Hudson Bridge tomorrow?

Under those circumstances, wouldn't it be better not to get the oil changed?

I mean, if they don't discover the car needs $5,000 worth of work, then it can't explode, right?

###

All afternoon long, I Remunerated gloomily away. Lew & Ed's wedding is this coming weekend, and I'm going to Ithaca & Edinboro for four days. Some details I took care of way in advance, but some are still dangling—like should I worry about the cats?

Four days is kind of the max for leaving cats untended with lots of food & water, and multiple litterboxes.

I never would have left Sybyl that long, but then, Sybyl loved me, and Mabel-Molly & Molly-Mabel do not. Never in my long history of animal companions have I ever had two who seemed so utterly indifferent. It's like adopting a waif from a Romanian orphanage & taking them home only to discover they have Psychotic Attachment Disorder.

(Well—Molly-Mabel may love me a little. She follows me around the house & often leaps up, meowing, for pets. But she dislikes snuggling & being picked up. Mabel-Molly has a memory like an elephant because she has never forgiven me for trying to condition & comb out her mats, and actually hisses at me every now & then—half-heartedly, true: a hiss of dislike not of aggression, but still.)

I don't really get a whole lot back from the kiskas.

When I am feeling upbeat, this is not a problem.

But I can't always feel upbeat.

###

In the late afternoon, Ichabod called.

We were both In a Mood.

Somehow, we started talking about RTT. "You know, every time I see him, we have at least one big fight," I complained to Ichabod. "And he tells me, 'I don't even feel like you're my mother. We hardly ever talk. You don't ever know what's going on in my life—' which isn't true, by the way. Everything that goes on in his life, he immediately posts to social media.

"So then I try to call him. And he never picks up the phone!"

"You & RTT need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.

"You think everyone should go to therapy," I said.

"That's true," Ichabod said.

"But I already know what the issue is. The real reason RTT doesn't feel like I'm his mother is because I'm so marginal. I don't have a home; I have a place where I'm staying for now. And he's ashamed of me because all his other friends have mothers with homes—"

"You really need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.

###

In the evening, J___ L_______ texted a starburst of photos:



Was sailing up in San Francisco all day! I'll call—

We'll talk SOON, I deferred hastily because by that point, I was utterly incapable of muttering a single word to another human being.

But the pictures of the glorious and presumably cool San Francisco Bay did make me feel a whole lot better.

###

In the end, it is what it is.

You sit at the table with the cards you're dealt, and sometimes you know the game you're playing, and sometimes, you don't, and sometimes by the time you figure out the game you are playing, they have changed the rules.

In the end, all you are really is a system of molecules whose coding has managed to defy entropy for 70 or 80 years. And the Universe is vast, filled with systems of molecules all doing their best to defy entropy. And so, gas clouds spin into stars and stars splinter into planets and things happen on those planets before the stars go all supernova, and nothing in your narrative can compare to those stories. Still, all stories have the same subtext: It is what it is.
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I ignored the mystery stomach ache & did errands. You're just being a slacker! I told myself.

Got back to the casa & began Remunerating. But in addition to the stomach ache, I felt... off.

Now, I never know when I feel off whether I really feel off or I'm just malingering. I'm incredibly lazy, & will seize every opportunity to do absolutely nothing—

But, no. I had a throbbing headache (& I don't usually get headaches), and I felt weak, and my insides were churning—and then I broke out in a fearful sweat just before my insides did what insides do when they churn—and I felt as though I could barely crawl back to my bed.

Food poisoning or norovirus?

Spent the rest of the day and the following night in bed in a semi-delerium, listening to a bizarre Netflix show called Ginny & Georgia, which is simultaneously good & baaaaaad. (I have a thing for teenage dramas.) I had to guess what the characters looked like 'cause I couldn't open my eyes.

Woke up this morning feeling more or less normal, so I guess it was food poisoning?

Still. I'm going to be sedentary today.

###

Drama this morning: The water in the house turned off!

Icky has this ancient Orbit digital timer on his irrigation hose. It keeps not timing, so the watering hose keeps not going on—and his little tomatoes were all parched & dying. I fiddled with the Orbit settings to give the the tomatoes a soak—and in doing so, somehow managed to fuck with the water pressure inside the house.

Icky berated me soundly for this over the phone, and, of course, he was not wrong—one really shouldn't fuck with machinery unless one knows what one is doing.

Still, I felt aggrieved—I thought I was doing a good thing! Shouldn't I get credit for that?

If it's not Icky being a dick, it's the U.S. starting World War III!

Always fuckin' something.
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Woke up yesterday with a throbbing—& slightly swollen (medial collateral ligament)—knee.

This is something that happens from time to time.

I'm fairly certain it's due to an ancient right ankle injury that causes me to pronate overly when I'm wearing the wrong shoes & not paying attention. I really should go to Montano's, which has a pedorthist on staff, to buy a pair of shoes that will correct for the pronation.

Anyway, because my knee was throbbing, I did not go to the gym, which, of course, was the sensible thing not to do. But I put myself through all sorts of mental punishment! Surely, if I were a real trouper, I'd soldier through the discomfort! I was just being lazy! Blah, blah, blah.

Thing is I am very lazy. Left to my own devices, I would lie around on my sofa all day long scarfing chocolate hazelnut truffles and watching Halt and Catch Fire on continuous loop—except for when I was reading some movie star or movie mogul autobiography. And I would thoroughly enjoy myself.

I'm not sure from whence this Calvinist sub-personality emerged that won't let me do what I like best.

###

Also, Mabel the kiska is really pissed off at me.

The enormous mat on her back is responding to the detangler solution, but she hates when it's sprayed on her and has begun running away or lashing out at me when I try to spray it on her. I now have a big scratch on my left arm.

Mabel the kiska is one distrustful cat.

I figure she was severely abused as a kitten. I am fond of her despite her intractable personality; I'm sure—just like the rest of us—she'd rather not be intractable—but she is, it's what her life has taught her to be. I'm one of those people who enter into covenants with companion animals, so however much I would prefer a cat with a more placid, loving personality—oh, Sybyl! I will always miss you!—I would never dump Mabel.

I guess I'm gonna have to end up taking her to the vet to get the mat shaved.

Which does seem like a waste of money—because, honestly, I could take care off it by myself if only she'd let me.

###

Other than that...

It rained all night, but the sky does seem to be lightening.

If it clears up by 2pm, I'll be able to make it over to Hyde Park to put the finishing touches on the self-sustaining garden.

Next week I'll tackle the New Paltz garden!
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My lungs cleared up! I can breathe again!

Before my lungs cleared up, I had no idea how compromised I was. I mean, I could feel the stiffness in my chest, and logically I know I know that if you can't breathe well, you don't take in enough oxygen, which leads to air hunger, which leads to shortness of breath with physical exertion—but I wasn't connecting the dots.

I was thinking the fatigue I was feeling when exercising was due to some sudden acceleration in the physical aging process! I am 73! And after all, that is old!

And 73 continues to be old—but still, when I went to the gym yesterday, for my weights circuit and 30-minute cardiovascular workout (spinning), I felt great!

Though two days before, I'd been laboring for breath and my muscles had actually been aching with the lifting effort (lactic acid buildup.)

I have no idea why my lungs cleared up. Did some lethal allergen finally disappear from the air? Did some nasty virus finally run its course?

But I am grateful, Universe!

###

Other than that...

I've been busily generating income, watching instructional videos on making AI videos, and trying to think of ways to expand my social life in the here and now.

Basically, I'm resentful about the first because I think I deserve a MacArthur Genius Grant for pursuing the second, and if the kiskas and Black Chicken would only learn to speak English, I wouldn't have to worry at all about the third.

###

I'm trying to identify the video creation service with the best bang for the buck, but that's difficult because right now AI video is in its gold rush phase. There is no available enterprise software; there are literally dozens of AIV engines attached to subscription services, new workflow and pipeline technologies are constantly raising the bar, and the state of the art is changing on a weekly—sometimes daily—basis.

This one was done on the Chinese AI video engine Kling. I reused my calico cat prompt. I actually like the one I did on NightCafe (same starting prompt) better for sheer fantasia. But there's no denying this one has a higher degree of photo realism.



Thing is, though, I'm not big on photo realism.

I much prefer fantastical imagery and animation.
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Hilary Mantel is a bit rich for bedtime consumption. All those unfamiliar vocabulary words! "Persiflage," anybody? I mean, it's a great word, a perfect word, but who wants to read in bed with a book and a dictionary?

So, I've been putting myself to sleep with an old favorite: Pride & Prejudice.

And in the spirit of Pride & Prejudice, I scampered off to Marshall's yesterday to buy some long, flowery dresses that no self-respecting Regency heroine would ever be caught dead in, but hey! they were cheap.

I say "scampered." I really mean "limped." Because once in Marshall's, I felt as though I was going to faint.

Maybe I have COVID, I thought.

I never did catch COVID back when everybody else was catching it. Or maybe I did catch COVID but I was one of those asymptomatic COVIDers the CDC warned us about, out there insidiously infecting everybody else.

I'm not running a fever. But all those other symptoms—shortness of breath, hacking cough, traveling body aches, headache, extreme fatigue—were a check.

So, I bought the first three things I shoved into my shopping cart—fortunately, they all fit—and raced back home to do a COVID test.

Nope! Not COVID.

Maybe it is the the mysterious malaise that leveled BB & Flavia for three weeks. They actually went to a doctor. Verdict: a rhinovirus. A nasty rhinovirus.

Since the three of us were inhaling each other's carbon dioxide in a car not too terribly long ago, I'm gonna assume I have what they had.

###

As a sidebar, I'll note that I do hate shopping for clothes, and I don't understand at all how anybody can possibly like it. I see loads of clothes I like, usually on actors on the various streaming entertainments I indulge myself with. But none of those clothes are ever for sale at the stores I can afford. The stores I can afford are filled with the most awful dreck in the most hideous colors and patterns, and the stores are lit up with migraine-inducing fluorescents, and the other shoppers are extras out of some colorized B-roll from Night of the Living Dead.

###

I went to bed early and slept nine hours, and feel maybe 85% this morning, but I expect that to fade.

The only going-out-of-the-house thing I have to do today is Adrienne's meet-and-greet, which I volunteered to help her with.

I wish I hadn't!

Adrienne has delusions of being Nancy Pelosi.

The other day, she was introducing me to someone: "And here's Patrizia who does... uh... social media—"

"I designed your website," I reminded her tartly.

She never even thanked me for designing her website!

And then yesterday, she emailed me some statistics about food stamp cutbacks in Ulster County (severe) with the note: Lets look into this.

You look into it, be-yatch! I thought. I am not your fuckin' staffer.

I remind myself that this is a networking opportunity. Networking has never been something I'm particularly good at, subscribing as I do to the naive notion that human connections should be sincere & spring from the heart.

But it's never too late to learn.

###

And speaking of learning...

Here's Today's Exciting AI Video!



Sora would not touch the medieval cats marginalia at all! I wonder if that's some weird kind of copyright hypervigilance?

So, it was back to NightCafe with some prompt tweaks. This prompt worked a bit more successfully than yesterday's, except that that the black cat is no longer turning pages and the strange hulking cat on the lower right keeps sprouting disturbing phantom limbs.
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It was sunny & hot by the time I made it to the garden yesterday. And then Claude showed up! Prize-winning chef and former Culinary Institute professor, raised on a farm in post-war Normandy, to me, Claude represents everything that's earthy & solid.



I weeded very happily for a couple of hours, sowed my lettuce seeds.

And then something weird happened. I got suddenly and violently ill, the kind of ill that it involves bathrooms, of which there aren't any at the garden.

No embarrassing accidents, but close call.

###

In fact, my usually robust health hasn't been all that robust lately. My lungs feel congested. I find myself getting somewhat winded when I exercise, I cough up fluid, and when I breathe out, I can feel how stiff my lungs are. Classic asthma symptoms. I hate the way inhalers make me feel, so I never use them; I just cough disgustingly.

I've been backburnering a fantasy that I have some sort of fatal but painless disease! Next time I visit my primary care provider, she'll take one look at me and say, "Patrizia, I'm afraid you're suffering from Amaranthinitis. There is no known cure, but here! Let me write you a script for unlimited quantities of morphine!"

I don't care if I cough.

I do care if I feel winded and weak.

But I probably wouldn't if I had unlimited quantities of morphine.

###

I'm still feeling kinda ill today, so I have tabled exercise plans. The day is sunny and bright, so I will lounge outside and read. The fabulous [personal profile] smokingboot sent me Hilary Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost last Christmas; it promptly got lost in bedchamber rubble. Recently, though, I unearthed it again & began reading it.

The first two books of Mantel's Wollf Hall trilogy are among my favorite novels of all time. They have a distinctly mannered style that took me around 50 pages to get used to (50 pages during which I didn't like the novels at all), and I guess I was a little afraid that this mannered style was Mantel's voice—which works as a narrative style for novels set in medieval times because we have to assume that people living in those times thought very differently than contemporary people think. I wasn't sure, though, that it would work for a modern-day book.

Not to worry! Giving Up the Ghost does not use Wolf Hall as a style manual.

I'm also piqued because two separate subscribers to my substack told me my prose style reminds them of Hilary Mantel.

I don't agree, but I kinda, sorta see how they got the idea: I break the fourth wall in sort of the same way that Mantel does. In her prose and my prose, there is a very strong sense that the writer is talking to a specific someone (who is not necessarily you, gentle reader.)

###

And, of course, the AI video experiments continue.

Today, I animated the cat marginalia on a medieval manuscript:



I wouldn't say it works. Ideally, all the cats would chase the mice as the mice scamper off the page.

Is the limitation my clumsy prompt or the clumsy AI (NightCafe in this instance)?

Dunno, but I may try the same experiment in Sora tomorrow.
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Rained all day yesterday, so I didn't leave the house except for a couple of car trips for provisions (half & half, McDonald's quarter pounder with cheese—I actually like MickyD's though I limit my consumption to every couple of months because so-oo unhealthy!)

I felt kind of ill in a subthreshold way that was difficult to get a handle on. My asthma has been acting up. THC, it turns out, is an effective bronchodilator, which is good though even in small quantities, THC makes me loopy, which I don't like—although I dislike it less than the inhalers they actually prescribe.

I kept sneezing and my nose was running—so maybe some virus?

And my insides felt off. (Before the MickeyD's, smartass! 😀) Like if I thought about it very much, I'd feel nauseated.

Basically, I suppose, I just do not like days without sunshine.

When I finally assume complete dominion over the known Universe, I'm gonna make it so that it only rains at night.

###
I was gonna garden today, but it is raining again.

I still have to go over the bridge. Belinda invited me over for lunch, and she is planning an elaborate menu (since we haven't seen each other for six weeks or so), and I don't want to hurt her feelings.

Does seem ridiculous to me that my moods—and possibly my physical wellbeing—are so absolutely predicated around the weather, But they are!
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Dreamed I was giving a master class in an exxciting new augury method I had invented!

My method: Look at the results of the 10 most popular Google searches for any single day, and you'll be able to figure out what happens tomorrow!

This is because the collective unconcious is quite good at prognostication, but being an unconscious, can't synthesize its prophecies into linear terms.

But if you can tap into the source of the Nile (so to speak), you can make those linear predictions.

###

I was so intrigued by this dream that immediately upon awakening, I tracked down the 10 trending Google search terms worldwide for April 22, 2025:

1. suits la harvey specter
2. bbc
3. bgmi
4. google news
5. most runs in ipl
6. digvesh rathi
7. cuet pg answer key 2025
8. iftikhar ahmed
9. porel
10. abp news

Nope, nope, nope, nope.

None of the breadcrumbs to Tomorrowland lead through there.

###

Meanwhile, I felt kinda physically out of it all day yesterday.

My hips ached, which I attributed to overdoing the weights on the hip adductor Nautilus machine and thereby straining either my adductor longus, adductor brevis, adductor magnus, gracilis, or all of the above.

But also, I felt really winded and barely lasted 30 minutes into my spinning routine.

I was coughing a lot & wheezing, so allergies? The pollen from those tree flowers is lethal.

Then Black Chicken baulked when I scooped her up to carry back into her coop, which I do every evening just before sunset since I am so anxious that some predator is gonna get her. Icky has not made good on his promise to acquire some companions for her—Icky not making good on a promise? What a surprise!—but she seems to have adapted to being an Only Chicken and hangs out under the back porch all day long.

Usually, I can lure her back to the coop by scattering tasty corn tortilla morsels in front of her. But yesterday, she wanted to stay out, so I picked her up—and got scratched up in the process.

Scratches aren't painful & I hydrogen-peroxided & bacitracin-ed the hell out of them.

Still. I had to eat an entire bag of Peppridge Farms Orange Chocolate Milano cookies for their medicinal properties.

###

Today, I feel much stronger.

It's a gorgeous day. I have a shitload of Remuneration to do, having shirked yesterday.

But in the late afternoon, I intend to get out.
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In my dream, I wrote four perfect sentences. They just came magically into my head.

Wow! the dream me thought. I better write these down before I forget them.

And I did write them down—in the dream.

But when I awakened, I had totally forgotten them.

###

On Tuesday, I came down with a cold. Non-stop snoozles, runny nose, inability to focus. I gave up on useful work, and napped on & off, and read.

That vanquished the cold but then yesterday, driving home from TaxBwana, I was infected with a melancholy so deep I burst into tears & kept crying on & off the rest of the day.

Don't ask me what that was about because I couldn't tell you.

My two TaxBwana clients hadn't made that much of an emotional dent except that they were both old—the one, a 90-year old woman, sharp as a tack & physically vital, living on the remains of an ancestral apple orchard her family had owned for more that 100 years; the other, a retired NYC cop.

"Wait!" I said to the cop. "You used to commute from New Paltz every day to the Bronx?"

He had!

Maybe the 90-year-old lady had made me sad because maybe I was seeing the beginnings of cognitive decline in her: She was very flustered, and had only brought in pages 7 through 11 of one form that I needed to see Page 1 of. But hey! It was a mistake that many people far younger than her can—and do!—make & having taxes done is nervewracking for most people.

Anyway, I was sad, sad, sad, when I got home though that didn't stop me from doing useful work.

This morning I woke up with a right-sided backache that won't stop me from doing useful work but may stop me from going to the gym.

I can't figure out why my back would ache. On Monday, I actually did heavy exercise designed to phuck up one's back, & I was fine; yesterday, I did nothing. The ways of the aging body are mysterious!

###

It is bitterly, bitterly cold out. Temps barely brush freezing! But bright & sunny, and the angle of the sun is higher in the sky, which means the sun actually sheds some warmth.

The local meadows and pastures are still frozen beneath enormous plates of white ice that shine like polished glass. And likely to remain so for the next few days.

It is an eerie sight:

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