Month: October 2020

I bought a new lampshade for my floor lamp which arrived yesterday. One of my cats had knocked the lamp over a year or two ago and shattered the glass shade. New shades aren’t cheap so I’ve been putting off replacing it. I finally decided I could afford one and I picked a new shade, different from the previous shade because I never really liked the previous shade.

It’s pretty, and has the loveliest pearl finish, but I think it looks ever so slightly too big for the stand. I worried that it was going to look too small, ironically.

But then I look again and think no, it’s the perfect size. And I go back and forth and back and forth. Boring, I know, and probably the least serious problem of all the problems in the world to have. Which is, in itself, annoying. Why am I obsessing about such a ridiculous problem?? I think part of the problem is the pole holding it up is so slender. But the other shade was much much wider and I never had a problem with the proportions! Here are some pictures.

I was going through my photo library, cleaning out photographs I really don’t need to save. For some reason I didn’t want to delete a single picture I’d ever taken of any of my cats. Thousands of so-so pictures have now been pared down to the best, and the most sentimental. But I don’t only take pictures of cats.

I took these photographs at a protest in 2014 for Eric Garner out on Staten Island. Six years ago. Now we have a president who has re-awoken and reinvigorated racism in America. God help us next week.

I’m glad I took a long walk yesterday, because it’s too miserable out for a walk today. Oh god, I want the god damn election to be over over OVER.

It may not have been full on raining yesterday, but it was drizzly and foggy. On the plus side, this was what the skyline looked like looking up. Beautiful, right? Gray can be the most evocative color sometimes.

My choir meets virtually every Tuesday night, the night we’d normally rehearse, to delve into music in different ways. This week our choir director, John Maclay, interviewed an old friend, Eric Conway, the Chairperson of the Fine and Performing Arts Department Director of the Morgan State University Choir. At the end we listened to his choir sing Glory from the movie Selma.

John sent out email this morning, with some words about America and voting. His last two paragraphs provided much needed solace. I think what he said is incredibly moving.

“Finally, as you vote, remember that you are carrying the whole of us on your shoulders. The caregivers, the isolated, the ill, the weak. Those who are afraid. Those who did not have the opportunities you may have had, or the privileges to which you were born. Those who are working the phone banks and pounding the pavement to encourage everyone.

“America is one long story about people walking over the bridge. When we are turned back, as we often are, we just have to keep walking. Again, and again, as long and as often as it takes.”

I couldn’t finish reading the obituaries for James Randi. Mitch Horowitz says everything I would have said in his article, The Man Who Destroyed Skepticism.

The Lab had a contract with the Office of Naval Research, headed by Gaither Pratt, to see if homing pigeons were using ESP to find their way. This is a picture of Pratt and his pigeons.