Mitt liv som Tobin

I'm so glad to have this view out of the window while I am working. It doesn't photograph well but it gives me something to look at while thinking.



I'm also glad to have the new heating pad in the chair as a cat decoy, because it is helping to keep the cats from constantly crawling all over me all day. Now they only periodically crawl all over.

Cats get themselves into some interesting pretzels sometimes, while napping over the course of the day.



I'm amused by the snow that landed on top of the disco ball especially.



George checking out the snow when I briefly reopened the catio:


The video is more entertaining:


Today I'm back in the office. At least my office also has a window view, although it's limited and not as nice because of being in the building's basement and facing a parking lot. The roads have all been plowed, so we're back to salty winter slop. I need to figure out a better bike chain lube strategy for this winter. When I ride in this stuff, I have to stay diligent about rinsing off my bike after every ride, but that washes the lube off the chain. So maybe it is time to investigate waxing, after all.

People here in Albany, NY have been feverishly checking the weather and school closure lists since yesterday afternoon. When I headed over to rowing practice, my institution hadn't canceled anything, and everything was quiet and clear. Promptly at 8 am, while I was finishing a cup of coffee with teammates at our favorite local coffee hangout, the snow started.

My institution still hadn't called it, so I started to head towards campus. By the time I reached the end of Van Rensselaer Boulevard to turn onto Route 378 by the Albany Rural Cemetery, it was snowing hard enough that I could barely see where I was going (glasses-on *or* glasses-off), and I wasn't relishing the thought of climbing up and then flying down curvy, narrow Schuyler Road while not really being able to see and in increasingly slippery conditions.

So I pulled over and messaged my students to let them know that we'd be pivoting to video instruction. It wasn't even so much the immediate conditions as the thought of how much worse things were likely to get for the eventual trip home.

I'm pretty sure my students are fine with this decision. I'd messaged them yesterday anyway, to tell my commuting students they should use their best judgment about whether or not to come in to campus, and to note that we'd pivot to video if classes were canceled.

And so I'll spend the rest of the day at home, with some Zoom meetings interspersed, playing the Lofi Hip Hop channel and grading student papers while the cats snooze on their heating pads.

This heating pad is a new acquisition, but a little catnip seems to have persuaded George to give it a try.





Cozy AF in here. Dunno why my institution thinks it's a good idea to have students and employees out on the roads today.

...were laundering the shower curtain, and harvesting worm dirt from the worm bin.

This is the first major harvest since I built Worm Bin Bench II. We've been adding and adding stuff to it, and by now it has (had) so much worm dirt in it that it really needed to be harvested. In the past, when harvesting worm dirt out of the old bin, I would bring the bin outside and carry out my work on the back porch steps, in bright sunlight. This bin is a little too big for that sort of thing, and also it's cold out there, so I had to come up with a new method: scooping dirt into a plant tray to sort it out then and there.

I think the hardest part was tracking down a hand trowel to scoop the dirt with. I eventually found one that has a wood handle that was stuck inside a bag of potting soil that was sitting out next to the outdoor compost. The trowel was exceptionally rusty and slimy, but those things didn't really matter for this purpose. I should probably get a nicer trowel for home use one of these days.

The new method worked well.



Well, with one small exception: it attracted the curiosity of the cats.





That, by itself, is fine, except that Martha decided she wanted to see about walking along the top edge of the open lid. That, by itself, also turned out to be fine, if mildly precarious, except for when she went to leap off, and the physics of the situation dictated that the lid came flying down. Thankfully, I anticipated that happening and caught the lid before it smashed into anything.

I gave a bunch of the houseplants all a generous helping of the freshly harvested worm dirt. Hopefully they like it. History suggests they will.

Other than that, I have mostly been grading student papers, or procrastinating from grading. The cats have been helping. Witness:





I suppose it's fine to have a relatively uneventful weekend. That won't make me enjoy grading papers, however.

I already blogged about yesterday morning. In the afternoon, I cooked up a storm. First, I made a big batch of a creamy tomato-lentil slow cooker soup from the NYT. I didn't have any cream, but we somehow have a whole bunch of cans of coconut milk, so I can report that the soup is pretty good with coconut milk as a substitute. One of the reasons for making the soup was to use up some of the last of this year's garden tomatoes that S brought in to finish ripening. Done. I like the concept of a tomato soup with added protein for rib-sticking power.

Then I finished cooking the ingredients and assembled the Portobello Wellington, and got the Madeira Sauce underway. With those items well in hand, I got to work on some more pumpkin-apple-pecan pie filling. Yum. I mean, just look at it!



(Never mind the dirty dishwater underneath it!) In between cooking tasks, I finally got started on a mending project that has been in the mending pile for at least a year: dealing with sleeve wear on an older bicycling jersey.



From the looks of it, this is just going to be a common wear point for me with wool bicycling jerseys. If this mending experiment is a success, I'll be very pleased. Wool cycling jerseys aren't cheap and I'd much rather keep the ones I have going than have to go shop for more. I have another wool cycling jersey that will be in the repair queue once this one is done.

At around this time, I started to get suspicious that I hadn't seen much of Martha all day. She does seem like the sort of cat who might arbitrarily decide to go curl up somewhere quiet and dark for several hours, but this seemed like longer than usual. Shaking a cat treat bag quickly summoned George, but no Martha. Also unusual. Hmm.

I went around the house and checked all the most logical hiding spots. In doing so, I found several other items I'd lost track of, but still, no Martha.

It was getting close to time to head to a friend's for Thanksgiving. I messaged my friend to say I might be delayed by the hunt for a loose cat.

Shaking the treat bag outdoors failed to summon Martha, either. It was starting to seem like I might be searching for a missing cat for much of Thanksgiving evening.

It occurred to me that one of the more distinct noises the cats associate with me is the opening and closing of the garage door, as I get my bike out to go to work in the morning, and put my bike away when I get home in the evening. I didn't ride my bike yesterday, but with that thought in mind I went ahead and cycled the garage door.

A minute or two later, there was Martha, at the back door. She knows the noise means it's almost suppertime. Whew.

That meant that friends and I could enjoy our vegetarian Thanksgiving feast without added worry.



Here's Martha, later that evening.



I don't think she feels even an ounce of remorse. I'm pretty sure that she escaped off the front porch in the morning when I had the dim-witted idea of opening up the porch door for better ventilation while erging. It was only a few moments later that it occurred to me that the cats could escape if I did that, but clearly Martha had wasted no time.

I had a different sort of misadventure this morning. In the midst of a workout to accumulate more rowing meters, I had the thought that it might be a good idea to lubricate the rowing erg's chain. I had a small bottle of chain oil for that very purpose nearby, so while I was in between pieces, I started to apply the oil.

I failed to pay close attention to some ominous plastic cracking noises until it was far too late, and the bottle's brittle plastic shattered in my hand.

Mineral oil EVERYWHERE!!


THAT was a hassle to clean up, let me tell you.

Other than that, so far today has consisted of going to work to water ants and collect up some student writing to grade. There's some potential for heavy snowfall this afternoon, so I decided I'd rather come home and grade at home than gamble with having to deal with a snowy commute later in the day.

There are a lot of good outcomes from that financial planning webinar. One was that the people who led it presented a useful heuristic for budgeting. This, again, is an arena where I've heard various bits and pieces of things from various places over time, but for a long time my financial circumstances were so volatile and variable that it was tricky to implement what I was hearing. Anyway, the heuristic is, 50/15/5: plan to allocate 50% of your income towards basic necessities (housing, food, utilities). Plan to put 15% of your income towards retirement. If your employer offers any form of matching retirement contribution, that can count towards the 15% total. And put 5% of your monthly income in savings for emergencies (unemployment, repairs, unexpected healthcare expenses).

When I got hired into my current job, I had my employer set aside 15% of my income, but without having much context for that number. It just seemed like a sweet spot, mathemetically. My employer does match set-asides up to 10%, but I also have to figure that I have gotten a late start when it comes to retirement savings, so I'll leave that allocation how it is. It's just comforting to know that it's on the aggressive side of the equation.

I *do* have one lingering task on that front: for the 4.5 years I was in Texas, funds went into the Texas Teacher Retirement Services, but if a person then leaves Texas, the account goes dormant and they stop paying interest. So I need to figure out my options for transferring those funds somewhere else that will earn interest. I also need to figure out whether I need to do anything with retirement savings from my 2 years in Berkeley. All those funds are kind of a pittance, but still, they're MY pittance!

With knowledge of the 5% heuristic, I was able to configure my checking and savings accounts to start a monthly automatic transfer. Yay! I'd had a different savings system in place in the past, but it was too motivation-based. A systematic arrangement is ideal.

With the 50/15/5 taken care of, one can view the remainder of one's income as discretionary spending. However, before I can really do that, I need to go back through my finances to figure out where I actually am with regards to the 50% towards the basics. I can already tell you that The Rent is Too Damn High, and I suspect I'm above the 50% mark already. But I'm ready to get back to more detailed financial tracking, because I am actually much happier to work within financial constraints as compared to not having a good idea of what constitutes realistic spending expectations. And if I can point to The Rent is Too Damn High, that's helpful for thinking about house-hunting or moving or doing any of a number of other things.

So then, the next part of the webinar that was great was that they provided a bunch of curated budgeting resources, including both some free expense tracking tools, and recommendations for which of the paid expense tracking tools are the most worthwhile based on their experiences (yes, with a shout-out to YNAB, for instance!).

There, again, I've tried to create and maintain my own spreadsheets for expense tracking in the past, but without much context for a lot of my decision-making. If I use something made by other people who have already done a lot of the thinking and calculating for me, well, that sounds great.

Anyway, I really appreciated twoeleven's comment about how refreshing it was to hear about something like this seminar, in the context of working with a lot of autodidacts who often wind up with a weird combination of tunnel vision and blind spots from the assumption that many/most things can be self-taught. I mean, sure, *some* things can definitely be self-taught! But again, I think this post illustrates how the right sort of seminar can be tremendously useful.

And with any luck, some of the other courses you'd like to take will get put together and offered, somehow. I feel like I need to keep a list of those things. My local library does try and offer some of these sorts of courses, at least.

Today I was originally going to play hooky and go rowing again in Petrichor with some teammates. However, the teammates both bailed, and I ultimately decided I should probably try to be a more responsible adult and focus on projects at home, especially given that the weather for the day turned colder, with some potential for snow flurries.

Today's bonus housekeeping project was vacuuming off all of the fan blades, before reversing their direction (so they help redistribute the warm air from the radiators). That meant many fewer dust bunnies flying all over the place compared to when I reversed the fans last spring. Oh, and also deep cleaning a second refrigerator shelf.

I don't have much photographic evidence of me then balancing my checkbook, so you'll just have to believe me on that front. That project also got temporarily interrupted by the project of figuring out how to reset the printer toner cartridge status, so I could print off a couple extra checkbook ledger sheets. I also eventually tracked down what I did the last time I actually bought printer toner cartridges, and ordered more, so that when the current ones really do legitimately run out I will have spares on hand.

Exciting business, I tell you.

By then, it was somehow midafternoon. What next?

Well, a somewhat urgent project has arisen. On Thursday I happened to notice that the backpack pannier I use every single day for bike commuting is on the verge of a catastrophic failure: one of the two straps that secure the pannier to my rear rack is about to wear all the way through.

That was enough to motivate me to track down all of my broken panniers and all of my broken pannier supplies. Instead of starting on the backpack right away, I decided it was time to work on further disassembling one of the ancient Overland panniers. The Overland pannier that isn't currently in service, is out of service because its plastic stiffener is cracked, compromising the overall structure of the bag. It seemed like a good idea to try and extract out the entire cracked plastic piece, but it is riveted in place. So, time to see what it's like to drill out rivets.

( cut for photos and blah blah blah )

The most recent issue of the journal Science has an "expert voices" article on The demographic future that we do not know about. It is paywalled, but if population demography is a topic that interests you it may be worth figuring out a method to access it.

The main thesis of the article deals with how a narrative about "the demographic transition" has been the major narrative about population demographics for much of the 20th century, but about how now, that narrative isn't so relevant anymore (we're largely past the point of a demographic transition on a global scale) and new thinking is needed about what could happen to human populations in the future.

If you aren't acquainted with it, the "demographic transition" refers to a change in population-level demographics that seems to occur whenever human populations get better access to education and other aspects of modern life (healthcare, etc): there tends to be a shift from high mortality and high fertility, to low mortality and low fertility. That has indeed played out across many human populations across the globe; so the question now is, now what? What will happen next?

The article notes there's a general consensus that the human population will likely peak in the second half of this century, and then decline. People quibble over the details, but not over the idea that human population growth will become limited.

This is kind of a big deal. Historically, there have been hysterics over the consequences of exponential human population growth. And think for a moment about the era of China's one-child policy.

But what will happen under an alternate scenario, and how will it happen? We're seeing some extent of population contraction in the northeastern U.S. right now, and it's hard to know what to make of it all.