I’m down to the last on the contract-scanning.
Still fighting the weight a little. Don’t know where that pound came back from — but it’s gotta go.
Doing all right the 3rd day after the header I took…pretty stiff, but Ibuprofen handles that. Something about the life we live means we have good bones. Used to stress and falls. My doc lectures me about Vitamin D. I need to be better about that.
I’ve decided the only way we get our vitamins on schedule is if I serve them up at dinner. And I usually put them in sake cups. But those never get turned back to the dishwasher, so they stay lost when I need them. I’m going to get a gross of those tiny paper cuplets, about the side of a quarter, that you serve such things in. And if we lose them, la! no problem. That’s what paper cups are for.
I would guess you could find them at CostCo in the food service area. I’ve seen them at Sam’s Club, but the nearest CostCo to me is 70 some miles.
I haven’t seen them at Costco, unless they are in the drug store aisles where I rarely venture. Too bad the sake cups didn’t work; they are so much classier than tiny paper pill cups.
Amazon and ebay both have them; I looked for ‘paper pill cups’ Hey, Jello shooters!
For little cups, our Walmart sells sleeves of those little plastic cups with lids that restaurants use for condiments. I find them useful for lots of things, and they’re pretty inexpensive as well, so they can be disposable.
And kudos to Jane for pressing thru the technical problems !!
And in the latest news on the really old world, they’ve found out that the Romans really did hunt heads.
I think Classicists tend to know that, but archaeological proof has been scant.
The expression capital punishment comes from ‘caput’, head—but in Roman law of the Republic and later, it meant ‘loss of citizenship,’ ie, being stripped of standing as a Roman.
OTOH, the Celts hunted heads bigtime, and it would take very little encouragement for ROman line soldiers in Britain (most of whom seemed to be from Syria and North Africa) to take it back to the old definition. Romans who had to be done in were invited to commit suicide by any method they chose, but if they refused, beheading was kinder than the end of a sword, which could become protracted misery. It came to be the preferred method of execution of a noble, in England, because it was actually nicer. Yum!
Look in the baking section of your grocery for the mini-cupcake papers. I use them when I make candy and want to give it away. They have no stiffness, but they will contain the pills.
I’ll bet the reason you don’t break bones in fall is that you know how to fall. I’m sure skating teaches that; I learned in modern dance classes, and it’s served me well. When I see people slipping on ice, common around here, they try to fight the fall, flailing their arms instead of using them to protect their head and direct the fall.
Absolutely: if you want to learn, my friends, even at this late date, try getting down on your knees. Then collapse bonelessly. But plan your fall. Learn from this that you CAN plan your fall. And learn a ‘stage-fall.’ With a mattress at hand, roll your ankle to the outside, bend your knee and plan for the side of your lower leg and the side of your hip to hit, then your arm goes forward (out of the way) and your shoulder hits.
Main thing, don’t fight a fall. Get your arms out of the way of your body—in front of you, as they were designed to function. If you’re falling backward, become a kidney bean: tuck, hard: you can take it—especially if you hug yourself hard and duck your chin. Above all don’t arch your back and put your hands behind you. The things you can break doing that are many.
Falling forward, you can use your arms, but try to take it on one knee—no sense breaking both—and ROLL on your side if you can. If you’re about to do a face-plant as your knee hits, near the same instant, on your forearms, with your hands aimed at each other and with your arms where they can protect your face—lock those arms. If you have real velocity, sustain the arm-prop as long as you can, catapulting your body forward and turn your head sideways: if you land on the chin, you can hurt your mouth, and if you flip you could break your neck.
I learned to fall, or I wouldn’t have lived this long. I took a header over the handlebars at a racing bike’s top speed on a downhill. I landed just as described above, karate-chopped the pavement with both arms, determined to break them if I had to, and didn’t get my head turned in time. Thanks to the strength in my core, I skidded on my neck rather than flipping—sort of like ‘planking,’ only at 30 mph. 😉 I had a lot of pavement burns, but I’m still here, relatively undamaged.
Still, if you don’t stop this falling bit, we’re going to take up a collection for one of those inflatable sumo costumes.
And a case of duct tape for Jane!
😆
Lol!
Having just “taken a header” this weekend, the advice is well and good, but is of no use at the time of a fall unless it has been practiced enough to become “muscle memory”. When you’re actually falling the body and “reptile” brain takes over from the “little grey cells”. 😉 Remembering what to do and thoughfully coordinating it all is too slow. When I was in high school and took Aikido training we did that on a mat, which does me no good now, of course. 🙁
Another way to learn to fall correctly is to take a martial arts class for beginner adults… TaeKwonDo, HapKiddo, Karate, KungFu, and other martial arts where grappling is part of the art generally take good care to ensure that adult beginners learn how to fall while giving enough or a workout to help those pounds melt off. Having some self-defense moves in this day and age and learning how to pay attention to your surroundings can’t hurt either. It certainly helped when I was travelling all over the country by myself for work. “Nobody bothers me.”
Bending your knees in an unstable situation is often a good idea for an adult. It’s the absolute first instruction in ice skating…as deeply as you can, tuck your butt and center yourself. If you’ve got to go down, silly as you may feel, you have a foot less to fall,and are more likely to go down in a more organized fashion. 😉
Very happy to hear Jane got the scene back, and better than before.
I found an interesting new list of women SFF writers at a site called The book smugglers: Andrea K. Höst (well worth reading herself) started it off with her 99 keeper-shelf SFF writers, and more are being added in the comments. I’ve picked up a few ideas of new-to-me writers to try; maybe others here would also be interested.
Thanks for the link; I bookmarked it. Some of these authors I’m not familiar with and am interested in reading if I ever get caught up with everything I’ve got backed up now. Between NetGalley & the Kindle daily deals I’ve got way more books to read than I’ve got time for!
If I don’t take my vitamins with breakfast, they don’t get taken that day. Consumer Reports did a small write-up on Vitamin D deficiency a while back and since then I have been taking 2,000 IU per day. When my doc checked my level for my physical it was right where it should be. I got the 2000 IU from the Consumer Reports article; they said the only people they tested who weren’t deficient were people taking that much supplement or residents of Florida.
I think the computer glitch thing must be going around; the Seagate hard drive on my Dell laptop that I use for my accounting and my DH’s business seems to have cratered last night. The boot sector has gone south, but I think the data may still be retrivable. Of course the drive is backed up locally & on Carbonite, plus I just transferred the company’s books to the accounting firm that does our annual review and don’t think I did any work after that. So after spending the day today running checkdisk and the Seagate utility that might have resurrected it, tomorrow I’ll be installing Windows and all my software on a spare 1TB Western Digital drive I bought a few months ago and never got around to installing. The laptop is actually still under warranty until May, but I don’t really want another Seagate 750GB drive; I’d rather have the WD drive.
I see that the movie Gravity got 10 Oscar nominations. As much as I am pro-space, I didn’t like it at all, and I don’t think it deserves the uncritical praise it’s been getting.
The special effects are excellent, but the characters and story not so much. The female astronaut played by Sandra Bullock spends most of the movie either panicking or flapping around uselessly. Both main characters are like cardboard cutouts. The story, what there is of it, is very ‘hollywood’ and as boring as an extended car chase.
It’s highly overrated in my opinion, but the film critics seem to like it for some reason..
Well, that sounds annoying. Haven’t seen Gravity yet, but was planning to when it appeared on pay-per-view. Most space movies seem to have some sort of egregious error though, and if it’s not in terms of science, I suppose they have to do it with characterization. 😉
I confess, my favorite SF space movie is still Red Planet, even if the “stand him up” at the end (in zero-g) always makes me yell “argh!” Favorite space opera, naturally, the original Star Wars trilogy. Favorite realistic space movie, Apollo 13.
I betcha we can get a whole subthread going here with space movie recommendations.
Oh, Gravity has plenty of science errors as well. In fact just about nothing that happens in movie would work that way in real life. But it’s worth seeing just for the stunning visuals – preferably on a big screen.
Oh, I think my favorite will always be “2001, A Space Odyssey”. Remembering what was being shown in its day, its effects were eye-opening. (I remember watching “Flash Gordon” on TV as a kid, and Liszt’s “Les Preludes” music.) The science was acceptable. The bureaucratic, political humdrum, e.g. the chat with the Russians (Margaret Tyzack) on the space station or jogging during the trip, was criticized by some, but was quite realistic IMO. And the symbolic story was good.
After I saw it, my father asked, “What’s it about? I hear it’s some ‘space opera’.” I replied, “I can’t tell you. You’ll have to see it for yourself.” He said, “That’s ridiculous, of course you can, if you wanted to.” A few weeks later he told me, “You were right.” (YES!!! SCORE!)
There’s a certain age in a man’s life when those are very prized! Maybe that’s part of the reason I like it.
p.s. Margaret Tyzack played Queen Anne in “The First Churchills”, the premier series of “Masterpiece Theatre”, the following year (1969). So I recognized her.
And she was “just on” an episode of “Doc Martin”.
Oh, she passed away in 2011.
The impact of space movies, to me, is largely their special effects. Detailed characterization is difficult outside of books. Sadly, it is difficult if not impossible to get the impact of 2001’s Cinerama presentation; maybe it needs an IMAX re-release. Many who see it are underwhelmed, seeing it on TV. The Blue Danube sequence is my favorite, and it’s as much the details of cockpits as the scope of the effects that impressed me at the time.
The original Star Wars had a similar impact. No one had ever seen anything close to that before. I was beyond lucky to see it the first day with an attitude that it was probably going to be underwhelming, but with so few space movies, I had to see it–might as well get it over with.
I’m not sure it qualifies, but the best candidate before 2001 might be Forbidden Planet, though the Buster Crabbe movie serial of Buck Rogers also deserves some notice; after all, it was only the 1930s(?).
Not in space, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is worth the considerable time to watch. (“Art Deco. Very nice.”–Ghostbusters, for a fun, silly movie.) Back to the Future does all the time travel twists and turns as well as can be done, a nice balance of good story and good–if not impressive–effects; maybe the movies with the best characterization of the lot?? And 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a favorite, though Disney: some good, some bad.
I agree about the Blue Danube. I said “Genius” to my date at the time. On a “Cinerama” screen, if not at the original Dome theatre.
The reason I pick 2001 over Star Wars is that 2001 was so far ahead of other movies that Star Wars, although impressive, seemed more of an incremental advance. It had nothing like 2001’s “slit scan” sequence.
I did see 2001 in a Cinerama dome. I think three 70mm projectors. Much bigger than the IMAX theaters I’ve been in, but I haven’t been to many. Tough to pay $10 a seat for one showing when you know you’ll be able to get the DVD for less in a few months.
Star Wars was hailed at the time as the first “used” future. Things looked as if they had actually been used, not all shiny and new like 2001. And the bar…! (In which Han shot first! I’m astonished that Lucas doesn’t get why that makes the story better.)
I am still in favor of my favorite shot of the whole movie, the view from the far side of Jupiter with the moons in syzygy with their parent, as well as Jupiter with the Sun……
Kubrick took some license, using Jupiter instead of Saturn, but that’s okay…..he did it with Sir Arthur’s collaboration.