get your brits out

[the_siobhan]

Engineer visited. He was... not encouraging.

I swear, if I ever run into this contractor ever again, I'm going to punch him right in the dick.

I'm not sure what happens next. Engineer said he would talk to permit wrangler and see what they could come up with, but that hasn't happened yet. I suspect he's trying to close out a bunch of work for end-of-year, so hopefully early next month there will be a plan.

***

Walked past a dog park on my way to the gf's a couple of days ago and a few of the owners had laced LEDs in different colours through their dogs' collars. It gets dark at 4:30 in Toronto, so all I could see were these clusters of bobbing lights running around in circles. It honestly took me a while to figure out what I was looking at.

Fucking genius to be frank.

***

Physio continues to go really well. I'm now running into the problem where I have been off my feet for so long they are a bit de-conditioned from walking so I'm getting sore arches and blisters as I get back into it. S'fine, I know that part is temporary.

I don't normally track my weight, preferring to go by how I feel. But I gained 15 pounds in 6 months and that is way too fast for my comfort. I'm doing Xmas with my family mid-January and then I might go dry for a few months just to see how it goes.

***

I don't know if the news elsewhere is talking about it, but this year's version of the flu killed a couple of kids here in Canada, so it's getting talked about. It's either mutating faster than usual or the vaccine wasn't exactly for the right strain, because it's dodging the vaccine and it's an especially nasty version.

So my dad's wife has laid down the law about masking if family wants to visit him this winter and I am very relieved. I plan to remind everybody prior to the "official" Xmas dinner that they need to mask for the couple of weeks after New Years and partying like it's 1919.

***

I finally opened up the ancestry account and I've been futzing around with it a bit. My brief exposure to people who get into genealogy is that it's mostly retirees who take it up as a hobby and I can see why - it's time consuming. (Maybe possibly being from an Irish Catholic family where everybody has 12 kids does not help with that.)

So far I've found a bunch of relations that hie'd off to the USA and one possible connection to Australia. I'm mostly mining other peoples' family trees at the moment. There is a higher level membership that gets you access to newspaper archives, I figure I'll do that one when I've collected enough hints to make it worthwhile.

***

Spent too much time listening to Kneecap and now the Youtube algorithm is sending me Irish language bands.

I have no complaints.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[cornerofmadness]

is there a legal recourse to go after this guy for the crap he did (though punching him in the dick would be good too)

I've seen dogs with those types of collars

[the_siobhan]

Lawyers, guns, and money.

[cornerofmadness]

sounds good

[dissectionist]

This is why I’ve been begging people to get flu shots. We’ve known for months that it was going to be a bad flu season, because it’s brutalized other countries already. There was some antigenic drift in the flu (not a full shift, but just enough that the vaccine isn’t a great match for the slightly changed flu). The vaccine is less likely to prevent infection than some years, but it still offers very significant protection against serious flu, and it’ll save lives if people get it. Last year we had about 300 pediatric flu deaths in the US and 90% of them were unvaccinated. (Only about half of the children had comorbid conditions; healthy people are at danger of dying from the flu too.)

Literally everyone in my house has the flu right now, and while my 100F fever and moderate joint pain and deep chest cough are not fun, they’re a hell of a lot better than being delirious with a high fever, being in excruciating body pain, getting hospitalized, and/or having even worse outcomes. We’re all having a mild flu rather than getting our asses royally kicked. (Thank you, vaccines.)

As for the geneology, I got big into it for awhile and have set it aside for a bit. I decided to make life easier by just recording direct ancestors (varying degrees of great-grandparents) rather than aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Even so I ended up being able to trace my dad’s side back to the 1400s and have 400+ relatives in that family tree. My mom’s side I can trace back far less (great-great-grandparents) because a lot of the Italian records aren’t indexed and searchable yet. Scans of the church records are online, but the handwriting is often difficult to read.

I can’t trace my Irish side any further back than my great-grandparents, because their names were John Sullivan and Mary Buckley, which were SUPER common names. My first record for them is when they immigrated to the US, so I don’t know their parents’ names, and I can’t figure out which of the John Sullivans and Mary Buckleys they are since there were a bunch of kids born with those names during those years. I can’t even narrow it down my location since the immigration record just says “Ireland”. Sigh.

[the_siobhan]

My dad has COPD, so even a mild case of the flu might kill him. My family is great about vaccinating but that's pretty much it for precautions - they get as far as knowing their infection will likely be mild but don't extrapolate to the risk presented to others.

He has dementia and it's basically because he's permanently hypoxic.

Irish geneology is awful. Most records were kept by the local churches and a lot of them were destroyed at different times. And yeah, it doesn't help that everybody used the same twelve names. My maternal line has something like four-five generations of Michael O'Connors and Thomas Geheartys.

[dissectionist]

Of the 210 or so men in my genealogy, nearly 70 of them were first-named either John or Stephen. Honestly, even if you’re limiting the family to Biblical names, there were a lot more names available than just Stephen and John! (Also John is one of the most boring names in existence.)

[greylock]

I suspect he's trying to close out a bunch of work for end-of-year, so hopefully early next month there will be a plan

I reckon this.
'Straya closes down for the better part of a fortnight. Good luck trying to get anything done here. I am sure it's similar there at least for a week.

so all I could see were these clusters of bobbing lights running around in circles.

I love and hate that kind of discombobulation.
These kinds of thing have been around for a while. Kids have them in sneakers too.
Everything that can be lit up, is lit up.


It's either mutating faster than usual or the vaccine wasn't exactly for the right strain, because it's dodging the vaccine and it's an especially nasty version.

Dissectionist basically has it right. It's a strain (Clade K?) from late in our season that exploded towards the end of winter and was not covered by our vax or yours.
I don't know anyone who got it, but anecdotally, it was pretty terrible.

I plan to remind everybody prior to the "official" Xmas dinner that they need to mask for the couple of weeks after New Years and partying like it's 1919.

Optimistic?
I feel like that's optimistic.

Spent too much time listening to Kneecap

Irish Puppy Riot ... actually have songs?
:P

(I only know of them via their kerfuffle. I can't imagine Irish rap is my thing. But I appreciate they are maintaining the rage.)

[dissectionist]

Yep, it’s an H3N2 flu (which traditionally tend to be worse anyway) and then it drifted from subclade J.2 to subclade J.2.4.1, which seems like it’s not much of a drift, but it was enough to mess with our vaccine matching. Then J.2.4.1 got renamed to “subclade K” because it’s having an outsize impact (and saying J.2.4.1 is a hassle).

WRT the LEDs - I remember back when I used to have my dog out at the dog park in 2000 and onward, LEDS weren’t a big and cheap thing yet, but we’d attach glowsticks to their collars if we were letting them off-leash in a darker area. It was a similar effect to the LED collars. We had that big blackout in 2004 and I remember dozens of us out at the dog park that night, all our dogs running around with yellow or orange glowsticks swinging from their collars while we all drank alcohol and ate cookies together for hours. It’s a nice memory.

[armiphlage]

Our puppies went around the neighbourhood yesterday wearing santa costumes and handing out presents to all the good doggies (plus Buffy, their nemesis). Each package contained two dried pig ears, and a pink LED light for their collar.

[the_siobhan]

All I could think of was that if a dog got out of the park somehow at least the owner had a chance of knowing where to follow.

[greylock]

I'm going to change my statement from "basically has it right" to "has understated the specifics".

I don't think I'd heard of clades and subclades until last year.

I remember the glowstick era.
First, with kids. Then with pets.
I

[dissectionist]

Ahaha, I’m a virology nerd, though not a professional virologist (I’m a cancer researcher in molecular biology). So I end up reading a lot about virology stuff for personal interest, and am always happy to talk about it if there’s an opening. XD

[the_siobhan]

I'm not so much a fan of their earlier stuff, but the stuff they're putting out now is fantastic.

My current favourite

https://youtu.be/fLt03BAQG0M?si=ryrYI3d2Ena-4Bl6

[disastrid]

Everything about that contractor is un-fucking-believable. Can you sue him?

[the_siobhan]

That's in the plan. I'm waiting until I find out how much this is all going to cost me before I take it to a lawyer. I figure I have more of a case if I actually have to get the floor torn up because of his bullshittery.

[kest]

I would say I'm into geneaology but haven't actively pursued it for a long time because yeah it is a time consuming hobby especially to do well. I'm lucky in that several other people in the family have been into it over the years so I had a lot of starting places. I love it for being a lens into history - it's not just the names and dates but the ancestor that was hung as a witch and the French Canadian fur trappers and the victims of pogroms and early supporters of workers rights and so forth. But then eventually you hit dead ends (the church burned with all the records, the ancestor was fished out of the English Channel and wouldn't give their name etc).

[the_siobhan]

My dad had a great-grandfather who moved around a lot and lied to his kids about his birthday. Getting him sorted will be a lot of detective work.

[the_siobhan]

(He was a gambler. So we figure intentionally covering his tracks.)

[doggiesushi]

Ugh. Here in the US, the flu has been going around just as fast and has really affected a few people in my circle. The vaccine on this side of the border is in the same vein as yours: not effective toward this flu strain since they started manufacturing it in the spring. Normally, the flu doesn't hit me that badly, but Tiffany always gets things about 10x worse than I do. I'm concerned that she'll end up with it.

To be honest, I'm a little jealous about the genealogy side. My sister was very, very into it when she was alive (this was pre-Internet) and a bit with Ancestry. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time with her at the local LDS churches, going through microfiches. I've really wanted to pick it back up again since I miss the feeling of endlessly scrolling through census rolls, looking for names... but, I know that I don't have the time to really get into it. I have whole huge parts of my family that are missing (my sister was my half-sister, so her family was super easy to find). I still need to figure out what side of the US/Canada border my paternal grandfather was actually born on to see if can one day qualify for Canadian citizenship.

[the_siobhan]

Now is a really good time to look into that, I believe they have recently relaxed the rules about claiming hereditary citizenship.

[kest]

left this tab open for a million years so I could get around to telling you I liked that youtube track, thanks for sharing it

[the_siobhan]

They don't have a full album out yet, but I've bought all their singles off bandcamp.