It's my 3 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 12 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both ( Read more... )

It's time to get our Nissan Xterra 4x4 smogged. In California all vehicles have to pass an air pollution, aka smog, check every 2 years starting at 8 years of service. (There's an exemption for cars produced before 1976.) Our Xterra is now almost 12 years old. I drove it to a test station today.


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Today marks a year since the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision throwing out the federal legalization of abortion decided in 1973's landmark Roe v. Wade case. A year later, where are we ( Read more... )

This month I've set a new blogging record for myself. I posted a whopping 84 entries in May, a rate of just over 2.7 per day. That eclipses my previous record tally of 81 in August '22 and edges out my old posts-per-day record of 2.67 in September '20.

A few reflections on this 84 post blitz, in the form of Five Things:

• As usual (for when I blog ( Read more... )

What's in a number? In the case of a telephone number, a lot. The number corresponds not to just one particular line, but the area code and branch number (the first three digits after the area code) also tell us where that line is based. Now that mobile phones on nationwide networks are commonplace, the number's less telling about where the person ( Read more... )

A few news organizations this week have picked up the story that smoking rates have dropped in the US. The source of the story is the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from 5/5/23. The MMWR is a fairly wonky weekly report. It sport no pretty charts or infographics. It's fully of stuffy, stilted language. The references it cites are ( Read more... )

I'm going bald. That was a startling realization I had at the tender age of just 23. Hawk and I had been to the beach the day before, and as I was looking in the bathroom mirror to apply lotion to my face I realized that I had sunburn on my forehead in places where I didn't even know I had forehead ( Read more... )

At the start of the month I posted some stats about my blogging. February had been a relatively slow month for me; I wrote 51 journal entries for an average of "only" 1.8 posts per day. That's slow-ish because over the past 15 months I've averaged a hair over 2.0 per day. Well, enough about February; what about March ( Read more... )

There's an upside to all the rainy, dreary weather we've been getting. After now 12 atmospheric rivers this season (again, normally 1-2 are enough to make news headlines for a few days) we're well past normal seasonal rainfalls in California. Reservoirs are filling up. A few are even discharging for the first time in a few years. We're gaining at ( Read more... )

February was a slow month for blogging. That's surprising because it didn't feel like a slow month. Indeed there were days when I published 3 or even 4 blogs a day. The numbers don't lie, though. On a daily average basis February was my slowest month in 9 months.


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