When I called the health center in late October and said "My last refill of ADHD medication came with a note that said 'book appointment with doctor for checkup'", they told me that there were no appointments available until December, and to call back at the beginning of November when the December appointment slots open up.

I called after lunch today, and the receptionist told me that all the slots had been filled already (even though the slots only opened for booking this morning - I checked their hours - at 8 am) so I would have to call back on November 17th when the next batch of appointment slots (for later in December I guess) opens up, "and preferably as early as possible in the morning!"

This isn't a functional system.

It might be the best way they can manage the resources they have, but it's clearly a health center that doesn't have enough doctors.

This is not an acceptable way to access a doctor's care in a public health system!!!!

(It's because conservative governments have had control in Finland and have been shoving through 'healthcare reforms' and insane cutbacks to all the social services over the last few years.)

An appointment with a private GP at the chain of private health centers with a branch in town has a base price of 100€, but it's 140€ for specialists and I suspect might be more for psychiatrists. (I haven't seriously considered going there, so I didn't check the specifics. Checking how the psychiatric medications are going for me is theoretically a more long-term monitoring anyway, not a one-time visit.)

I finally managed to find good information about getting rust off of a cast iron woodstove by using Marginalia Search Engine, a specialty search engine that is intended to resurface the "old web" of private websites and bulletin boards and stuff instead of SEO and corporate slop.

A few years ago in the winter when we were using the cast iron woodstove sometimes, someone (me) uhmmmmm absent-mindedly left some candle holders sitting on top of it with candles in them and those included ones carved out of solid blocks of pink rock salt (hideous, they belonged to my MIL, who was addicted to candles. Why didn't we just get rid of them? We hated them. Natural aversion to throwing things away. We have since thrown them out). So it turns out that ummm the candles completely liquefy if you do that and then light a fire in the stove, and they like cause the salt to run and melt onto the surface of the wood stove and salt is bad for cast iron. So. Big rust spots.

And the rust spots have got worse with time, because when it first happened and we tried to get them off, we tried with normal google and duckduckgo searches and got no better advice than sandpaper and steel wool. We only managed to get a tiny bit of the rust off and determined that getting it all off would have taken about 5000 hours of hand-sanding. Since that was not a worthwhile proposition, we left it that way for another year.

So anyway, I tried Marginalia a month ago or something, and it only took a few minutes to unearth a thread about restoring cast iron woodstoves on an old-fashioned bulletin board on "finishing.com, the home of the finishing industry". It's straight out of the internet 20 years ago. And the information was MUCH better!

• WD-40 softens rust


• wire brushes, not sandpaper or sandblasting (although industrial, like, having the stove ripped out and taking it to someone who will sandblast it is the nuclear option if it's completely covered in rust everywhere)


• wire brush attachments for power drills

That was all the info we needed! WD-40 never seemed stinky to me when I was using it on door hinges and stuff, but when you spray it over the visible rust on a wood stove it is noticeable, though not TERRIBLE; it smells kinda like you're in an auto shop, but not in the middle of the car part. Like by the entrance.

You can get visible change on small rust spots with a handheld wire brush. A few hours on two days with the drill attachment has seemed to do the majority of it. It's very hard to work in eye protection goggles and a high filtration mask though. I have to stop, lift the glasses to look, then lower them and start again every minute or so. We are not planning to repaint the spots that have been taken back to the silvery iron, according again to the advice on this bulletin board. Apparently lighting a fire after the WD-40 is already going to be stinky enough and the paint would be worse. You can get protective stove polishes of some kind apparently.

This stove is a Jøtul 3 Classic cast iron woodstove, in a traditional 19th century style. It's completely inappropriate for this 1950 modern-style house. The expected stove in the livingroom is (and no doubt was) a masonry stove, which is much better at heating an area because the ceramic conserves heat and releases it gradually. The form of masonry stoves, which are of course built on-site, was typically streamlined in the years after this house was built. Nowadays you can't build them yourself anymore and that makes them more expensive, so somebody probably replaced the original one when it failed with this cast iron stove perhaps in the 1980s, which was the last time this model was made. But crucially, although a woodstove is completely inappropriate to the house and less functional, there were and are woodstoves that are more minimal and modern in form and they could've just got one of those. But nope.

Anyway, we can't afford a masonry stove like, ever, but our ambition is to replace this woodstove with a Porin Matti, a cheaper alternative to a masonry stove that is still slightly better at retaining heat than a cast iron stove, and which also (a) was in popular use in 1950 and (b) looks similar to the style of masonry stoves typically found in our type of house. These only cost about 2500€ (not counting labor), in contrast to masonry stoves which are typically over 8000€ not counting labor (and requiring much more labor because the mason has to build it on site out of blocks and tiles). We would've been able to buy one this year probably if we hadn't had this broken sewage pipe issue, which ended up costing around 10k. (We had previously earmarked that money, an inheritance from my great-uncle who died recently, for restoring the outer front door and maybe a stove; but the last of it got used on the plumbing instead.)

The importance of fresh air to health, and the importance of airing things, comes up repeatedly as I read 1920s magazines. This is left over from the late Victorian medical advice, because many diseases were treated with or (thought to be) prevented by fresh air which have since been eliminated, most notably TB. (In 1910s women's magazines the language is very much reminiscent of the miasma theory of disease, even though of course germ theory was established by then.) More so in 1910s, but into the early 1920s, I see notions like:

• it's unhealthy for any human being to ever sleep in a room with closed windows


• lower incidence of disease in babies in tropical climates is probably due to spending almost all their time outdoors (I still wonder if this notion of low infant illness in the tropics wasn't mistaken? But it might be due to HIGH infant mortality in the US, where breastfeeding was being discouraged and babies were typically fed unpasteurized and frequently spoiled or contaminated cow's milk)


• every bed in the house should be made every day and every time the housekeeper makes it, she should first air the bedding, room, and mattress, by opening the windows in the room all the way regardless of temperature, stripping the mattress to leave it bare for some hours, and airing the bedding outdoors and/or beating it before remaking the bed (I've also seen articles which only want the bedding to be aired or beaten once or twice a week)

Of course, this idea of airing bedding is also part of performative housekeeping perfection/cleanliness and cultural standards of class and gender etc, not just health.

My life is distinctly complicated by airing, because wool garments prefer to be aired, shaken, and brushed and only washed if there's no other choice. But the season when we use wool garments is also the season when it is rarely dry outside. Airing wool garments outside would mean setting up a laundry rack outdoors and clipping things to it (because it's also almost always windy through the cold months), and sometimes multiple weeks might pass before a day where I was certain they wouldn't get rained on.

waxjism points out that this is probably not a problem for people without ADHD, because the things probably only really need to be outdoors for a couple of hours, and they would perhaps notice when it started raining and be able to run out and get their laundry. Whereas in our household, putting laundry outside carries a 50% risk that everyone will forget it exists out there until the next time one of us walks outside for another reason. I guess I could use an alarm - maybe even on a day with a chance of rain if it wasn't raining yet? But so much of the autumn and winter the air just looks sodden when you look out the window, even if it isn't raining or snowing.

In constrast to our sad state, apartments almost always have covered balconies, which are ideal for the purpose of airing. I really miss that. (Our balcony is under construction right now, but it doesn't have a roof over it, anyway.) I suppose if you had to dry all your laundry outdoors (and the whole week's on one day), it would be harder to forget it was there and easier to just put the wool up at the same time. That must've been hard for the women of the period in Finland in this season though. There isn't a suitable day every week. They must've been drying things on the stoves and radiators instead.

Yesterday Wax and I went and bought a new curtain rod to replace the one in the bedroom that's been hanging crooked for... several years.

We haven't put it up yet, but we got it!

I wonder how many people have gotten about three hours of research deep into "How to break up with all your Google products" and given up because it's too hard or too much work. This has DEFINITELY happened to me AT LEAST three times in the last ten years.

I'm not even doing it today, I'm just reminded because there's YET ANOTHER post going around about Firefox updating to integrate AI and the hidden switches in about:config you have to use if you want to turn it off. The same post talks about switching your default search engine. In one of these previous times years ago I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but DuckDuckGo has been pushing AI more over time and it's really annoying so I've been meaning to switch and -

- at the bottom of the post it said we should all switch to Qwant or udm=14, and so I looked up both of those. Qwant is a French search engine that is aggressively integrating AI, but they are big on not storing and selling your data at least, which would've been nice if not for the llm. udm=14 is a string you can append in Google search that gives you the "old" (pre-AI) style results. (There are other search engines - I found a link to The Search Engine Map, which shows all the ones which give English results - but I feel this experience is representative.)

I'm weighing whether I want to switch browsers. I'm definitely mad enough to, but I hate switching browsers...

I have been reading and skimming 1920s magazines and have not got tired of that yet. I have learned so much more about the period, and have a much firmer grip on the idiom of the time.

It was a didactic article about world literature from one of these 20s women's magazines that actually made me curious about the Arabian Nights - I didn't read the whole article, bc racism, but the brief history inspired me to read on Wikipedia. The history and background there fascinated me, and I wanted to read the translation of

[t]he Leiden Edition, prepared by Muhsin Mahdi, [...] the only critical edition [...] to date,[48] believed to be most stylistically faithful representation of medieval Arabic versions currently available. [... It] was rendered into English by Husain Haddawy (1990).[61] This translation has been praised as 'very readable' and 'strongly recommended for anyone who wishes to taste the authentic flavour of those tales'.

It is very readable and really entertaining! In fact I've stayed awake longer than I meant to several nights this week because of wanting to finish one of the stories.

I've also realized that the... maybe not exactly subgenre; category? of Arabian fantasy is all stylistically influenced by them. That seems painfully obvious now that I've thought it, but I've never thought about it before! I have not read much of it, though, and I know there are newer fantasy novels in that setting that are not written by white people, some on my to-read list; they are possibly quite different or more diverse. But in the past (mostly childhood), I've read

• Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones (1990), set in the universe of Howl's Moving Castle


• The Harem of Aman Akbar by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1984)


• Night's Master and Death's Master by Tanith Lee (1978-79)

Oh, Wikipedia even says on the page for the last series that it's inspired by the Thousand and One Nights. I must've seen that before I read them (it was only like five years ago maybe) and forgotten.

For long-time readers following along at home, you will likely remember our year-long struggle with the open septic tanks in the yard and the conclusion a couple weeks ago when the plumbers (and the digger) finally fixed it! Unfortunately, in the process, as well as digging up a bunch of grass and the gravel of our driveway, they had to dig up

• The horizontal cement square at the base of the cement steps to our door connecting them to the cement steps a couple yards in front of them that led up the retaining-wall hill to the higher level of the yard. Why did they build these two steps with a little square of cement between them? Nobody knows. But because it was connected to both sets of steps, and it had to be dug up, the bottom step of each set of steps is now all crumbled and broken with rebar sticking out and the step down to the ground is now too great. I guess we're gonna get some bricks???



RIP hideous but previously functional bottom steps :(


• A row of established bushes marking the edge of the yard on the right of the driveway as you turn in. The broken pipe went under it. So we lost all of them. They were kind of straggly and unhappy anyway and we have tried several times to cut them back and fertilize them, to no avail.



• A lot of the roots of the beautiful birch tree on the corner of the lot, planted by the wife of the builder of the house, so probably sometime around 1950. The city workers who dug up and repaved the street 1 year ago unfortunately cut right up to the base of the trunk at the corner, so it lost a bunch of roots then, and this new excavation went almost as close, but from about 120° off. Two different old people in the neighborhood stopped on their walks to tell us "Hey, that tree's gonna die." Which seems plausible based on how much of its roots it must've lost, but it will be really sad and we are at least SLIGHTLY hoping that maybe it won't? Wax wants to wait and see how it feels next spring before we consider calling an arborist. I looked at the city website, but there is no number for the people in charge of trees (it is on city land since they own the margin next to the road) or any contact information about trees, so I suppose there isn't a municipal "Is This Tree a Danger" number.
  
  
  You can see the tree on the edge there and all the bare earth where the excavation was...

So we bought some clover seed to put where the grass used to be (hoping the headstart will help it outcompete the grass - we hate grass) (it won't grow until next spring though) and where the cement square was. We can't hope to repair the steps until spring thaw because it's too cold to be sure of being able to cure concrete already. And we also bought some baby bushes to replace our lost bushes.

One of the bushes is the extremely common native shrub dasiphora fruticosa, or shrubby cinquefoil (Swedish: Ölandstok, Finnish: pensashanhikki), the Creme Brulee cultivar, which is white. The yellow-flowered one is what you see everywhere, so this will be a little different. In the center are two spiraea betulifolias, birchleaf spireas (björkspirea, koivuangervo), a variety whose leaves turn red early in summer after it finishes blooming. And the last one next to the driveway is forsythia x intermedia Courtalyn, or border forsythia Courtalyn (forsythia, I guess? in Swedish, and komeaonnenpensas in Finnish), which will have yellow flowers. However, now we have to get one or more stakes to put around them to protect them from the snowplows. The old bushes were big enough to warn the plows off, but these guys probably not so much. And they're near the corner of the lot and the street corner at a T intersection which is a big danger zone for snow plows because of the way the street widens a bit at the corners there.

Sipuli has had three days of short sessions, 5-10 minutes, of clicker training, and it's adorable. She's possibly the cleverest cat we've ever met, and she's very food-motivated.

Our rewards are the little cubes of freeze dried chicken, which are much more expensive than most cat treats but also healthier because, unlike most cat treats, they don't contain anything but meat; and they were the only kind Snookums could have because he was diabetic, and as a result Tristana is used to getting them at bedtime and after Procedures like claw trimming and ear cleaning.

Sipuli has not fully mastered "touch the target", but she's so engaged, and you can see her thinking.

The idea behind this suggestion from the cat behaviorist was, I think, being able to ultimately train them simultaneously in parallel, and maybe get them to act differently at the gate. This seems possible, but we haven't started training Tristana or introduced Wax making the requests yet, so it's early.

On the minus side, yesterday Sipuli got out and chased Tristana across the room for about thirty seconds. You'd have thought they were both dying, but actually it seems like they did not in fact touch each other at all - Tristana was screaming under the chair while Sipuli was yelling back. That's good, that nobody was hurt and they didn't physically fight. But obviously still a setback. Tristana had to go hide in the turtle bed on the heated upstairs bathroom floor for a few hours.

I have been thinking about the ADHD struggle, and I decided I should buy the Barkley book on adult ADHD and also a copy of How To Keep House While Drowning; I added them to my cart at the online bookstore, then didn't order them because I didn't have the executive function to do that yet. I found some potential replacements for the charger of my laptop that just broke as well, but didn't manage to finish comparing them and decide.

Other stuff I need to do and have been unable to start includes:( Read more... )

I think a lot of what's blocking me from several of these things in the last month, anyway, is that they feel like projects that require planning and stamina, but so much of my bandwidth has been going to anxiety about the driving test (two days from now) that there wasn't space. This is extremely normal for me and obviously a fallacy, but I guess I've been feeling like the time until the test was mostly short enough that I should just try to minimize anxiety and worry about all the other stuff after. And I didn't want to take my adhd meds in between.

On the plus side, plumbers are here digging up the yard to fix the drain to the sewer.

On the minus side, the plumber asked me if Wax was my mom. 😂😭But on the plus (?) side that was probably more embarrassing for him than for us? (I have gray in my hair! But apparently not visibly, at a glance.) (Wax also looks young for her age, but I guess her hair looks much grayer now.)

The tenant side drains will be cut off from tomorrow, so we have to clean the bathrooms tonight so they can use our bathrooms. And the giant pit that's being dug has eliminated the direct route from their door to ours, so they'll have to go the long way around the house to reach us. And we'll have to climb over the railings and jump down the side of the stairs to our door for a little while.

But obviously it's all worth it! Because ultimately it means working drains instead of open septic tanks with a pump in them.