Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

Three zoos in just over a week!

A couple weeks ago, my oldest friend – who I met in elementary school – visited Chicago for a conference, and followed that with a visit out here in the suburbs. On one of the days she was visited, we decided on the nearby Phillips Park Zoo for an afternoon walk, strolling around in delightful weather, with only the minor lament that the zoo’s alligators outgrew their space and have moved to another zoo.

A highland cow at Phillips Park Zoo in Aurora, Illinois

A lion at Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield, Illinois

In discussions that evening at to what we could do the next day, which would include dropping her at one of the Chicago airports early evening, we decided to introduce her to Brookfield Zoo, one of the two large zoos in the Chicagoland area (the other being Lincoln Park Zoo). The lovely weather continued, and we were able to view the new outdoor primate habitats in the Bramsen Tropical Forest, including the delightful experience of watching several monkeys chasing a squirrel that was traversing the netting of their enclosure on the outside. (Delightful for us, that is. I’m not sure how the squirrel felt.)

A week after dropping her off at the airport, we flew to Washington, DC, dropped our luggage at the hotel for the conference I was attending, and beelined to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Alas, we ran out of energy before we saw the pandas. Like many larger zoos, it may be possible to see all of the animals in a day if you arrive at the beginning of the day, but we arrived at lunch time after an early morning and eventually called it quits. Hopefully we’ll make it back there in the near future to see what we missed and revisit the many animals we enjoyed seeing this time around.

The mallard’s nest, part one

On Tuesday, I walked out to the end of the driveway to retrieve the garbage can – I knew the recycling hadn’t been picked up yet- and placed it by the garage door, slightly sheltered from the rain by the overhanging roof and gutters. As I rolled it into place, a female mallard flew away from the house, startling me.

Mallard duck eggs partially obscured by dry leaves

I returned along the walkway to the front door and noticed a handful of eggs, partially exposed. Concerned that she might not returned, I did a quick Google on my phone and found out that a nesting mallard will leave a couple times a day to get food, so I hoped that was the case here. Cassandra did more research later in the day, discovering that mallards don’t start incubating their eggs until they’ve laid them all, and an average nest can have between 8 and 13 eggs. Wow! That reassured me when she wasn’t back on the nest later in the day; our thought is she’s not done laying the eggs yet.

A female mallard blending in with dried leaves between a solar charger and a hose stand

Not, mind you, that I would necessarily notice her. She camouflages quite well, as you can see. Or not see, as the case may be. Knowing that she’s in this photo, I still had to crop it a lot to see her easily. Here’s hoping for a part two on this topic, though research says that’s almost a month of incubating away.

The interesting times continue

“May you live in interesting times” is said to be a curse. And our times have certainly had waves of interesting in the past few months. Back in December, I had mentioned our leaking bay window (apparently the guys who put in our new siding and fascia didn’t actually caulk above the window like they were supposed to) and our internet outage. I didn’t mention that my car’s bumper was damaged around the same time, while parked at a public parking lot. Fortunately, the driver left a note and his insurance covered the repairs.

On top of that, while I was in Tennessee in February, there was a power outage that came with a surge that fried the circuit board for our solar inverter. That meant when power was restored, anything running through the solar was still out. Understanding that we had the most essential circuits mapped to the solar power, I came home to a cold house, with pretty much only power in the bedrooms being usable. Did I mention this was in February? Our solar company was able to come out that afternoon, saw the fried circuit board, and bypassed it to get us up and running again. The actual repair – replacing the solar inverter – was originally scheduled for before our Caribbean cruise, but they had to postpone until the day after we returned.

After they finished and left, I was looking out the bay window at the equipment on our wall. Then I turned the other direction and saw something entirely unexpected: the utility pole out back was suddenly leaning. I do mean suddenly; we had done a garden walk after arriving home the day before, so I was fairly sure that it hadn’t started leaning during our trip. I call ComEd, our electrical company, and they had a team out later that day, mostly before the rain picked up. They carefully navigated our trees with the small truck in the second photo, which was then used to prop up the pole. Surprisingly, the power was only out for a brief period while they were working, though I found out the next day that the attached cable wires were affected.

Just over a week later, I received a text warning me about an upcoming outage scheduled for this past Monday. The new pole was delivered to our front yard on Saturday – again, carefully avoiding damage to our plants and trees. On Monday, I intermittently took window breaks to watch the process, including happening to look out at one point when a guy with a chainsaw dropped a piece of the old pole, after having moved the appropriate hardware and wires above that point. The old pole still has some wires, presumably not electrical, attached to it, and it about half the height of the adjacent new pole.

And I’m happy to report that our solar battery kept us up and running throughout the scheduled outage.

What is Patches?

As I was cruising in the Caribbean (posts about that coming soon!), playing my daily puzzles like Wordle and Zip, I noticed that LinkedIn was suggesting a new puzzle: Patches. How new? Yesterday’s puzzle was numbered 16; I have a 14-day streak playing it.

Like Zip, Patches is a spatial awareness game, trying to fill the entirety of a grid. Instead of numbers to connect, there are blocks, some with specific numbers or shapes that they must match. In the first image of the slideshow, there’s a gold 9 in the upper left corner with crossing rectangles, with no other blocks in the 3 by 4 squares below and to the right of it; the placement for that one seemed obvious at a 3 by 3 square. But in the bottom left, one space to the right of the edge, there’s a blue block with a 2 shaped as a wide rectangle; that could go either direction, depending on what other blocks fill. And the bottom right has a red block with crossing rectangles without a number; that means it can go any direction, any number. Any direction does still mean rectangular; you can’t drag one block to form just a corner.

The second puzzle in the slideshow has a whopping ten blocks to place, still in a 6 by 6 grid. Is that easier or harder?

My different packing styles

In the last month and a half, I have packed for four different places that weren’t my own bed (and were all sadly lacking in cats): a local convention, a brief work trip to Tennesee, a conference for work in Boston padded with an extra night to see friends, and a Caribbean cruise. As I packed and unpacked yet again, I reflected on the differences inherent in packing for very different trips, both in the duration and the nature of the trips.

For three of the four trips, I packed my Temperature Tree embroidery project; I didn’t take it on the 2-night work trip, and by the trip to Boston, I had moved it into a smaller bag that fits in my carry-on. At Capricon, I worked on it during my Friday morning Stitch & Bitch, then didn’t touch it for the rest of the trip; in Boston, I kept up on it until the morning I was packing out. (Yes, I had enough time at the airport after the conference to catch up if I had felt so inclined. I was busy reading.)

Capricon was the only driving trip, which gave me a lot of leeway in how many bags I packed and the possibility of loose items. (Not to mention boxes to build a Box Fort.) On the shorter work trip, I checked what’s effectively a carry-on bag (not to be confused with my actual carry-on, a backpack that includes my laptop) with some space to spare. Heading to Boston, I knew I was spending an afternoon “book and yarn shopping” with friends, so I gave myself the extra space of a larger suitcase, and I did in fact use it. (Among other things, I found a used copy of Elphie: A Wicked Childhood, a recent prequel to Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Score!)

For our longer trips over the last couple years – to the UK, Canary Islands, or even to Portland (which was only a week) – I’ve packed knowing I’d want to wash laundry during the trip. In Glasgow a couple years ago, it was easier to find a laundry service than time to use a laundromat. Similarly, on a longer cruise, there isn’t a really good laundry option… handwash everything in the tiny bathroom, pack an extra suitcase and have to store it in the equally tiny room, or pay for the laundry service per bag. I lean towards a mix of those, handwashing smaller items, and paying to wash larger items, so I can pack for half the duration of the trip and reuse items. Of course, part of that is because some delicate items like bras really shouldn’t run through the dryer if you can help it. On our cruise, that plan lasted until we realized how small the laundry service bags are; then we decided to use some of our promotional credit to pay for ongoing laundry service instead of on a per bag basis. As it turns out, coming home with only a couple days of dirty laundry from a long trip is a fabulous experience.

For everything except the cruise (for both Customs and profitability reasons, they don’t want you bringing your own), I packed some nicer teas, though I was so tired one morning at Capricon that I completely forgot I had and asked housekeeping for some spare tea. (My roommate slept in the first morning, so our room wasn’t reset.) For Capricon, we packed a couple meals, knowing that we’d have a fridge in the room, and for my trip to Tennessee, I packed some snack foods, mainly because I didn’t know what time the included breakfast would be available compared to when my work day needed to start.

Overall, it’s an interesting study of what becomes important for each trip, including the never-ending dilemma of “can I fit another craft project?”

Do you Zip?

I realize, without context, there are a lot of options for the word “zip,” not the least are “zipper” or “zipline”. In this case, Zip is the name of a daily puzzle game available on LinkedIn. It’s one of a handful of puzzles I like starting my day with, along with Wordle, Waffle, and Connections.

Zip is a spatial rather than word puzzle, where you need to connect all of the numbers in order while also passing through each space only once. The quantity of numbers varies, so you never know until you click into that day’s puzzle how many you’re trying to connect and what the layout looks like. The grid pictured in the first image above had no obstacles; sometimes there are borders to work around.

The second image is the completed puzzle for that day, and the third image shows how my time compared to other players’. That was a particularly good day for me, completing the puzzle in 15 seconds when the average was 26. The “flawless” text at the top of the third image means I didn’t undo any of my path while completing the puzzle. That is certainly not always the case, some puzzles trip me up in different ways, hitting a mental block that sometimes prompts me to close the window (pausing the timer) or use a hint.

What does your daily puzzle routine look like?

Did you “spring forward” last Sunday?

Or did you, like me, reluctantly hobble forward in this seemingly pointless semiannual ritual where we change the clocks and hope our circadian rhythm catches up to the change quickly?

I was oddly lucky this morning in not realizing the change had hit when I woke up to feed the cats. Had the clock in my bedroom automatically changed, I might have wondered at the cats letting me sleep in; they do not partake of time changes lightly. In fact, I didn’t remember about it until nearly an hour later, after they had been fed and I had showered, which is when I felt like I had lost an hour of my day, preparing and eating breakfast at a time – according to the clock – when I have normally finished those and moved onto either chores or work.

There have, on multiple occasions, been bills put forth in the US Congress to end the time change. In recent years, it seems one will pass either the House or Senate, and then get ignored by the other body until the resurgence of complaints – now or in November – brings the issue to light again.

I am aware that the issue is not as simple as “stop doing it.” Back in 2007, with about two years warning, the start date changed, extending daylight savings by four or five weeks. From an IT perspective, this was a borderline disaster for the bank I was working at: PCs ended up on one time and servers on another, due to a mismatch in software updates. I see a bit of that now, as I have co-workers in other countries who don’t change their clocks, which means recurring meetings will shift for someone… which way depends on who originally scheduled it.

I do hope we do away with the time change, like so many other countries have, at some point in the near future.

You’ve got dice!

If you read Cassandra’s blog, you may have seen her post a few months ago about entering sweepstakes. When she finds a sweepstakes that may also be of interest to me, she shares the link. While the odds are better than winning the lottery, I never really expect to win something. So it was a pleasant surprise about a month ago to open an email saying I was a potential winner for one of the sweepstakes I had entered.

To be clear, legitimate “you won something” messages are entirely different from spam versions. The sweepstakes I had entered and the specific prize were mentioned in the email, along with detailed instructions for claiming the prize and the deadline for doing so. Presumably because there was a minimum age for entering the sweepstakes, a copy of my ID was required along with an affidavit.

A set of liquid core RPG dice (the usual: d4, d6, d8, d10 standard, d10 percentile, d12, and d20). Essentially translucent dice with a dark red center and gold letters.

Given the title of this post, you can guess what part of the prize was… dice! These are described as a “branded set of 7 liquid core RPG dice”… pretty cool looking, aren’t they? So far, the d20 has been rolling pretty well for me on this year’s Quest Calendar.

A wine stopper with a fancy dragon claw top

But that’s not all! The prize package also included a “branded dragon claw shaped wine stopper” and a (not pictured, cause I couldn’t get a good photo) “branded wine tote”.

How’s that for a random prize package that’s totally appropriate for me?

Thyroid: the Stabbening

When I had my MRI in November, other than the arthritis, the results turned up something odd about my thyroid. After a discussion with my primary doctor in December, I scheduled a thyroid ultrasound, which confirmed that I have “nodules” on and around my thyroid. This resulted in a specialist visit to see an otolaryngologist, also known as an ENT (Ears Nose Throat).

After an initial meet & greet – which I question the need for when the ultrasound results recommended an “FNA” – Fine Needle Aspiration – I scheduled the FNA, or thyroid biopsy, to pull some tissue from the nodules. Alas, our medical system is weighed down by bureaucracy.

The base of my neck with slight scabbing from the Fine Needle Aspiration (FNA) for my thyroid

Bureaucracy aside, the doctor’s bedside manner was good, talking me through the process before starting and throughout. I was warned that the local numbing agent would burn going in – it did. After that, I only felt pressure as each needle went in, and then got poked around a few times. I’m not sure the poking around part was really mentioned, though I suppose it still just counts as pressure. It reminded me a little of a root canal, when the dentist is poking into the tooth repeatedly to make sure they got all of the root and you only feel the pressure of the poking.

I was warned that the results could take up to 7 business days; they took 5, and I am relieved to say my thyroid nodules are benign.

Temperature projects update

2025 is done!* 2026 projects are progressing!

My 2025 temperature blanket stretching across the sofa in an array of colors, with a skein of yarn for the border dangling on one end.

OK, the * is because I still have the border to finish on the 360-day granny square blanket I started in mid-February 2025. The final day in that count fell during Capricon, so I finished the squares, adding the squares to the row, and then attaching the row to the overall blanket after we got home from the convention. I have started the border using the same gradient white to black yarn that I used to join, knowing that I have an unstarted skein still. My approach at the moment is to get a row of single crochet around the entire blanket – which lengthwise stretches across the sofa – and then determine whether I have enough yarn for a fancier second row.

The beginnings of my 2026 temperature blanket - a completed strip for January, with 31 linked chains and a white border, and a partial strip for the first half of February, with the beginnings of the white border.

The 2026 blanket is definitely less of a time investment than the 2025 one – each link, even with my February decision to start on the border as I add each link, which helps orient them correctly, takes 10 minutes or less. I’m super excited about how this will look once I’ve connected multiple months. That part has to wait until the full month is finished, since there’s a second row on the border that can’t be added until the entire month is complete. I can’t even make the filler links – 3 gray ones for February – until I finish out the month, since they connect in as they’re crocheted.

My 2026 Temperature Tree, an embroidery project that encompasses the entire calendar year.

The temperature tree is also progressing nicely. I feel like each day takes longer than this year’s blanket, but that may be inaccurate. I still have to think about what I’m doing for the embroidery, which is mostly not the case for the daily links I’m crocheting. I can multitask the daily crocheted project while watching or listening to something, which probably gives me impression that it’s going faster than it really is.

Overall, these are both fairly quick daily projects, so I have started another (side? main?) crochet project as well. That’s a gift, so it won’t show up here until it’s been handed to the recipient. Actually, that’s the case for a couple upcoming projects, so there may be some project photo dumps later in the year.