We had a substantial snowfall on Jan. 25. I shoveled the front walk and steps four times, and the back sidewalk twice, in 24 hours.

Around the 28th (or was it the 1st?), I shoveled a path from the back door to the garage, and from the garage to the back sidewalk, in order to take out the trash, recyclables, and compostables and leave them on top of a snowdrift adjacent to the street behind the house. They didn't get picked up that day, but by the next week my next-door neighbor (whose stuff had also not been picked up) had shoveled out a section of said snowdrift so he could put his trash, recycling, and composting bins on pavement adjecent to the street behind the house, and I put mine in the same bare patch.

On various occasions in the first ten days of February, I did some shoveling around the car, hoping to have it freed by the time we needed to use it. So by Saturday the 14th, when we needed the car to drive to a Recorder Society meeting, the car was not embedded in snow, and indeed the pavement around it was dry. We moved the car for the first time in three weeks. Naturally, by the time we got home, my carefully-shoveled parking space had been occupied by another car, but I found an empty space only two or three spaces away, and grabbed it.

On Sunday the 15th, I finally shoveled out the rest of the path between our house and the next-door neighbor's, so we could walk from the back sidewalk to the front steps without climbing over snowdrifts.

On Sunday night into Monday morning, we got another inch or two of snow. By the time I got up, the front and back sidewalks had both been cleared by neighbors with snow-blowers, so I only had to deal with the front walk, steps, and the path between the houses, which didn't take long. And I was able to move the car back to the space in front of our house.

It's supposed to be relatively warm this week, with highs in the 40's Fahrenheit and a rainfall or two to melt the snow. Then more snow next weekend; it remains to be seen how much will fall, how much will stick.

Last week I decided to give up on my current sourdough starter, which was smelling alarmingly vinegary and not rising much, and order a new one from King Arthur. The new starter arrived Sunday, with a "care and feeding" pamphlet that suggested I didn't need to give up on the old one after all, just feed it better. Anyway, I had already thrown out the old starter, so I've been following the feeding instructions meticulously: at every feeding, discard (or use) 2/3 of the starter, leaving 50 g, and add 50 g of flour and 50 g of water. And it does smell nice, and it's been puffing up nicely in the crock.

Last night's batch of bread wasn't exactly light and fluffy, but less dense than the previous two, and not bad considering I'm still trying to make it high-protein and low-carb (using 2 eggs, 1-1/2 cups of water, 1-1/2 cups of white bread flour, a cup of whole-wheat flour, 3/4 cup of wheat gluten, 1/4 cup of flaxseed meal, and 1/8 cup of quinoa). I had the oven at 150°F for a few hours while the bread rose on the stovetop, then put the bread into a soaked Romertopf in the oven, and set the thermostat to 475°F and the timer to 45 minutes. It came out a little dark, so maybe 450°F for 50 minutes next time. And the recipe in the pamphlet for pain au levain, using only sourdough starter and no commercial yeast, has you amplify the 50 g of starter to a levain for 12 hours before adding anything else, which I haven't been doing. The levain is not at a 1:1:1 ratio of starter:water:flour, but a stiffer 1:2.5:5. Try that next time.

Speaking of "stiffer", one of the bread-baking books I've worked with in the past follows a different model of sourdough, allegedly based on the practice of people traveling to California in covered wagons: rather than growing it semi-liquid in a crock, you make it much stiffer into a baseball, wrapped tightly in two layers of handkerchief, and at each feeding, discard the outer crust and use the soft, spongy inner part. Haven't done that in a number of years.

Of course, the Romertopf approach to baking -- starting with a cold oven, as you'll crack the Romertopf by putting it cold-and-wet into a hot oven -- is inconsistent with the way bread ovens have worked for 98% of human bread-baking history: build a fire in the oven, get the floor and walls good and hot, pull out the fire and ash and put the bread in to bake as the oven gradually cools down. I've done the latter too, both in a modern gas oven and in a wood-fired brick oven, and that's another knob to tweak.

In second grade I had French classes, so I learned a smattering of French then, but never continued it.

In high school I was asked to choose a language to study (the options being French, German, and Spanish); I decided rationally that Spanish was spoken by the largest number of people in the world, so I went that way, taking two years of Spanish in high school and a third year at the local community college (I really didn't like my second-year Spanish teacher, so when I walked into third-year and saw her there, I dropped the class).

In college I was advised that I should have some reading knowledge of German if I wanted to go to grad school in mathematics, so I took a year's worth of German classes. I forget whether that was before or after I went to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria briefly as a tourist.

In grad school I was (as predicted) required to pass reading-comprehension exams in two of French, German, and Russian, on grounds that mathematics research papers have traditionally been written in those languages. I picked French and German because they use familiar alphabets, have lots of cognates, and I'd already studied both of them a little. The reading-comprehension exams amounted to "here's a chapter of an undergraduate math textbook in Language X; come back with an English translation of it in a few weeks," and I passed both of them.

Later in grad school my advisor got funding for me to attend a month-long workshop with him in Prague. The University didn't offer classes in Czech, but there were self-study materials at the library, so I spent a few months before the Prague trip studying Czech, and impressed my advisor on our first day there by walking into a convenience store and saying "Dvacet listeky, prosim" ["twenty mass-transit tickets, please"]. (One ticket cost 4 kroner, or about fifty cents, and would get you on the street-car; two would get you on the faster subway that only served a few places in the city.)

Around 2020 shalmestere installed DuoLingo on her phone and tried to learn some Irish, in honor of her Irish ancestry, but "it made her brain hurt"; she switched to Welsh (where she also has ancestry) and had a better time.

In summer 2022 we visited Wales, so a few months earlier I installed DuoLingo on my phone and we both tried to learn Welsh (not that one needs to speak Welsh to be a tourist there, but it's always cool to learn another language). I can still say things like "Ydy Bailey eisiau mynd am dro?" ["does Bailey want to go for a walk?"]

In Spring 2024 we visited Spain, so a few months earlier we both switched to studying Spanish in DuoLingo. My high school Spanish came back pretty well, and things mostly made sense to me. There are words that according to all the rules should be masculine but are actually feminine, or vice versa, but those are rare.

In Fall 2025 we visited France and Belgium, so a few months earlier we both switched to studying French in DuoLingo, and are still working on that. My grade-school French did not come back so well, though there are lots of helpful cognates, and I stumble over my tongue whenever there's a pronunciation exercise. And I'm reaching the conclusion that I Do Not Like French; it's almost as irrational and unpredictable as English. I'm still having trouble remembering which nouns are which gender (not an issue in English), and which adjectives go before the noun and which after it (not an issue in English, although we have weird rules about in what order to put multiple adjectives), but the real bugbear is pronunciation.

The words "souvent" and "savent" are spelled similarly, but one is pronounced as two syllables and the other as one. Can you guess which is which? Apparently the "ent" ending is silent in verbs, but not in prepositions, or something like that.

The words "aller", "allez", "allé", "allés", "allée", and "allées" are all forms of the verb "to be", which is somewhat irregular in most languages (including French and English), but irregularity isn't the problem here. All six of these words are spelled differently, any one would be grammatically incorrect if substituted for any of the others, and all six are pronounced identically. The phrases "Il court" and "Ils courent" ["he runs" and "they run"] are pronounced identically, as are the feminine equivalents "Elle court" and "Elles courent" (I got a listening exercise wrong in DuoLingo by guessing the wrong one).

Woke this morning to snow on the ground, and still falling. Around 8:45, put my breakfast on to simmer and went out to shovel. There was about 3" of fine, powdery snow on the ground, easy to shovel, so I did the front steps, the walk to the sidewalk, and our sections of front and back sidewalks, then came inside to eat.

Steel-cut oats, with a dribble of maple syrup in the cooking water, "allayed up with yolkes of eyroun", and a nice red grapefruit half. Yum.

Update, 1:00 PM: there was another 6" of fine, powdery snow everywhere I had shoveled before. Shoveled again.

Update, 2:15 PM: it's no longer snowing, but raining and/or sleeting. Yuck.

Update 5 PM: shoveled another 4-5" of heavier, wetter snow.

Update midnight: there's another two inches or so on the ground; haven't shoveled it yet except for a path from the back door to the back sidewalk, which I hadn't shoveled at all yet. This was annoying because I was sleepy, because I was shoveling the full depth all at once, and because of the slight crust on top.

From the US Department of War (in 1945, before it was renamed the Department of Defense), a pamphlet directed to US military personnel:

https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up

It's self-congratulatory wartime propaganda, of course, but it makes very clear that we can't assume fascism will never come to our shores, and must learn how to recognize it when we see it, even if it's wrapped in an American rather than a German, Italian, or Japanese flag.

shalmestere and I were staying at somebody's house, and took the opportunity to take a hike in the mountains (fairly arid and bare, perhaps southern California) starting just around the corner from the house. I had taken the same hike solo the day before and enjoyed it, but recalled that the maps in the guidebook weren't entirely clear, and there was no signage at all on the trail. Just as shalmestere started up the first hill, I realized that I hadn't put the shawms in the car, which was a problem as we would need them the next place we were going. I offered to go back to the house and get the shawms, but didn't want shalmestere to get lost before I could catch up with her, so I told her "if you get to an intersection of trails and it isn't absolutely clear which way to go, stop and wait for me." [Why we didn't just get the instruments after finishing the hike must be attributed to dream logic.]

Last night I went to a meeting of the Richmond Hill Historical Society, most of which was given over to a presentation by another organization called Queenslink about their proposed project to revive an abandoned and overgrown train right-of-way (originally built in 1880 as the Rockaway Beach line of the LIRR, which ran until 1962), putting in a subway line (more precisely, extending the existing M subway line) with accompanying foot and bicycle trails. In this satellite map, the right-of-way is the green stripe running from Rego Park to Resorts World. The subway line would be underground in the Rego Park section, and above-ground (and cheaper) the rest of the way.

Sociological aside: the room was full of train geeks, reminiscent of the guy in the Monty Python sketch "It all happened on the 11.20 from Hainault to Redhill via Horsham and Reigate, calling at Carshalton Beeches, Malmesbury, Tooting Bec, and Croydon West". Naturally, most of them already knew in what year the line had been built, when it had been closed down, when the Richmond Hill LIRR station had closed down, when the G train stopped running to Forest Hills, etc. and were not shy about correcting every trivial misstatement anybody made.

This whole plan will of course require a few billion dollars, but oddly enough the biggest obstacle isn't elected officials unwilling to spend money but rather another organization called Queensway, whose proposed project is to revive the same abandoned and overgrown train right-of-way with foot and bicycle trails and recreational facilities ("the High Line of Queens"), but no mass transit. Notably, the Queensway project already has the approval of the current Mayor, Eric Adams, who's leaving office in three weeks. Now, Eric Adams appears to be a crook in bed with Donald Trump, and anything with his name on it is suspect, but that doesn't necessarily mean Queensway is a bad idea. However, the Queenslink people argue that once half a billion dollars has been spent building recreational facilities along the Queensway trails, it will be politically difficult to ever put in mass transit there. And building mass transit anywhere that isn't already a city-owned right of way requires the government taking people's homes and shops, which is also politically difficult.

One player with a vested interest in the project is Resorts World, a developer who's just received final approval to replace the Aqueduct horse-racing track in southern Queens with a casino, hotel, etc. There's still a lot of controversy about that project, but apparently it's going to happen. There's already a subway station at Aqueduct, but only for the A train, which runs through southern Queens and Brooklyn, through lower Manhattan, up the West Side to the northern tip of Manhattan; no straightforward way to get there from northern Queens, which Queenslink would provide. Resorts World has an incentive for as many people as possible to get to its facilities easily, so they may put some money into the project.

The New York City subway system, like most city mass-transit systems, makes it fairly easy to get from outlying areas to the densest business districts in the center of the city, but not at all easy to get from one outlying area to another: you generally have to go into the city center and switch to another line that goes out to where you want to go. One exception is the G train, the only line in the city that doesn't go into or through Manhattan at all: it runs from western Queens straight to southern Brooklyn. It used to run farther out in northern Queens until the early 2000's, and the Queenslink people claim that their project would enable the G train to be restored to where it used to go. After the meeting I asked one of them why this was, and one of the train geeks in the audience jumped in to explain. At present, four subway lines go to Forest Hills, two of them (the R and M) ending there, and the G line used to end there also. But Forest Hills doesn't have a turnaround facility (it takes a lot of space to turn around a 600-foot-long train), so any train that stops there has to go a little beyond the station, cross over two other tracks, and reverse direction before it can pick up passengers and head back towards Manhattan. Every train that does this maneuver takes a long time and blocks traffic on other lines. So the reasoning is that if the M train did that maneuver in Rockaway Beach rather than Forest Hills, there would be room for the G train to do it in Forest Hills again.

The M train is sorta weird in that it starts in Queens, goes through Manhattan and Brooklyn, and ends back in Queens less than three miles from its other end. We've often wondered why they don't just connect the two ends of the M train into a loop, which would provide another way to get from northern Queens to Brooklyn. Naturally, the same train-geek-in-the-audience explained that this is because (a) there's a cemetery in the way, where it's difficult to do underground construction, and (b) the two ends of the M line are basically perpendicular, subway trains can't make sharp turns, and there isn't room to get the two ends of the line lined up with one another.

As it turns out, there's another proposed project to connect Queens and Brooklyn: the Interborough Express, which would run 14 miles from western Brooklyn to north-central Queens along another abandoned and overgrown right-of-way. This project is farther along, with some design work done and environmental impact statements underway. It's farther west, so it wouldn't impact our lives as much as Queensway or Queenslink would.

I haven't heard from the Queensway people directly, and I like the idea of a walking-and-bicycle trail, but multi-mile-long straight-line transit routes already under city ownership are rare commodities, and it seems silly to have one and not use it for mass transit (as well as for pedestrian and bicycle trails).

As far as I can tell, Queensway has two advantages over Queenslink: it costs less money, and it provides a continuous pedestrian-and-bike trail (for about 3/4 mile south of Park Lane South, the right-of-way is too narrow to allow both an above-ground subway and pedestrian-and-bike trails, so the Queenslink people propose a parallel bike route a block away). But it seems to me that continuity is a sine qua non for mass transit, and a "nice-to-have" for trails (since there are plenty of other routes that pedestrians and bicyclists can legally take, just not as pleasant as a park).

Well, OK, it's not particularly holiday-themed, but it came up two days before Thanksgiving, so...

Suppose (hypothetically) you were decommissioning a somewhat ragged queen-sized foam mattress topper, and it occurred to you that rather than throwing it all away, you could cut some pads out of it for your circular dog beds. You might spread it out on the kitchen floor (the largest unobstructed area of floor in the house), then put a dog bed on top of it to trace the right size and shape. Unfortunately, it's obvious that you won't get two circles the size of this dog bed from one mattress topper. So how much smaller do they need to be?

( Give it a try yourself before reading my various wrong approaches )

President Trump has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the results of the FBI investigation into his buddy Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking being released to the public, after promising his supporters for years that they would all be released and the prominent Democrats named therein would finally face their comeuppance. The obvious conclusion is that there's something really bad in there about him personally, and perhaps not much about prominent Democrats.

It's hard to imagine what could be in the Epstein files about Trump that's more scandalous than what we already know about his sex life: posing as his own assistant to "leak" stories about his prodigious sex drive, cheating widely, repeatedly, and publicly on all three of his wives, paying hush money to a hooker he was screwing while his wife was home with the newborn, musing publicly about dating his daughter, routinely dismissing women he dislikes as "fat", "ugly", or "Miss Piggy", walking in on half-dressed underage beauty contestants, raping a journalist, "grabbing them by the pussy", and I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch of things. Even if the investigation turned up something that would cost him a few percentage points of support with his loyal base, he no longer needs his loyal base to win elections: either he won't run again, or he will run again with no doubt about the outcome. And if there are crimes attributable to him, they're almost certainly past the statute of limitations.

But we're unlikely to see the full FBI files on Epstein while Trump is in office. Even with both houses of Congress demanding the full release of the files, by veto-proof majorities, he has a legitimate excuse for keeping them from the public as long as there's a criminal investigation underway in which they could be used as evidence -- and Pam Bondi obediently announced such an investigation a few days ago. That criminal investigation can go on as long as Trump and Bondi want it to.

And if we do see "the full FBI files on Epstein", and they actually are complete, it'll be tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of mostly-boring stuff, which journalists (and self-appointed journalists) will have to comb through to find what's actually important and/or damaging to him (or other prominent people). For the vast majority of people who don't want to spend a good portion of their lives reading through this dreadful stuff, the files will be spun (as the much-shorter Mueller Report was) as "completely exonerating the President", and a good fraction of the American people will believe that. They may even be right: it may actually be a gigantic nothing-burger. And Trump will still be a senile, sadistic, mind-bogglingly corrupt, would-be dictator who's squandered and destroyed a century's worth of national progress in a few years.

160.3 lbs.
breakfast: grapefruit, yogurt, cereal, soy milk
lunch: chicken bacon avocado sandwich, lemonade
dinner: chicken tortelloni, pesto
dessert: chocolate bon-bons

In bed about midnight; D. followed half an hour later. Up once or twice to cough and pee; up 7:00 to alarm (for an 8:00 doctor's appointment).

Not a lot of coughing overnight, but I have a scratchy throat this morning.