[food] the kale thing
Feb. 19th, 2026 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI have introduced my mother to this, I have introduced the Child's household to this, I am writing it down because clearly It Is Time for me to do so.
( Read more... )
kaberettDoors closing, windows opening.
Feb. 19th, 2026 09:37 amwildeabandonSo the Church of England has drawn the "Living in Love and Faith" process to a close, in a way that puts any pursuit of my priestly vocation out of reach for the foreseeable future. A new working group is being set up to continue looking at the question of priests in same-sex marriages, which is supposed to report back to Synod in 2028. Based on past experience, that probably means 2029 or 2030, at which point there will no doubt be a new round of painful arguments, and then I guess we'll see. But for now, that door is closed.
I think I am currently feeling less upset about this than I thought I'd be, although it might just be alexithymia fogging things up. It didn't really come as a surprise, so to some extent letting go of the uncertainty is something of a relief.
It also removes the potential complication that comes with having reinvigorated my academic vocation, coming back to the field with my mental health intact, my ADHD treated, and the general increased wisdom that comes with age. Of course academia and the priesthood is hardly a combination that hasn't been tried before, but I had been worrying slightly about what happens if I have to make a choice about which to pursue first, and now that that choice has been taken off the table I can just concentrate on my studies, and should at least be well into a PhD before the question of formal priestly discernment becomes pertinent again.
I think I am currently feeling less upset about this than I thought I'd be, although it might just be alexithymia fogging things up. It didn't really come as a surprise, so to some extent letting go of the uncertainty is something of a relief.
It also removes the potential complication that comes with having reinvigorated my academic vocation, coming back to the field with my mental health intact, my ADHD treated, and the general increased wisdom that comes with age. Of course academia and the priesthood is hardly a combination that hasn't been tried before, but I had been worrying slightly about what happens if I have to make a choice about which to pursue first, and now that that choice has been taken off the table I can just concentrate on my studies, and should at least be well into a PhD before the question of formal priestly discernment becomes pertinent again.
what does one do with Sad Bedsheets?
Feb. 18th, 2026 10:55 pmkaberettSpecifically: I find myself in possession of both a superking duvet cover and a deep fitted double sheet that are mostly Genuinely Nice Cotton... and have both got holes worn through them in one specific place.
I have accepted about myself that I am not a person who will tolerate sleeping on patched bedsheets (because Textures). I am loathe to just hand them over to rag recycling. I am scared of trying to sew anything out of them, but might manage it with some encouragement.
I would greatly appreciate people Being Opinionated on this topic.
particularly timely
Feb. 17th, 2026 11:25 pmkaberettYesterday afternoon I'd been discussing auditor traps. Yesterday evening we walked out of the supermarket and were confronted by
[description in alt text, better to follow]
One page of async Rust
Feb. 17th, 2026 07:42 pmfanfhttps://dotat.at/@/2026-02-16-async.html
I'm writing a simulation, or rather, I'm procrastinating, and this blog post is the result of me going off on a side-track from the main quest.
The simulation involves a bunch of tasks that go through a series of
steps with delays in between, and each step can affect some shared
state. I want it to run in fake virtual time so that the delays are
just administrative updates to variables without any real
sleep()ing, and I want to ensure that the mutations happen in the
right order.
I thought about doing this by representing each task as an enum
State with a big match state to handle each step. But then I
thought, isn't async supposed to be able to write the enum State and
match state for me? And then I wondered how much the simulation
would be overwhelmed by boilerplate if I wrote it using async.
Rather than digging around for a crate that solves my problem, I thought I would use this as an opportunity to learn a little about lower-level async Rust.
Turns out, if I strip away as much as possible, the boilerplate can fit on one side of a sheet of paper if it is printed at a normal font size. Not too bad!
But I have questions...
vital functions
Feb. 15th, 2026 10:56 pmkaberettReading. A Variety of books with the Child, including One Fish, Two Fish and A Squeeze and a Squash.
For my own purposes I have been continuing with The Rose Field, Philip Pullman, and I do indeed continue unimpressed. Not enough to stop! But.
I also picked up What Is Queer Food? (John Birdsall) from the library when I was having an insomnia; I have made it most of the way through the introduction but I am not yet grabbed.
Writing. Words... increase.
Listening. More Hidden Almanac catch-up! "While doing the laundry" or indeed "weeding" continues to work quite well.
Playing. Puzzle progresses! I am not calculating current %age but Significant Progress.
I think we did a leeeeettle bit more of our current run of Inkulinati? But it is petering out.
Cooking. Pineapple upside-down banana bread! This time with some ground almond in it. Otherwise I think... very little of note.
Eating. I was very excited to get to try a Neuhaus dark chocolate poppy seed praline, which on the one hand was not actually quite as dark as I would like and on the other has given me Ideas.
Growing. I got some broad beans in the ground?
Adopting tag2upload and modernising your Debian packaging
Feb. 15th, 2026 01:27 pmdizietIntroduction
tag2upload allows authorised Debian contributors to upload to Debian simply by pushing a signed git tag to Debian’s gitlab instance, Salsa.
We have recently announced that tag2upload is, in our opinion, now very stable, and ready for general use by all Debian uploaders.
tag2upload, as part of Debian’s git transition programme, is very flexible - it needs to support a large variety of maintainer practices. And it’s relatively unopinionated, wherever that’s possible. But, during the open beta, various contributors emailed us asking for Debian packaging git workflow advice and recommendations.
This post is an attempt to give some more opinionated answers, and guide you through modernising your workflow.
(This article is aimed squarely at Debian contributors. Much of it will make little sense to Debian outsiders.)
today the post brought Many Things
Feb. 14th, 2026 11:52 pmkaberettOne (1) duplicate letter from the DWP, which I had actually requested, because the council is apparently incapable of giving me the concessionary rate on the basis of disability without me providing one letter per year from the DWP telling them I'm still disabled, despite the fact that for anything that is not the allotment rent they can work this out from all the other information available to them without needing me to have Special Executive function;
three (3) rolls of washi tape from Sweden, one of which I have been Tempted By for probably actual years at this point and the other two of which are relevant for this year's notebook set-up and I was sad and wanted a treat;
and one (1) book, Citrus: A History, because it was £4.56, on a topic I have previously been interested in, and Interest Has Been Expressed in me yelling about it. (When will I get to it? Unclear, because once I've finished reading The Rose Field I should probably do some more pain reading, but. Eventually.)
(And why have I been sad? I genuinely do not know; my brain has just been having a Sustained Patch of Uncooperative. I would like it to stop. In addition to post, today's efforts in that direction have included a batch of pineapple upside-down banana bread, this time with some of the flour replaced with almond meal.)
[movement] amusement
Feb. 13th, 2026 10:38 pmkaberettBefore getting myself onto the mat: all is woe, everything is too much and takes too long, I Cannot Face Cooking, we shall be forced to Resort to Sad Pasta
Ten minutes after getting myself onto the mat and starting moving: ... actually, you know what, stir-frying the purple sprouting broccoli with Stuff sounds both achievable and Vastly More Appealing, scratch the Sad Supermarket plan
It was just warm-up! I hadn't even got the endorphins going yet!
[picspam] from yesterday's trudge in the rain
Feb. 11th, 2026 10:48 pmkaberett
(Which last I took in part because A only discovered last week that many snowdrops have decorative green bits on their frilly inner noses, courtesy of a waist-high planter outside one of our local pubs!)
[food] chickpea chaat
Feb. 10th, 2026 10:38 pmkaberettI actually made this as a protein to go with Meera Sodha's winter pilau, after An End Of Breakfast Dal went really well and for the purposes of using up the chaat masala I made for The Ongoing Cook All The Book Project, freely adapted from a number of recipes (which were The First Few Search Results when I prodded the internet). A is sufficiently convinced that I provide notes herewith in service of being able to repeat it in future.
( Read more... )
Update on legal cases: one new victory! :) One new restriction :(
Feb. 10th, 2026 03:03 pm![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
denise posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_newsBack in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.
We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)
Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/
In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.
I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update fordw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.
In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)
In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.
I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to updatedw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.
I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.
We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)
Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/
In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.
I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for
dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability. In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)
In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.
I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update
dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to. I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.
Back to school!
Feb. 9th, 2026 10:37 pmwildeabandonFirst day of lectures today. I was supposed to be starting with History of Church and Theology: Contemporary Period at 9.00, but got an email sent at 7:46 saying that it was cancelled (along with tomorrow's and both of next week's), because the professor is in India. I can't help but feel that maybe he might have known that would be happening more than 75 minutes before the lecture, by which point I'd already left the flat, but it gave me a couple of extra hours in the library, so I'm not really complaining.
Following that was Coptic II, with my favourite prof. The first half was talking about the practicalities of what the semester was going to look like, including asking for thoughts on what texts we'd like to read. There were a whole two students, so unless it turns out to be too difficult for relative beginners, then we should get to look at "The Investiture of the Archangel Michael", an apocryphal text which covers some of the same ground as Paradise Lost, which was one of my requests.
In the afternoon we had Christian Social and Political Ethics, which was reasonably interesting, although I'm actually hoping that I'm going to be allowed to swap that module for a Hebrew/Midrash one that I'm a lot more excited about. I'm not sure when I'll find out though, so until I do I'll be going to lectures for both. Afterwards I was doing some reading related to that first lecture, which talks about the necessity of social and relational ties for human beings and humanity to flourish. From time to time it used the phrase "mutual flourishing" and I kept having to remind myself that this was a book chapter written in a Roman Catholic milieu, and therefore it had nothing to do with the very specific way that phrase is used in Anglican ecclesial politics...
Following that was Coptic II, with my favourite prof. The first half was talking about the practicalities of what the semester was going to look like, including asking for thoughts on what texts we'd like to read. There were a whole two students, so unless it turns out to be too difficult for relative beginners, then we should get to look at "The Investiture of the Archangel Michael", an apocryphal text which covers some of the same ground as Paradise Lost, which was one of my requests.
In the afternoon we had Christian Social and Political Ethics, which was reasonably interesting, although I'm actually hoping that I'm going to be allowed to swap that module for a Hebrew/Midrash one that I'm a lot more excited about. I'm not sure when I'll find out though, so until I do I'll be going to lectures for both. Afterwards I was doing some reading related to that first lecture, which talks about the necessity of social and relational ties for human beings and humanity to flourish. From time to time it used the phrase "mutual flourishing" and I kept having to remind myself that this was a book chapter written in a Roman Catholic milieu, and therefore it had nothing to do with the very specific way that phrase is used in Anglican ecclesial politics...
vital functions
Feb. 8th, 2026 10:38 pmkaberettReading. I have FINISHED Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), including both indexes, including The Games Therein, and had a Great time.
Started (just now) The Rose Field, volume three of The Book of Dust (Philip Pullman). ( Grousing; vague spoilers for vol 2 )
so as I say I'm not hugely hopeful for this, but hey, maybe I'm being unfair to it.Writing. Did you know that getting knowledge out of your own head and into other people's is a specific set of skills that has very little to do with how well you know the things you're trying to communicate? TRY TO LOOK SHOCKED, PLEASE. (6.3k words, and am absolutely in an Iterative Cycle of trying to make the introduction more-or-less work. It is progressing, just... very slowly.)
Listening. I realised that Hidden Almanac was possibly in fact exactly a useful sort of thing to listen to while Wrangling Laundry, and have therefore started again from the beginning, at least in part as an attempt to actually listen to some of the episodes I dozed through while they were playing in the car...
Playing. Incomplete White Puzzle progresses. (Today I have added I think three pieces to the contiguous section, two of which I had already joined to each other as a free-foating lump, and made another couple of free-floating lump connections.)
I think we also did a bit more Inkulinati before I got horrendously distracted by Puzzle. And the sudoku fixation continues, though it is at least ramping down a little.
Cooking. I have been having A Rough Week brain-wise, but I have today managed to make some bread, and I did earlier in the week gently fry up some celery and garlic to add to the mashed potato & parsnip that we were having with Vegetables and Veg Sossij. I think that is about the extent of it.
Eating. VEGETABLES, including a couple of peppers from an overwintered plant. (Restricted diet for a week up until the Tuesday just gone, so the return of Fibre was Extremely Welcome.) Favourite chocolate stars with raspberries. Fruit With Skin On. Lebkuchen. Stollen. Seeds and nuts.
Growing. I think the nematodes (applied as a split dose a few days apart) have dealt? at least temporarily? with the sodding Sciarid Flies? for now?
Lemongrass needs pricking out. Physalis are showing zero indication that they have any intention of germinating, which is mildly annoying. There are still three not-dead Lithops seedlings, though I doubt they're the same three as last week. Orchids getting increasingly enthusiastic about their plans to flower.
Have not managed to get anything else sown, yet.
Observing. Lots of bulbs: daffodils and crocuses various and snowdrops are Definitely Underway, at this point. We are fairly convinced that the Yelling from the garden around dusk is Amorous Foxes, though we have not (yet?) bestirred ourselves to ask the internet if what we think we're hearing is in fact what we're hearing...
What does the word "grocery" mean, no, really? [econ, curr ev]
Feb. 8th, 2026 12:47 amsidereaHey, does anybody happen to know the answer to this question?
Back when Mr B and I started doing joint grocery orders, I started analyzing our budget like you do. In the course of doing so, I discovered something I hadn't realized: about a third of my "grocery" budget wasn't food. It was:
• Disposable food handling and storage supplies: plastic wrap, paper towels, aluminum foil, ziplocs, e.g.
• Personal hygiene supplies: toilet paper, bath soap, shampoo, skin lotion, menstrual supplies, toothpaste, mouthwash, Q-tips, e.g.
• Health supplies: vitamins, bandaids, NSAIDs, first aid supplies, OTC medications and supplements, e.g.
• Domestic hygiene supplies: dish detergent, dish soap, dish sponges, Windex, Pine-sol, laundry detergent, bleach, mouse traps, e.g.
None of these things individually needs to be bought every grocery trip, but that's good, because they can add up fast. Especially if you try to buy at all in volume to try to drive unit costs down. But the problem is there are so many of them, that usually you need some of them on every order.
This fact is in the back of my head whenever I hear politicians or economists or social commentators talk about the "cost of groceries": I don't know if they mean just food or the whole cost of groceries. Sometimes it's obvious. An awful lot of the relief for the poor involves giving them food (such as at a food pantry) or the funds to buy it (such as an EBT card), but very explicitly doesn't include, say, a bottle of aspirin or a box of tampons or a roll of Saran wrap. Other times, it's not, such as when a report on the cost of "groceries" only compares the prices of food items, and then makes statements about the average totals families of various sizes spend on "groceries": if they only looked at the prices of foods, does that mean they added up the prices of foods a family typically buys to generate a "grocery bill" which doesn't include the non-food groceries, or did they survey actual families' actual grocery bills and just average them without substracting the non-food groceries? Hard to say from the outside.
When we see a talking head on TV – a pundit or a politician – talking about the price of "groceries" but then say it, for example, has to do with farm labor, or the import of agricultural goods, should we assume they're just meaning "food" by the term "groceries"? Or it is a tell they've forgotten that not everything bought at a grocery store (and part of a consumer's grocery store bill) is food, and maybe are misrepresenting or misunderstanding whatever research they are leaning on? Or is it a common misconception among those who research domestic economics that groceries means exclusively food?
So my question is: given that a lot of information about this topic that percolates out to the public is based on research that the public never sees for themselves, what assumptions are reasonable for the public to make about how the field(s) which concern themselves with the "price of groceries" mean "groceries"? What fields are those and do they have a standard meaning of "groceries" and does it or does it not include non-food items?
This question brought to you by yet another video about the cost of groceries and how they might be controlled in which the index examples were the ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but, as usual, not the sandwich baggy to put it in to take to school or work.
Back when Mr B and I started doing joint grocery orders, I started analyzing our budget like you do. In the course of doing so, I discovered something I hadn't realized: about a third of my "grocery" budget wasn't food. It was:
• Disposable food handling and storage supplies: plastic wrap, paper towels, aluminum foil, ziplocs, e.g.
• Personal hygiene supplies: toilet paper, bath soap, shampoo, skin lotion, menstrual supplies, toothpaste, mouthwash, Q-tips, e.g.
• Health supplies: vitamins, bandaids, NSAIDs, first aid supplies, OTC medications and supplements, e.g.
• Domestic hygiene supplies: dish detergent, dish soap, dish sponges, Windex, Pine-sol, laundry detergent, bleach, mouse traps, e.g.
None of these things individually needs to be bought every grocery trip, but that's good, because they can add up fast. Especially if you try to buy at all in volume to try to drive unit costs down. But the problem is there are so many of them, that usually you need some of them on every order.
This fact is in the back of my head whenever I hear politicians or economists or social commentators talk about the "cost of groceries": I don't know if they mean just food or the whole cost of groceries. Sometimes it's obvious. An awful lot of the relief for the poor involves giving them food (such as at a food pantry) or the funds to buy it (such as an EBT card), but very explicitly doesn't include, say, a bottle of aspirin or a box of tampons or a roll of Saran wrap. Other times, it's not, such as when a report on the cost of "groceries" only compares the prices of food items, and then makes statements about the average totals families of various sizes spend on "groceries": if they only looked at the prices of foods, does that mean they added up the prices of foods a family typically buys to generate a "grocery bill" which doesn't include the non-food groceries, or did they survey actual families' actual grocery bills and just average them without substracting the non-food groceries? Hard to say from the outside.
When we see a talking head on TV – a pundit or a politician – talking about the price of "groceries" but then say it, for example, has to do with farm labor, or the import of agricultural goods, should we assume they're just meaning "food" by the term "groceries"? Or it is a tell they've forgotten that not everything bought at a grocery store (and part of a consumer's grocery store bill) is food, and maybe are misrepresenting or misunderstanding whatever research they are leaning on? Or is it a common misconception among those who research domestic economics that groceries means exclusively food?
So my question is: given that a lot of information about this topic that percolates out to the public is based on research that the public never sees for themselves, what assumptions are reasonable for the public to make about how the field(s) which concern themselves with the "price of groceries" mean "groceries"? What fields are those and do they have a standard meaning of "groceries" and does it or does it not include non-food items?
This question brought to you by yet another video about the cost of groceries and how they might be controlled in which the index examples were the ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but, as usual, not the sandwich baggy to put it in to take to school or work.
[navel-gazing] reading, fast & slow
Feb. 7th, 2026 11:21 pmkaberettAt some point in proceedings (depression? pain? migraine? dense technical text for the PhD? poetry?), I realise, I have gone from reading Unusually Quickly to still reading More? Than Population Norm? (75ish books last year, of which 15ish were graphic novels or otherwise not-a-novel's-worth-of-words), but no faster than I'd be able to read the text aloud -- "hearing" each word in my head, and often rereading sentences repeatedly.
This is in contrast to how I type, which is much faster than I can speak comprehensibly (... though I now recall that I am in fact often asked to Slow The Fuck Down when providing information verbally).
I have over the last little bit been tentatively experimenting with trying not to read each word "aloud", mentally, and instead treating The Written Word as something that doesn't always need to be (pseudo-)vocalised.
It feels weird. It's an active effort. I am extremely dubious about the impact on how much information I retain; Further Study Required. I think this is probably how I used to read (when?); I'm not sure what changed; I'm unsettled.
(And I want to post something to Dreamwidth before bed, and this is a thing I was thinking about a lot while almost-but-not-quite finishing Index, A History of the -- I'm at a point I'd ordinarily count as "finished" but obviously it is in this instance both important and rewarding to read the index, all two of it, so here y'go.)
preposterous puzzle: thoughts so far
Feb. 6th, 2026 10:45 pmkaberettThe context is Simone Giertz's Incomplete White Puzzle, which A got me partly to troll me and partly because they thought I'd enjoy it and partly because getting the bundle of all three puzzles gets you 20% off individual list prices.
Current status: 105/"500" pieces in their final positions, plus another 57 no longer singletons. I have several semi-sorted categories including (in the halves of the box) "could plausibly have come from a reasonable puzzle" and "bullshit", and (on the table) Swoopy Bullshit, Offset Noses, Weirdly Straight, Multi-Nose Bullshit, and Featureless Curves.
( THOUGHTS )
I am having a very pleasant and soothing time, and I am trying to break up the hyperfocus by instituting a rule of Get Up And Do One Unit Of Something Else After Every (Contiguous) Piece Placed, and yes that is me rules-lawyering after the fact...
Exam results.
Feb. 6th, 2026 03:38 pmwildeabandonI got my exam results yesterday, and they were slightly disappointing, in the "virtually anyone would be fucking delighted, but they were all on the low end of what I was expecting" sense of the word disappointing. I got 15/20 in Catechetics, 16/20 in Anthropology, 17/20 in Psalms & Prophets, and 18/20 in Hebrew II and Ugaritic. The first two are entirely understandable - I wasn't particularly keen on either course, and whilst by no means neglecting them completely, I didn't put in a particularly high level of effort. I'm happy enough with the 18s. They were both challenging courses, and 18 is a bloody good mark.
The one that's bugging me is the Psalms though. I thought I understood the material well, and that I'd had some interesting and insightful things to say. I know that I got 18/20 in the paper that makes up half the mark, which means that I only got 15-16/20 in the exam. Hardly the end of the world, but it's the only one where I don't understand why I didn't do better. I've emailed the prof to ask for feedback, so with luck I'll get something useful. (ETA: Apparently marks get rounded down, not up - I got 8/10 and 9/10 in the two exam questions, and the 8 was because he had to prompt me a couple of times, and since at least one of those time he prompted me for the thing I was about to say anyway I am now feeling a lot less bothered by the overall mark.)
One result though which is positive in a sense is that my overall grade is now almost guaranteed. My average is currently 87%. The top grade boundary is an average of 90%, which had seemed in reach before these results, but would now require me to get 20/20 in all but one of my remaining courses (and 19/20 in that), which isn't really plausible. The grade boundary below is an average of 85%, and whilst the fact that there are just more numbers between 0 and 87 than between 87 and 100 means that there's more scope for my grade to be dragged down than up, I would have to do quite a bit worse than I have been for that to happen. Anyway, the sense that there's not a lot that I can do to change my overall grade means that I can concentrate more on learning for the sake of learning, which in the long term is almost certainly better than chasing grades.
The one that's bugging me is the Psalms though. I thought I understood the material well, and that I'd had some interesting and insightful things to say. I know that I got 18/20 in the paper that makes up half the mark, which means that I only got 15-16/20 in the exam. Hardly the end of the world, but it's the only one where I don't understand why I didn't do better. I've emailed the prof to ask for feedback, so with luck I'll get something useful. (ETA: Apparently marks get rounded down, not up - I got 8/10 and 9/10 in the two exam questions, and the 8 was because he had to prompt me a couple of times, and since at least one of those time he prompted me for the thing I was about to say anyway I am now feeling a lot less bothered by the overall mark.)
One result though which is positive in a sense is that my overall grade is now almost guaranteed. My average is currently 87%. The top grade boundary is an average of 90%, which had seemed in reach before these results, but would now require me to get 20/20 in all but one of my remaining courses (and 19/20 in that), which isn't really plausible. The grade boundary below is an average of 85%, and whilst the fact that there are just more numbers between 0 and 87 than between 87 and 100 means that there's more scope for my grade to be dragged down than up, I would have to do quite a bit worse than I have been for that to happen. Anyway, the sense that there's not a lot that I can do to change my overall grade means that I can concentrate more on learning for the sake of learning, which in the long term is almost certainly better than chasing grades.