As of Wednesday afternoon, my dissertation deposit was successful, and my PhD is finished once and for all! In a few months the thesis will appear on the University’s website, and I’ll have to sign some papers to get it indexed by databases, and so on and so forth, but there’s nothing that can possibly stop it now.
It’s been a long time coming!
Dude…
Duuuuuuuuude…
Haven’t you played enough IF to know that that’s the ultimate jinx?! Why would you even risk saying it?!
As any decent super-villain or evil genius should know, saying that is the surest way to have your cunning plan foiled.
I hope you aren’t in the US… cause I could totally imagine our idiot in chief trying to shut down academia full stop.
Anyways, initial tests with my bash script to split long downloaded YouTube audio into more manageable durations are going well.
Also, on day 3 of trying to cut my daily tea consumption down to just having tea with lunch instead of both lunch and supper, mainly to cut down on my daily sugar consumption.
Ah, but you see, that’s my plan! I want to tempt fate now, while I’m spending a couple weeks recovering and grading papers, so that if any problems come up I can handle them. I don’t want everything to fall apart when I’m on vacation or hunting for jobs.
Aaaaaaaaaah. You’re strategising as in them old-school IF games.
You do us all proud. Carry on.
Why not keep the tea and drink it without sugar? Heresy as far as I’m concerned, but it’s what my Dad has apparently done.
Simply put, because I’d rather drink plain tap water than unsweetened tea… I’ve also tried using less sugar, but semi-sweet tea just doesn’t do it for me either(or at least, trying to cut back from a half-cup to a third-cup when I was making hot tea by the quart and cold tea by the 3 pints didn’t work… maybe cutting back from a quarter-cup to a fifth-cup for a pint hot or 3 cups cold would work, but best I can tell, no one makes measuring cup sets with a fifth cup, who wants to measure out 11 teaspoons or some such, and sugar cubes are too pricey compared to granulated sugar for my budget)… And no, I don’t know why cold tea with a lower sugar concentration seems to be as sweet as hot tea with a higher concentration, especially given my experience that cold dulls most other flavors(at least, I find most fresh produce tastes better stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated and most cheese becomes more flavorable as it warms up to room temperatur
or is melted.
Anyways, it’s May 3, so today marks the beginning of this year’s reading of Dracula via the Dracula Daily mailing list. And last night I passed the 4000 mark in my reading of Number Gossip(or at least the unique and rare properties for each number, the common properties really are better presented as sequences than on a number-by-number basis).
I feel the same about tea (or rather infusion in English). I use sweetener, and yes, cold tea seems to be more sweet than hot one.
Positive happening for me today: Summer temperatures, sunny. I walked with my new shoes (bought yesterday) and they felt good.
It’s still called tea if it is an infusion of tea leaves, right? Black tea, white tea, green tea? I dunno whether Jeffery is referring to tea or other infusions, I can’t tell by their post. 
Personally, the whole “might as well drink water” thought sequence is the same I had a while ago, so these days, unless it’s a special occasion, I just drink water and feel no need to drink anything else.
I recommend it, actually.
My preference is herb or fruit infusion, I guess Jefferey’s is “real” tea. I didn’t express that very clear. I try to be short and terse, but that sometimes leads to me being misunderstood.
I’m not a water drinker, except when I have strong thurst for a fast, small drink (then I drink a single glass of tap-water which is of excellent quality over here.) At home I never drink coffee (but at work and in a restaurant I do.)
Technically, I’m drinking a mix of tea and herbal infusions, but the latter are sold as herbal tea, prepared in the same way, and packaged the same way. My tea chest currently contains, if memory serves:
Tea: Earl Grey, Constant Comment(which is a lemon/black pepper blend if memory serves) Vanilla chai, and green tea.
Herbal: Orange and spice, lemon ginger, apple cinnamon, peppermint.
I did kick the sugar water habit completely back around 2012 and was a sugar water teetotaler for about 5 years, but fell off the wagon hard after my father’s death in 2017… my current tea habit is sort of a rebound from binge drinking of soda, though to be fair, when I make hot tea, I add about as much sugar as would be in an equal volume of soda and even my cold tea is pretty strong on the white powder… I think I once did the math and if I was making tea by the tea cup, my answer to “one lump or two” would be like 5.
Never cared for coffee, even the super sweet, caramel drizzel concoctions that probably have fans of black coffee thinking, “would you like some coffee with your sugar?” make me cringe at the coffee flavor.
Strangely, as much as I like my tea sweet, and despite also being a fiend for highly sweetened baked goods(I could easily eat a 6-count box of raspberry bismarcks all at once), I actually prefer tarter or even outright sour varieties when it comes to fresh fruit… granny smith is my favorite apple variety, lemons are my favorite citrus, I love fresh, unsweetened strawberries, blue berries, raspberries, and blackberries, I prefer my bananas on the tarter, greener, firmer end of their ripening process, I prefer green grapes. Watermelon is about the only culinary fruit that’s super sweet fresh that I get cravings for over something tarter… granted, at least some of those are probably super sweet, just they have a ph low enough the sour masks the sweetness(I know this is true of lemons).
Also, in chipping away at my YouTube and reading backlog, I’ve gotten my bookmark count in Firefox under a thousand.
I got jury duty and had to serve for 6 days. Getting to go home early today and knowing I don’t have to return for at least 3 years is such a relief.
Well, after yoyoing in the 290s for months, I have finally broken into the 280s in my weight loss journey. It’s tempting to credit the above mentioned reduction in sugar consumption, but honestly, a roughly 200 kcal/day reduction in caloric intake shouldn’t add up to the changes I’ve heard from the scale in the last week. Down to around 10 or 15 pounds to reach my highschool weight and about 20 to reach the weight I was when I did the weigh-in for my retinal reattachment surgeries back in 2012. The last time I underwent a similar reduction, I went from plateauing around 320 to plateauing around 290, so while I doubt this will get me to 250 before plateauing again, I’m hopeful it’ll at least get me to around 270, and maybe by then, I’ll be up to trying a further reduction… Also, I think I’ve knocked a point off my BMI since the last time I calculated it.
I guess this qualifies as “neutral”. Very simple thing; I merely became aware of the Solomon Grundy nursery rhyme.
I thought this was notable because I didn’t know of it, but I have known, from my childhood, a children’s song we sang a lot as kids, and of which I still have a vivid memory.
À uma eu nasci,
Às duas baptizei,
Às três pedi namoro
E às quatro me casei.
Às cinco uma dor,
Às seis uma aflição
Às sete no doutor
E às oito no caixão.
Às nove a caminho
Às dez no cemitério,
Às onze no buraco
E às doze lá no céu (béu béu)
Translates to…
I was born at 1 o’clock
Christened at 2 o’clock,
Had a date at 3 o’clock
And got married at 4 o’clock
At 5 o’clock, a certain pain;
At 6 o’clock, in distress;
At 7 o’clock, at the doctor’s,
And at 8 o’clock, in the coffin.
On my way by nine,
In the cemetery by ten;
Down the hole by eleven
And in heaven by twelve
We would sing this together with those rhythmic hand clappings and gestures that make children look like a chibi version of freemasons-turned-cultists.
My first girlfriend didn’t know this one, and she was amused and slightly horrified by it. I suppose it’s a bit of a short life, isn’t it? And there’s not much “life” in it; the last four hours happen after death.
At any rate, you can imagine how interesting it feels to have this perpetually stored away in my brain, just taking up space along with other childhood sonds such as “Atirei o pau ao gato” (“I threw the stick at the cat / but the cat didn’t die / Missy Chica got startled / at the cat´s great big yell". Amazingly, despite singing this over and over, I grew up to be a cat lover) , and then one day reading a volume of Black Butler and finding out about Solomon Grundy.
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
This is the end
Of Solomon Grundy.
He didn’t have much of a life either.
EDIT - It strikes me that the last four verses of the Portuguese version completely do away with any pretense of rhyming. Up until then there’s a bit of an effort, but after that, it’s like “screw this, guy’s dead anyway and I have to get up to twelve so I’ll just make sure it scans.”
I’d argue Solomon Gundy has a longerlife, proportionally, but I could be wrong. I’mvery tired right now which actually links to my positive thing.
I finished my first two of my final GCSE exams. One was from 4pm to 6pm, the other from 8:30pm to 10:15pm. Not a great time to be doing one of the most writing heavy exams there is - unexpectedly, Drama. More than English, or even potentially History.
He sure did, but he didn’t get to have a date. Maybe an arranged marriage? Or love at first sight?
Still a bit of a sorry thing. Although, poor Solomon doesn’t make it to heaven, in comparison.
How did it go? 
He may not have had much of a life, but he had quite the afterlife.
Ah, that’s Solomon Grundy Jr. I was referring to Solomon Grundy Senior. Funny family, the Grundys.
I had no idea Solomon Grundy existed beyond the DC villain but recent posts suggest DC was inspired by some folklore I’m unfamiliar with.
Though, with how similar the two rhymes are, I have to wonder if one inspired the other and if so, which came first. Though the one based on the days of the week flows better than the one based on hours of the clock in my opinion, at least using the English translation of the clock one, maybe it flows better in the source language… Granted, for the clock, you need nearly twice as many steps, so it feels a bit dragged out.