Jed

Posted by Jed

https://www.kith.org/jed/2025/04/20/what-ive-been-up-to-lately/

https://www.kith.org/jed/?p=21335

Sometimes lately I haven’t had the time to post much on social media; other times I haven’t had the emotional energy; other times I haven’t wanted to post about ordinary trivial daily stuff when big important horrible stuff has been going on in the world (but also haven’t felt up to posting about the big important horrible stuff).

But all of that has left me with a backlog of what-I’ve-been-up-to stuff to post about, and that backlog isn’t gonna get smaller over time. So here’s an attempt at a summary of some of what I’ve been up to lately.

The Hugo Voter Packet

Most of my time and energy for the past month has gone to the Hugo Voter Packet. We’re finally essentially done, so I’m coming up for air. (I’m not sure when it’ll be available for download, but sometime soonish.) It has been, overall, a good experience—significantly more work than last year, but nowhere near as many last-minute frantic panicked scrambles to solve unforeseen major technical roadblocks as last year. And I learned a lot about accessibility, and we laid some good groundwork for further improvements in future years.

Taxes

(No advice, please.)

I didn’t manage to start working on my taxes until around April 14 this year, despite multiple reminders-to-self in the weeks leading up to that. I managed to get more or less done with them by the night of the 15th, and sent them off to the IRS. I owed a whole lot of money—probably the most I’ve ever owed. (I had known that I was going to owe quite a bit because of stock sales last year, but I had forgotten various factors that led the amount to be a lot more than I had expected.)

And then on Friday the 18th, I got email from TurboTax telling me that my return hadn’t been accepted. I was annoyed that they had waited three days to tell me that, until I saw that they had notified me on the night of the 15th; I just hadn’t noticed. Sigh.

And the reason for the lack of acceptance had to do with health insurance stuff that I had forgotten to deal with. So really, it was my fault. Quite an expensive series of mistakes. Oh, well.

Juicer

I’ve been buying carrot juice at the grocery store for years now, but it fairly often happens that they don’t have any (of the brand I like, Barsotti) in stock when I go shopping. So I started thinking about getting a juicer. Eventually, I bought a Jama J3 juicer (one of the best-reviewed brands). So far, I’ve made carrot juice, orange juice, and apple juice. They’ve all been reasonably good, in different ways.

The apple juice has been especially interesting: it’s nicely less sweet than highly filtered commercial apple juice, while also tasting better to me than unfiltered dark-brown hippie apple juice, which has always made my throat hurt. (Dunno, maybe I’m slightly allergic to some aspect of that, or something.)

I had been expecting that it would be much cheaper to make my own juice than to buy storebought, but that isn’t turning out to be true; I’m guessing that (for instance) Barsotti buys organic carrots in bulk at much lower prices than I can.

Bread-maker

My favorite sandwich bread used to be Honey Wheat Berry, produced by Oroweat out here (and maybe under other brand names like Arnold and Brownberry elsewhere in the US). But HWB was discontinued sometime in the past few years, and I’m not a big fan of any of the other wheat breads that I’ve encountered in grocery stores. So I finally bought a Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso, the well-reviewed bread machine that makes horizontally oriented loaves, with two rotating paddles instead of just one.

I made my first loaf of wheat bread with it a couple days ago. And although the loaf is oddly lopsided (from the side, it looks a little like the drawing of the elephant from The Little Prince), it tastes quite good. I don’t like it as much as Honey Wheat Berry, but I like it better than any of the wheat breads I’ve had since HWB went away. Looking forward to making more, and doing other things with the machine.

Blinds and sheers

My guest-room blinds broke many months ago, and I couldn’t figure out how to repair them. I recently finally got and installed a new rolling blackout blind and some sheer curtains. I’m pleased with them so far. I still intend to get nicer and wider sheers at some point, but the ones I got are good enough for now.

Clocks

In February, I acquired two clocks that had belonged to Kevin W’s parents; one is a really lovely wall clock, the other an extremely heavy mantel clock with a body made out of some kind of stone. A clock shop has now finished repairing them. I need to figure out where to put both of them, but I’m glad to have them.

Health

Had a biopsy to check for prostate cancer. It showed no problems, so the plan continues to be to do more-frequent-than-usual PSA tests and generally keep an eye on things.

Unread-books project

I’ve recently read Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon (interesting structure, interesting characters, some stuff I liked a lot, other stuff that annoyed me); skimmed The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (32 stories, all (I think) by men, first published in Playboy from 1955 through 1965; largely uninteresting to me, though I wasn’t expecting that two of them would feature sfnal societies where male homosexuality is the norm); and am now reading Borges’s 1949 collection The Aleph (mildly Borgesian so far).

But I’m about to put the unread-books project mostly on hold for a while in favor of reading Hugo finalists, as I do most years.

What I haven’t been doing

So so many things. Especially political things—I’m trying to get myself to get more actively involved in various stuff, but not making a lot of progress yet. Also not getting various financial things done. Also not making progress on various personal and home-improvement projects. Also not actively job-hunting. And so on.

But for this post, I’m just focusing on the stuff that I have been doing.

https://www.kith.org/jed/2025/04/20/what-ive-been-up-to-lately/

https://www.kith.org/jed/?p=21335