embuggerance

Here’s a report on my Adventure of almost a fortnight ago, sent out to friends and family and stored here for ready access:

The “AI Overview” of the term embuggerance, coughed up by google, is a good summary of the ambit of the term, and fits nicely with my thinking about the event described below and its consequences.

So in short:
On Saturday January 24th we were out to dinner with friends, well into the dessert course, when I experienced vertigo so sudden and arresting that I knew I couldn’t move and certainly wasn’t going to be able to get to the car, let alone drive. There happened to be an EMT person as a guest at the inn, and he asked all the right questions and summoned an ambulance, which took me to the nearby Pen Bay hospital ER, which led to 3 days as a guest in the hospital, and eventually to an MRI on Monday that found the cause to be an acute bilateral cerebellar infarction, basically a small stroke in the lizard brain. Such things are pretty rare, and not obviously karmic (that is, I didn’t earn or deserve it as far as I can see). It took about 24 hours before I could stand or navigate because of dizziness, but that passed gradually and by Tuesday morning I was mobile again. The CT scan at the ER showed no obvious cause, so they did the MRI on Monday which disclosed the small strokes.

So instead of the cataract surgery that I was scheduled for tomorrow, I’m at home and doing pretty much nothing for a while –reading, writing, watching videos, entirely mobile and needing no assistance to move around the house, unimpaired in physical and mental ways. Even stood on one leg while putting on socks this morning.

Of course Betsy and Kate get to do the household stuff like wood-hauling and venturing to the mailbox, and dealing with snow shoveling, and I’m periodically asked if there’s anything I need or want, but otherwise daily life is returned to normal. I don’t foresee any lifestyle changes as indicated or likely, but do vow to work more assiduously at curating collections and refining https://oook.info/lifebox.

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I seem to be back to pretty much normal now, I’m pleased to report, but enjoined to “take it easy”, which turns out to be quite pleasurable as a lifestyle.

yeah, well…

So here it is, the beginning of November. A lot of work in /lexicon and /lifebox, and at the moment it’s not clear what the blog is doing, beyond helping me remember where I’ve put stuff. I may return to thinking of it as a way to keep like-minded others (whoever they might be) updated with my doings and discoveries and curiosities, but I have no idea if there’s anybody out there …

and now it’s nearly the end of August

Lots of activity in the last couple of months, unrecorded in the blog. A lot of my daily link-farming is captured via my August 2025 page (Collecting the Portentous and the Exemplary)

Lately I’ve been thinking about Legacy and the where and why and how of collecting, curating, displaying. Today I looked through the homepage links (oook.info) and made a page of links to pages found/rediscovered that trace some of the ways I’ve used html to track my own thinking… some from W&L years, some from the last 20 years, and even one dating back to 1971. The page needs reorganization (perhaps chronological, maybe topical) and …explication, and it hints at further delvings into my past, so it’s just a start.

the Andover gig

About 3 weeks ago I got a request from Stephanie Aude, the Local History and Genealogy librarian at the Andover Public Library, to use a map I had drawn (in 1976) of the world around me when I was 10-11-12 (1953-1956) and lived in Shawsheen, a village that is part of Andover. In short order I volunteered to talk to the genealogy resources group at the Library, and the Event took place on April 10th… and was a grand success from my point of view. http://oook.info/etc/Andover.html has the materials I prepared for the presentation (along with links to various other bits I had gathered and shown and talked about). To my great surprise and pleasure one of the participants (Alice Mooney, as she then was) was a classmate from the Grade 6 class picture. Small world, as they say.

Along the way I revisited material Broot and I had gathered for a project we did on our own families in 2001, and was pleased with its eloquence.

As seems to have become routine, I’ve set up pages to gather links to revisit from April incoming, YouTube videos of particular salience, and videos specific to the current contretemps with Canada. And now I’ll get back to work on the Lexicon project.

keeping track

I’ve bundled the February YouTube finds into a suite of 7 connected pages (so that they load more reliably and quickly), and just barely started a location for extracts from my yellow pads since 2018. The page of February links is unwieldy, but I haven’t decided what to do about that.

The tag cloud for my LibraryThing is updated and still under revision, but provides the beginnings of subject access to books on my library shelves.

And the Lexicon Project burgeons.