I have had really bad sleep the last two nights because our big goofball labradoodle, Chet, has had bad diarrhea. He wakes me up every two hours to go out. I'm glad he does so, but it does not make for a restful night. I gave him rice for dinner and he's fasting today, so we'll see if things improve.

Probably the best way to avoid Drama is to just not engage him on the oppression of bikes issue, and if asked just note that you have differing opinions and you're done debating them.

That's what I'm trying to do. I'm not always too good at that sort of thing.

Mmmm, forbidden Teppy blood.

LaTex, I remember that being a PITA. But pretty. ETA: 25 years ago when we had to log into the mainframe to use it. I'm sure it's better now. And I am old.

Aw, poor Chet and Scrappy. That's rough.

I am writing equations in LaTeX right now AIFG. Well, compared to the alternative.

LaTeX is kind of a pain in that I can never remember how to do stuff when I haven't done it in a while, so I have to keep looking up things like "How to I make these equations left-justified rather than centered?" or "How do I insert an image file?" because none of those things really work the way I'd expect them to. (Seriously, LaTex REALLY wants you to have all your equations centered rather than left-justified. Every way that I've seen to make them left-justified is some kind of work-around, where you exploit some function that was meant to do something else. There is no way to just say "left-justify this.")

Aw, poor Chet and poor Scrappy! I hope he feels better.

Well, we always center-justified our equations, Hil. It's obviously better. (We really did, but I think it was because we didn't care that much). I think it might be time for lunch. Because cupcakes are at noon (every time I think that I want to turn it into some kind of Darkness at Noon spoof. Perhaps with muppets. Not that I have read Darkness at Noon, I think I actually am picturing Murder in the Cathedral, which I have only read excerpts of. But why let that stop me?)

Man, I'm chatty today.

Hil, with the mood I'm in today I'd be happy to kneecap your biker's rights "friend" so he could learn some appreciation of how hard it is to get around when disabled.

Mom has come down with a case of Shingles despite being vaccinated a couple of years ago, and has been more or less incapacitated today by a combo of that and nausea. I'm plying her with ginger ale and alka-seltzer in the hope that if her stomach settles a bit she can take her horse pill pain medication and thus feel better across the board.

He's really involved with Critical Mass and stuff like that, and he consistently uses social justice language to talk about biking issues, and gets horribly offended if anyone points out that, while there might be some similarities, you can't just wholesale take the language used for talking about oppression of women or black people or disabled people or whatever and use it to talk about oppression of bikers.

Critical Massholes are the fucking worst.

A number of people in a (very nice) neighborhood in my city were having problems with a guy who was using Airbnb to rent out his house. It was a good-sized house, but he'd advertised it so that it was being rented for large - like 400 people - parties with lots of noise, traffic, parking problems - that kind of thing. It took a good while, but they did get Airbnb to include a limit on the number of people who could be in the house. Then the guy was shocked - shocked, I tell you - when he got nailed with files by the city for running a commercial place with no licenses, permits, disregarding occupancy limits and so on.

Same guy got into trouble in yet another neighborhood because he was running an operation that was a yoga studio during the day but a party place at night. Again, in a residential neighborhood, causing problems with noise, traffic, parking, etc.