Michael Thériault / is on Nostr

I’ve done a few things. I’m not quite done yet. (Really, I tried to list them, and 500 characters aren’t nearly enough.)

Last Notes

2025-02-12 04:44:37

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@nprofile…vvm4 There's a fifth, Richmond-San Rafael. The San Mateo bridge can't be bicycled. Only part of the Bay Bridge can. The other three can, for now. From my #SanFrancisco house, the three can be done in a 105-mile loop. Here they are, from one such ride:
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2025-01-09 15:36:35

She taught Biology at Balboa High School, #SanFrancisco, and chaperoned prom a few times. I tagged along once.
We’ve been married forty-three years today.
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2024-11-16 21:29:03

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@nprofile…k7vf My tech for a broken wrist earlier this year gave me the explanation before using the contraption on the cast, and he included a demonstration of the harmlessness on his own skin.

2024-09-27 00:35:29

Was bicycling south on Harrison in #SanFrancisco this afternoon and where the street narrows as it reaches 24th I put my left arm out to signal to a car not far behind that I was moving over. At the stoplight I looked back and saw that it was an unoccupied Waymo. Questions: Do the robots recognize hand signals, or did this one slow to avoid me because I was an Unpredictable Moving Object? And if I repeat the gesture vigorously, as I do sometimes to insist on a merge left, will they understand?

2024-08-27 15:36:18

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@npub14vw…4nuy J’y ai reconnu Francis Ponge.

2024-07-22 21:34:34

On the Harris is a Cop trope: The real cops hated her for refusing to ask death for the killer of San Francisco officer Isaac Espinoza. Ironworker rep, I was at Espinoza’s funeral. I witnessed the hatred, heard Feinstein contradict her. I admired Kamala. I later cooperated in her Back on Track program to divert away from incarceration and into careers. If we don’t hear much about it, it may be that the 2008 crash blocked career access, including in the Building Trades I then represented.

2024-04-30 04:18:37

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@npub1gg5…vxnm Something to be said for Robert's Rules of Order.

2024-02-19 21:38:36

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@npub1hyk…3p33 I once negotiated a multiunion contract for a major construction project, and one of the tougher clauses on which to find agreement was the role of trades in installing works of art, some of which certainly would employ construction methods and skills. I said Oh, and the Plumbers want to know if there will be anything by Marcel Duchamp.
Turned out this required explanation, even to the Plumbers.

2023-12-20 16:48:13

Word came yesterday that Guesthouse will publish my short story The Wolf in the Oxalis. My thanks to them.
This is my tenth acceptance since Jan2022 and in my return to writing fiction after decades given to supporting a family, then the labor movement. It came just before my 68th birthday. I've long considered ten enough for a book. Now begins the task of finding a home for that.

2023-12-17 01:52:22

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@npub1gvl…8ag7 I grew up with it, kind of, Dominus vobiscum, Et cum spiritu tuo, and so on, but to supplement your legal Latin I offer instead this useful bit from Montaigne, slipping as he often does out of French and into Latin:
Stercus cuique suum bene olet.
Which is, To anyone his own sh*t smells fine.

2023-08-18 14:07:05

I once had a voice; I mean, a VOICE. As a boy soprano, cantor in my parish choir, I soloed in Mozart. Baritone as a young man, I sang Renaissance polyphony, Schubert lieder, Bach cantatas. With old age, the voice shrank; less power, range, endurance. July2022, weakened by radiation therapy, I fell down the stairs of my house, landed on my forehead, broke my neck. Took months, but the neck is fine. Somehow also, though, the voice broke, and seems gone for good. Sing while you can. I’m listening.

2023-07-18 20:52:22

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@npub1q2t…jr8a I’m putting in a vote that bigger, stronger, and just as damaged is a state preferable to smaller, weaker, and just as damaged. Congrats on the good work.

2023-05-19 22:43:24

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@npub1q2t…jr8a In every one, I think, of the many French villages I rode through in nearly 1000 miles of bicycling August 2019 was one of these stelae memorializing the dead, the Morts pour la France, of the Great War. Here is the one from my Thériault family's tiny ancestral village, Martaizé.
https://media.mas.to/masto-public/media_attachments/files/110/397/749/674/136/363/original/5927023842956ace.jpg

2023-04-21 20:25:22

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#[0] A little delegation of us from Ironworkers Local 377/San Francisco went to visit Stackpole in his Bel Marin Keys home the year before he died to ask permission to use one of his Bay Bridge construction photos for T-shirts for the local’s 75th anniversary. (It replaced two earlier locals.) Those photos of Ironworkers had started his career, and so he happily agreed. #[1] #[2] #[3]
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2023-04-18 13:50:58

Happy Earthquake Day from #[0], for those who celebrate. Our biggest was 117 years ago today, but if you know where to look, you can still see its effects: The jagged line where new brick meets old in the bell tower of St. Patrick’s on Mission, for example, or the back end of the Humboldt Bank Building, knocked badly out of plumb by the quake while under construction and left that way. This morning someone is repainting in gold the fire hydrant that saved the Mission District.