furthermore, flask

not current, not funny

2012-02-12T12:26:00.000-05:00

yes, i do have that many fingers but yet i am afraid to count how many months i am behind in the thirteen project.

when i first started it, i thought: i will do this for a year.

we are now firmly into year three and i am not sure where this is going exactly and yet i can't quite stop.

here's last may.

in the unlikely event of a water landing

2012-02-11T22:10:00.000-05:00

while we're on the topic of things unlikely to happen, if you wish to propose marriage to me, just ask. do not whip up some big theatrical production or spend your hard-earned money on a ring. do not expect me to start planning a big ceremony for a perfect princess day, either.

if you know me at all (and i'm assuming you do, if you are proposing marriage), you already know that i will prefer a quiet, private ceremony followed by a quiet, private dinner and while i may wear nylons and pretty dress and everything, don't expect much in the way of floral arrangements or jewelry.

or manageable hair.

and heaven help you if you think valentine's day would be a good time to propose!

as far as i'm concerned, valentine's day is just one more advertising campaign designed to make you buy me stuff i don't want. a diamond will not tell me how much you love me; only your commitment over time and your treatment of me in general will tell me that.

if i do not feel special to you just because it's raining or it happens to be tuesday afternoon, i will not feel special to you if you buy me something expensive for valentine's day.

diamonds! chocolate! wine! the advertising all shouts. if you spend your money on these things the girl will love you forever!

because it's not about caring or loading the dishwasher or having common interests or not noticing that i stole your favorite sweater.

it's about making you feel bad if you don't measure up to some imaginary standard and it's about making me feel unwanted unless you buy me things.

a lot of things.

expensive things.

if you were really paying attention you'd know that my favorite gifts from you are rocks you found in a parking lot and that what i REALLY want is to make your damn dinner and get to see the look on your face when dessert is THAT good.

so pardon me if i ignore valentine's day.

orange

2012-02-10T15:21:00.001-05:00

although it was beautiful on the mountain today, it was photographically uninteresting, so i have nothing to show you. instead of taking pretty pictures from the lift, i played with camera setting experiments with and without gloves, which will come in handy on colder days.

of course i have a picture of the elbow of peggy dow's, because i take a picture there every day i go up there, but you probably do not need to see it since it looks a lot like it does every other day when it's sunny with light clouds coming in, which is often.

i'm still working on codeyear, and i am even clocking photos from the thirteen project, although i am monumentally behind.

the day before yesterday i went to buy a springform pan (how did i get to be in my late forties and have no springform pan?) and nearly got run over in the parking lot. happily, i saw the woman start to back and began taking evasive measures early on.

i was on her passenger side and in retrospect the smart choice would have been to turn and run in the OPPOSITE direction, but i didn't realize she would be backing so fast and usually it's enough to just swing out and give them a wide berth.

not so much this one. by the time it was finished, i'd had to run three-quarters of the way around the back of her huge SUV and jump her left rear bumper, which landed me right next to the driver's side door, which was the first time she noticed i was there at all.

do NOT ask me how she missed me in three windows and three mirrors, but she did.

anyway, i'm thinking i might could share with you some of the things i've been saving up to share with you, so i went back only a couple of weeks in my photos before i found something.

i saw a little posting last week about candles made from orange peels at about the same time i saw a recipe for an orange cake, so it seemed a good fit, plus cr loves candles of all types and we were talking briefly a few weeks ago about primitive oil lamps so there was no excuse NOT to try them.

my first couple of tries went pretty well and my second one burned for about four hours, but the peels i make ahead of time so i could show them to cr didn't start up at all well, which was disappointing.

and the cake was pretty good, but i wasn't completely happy with it.

maybe i just need more practice.

come to think of it, i still have oranges...

two shorts

2012-02-09T13:51:00.000-05:00

here are two short open letters:

to americans who can't understand why everyone hates us:

here's a good start figuring it out. please do better in the future.

love, flask.

to all the bloggers participating in this month's tedious blog challenges:

see you in march when you return to saying something original.

love, flask.

still without comment

2012-02-08T15:53:00.002-05:00

open letter to domino's and frito-lay

2012-02-06T12:12:00.001-05:00

dear huge corporations,

i notice that you are marketing products as "artisan" recipes.

i realize that legally there is no defined meaning of "artisan" and its related words in terms of food packaging, but there is actually a definition of the word "artisan" that is generally accepted and a meaning of "artisan" as it applies to foods and while i guess you're free to declare oxygen not just visible but mauve in color, it doesn't make these things so and shame on you for trying.

according to dictionary.com, here's the definition of "artisan":

1. a person skilled in an applied art; a craftsperson.

2. a person or company that makes a high-quality, distinctive product in small quantities, usually by hand and using traditional methods: food artisans.

artisanal foods are made in small batches by skilled craftspeople. these are pizzas, cheeses, breads, beers, and what-have-you made in small batches by real people with care and attention. even if you take a recipe used by an actual artisan maker, the second you scale it up and mass produce it in a factory, it isn't artisanal anymore.

"artisanal" is not a term that means "we put a buncha stuff on this and expect you to pay more for a longer ingredient list". it isn't even a term that means "we'd like to call to your mind what you'd be getting if you were eating real food instead of this crap".

if you're going to call your products artisanal, i'm going to redefine words, too.

here's my definition of "visible": it goes in and out of the lungs.

as you see, oxygen can most certainly be made to fit my definition. i am also defining "mauve" as "the color of anything that can be put into a balloon".

now that you and i have paused to redefine words to suit our whims, let's invite everyone to do the same and soon nobody will have any idea what anyone else is talking about and maybe we'll all just be reduced to eating foods that taste good and can be easily identified without marketing.

one can hope.

prêtre

2012-02-05T21:17:00.001-05:00

this is kind of rough draft of a thing i was working on today.

best to offer it without comment, i think.

listen

calling audaria

2012-02-04T09:08:00.001-05:00

yes, i miss you, too. for some reason my formspring thingy isn't working reliably, but at or near the time your question came in, i was thinking: i miss audaria, and do not know how to contact her.

so. if you like, you can make a comment with your email address in it, and i will write to you.

i don't publish comments i get with emails in them.

for the record, i also do not publish spam comments and for the both of you who are probably wondering, although i WILL publish hostile comments, i will not publish anonymous hostile comments. if you want to disagree politely, you may do so anonymously. if you want to be unpleasant, you have to do it under an identity of some sort.

those are my rules.

today i was going to write an open letter to some corporations, but i decided instead to try to talk to audaria and -oh, look, a squirrel!- ended up outlining my (until now) unwritten rules about which comments get published and which do not.

maybe i will go now and organize some photos from october or something.

today on the mountain

2012-02-03T14:26:00.000-05:00

it was beautiful this morning on the mountain, all dark and broody under the morning clouds but with the sun coming out and over the mountain.

it was all light and hoarfrost and the snow was surprisingly good, too, given the weather lately in which we have two days of really cold temps and then a day of rain. i wasn't even going to go, but these days they're pretty good about putting out a ski report that actually TELLS you what the conditions on the mountain are so you can decide if it's going to be worth it before you leave home.

so it was a couple of inches of light freshies on top of reasonably nice corduroy and temperatures approaching 20 and the sun coming out. and the thing about it is they were spinning the number one chair, which they often don't do on a weekday, but that's my favorite chair (otherwise known as the wilderness chair) and it's the only way to get to my favorite view at the elbow of peggy dow's unless you want to walk.

i love the view at the elbow of peggy dow's so much that i take a picture of it every day i am there and i even wrote a song about it, which you can see here.

while i was up there, i took a few other pictures, which are in a little album over here. they're pretty; go look.

pinking shears

2012-02-02T09:17:00.000-05:00

a while ago i was on a tear about this: those blasted pink ribbons are all over the place, and i have a low opinion of them. the more i listened, the more i realized that i'm not alone.

this week there's more to be irritated about.

pz meyers wrote this excellent post on it this week, in the wake of the outrageous decision by the susan g. komen people to cut funding to planned parenthood because, let's face it: women's health care (which is most of their work) is a lot less important than satisfying the christian conservative moneygivers over preventing abortions (which isn't really what planned parenthood is about, any more than your north american GP is about treating you for malaria. she WILL provide that service, but it's not her primary function, you know?).

in related news, janet howell is one of my new heroes. her excellent amendment didn't get passed, but it came close, and it made a point. it cheers me up every time someone brings out a clever amendment to an idiotic bill, kind of like what happened recently indiana.

ah, indiana, that shining star of legislative brilliance!

a few little things

2012-02-01T16:14:00.002-05:00

i'm still working on web-ish things.

it is week four of codeyear, which means i'm starting to have a clue. just one, mind you, but it is a clue.

i'm trying to work with the half-functional site i mentioned last time and although it doesn't have much to offer in terms of ease-of-use, with a good FTP client it becomes almost manageable.

i'm using two nice free tools: a simple editor called textwrangler (mac) and an FTP client called filezilla (mac and windows).

you can do a lot with those if you've a mind to. so far i'm not doing a lot with them, but if you want to see the little half-formed site built from scratch, it's here. please bear in mind that it isn't functional at all; it's just a little scaffolding on which to hang a little html and css. i'd like for it to do nothing a little more smoothly, but right now at the host site i'm getting a lot of "read-only file system" error messages both through filezilla and through the super slow and ungainly online file manager.

in the meantime, how 'bout i close some tabs?

i totally adore this poem and it makes me giggle every time i read it, which is a more impressive statement now than it was a couple of months ago when i first left it open on my desktop meaning to tell you about it.

curvy is a lovely little html5 game you can play, but be prepared to spend a number of hours at it.

and if you've ever wanted a unicode character to represent whatever little image is in your mind you need this tool, and you need it NOW.

and for no good reason and with absolutely no explanation, here's a little picture of khalil:

web things.

2012-01-30T13:34:00.001-05:00

news first, i guess.

i have still been trying to figure out how to do what i want to do on the web, which is pretty simple, if not super common.

i want to have a little blog for my own enjoyment and maybe the two dozen or so people who sporadically read it. i also want to be able to post my photo albums and the occasional podcast and give the infrequent visitor the ability to download selected mp3s and sheet music.

i would like to link all these these things together in a nice clean stylish way without ads or banners and i sorta used to have what i wanted with the server space i was renting through the apple servers and it was fairly expensive but as of june they're taking the parts of the service i used (webhosting) and discontinuing them while taking the parts of the service i DIDN'T use and making them available cheaper.

fine. i can find cheaper alternatives.

but it's a pain in the butt, yo.

i have found a SEA of cheap or free services that really push expensive useless upgrades hard.

for instance, i thought this service was promising, because it purports to allow you to augment its pitiful array of cheap templates if you can hand install platforms like wordpress and joomla, but it turns out that the installing doesn't go so easily unless you have advanced skills or you have purchased an expensive upgrade.

the thing is that if their service had been usable at the free level, i would have shelled out bucks already because i need a host.

and i spent a couple of days looking at joomla! and maybe it is a very nice web editing tool, but i see a lot of modules and extensions and while it's very flexible drag-and-drop maybe, what i really WANT is to just build a little something myself.

same thing with wordpress, which REALLY doesn't want you to go into those templates and mess with them. not as hideously unmodifiable as google sites (are those things still running?), but still not a happy place for making your own little template and working with that.

do you miss geocities? i do.

sure, it was a place where you saw some of the greatest atrocities of very, very bad design and clip collections of useless animated GIFs and autoplay midi files, but it was also a place where you could just build a site from scratch without advanced skills and it was really super for learning basics if you wanted a nice little lab.

...which i did.

...and do.

i am getting happier and happier with blogger, because even though they make it hard for you to get under the hood and drop in all your own design, they do not make it impossible. and if you can wade through the source code for the page and manage to sort out what the mandatory blogger components are, you can change EVERYTHING else, which is a thing i am beginning to appreciate.

just so i don't leave you hanging, i think i have a line on a very practical hosting solution, but i think i'm still going to keep this blog at blogger, just because the more i see of how its running, the happier i am with it.

counterweight

2012-01-26T15:40:00.000-05:00

this week i had my kitchen countertops replaced.

see more photos

i'm in week three of codeyear, and it's a challenge.additionally, i have updated my photogallery and my audioblog. if you want to follow any updates in audio, you should probably follow that one on its own, since while the link IS in the sidebar here, it will not give you any warnings, and that kind of goes for the photo gallery.i still may end up doing and independent website so i can configure everything more to my liking.

a marriage of sorts

2012-01-24T08:46:00.001-05:00

well, it wasn't all that hard.

i now have two blogs melded to look like one, which means i can keep my audio entries separate and cataloged and still be part of a unified whole AND i've got my photo gallery which isn't as smooth as i want because i have to farm out the images to photobucket (or any other host, just because of storage limitations), but otherwise you can get it all HERE.

and i'm learning so much!

helpful hint: download your blogger templates and modify them in a good text editor and then stick them back up. it will save you HOURS of sadness.

adventures in templates

2012-01-23T13:07:00.000-05:00

anyone who makes a habit of scanning this blog for minute changes (not me; i have better things to do) will have noticed that in the right sidebar i have added a photo gallery.

i had to do this because my web server is drying up in june and i'm looking to create pretty much the same package, only using free services and linking them together.

but will blogger (or wordpress, for that matter) let you use multiple templates on the same blog?

no.

wordpress will, but only if you're using their software ON YOUR OWN SERVER, so the answer is still basically no.

the good news is that if you know a little CSS you can modify templates to read as you want.

do i know CSS?

no.but by the time i'm done, i will.and while we're at it, i'm taking a little time to learn to code using codeacademy's codeyear. if you want to join in the hilarity, it is only week three and you still have time to catch up.

daily downloads

2011-12-24T22:58:00.000-05:00

tonight at church joan preached a thing she called "everybody goes to bethlehem". if you really want to know, you can wait until martin posts it over at steeple.org.

it was beautiful, though, and if you stand where i stand in the church when the candles are lit, you look out facing the whole congregation, and people are mostly wearing red: red vest, red sweaters, red jackets, and you don't notice it so much until you see it in the sea of candle flames and they are all so beautiful that i almost can't stand up.

anyway, i've been posting racks from my christmas album over at soundcloud.com and you can download them until january 6 if you like. here is tonight's posting; you can find the others from there if you're inclined.

http://soundcloud.com/eflask/24-o-little-town-of-bethlehem

peace be with you, tonight and every night.

songs from an alternate reality

2011-12-16T22:37:00.000-05:00

there's a lot to tell.

right now i'm just going to say that i am still out here and i'm doing pretty well, considering. i have a ton of projects, and i have pictures to show you later but for right now i'm just going to give you two sound clips.

i'm still playing glitch a lot, and that little imaginative world sparks a little imagination.

a while ago i was trying to get currants in the game (the currant-sy. hehe) to buy my precious little house in groddle meadow but it was going to mean a long haul down in the ilmenskie mines, which only made me think of the traditional groddle song that the miners used to sing on their way down into the mines:

ilmenskie miners

of course, as time goes on the traditional songs of groddle are being uncovered, and it turns out the people of groddle are a cheeky bunch. there's much more expensive real estate to be had in alakol or salatu and often peopel will work to buy very expensive houses in alakol only to realize they'd rather live in groddle.

of course the meadow dwellers have a song about that, too.

i live in groddle meadow

the most famous song of groddle, though, is immortalized in the GNG musicblock and you should go listen to it.

good night, groddle.

hey, hi.

2011-12-12T11:42:00.000-05:00

i've been playing glitch kind of obsessively, or at least playing it in most of my computer time.

things have not been going so well for me, and it's nice to be in an alternate world where things ARE going well for me and life is simpler.

outside of that i'm still taking pictures and making foods and sooner or later i hope to have something for you about that. for right now, though, i'm thinking about what i will do with my afternoon, what i will make in my kitchen, and my advent project.

i'm not feeling so well. i have to keep busy.

open letter to my neighbors

2011-09-07T10:16:00.000-04:00

hey, neighbors!

i like what you've done with the place. and your weekend parties look awesome when i go by and i don't mind having all those cars on the road because you all look like you're having a pantload of fun.

i think it's super cool that you have a live band and i actually enjoy your practices and i enjoy it when just the drummer practices even though it's plenty loud here at my house, across the road and back a ways.

i even like the idea that when your band is between sets you let the children play with your drums.

but you cross the line when you DON'T TURN OFF THE SOUND SYSTEM between sets. i don't mind hearing your party, or your practices even though it's quite loud even with my windows closed.

i DO mind open mike for six-year-olds.

for the sake of all things kind and decent, when you let the children play with the equipment, KILL THE AMP.

those four kids who want to sing into the mike wouldn't be enjoyable for us out here even if they knew more songs than the first two bars of the star spangled banner, repeated over and over and over while that kid on the drums plays bah-bah BOOM, bah, bah BOOM uninterrupted for ten minutes.

so please. just KILL THE POWER BETWEEN SETS.

PLEASE.

prybar

2011-09-05T09:37:00.000-04:00

last week i went into waterbury to work on flood cleanup.

it's good to see how many people are coming to shovel muck and strip carpets and whatever work needs doing just "because we're neighbors", with "neighbor" apparently a word that means "you live in my state".

i didn't take any pictures and there's not much to tell you about except that pretty typical of it was a bunch of us in a room of a destroyed trailer in a trailer park. there are five of us in that room, and we are trying to scoop up the mess and maybe save out a few personal items that aren't destroyed. so two people are scooping, one is boxing, one is gently removing keepsakes from a waterlogged wall, and one is using a chainsaw to cut up the furniture.

later in the day we are leaving big pieces of things that don't go around corners easily "until we knock out the drywall".

it's hard work, and i had never done demolition, but a worker is a worker and they take everyone and now i'm pretty good with a prybar and a mat knife.

yesterday at church our pastor got up and said she hoped we'd forgive her for not having prepared a sermon; she had been cleaning up in moretown. and then she turned to us and asked what we did this week.

and i am so proud to have been in that room, a church where we were not flooded, but where nearly every person had either gone to work on cleanup, or rounded up supplies or raised money or in some way had worked support.

a little girl in the second row was making cookies to feed the volunteers.

last night there was more flooding. not as widespread, but there was still flooding.

today it's raining.

damage

2011-08-30T20:39:00.001-04:00

yeah, my house is fine, and my road is fine.

my town roads are also fine. the water is going down.

one town south of me it's a different story; school can't start until next week, because they have no way to run the busses.

the thing about vermont, in case you don't know our geography, is that we are a small state with a mountain range running right down the center of it. our border with new hampshire is a river, and our border with new york is a big honkin' lake.

in order to get from one side of the state to the other, you have to go through the mountain passes. mountain passes are where the floodwater runs.

so along the winooski river (which goes through my town) there was a lot of flooding, but the winooski is wide and pretty close to sea level.

the deerfield river, on the other hand, goes through the mountains and after two weeks of rain when all of a sudden one afternoon the sky opens up and pours fourteen inches of rain into already filled catchments and saturated ground, what happens is that all that water simply flows downhill.

it takes everything in its path with it.

many of our precious historic covered bridges are now simply gone. many of our picturesque towns are destroyed.

tonight we hope to have access to what we're calling "the thirteen isolated communities"; these are towns that since sunday have had no land access at all and have had to have food and water and medical needs carried by helicopter. and you have to understand that there are a LOT of towns where there isn't cell reception. they're just too far into mountain hollows, so when the water came crashing in, a lot of those people had no way to communicate with the outside world. one town not too far from my house was so cut off that yesterday afternoon they sent out a party ON FOOT to bring back water to drink.

when we say we're bringing access to the isolated communities, that means there will be an ATV trail. car travel for some of those towns may be a LONG time coming.

tonight one of the most popular radio shows in the state is one where you can call up and tell people how to get out of towns to places where you can find electricity and hospitals. apparently if you have a couple of hours to burn you can get from dover into brattleboro.

let's be clear here: when there used to be a road that went through, you might go into brattleboro from dover to get a pizza. i know i did.

but route four is GONE in a lot of places, and so is route nine. in some paces they're talking about evacuating people but not bringing them back, because they say it may be years before some of those back those roads are repaired, if ever.

right now as it stands they say the best way to get from any point on the east side of vermont to any point on the west side of vermont is to go down and take the mass pike. i'm not kidding about this.

CVPS, the largest utility serving that area, says they can't repair the lines that went down, because the land they were on is simply not there anymore. those towns are not getting power until the utility comes in and build new lines from scratch.

there's no water in woodstock. they have a line of porta-potties on main street.

to the good, power crews from as far as texas are working around the clock. road crews from northern towns where there was no damage are going down with their dump trucks. google has been working with the state today to put together some kind of map project so people can see which roads are passable. people with chainsaws are just going out and clearing paths. ATV riders are going into isolated towns by way of snowmobile trails to bring water and supplies. hotels and campgrounds are taking in people for free.

small towns are still small towns, and you may not know your neighbor's name, but he'll still come the couple of miles from his house and clear the road with his chainsaw so you can get out.

disaster area

2011-08-29T14:42:00.000-04:00

for a while i thought it best to go silent; there was a thing about some low-grade stalking and the biggest hatwipe in the world who is, still apparently, the biggest hatwipe in the world.

and i was playing glitch. i play it a lot these days when it's open, and when it's closed i flail about waiting for it to open. it's still in beta, and i'm playing it real hard because i'm thinking about laying out the cash to be a subscriber which i would want to do if it was going to hold my interest for a whole year, so i'm playing it AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE to see if it will keep me interested.

since i am currently dreaming about it, it appears to be keeping me interested.

and of course i'm also in my kitchen making delightful things to eat. this week i made more roasted tomato soup and some really swell white bean and eggplant soup, and there's a really, really long list that i won't trouble you with because what i really want to talk about is the storm.

did you notice the storm?

i did.

from where i was sitting it appeared to be simply very dramatic weather, but i'm listening to the news today and national news is using phrases like "the little state of vermont was hardest hit".

at my house, i just battened down the hatches and monitored the power outages across the state. there were a LOT of them. and an "outage" simply refers to a point at which the lines have gone down, so that might be one household, or like yesterday afternoon in the islands, 1700 households. at one point there were over 13,000 outages in windham county alone.

my power flickered off for a few minutes at about a quarter to one, and when it came back on i could see according to the outage reports that 43 households in my town had gone out.

as of this writing there are still no plans to restore power to those households. and interesting thing to note is that some power was restored a couple of miles away a little after that, and i kind of expected there to be some work on it then, but today since it's all sunny and bright i thought i should go out and get some exercise and assumed that the trails would be too wet for mountain biking, so i decided to go play disc golf.

it may seem like a non-sequitur, but that's how i discovered exactly where the power lines went down and why they're not getting repaired any time soon.

first of all, i don't carry flood insurance because i live way the heck up here on a mountain a mile from a good stream that drains to a very large wetland that is itself way up above the river and drains down quite a bit.

in short, if i am flooded out, i have much bigger problems than high water.

but my town is funny-shaped: it is rectangular, but the corner i live in is waaaaay up over the spine of the green mountains and as recently as 15 years ago we had to tuition our kids out to other towns to go to school because it was not possible to get from here into the main part of town in the winter.

it's the power line that comes up here from town that went down. i live close enough to the other side that i can be supplied from any one of three directions and judging from the outages, only one of my routes was (is) still up.

but up in the notch, there's only the one transmission line.

and after i saw where the line went down, i got down to route two and got to see that it would not have been possible for crews to come up my road; the bottom of it was under say, five feet of water. and so was that low-lying neighborhood near the river.

now bear in mind that as i'm seeing this, i still think i'm going to go play golf in waterbury center, which means going through downtown bolton.

uh, not happening. the water may have receded five or six feet, but downtown bolton is still pretty much underwater. the guy from the utility company said you can get through on the road IF you have high clearance AND you don't mind your vehicle smelling like raw sewage after that.

because flooding means sewage.

i did not try to go any further than that. i did not need to see the damage all along route 2.

it turns out that a record number of roads in this state simply aren't there anymore. that's impressive, because this summer we had record floods and a record amount of roads disappeared.

if you'd like to see a LOT more flood damage, try this search.

and i was listening to the news this afternoon and learned that the state was considering FLOODING THE STREETS OF THE STATE CAPITAL yesterday.

why? because of the very real danger of the breaching of dams upstream in residential areas.

our state capital is a big bowl with the river going through it. most of the homes are on high ground. it would have been devastating to the businesses, but if the marshfield and wrightsville dams had breached, it would have been a stunning disaster.

anyway, it's considered to be WORSE flooding than the flood of '27, when dams DID breach, with great loss of life.

we think we "only" lost one man to the flood yesterday; a city employee checking on flood conditions and was washed away.

it's going to be a long time before we can get from here to there easily again.

waiting for the world to open up

2011-08-11T10:05:00.000-04:00

it's thursday, which means the little world at glitch is going to open up sometime today. i am so excited that i have not slept in two nights, which is bad because i don't imagine i will sleep well tonight since i'll probably be up late playing the game.

i like it that much.

meanwhile, i am trying to win at tinyhack, which isn't going so well. i have found all the objects i need to find AND i have found the secret entrance to the fortress, but so far i am unable to put these things together for a win.

i'm experimenting with this video conversation thingy, but so far i do not know if i like it.

and because i have the tabs open on my desktop i'm having a look at some games that are played in google earth. right now i'm looking at skydiver, but i don't know yet if i like it enough to add to my list. games played in google earth are fascinating to me, though, just because of the real earth imagery. if you go there, please note that it runs in chrome, but not in firefox. i have not tried it in safari or opera, but you KNOW it won't work in IE anything. last week i was on a visualization site and saw a fun notice on a broken graphic on an RSS feed: it said please use a modern browser like chrome, firefox, safari, or opera. if you are viewing this through RSS, please click through and view it in your browser.

here are some odd bits i have laying around:

arounder isn't really state-of-the-art virtual touring like this, but it will give you some pretty nice panoramic photos of some interesting international locations.

captchas for idiots just makes me laugh; would such a thing were possible!

here's and interesting chart about nutrition and cravings. i am not in a position to judge its factualness (factualness? is that even a word? it is now.), but it's worth looking at.

and finally, here's a comic from xkcd:

last night i rode a good race. yesterday i made borscht, vegetable stock, zucchini brownies, and i prepped a couple of things i'll make later. i also packaged the cubes of frozen tapenade for later use.

today it will be more soup, a roasted beet risotto, and probably something else delightful. and this afternoon the fish i'm curing will be ready to rinse and package.

that's it for me, i guess.

i have to go check if the world is open yet.

how can i get more traffic for my blog?

2011-08-10T11:10:00.000-04:00

the real question here is "why do you want more traffic for your blog?"

are you a business and think of your blog as a way to draw in consumers?
do you have dreams of internet fame?
do you expect to make real money from your blog and be able to retire?
do you think it's going to get you that book/record deal you want?
do you collect followers on your blog just like you collect facebook "friends" and twitter followers?

i read a lot of blogs. and i see a lot of blogs that seem to be more about driving traffic than anything else. so here's my advice:

join networks. you don't really care if people are reading you, do you? you just want those all important clicks and backlinks. so join as many networks as you can. bloggers there who aren't reading your blog will all be part of that network and they'll all follow you in return for following them.
go to conferences. same thing. spend a lot of time and money to go to meet thousands of people who don't really want to read anyone else's blog, but they want to have you follow theirs.
invent blogging challenges. make some little blogging meme and get lots of bloggers to do it too, and hopefully they will give you a link. awesome. i LOVE to read dozens of nearly identical blogs every day when people take up cookie-cutter challenges.
participate in a challenge. "august vacation!" "pic-a-day". "seven things about yourself". then you can all link to each other and see who's doing it, too. it's like death to the reader, but you'll have links.
giveaways! give stuff away to people who leave comments! there. THAT will get tons of people to comment. and of course people who comment just to get a prize will stick aroudn and be a real reader, won't they? well, at least you'll have a backlink.
make tons of comments on blogs. it doesn't matter if it has anything to do with the post, or if you're part of an actual conversation. you will have a backlink. and of course your comment will be so interesting that tons of people will follow your blog as soon as they see it.
give out blog awards! make a little graphic that people can put on their page to tell the world how proud they are that you awarded them the "flowers and sunshine" blogging award even though they write about war atrocities. of course your award will have lots of little rules in it, including a mention and a backlink. and won't you feel special when they display your award right up there with the 56,000 other awards they received from people who want backlinks?
ask questions. no matter what your blog entry is about, be sure to end with a question so that your readers will want to make lots of comments. it works because people love to talk about themselves. you know they do. you have a blog, right? so you talk about yourself and then ask a meaningless question so that other people will talk about themselves and give you their traffic.
follow, follow, follow! follow dozens -no, hundreds of blogs. you don't have to read them. just follow them publicly and the people who write them will be polite and follow you back.

oh. were you just interesting in writing an interesting blog? and you don't care about traffic?

well then. it's easy. write what you want, when you want to. show pictures or tell stories or whatever. if you are blogging for a business, connect to your customers by giving them content that will interest them. if you sell barbecue accessories, blog about recipes and gardening and how to use a grill really well, but ALSO tell about whatever interests you. banjo music?

give people a reason to read you. provide a service that's not about making a sale.

on average i read about 400 blogs every day.

every. single. day.

some of them are aggregators. some of them give original content. there are professionals and average joes.

here are two of my favorites:

gurney journey this is the blog of a working artist/illustrator. he writes about his work, other people's work, and whatever happens to interest him at the moment. he has (i think) a large following, but he's about content, not followers. he post on average twice a day, and it is always interesting.

janette kok is a quiet little christian lady living a quiet little christian life in the pacific northwest. she writes on average once a day and talks about what she's reading and what's in her garden. it maybe doesn't sound like a must-read to you, but i read her every day and when i'm too tired or fed up to read a lot of the other blogs i read daily, i am always happy to read hers. she does not care one bit about followers or links or comments.

meanwhile, back at the farm, i am eagerly awaiting the opening of the glitch world tomorrow. and i am making lots of precious little recipes. i'm also signing up for various new internet services for communication and data visualization, just to try them out. i'll let you know if i get anything good.

oh! by-the-way- last night for dinner i made this casserole before i went out for my run and then baked it after. it's good.

little things

2011-08-09T10:10:00.003-04:00

today's little chore was updating the slideshow that plays on my blog page. i know, you probably read it in RSS, but there's a slideshow if you want to see it.

so that took a little time, going through my bazillions of photos and adding the ones that seemed worth it, and taking out some old ones i wasn't so happy with anymore. then of course the feed was broken, so i had to fix that.

in other little internet news, yesterday i added two new designs to my zazzle store. i took a picture of some flowers from cr's garden and she said it was like us smiling in the sunshine, so i made this:

then i was thinking that if i could make that into a template, it would make a nice little greeting card or mug or something, so no anyone who wants one can put their own photographs into the flowers and that's how i spent my morning yesterday.

flower garden by flask_ehrlenmeyer

you and me, sunshine by flask_ehrlenmeyer
make a card online at zazzle

so then i went for a mountain bike ride and came home and made the soup du jour. it's almost as good as yesterday's soup. i think now i'm going to go make brownies.

music, language, and games

2011-08-08T09:31:00.000-04:00

gonna close some more tabs.

why? because i have a backlog of things i need to open up and play with so i can either show you or not.

music! weird music! weird AWESOME music!

first, i'd like to introduce you (have you met?) to the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, or PLOrk, as it is affectionately called. their webpage is kinda dry, but there's a nice little piece about them in the NPR archive, and one of their photo sets works like a gallery and is interesting. they don't look like they're really set up for hotlinking, but if you're looking at those pictures, please notice the exit sign in the auditorium. ooooh. talk nerdy to me.

and then there's the vegetable orchestra. not only is this a concept that i am in love with, but their website is rich with images and words and sound samples, so you should go. then, if you're like me, you will buy their album "onionoise"and you will look for the nearest venue and wait until you can go there and see them live. mmmm, soup.

(and speaking of soup, here is a really good soup i made yesterday. i played fast and loose with the recipe, both changing the quantity of things in it and adding potatoes to the roast, but it is whoa-nellie-i-can't-talk-to-you-now-i'm-eating-soup! good.)

soup? how did we get there? is it non-sequitur hour? were you READING the website, or did you just skim through, hmmm?

ok, NOW we're just going to jump topics, but it's ok; it still involves sound files. if you've known me for more than ten minutes, you know i'm a big language fan. so naturally i was interested to hear the story of the three little pigs as told in new guinea pidgin, which is a creole.

for a neat look at the evolution of alphabets, look here.

a lot of the world speaks english, though. me, i'm learning OLD english (more accurately west saxon literary dialect), but one of the things that interests me in the world of english speakers is accent. so it's super cool that there's a game you can play to try to guess where a person is from based on his or her accent when reading a passage in english. it's harder than i thought it would be at the outset, because while me ear can distinguish the accent of a native german speaker, i'm not good enough to know if it's swiss german. and what if the speaker is, say a native french speaker, but was taught english by australians? oh, man. it gets complex...

anyway, you can play can you guess where my accent is from?

and then as long as you're playing games, you might as well play this clever little old-school favicon-sized game: tinyhack.

or maybe you just want to play with movement and sound: balldroppings. it's s chrome experiment, but it seems to work just fine in firefox.

and if you like your games more cerebral, there's a whole playground here.

and just for good measure, last night i heard about this race: run for your lives! ha. that's funny.

girl talk

2011-08-07T11:43:00.001-04:00

i'm cleaning off my desk so i can close my tabs and now that i can use that handy tool i told you about yesterday to have any tab from any of my machines open, it's a lot easier for me to have a look at the stuff i want to tell you about and then also have it handy for the machine i write from.

it's especially important since the keyboard on my laptop needs replacing and i no longer have use of the spacebar, or the b, n, ? and up arrow.

a while ago the band girl talk came out with an album called all day, which you can download in its entirety for free. the interesting thing is that there's a real-time list (with video) of all the samples used in the album. and even if it's not your style (it's not mine) it is a fascinating project and what the heck; it's free.

so i watched that in its entirety yesterday and although it's not going on my favorites playlist, it sure was interesting to see how the samples were used and also how the list was compiled. i am a sucker for a beautiful graphical representation.

i also want to tell you about a privacy tool i discovered and downloaded this week. it is also free and so far i am happy with how it works. the idea is that companies that have those like buttons are tracking you whether or not you are logged into their services. all you have to do is be on a page that has those buttons and you are being tracked, even if you have cookies disabled.

and you can get add-ons that disable the buttons entirely, but what if you want to use them sometimes and not be tracked everywhere else? so this thing (and so far i'm pretty happy with my test of it on both of my machines) simply blocks the tracking unless you choose to interact with the button on the site. you can manage your permissions and grant and ungrant as you please, which makes me happy.

you can find that here: share me not.

and appropos of nothing, i want to tell you about this because i think it's screamingly funny:

The Birthday Clown Consortium Price Guide.

there. i'm done for now. it's off to the kitchen with me. i don't know yet what i'm going to make, but there will be a few things and i bet they'll be good.

organizing at the end of the world

2011-08-06T11:43:00.000-04:00

the end of the world came yesterday.

did you notice? no, you probably did not, unless you play glitch. the thing about the beta testing is that they roll out a version of the game and the testers play it until the test ends and then they start over in the new test version.

since i only started playing wednesday, i was not aware that at the end of the test, there's a giant End Of The World Party. but for a game that i only started playing wednesday, it sure has a hold of me. i am marking the days until the new version launches, and i know from the start that we'll only play for a week and then THAT world will end.

later on, and soon we hope, they will launch the game for real and we can just play. my initial assessment of it is that it's AWESOME.

it is smart and funny and graphically interesting and has a decent soundtrack. the environments and the storyline are imaginative and quirky. and here's the thing i REALLY like: it is cooperative in nature, rather than competitive. in order to advance in the game, you have to work and play well with others.

and you have to be able to make a good sammich.

while i'm casting about blankly for the startup of the new version on or around august 11, i have the usual projects, which includes SOMEHOW organizing and consolidating the bookmarks from both of my machines and all of my browsers, a thing which i was beginning to think impossible until this morning i found an add-on that works across platforms and across browsers and now my machines have all the same bookmarks and open tabs, or they CAN have the same open tabs or not, because it's configurable.

boo-yah!

you can find that here.

useless

2011-08-04T21:08:00.001-04:00

yesterday and today i played a game.

apparently it's addictive; i played it through several mealtimes and one bedtime, only leaving the house to race bicycles and play disc golf with cr.

it's still in beta, so not everyone can get in, but go ahead, if you dare: glitch

sleeping: an equipment guide

2011-08-02T13:30:00.000-04:00

you probably don't know how to pack for going to bed.

what's that you say? you just crawl in there and sleep? you're not PREPARED?

you need my advice.

i am changing my sheets today. i say it in the present tense because right now i only have one set of sheets that i really like and that fit my mattress well, so in order to clean them it's a commitment to see the process through all the way.

i confess that i have not changed them since those two days it was really hot because it kind of seemed pointless to put fresh sheets on the bed if it was only going to be another hot night, but i have to draw the line somewhere.

it's not ENTIRLEY as slovenly as it sounds, because i habitually sleep in long-sleeved shirts and athletic tights and i ALWAYS wear socks, so there's not a lot of actual skin contact with the sheets, but still. there are limits.

uh, anyway, when you take the sheets off the bed, you find out what's really under that comforter.

i used to need a completely empty bed, with nothing in it and the sheets all needed to line up square and i wish i could tell you i have never gotten out of bed in the night to remake the bed because the sheets were crooked.

so while my life now may not represent progress in the strict sense, it does represent movement.

sleeping is dangerous business. last thursday on my way out of bed i managed to hit my head so forcefully on a nearby shelf that i managed to punch a half-inch triangular cut in my scalp but didn't notice the matted blood until i took my hat off at lunchtime.

apparently there's a whole suite of things you need in order to sleep. here's my list:

in the bed:

four pillows. it's important that if you roll over, you are fully supported.
two phones. you can't be bothered to roll far enough to pick one up if it rings. one functions as an alarm clock, too.
camera. you usually need to take pictures during the night. (see above, phone as alarm clock)
t shirt. you can't drool on the pillows, can you?
sweater that does not belong to you. this is a sufficiently grown-up looking susbstitute for that stuffed dog you stopped sleeping with when you were nine because it was falling apart but you still have it in your closet.
large chunk of rose quartz. handy in an emergency. you know.
hat. either your head is cold, or the room is not dark enough.
ipod and headphones. duh. don't use the good headphones; they only get tangled.
pretzels and pretzel fragments. ok, this isn't strictly intentional, but if you eat in your sleep, you're bound to lose some of it in the bed, ambien walrus.

not actually in the bed, but within reach without rolling over:

large bag of pretzels.
assorted other snacks. you sleep better if you don't have to go so far to get snacks. if you have ever woken up in the driveway on your way to get something to eat, you know this is important.
two bottles of water.
spare ipod. emergency podcasts in case of failure.

furthermore, before you go to sleep you should plan your next day's activities and make sure you are wearing socks appropriate to that activity. this means if it is saturday night, you should be wearing your bright red or florescent yellow socks, or at the very least your black and pink flamingo socks because that's what you should wear to church, ESPECIALLY if you are in front of the congregation for any part of the service. it also means that if tomorrow is canada day, you are wearing your maple leaf socks.

details are important. if you forget to put on the right socks at bedtime, you will only have to get up and change them as soon as your error is discovered.

save yourself time and energy. be prepared.

i know i have helped you.

this is what it's like

2011-08-01T08:10:00.000-04:00

yesterday i got up on a sunny day feeling GREAT and after church my chicken guy's wife gave me not one but TWO dozen boxes of eggs which means i have enough eggs to do some of the other things i was maybe going to go with them, but was kind of saving them out for things i HAVE to use them on...

but anyway, i was going to go to the grocery store to do my shopping after church and now i don't quite know what to do because it's warm out and now if i leave the eggs in the car i have to leave them in the cooler, but i always put my cold things in the cooler when i shop and i hadn't brought an extra because i wasn't counting on the eggs and now i don't know what to do so i start to go home and then i turn around and go back because i'll just figure it out, whatever, but then i'm crying.

really, really crying. and so i pull off into the nearest parking lot which is the town office (closed because it's sunday) and it's the kind of crying that short circuits something in my brain and i just start barking out words or parts of words and i know they're the beginnings to sentences i'm trying to say but after a while they're meaningless tics and i can't go forward with other thoughts and i can't make them stop and at this point since i am so close to the police station i'm afraid an officer will come and talk to me and i won't be able to do anything but bark and yip and twitch and up until this point it's just paranoia

-and i'll interrupt here to tell you that while i am always willing to consider that it's just paranoia, i HAVE been hunted by the police and if you have that reality to toss into your paranoid delusion, that is just not a good mix.

so anyway, i'm afraid the police will come and i'll be unintelligible and the next thing i know i'll be cuffed and transported when all i need really is to calm down and rest a little, maybe, or at any rate we all know that's how it goes since if there's a drug out there that works, i'm allergic to it.

yeah. so. i'm sitting there in my car crying and i'm thinking that i'm maybe not in a safe position when this police cruiser goes by me a little and then turns around with his lights on. he goes by me, but i go into panic overdrive. what follows is the whole of the williston fire department and rescue squad resopnding to a call somewhere down the road, but all the siren and lights are not making me feel any better.

so i think: i have to get out of here.

and i head out, back toward the church, on foot, because i think maybe i shouldn't drive. i think i will be safe at the church.

but it's locked up and although i know how to use the key box it's at least cool on the lawn and what i really want is just to stop crying and go home and have a nap or something and i try to cal my mom who can figure that i'm in bad shape, but can't figure out the barks and yips and i try to call cr who can sometimes calm them and in the end finally i get home somehow and watch some youtube videos until i feel better, and then since i'm in a bad mood, the only thing i can think of to cheer me up is to make some exquisite little dishes.

so i made a lovely tomato-basil sorbet and a balsamic reduction and a roasted garlic pasta salad that is so good you'd sell your grandmother for a second taste.

and now because i have a splitting headache, i'm going to go make popovers.

i've never made popovers.

it should be fun.

return to my usual programming

2011-07-30T17:00:00.001-04:00

wow, that was some week.

somehow i managed to get signed on as the head instructor for the essex rec department's week-long geocaching day camp. i am still a little fuzzy as to how that happened, but it did.

if you are interested in seeing my online materials for that, you may find them here.

without crashco i think i would have been dead in the water, but with him i think it went all right. i have all my experience in education and all that to draw from, but when it comes to putting all the containers and clues and such out in the field, it becomes a mighty big job for one person.

with many of the other camps you can just take all the kids outside to play a game and one adult is sufficient oversight, but geocaching done properly means a lot of wandering around in the woods and if you need to keep track of twelve middle school kids, three adults is just about right.

anyway, today was my first day back to "normal", and i have celebrated by catching up in the reading of the blogs i read, doing some light housework including laundry and cleaning the upstairs bathroom and washing the windows (inside and out) in the front room as well as organizing and clocking the january 2011 photos from the thirteen project, and editing them into video.

normally doing a month of thirteen photos takes me three days if i don't dawdle, but i guess i'm just on fire today, nevermind that last night i celebrated the end of the week by making split pea soup, zucchini bread, a batch of ginger ale, and a new experimental lavender-rosemary cooler that i hope will be light and refreshing.

now if you'll excuse me, i have to go make a different zucchini bread and maybe some more soup or maybe some cookies or something.

and i have to call my chicken guy because i'm out of eggs.

art and artificial intelligence

2011-07-25T20:33:00.001-04:00

art. where to start? art. art. art.

so i was doing what i always do, which is a lot of random stuff, and i saw this website that takes images and "textifies" them. simple enough. it's fun to play with, and you can configure it a little and save the image.

here's a photo i took, modified with textify it.

kind of nice, yes?

and then i saw to really astounding interactive art projects:

the first is an interactive film that uses google earth imagery and music video. you should run it in chrome, but it is so cool that it's worth firing up a second browser and shutting down everything else you're doing just to see it.

the wilderness downtown

the other is the johnny cash project, which i might could describe, but you really should go see it for yourself. i am not kidding about this.

but yesterday i was listening to a radiolab podcast about talking to machines and heard about cleverbot. it's fairly astounding, and you can talk to it from here.

cleverbot is pretty far along in its learning, but if you want you can talk to a newer avatar called evie. she isn't trained as well, but every conversation you have helps her learn.

you may not wish to assist in developing artificial intelligence. it's interesting, though.

i had a very weird experience with her tonight in which she asked me my name. i told her i was called flask, which i am. and she said "hello, (my given name)". given what little i know about how her training works, that's a really bizarre coincidence, even if she did follow it up with asking me why people call me harper, which to my knowledge nobody has ever done.

that's it for me.

you can call me harper if you like. evie says she only did it because she's nice.

it isn't just chimps and us anymore.

2011-07-24T20:55:00.001-04:00

there's been a lot of hoo-hah about lots of species using tools, which is one of the things we used to think made us special.

as far as i know, though, we are still the only species to construct tools for use and distribution on the internet, although there are lots of videos these days of various critters from octopus to lion recording themselves and lots of discussions about who holds the copyright for images that a gorilla makes.

uh, anyway.

my point? it was really to talk about some little tools i have open on my desktop but was waiting to tell you about.

of course there's a cute little map tool that tells you how far two points are from each other, which is super handy.

and if you're worried about security, you might think about your passwords.

and librarians? librarians are awesome. they care about your privacy, even when the government doesn't.

and maybe this isn't so useful, but it's kind of cool. the colour clock. and as long as i'm talking about clocks (wasn't i just?), i just heard about this today. i am sad that it is not playing near my house.

simple solutions

2011-07-23T09:51:00.000-04:00

aside from stopping the stupid stinking expensive war that is the death of the republic and the downfall of the empire (didn't ANYBODY learn anything from rome?)

-uh, aside from THAT, we could actually be helping people. here are some projects that take small practical approaches to big problems, and while they don't solve the cause of world poverty, they increase the standard of living for people who really need it.

these people make and ship low-cost wheelchairs to people in developing countries. it's not state-of-the-art-insurance-is-paying-for-it perfect fitted medical supplies, but a lawn chair fitted with bike wheels is perfectly serviceable and a cheap alternative.

and even during daylight hours it's DARK inside a lot of people's homes, where electricity is either expensive or unavailable. these people have come up with a cheap solution that helps.

and while we're at it, the problem of clean drinking water is a major one in much of the world. you don't hear much about this solution to the problem, but i think one of the reasons you don't hear a lot about it is that nobody is going to make a lot of money from it.

and in the developed world, people with diseases like ALS or MS typically can't get access to those spiffy computer-assisted communication devices that would make their remaining days better. those machines are expensive and your insurance won't cover them, so unless you're rich, you're out of luck.

so these guys developed a cheap DIY version you can make yourself or have made for under $100.

hard travelin'

2011-07-22T16:05:00.002-04:00

here's today's work:

this is the posted video of december from my thirteen project. it is difficult to wade through those images and see the hours crawl by knowing what it was like to be living in that room with barred windows, to be separated from my loved ones, and the general grimness of the atmosphere in the halfway house over christmas and new year's.

since they took my camera away while i was inside, i snuck some illegal external shots later and modified those to represent the hours i was still marking inside.

there are "normal" pictures taken in parking lots, but i know where they are and when they are: they are the hours between session and curfew when i had to go out to get groceries, medications, supplies, and just to get out.

checking my email meant sitting in a parking place curbside at an open network, usually at the library.

you see pictures of sunshine and ice fisherman, but they're taken from inside a session room. it's done quickly, under the notice of the staff. the patients don't care; they're not in the picture.

it's hard to see those images.

temperature

2011-07-21T22:44:00.000-04:00

i don't care how hot it is during the day.

really, i don't. over a hundred degrees? awesome day for a road bike ride.

but it's nighttime and i want to sleep, you know?

i wouldn't bother to mention it, except that there's an interesting little temperature thing going on here:

if i walk out my front door it's just about as beastly hot outside as it is inside, but here at my desk only one floor up and on the same side of the building what's coming through the window feels like a cool breeze. there is some difference between the upstairs temperature and the downstairs temperature, but not enough i don't think to account for the difference.

in the basement, however, it's about twenty degrees cooler, so i'll be sleeping down there.

overnight the temperatures are supposed to fall into the low 60s so it will give the rest of the house a little chance to cool before i shut it all up in the morning starting on the sunny side of the house and then all the way around when the outside temperature draws near the inside temperature and of course as the evening cools i go through the reverse process, testing every window and door and opening everything where it's cooler outside.

yes, i have considered a/c.

...for about ten minutes.

what? i should get a/c for the three days a year it's above 50 degrees here at night?

i don't think so.

i don't even bother most days to wear short sleeves, let alone shorts. today called for short sleeves, but still long pants. as far as i'm concerned, if it's july and i can wear turtlenecks, i'm happy. if there's a light frost on the grass in early august i am ecstatic.

wednesday night my friends and i were laughing about our definition of what constitutes "the south": bennington and brattleboro counties.

and beyond that, you might as well be at the equator.

we're having a heat wave!

2011-07-20T21:11:00.000-04:00

tonight at my race i was talking with my friends and while we're not really happy about the temperatures, we thought it would be really funny for all of us here in northern new england to get on the interwebs and complain about the heat.

and the weather.

today it must have been eighty-five degrees here at my house! and it's sunny every day except for the afternoons when it rains, so the grass is lush and green and at this time of year golden topped in the sunset hours.

blast the heat. eighty-five degrees is about fifteen degrees warmer than i like it.

it's july, which means i watch a lot of TV. the whole reason i pay for he cable package i do is because i have to watch the tour every july.

every day.

today i have to catch the primetime coverage because i had to miss the live coverage because yesterday i got a flat tire on my way to my race and today i had to get it fixed AND i had to take my bike into the shop for repairs.

in my spare time, i'm editing the song i wrote and i'm organizing and clocking photos for the thirteen project. if you're just joining us, i take a picture every thirteen hours. i have been doing this for eighteen months now. i'm behind in the organizing, mostly because i got bottled up behind the Very Bad Thing; in order to clock the photos from november and december i have to come face to face with it and the subsequent prolonged stay in the crazy house where they took away my camera, so i've had to come up with a way to represent the weeks behind bars in a way that preserves the spirit of the project.

yesterday i posted november to youtube; tomorrow i'll get a good start on clocking december.

old news

2011-07-19T11:29:00.000-04:00

since i took five weeks off, i have kind of a backlog of things on my desk. none of this is particularly fresh, but i think it's worth mentioning.

first, i heard a really interesting podcast on studio 360 about three-dimensional sound. it's worth going to their page to have a listen.

and i don't care if you are allergic to cute and fluffy kitties and fuzzy puppies give you hives. you should go play sissy's magical ponycorn adventure, which is a game designed by a five year old girl. if you're interested in the story of how it came to be created, her father wrote about it here.

recently i burned up a lot of time looking at some maps. uh, really, if you know me, you know that i habitually burn a lot of time looking at maps. in this particular instance, though, i had been to campobello island, NB and eastport ME among other places and i had taken a picture of a navigational marker out in the channel by the old sow and i thought i'd look it up and the next thing i knew i had two things on my screen: a complete description of the coast of maine and new brunswick from quoddy narrow to calais, and the accompanying chart 13396. taken together, you can have hours of charty fun.

if you like your maps on a smaller scale, you maybe would like the atlas of the habitual.

time off

2011-07-18T11:11:00.000-04:00

ok, so i took five weeks off.

if you really wanted to follow what i was writing, you could have been reading my geocaching logs, which are now all caught up. it's kind of like blogging, except that each entry is attached to a place i went and tells part of the story of a day. most of my logs also include pictures, many of which i post to panoramio, and many of those get onto google earth.

speaking of google earth, i also did a little map project with that about our two days playing geocache battleship.

View battleship! in a larger map

i also made a little tour in google earth, which you can download as .kmz here and play for yourself.

tuesdays and wednesdays i still go out and run a 5k trail run and mountain bike race, respectively, and i still go out and play disc golf a couple of times a week.

in other news, i made a new ice cream flavor that's kind of complicated but very good. i call it "hot chocolate". basically it's a very chocolate ice cream with arbol peppers and cinnamon. it's complicated because in order for the custard to hold as much chocolate as it does, you have to melt the chocolate in the milk and temper it. in order to get the pepper taste in there properly, you have to slow simmer the peppers and cinnamon and other spices in scalded milk. and in order to carry all that chocolate, you have to use egg yolks, which have to be tempered as well. then the whole thing has to be combined cooled and after it cools you have to run the combined custard through the blender because some of the chocolate will have precipitated.

THEN you can add the cream and toss it in the ice cream maker.

it's time consuming, but very, very good.

the thing about it, though, is that it is so smooth going down you don't even hardly notice the peppers until you have already swallowed it, so if you don't enjoy a stealth kick, you ought to be careful. and for heaven's sake don't get any in your eyes when you're busy licking the bowl.

oh, and i wrote a new song.

outside of all that, though, things haven't been going so well for me and i just didn't want to write to you about that. it's bad enough that i have to know about it without depressing you, too.

les paul and google

2011-06-09T15:41:00.002-04:00

i was (maybe) going to post about some other things, like geocachng, or some chartalicious things i found, or the power outage map that isn't very informative if your OWN power is out, but then i was looking at today's google doodle. do you ever look at the archive? and i was wondering: what does that commemorate?

oh. les paul's birthday. cool. (beware auto-play)

but here's the REALLY cool thing: it's not just a pretty doodle. you can PLAY it! and it records! here's mine, from a few minutes before i discovered you can take lessons.

way cool.

most awesom spam bless honestly veracious.

2011-06-08T11:36:00.001-04:00

with only a few edits (in parentheses), here is the most awesome spam comment i've gotten to date:
--

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(link removed).

honestly, even if you WERE looking for those services, would you use those links?

rollin', rollin', rollin'

2011-06-07T21:50:00.000-04:00

tonight i went to run my usual 5k trail run (doesn't that sound hardcore?) and went down hard right out of the start. i have no idea how i managed that; the terrain was flat and grassy and there wasn't so much as a dip to lose my footing on.

but i went down, rather dramatically.

it probably looked a lot bigger than it was, because i am a very good roller. at least that's what the guy in the oncoming lane said when i got run over by the dodge durango on route 2 a number of years ago and my choices were basically roll or die.

it is my opinion that once a fall is already in progress, there's no point worrying about it. you may as well roll. if you roll well, you can keep the tender bits from hitting and you can keep the long bones from breaking, and you can keep the connective tissue from snapping. a few bruises and cuts will heal right away, and with a kiss and some bandaids you can race again tomorrow.

tomorrow we'll race the same course on moutain bikes. that will not suck.

tonight was our first look at this year's blue course, and it's my favorite of the three, even though i have not yet seen the third course. i've been around long enough to know that the third one, next week, will be, uh, climb-ier. that course, no matter what trails they put it on goes up and up and up and then just when you think you can't take any more it goes up some more and then there's a short hard downhill and then you go up again and again and then it's just a long flat mile and a half run from there.

but tonight's course is in the woods, on the lowland. sure, it goes up and down, but it's the flattest of the three and while it has its twisty moments, it flows and swoops and in general is very fast and fun.

tonight, though, it's painkillers and muscle relaxants. and benadryl, too, for my allergies, so no matter how i cut it, tonight i'm going to SLEEP! woo-hoo!

mishmosh

2011-06-05T22:19:00.001-04:00

right.

so i'm still writing geocaching logs, like that's any big surprise. the big surprise is that i am now only about a month behind in logging, so i may actually catch up. i have also posted the videos that go along with those logs.

in other news, here are two really cool optical illusions.

yesterday i made some baked cheese things that go around olives (pretty good) and i am still experimenting with some other things, but tonight i am happy with the dulce-de-leche-with-butter-brickle flavor ice cream i made, and i adapted this recipe for a shaved asparagus pizza.

the ice cream is very, very, good.

the pizza is to die for. it is so good i ate the whole thing myself. oh, my goodness gracious me.

ok, that's enough dawdling. i have to go write more cache logs.

assorted other videos can be found here.

debridal suite

2011-06-01T22:21:00.000-04:00

tonight's mountain bike race did not go well for me. i wasn't even a mile into it when i just didn't have the speed to go over a little shelf that i've gone over without problems for YEARS and i went over at slow speed onto my left elbow leaving a deep cut that isn't very long, didn't bleed much, but that i had to debride with a toothbrush when i got home.

and now i can't rest my arm anywhere because even though it's dressed, it's weeping and tomorrow there's gonna be a very festive bruise.

of course i took pictures and at some point if you're very nice to me i'll show you.

meanwhile, back at my desk, i wrote a lot of geocaching logs today, which doesn't just mean writing geocache logs. it means updating my website and posting to panoramio and ordering the november photos from the thirteen project because now i'm just getting to all the pictures from the days surrounding the Very Bad Thing and while i was at it, i posted the video journal that i started and never finished because i got to the day of the Very Bad Thing and then just stopped filming.

you can see it in my eyes, though.

this is the before of the before and after shots. these are what my eyes look like before something in them goes dead.

these are the pictures i have been avoiding looking at for seven months and there's no way to go forward besides through.

can you put a number on that?

2011-05-31T21:52:00.001-04:00

today's activities:

write lots of geocaching logs.
process video.

watch a documentary about data visualization.
write more geocaching logs.
go run a 5k.
and more geocaching logs.

that's my list. this week the run felt marginally better than last week; last week in the fog of pain it simply ranged from "excruciating" to "subsuming" and tonight it only went from "severe" to "extreme", so that's progress.

when you go to the doctor, they always want you to rate it on a scale from one to ten, or one to five, or some other managed care claptrap. i always want to ask: what kind of scale? is this meant to be expressed as a percentage of the relative pain i've EVER felt? the relative pain i imagine there could possibly be? or just in relation to a general baseline? 'coz let me tell you, i am no stranger to pain but that night i nearly froze to death i learned there were whole new dimensions to pain that i never thought possible, so if i have to judge my present pain in comparison to THAT, it only come sin at about a two, but if i rate it according to a scale on which five is the level where i can't function too well, this comes in at about an eight.

or is your scale based on exponential growth?

by the time i'm done talking, they have made a little tick in the checkbox labeled "pain in the ass."

fine. NOW may i have the refill for the muscle relaxant?

stuff! and more stuff!

2011-05-30T19:49:00.002-04:00

it's not that i have nothing to write about; it's just that i've been very, very busy writing about it.

and doing more stuff that i can write about later, if i ever get caught up.

so today i wrote a whole buncha geocaching logs, which means uploading and processing pictures, ad that included two new videos for youtube; nothing earth shattering, but just some footage of some wind chimes i saw on the way.

don't laugh; one of my most popular videos is one i took of windchimes i saw while geocaching in buckland, MA. for some reason that gets about as many hits as the one of two carrion beetles moving a dead vole, and many more hits than the one of my hair growing back after i got my head shaved.

and also on my list today: i went out and played a round of disc golf, and shot a surprisingly good 74, which is +20 on the course, but i consider it an outstanding day if i break 18 AND i hadn't played in a while and was experimenting with some new drivers.

new drivers or other excuses notwithstanding, shooting +20 is still a good day for me.

then i came home and made a batch of pizza dough for later use, and some insanely good pasta salad involving black olives and tomatoes and a roasted garlic ricotta sauce you could just die for. and i roasted an extra head of garlic because i'm looking at some darling little recipes that call for a clove or two of roasted garlic and you can make that stuff up and freeze it ahead of time and use as you need.

oh. and i'm catching up, bit by bit, reading all the blogs and articles and such (thousands) sitting in my inbox.

i gotta go.

addison county got power

2011-05-27T22:18:00.001-04:00

last night a set of powerful storms came through here. then tonight a line of lesser but still significant storms also came through, setting back the efforts of the power companies to restore electricity to the thousands of households that went dark early yesterday evening.

you may know that i'm a big fan of extreme weather, even when it's happening to me. ok, maybe not house-destroying weather, but if my power goes out for a week during the winter, it's an adventure.

and you KNOW i love maps.

so today i've been watching a really neat website that shows the general outages by county and by utility.

essex county has been largely red since yesterday afternoon.

here's a screenshot from earlier today:

in other news, i'm still plodding through the infernal geocaching logs, and am now caught up to halfway through october 15.

and while i was at it today, i processed some video footage to make a little movie about hunting a cache:

so. that's it for me.

list

2011-05-26T20:51:00.002-04:00

today i wrote more geocaching logs, which is quite a project if you have hundreds of them to write.

but i also made a little google map of all the chuches where i've been to services.

you know how i like maps.

View churches where i have attended services in a larger map

stress incontinence

2011-05-24T22:06:00.000-04:00

well.

today i didn't get out of my pajamas, except to go run a 5k. it was the first of the season, and the longest most painful 5k ever.

but nevermind about that. i meant to maybe write you about my time on PEI, but today i wrote a bunch of geocaching logs, so now i'm only nine months behind telling those stories.

now i'm going to have a nice hot shower and take a whole bunch of advil and some muscle relaxant.

yay!

high point

2011-05-20T09:58:00.000-04:00

so yesterday i made the strenuous climb to the high point of PEI.

the hike in was nearly two tenths of a mile, with an elevation gain of about twenty feet.

here's a picture of me, standing triumphant at the top of PEI.

short and stout

2011-05-17T21:39:00.001-04:00

this morning i did my reading at the church (where i am sleeping) and then i went out to play.

i did a cache that involved some compass skills, and apparently this area has a LOT of declination (more than 18 degrees), so i had some head scratching. go ahead look up declination here.

but i was too distracted because i really needed a bathroom. i needed one so badly that i actually got into my car and drove into the nearest town, looking for the CAP site which turns out not to be the town hotspot (go figger) but they have a sign that says "open" and i need a bathroom SO BAD that i decide to just go into the business (they're a CAP site, right?) and beg to use theirs, but it's a weirdly set up building and you go in the front door and there's no reception area and no visible people but there's an open bathroom door RIGHT THERE so i decide to use it first and ask after but then i'm done and what's the point of asking?

and i don't see any point in going to find a person at a desk so i could announce that i'd just used their bathroom, so i just slink out.

but then there's a lot of looking for geocaches and fiding most of them and i'm having a blast and the filthy rain stops and the water begins to evaporate from the fields and turns into thin, fast-moving fog and the sun almost comes out and i hear on the radio that there's a rumor (rumour?) that they've seen the sun in cornwall and they're actually talking about this on the radio like it's news.

come to think of it, it's a happy, gentle kind of conversation. they intermittently play music that listeners have suggested will break up the mood caused by all the infernal rain.

and then i go look at some awesome natural features, mostly from erosion. there's a heart-shaped sea cave, a giant teapot, and i have included here a picture of my awesome parking place. do you like it?

and then i return to the church to use the bathroom there before heading out to the parking lot and the pastor introduces me to some people in the parlor as "our new friend" and they ask me if i play guitar and i say i do, but i didn't bring one and the mandolin player says that's all right, i can play his.

and he goes to get it.

so apparently we have a gig sunday night.

marathon reading

2011-05-17T09:24:00.000-04:00

so i'm up here on PEI and i heard on the news hat there's a church here doing a marathon reading of the bible. out loud. the whole thing. it's going to take them nine days.

and i thought: wow. i should go see some of that. and the next time i heard it on the news, i'll have to listen carefully and find out what church that is and where so maybe i can go while they're doing it.

and the news report came out and i was listening for the name of the church and the town it was in and all of a sudden i think: hey! isn't this hunter river? and isn't it that church over there?

right then, as i was driving by.

so i went in, figuring to see some of it, and they signed me right up to read a portion. and then there was a thing with a reporter and i think i'm in the paper tomorrow.

meanwhile, i'm hunting gocaches and doing some real fun mudbogging. the mud here is not just red, but really, really slippery. but it has solid botom, so you're all over the place, but you stay in low gear and you get there.

thing is the floor on the driver's side of my car is covered with red mud and the outside of the car looks like it's been sprayed with tomato juice.

i gotta go. rain or not, i'm working on a set of caches and i want to get back out there so i can do the math later.

awesome.

bright red

2011-05-16T11:31:00.000-04:00

yesterday morning i woke up and skipped church because i had the opportunity to go loo at some cool tidal anomalies, but i had to go at high tide, which was right about church time and i have to think that God would not so much mind me going to admire such handiwork.

but then for some reason i just decided to go to PEI. the mud here (and there is a lot of mud) is the most amazing red color.

and i have been listening to canadian talk radio, which is stunningly polite. yesterday i hear one guy saying that if the government doesn't fully compensate the farmers in manitoba for the intentional flooding, "well, then, i'm one guy that will be angry".

that was about the height and pitch of the discussion. one thing i notice is that no matter how strongly these people hold their opinions, they are all willing to look at the other guy's side, and that's a LONG way from US talk radio mouth-foamers.

anyway.

i have to go find some geocaches or something. it's sleeting here today. i'm glad i brought my long johns.

what time is it?

2011-05-14T08:54:00.000-04:00

i'm pretty near lubec, maine, which is the most eastern town in the contiguous US. i'm on my way to campobello island for the day.

my cellphone keeps alternating between picking up US towers and canadian towers, which here means that i never quite know what time it is. all of maine, even the eastern parts, are in the eastern time zone. this part of canada runs on the atlantic time zone.

i'm totally toasty with the idea of changing timezones when i actually cross over for the day, but all this switching back and forth is driving me nuts; i have alarms that go off when it's time for prayer and for when i'm supposed to take a picture and since i keep switching back and forth, it's crazy-making.

well. i'm off into new brunswick for the day.

straight answers

2011-05-10T08:59:00.000-04:00

sometimes i hang out on yahoo! answers just to kill time, or to break up stretches at my desk when i'm sitting here doing stuff.

people ask the goofiest questions over there, and apparently what 13-year-olds have to say about relationships is considered good advice.

my favorite questions involve people who want unseen strangers to diagnose medical conditions for them.

sometimes it's just a case of people who need attention, or people who are too lazy to use google properly, or kids who want their homework done for them, but sometimes there are questions i actually can answer, and it's nice to be able to help.

some of the questions just break your heart, so be careful if you go there.

back in time

2011-05-09T10:48:00.001-04:00

PLEASE don't try to follow the story very linearly; it will only drive you mad.

i'm writing to you today about a sunny day LAST may (30 may 2010) because i happen to be there writing my geocaching logs in case that's the sort of thing you care about.

it was this fantastic sunny day and i was driving along 414 on my way back into watkins glen admiring the wineries and the lake views and in general enjoying the sunshine and the day.

i was also looking for a winery. it's wine country.

i'd asked at church what local wine they would suggest if i wanted to buy something special but not too expensive for friends back home, and since i don't drink, i have to go by advice rather than tasting. the people at the church in tburg recommended something from lamoreaux landing, so i went there.

i walked in and the first person i ran into was the manager of the tasting floor and i explained to her that i wanted to buy something special but reasonably priced for my pastor and for my best friend, but that tasting is out of the question for me, so could she advise me, please?

she could. and she did.

and i came away with two very fine bottles of wine for under $20 each.

what i was trying to capture, of course, was the sunlight and slope and the crispness of the day, which i guess is what they're doing with good wines, anyway.

that video i promised

2011-05-08T21:47:00.002-04:00

i very unexpectedly had to come home yesterday.

of course i couldn't find out that i needed to come home NOW while i was still north of skowhegan and therefore nominally on the way; oh, no. i had to find out after i'd driven all the way to BANGOR.

so anyway, i'm home for a few days, which means i can get my snows changed off of my car and i can upload pictures.

this is a short video of a spring that comes up through fine glacial till. it is such an amazing thing to look at that while i only shot a few seconds of it, i stood int the cold and rain, watching it bubble for several minutes.

there's a little shed built over it, and when you look down into it, you're looking down about three feet.

that's some clear water.

one amazing thing

2011-05-05T19:16:00.002-04:00

i see a lot of cool things on the road.

right now i think i have enough of a connection to upload video i took yesterday of the single amazing-est thing i saw yesterday.

now, maybe you don't spend a lot of time looking at rocks, but i'm a big geology fan and i was doing this earthcache that follows along an impressive esker and near the end of it is the place where the still-active underground river pushes up through the sand in a fresh spring and i just stood there for a long time, looking at it.

it's almost like watching a living thing.

i was going to upload a video for you, but it'll have to wait until i get out of the woods.

talisman

2011-05-03T19:09:00.000-04:00

i was going to post for you pictures of what i saw today, but this is a powerful slow internet connection, leading me to believe that someone does not understand what the words "high-speed wifi" mean.

anyway, i got into my car yesterday to come here and found this tied inside waiting for me:

should be gone by now

2011-05-02T16:33:00.000-04:00

i'm waiting for my ipod to sync.

it was only going to take a minute, but i decided at the last moment to load MORE podcasts on it, just because i can.

so it's going to take a few minutes.

while i'm at it, i'm printing up some golf scorecards to take along. and don't let me forget the extra gallon of wash water!

anyway, i never did tell you about the cheese; it'll have to wait until i get home.

but here's my parting shot:

last week i made ginger ale. it's just about ready, and i made it extra lemony and i infused it with lavender, just for giggles because cr likes lavender.

it was really pretty in the bottle before i filtered it, with the ginger and lemon on the bottom and the lavender on the top, and the pinkish liquid between. for a couple of days i just kept shaking it up like a snow globe, just to watch the magic.

taking stock

2011-04-29T23:16:00.001-04:00

so. today i worked on my geocaching logs for a while and then i went into town to have lunch with my mom and pay my bills.

i was supposed to do that yesterday, but i was halfway into b-town on my way to my appointment and realized i'd forgotten to bring my mail with me.

and along the way i thought, ok, it's less convenient, but at least then i'll get to get off the interstate at exit 14, which is a bonus.

"why is that a bonus?" you might rightly ask. because i'm collecting fourteens. you know, photos of fourteens. no, it's not related to my thirteen project, in which i take a picture every thirteen hours. never you mind why i'm collecting fourteens. i just am. later on there will be a project, but for now i just have to collect them.

after lunch with my mom i did some light shopping and then came home and made some little things. the biggest project on my plate (outside of packing because it will soon be may) is using up the groceries in the fridge so they don't go bad, and one of the things i had to do toward that end was make vegetable stock.

so that's what i did. i also made split pea soup, and cut and packaged yesterday's brownies for the freezer (they keep well and are DIVINE frozen) and made a loaf of zucchini bread. a savory one, with olives and goat cheese. it will be awesome on the road.

tomorrow i have some more things to make and my fish will be ready to rinse and package, and i hope the ginger ale will be sufficiently brewed to filter and rebottle.

and of course, i'll be pouring the stock into ice trays to freeze it into handy cubes to store in the freezer for future use.

yeah.

it's awesome over here at my house.

now i'm going to go to bed.

yeah, had to.

2011-04-28T22:46:00.000-04:00

today i had to make mascarpone brownies. well, what was i going to do with a half container of mascarpone cheese? for what you pay for that stuff, you can't use half of it and let the rest go to waste, and the fabulous brownies freeze well, so there it is then.

i also made some ice cream.

and an experimental ginger ale, double lemony and infuse with lavender. we'll see how that goes.

and i'm making salt lox, but today i only turned it over. it'll pretty much make itself and be ready saturday.

but that ice cream... dulce de leche flavor. i just go right ahead and ignore safety suggestions and make mine on the stove. and then i put take my dulce de leche, dilute it with two cups of milk and heat it until the caramel dissolves and then i blend it until it's smooth and refrigetate it until it's cold. then i toss it in the tank of my ice cream freezer with a cup of heavy cream and let it do its thing.

it takes a while to do it, but it's super easy and oh. my. good.

planetary motion

2011-04-27T17:04:00.001-04:00

awwwright!

today i went for my first bike ride of the season because a) i need the exercise and b)it is insanely warm out today; some weirdo temperature above eighty degrees, and i gotta tell ya: we have a lot of days in JULY that it never gets to eighty degrees.

i wrote up a truckload of geocaching logs and that takes time.

but you know how i keep threatening to pull the stuff out of the files and process it so i can show it to you? well, i finally got to one of those today, too.

last may while i was up in aroostock county i saw they have a really big scale model of the solar system, which turns out to be the world's largest such model, with a diameter of forty miles.

now, i am nothing if not nerdy, and i put it on my list of things i want to do while i'm up here. not as an oh-by-the-way; as a full-blown intentional activity.

so i took the time to assemble my photos and make a little album for you to look at, along with some handy links i discovered along the way:

UMPI solar system model homepage
astro guyz

and astroguys youtube videos about it:

part one trailer/teaser

part two

part three

part four

and the outtake reel! woot!

cleanup in aisle five

2011-04-26T15:18:00.000-04:00

i actually have things to do besides play games, but i'm kind of tidying up some things and if i close the tabs without telling you about them, i'll never find them again, and let's face it: i just do not have the kind of dscipline to keep these things open on my desktop and still write any geocaching logs, nevermind produce any new work or even get it together to go downstairs and make more delicious treats to tell you about later, or wrap cr's birthday present, or toss in the laundry, or even think about whether i will go to nova scotia or central new york when may rolls around, which is mighty soon.

so in the interests of not having all these fun little distractions open on MY desk, i'm just going to drop them into YOUR lap and remind you that as i write them, i always update the "online toys and tools" page over on your right.

so... what do i have for you today?

well, to start with, music you can download for free! it's a cigar box tribute to blind willie johnson! and did i mention that you can download it for free? what's there not to love about this?

and there's this handy reference tool that will tell you how to pronounce things. while we're on the topic of HOW to say things, we might as well also talk about what not to say, and how to unsuck it in case you slip.

the REAL reason i need to write this post is to get this game closed and off my desktop, because i keep thinking i'll "just play one more". consider yourself warned.

whew. glad THAT'S over with. but while we're on the topic of charming little games you can't quit, you might as well have a look at magic pen which is only slightly misnamed because it works with flash and not with magic, and your tool of choice is a crayon, not a pen. outside of these two flaws, it is really charming and engaging and if i don't close THAT tab soon, i may never get out of this chair.

and let's face it: you NEED the museum of online museums. you just do. and as long as we're in museum mode, go look at this thing. a person could get lost.

there are some other things on my list to try out before i bring them to you (or not), but for now i'll just leave you with this collection of science based songs that i can't resist just because the article is named "rock out with your erlenmeyer flask out" which just makes me happy.

*exhale*

ok, that's it for today.

speaking of rising

2011-04-25T22:53:00.000-04:00

ok, it's late and i don't have a lot of time to write you so i'll just tell you that last week i went overboard cooking things because that's how i am and one of the things i made was this recipe for sweet potato dinner rolls, and they are GOOD.

and not hard to make. go on, scoot. go make your own. these are mine.

rising

2011-04-24T19:30:00.001-04:00

what i haven't been talking about is my crisis of faith, brought on by the Very Bad Thing, which i'm not talking about but only alluding to in the most general of terms.

the fallout, though, was that i very much didn't like who i was becoming as a result of it and if God was going to support that, i wasn't interested. but i went through the lenten season thinking maybe to reconnect myself with the voice i had lost, the way i had loved being and i was at an undisclosed location and this guy, an ordained clergyman in a mainstream church looked me right in the eye and he said "don't let the asshole take anything else from you."

which was a pretty strong statement but i still didn't have any other lenten project this year other than to simply talk about God and related concepts as if i was still whole and i won't tell you where i was when i heard a guy speak and maybe it wasn't what he said so much, but i knew i was going to be all right after all.

anyway, what had been missing was my voice. music had gone out of my soul and i had not been writing or performing music and even my little bit for choir had been way sub-par but first i got together the people i'd drafted before the Bad Thing to sing a piece i'd written before not because i still wanted to do it, but because i HAD wanted to do it.

heal me up. that was the title of it. i'm not kidding. so we did that, and it was ok. but i still wasn't up to creating music. and then all of a sudden i got the brilliant idea to re-set one of my benedictuses (benedicti? why do i even need a plural?) for connie and donna sue, because it's awesome to write for them and the more i write for them the better i get at it, because awesome musicians only get awesomer when music is written expressly to play to their strengths.

and it HAS to be done before easter, because although a benedictus may be sung properly at any time of the year, i WANT this one to go for lent. nevermnd connie's surgery and donna sue's vacation. so i trot this thing out with just three weeks to go and i'm all, like, no, of COURSE we don't have to do it right now. it can wait until next lent and so donna sue and connie just bite down and do it and it's beautiful.

they are awesome and talented. often i feel like i'm the schmoe, the one who doesn't belong up there with them, but hey, i wrote the song so i guess i can sing it if i want, and besides, i wrote my part so i only have to sing things that i'm good at so i sound like a better singer than i am.

and then some stuff happened. i made some recipes, which i may or may not tell you about, and did some stuff, including play a couple of games of golf, and then it was holy saturday all of a sudden and i was thinking about last year and what i wrote then and i was maybe going to write something more beautiful or poetic to tell you about it, but instead i'll just quote to you from a thing i wrote to a friend a the time:

one of the things about the vigil is that you don't always know when the third star will be visible.

you don't always know when Jesus will appear.

so you wait.

and you watch.

on cloudy nights one may use the astronomical time of sunset, but looking out my window i see that the clouds are lifting, so i'll go and wait.

for now, i'll turn out all my lights and sit in the coming dark.

see you on the other side.

and later:

do not look for the first new light where the sun has gone down; the Light always appears at the darkest point of the sky.

and so Jesus, the Christ rose from the darkest night to new dawn.

so there i was, out on the lawn, my house dark, looking for the first new lights. i lit my new, clean candle and singing lumen Christi i brought it in and lit new candles in every room, and sang the exsultet.

and then i had dinner.

may blessings fall upon you and yours.

good friday

2011-04-22T23:32:00.000-04:00

our service tonight was at the church i belonged to before i left it to join my present church. my friends, my church family, immediately on learning the location of the service several weeks ago asked me if it would be uncomfortable for me. "of course", i told them.
"but you're still going, right?"
"of course."

we are family. we go anyway. as choir, we go robed, no stoles, because it is good friday. once before i left that other church i went to a service wearing a robe borrowed from the church where i am now. tonight i returned wearing that robe in my own right, surrounded and supported by people who understand.

this was my home. it is not my home anymore, and yet we are not about territory, we are not about what separates us. i'm sad because i know that the brass cross is in the deacons' closet, hidden from view until easter morning, and that i will not this year or anymore be the one to take it out and hold in close in that fierce, private processional of the one who polishes it up for its honored return to the altar.

in my new home i polish the brasses also, and right now in my living room i have the plates and candle lighters to prove it. but i was once intimate with this cross in this way, and my Lord does not care in which building i honor him.

this week for service i read my poem good friday, which you can read here. and tonight i played willow, which you can find here. the version i did tonight was the old one, from the down the jericho road album. "down the jericho road" is how you get from my house to my old church. the cover art is my collage of photos of the stained glass in that sanctuary.

it isn't my job to polish that one specific cross anymore. it is not my job to touch up the woodwork or to clean the plates. not there. i wanted to stay a little after the service and speak to God from that one spot the way i used to, but they were locking up and even though i still have a key, it is not my home anymore.

tomorrow i will go and polish the candlesticks, putting back the plates and lighters. i will breathe the air of my settled home and i will speak to God from my new place.

it's just right the way it is.

maundy thursday

2011-04-21T20:45:00.000-04:00

maybe i'm just a heresy trial looking for a place to happen, but i always think that the beginning of maundy thursday services ought to be a little more upbeat.

every other time Jesus says something (that we have recorded in scripture, anyway) he's at some kind of feast. that guy liked parties. it never mentions singing and dancing, but i have to imagine there was plenty of both.

i mean, really, he had to have been a fun guy. sermons aside and everything, nobody wants to hear it if you don't bring something to the table and there's no point in loving one another if it's all a parade of suffering and granted we traditionally hold that he knew what was coming up, but if you were going to have one last supper with your friends before the end, wouldn't you have a few laughs? wouldn't you want to have one last joyful time? wouldn't you throw an awesome party just to remind them of what's good and sweet?

just once i want to go to a maundy thursday service with platters of lentils and lamb and figs and talk and laugh and eat and maybe sing before we get all solemn.

we all know what's coming. we all know how it ends.

we are easter people.

last year

2011-04-20T12:47:00.003-04:00

i've decided to just wade in and write last year's geocaching logs. yes, real logs the way i always do, with pictures. it's a little more challenging to tell the story a year on, but i'm doing it.

ginger milk pudding

2011-04-19T09:36:00.000-04:00

i was going to write to you about something else, but i was going through the pictures and came across one of a dessert i made a couple of weeks ago at about the time of the thing i was going to tell you about, and it's less complicated to post this than that, so the new plan fits in very nicely with my conception of how my day will go.

i was listening to an old podcast of the splendid table and they were talking about a precious ginger milk pudding that's basically held together by the fragile bonds of milk proteins in reaction with enzymes in ginger juice and i thought: hey! i like puddings, and i like ginger!

so i looked up the recipe and tried it. they tell you in the recipe that if you steam it too long it will get a kind of curdling that's unattractive but tastes just fine but what they don't tell you is that it's a little tricky to get that amount of steaming just right. they also don't tell you that once the pudding is made if you jiggle it too hard, the fragile pudding will break.

so it's easy to make it so it turns out unattractive, but it is uniformly delicious, and if you don't like the way it looks, that's more for me.

cutting back

2011-04-18T17:38:00.000-04:00

i'm in unsubscribe mode today.

i have too many blogs to read. some of the blogs i'm subscribed to just stopped being interesting enough to read. there was the woman who had uh, spotty publishing of comments; publishing some but not others and then quoting out of context the things you said in the deleted comments and then whining about how nobody engages her in conversation anymore.

ok, bad example. i didn't stop reading that one, but i don't comment anymore, ever. she's still entertaining, though because she writes pretty well about her life and she can't figure out why it's disintegrating even though everyone around her keeps telling her to quit taking drugs.

i did unsubscribe from a couple of perfect blonde happy mommy blogs when i realized that i had a half dozen of them that i couldn't tell apart. same story, different toddlers.

and then there's the site that has good content, but loads so slowly that by the time the page loads, the feed has been picked up by half a dozen aggregators and i can read the précis.

i have given up on liking that blog that used to be interesting, but has degenerated into a mess of link whoredom, but i only read it in RSS and don't go to the page. actually, i only skim it to see if it's still getting worse.

and i smirk.

that guy i used to think was clever until he decided to do a web talk show that mostly centers on unfunny jokes? he's gone, too. his writing used to be funny, but now he doesn't write much except to pimp his talk show that is decidedly unfunny.

i'm looking to unsubscribe to some aggregators, but i'm having trouble figuring which ones are giving me the least original content and the slowest reposts. does that make sense?

and there was a woman whose blog i used to love when she wrote WORDS, but now that she's gotten instagram, it's just a six-times daily dose of useless.

argh.

maybe i'm just cranky today.

maybe i should go eat.

october, a little late

2011-04-15T12:21:00.002-04:00

i'm working my way through the big pile of stuff that i have backed up.

this week i clocked my october photos and today i compiled them into the video.

it's kind of a hard project, because the end of october was when the Very Bad Thing happened, and for the next couple of months wading through the photos will be a hard thing to do.

but a project is a project, and by golly, i am doing a project.

how i spent my day

2011-04-14T22:17:00.000-04:00

i made some food. never you mind why. i think best, pray best by cooking. i can't help it.

i got up this morning, checked my email, finished my reading for today's book group - i will add here parenthetically that this is not out of neglect, but by design. my memory isn't very reliable, so if i want to be a part of the discussion in a way that suggests that i have read the book i have to read the portion we are discussing the same day we discuss it.

uh, anyway. i cooked yesterday, too, so a lot of what happened today was just the end of yesterday's cooking, but i'll try to put it in some kind of order.

no, nevermind, i can't. i think at one point i had six things going at once.

so i cooked. i did a load of laundry. i made lunch for cr and me (because in order for me to make myself a lunch i have to have enough stuff so that it just goes easier if i can share, because i'm not willing to have the same lunch that many days in a row). i packed my lunch and the goodies i brought to share at the book group, as well as a little something for the pastor and the secretary -the pastor because i subscribe to the old and charming custom of the pastor's share, and the secretary because, well, she's the secretary and i KNOW who it is that pulls my fat out of the fire when something happens like i'm sick and am all out of cold medicine and i need soup and english muffins. i live twenty minutes out of town, but she makes sure stuff happens.

still following me?

good.

so i made a few things. and then after book group i made a few more things and packed them up to share (after eating a half dozen teeny little quiches) and went to choir practice and then a rehearsal and now i'm home.

today i ran my dishwasher four times.

here's my list of things i made yesterday and today, or finished yesterday or today, since i had to start making both the salt lox and the ginger ale five days ago.

today’s menu:

black olive tapenade
fresh mozzarella (made today!)

salt lox

savory zucchini bread
sweet potato dinner rolls

teeny little vegetable quiches

mini oat pies
constant comment tea cookies
mascarpone brownies

and of course, because i didn't have enough to do, i took the leftover beet syrup from making the candied beet slices last week and boiled it up to about 250 degrees and poured it into a pan to make a lovely deep red candy.

my feet kind of hurt now and i'm tired. tomorrow i may or may not cook something; i got started on all of this stuff because i was looking for a recipe to make for the weekend and i managed to forget to buy two of the ingredients but on the way i performed the culinary equivalent of "oh, look! a squirrel!" and accidentally made a truckload of other things, but it was all good because i think i'm the only one in the book group who never made a table setting and instead decided to bring snacks to share every week.

i hope nobody minded.

barigoule

2011-04-13T10:02:00.000-04:00

news from my kitchen:

or really, not news, but one of those things i meant to tell you about before, but didn't get around to it.

a lot of recipes cross my desk every day. when i got sick a couple of years ago, i stopped cooking and subsisted on cold cereal and vitamins for a year or so. then i moved up to warming up prepared meals and it is only fairly recently that i am cooking my own meals with any regularity.

so i look for a recipe or two each week that doesn't look to hard to make, and i make it.

a couple of weeks ago i tossed together this lovely artichoke barigoule. it promised to be quick and easy and sunny-tasting, and it was. it's even ok after you freeze it!

leaves

2011-04-12T10:21:00.000-04:00

here's today's project.

well, it's more of an ongoing project that i've just managed to finish, since clearly it includes autumn leaves and no snow. not one little foot of snow, so you KNOW i didn't take those pictures yesterday.

anyway, i've finished it. now if i can only get going on the mongo project i've only been working on since last march...

map related goodies

2011-04-11T11:41:00.001-04:00

the last time i was clearing off my desk i realized that i had enough map related goodies to make their own post, so today i'm just going to make a rundown of those and that will mostly take care of my list.

so.

very simple, but very handy: latitude and longitude of a point. i don't know about you, but i am always on some site or another where i need to enter the location of a thing i want to look up. sometimes they only want it in terms of latitude and longitude, which is only handy if you know the coordinates and it's nice to have a site where you can just look it up quickly.

while you're there you might want to look at a less practical but still interesting tool that tells you where all the M5+ earthquakes have been lately.

then, if you want to get more personal instead of geologic, you can go and have a look at US census data, tract by tract. here are the data representations for my neighborhood.

and if you've always wanted to know everything about timezones, the bbc has a beautiful interactive globe with tons of information for you. go soak it in, and then style yourself an expert.

if you want to get a big-picture idea of why the middle east is so much of a quagmire, you may wish to look at this map. if you have general worldwide interest in the history of conflict, you might could go here.

if you have a picture of a place but don't know where it is, or you're somewhere and you have no idea where you are but you have a camera and an internet connection, you can send the picture to this site and ask where it is.

and then, if you want something you can pin up on your fridge or keep in your wallet to remind everyone where to go in case of an emergency, you can make a safety map.

everybody relax

2011-04-09T18:14:00.000-04:00

ok, everybody can breathe a sigh of relief now that they're not shutting down the federal government right away.

i was really worried that people might continue to fund things like planned parenthood and i sure breathed a lot easier when it became clear that we'd all lined up to agree that it's really IMPORTANT to continue to fund that giant money sucking war that's now open on THREE fronts because planned parenthood will bankrupt us and education will bankrupt us, but oh, no, we'll all be OK for a week or two since we've all agreed that we can keep paying for the war.

hatwipes.

and what was that thing i heard this week? "cooperation without compromise"? what genius came up with that stinkin' load? let's look at that cretinous catchphrase a little more carefully, shall we? what kind of cooperation are you engaging in if you require the other side to meet every one of your demands? doesn't that kind of negate the whole "cooperation" thing? or does it mean that the new definition of cooperation is going to be "continuing to talk until the other side capitulates entirely?" maybe the new definition of cooperation will end up being "to beat someone insensible and take whatever they have", similarly to the way "bringing peace and democracy" appears to be "bombing the hell out of other countries at great cost to ourselves until our republic dies, our empire collapses, and yet another dark age is ushered in".

i'd fall back on the position that people will know something about history and take a lesson from the fall of rome, except we're too busy defunding education and libraries and archives.

beet it!

2011-04-08T17:24:00.083-04:00

i was going to write to you about a thing i made with beets, and then i got busy and didn't. and then there were some other things with beets and i guess i could save them for a slow day and trot them out then, but i already have a backlog, so i'm consolidating the beet posts.

it doesn't matter what you do with beets; your knife and board and your hands always look like a small scale massacre has gone on.

first i made a lovely roasted vegetable sandwich, like the roasted vegetable sweet potato wrap i told you about, only this one had roasted beets mixed in and that was good.

then i decided to make a little thing with a beet cake rolled up around mascarpone cheese in a spiral and that was pretty awesome, too. i used this recipe and it involves first roasting the beets and pureeing them and then making a big pancake with it. my mom used to do something similar with a pumpkin roll and a cream cheese filling, only this one isn't dessert-y.

so then i did a simple thing with roasted beets under a balsamic glaze because cr likes beets and it was getting to be time for her surgery and i was maybe going to be done with beets for a while, except that a recipe just happened to cross my desk that was too good to pass up: candied beet slices, which are beautiful and sweet like dessert only still fully beet-like and did i mention beautiful? on the plate they look very much like rose petals, and they leave behind a deep red sugar syrup that i put in a jar and i still don't quite know what to do with it, but if you have any ideas, send them along.

other than that, i think i'm done with beets for a while.

more desk clearing

2011-04-07T15:59:00.000-04:00

is this your favorite part of my blog? when i clear off my desk?

i have gotten so behind in these things and even when i clear tabs, i still have a ton left. the thing is that i have to look at a thing and play with it before i recommend it to you.

so. first up: a tilt-shift photo maker! this is an awesome little tool that you can use to play with photos. i've had it sitting on my desk because playing with it required finding a suitable photo and then taking the time to manipulate it. turns out you can manipulate a photo seven ways from sunday faster than i could find one i wanted to try it with.

so here's my first effort, a photo taken on a civil war battlefield:

i'm going to have to play with that some more. i think that if you're going to have real fun with it, you start to take pictures with the tilt-shift in mind.

if you like playing with photos, here's an excellent little tutorial on stereogram photos on the cheap. i have not tried it yet, but it's on my list. while i'm on the topic of disposable cameras, i'll briefly mention this project that caught my attention enough to tell you about.

back in the day i did a photo project at school and bought a bunch of disposable cameras and painted them white, like the white bicycles of amsterdam, and had people use them and leave them and pass them around. it was quite a slideshow in the end.

on my list is also an interesting little application that tracks you mouse movement and turns it into art. you have to download it, but i just have and while i'm writing this i'm using it and when i'm done i'll have a little graphic i can show you.

there's a super-cool fractal explorer that you can use if you have a web-GL (what the heck is that?) browser. if you haven't a clue who benoit mandelbot was, and can't remember your times tables, you can still get real happy looking at all the pretty pictures and flying around in them.

then, because i can't stay on any given topic too long, we're moving to the wonderful world of music! you love music, don't you? i do. and you love samba, right?

well, i'm not a big samba fan, but i have more than a passing interest in musical styles and what makes them tick, so i was deee-lighted to find this awesome (do i use that word way too often?) interactive animated website that shows how a batteria functions and lets you break it down, and it includes explanatory videos! imagine me stiing stock upright in my chair, eyes all squinty and tiny wildly vibrating fists raised chin level in paroxysms of joy.

because i like words, and apparently late in life i have developed an interest in counting things, or at least analyzing things so they can be represented graphically and maybe conclusions drawn or amusements drawn out, i'm finding the word count project interesting.

and while we're analyzing things, bård edlund has made an audio representation of the closing level of the dow.

today i applied for membership in this social network. the reason i gave (since you have to give a reason) is that i'm not very interested in being a part of it, but that i have a mild curiosity about it. the little screen that comes up after you send in your application says something to the effect of maybe they'll send me a response later if they feel like it.

if you have a desire to watch live streaming video (right now there's a broadcast of an eagle nest), you can go to ustream. eagles hatching is a kind of transitory event, but it's cool to watch and you never know what may be broadcasting on the other channels.

and i think you ought to go look at this art project.

i know i gave you an interactive tree of life last week, but here's another nice one. and here's a super resource on geologic time from the smithsonian.

ok, that clears almost everything except the big pile of nerdy map-related things that you KNOW is coming. later will be soon enough.

that's quite a list

2011-04-06T21:58:00.000-04:00

right. so.

today i was going to try to catch up on my huge pile of internet things that i still haven't cleared from my desk, but my day went differently.

i started out here at my desk, but then i took delivery of my new mattress, which means washing linens so i can put fresh on the bed, but i can't do that RIGHT away, since there's already clean laundry in the dryer that i can't dump on the bed pending putting away until the new mattress is there, so THEN there's tending to the laundry and a little eating of lunch before i head downtown for a haircut and then into williston to do the grocery shopping and after THAT things really started to pick up.

in the last two weeks i've had basically two speeds: way too slow, and way too fast. i have had more than two crying jags that lasted two days. and then alternately i'm working on way too many things at once.

so. back from the grocery store, i got going on a few little projects:

i made cheese. i never made cheese before, so i thought this would be a good time to start. a nice little farmer cheese.

i roasted mushrooms (related to a sandwich i will make tomorrow), and tossed some stale english muffins in the oven so that later on i could whirl them in the food processor to make the breadcrumbs i'll need for a recipe later in the week.

i caramelized a half dozen onions for later use, and put them in the freezer in an ice cube tray.

at some point i had dinner: leftover cabbage and dumplings, deciding to pan fry the leftovers to get delicious crunchy brown bits on them while i warmed them up.

and then because i hadn't enough to do, i made fresh mozzarella cheese, because i've never made cheese before and it sounded like a fun thing to do to make not one but two cheeses. and then while i was at it, i made fresh ginger ale and since i was grating ginger i made a cute little ginger custard, which i plan to write about later.

then it's finish up the laundry and put the fresh sheets on the new mattress and upload photographs and i just KNOW i missed some of the day's activities, but that's most of what i did today.

things i love

2011-04-05T17:42:00.000-04:00

maybe it says nothing good about me, but i love everything april winchell does.

she is awesome, and if you have not seen her video with martha stewart, you should run, do not walk. go watch it now.

i'll wait.

ok, less famous (much) but equally enjoyable is reprobatio certa, the journal of universal rejection.

and i love jassica hagy, who draws indexed.

and just in case you're not overloaded on nerdy goodness, you should go look up the stunning and brilliant vi hart.

oh, my goodness gracious.

bad mood youtube

2011-04-03T17:43:00.000-04:00

here's an old bbc show i've been watching.

your sky calendar

2011-04-02T15:29:00.000-04:00

this one is so awesome that it deserves and entry of its own.

i was testing things toward the purpose of closing some blasted tabs and one of those things was this AWESOME interactive thingy that lets you make a sky calendar for any location.

here's one for a place near where i live for this year.

favicons

2011-04-01T12:08:00.001-04:00

ok, so i made some major edits to my website, which means that because it's made in iweb i have to add the favicon to the directory folder for each page instead of to the template, which would just be a nightmare.

to start, if you do not know what a favicon is, it's that awesome little graphic some websites have to identify them in the address bar in your browser instead of a generic blogger or generic apple icon or what-have-you.

i use that little ehrlenmeyer flask filled with something purple and inscribed with the initial "F". isn't it darling?

it's not all that hard to put one on your blogger template; if you want to do it and don't know how, here's a little tutorial: how to change a favicon in blogger.

if you, like me, need to go into a directory and figger out how to do it repeatedly in multiple pages, you can find a very nice little tutorial here: add favicons to an iweb published website. it even tells you how to use script editor to automate the process. awesome.

so that's off my list.

extruded oddity

2011-03-31T09:57:00.019-04:00

i eat pretzels in bed. perhaps i should refer you, again, to this graph:

anyway, i eat pretzels. stick pretzels, very plain. sometimes some of them are a little fatter than most, or is bent, but in my last bag i found a few that indicated (to me, at least) that the extruder needed to be reset.

a different benedictus

2011-03-30T11:42:00.001-04:00

i have updated my podcast to include the newest music, along with the previous incarnations of that tune, and some words about the process.

i'm almost embarrassed by the immature form of the benedictus, but it's making me think of revisiting a lot more of that mass and mining it for material that can be developed into something better now.

anyway, that's about all the web exhibition i can take for the day.

now i have to go plan a menu and go grocery shopping.

you can find the podcast here.

literacy

2011-03-29T15:02:00.000-04:00

i remember the moment in which i first realized the power of the written word.

my parents had gone around the block to talk to some people and they were gone longer than my six year old mind judged appropriate, six year olds having really only four references to time: "before", "now", "soon", and "some point in the future very incomprehensibly distant".

so i decided to go out and look for them.

but what if they came back to find me missing? surely they would be as worried to find me gone as i was to find them not home yet. there must be some way to convey to them the idea of having gone to look for them where they said they'd be, some way to leave a message where i had been and then be able to go somewhere else.

a note! i could leave a note!

i had learned at school what some words looked like, and they had taught me how to sound out words, so i figured i could use the arcane symbols of the alphabet to express my thoughts.

it didn't look right, but i knew my phonemes, by golly, and i got it down on paper just fine enough to convey not just information but ATTITUDE.

and i went off to find my parents.

happily, that first effort has been preserved and was returned to me last week.

knowledge is power. literacy is power.

where the week has gone

2011-03-28T11:50:00.000-04:00

it's not that i have nothing to say to you; i have lots of things to tell you about, going back to october and the roadtrip pictures and i keep meaning to finish the story of the mental hospital and halfway house and i have the thirteen project and new music and assorted things from my kitchen and MORE tabs that are open that i need to try out the stuff to see if i want to tell you about it, so if anything i have an overload of things to write to you, but what's really been keeping me from writing is that cr had some surgery last wednesday and if you know cr, you know that she's going to downplay her own discomfort because other people have more serious surgeries or hurt more or have fewer people to care for her, and if you really know cr you know that even though she's been accepting and appreciating the steady stream of visitors, she still puts on her hostess face (she is a lutheran, and from kansas, so that right there explains a LOT about her) and even though she's recovering very well, at the end of the day she still gets tired and cranky and has cramps and muscle spasms and is a little depressed.

i've had enough injuries and surgeries to know the pattern of the recovering days, and how even as you get better and better after you've reached your daily limit you fall into that dusk-to-bedtime blue funk, so i've been spending a lot of time with her and i wait with her at night until she can sleep comfortably and then i go home.

it's a thing i'm happy to do, but it takes a fair amount of my time and energy and i need some time to nap and vegetate and recover myself, but i have the luxury of that timeand in between i'm making little delights from my kitchen to share with cr and my other friends (because i'm not capable of doing things by halves) but blogging just hasn't been on my list.

and it drives me nuts when bloggers write an entry just for the sake of writing an entry. i will not forget you if you go a day or even a week without writing, and unless you are supporting yourself with ad revenue (and no, HOPING to be a big-time blogger does not count), you can take a few days off and nothing will be lost.

so that's where i've been. later on i'll have things to show you.

i promise.

clearing my desk

2011-03-22T11:36:00.050-04:00

ok, ok, ok.

i just have to close some tabs, you know?

so i'm just going to toss you a hodgepodge of assorted links that i liked enough to tell you about.

tree of life web project is a fun exploratory thing you can play with if you like biology, which i do.

bryan makes self-portraits under the influence of various drugs. it's a weird psycho-pharmacological documentary/art project.

you probably don't follow this blog, but here's one of the best posts i've ever read.

this is an awesome gallery of pretty science-y pictures.

want to see where all the geolocated tweets are coming from today? go here.

i think these involuntary collaborations are very funny.

here's a handy tool you can use if for some reason you need to identify all the world's national flags.

...and if you want to know how the world moos, go here.

The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

here's an awesome weather map site that will turn out so many cool graphs for you that it will make you giddy.

...and another fabulous interactive map that shows health and well-being statistics by state and county

and if you're not sick to death of maps (i never am), an awesome interactive historical map of new york.

here's a fabulous panoramic view from the top of everest, and for the hardy adventurer here's an expedition documentary you won't want to miss.

this comic makes me nearly pee myself every time i see it:

so. now i can close some tabs. not enough tabs, but some. there are still some things i need to play with before i decide to pass them on to you or not.

up and down and up

2011-03-21T17:53:00.001-04:00

yesterday i wasn't able to do anything but stare blankly into space and at times play that little flash game i last wrote about (thank goodness for that!) and i did manage to watch the syracuse orangemen take a beating and the hands of marquette, which did not improve my mood.

as far as televised sports go, i fanatically watch the tour de france, but i also watch portions of other prominent cycling events. outside of that, though, i'm kind of fussy. i care about college basketball, but only if syracuse is playing. i don't give a flying fig about the NBA. similarly, the only time i care about baseball is if the red sox are playing, if they haven't blown the season yet. if revolution soccer is available to me i will watch that, but i won't pay extra for it. and rounding out my televised sports enjoyment, i like to watch the canadian curling championships.

everything else is a waste of my time.

today i finished writing the benedictus that i've been working on and cleaned up the typesetting for the hard copy so if i was ambitious i could post that to my podcast and make the preview of the sheet music available for you to see, but i'm not feeling ambitious, at least as far as deskbound activities go.

i kind of feel like making ice cream or cookies or something, and it's about dinner time.

so i think i'll just leave you with this old poem of mine:

Elegy

Syracuse lost
the ball game last night.
It made me think
of the last time i was in Syracuse
and found myself
pushing a car
on a street
where someone i once loved lives.
Everything was cold and grey,
encased in ice
as we tried so hard
to keep the car from slipping
out of control,
down the hill, because
Everything
slides, too easily,
down.

like i got a choice

2011-03-18T19:14:00.000-04:00

blast.

i probably meant to write about something else today, but i got a link to a cute little flash game that i wasted too much time on, and it's one of those little links that once sitting open on your desktop will make noise for as long as it's sitting open on your desktop.

it's cute noise i rather like, but only while i'm playing the game, so i have to get that tab closed which means i can't save it for another day.

it's about as cute a little logic game as can be, so if you'll excuse me, i'm going to go play some more.

worn out

2011-03-17T21:47:00.000-04:00

things have not been going well for me.

i spin around and around, one foot in this life and one foot not.

on the upside, i make precious little cookies and soup and ice cream and roasted vegetables and excellent sandwiches and write music and words and take pictures

...and then i'm too crushed to get out of bed or take a shower. nothing seems worth the trouble, but yet i buy more groceries for another round of holding the wolves at bay.

mostly i don't feel like talking about it, much less leaving a written record.

the body is strong. it fights even after you pass out.

pssst, over here ------------>

2011-03-14T14:32:00.000-04:00

all right.

as promised, i went back through allllll my blog posts looking for links to games and toys that you may or may not be interested in. on the off chance you want to play with them or find them without having to page through everything i've written, i've made a page on which i list them, with links.

i did not go so far as to comment on them, or to link you to the blog posts in which i talk about them.

anyway, the list is there, and i'll update it as i go from now on.

you'll be glad to know

2011-03-12T20:37:00.001-05:00

too much; it's too much.

wednesday afternoon and thursday during the day i was all weepy and crying a little and at one point i said to cr "i'm crying and i don't know why!"

and i needed a nap. and my back hurt WAY too mcuh even though i'd shoveled more than i should have and i remember saying to cr that i had NO idea why my back and hips hurt as much as they did and i thnk i may have cried a little more and you all will be relieved to know that at least we know that i'm not pregnant.

-whew!-

(like it was a possibility.)

anyway, today i still needed a nap and i was weepy and super moody and crampy but at least i'm not walking around not knowing why. forty-six years old and i still get surprised and can't figure out what's going on.

anyway, i was feeling really grumpy, so to take my mind off of it i worked on that list of things i promised you but i'm not finished and i worked on the new music i'm writing and i worked on another project but then i saw some news stories and between the earthquake news and a few stories (ok, a lot of stories) about greedy bastards and the rise of poverty and homelessness and the privatization of public libraries and the corporate takeovers of entire municipalites and nevermind elected officials or civil rights and in my state we're cutting social programs that pay for assistance to the mentally ill and disabled people we promised to take care of in the community thirty years ago when we closed down the state hospital and the brandon training school because community care is soo much better and more cost effective, only NOW we're letting rich bastards have tax breaks but we're going to pay for that by cutting social services to the people who can least advocate for themselves and what NOBODY'S talking about too loudly is that we're still paying for that obscenity of a never-ending war and the armed forces are sponsoring NASCAR and NBA events and IF you can make a case for that giant money-sucker of a war because it's necessary, how the hell do you justify sponsoring athletic events? how much does THAT cost? how is THAT necessary?

you think the soviet union fell apart because they lost the cold war?

the soviet union fell apart because they bankrupted themselves in a war in afghanistan, THAT'S what happened to the soviet union. it's ok, though, because even though regular people went homeless, the rich bastards got to keep all of their money.

wall street bankers run the economy into the ground with criminally greedy fiscal irresponsibility and not a one of 'em loses his fat bonus because that would be a disaster not to honor their contracts, but firemen and schoolteachers who haven't ruined the economy and can barely feed their families have to have their contracts abrogated because that's shared sacrifice.

and at some point it was all way too much for me and instead of thinking about it, i roasted some beets that later on i put under a nice balsamic glaze and while i was waiting for the beets to cook i made creamed chipped beef on mashed potatoes and started to salt-cure some salmon and i made split pea soup because i've never done any of those things before and after the beets came out of the oven i made two fresh hot cookies to eat and now i feel better.

cookies.

yeah.

lemon fresh

2011-03-11T20:31:00.000-05:00

snow.

more shoveling than is good for me.

napping.

frozen roads.

in other news, i saw a nifty recipe for lemon curd and thought: that's just the thing!

and it was, too.

just TRY to be decent.

2011-03-08T23:12:00.001-05:00

so today i had a doctor's appointment. well, first i had lunch with my mom, at the waterman grill. the guy (glenn) who makes the sandwiches at the grill (basically just a university snack bar) is a bona-fide chef and it doesn't matter what today's special is; it's fabulous. there's always something new and it's always good.

today, for me, that was a fish taco. fresh-fried tilapia in flour tortillas with just the right blend of "stuff".

so.

THEN i went to my appointment.

and people are idiots.

oh, no, there's snow on the ground! we no longer know how to park our cars! we don't have TIME to pull out once and straighten up so we're not taking up two whole parking places. we're too important to take the trouble to park properly, and hey, we're already parked, so we don't care that only a third of the people who park in this lot are going to be able to park here.

and then i was at the grocery store, and i notice lately that people are idiots there, too. you know that little blue-painted space left next to the handicapped space? that's not a cart return, hatwipe! that's there so people can get their chairs out of their vans. and if you drop your cart in the handicap spot, they can't put the van there, either.

could you just walk the cart the extra twenty feet to a cart return?

i mean, often the actual handicapped people leave carts there and store staff comes and picks them up. if you need a wheelchair and a van spot, i don't expect you to return your shopping cart. but you able-bodied hatwipes who can't take the trouble?

i'm sorry, but a moral handicap does not entitle you to make parking inaccessible.

so when i go to the store, i clean a cart or two out of there. and today as i was coming by this broad comes and dumps her cart there bold as brass. so what did i do? i gave her a bad look, that's what i did. and i kept giving her that bad look as i collected her cart and two others and returned them to the store.

she saw me do it, but her face did not betray what she might have been thinking. she was still watching when i got into my car and drove off.

hey, lady! that is not a cart return. you are a hatwipe. i hope you are embarrassed to have other people clean up after you. probably not, but i can hope.

snow biggie

2011-03-07T21:25:00.000-05:00

ha. i think i'm funny.

in addition to all the usual activities, today i watched the snow come down.

i have a new added benefit in that if i want to walk around nude, i don't have to pull the blinds. i have new window coverings.

just to catch you up to speed, here are two pictures: one is the view from my desk on a regular day (this one obviously summer) and one is the view from my desk today.

you will note the extreme lack of an outside to look at.

since i'm a big fan of snow, i am happier about this than most of my neighbors, who are NOT looking forward to the snow that's supposed to fall later in the week.

me, i'm like, boo-yah! ski season goes past easter this year!

thirteen september

2011-03-06T15:27:00.000-05:00

the changeover in the storm between rain and snow came this morning around ten-thirty as forecast. because i've been down with a cold since thursday night and because of the weather, i decided not to go to church, which is just as well since the changeover came just about as i would have been leaving church.

there are no good ways to get from there to here in bad weather, not even if you go around the long way. and ever since the changeover, it's been snowing like a sonofagun and we're expecting over a foot of heavy wet snow.

i like shoveling more than the average person, but even i have my limits.
so today i finished clocking the september pictures, put up a new design or two in my zazzle store, and worked with my january data trying to learn how to use the spreadsheet and figure out what i want to do.

i'm also working on writing that new benedictus, which is really a reworking of an old alleluia, which was a reworking of an older benedictus, which was a reworking of a little tune i made up a long time ago to sing in a stairwell.

hey, it's my material; i can rework it however i want. i used to think that once i was done writing a tune i was done with it, but as i get older i realize that i can take the good material and make it into as many new things as i want.

nyah.

oh, and as long as i was done clocking september, i went ahead and assembled the video. there are some other things, but that's the précis.

toys and the end of childhood

2011-03-05T14:10:00.000-05:00

a (really) long time ago at summer camp, i had some friends who came to the camp from syracuse. well, not exactly syracuse; they came from fayetteville-manlius, a suburb of syracuse, and one where i ended up doing my senior student teaching, at their old high school. cute coincidence.

anyway, this one girl said that when she was asked what she would do under imminent threat of nuclear strikes, where she would go to be safe, she picked burlington, vermont, which is where i was from (i still live pretty close to there).

you have to remember it was along time ago, and "where would you go if you thought there was going to be a nuclear war?" was the kind of question that people thought was perfectly reasonable to ask children and the sort of question that children asked each other.

you've got to be kidding, i told her. burlington? that's one of the places that will be vaporized in the first strike.

"my childhood is over!" she exclaimed.

anyway, this week i saw a map showing the target areas of soviet-era nuclear strikes in the US and their fallout zones.

(source)

that little red dot up there in new england? burlington, vt. new hampshire didn't have its own strike zone. we were IMPORTANT, boo-yah, important enough to kill first.

so. completely unrelated: i promised you toys.

here's a fun little evolution simulator you can run, and a screen shot of my game running.

oooh! it looks like they've updated the program! awesome. now i have something else to wast prodigious amounts of time doing!

and here's an awesome little flash game to play, as if you don't have enough time to waste. oh! and this little thing is awesome. it's kind of like the tone generator i posted about earlier, but it's more kid friendly and comes in brighter colors. it also has different timbres, so that's fun to play with.

maybe i'll make you a little list of the toys i've recommended to you over time so you can find them easier. maybe i'll put it in the sidebar, or on a side page or something. while i'm at it, maybe i'll make a list of the recipes i've posted about, too.

yeah. on a day when i have nothing else to do, right?

i gotta go.