taking stock

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

your sky calendar

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

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.