gentlemen:

today is valentine's day.



while i am in favor of love and enjoy expression of same, rest assured that nothing you can say or do on that day or even the week preceding is going to buy you my favor in the bedroom.

trust me, if i wish to have your companionship there, you will already know about it and you are already a frequent traveler to that land of delights.

i am sick to death of the mass marketing and raised unrealistic expectations about this one fraught holiday and its assumptions about gender normative behaviors, the spiraling cycle of profit from the hopes and disappointments of both men and women, and the underlying subtext of sex in exchange for gifts.

THAT said, i am not against romance. life is too shot not to throw yourself into lavish romance EVERY. DAMN. DAY. and not just on my birthday or for some holiday manufactured by the greeting card and jewelery industries for the exploitation of your insecurities about us.

i do not presume to speak for all women when i say this, but television has us wrong. you do not have to spend piles of money to make us feel loved and respected, and you do not have to come up with something special for the day, especially since  (this is true if i have given you a second thought) you often come up with something special just because it's tuesday.

so here's my handy gift guide to help you guys out.

flowers:

• unless you have noticed that i keep cut flowers around the house, don't bother.
• same with potted plants.
• try these: duct tape roses.

chocolate:

•  do not pester me with those horrid little boxes of filled chocolates.  if you insist on buying me chocolates, GO TO A REPUTABLE CHOCLATIER and buy me something they make. if you are wealthy, buy me a lot of them.  if you are an average joe, two or three will be fine.
• even bar chocolate is acceptable, if you know how to find good bar chocolate. what i'm saying here is that i know chocolate and if you're going to bother with chocolate, make the effort to find chocolate that i will want to eat.

jewelry:

• don't bother going to jared.  i don't kare how you spell "kiss", and no matter what jane symour says, mass produced bling is NOT a personal statement of love. it is not a personal statement of love unless you designed or made it yourself. some guys do this. props to them.
• you know those little earring backs? the little doodads that keep post earrings from falling off? i'm always losing mine. if you were an observant intimate companion of mine, you would know this and you might stop off at the craft store and buy me a bag of spares for something like $5.

dining:

• i'm pretty happy with an evening at home.  if you have the skills and inclinaton, we could make something special together.
• if you really want to take me out,  it doesn't have to be expensive. a really good hotdog is just as good to me as anything a chef will send from the kitchen. what will matter to me is that you took the trouble to take me somewhere to have me taste something AWESOME.

dancing:

• take me to a contradance.

sporting goods:

• yes, sporting goods. you have to know which sports though. some of my favorite gifts are sporting goods.

tl;dr:

BAD: anything that looks like you're trying to impress, fulfill a social obligation, or get into my bed.
GOOD: anything that shows you care about me, not just today, but EVERY. DAMN. DAY.

music of the spheres

today i spent a lot of time making a little model in sketchup. you know how i love toys.

i did a little bit of clocking on june 2011, but mostly i was just playing with my model. then i thought i might go back into my pictures and see what i have waiting around for processing to show you, and i came up with some very pretty windchimes that john has in his yard.

the video doesn't come close to doing them justice. when you stand near them, your whole body vibrates.

plus john went to some trouble to get the brook to babble just so.

they're from a company called "music of the spheres", and they deal in precision tuned chimes.

not current, not funny

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

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

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

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

open letter to domino's and frito-lay

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

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

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

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

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

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: