the bike fairy

so i was over at this geocache and there was not only a truckload of people, but there was a bike locked to the post at the cache, so i not only have an audience, but i might be mistaken for a bike thief.

it's a bike that clearly somebody uses for commuting, and the chain and pulley wheels and derailleurs are not just dirty, but full of grease and grit and i figure if i'm in for a penny, i might as well be in for a pound.

now other people, when hunting geocaches, try to look all unobtrusive and sneaky like, but not me. i have have gone on record as saying that the best way to arouse suspicion is to try to appear un-suspicious looking.

of course i also have to park RIGHT UP NEXT TO THE CACHE,  so here's my funky little diagram:

[ ]  [.] [ ] [ ]
    o
[ ] [.]     [ ] [ ]
          ^
          this is where i have to park.

[ ] = empty vehicle
[.] = occupied vehicle
o = post to which bike is chained, and where cache is located

so i pull up into the convenient empty slot, get out of my car, and scope out the post with the bike chained to it. there's a kind of hostile looking guy in the pickup truck next to the pole, or maybe i'm just imagining that he's hostile looking because he has a "maine terrorist hunting license" sticker right on his driver's side window, so i'm looking at it when i get out of my car.

then since i don't feel like exposing the cache location with hostile man (his new superhero name) right there, i do the only thing a right-thinking person would do: i open up my tailgate and take out a soft rag and a can of boeing T-9 and i begin to clean up the rear derailleur, chain, and pulley wheels of the bike.

it takes me a while, and i go back to my car a couple of times and while this is happening hostile man apparently gets sick of me being there. perhaps i am interfering with his sitting and doing nothing, but in a great show of fury or impatience he fires his truck into motion and while i am moving between my car and his truck he takes off at a speed not safe for parking lots, as if he is in a very big hurry to get to someplace important to which he is late and i have been standing in his way.

it turns out that the "someplace important" is another parking place two aisles over, where he sits and does nothing again. after a while he gets out and gets himself a cup of coffee. this takes him a long time, but he does it in as hostile a fashion as possible, which is difficult, since now he has to project this hostility at me from a farther distance.

i'm still busy cleaning that derailleur and chain and pulley wheels, and they are a greasy, gritty mess, so much of a mess that i don't notice at first that the pulley wheels aren't solid. they have that much gunk in them.

i go back to my car and take out a nice clean sheet of paper and a pen and with my greasy hands i write a note to bike guy:

dear bike guy,


i was here to do something else and while i was here i cleaned and lubed your chain, your pulley wheels, your rear derailleur and some of your gears. i didn't have my brushes or other tools with me so it isn't perfect, but it's a good start. i used a high quality low-density lube on everything, so you'll probably want to toss on something heavier grade to keep the road dirt out later on.

i signed it

love,
the bike fairy.


somewhere during the process (once hostile man had finally quit glaring at me in his rearview mirrors and driven off at full speed), i found the cache and cleaned up my stuff, leaving the note for bike guy.

later on someone asked me: what if he didn't want his bike cleaned?

well then, he can't catch up to me.

i'm gone.

boom!

today i went to play disc golf at boom field in saco.

boom field.

i just like to say it.

it was nice and then some other stuff happened that maybe i'll tell you about later.

who am i kidding? of course i'll tell you about it later.

and there will be pictures.

but i just wanted another excuse today to say "boom field".

boom!

sunburn on my feet

i got sunburn on my feet! not a bad one, mind you, but i went over to parson's beach and played a long time in the sand (pictures later) and since my feet are one of the only parts of me that never see daylight (i am a sock-wearing person, even in summer), it was interesting to see my feet slightly pink right up to the place where my socks usually stop.

huh.

well, that's about it. i spent a while nearly totally devoid of thought. it was nice.

ground and sky

maybe i had some other things to say; i don't remember.

i have a room with an ocean view, though, and the weather is exceptionally pleasant.

tonight after supper we went over to wells beach and we just happened to see an overhead flyby of the international space station. that is just cool.

simple plans

right, ok.

i'm sick to death of terry jones (get your own blasted link for that fruitcake) and i'm sick of all the anti-islamic crap in this country and europe (do you HEAR me, france?). even the nicest, kindest, little christian ladies are spouting some of the most stunning examples of bigotry and islamophobia i've ever heard.

want to know how to stop the shrinking of your churches? want to know how to keep young people from being islamified or atheized?

OFFER THEM SOMETHING OF SUBSTANCE.

i am sick to death of the daily dose of who died today in the wars and i'm sick of articles like this.

want to know how to stop the cycle of violence and by the way slow the radicalization of muslims / africans / basques / catholics / gays / poor people?

STOP TREATING THEM LIKE CRAP.

i am REALLY sick of hearing people whining about how bad the economy is and how nobody knows what to do about it without putting it all on the backs of poor people or children or the mentally ill or crippled.

here's my handy four-point plan for reviving the economy.

1) STOP THE WAR. it's the single most expensive thing going on. it's not necessary, and the cost of caring for all the mangled veterans (which we are morally obligated to do) grows larger every day. this cost will only increase over the next 40 years even if no more of those guys get hurt after today.

2) LEGALIZE MARIJUANA. you heard me; legalize it. and tax it. while we're at it, lessen the penalties for possession or use of other drugs, which brings me to the third point:

3) STOP BUILDING PRISONS. these things are expensive. let's quit sending nonviolent offenders to prison for long sentences in what can only be called the world's most efficient trade schools. kids go in there green and come out professional criminals. let's put that money into education and jobs programs. out-and-out gifts, if we have to do it. everybody's got money for punishment, but not for prevention. dumbasses. prevention is more cost-effective.

4) STOP THE FREAKING WAR, ALREADY.




there. i'm done for now. tonight i'm going dancing. tomorrow i'm going on a little vacation. later on i will tell you about what's going on in my kitchen or on the golf course or some sunny little thing, but not today.

today i'm mary sunshine.

sticky rice

this is what it looks like when i make it.

ok, so this isn't news.

it's kind of old, i think, but i have been making coconut sticky rice.

the short version of today's story is that i am a nutjob and there was crying and two appointments and a lot of social awkwardness but that in the end i made some mango coconut sticky rice, which made me feel better.

i make it a lot ever since i found the recipe here, and it's easy so you can make it, too.

adirondack slideshow

later on maybe i'll tell you more and show you less, but if you want to see the pictures from our camping trip, you can see them here, at the usual place.

overheard at a natural history museum

i'm back from my fabulous labor day vacation with the crashcos and i'm sure that as time progresses that story will come out in a variety of locations.

for now what i'm giving you is a short movie i made at xtranormal, which is an interesting little animated moviemaking toy that's free with add-ons you can pay for .

the link to it has been sitting on my desk for a while, and i've been waiting for an opportunity to use it and see how that goes before i tell you about it. i like it pretty much, and i think i will maybe use it to play a little with conversations i have overheard.

this conversation took place after a presentation with the captive otters at an unnamed (here, at least) natural history museum. through the entire presentation the young man giving it kept talking about how only CAPTIVE otters need enrichment in order to stimulate their brains like their wild counterparts.

maybe i should also mention that the natural history museum does not capture wild otters but only has rehabilitated otters that are for some reason or another unsuitable for release.

here's my movie.



you can watch it on youtube if you like.

labor day

traditionally i go to montreal for labor day. i started doing this years and years ago, and then at some point the crashcos started coming along and sometimes we'd meet up with friends there and then we were talking about maybe going to nova scotia instead and then it came out that what mrs. crashco really wants to do is go kayaking in the adirondacks, so that's what we're going to do.

you can see where we're going here.

meantime i'd like to clear off my desk, so here's a fun little linkdump of things that are science-y and pretty to look at.

more about color names by gender
global economic analysis
water

my grandfather always said

recently i was standing around after church and this guy (old enough to be my grandfather) comes up and says that my hair looks a lot better now that i've let it grow out. the implication, clearly, is that it is too butch as short as i like it.

my grandfather always used to tell me "if you don't do something with your hair, you'll never catch a man." why THIS guy who is not my grandfather feels he has a right to comment on how i should be wearing my hair is beyond me, but some people just think they have the right.

i will refer you (again) to this blog.

the thing about my grandfather saying it is that he was my grandfather and not just some old guy who thinks it's his business to instruct me, so i had to stand and be polite to my grandfather about it.

if you don't do something with your hair you'll never catch a man.

the funny thing is that when my grandfather was alive, i used to wear my hair long, all the way down to my butt, and back then it was red (yes, i was a natural redhead). for parties i used to like to roll it up and over my forehead and weave in baby's breath. very cute.


if you don't do something with your hair you'll never catch a man.

once a long time ago i ran a personal ad:

my grandfather always said if i didn't do something with my hair i'd never catch a man. call if you want to be the punch line to that joke.

i won an award with that one. really. the paper that ran it has a weekly contest for best personal ad, and i won that week. and i almost got a really scary moment.

i'm at an appointment and my case manager says "that was yours? i almost called for a date!" and there was this long terrified pause before we both said "wow. THAT would have been awkward."

i STILL haven't done anything acceptable with my hair. in october i'm getting it shaved off again. i might not catch a man that way, and it might not even be the cutest way for me to wear my hair, but it is the length at which i am comfortable wearing it, and since i spend more time wearing it than i spend looking at it, that's what's important to me.

plus when it's really short, it's fuzzy and kind of comforting to run my hand across it when i'm stressed.

and i save a lot of money on shampoo.

prize time!

we just had the award potluck for this race series. prizes are handed out on the basis of attendance and since i'm there every week (for like eleven years running or something like that) i go up to the prize table pretty early on in the proceedings.

i'm kind of nuts about bags. is that a girly thing? i love shoes and i confess i love bags. one of the best thing about taking up any new activity is the possibility that i will need new shoes to wear or a new bag in which to carry equipment.

so i got this bag. in the plush plaid version.

i gave it to cr, because let's face it, i have four hydration packs already in various sizes, plus one more i don't yet use that still has its tags on it, and although it is awesome to win a cool bag, it is even more awesome to win a cool bag to give as a gift.

cr wasn't sure i should give her such a thing, but i was all, like, dude. there's NOTHING on that prize table i don't already have three of. and she says, maybe for my birthday or for christmas.

she hasn't yet caught on to the way the natives here give gifts: it's wednesday. here. hope you like it.

unrelated things

my ginger ale came out and it is AWESOME. you can find the recipe for it here. i used the actual brewed method.

yesterday and today i made four dozen teeny little quiches. they are also awesome and if you are very nice to me, i will tell you about them later.

today i ran across a cool site that tracks annual migrations (wildlife, not my dad and his tribe from here to florida every year). it's mostly geared for students, but it has some awesome maps and you should go there, especially if you like monarch butterflies, which i do.

and last on my list (cleaning off my desk), here is an awesome image. be sure to zoom and scroll to really see it. go ahead and look at the blog entry if you want, but it's the image i'm wild about.

ginger ale

i'm making ginger ale.

i've never done it before; i'll let you know how it goes.

now 37% friend-ier!

i just can't keep up

last night on my run i couldn't keep up with a seven-year-old girl. to the good, i managed to run the whole thing in under fifty minutes, that while not fast by any standard in the world of runners, makes it on average sixteen minute miles, which for me is blazing fast.

i was in some fancy pain, too; not the worst pain i've ever experienced, but definitely top five. but pain or not, i at least felt strong, which counts for a lot.

for today i'd like to leave you with a really cool interactive infographic regarding relative ranking of the world's countries. last week a friend asked me if i couldn't live here in the US, where would i live? without skipping a beat, i said "canada". and then maybe two seconds later, "maybe finland."

so i feel kind of vindicated on that, as if picking right somehow makes me a star.

and now that i'm done tossing unrelated stuff into a blog post (a thing i've never done, right?), here's the thing i was actually going to tell you about today, so i can get it off my desktop: this is possibly the best rant on the use of the apostrophe that i've ever read. ok, ok, so i don't use capital letters and all that, but otherwise i'm all about grammar and i really wish i could tell you that i've never interrupted a moment of passion to comment on the proper use of the semicolon, and maybe i have some unorthodox sentence structure but i assure you it's a style choice and that the words "pronoun referent" come up in my social interactions, so i've read quite a few things about the apostrophe.

so what are you still doing here? go read it.

hunting

yesterday afternoon i went out to my favorite mountain bike venue to ride a little and to use the big open field to practice my throwing (i have mentioned that i have taken up disc golf, but i have not officially talked about it here, which i will, i guess, at some point...)

i was going to ride the new course, but as i was getting my bike ready i saw a little forty-ish woman get her bike out of her honda pilot and ride off.

that was suspicious to me, because typically people get their bikes down and then go into the shop to get their trail pass. granted, sometimes they walk over first and THEN get their bikes down, but this woman has "poacher" written all over her.

and i am the queen of the poacher catchers. i just like to say it: poacher catcher. poacher catcher.

so i rode off after her, after getting my trail pass.

actually, it IS my business. i don't pay for my membership; in return i do miscellaneous light trail work, i ride the trails in the uniform of the place, giving friendly directions, and i check for trail passes.

while i don't ride as fast as a lot of people and can't chase poachers, i know where all of the trails come out, and i know where they pass close to one another. i also know where to go stand in order to hear the sounds of riders echo.

in short, i can pretty much find anyone there.

except this woman. much to my shame, with all my skill in tracking and my knowledge of those trails, she was a phantom. i am in disgrace.

i have no tolerance for poachers, though, because that venue is somebody's bread and butter. if anyone cares to make the argument that things are rough for them and they can't afford the $6 to ride, my response is that there are four other trail networks within a fifteen minute drive that are free to ride.

go there.

why don't my neighbors look more hungover?

i don't like my neighbors.

that's a pretty strong statement, since in the fifteen years or so i've lived here, neighbors have come and go and although i loved the first ones (ed and wendy) the rest have mostly made so little impression on me that i couldn't recognize them on the street or even in the driveway.

one or two sets of neighbors ago a woman from the NSA came to ask me questions about my neighbors for a background check because apparently one was applying for a government job that requires such things.

"good morning, " she said, flashing her badge. "how well do you know your neighbors?"
"not at all", i said. "i wouldn't recognize them if i saw them.
"can i ask you some questions anyway?"
"sure".

she had a lot of questions i couldn't answer, but some i could, i guess.

how many people live there?
i don't know. probably two, but since i don't recognize them when i see them, i can't say for sure.
what cars do they drive?
i don't know. i think one is red.
any disturbances? ever heard yelling?
no. they're very quiet.
a lot of visitors?
i don't know. since i don't recognize them, it's hard to tell if they have visitors.
is there anything you know about them?
they grill a lot. and everything they cook smells good.
oh?
yes. their grill is like nine feet from my back door, so i smell whatever they're cooking.
any pets?
maybe. none that i know of.
would you call them "good neighbors"?
yes. they're quiet.

it was about an hour's worth of interview. if being practically invisible to your neighbors is a good quality for security screens, the guy is a shoe-in.

i first decided i didn't like my new neighbors when one of them got a puppy. the kind of puppy that they leave alone all day and the poor thing barks and howls for about ten hours in a row and then when they get home it barks and howls and you hear a lot of yelling "NO!"

and then i decided i really didn't like the neighbors when they subsequently got a second puppy that also howled during all their hours away from home, which were ten or eleven at a stretch.

the people with the first dog moved out, but since i didn't recognize the people, i can't be sure. there was a moving truck, and then only one howling dog.

and i started noticing that the friend who seemed to have charge of coming to let the puppy out would show up about a half hour before the resident and get out quickly, as if he had been putting it off all day and i couldn't be certain (because while i spend a lot of time here at my desk, my primary purpose here is desk-y things, and not neighbor surveillance) but i think some days he didn't come at all.

and then i noticed that when the neighbor was home she would just tie the dog up to the porch. since it was winter, it was easy to see that this animal was peeing primarily on my front walk, another thing not to like.

since i had a lot of snow, i just kept piling it up to make a tall wall between my clean walk and her disaster area, but it was only partly effective. i began a program of dominance-staring the dog anytime she was on MY side of the lawn and being friendly to the dog anytime she was in her own space. that works pretty well in terms of keeping my walk clean.

but the neighbor! this dog is a lanky lab mix! those things need exercise! the dog stays inside while the neighbor works. the dog gets tied to the porch for a lot of the time the neighbor is home. IF the neighbor walks the dog at all (and that's a big "if") they only go as far as the dumpster, about 200 feet away. the dog keeps hoping they're going to play or something, but they don't.

the neighbor looks like she could use to go for a walk now and then too, and since she is often wearing army fatigues, i cannot imagine how it is that she passes her PT requirements.

she drives a red car the front fender panel of which has never been repaired.

all this has been but one level of annoyance.

lately she and someone else not permitted to smoke inside HER house are smoking outside MY window, which means i get to smell that stink from my bed.

she and her friends often hang out on their desk pontificating in what must seem to them an interesting way about how bad everyone in their jobs suck.

last friday night she and some friends treated me to a conversation they seemed to think was very clever.

"you're two shots behind us. go in and drink"
"i'm already drunk. i don't want to drink more"
"you're not drunk enough", one of them sang in a way that indicated she thought herself funny, or alluring, or something.
"if i'm not drunk, i should drive home."
"no! you're just two shots behind us. go catch up."
"i don't need to catch up."
"if you'd have drunk enough, we wouldn't behaving this conversation."

there was a lot more to this conversation. it was pretty much the same thing for about ninety minutes, except the words "pontificating" and "self-righteous" got used, and there was a side discussion of why smoking is cool.

i wouldn't have stayed to listen to the conversation, but i was in bed, trying to sleep. listening to my ipod.

i was hoping they would all look very hung over in the morning, but no. and by evening they were at it again.

i imagined how happily i would describe THEM to the NSA interviewer lady if given the opportunity

but then two nights ago (once again, in bed, listening to my ipod) i heard the happy sounds of my neighbor having sex.

you know what i learned? when i inadvertently hear sex noises from someone i like, i'm happy for them. i am even happy for strangers i happen to hear, say, in a full-up motel. it's not their fault the soundproofing is bad and they're in the reasonable range.

i have discovered that when i hear sex noises from the neighbor of whom i already so heartily disapprove, it's just icky.

and then when i hear her on her phone - and i do hear her on her phone, because apparently what she's talking about is sensitive enough that she doesn't want her housemates to eavesdrop, so she sits either just outside my bedroom window during my sleeping hours or just under my desk window while i am here- when i hear her on the phone most of her conversations have to do with the inherent unfairness of the world because school districts just aren't hiring her to fill positions.

if she brings the same level of care to her work that she does to her home life, i hope she never gets hired.

clocking in

well, here's july.  if you're susan, you may notice that i was at your blog, which you know i read, but here's proof.

it's still weird, this snapshot life. it does document what i was doing every thirteen hours, but it does not necessarily represent what i did in a day. maybe there's a really cool shot of me on a mountaintop or i was at a really beautiful place, but if it didn't happen when the alarm went off, it's not in the video. in terms of the project, it does not matter one bit if i just walked in the door from something cool and i am now checking my email; if that's what i'm doing at thirteen hours, that's what i'm doing.

july was a hard month for me. if you're following along you already know that i spent time in a sort of halfway house, so you can see that if you look closely. you can't see much of my vacation, because the shots happened to come up mostly during times i was in my motel room.

there's one shot i couldn't figure out what it was, until i tried to figure it out by what day it was taken.

....oh. i remember that day. i cried for hours, so hard i couldn't sit in a chair, so hard my nose bled.

and my alarm went off to take a picture and where was i?

under my desk. i couldn't talk, but somehow i managed to take a picture.

so. have look, if you like.

zucchini bread

ok, ok, so i was reading a kitchen blog and found a fabulous recipe for a savory zucchini bread with olives and goat cheese. i have made it twice and it is a whole bunch of good. you can find the recipe here.

this is what it looks like in my kitchen.

end of an era

i know you've heard me say that i hold the all time record for most consecutive last place finishes in this trail run series, but what i think i've never mentioned is that i also hold the all-time second place record for most consecutive starts in this mountain biking series, which is held on the same course. the all-time first place record for most consecutive starts belongs to crashco.

crashco has taken a start in every race in that series since 1998.

...until last night.

last night he was on vacation. this time he decided that after 25 years of marriage he was finally going to take a vacation when mrs. crashco wants to go on vacation, and nevermind the race schedule. God bless him.

this means, of course, that next year a week from now i will have passed him and the record will belong to me. although it will be cool to hold that record, it was cooler for some reason to be second to him in it. it was cooler that we were both deadlocked on a streak that nobody else was ever going to touch.


in nearly unrelated news, last friday i bought a present for crashco. we do not celebrate each other's birthdays, nor do we exchange gifts at the usual times. it's not that we're not close (we are very close), but that we prefer to make presents to each other "because it's tuesday" or "i saw something you'd like."

this is a very pleasing way to exchange gifts over the years, as it sets up no expectations and sure livens up a tuesday or whatever odd day you get the present.

so i was out last friday and saw a vendor selling a maple liqueur and although it got my attention i wouldn't have given it two thoughts but one of the women working the ALS association booth bought a bottle and i tasted a little from cr's cup and it was very fine stuff and that brings us back to crashco, because if it's real maple, he's all over it.

so i bought him a bottle.  i'll probably give it to him next tuesday.

my internet meme

i think i've mentioned that i read a lot of blogs. and i have feeds from a lot of sites that aren't strictly blogs. one little piece of dreck i've noticed is the thirty day blogging program and i can't possibly figure what the benefit to this is, or why this is interesting, but there are a lot of these little programs out there.

typically they go like this: "i saw this cute little thirty day blogging challenge over at (insert cute blog name here) and thought it sounded like tons of fun. so here goes..."

invariably the thirty items are all the same questions or tasks as every other "challenge", and of course they all want you to link back to them. apparently three things are in operation: there are a lot of people with nothing to say, a lot of people who want you to link to them saying nothing, and a lot of people who want advice on how to do those two things.

so here's my handy thirty-day blogging challenge:

day 1: introduce the challenge. link to MEEEEEEE!
day 2: it's your blog. write what you want. include a picture if you like. that'll look nice.
day 3: that was a good start. now do it again.
day 4: see where i'm going with this?

don't forget to link to MEEEEEEEEEE!

if you're susan

this is the rock i picked for susan.

if you're susan, you will understand why you're mentioned here. if you're cr, you understand why we were at this place, but you're probably mystified and too polite to ask: "who's susan?"

this is where we went to throw the rocks in.

this is the view upstream.

everybody loves saturday night

well, it's saturday.

i kind of have some things i'm working on, but don't have the energy to write about them. and if you're paying attention (close attention), you know that i am unlikely to post on sundays. sundays i go to church and sometimes hang out with friends or family. sometimes i cook a good meal, sometimes not. often i don't even ride my bike on a sunday, because on sundays i don't do anything that smacks of work.

i was going to maybe tell you that i'm taking up disc golf, or i was maybe going to tell you about a present i bought yesterday for crashco, or complain about my neighbors (who did not seem to me to be hung over enough this morning), or tell you about a past or present project or even give you an update on the projects for which i am behind, like august is half over and i haven't even clocked my july photos.

what i am pointedly NOT telling you is that it's that time of year again. i am NOT telling you that monday it will have been three years and although i thought i was going to feel better about it, i don't. what i am not telling you is that monday i'll go and put on my reds and go ride the fourcross course and then i'll meet up with cr and i'll talk and cry and maybe we'll go down to the richmond church to pray and maybe we'll go throw some rocks off a cliff and maybe we'll watch a silly movie and i'll cry some more or maybe i won't but next week i'll feel better and the week after that i'll go out to play and the week after that i'll go on a vacation and then there will be only two weeks left before i go out on the road and the next thing i know it will be christmas.

then it will be ski season and i'll build a snowfort and it will melt and then i'll hit the road again and before i know it four years will have passed and i'll be sitting here on a monday night telling you that i thought i'd feel better about it but i don't.

and then one year i will look up and realize that i do.

i hope.

things i love but can't afford

today i was at the lake champlain maritime festival and i went to look for something else and came across the most AWESOME vendor booth; this woman named lisa does these incredible charts carved in wood. these things are amazing and the first thing i had to do was drag cr along to see them.

these things are stunningly gorgeous and you really have to see them for yourself, but you can at least go over to lisa's website and get an idea of the thing.

i have not met lisa and i do not represent her in any way, but if there's one thing i love, it's a map. i'm naturally predisposed to like things carved outta wood and i also like pretty things. so you show me a pretty map carved outta wood and i just stand there with my mouth open.

even though you can't possibly see how gorgeous these things are from this picture or any picture, you should go over to lisa's site and look at her slideshow.

you know, if you like maps. or things carved outta wood.

traffic

two days ago i was coming down college street in burlington and there was a guy with a trailer blocking the intersection. he had a red light, so now nobody can go down college street. his light turned green and he still went nowhere, but one might have hoped it was just a delay as sometimes happens, so i, as the first driver in line waiting at the opposing right, entered the intersection along with the drivers behind me, expecting him to move.

he did not. now we are three cars blocking the intersection from the opposing direction.

two light cycles later, the trailer is still no farther along, and college street is still completely blocked off.  now battery street is blocked, too. nobody is going either direction along battery or lake for a block either way.

two more light cycles later, the trailer moves JUST enough to permit traffic coming down college to squeeze around him, allowing the traffic on battery to move in one lane, at least. the people coming up college were out of luck, but i don't know how it all came out.


View Larger Map

two things

last night just before we ran the blue course a monster storm hit. it didn't last long, but let's just say it made things moist. and blow-y. kind of uncomfortable, but i ran my fastest time on it, at four minutes better than any other run. that's kind of cool.

no, it's very cool.

and speaking of cool, if you do not know karen, you can find her here. i found her there by accident and started following along (i do that) and hers is among my favorite blogs to read. yesterday was her birthday, so i took a photo of a thing i know she likes and made a little digital gift to send her.

mount washington

i believe i told you that when i had processed my mt. washington pictures i'd post them so you can look.

at the end of last month my mom sent me on a short vacation to gorham, nh, which turned out to be just the thing. my first full day there i thought maybe i'd do some touristy things and decided to make my way (via some geocaches) over to the mt. washington auto road.

the fee you pay to drive that road seemed rather expensive to me, but in the end it was worth every penny. the road itself is fun to drive and the scenery is stunning and it gave me a chance to go up there and hang out on the mountain without having to walk all the way up, which was fine with me.

once i was up there i walked about a half mile down the tuckerman ravine trail, and that took me a couple of hours. it's slow going with my knees, and a half mile was plenty for me, thanks. going up was much easier and took less time and it's the kind of terrain where you can tell by how people move who has good knees and who hasn't.

back up at the top i had time to wander around and look at stuff and in general just have a good time, achy feet and knees and all.

the pictures are posted over in their usual place, so you can go look at them there if you like.

new word cloud

i'm pretty sure that i said that periodically i'd make another word cloud from my blog feed and post it here. today seemed like as good a day as any to post the update.

'bout honkin' time

i have been promising to tell you about the bead project for so long now that you have probably begun to doubt its very existence if you cared enough to think about it at all.

in -what was it?- april i had this dream that i was supposed to make a set of prayer beads for a friend of mine. it was supposed to have fourteen beads, and designs based on the number fourteen.

 the cord had to be lavender, and it had to do with fourteen somehow, i thought. i tried different weight flosses and threads ans a couple of different patterns on a couple of different disc looms, but in the end i settled on seven strands of heavy two-ply thread that made a very nice cord.

i didn't know much about bead making, but jumped right in anyway, learning to make canes and to stretch them and to cut and recombine them. once i'd baked the beads i picked the best one from each of the fourteen designs for the prayer string, drilled a hole big enough for the cord, sanded them smooth, and buffed them with a dremel tool.

i left them loose to slide on the cord, each bead and the strands themselves carrying my prayers for this friend. they're heavy and smooth and feel good in your hand.

color challenge

i'm clearing off my desktop and another thing i have here is a fun color acuity challenge in which the object is to place the little color chips in order by hue, a thing that i found difficult, but i scored pretty well, so i guess i was more uncertain of my ability to distinguish hue than anything else.



here's my score:

ok, now i can get that off my desk. thanks for your patience.

rant

ok, a woman who writes a blog i read keeps one of those lists of things she wants to do in a set amount of time. that's not irritating in itself; it's a quiet little meme that does nobody any harm and some of the lists are very amusing.

what's annoying about this particular list (and no, i will not link you to it) is that one of her items reads "learn to use my camera in manual mode" and another reads "get my photography business up and running."

this latter item she has emended to read that this is already accomplished since she has ten "bookings" for photo shoots.

there seem to be a lot of people out there who fancy themselves professional photographers just because they have nice cameras and indulgent friends.

i'm sorry, but if you cannot use your camera in manual mode, you are not a professional photographer, no matter how many of your friends agree to give you money to shoot portraits of their families.

every bozo with a new DSLR camera and a good eye for composition is not a professional photographer, even if they have friends willing to pay to have them take pictures.

here are two items from professional photographers that i find interesting, though:

WTD?

the iphone fashion shoot

the camera i use, by the way, is a little canon powershot. it takes very nice pictures, is lightweight and can be used one-handed.

granted, sometimes i wish i could set it for a longer exposure than two minutes, or that it had a cable release, or that i had a little more control with it at the far ends of its performance range, but on the whole i'm very happy with it, for three reasons:

1) i can get some really nice pictures out of it.
2) it's easy to use, even in manual mode.
3) it's lightweight, sturdy, and inexpensive, so i can take it everywhere with me without worrying. this includes long road trips, winter hikes, boating days, rough weather, and rough terrain.

i am not a professional photographer. i just take nice pictures.

queen of the desert

my roommate looks dead when she's asleep. by day she smiles easily and smokes heavily and has all the wrinkle lines to prove it but while asleep her skin is smooth and waxy, yellow like jaundice.

suddenly her eyes snap open.

"you have to go get the head nurse!" she shouts. "you have to tell her to call 911 and go outside because tim is swinging from a pole!"

this is a fine how-do-you-do.

i'm still sleeping when she wakes up, and by the time i wake up, she is just coming in from downtown. this is a little disorienting to me. for starters, when i am this messed up i am accustomed to being in places where the inmates aren't allowed to take a bus downtown.

and my roommate, as bizarre as she is, has almost undoubtedly just come back from downtown. it is one of the few things she says that when fact-checked a little turn out to be true.

the room is covered with her stuff. there is furniture enough for two people, but she has filled all the drawers and every flat surface (including the real estate at the foot of my bed) with her clothing, her shoes, her books, her personal dishes, her seemingly endless collection of purses, her immense selection of costume jewelry, and goodness knows what-all else.

she offers to empty out a drawer for my things, but i'm happy living out of my bag.

the social worker offers to have her move her stuff from the foot of my bed, but really there's no place else to put it, except the middle of the floor.

my roommate seems to change clothes every hour. i think (although i may be wrong) that she has on a different outfit every time i see her, which is a lot. if what she is wearing is not predominantly animal-skin prints or gold lamé, it is almost certainly something in hot pink or lavender, sometimes both at once. her costume jewlelry (a pound or two at a time) is not entirely balanced by one each from her collection of once-fashionable sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats.

she is unsteady on her feet, and her voice is gravelly from years of heavy smoking. she keeps her right hand poised in the air as if she is the queen or the pope and may be called upon to wave from the motorcade or bestow a blessing on the crowd.

she is very elegant, or wishes to appear to be very elegant, as if this place is just a stopping point between polo matches or that her condo in west palm (as she calls it) is being painted.

she is fluent, she will tell you, in french, spanish, italian, russian, latin, and sunni.

"sunni?" the social worker asks.
"you know, the language they speak in ahghanistan." she says dismissively.
"farsi?"
"yeah, that."

nevermind that latin is not spoken conversationally anywhere anymore, even though my roommate insists that it is the primary dialect of her favorite city, rome.

i am not fluent in any language except english, but i have studied enough of the others to know that she speaks none of them. she wishes to converse with me in french, but her command of the language does not go beyond "comment allez-vous?" and "n'est-ce pas?", which you can pick up easily enough if you only watch enough tv.

her ex-husbands, which number four, are all rich and famous, and two of them left her all of their money, which is why when her disability check comes every month she gives it all away to important-sounding charities that either do not exist, or do not exist as she imagines them.

much of her money goes to the revlon foundation; joseph revlon, the cosmetics company founder, invented the pink breast cancer ribbon. he is a good friend of hers.

go ahead, google it all.

she will tell you the street addresses of her many elegant homes and the famous people who frequent them.

"of course," she says, "money is never a problem", but in the next sentence she is trying to sort out the bus schedule so she can get on the proper bus to go to the salvation army thrift store in order to buy winter clothing (she has never wintered anywhere but florida and hawaii) using the voucher they gave her for free clothing.

the bottom line is that she is homeless and all that stuff piled in that room she shares with me is all her stuff in the world. she is desperately trying to be a gracious lady of some means and a gentle life but the truth is she's looking for some cheap rathole that she can afford to live in on her small disability check.

the fictions she composes are the remains of a broken mind trying to hang on to some shred of dignity and grace and the gulf between who she is and who she wants to be is far too wide and her delusions go spinning out of control, her mind trying to attach to any detail that seems rooted in reality but maybe not the harsh reality of her broken-down life and she can't actually tell the difference between what's real and what's not.

so she reinvents herself out of whole cloth and wraps herself in this other life that she cannot possibly sustain. she is not well enough to see who she is, and the paradox is that if she could see her life as it is, the pain of it might break her open like a sack of flour on the railroad tracks.

are you who you want to be? how great is the gap between who you are and the person you want to think you are? if you had to face the truth, would you break open? are you better off not knowing?

my roommate is afraid people will see through her. she is afraid that if she asks the bus driver how to get to the thrift store that he will announce for all the world to hear that she is too poor to buy her own clothes.

another time waster!

maybe i should blog about something current, but it turns out i have a backlog of things i keep meaning to write about and if i just tell you this one thing i can get it off of my desktop and make room for something else.



it's a fun little online toy that illustrates fun mathematical concepts that can be applied to the growth of an organic population.


http://sixfoottallrabbit.co.uk/gameoflife/

there. now i can clear it from my desktop.

have fun.

signs of trouble

on my way home today i saw two signs that were to me vaguely disturbing.

one was a plain black and white that said simply:

NO
SHIT

i have no idea what this was a reference to, nor any clue about its context.

and then i was passing through a town and i'm pretty sure there was a sign outside a church listing the time of the sunday service as being at 10:01.

huh?

weird.

drive-thru of DOOM

it wasn't actually the drive-thru that was deadly; that was moving smoothly. but "in-store ordering corral line of doom" just doesn't sound catchy, you know?

so this morning i was still pretty tired out from yesterday (read: still tired from the whole honkin' month of july) and i got up and went to church at the congregational church here in gorham.

after church i came back to the motel and had a little nap and then went out in bike clothes thinking that i might find some geocaches by bike and then drove down hogan road (get your own map) looking for some kind of connection with the rail trail but even as the road became more and more remote and in one place crossed the rail trail on the back of the river, i was unable to find anything that looked like a regular and public access to the rail trail.

so i never did ride, but i got to drive an awesome back road and i got to see and incredible view of which i have beautiful pictures. i'd share them with you, but i still can't upload.

so it was late in the day and i was tired. i went back to my room, changed clothes and then went out to get some dinner. i like the BK A1 steakhouse burger (not an endorsement but more of a confession), but i do not want that gigantic meat patty that comes on the XT. since this is a special order that sometimes baffles the counter help, i always go inside.

it was not the special order that caused the clustertangle. the woman at the counter, while very pleasant, just kept taking orders but did nothing to actually put the food in bags and get it out to people. i watched the drive-thru customers come and go and the line pile up inside.

still she took orders.

at BK they have this cool little computer screen on which orders show up and are filled as the people in the kitchen make the food. and it has a spiffy clock counter on which you can see how long each customer has been waiting.

the average wait time this evening was fifteen minutes and then some. the kitchen crew was fully competent; they kept the food rolling out of the kitchen and stuff was just piling up. the drive-thru orders kept going out and the drive thru guy respectfully suggested (absolute truth) that the counter lady stop taking orders and start filling bags and she would not or could not tear herself away from it until there was nobody left in her line.

it wasn't like she had an attitude problem; she simply seemed unable to cope. she really seemed to want to make things work, but even when she stopped taking orders she was unable to start pushing them out until she had wiped down some trays and put in fresh liners while people who had been waiting fifteen minutes for sandwiches that were already made watched and boiled over quietly.

i do not think she's going to last very long at the BK in gorham.

up and down

it is no longer a mystery vacation; ihave landed in gorham, nh. i have lots and lots of nice pictures to show you, but the wifi here at the motel won't support posting them.

today i got up in the morning and made my way slowly (by way of several geocaches) over to the mt. washington auto road. twenty-three dollars maybe seems too steep (unintended pun erased and then allowed to stand), but it was five different flavors of awesome and i ended up spending pretty much the whole day at it.

it turns out i'm still pretty exhausted on top of being in general not up to my best conditioning, so even though i didn't go for a long hike, it was plenty hike for me.

from the top of the mountain i walked a half mile down the tuckerman ravine trail as far as the crossover and then it was three-o'clock and time for my turnaround.

back up at the top i hung around for a while and only started down around quarter past five.

that's quite some road, the toll road.

on my way down for a while i had a guy from new jersey riding close on my butt. i can't figure out why. i'm in a line of traffic on a very steep twisty road and it seems prudent to me to leave plently of space between me and the car ahead, but i guess it's a matter of taste.

strikes me that if you're in a hurry to get somewhere, the mt. washington toll road is not for you.

talk to you later.

pharmacy phun

ok, so i've been released and my mom thinks it would be a good idea to send me on a bit of a mystey vacation.

i know, it sounds scary, but it's only a mystery vacaction because i haven't decided where i'm going yet. when i decide, my mom is picking up he tab, which will be very nice. get me away from home and have a little fun.

i'm taking neurontin again, or at least its generic version, gabapentin.

i used to take it a long time ago and it worked pretty well for a while and then (as so often happens with psychiatric meds) it stopped working for me. sometimes when meds stop being effective, a break of a few years will give it enough of a rest to make it effective again, and if you have a lot of useful meds available you can go through the rotation every so many years.

when neurontin stopped working for me was right about when i changed psychiatrists, which was right about the time that the justice department went after pfizer.

see, neurontin is the kind of drug (it's classed as an anti-seizure med) that has a lot of useful and sometimes unpredictable side effects, and one of its side effects is mood stabilization.

now, it's perfectly legal for doctors to prescribe medications for off-label purposes, but it is not legal for drug company reps to recommend these drugs to doctors for off-label purposes, so when it came out that the pfizer reps were recommending to doctors this potential goldmine of useful medication, the justice department went after them.

and my new psychiatrist wasn't all that anxious to pull out her scrip pad to write a new scrip for a drug that the justice department is all over, especially since it wasn't doing much for me.

so i stopped taking it.

now, of course, my choice is pretty much this drug or no drug and we don't know yet if it will help me. it's not very expensive, and i didn't have any bad side effects with it, so even if it doesn't work, it's worth a try.

halfway home

well, if you're following my story it's pretty evident even if i don't tell you that i'm some kind of manic-depressive. the official diagnosis is bipolar I, rapid cycling.

a lot of the time i'm just fine or i'm just crazy around the edges, and even when i'm very crazy i have a very good assortment of coping skills and friends and family who take care of me and even when things get really bad usually all that happens is i need to be babysat for a day and then i take things easy for a day or two and then i return to being fine.

over the past few weeks, there's been no returning to fine. every couple of years i run into a patch like that. it's kind of complicated by my allergies to pretty much every drug that works, so that's difficult.

our operating assumption this far is that sometimes even with good supervision and management the illness gets the best of me and it needs a good thumping back before the cycling breaks and i regain my tenuous hold on sanity.

for now i'm living in a sort of halfway house which is a story in and of itself, and we're going to try a medication that i was on a long time ago (another story i'll tell you later) but for now the increased supervision seems to be doing the trick. i'm letting it be someone else's problem for a few days.

right now i'm out visiting my home, which is kind of instructive in terms of how stable i'm still not, but information is power. i'll let you know how it goes.

trip the light fantastic

it's been over ten years since i went to a contradance, and brain damage has taken a lot from me, so i wasn't sure how much i would or would not remember but somewhere in the last couple of weeks as i've been slowly sliding off into the deep end toward heavy antipsychotics, i got it into my head that i HAD to go to a contradance, and SOON.

if you know me or if you've been following along, you know that i am sometimes bothered by irresistible compulsions or sticky, insistent thoughts and some of them are harmless and some not. for instance, i am not capable of putting my left sock on first. i also sometimes really need to put my pants on both legs at once (you know the old expression?) and i do not think i am capable of starting the dryer without patting it twice.

in terms of compulsions, those are fairly benign and there's no use wasting valuable energy resisting them. why bother with the anxiety?

more serious is my compulsion to show up at EVERY tuesday night run and EVERY wednesday night mountain bike race, and while those compulsions are fairly severe, they fit into my overall fitness plan and also add to my stability and get me out with my friends on a regular basis.

there's no point resisting those compulsions, either.

and last week i got it into my sick little head that i HAD to go to a contradance but missed last saturday's dance at the montpelier grange because i was home crying for most of the night. and thursday i was so depressed i lay in bed for nine hours, too depressed even to cry and i didn't eat or drink and at some point thursday night i figured it was time to get out of bed and force myself to do things whether i felt like them or not.

so i went for a mountain bike ride with crashco in the afternoon and in the evening we went to the mad robin callers collective contradance at the shelburne town hall, which was about seven different kinds of awesome. the crashcos had never been contradancing and it had been a long time since i'd been and it turned out that with the brain damage it might as well have been my first time but everyone was very sweet and they took care of us graciously and shepherded us through the dances.

now, we are accustomed to racing mountain bikes and fancy ourselves to be in pretty good shape or at least up to an evening of dancing, but i will tell you that the racecourse has nothing on these people and i was worn right out and today i'm sore in muscles i didn't even know i had.

but the really great thing about a contradance (and this i remember from before the brain damage) is that it's not about you finding a partner or you and your partner, but you and everyone in the room, because you move in and out of the figures with everyone around you as you progress up and down the sets and in some of the dances you dance more with your neighbors than with your partner and it is a polite social mixing at its best.

it's an old, old tradition and it's so beautiful and balanced that when you stand to the side and watch it, you could almost cry, it's so perfect.

every dance has in it a moment of such stunning geometry or physics of orbit so that it just takes my breath away; the repetition of simple patterns progressing and varying at small intervals and oh, my goodness!

the last dance before we left i was partnered with a young man who was very good at the dance, very handsome, charming, and flirty.  not flirty with any significance or intent, but flirty in that very genteel old-fashioned not-going-anywhere way.

he could have had a girlfriend or wife right at the dance even, but while he was dancing with me, i felt like the only girl in the room, which is a lovely measure of social artistry.

he swung me fast through moves i could not quite comprehend and the room just spun around me and i thought my face would break from smiling too broadly and he asked me if it was too fast and i laughed and said no, it was all kinds of AWESOME and so he swung me harder and gave me an extra spin to boot.

the race that wasn't

wednesday afternoon i was sitting at home thinking about how much i didn't want to get my gear on and go race, how miserable the race was going to be and a whole other host of unpleasantness but i knew i was going to go because i go every week. it's what i do.

it's what my friends do. we do it.

every week, no matter what.

so the filthy pouring rain is coming down and i get into my race clothes. regular short sleeves, but full-fingered gloves and i get to the venue and it's not raining, but it's pretty clear it's going to rain and that the rain is going to start at about our start time (we do this enough that we have a very good idea what distant clouds will get us, and how soon) and the crashcos arrive and park next to me and we're joking about how it's going to be another night when it's not going to be pleasant enough to be fun, but not bad enough to confer bragging rights.

so we get all ready and head over to the start. we're noticing some pretty strong surface winds blowing roughly northeast and watching the cloud layer blow very fast kind of south-southeast, and we're noticing that a cloud somewhere not too far away has some pretty big lightning in it and we notice that but by bit there are fewer and fewer people lined up to take starts.

furthermore, we notice that some of the people lined up to take starts are the people who normally start a half hour later and go more laps than us, so it looks pretty much like nobody wants to go around more than once.

and two minutes from start time the sky opens up. the rain comes down to such a degree that now the mood of the last remnant of the racers changes from grumpy to ebullient as the rain comes on full force and the wind whips up and we realize that it IS going to be bad enough to brag about after all and that tonight's race is going to be about shared suffering and the finish will not be judged by time but by attrition.

and the starter comes down the hill, waving us off.

"go home!" he shouts, over the wind. and faster than an actual race start, the riders are off to the parking lot. there is a general mood of celebration! we do not have to ride! we are not sure why we all feel like celebrating this event, the cancellation of this race, a thing we supposedly love, but celebrate we do.

some of us celebrate by going for a different, longer ride in the rain, and some of us celebrate by trooping off to local restaurants. the crashcos and i take pictures of each other, and then we head down to the bridge street cafe, where everything on the menu looks really, really good.

granted, everything on the menu typically looks good, but on this night everything looks REALLY good and for some reason i'm craving RED MEAT so i have the honey chipotle BBQ burger with fries and i ask for vinegar for my fries but the BBQ sauce that comes with the burger is so good i mop it up with my fries and nuts to the vinegar.

i am totally in love with the onion rings that come as part of my burger, and when the people at the next table are done, i notice that the lady leaves two of these onion rings on her plate. we laugh for a while about how funny it would be to just lean over and ask "are you gonna eat that?" and then we laugh about how funny it would be to wait until they leave and then take them. we laugh about a few other scenarios and then we laugh HYSTERICALLY when crashco casually reaches over and snags the onion rings before the table gets bussed. he puts one on his plate, and one on mine.

we laugh some more.

and we eat them.

running late

well, now that july is nearly over, i'm pleased to announce that i  have finally clocked my june photos.

if you're following along, you already know that i take a picture every thirteen hours, wherever i am, no matter what i'm doing. yesterday i got the brilliant (i thought) idea to compile some data about my daily activities based on the photos, now that i have six months of my life documented at handy thirteen hour intervals.

i guess i could make some cool charts or graphs and answer the question "what exactly do you do with your time?", as if anyone had asked.

still, while i'm compiling photos, it does give me pause. snapshot life is not life, and it is not the moments we think of. it is not all the best moments, nor is it the important moments, nor the moments we necessarily want others to see.

for better or for worse, here's june:

here, kitty.

yesterday i had a CAT scan. it's about that mountain bike crash i had a month ago and from which i still have localized abdominal pain. we don't think i'm going to die from it, but we think maybe i could'a' hurt something and maybe we ought to check.

anyway, they don't want to give me the IV dye contrast, because not only do i have multiple drug allergies and fall in the high-risk group with regard to this dye, but i once had a severe reaction to IVP dye and although they wouldn't be using that exact dye today, it places me in the crazy high risk group for a deadly reaction, although they don't phrase it quite that way.

nobody has any worry about giving me a whole buncha vile quasi-banana flavored barium shake, and i have to drink two of them. it's not bad enough i have to drink them, but they want me to drink them slowly over the space of an hour, a half hour each, so chugging the horrid things to get them down while they're still cold and therefore less, uh, objectionable is out of the question.

i wanted to take a whole bunch of pictures of the machine for you, because if you are reading this blog you probably have at least a passing interest in things that interest me, and i am naturally attracted to big, clean looking machines (but phobic about big rusty, clanky ones), big smooth holes, things with buttons, whirly things, and things with patterns of lights.

an EEG is almost a dream come true for me. a CAT scan is still pretty cool.

if i'd have pressed the issue they may have let me take pictures of the machine, but i had already asked if i could keep an empty barium shake jar as a souvenir and i was already on their list of odd.

down the road

here's the elevation profile of a trip from the church to my house:



last week i told you that i would test out a new toy and let you know if it was cool or not.

it is.


http://www.geocontext.org/publ/2010/04/profiler/en/

that "en" on the end is very important if you are an english speaker, because you will not enjoy sorting out the instructions in the main language of the site, which appears to be polish.

li'l 'splosion

if you've been following along, you know i spent most of the month of may on the road. you may also know that i spent memorial day weekend in central new york, which is a place i like to be and when it came time to guess where i might touch down for the weekend and make reservations at a campground (try getting a free site or even a paid one on short notice), i guessed there.

of course i was wrong. i ended up in northern maine, but that gave me an opportunity to come home and tidy up a little and go out more leisurely, since i had reservations and everything.

and it was warm out there during the day. my ice held out and my cooler was cold except for a very brief period on monday, which is when the brand-new half gallon of milk curdled.

it did not go sour; it simply went largely solid, which was a little bit of a surprise to me, but i'm interested in this sort of thing and once kept a half gallon of milk unrefrigerated for many months and even moved it to a new home, finding a place to enjoy my "science experiment".

i guess if you have no real purpose and no real observations other than "huh. that's cool.", you can't really call it a science experiment. at some point my mom was tidying up here a few years ago and found it under the sink and threw it out.

"hey! where did my milk go?!?" i asked, irritated.
"what milk?"
"the jug under the sink."

i got that look that i assume moms everywhere give.

"it was a science experiment," i whined.

anyway, i had this brand-new jug of suddenly curdled milk and i didn't have the energy to dump it out so that it wouldn't clog the plumbing, so i just set it out on the porch figuring i could decide what to do with it later.

it sat there quite unremarkably until one day there was a loud POP and when i went out later i saw that the lid had blown off. it wasn't growing mold or anything, though, so i pretty much let it be and i have enjoyed watching its progress over the past several weeks as i go in and out of the house.

nothing to write home about; a lot of whitish clotty-looking stuff.

and then yesterday i went to put out some recycling and my whole front stoop was wet and smelled powerfully of expired cheese and there were bits of curd blown out on the lawn.

apparently it involved some fermentation and the thing had blown up quite spectacularly, jetting its water (whey?) out in some kind of geyser across the porch. i regret that i did not see the explosion, but i did manage to take pictures of the inside of the container, now once again peaceful.

my streak is over.

i hold the all-time record for most consecutive last place finishes in the tuesday night running series at catamount, at twenty consecutive starts in the series and twenty consecutive last place finishes.

that's a season and a half of showing up to every race, running my best, and finishing last.

when i first believed i was the record holder in this category, i went back many years in the records to find that for the most part last place finishers or even those finishing in the last dozen places or so come every now and again, but they do not generally come every week.

two seasons ago i was last in every race.

then last season in the opener betty (who was 81 years old and had just run a marathon on sunday) slowed a little to let me finish ahead of her, not realizing she wasn't doing me any favor.

my streak was still good and running strong until last night when a woman finished behind me.

i do not think anyone will ever break my record, but i'm still sad to see my streak come to an end.

pickled peas

i told you i'd write later about the peas.

there's a lot i keep telling you i'll write about and i promise i'll get to it sooner or later.

i was reading some blogs and it was wednesday night or thursday morning and i was therefore about to do my grocery shopping and i happened to see a recipe for pickled snap peas which i thought sounded very tasty and a nice thing to make with friends coming over for the weekend.

as other people have noted, although the recipe calls for the peas to pickle for a couple of weeks, they are nicely lightly pickled after only a couple of days, and very good.

here's the recipe if you're interested.

liquid sunshine

don't ask me how "let's get together sometime next week to finish watching a movie we were watching" turned into five people coming for movie night, but somehow it happened and i'm really happy it's going to happen, but i'm still just a little confused.

the heat broke enough to cook, which is good because i got to do all the stove-using prep work before people get here, which in the summer is a good thing.

it's a good thing cr is bringing the pizzas.

but i'm making (have made) a really nice VERY dark chocolate mocha custard that verges on bitter, but the dish is lined with caramel, so it's velvety and you can manage the sweetness yourself.

there's also a little number with some pickled peas that i'll talk about later, but what i wanted to tell you about was the simple syrup. tomorrow i'm going to make a nice fresh lemon/limeade and i like to use a honey-based syrup and i had it in the pan and it was so beautiful and sunshiny that i took a picture of it for you.

online toys

it will be no surprise to you that i like toys.

for today i'm giving you a little list of a few online timewasters toys that i like and wish to share with you.

click on these links at your own risk; and not if you're on deadline about anything.



http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix

is a little thingy that lets you play with sound and rhythm ans it is totally addictive.


http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments/flame/index.html#top

play with color and movement! this guy has some other cool graphics toys you can play with, too.

http://www.badarguments.org/ba/

do you suspect that the person you're arguing with is not just a whack-a-loon, but suffers from stupid, bad argument? you can brush up.

http://www.wordle.net/

i think i have mentioned this one before. i never get tired of it, though.

http://www.flash-gear.com/stereo/

make cool little stereograms. then get obsessed with them and buy an inexpensive piece of software that will allow you to put your entire life on hold while you play with creating them, even though you never really could get them to work for you.

kind of like that colorblind guy i used to know who was obsessed with the color blue.

he was also heavily schizophrenic, so he was likely at odd intervals to hold up an object suddenly and shout loudly "is this BLUE???"

i have another thing i found but i haven't played with it yet, so i don't know how it works. if it's cool, i'll let you know.

yes, i do.

all right.

it's tuesday night and still too hot to sleep and maybe tonight's numbers are already posted but there's no use checking my time; i know i was slower than molasses on a january morning, but i didn't care because i didn't expect to do any better than just finish, which by the way makes my awesome streak just about unbeatable.

nobody will ever break my record: i now have twenty -TWENTY- consecutive last place finishes to my credit in this race series, which is pretty close to a season and a half of showing up to every one, running my little heart out, and coming in last.

it is a badge of honor.

but what i wanted to say is that i know some of you have looked at my profile. at least i don't remember looking at it that many times and maybe i have, but i think i'd remember that.

anyway, for some reason or another i looked at my profile a couple of days ago and i realized: that's quite a list of blogs i follow.

so to answer your question, or the question i imagine you might ask, yes, i do read them all. i read them, and i read others that don't show up on the list. every honkin' entry. if you have nice formatting or good pictures, i even click through to your site instead of reading it in reader.

and if one takes the time to sort through the endless sea of randomly scattered stuff, one discovers real live interesting people. regular people with interesting lives, or regular lives that are interesting because the story is written well, or there are nice pictures, or -who am i kidding?

we all like to look.

i used to work as a storyteller. what people liked was that point where i opened up my chest and showed them that little place where i keep my heart and i think we're all a little like that.

if i'm reading your blog, chances are that i stumbled onto it by accident, just reading random blogs. i do that. i don't think any of my real life friends keep blogs, and i don't twitter or facebook, so i maybe wouldn't know.

but when i look at your pictures of your flowers, or your vacation, or i read about your dog's latest trick or your bike ride in the rain or the cookies you made or the class you're taking, you are showing me that little place where you keep your heart.

i'm an outsider and i don't have the privilege if i meet you on a bus or in line at the grocery store, but sometimes i think because i'm reading your blogs, i am looking at the people on the street as if they may have lives just as beautiful and interesting as yours.

barbecue pit

this is what i did today, along with the rest of the folks from the williston federated church.

i think the smell of barbecue won't come out of my nose until tuesday.