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.

extruded oddity

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

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

a different benedictus

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

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

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

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

you can find the podcast here.

literacy

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

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

so i decided to go out and look for them.

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

a note! i could leave a note!


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

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

and i went off to find my parents.

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

knowledge is power. literacy is power.

where the week has gone

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

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

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

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

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

i promise.

clearing my desk

ok, ok, ok.

i just have to close some tabs, you know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

i think these involuntary collaborations are very funny.

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

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

The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

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

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

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

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



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

 

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

up and down and up

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

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

everything else is a waste of my time.

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

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

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

Elegy

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

like i got a choice

blast.

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

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

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

worn out

things have not been going well for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

all right.

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

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

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

you'll be glad to know

too much; it's too much.

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

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

-whew!-

(like it was a possibility.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

cookies.

yeah.

lemon fresh

snow.

more shoveling than is good for me.

napping.

frozen roads.

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

and it was, too.

just TRY to be decent.

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

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

so.

THEN i went to my appointment.

and people are idiots.

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


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

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


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

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

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

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



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

snow biggie

ha. i think i'm funny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

thirteen september

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

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

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

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

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

nyah.

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

toys and the end of childhood

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

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

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

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

"my childhood is over!" she exclaimed.

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

(source)

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








so. completely unrelated: i promised you toys.

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

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

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

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

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

i gotta go.

scattershot

so i was all ready to go skiing today and the weather and conditions were prefect and they're not going to be so nice again until sometime next week, but if i haven't caught cr's cold, i have some low-level grunge and i just don't feel good.

it's possible that if i'd gotten dressed and gone out i'd feel better, but my throat's just a little swollen and my chest feels just a little nasty the way they do when you're doing pretty well at fighting the thing off and while some exercise and sunshine might have been in order, i just had a hunch that it would be better to lay low and keep warm.

i did have the energy to toss in some laundry and clean the upstairs bathroom.

in the meantime i clocked half of the september photos, and i also managed to put up a new design at my zazzle store. i'm not selling a lot of stuff, but hey, you never know. i also managed to lay out a little spreadsheet and enter data about how i'm spending my life according to the snapshot life of the thirteen project, so although i have no cool visualizations of that data yet and no concrete idea of how i'm going to play with that data, i at least have the first month entered in a table that i can mess with.

i think i'm going to rework an old theme into a new piece suitable for lent, which then maybe i can do with donna-sue and cr, who are awesome to work with. it was the last idea before i went to bed last night, and i haven't done much with it, but it's in here somewhere.

in the blogosphere the latest news is that the drawing is complete, thanks to peg and mybabyjohn:



it's kind of a fun game and i think i want to play more of it.

i may never catch up with the gigantic story, or even news from my kitchen, but it's naptime for me.

hey, that looks good.

so i was reading this post and the number two on that list caught my attention and i've been keeping it open on my desktop just to remind me that it sounded good and that i intended to make it sometime soon or something like it so yesterday after i was done grocery shopping i made a generic roast of some sweet potatoes and some mushrooms and some beets (the beets i used later for something i'll tell you about later) and i made this wrap, thinking that i would take it to church as my bag lunch for the meeting.

i had caramelized onions already. did you know that you can caramelize a whole bunch of onions at once and they keep nicely in the fridge a while, or in the freezer indefinitely?

handy to know.

anyway, i roasted the veggies separately and generically; a little olive oil and some salt and pepper. i slathered pesto on a warmed-up wrapper (spinach) and piled on the roasted veggies and warmed-up onions and oh, my goodness! this thing is good. you should run right out and make yourself one.

beats tuna salad any day.

and unrelated, if for some reason you decide to follow me on twitter, what you're going to get is mostly the odd thing i find that's worth mentioning, but i'm not going to write a blog about it. today i'm interested in harper collins' ridiculous announcement that they're going to destruct the ebooks libraries purchase after twenty-six checkouts.

i am not sure why they're doing that, except to make librarians think that their acquisition dollars might be spent in better ways beside buying harper collins ebooks.

greedy hatwipes.

drawing update

peg very gamely drew a part for me, and sent it back to me to draw, so now someone should please have a whack at the next part and we'll see what we get.

http://www.drawandfoldover.com/drawing_80706fc8-45a0-11e0-b475-002219876be3

help me out.

i'm testing a new little online toy and i need a volunteer or two to play.

i drew a head. you draw the next part.

http://www.drawandfoldover.com/drawing_da81a480-4507-11e0-b475-002219876be3

and send it to someone else. we'll see what we get. it's an interesting concept, brought to you by the campaign for drawing, whose work i am in favor of.

could be fun.

meantime, i feel lethargic today. i took cr to the airport and i'm roasting some vegetables, but i haven't worked on anything "real". i haven't processed photos, or finished the reading i'm supposed to do, or worked on snohaus, although i did do the grocery shopping, and like i said, i have things in the oven.

still, when i settle to do quiet work, i feel too sleepy.

early bedtime for me.

dark and strong

today it was fantastic skiing. and i know it's childish, but when i got on the lift i noticed right away that i was in chair 70 on the #1 line, so i went ahead and took a picture.

and i skied longer than i should have, so i'm tired and weepy and i hurt.

but it was still good.

the thing i want to tell you about, though, is the ice cream. saturday i made dark chocolate ice cream and never you mind why. it's awesome, though, if you like your chocolate dark. i used only enough sugar to take the astringent feeling out of it. and because i'm working by feel and not from a recipe, my instructions here are only an approximation, but you can probably replicate my results without trying too hard.

of course you should use the best quality chocolate available to you. and they always say to use fresh-brewed coffee in recipes, but since i never make coffee, i use instant. it's probably be better with an equivalent of high-quality fresh brewed, but i use what i have.they say coffee intensifies the taste of chocolate.

and my eggs come from a guy i know and not the store, so blast if i know what size they are. kind of smallish, but regular-size looking yolks. there's so much chocolate in the recipe that you need egg yolks to stabilize it. quite frankly, there's just enough cream to hold the chocolate and that's about it.

4 oz. unsweetened chocolate
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup sugar more or less according to taste
a tablespoon or two instant coffee

3 egg yolks, whisked

about 2 cups cream. add enough so that the chocolate stays in the mixture without falling out. you kind of have to do this by feel.

heat the everything but the eggs and cream on low heat until the chocolate melts in completely, whisking frequently. if you need to turn the heat up to let it simmer, you can do that. when it just about comes to a simmer, add a little of the mixture to the whisked egg yolks to temper them and then add them into the mix. when that's just below a simmer, add the cream and whisk it until it's smooth.

this is the part that requires the most guesswork: there's a good custardy consistency you're looking for where the yolks thicken and smooth the mix but not too thick and there's enough cream to carry the chocolate in emulsion.

then chill the mix and when it's cold, either toss it in the blender or use an immersion blender until it's really, really smooth. or if you like little flecks of unsweetened chocolate, until it's almost smooth. both ways are good.


then toss it in the tank of your ice cream maker and do whatever you usually do. it'll be awesome. no, you don't have to share if you don't want.

13 august

i know i've been going on and on about meaning to clock the august photos and process them, but i really was working on them!

i just finished editing the video and posted it.

if you've just come in on the story, ever since 1 january 2010 i have been taking a picture every thirteen hours and then i make the photos from each month into a video. i'm a little behind, mostly because when i got sick in august i lost the attention span required to process all those photos.

later on i hope to do a little data analysis of my snapshot life and maybe a cute infographic, but i'm still thinking about how to organize the data.

for now, though, i'm just happy to have posted the august video.

failures and delights

so i got it into my head that i had to make turkish delight. it's probably not important why exactly, and it probably cuts too close, but i wanted to make something sweet and delicate and interesting for cr.

it took a few tries. first i had a recipe that was missing some steps and all i had was hardened sugar syrup. then i kind of figured out what was going on and tried again, but i hadn't let the sugar syrup heat up enough, so it never set up right. nice flavor, but it wasn't going to harden enough to eat except with a spoon, not ever.

so then i looked at a different recipe, and started again.

i let the first batch simmer too long too hot and it caramelized a little, which was all right because it still had a nice taste and the lovely brown color suits the almond flavor i'd planned to give it. and then i figured out more of how to work it, and made two more batches over a couple of days, in rose flavor and lavender.

they're pretty and delicate, but they have an odd similarity to, uh, flesh tone.

...if you're pinkish.

...which i am.

anyway, i made a slideshow of my pictures, and here's a fun little video of the stuff simmering. it's very thick, so it's a SLOW simmer, which i thought was amusing enough to record.

kind of fun

ok, so i have some pictures for you of the thing from my kitchen, but i'm waiting for another batch to set, so nothing for you yet.

and i've been clocking photos, but it turns out i'm only halfway through august. AUGUST!?!? well. still workin' on it.

and i was going to write more things that i've been meaning to tell you, but i notice that i have a LOT of open tabs in that "interesting or fun things" window i have open in my browser, and maybe i ought to just finish up some stuff and close some tabs, ok?

plus it's snowing like a sonofagun, eight inches today and counting, so i have time to play with stuff here at my desk since it turns out there's no party for me to go to this evening.

so.

here's a funny sign that made me laugh. i like this sort of guerilla art, which leads me sort of to the next thing:

red bull has put up an awesome awesome collection of street art through google street view.  and if you like your art museum-y, there's a collaborative art project between street view and a bunch of art museums, which is also awesome.

and less cool but still entertaining: where the streets have your name, a fun little -you guessed it- map related amusement.

but then MAPS MEET THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!, which is super fun if your idea of fun is trying to escape zombies and keep from dying, and thanks to this cool toy you can now do it in your neighborhood. i don't usually browse in chrome, but it's worth opening up a second browser to play with. i managed to outrun the zombies (at the easy level) and get out of town, surviving nearly a half hour. apparently once you get away from them, you're safe, as long as you keep running. those first few seconds will get you nearly every time, though.

and while i'm not usually into the zombie apocalypse, i have TWO zombie-related links for you today. there's a neat interactive youtube thing called "editing the dead", which puts you right in the zombie action.

and then there's this comic:

it can be found at toothpaste for dinner.

that's it for today.

one in the morning

when your alarm clock goes off at one in the morning, what do you do?

• assume it's a mistake and roll over?
• wonder who has played this cruel trick on you?
• draaaaaag yourself outta bed for whatever activity you've misguidedly gotten yourself into?
• reach for your camera and take a picture?

yeah, that last one. at least that's what you do if you're me. every thirteen hours i take a picture. i don't even wake up anymore; i just take the picture.

and sometimes, apparently, just a little more. i was loading my photos onto my computer and i noticed a couple dozen pictures that were mostly just unidentifiable pink.

huh?

and then -oh!- that's an eye. hello. and that thing? oh, i really hope that's not - no, just a nose.

and what an interesting angle!

something white and flat?

oh. the ceiling.

and i wonder why i wake up feeling not fully rested?

willow

this morning i got ambitious and posted the two versions of willow over at my podcast.

the first is a simple voice and guitar arrangement from my album down the jericho road, and the second is the new arrangement i made last week thinking we might use it at church for a lenten service.

either way, they're there and you can hear them.

tunnel break

on day 30 of the snohaus build i managed to get far enough up into the tunnel to break through. here's a cool photo of the tunnel, and a video of the digging that broke through.

i am laying on my belly about twelve feet up the tunnel, and i have barely enough room to lift my head.

it is terrifying, but also awesome.






in other news, today i managed to get out of bed and go skiing. i have some pictures of that, and saturday i made a new arrangement of my song willow, and i was going to link you to a recording of that, but i notice that i never did put one up on my podcast, so there isn't one for you to compare it to. at some point i'll put those up, but i wouldn't hold my breath if i were you.

i still haven't clocked the october photos from the thirteen project, although i did manage to sequence them all.

and i was going through my pictures, looking for what i might have done or photographed to tell you about later and i found a very entertaining (to me, at least) series of pictures that i do not remember taking, but from the timestamps i can only assume i was heavily sedated.

so maybe you'll get to see those.

but not now.

now i'm going to bed.

short tour

here's the short tour of the outside of snohaus.

on the outside

ok, snohaus fans!

here's some video of the work on the outside of the structure from day 28.




later there will be some other pictures and some news about the construction, but yesterday it was a freakish sunny and sixty degrees and if you don't mind i'm just going to go out and survey the damage and begin the repairs. happily, there's new snow that fell overnight and it's going to be cold again this week, so once i get repairs laid in they'll stick a little.

fifty-nine blogs

today i thought i'd do a little thing i've been threatening to do. you know that i read random blogs and subscribe to ones i like.

i decided to visit a bunch of random blogs and pick out the best ones for you. but then the farther in i waded, the more i saw that today's crop of random wasn't yielding very much that's good or interesting. i had to visit fifty-nine blogs until i found ONE that i thought was worth subscribing to.

of the first fifty eight, here's my breakdown:

14 were well out-of date and not being updated.
14 were sicky-sweet cute mommy blogs.
14 were just plain not very good.
3 were commercial
3 were informational on topics of no interest to me
3 were way too preachy
2 were very bad writing
2 had auto-play music
1 was in a language i don't read
1 had bad formatting, and
1 was pretty good except it only gets updated every four or five months.

the winner is this blog here. i like it. maybe you will, too.

income

i'm pleased to see that someone just bought a bunch of one of my items at my zazzle store. i'm not sure what anyone is going to do with 15 ceramic ornaments with my dove design on them, but my cut of that is 10%, so that's money in my pocket i'd otherwise never see.

it's kind of awesome for me, because it was a design i made for cr and i just happened to have taken a pretty photograph of it before i gave it to her, and this winter i thought maybe i'd just make it available for people who might buy it.

i'm not marketing very aggressively, or even at all, unless you count the sidebar on my blog, so i'm always surprised when someone finds and buys one of these things.

i kind of want to know what they're doing with fifteen of the same product, though. are they reselling them? giving them as a gift to multiple people? awards for something? decorations for a church? a wedding? some event?

i guess if i'm going to sell this stuff, i don't get to be fussy about who the purchaser is or how they will use my designs. that's my copyright, and i still get paid.

paid. that's kind of awesome.

dove by flask_ehrlenmeyer

thrizzle

it was a bad day at snohaus; it was forty degrees and that's bad for the structure. there was a loss of height, and my neat edges and flat surfaces have eroded somewhat. late in the day when it started to cool down i was able to re-face some of the surfaces, but since the temperature is only going to be in the single digits tomorrow, there won't be much that's workable until wednesday.

and although i did get some things done today, editing video was not one of those things, so i have no fun snohaus pictures to show you.

and i don't feel like telling you about what's going on in my kitchen right now, although probably later i will tell you about it.

what i feel like telling you about is a comic book. i heard about it this fall while i was running around on backroads in the green mountain state forest, in an episode of the NPR culture blog monkey see and as the nice gentleman said, it is "not a 'graphic novel'; it is a comic book."

and it sounded so awesome that i thought i'd better get a copy for crashco if he'd never heard of it, since he likes comic books. and i looked it up when i got home and saw it wasn't all that expensive, so i got three. if a thing was going to be that awesome, i figured that i should have a copy, and so should my sister, who likes weird stuff.

tales designed to thrizzle #6.

now with TOO MUCH COLOR!

higher up and farther in

yesterday was kind of a big day in snohaus and i was excited to tell you about it, but it was dark so there are no pictures.

i wanted to figure out how far my tunnel has gone up because i didn't actually measure or do the math and only just eyeballed it, but that's a little hard to do when it involves irregular curved surfaces that change from day to day.

you can lay in exact lines in snow but it still settles and melts and compresses as you go, and between that and working inside and outside it's tricky to tell exactly how things will line up. of course, i use rough measures; eye level is about five feet for me, if i only look straight ahead. the sled is longer than a yard. i keep meaning to measure it or maybe bring out the yardstick, but i think maybe approximate lengths are good enough.

but the thing is that i have to know, sort of, where that tunnel is coming up. i have to know how close it is to the place where it will meet the second room that i haven't dug yet. i need to know if the angle is too steep, or not steep enough.

and then i had this idea: snow is translucent. i figured i could lay flashlights on the outside right up against the walls and then go in the tunnel to look for the light spots and then be able to mark on the outside how far up and along it's come.

of course, to do such a thing you have to wait until it's dark out. cr thought maybe i could have laid a big tarp over it.

that's funny, because cr hasn't seen it yet, and she doesn't really know how big this thing is. i have no idea where i would get a tarp that large outside of a military or industrial setting! and who has the energy to schlepp a thing like that around?

anyway, by my little dots of light i figured out that the top of my tunnel has reached the height of the raised walkway and that i'm only four or five feet from the place i need it to come out, so another day or two of digging will finish that.

now the tricky bit is still going to be building that second dome large enough to carve a small room out of it. the awesome thing is that i have figured out that the base will be so large that when i get done putting in the top room, there will be room in the base for a small room down in the trench.

trench?

you didn't remember mention of a trench, did you?

ah, well. there is one. tomorrow will be a big build day, and i promise to take pictures. i do not promise to have the energy to post them right away, because if i move all the snow i want to tomorrow, i am going to be cold and tired and need a nap.

abstract landscape

today is day 27 at snohaus. "massive" is one word that one of my neighbors has used to describe it. "crazy" is probably another, but not in my hearing. the children across the street have started building a snowfort with stairs and a little dug out area, and a guy across the way has built an igloo that he plans to spend the night in tonight.

i'm a veteran of winter camping, but i can't wrap my head around winter camping so close to a warm bed.

anyway, i'm finally going to tell you about a thing i've been meaning to tell you about for a long time:

last october, before the Very Bad Thing happened, i was at a potluck and the host tells me that i'm not to leave before he gives me a thing. it's a birthday present, nevermind my birthday is in december. it's large and light and wrapped in a garbage bag and handed over unceremoniously.

but what it is is this fantastic painting, the work of abbie bowker. a long time ago i was at a showing of hers and i can't begin to afford awesome paintings, but this one had my attention. i fell in love with it. the landscape is loosely based on a view of mount mansfield, which is a mountain i can see from my living room on a good day. it is the highest mountain in vermont.

i love vermont. i love mountains. i love things i can see from my sofa.

and i love this painting.

and now, courtesy of the artist, it's mine.

get a bucket

ok, the truth is that i was going to write about something else today, but plans change sometimes.

like my plans for snohaus. i'm getting close enough to finishing that tunnel and close enough to piling up the material for the second dome that i can start to think about other elements: more upward stairs? a terrace? bocce court?

but i was getting ready to go out for a while and a guy showed up with a bucket loader to push back the snow from the parking lot because the plow just hasn't been able to keep up and the driveway just gets smaller and smaller.

so now i have ENORMOUS piles of snow near my structure and that bad boy didn't do any damage, but how and where i mine the snow for building will necessarily change. so now i have descending stairs and a big trench and i moved a LOT of snow today and i'm tired.

tomorrow i intend to spend the whole day working on it, and maybe i will have interesting pictures for you.

while i'm indoors warming up i'm thinking of making a little something in a dark chocolate ice cream, and i'll let you know how that goes, as well.

the hole thing

yesterday was day 24 on the snohaus build. it goes slowly, because i want the structure to be stable and if you're not in a hurry the best way to do that is to let things sit a while after you disturb the snow.

digging INSIDE the hole goes very slowly because of that and because of my clautrophobia; there are only so many times in a day i can force myself to go on in there. still, the attractiveness of having built an awesome snow house outweighs the fear, but only by so much each day.

then there's the additional consideration of hypothermia. if i'm only building the outside, i have minimal contact with the snow, but once i go inside i am sitting or lying on the snow and that sucks the heat out of me pretty quick. extra layers help, but wear too many of those and when i'm active i only sweat.

even if i get the layers perfect for the day, moisture seeps into my clothes and once my outer shell is wet, i'm done for the day. i don't mind changing gloves and most days i wear three different pairs because they get wet as i work, but i only have the one shell that's good for digging in the snow. it's light enough to work in and has all the appropriate skirting to keep out snow, but once i'm crawling on my belly the arms get wet.

the tunnel is by far the scariest part, and the slowest. i'm digging it toward the second dome and because i haven't done the math but only eyeballed the distances, i'm not sure exactly where the tunnel will come up into the second room. and i'm still just building that second dome. even to make it a small room means a HUGE base, because its floor is a good three feet at least above the floor of the main room, and that means i haul in a LOT of snow.

one of my neighbors says that if i build it much bigger, i'll be able to ski off of it.

here's some video i shot inside the hole to show you what it's like digging in there. one thing you probably don't notice is that i do not go in or out of a hole without my yellow scoop in hand. sometimes i leave the shovel behind, but i always keep the yellow scoop with me.

why?

in case of a cave-in. the structure is well-packed and it sets every day and i'm confident of its strength, but just in case, you know? if part of the structure collapses on me, i'd better have a tool to dig with.

ya gots ta laugh

ok, so i'm still working on snohaus, and maybe soon i'll have more pictures for you. and there are a couple of videos i might link you to later, but not now because i don't feel like it. and i was reading blogs today and i'm kind of grumpy about one that i used to like a lot where the lady used to write about stuff she was doing, but now her blog is one giant collection of STUFF SHE LOVES, complete with links that you can use to buy the stuff, and the only reason i keep reading her is that she's taken blog whoring to new heights.

the thing about it, though, is that most of the stuff she posts about, except for the link exchanges with other ladies desperate to gain readers and count hits, is that by the time she posts about any given thing it's already been going around the internet for a couple of weeks and isn't even OLD news.

my analysis is that while she had a lot of content, she had a handful of actual readers and she was interesting. now she has nearly no real content but lots and lots of "readers", but something tells me that it's worse than tupperware parties. it's like collecting facebook friends and twitter followers just to collect them, and you just KNOW most of those visitors are only there because they're trying to drive visitors to their own sites.

it's on my mind because i just read her most recent post, which is all about how many visitors she has. her post yesterday was a commercial for a product very similar to the shamwow. the post wasn't anything more than advertising copy, and a lot of it, disguised feebly as pleasant chat.

no, i'm not going to link you to it. i'm just not. but i will quote her verbatim (italics mine):

(product name and link removed).
Sounds all spacey and cool huh?
Oh it is.

I recently came across (product name and link removed) while looking for a better option when it came to cleaning up wet messes and scrubbing down the kitchen, bathroom and dishes. I normally run to my paper towels or to those yellow and white checkered kitchen rags that stain and fall apart after 2 uses. I hated buying paper towels only to see them pulled off two and three long and wasted on a small clean-up job!! Seemed like such a waste!

Well, I found my solution in (product name and link removed) They boast a better cloth that is also environmentally friendly! Did you know that 2.5 million tons of paper towels are used annually!? The (product name and link removed) is made from renewable and raw materials such as cellulose (a derivative of wood) and cotton! One (product name and link removed) is comparable to 15 rolls of paper towels! What savings!!!


so. i didn't mean to go all grumpy on you. what i MEANT to do was give you a short list and linkdump to my favorite webcomics, because i loves me my comics and i thought i'd like to tell you which ones i read regularly.




instead of trying to tell you about them, i'm just going to give you a list.  you do your own clicking.

xkcd
toothpaste for dinner
the oatmeal
the non-adventures of wonderella
the adventures of superhero girl
saturday morning breakfast cereal
questionable content
girls with slingshots
cyanide and happiness
comic jk - you have to be pretty nerdy for this one. sometimes i am not nerdy enough.

and not really a comic strip, but laugh-out-loud and brilliant: hyperbole and a half.   you probably know about her, though, because everyone seems to know about her. i've been reading her for a while, but last week i heard them talking about her on NPR, so pretty much everybody knows now.

claustrofun

yesterday was day 22 on the snohaus build. it was too warm by midday to do a lot of structural work, but i managed to move some snow and make some progress on the connecting tunnel.

right now the connecting tunnel doesn't actually connect anything, but if you look at this picture of the upper walkway, i'm putting a second dome just to the left of where i'm standing to take the picture and underneath that long wall is going the tunnel to connect the two domes in an indoor sled run. i think it will be very cool.


this second picture shows the upper walkway from down my the entrance to the main cave. down the end of the walkway is where the second dome is going. it's not possible to see from the photo that behind the wall is a massive conical base that goes all the way down to the ground. the top of the structure there is maybe six and a half feet off the ground.

but then you get into the nitty gritty, the part that terrifies me, the part that terrifies peg. it's big enough now that once i ride my sled through the tiny little entrance hole i can sit up and even kneel comfortably, and it's big enough to use a shovel inside, so if i don't think too hard about the tunnel that i'm building my heart rate is almost normal.

but see? next to the sled? next to the entrance hole? that's the mouth of the tunnel. why yes, it IS very small. it is only large enough for me to creep in on my belly, which i do on the sled. because the tunnel slants up, i have to work hard to creep up, but then all i have to do is release my grip and i come flying out the bottom.



it goes far enough now that when i'm digging in there, i am entirely up in there, which makes me need to concentrate very hard on the digging and not so much on the not being able to move so much or lift my head, because if i think about those things i feel my stomach coming up.

happily, like i said, all i have to do is release my hold and i come sliding out backward.

dinnertime

i was maybe going to post for you the new pictures from the snowfort, where things are now very, very scary inside.

but it's kind of late in the afternoon and what i'm thinking about is dinner. today what i have to eat is awesome leftovers, lunch and dinner.

i have some tasty pasta e fagioli, which for some reason is pronounced "pasta fazool". i got the recipe here, and it's good. and last night i made this recipe for mushroom risotto with caramelized onions. i never met a caramelized onion i didn't love.

anyway, it's time to go forage. i think there will be some cheese involved, too. and i'm pretty sure i have some ice cream for dessert.

on my board

last week i made bread. it's a good heavy sweet bread that makes excellent toast and i think i promised to tell you about it or to post the recipe or something.

you can make it fully kneaded, or as a no-knead. the more you knead it, the denser it will be.

i'm going to assume that you know your breadmaking basics and let you go from there. of sourse i use the maple syrup from the isham farm, but you're welcome to use any premium syrup you like.

maple barley malt (a mostly complete recipe)

about equal parts white flour and barley flour, totaling about nine cups
2 or three tablespoons yeast
1 cup grade b maple syrup
1/2 cup malt syrup
1/2 cup vegetable oil
four or five cups of water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon salt

prove your yeast in a cup of water with a little sugar. when you come back to it, combine your wet ingredients in your bowl and add in the salt and the flour, alternating barley with white.

if you're going to knead it fully, use more flour. if letting it sit for a no-knead, more liquid.

either way, when it's the right consistency, let it rise. you know, until it's ready. then punch it down and form it into loaves or put it in pans.

bake it at 350° for about a half hour. it's done when it makes that lovely hollow sound when you thump it.

chops

on the seventh of december in the evening a small woman came onto the ward and she was all full of some kind of attitude. i didn't have any clue what she was about, but she was all toughness and defiance. and on the back of her neck she had a tattoo, the kind that your pimp will sometimes brand you with, but it was a weird kind of mark; crossed fork and knife.

you meet all kinda people up there, and you can't assume what kind of life they're having.

in the morning we learned that this woman was a professional chef. and that tattoo, i thought, was a very funny and dark joke. i knew i was going to like this woman.

and we're sitting on a sofa in the common area, pretending to be reading while pandemonium goes on around us.

i say "pretending", because what we were really doing was eavesdropping and it was fascinating.

and without looking up, she says to me: "damn. i majored in cultural anthropology. and i forgot to bring my notebook!"

double dip

sorry to go all extra-postal on you, but i wanted to respond to a comment i got about my snohaus and claustrophobia: during last year's construction i went on at some length about my claustrophobia and you can read it here.

if you want to read the other posts about last year's construction, you can find those here:

invasion of the mole people
into the hole again!
keep digging
round two
snohaus
fall of the house

i think that about sums it up for snohaus posts, but i also realize that today is february second, and i always try to sneak in a link to a little piece of music i wrote a long time ago on february second:

brigid

ok. i gotta put my snow clothes back on and go out to dig some more.

snohaus

it's snowing today, which only makes me happy.

i'm the perverse sort that likes recreational shoveling.

today is day 17 of my build on this year's snohaus, and here's my slideshow to date:

i'll talk to you later

while i was out on the road in october i made a video journal. it's taken me forever to edit it down to just the fifteen minutes.

it's my mornings and evenings on the road and a look at my campsite and my living space. really, i guess, if you want to go all interpretive, it's about tedium, isolation, and the oncoming winter.

bad things are around the corner, and you can almost see them in my eyes if you look.