stuff! and more stuff!

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

i gotta go.

addison county got power

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

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

and you KNOW i love maps.

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

essex county has been largely red since yesterday afternoon.

here's a screenshot from earlier today:

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

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



so. that's it for me.

list

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

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

you know how i like maps.


View churches where i have attended services in a larger map

stress incontinence

well.

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

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

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

yay!

high point

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

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

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

short and stout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and he goes to get it.

so apparently we have a gig sunday night.

marathon reading

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

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

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

right then, as i was driving by.

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

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

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

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

awesome.

bright red

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

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

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

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

anyway.

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

what time is it?

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

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

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

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

straight answers

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

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

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

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



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

back in time

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

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

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

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

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

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

she could. and she did.

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


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

that video i promised

i very unexpectedly had to come home yesterday.

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

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

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

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

that's some clear water.

one amazing thing

i see a lot of cool things on the road.

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

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

it's almost like watching a living thing.

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

talisman

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

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

should be gone by now

i'm waiting for my ipod to sync.

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

so it's going to take a few minutes.

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

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

but here's my parting shot:

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

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

taking stock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yeah.

it's awesome over here at my house.

now i'm going to go to bed.

yeah, had to.

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

i also made some ice cream.

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

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

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

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

planetary motion

awwwright!

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

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

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

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

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

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

UMPI solar system model homepage
astro guyz


and astroguys youtube videos about it:

part one trailer/teaser



part two



part three



part four



and the outtake reel! woot!

cleanup in aisle five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*exhale*

ok, that's it for today.

speaking of rising

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

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

rising

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you don't always know when Jesus will appear.

so you wait.

and you watch.

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

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

see you on the other side.

and later:



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

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




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



and then i had dinner.

may blessings fall upon you and yours.

good friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it's just right the way it is.

maundy thursday

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

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

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

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

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



we are easter people.

last year

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

ginger milk pudding

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

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

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

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

cutting back

i'm in unsubscribe mode today.

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

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

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

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

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

and i smirk.

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

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

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

argh.

maybe i'm just cranky today.

maybe i should go eat.

october, a little late

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

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

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

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

how i spent my day

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

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

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

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

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

still following me?

good.

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

today i ran my dishwasher four times.

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

today’s menu:

black olive tapenade
fresh mozzarella (made today!)

salt lox

savory zucchini bread
sweet potato dinner rolls

teeny little vegetable quiches

mini oat pies
constant comment tea cookies
mascarpone brownies

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

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

i hope nobody minded.

barigoule

news from my kitchen:

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

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

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

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

leaves

here's today's project.

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

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

map related goodies

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

so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

everybody relax

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

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

hatwipes.

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

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

beet it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

more desk clearing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that's quite a list

right. so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

things i love

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

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

i'll wait.

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

and i love jassica hagy, who draws indexed.

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

oh, my goodness gracious.

bad mood youtube

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

your sky calendar

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

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

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

favicons

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

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

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

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

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

so that's off my list.

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.