girl talk

i'm cleaning off my desk so i can close my tabs and now that i can use that handy tool i told you about yesterday to have any tab from any of my machines open, it's a lot easier for me to have a look at the stuff i want to tell you about and then also have it handy for the machine i write from.

it's especially important since the keyboard on my laptop needs replacing and i no longer have use of the spacebar, or the b, n, ? and up arrow.

a while ago the band girl talk came out with an album called all day, which you can download in its entirety for free. the interesting thing is that there's a real-time list (with video) of all the samples used in the album. and even if it's not your style (it's not mine) it is a fascinating project and what the heck; it's free.

so i watched that in its entirety yesterday and although it's not going on my favorites playlist, it sure was interesting to see how the samples were used and also how the list was compiled. i am a sucker for a beautiful graphical representation.


i also want to tell you about a privacy tool i discovered and downloaded this week. it is also free and so far i am happy with how it works. the idea is that companies that have those like buttons are tracking you whether or not you are logged into their services. all you have to do is be on a page that has those buttons and you are being tracked, even if you have cookies disabled.

and you can get add-ons that disable the buttons entirely, but what if you want to use them sometimes and not be tracked everywhere else? so this thing (and so far i'm pretty happy with my test of it on both of my machines) simply blocks the tracking unless you choose to interact with the button on the site. you can manage your permissions and grant and ungrant as you please, which makes me happy.

you can find that here: share me not.

and appropos of nothing, i want to tell you about this because i think it's screamingly funny:

The Birthday Clown Consortium Price Guide.

there. i'm done for now. it's off to the kitchen with me. i don't know yet what i'm going to make, but there will be a few things and i bet they'll be good.

organizing at the end of the world

the end of the world came yesterday.

did you notice? no, you probably did not, unless you play glitch. the thing about the beta testing is that they roll out a version of the game and the testers play it until the test ends and then they start over in the new test version.

since i only started playing wednesday, i was not aware that at the end of the test, there's a giant End Of The World Party. but for a game that i only started playing wednesday, it sure has a hold of me. i am marking the days until the new version launches, and i know from the start that we'll only play for a week and then THAT world will end.

later on, and soon we hope, they will launch the game for real and we can just play. my initial assessment of it is that it's AWESOME.

it is smart and funny and graphically interesting and has a decent soundtrack. the environments and the storyline are imaginative and quirky. and here's the thing i REALLY like: it is cooperative in nature, rather than competitive. in order to advance in the game, you have to work and play well with others.

and you have to be able to make a good sammich.

while i'm casting about blankly for the startup of the new version on or around august 11, i have the usual projects, which includes SOMEHOW organizing and consolidating the bookmarks from both of my machines and all of my browsers, a thing which i was beginning to think impossible until this morning i found an add-on that works across platforms and across browsers and now my machines have all the same bookmarks and open tabs, or they CAN have the same open tabs or not, because it's configurable.

boo-yah!

you can find that here.

useless

yesterday and today i played a game.

apparently it's addictive; i played it through several mealtimes and one bedtime, only leaving the house to race bicycles and play disc golf with cr.

it's still in beta, so not everyone can get in, but go ahead, if you dare: glitch

sleeping: an equipment guide

you probably don't know how to pack for going to bed.

what's that you say? you just crawl in there and sleep? you're not PREPARED?

you need my advice.

i am changing my sheets today. i say it in the present tense because right now i only have one set of sheets that i really like and that fit my mattress well, so in order to clean them it's a commitment to see the process through all the way.

i confess that i have not changed them since those two days it was really hot because it kind of seemed pointless to put fresh sheets on the bed if it was only going to be another hot night, but i have to draw the line somewhere.

it's not ENTIRLEY as slovenly as it sounds, because i habitually sleep in long-sleeved shirts and athletic tights and i ALWAYS wear socks, so there's not a lot of actual skin contact with the sheets, but still. there are limits.

uh, anyway, when you take the sheets off the bed, you find out what's really under that comforter.

i used to need a completely empty bed, with nothing in it and the sheets all needed to line up square and i wish i could tell you i have never gotten out of bed in the night to remake the bed because the sheets were crooked.

so while my life now may not represent progress in the strict sense, it does represent movement.

sleeping is dangerous business. last thursday on my way out of bed i managed to hit my head so forcefully on a nearby shelf that i managed to punch a half-inch triangular cut in my scalp but didn't notice the matted blood until i took my hat off at lunchtime.

apparently there's a whole suite of things you need in order to sleep. here's my list:

in the bed:

• four pillows. it's important that if you roll over, you are fully supported.
• two phones. you can't be bothered to roll far enough to pick one up if it rings. one functions as an alarm clock, too.
• camera. you usually need to take pictures during the night. (see above, phone as alarm clock)
• t shirt. you can't drool on the pillows, can you?
• sweater that does not belong to you. this is a sufficiently grown-up looking susbstitute for that stuffed dog you stopped sleeping with when you were nine because it was falling apart but you still have it in your closet.
• large chunk of rose quartz. handy in an emergency. you know.
• hat. either your head is cold, or the room is not dark enough.
• ipod and headphones. duh. don't use the good headphones; they only get tangled.
• pretzels and pretzel fragments. ok, this isn't strictly intentional, but if you eat in your sleep, you're bound to lose some of it in the bed, ambien walrus.

not actually in the bed, but within reach without rolling over:

• large bag of pretzels.
• assorted other snacks.  you sleep better if you don't have to go so far to get snacks. if you have ever woken up in the driveway on your way to get something to eat, you know this is important.
• two bottles of water.
• spare ipod. emergency podcasts in case of failure.

furthermore, before you go to sleep you should plan your next day's activities and make sure you are wearing socks appropriate to that activity.  this means if it is saturday night, you should be wearing your bright red or florescent yellow socks, or at the very least your black and pink flamingo socks because that's what you should wear to church,  ESPECIALLY if you are in front of the congregation for any part of the service. it also means that if tomorrow is canada day, you are wearing your maple leaf socks.

details are important. if you forget to put on the right socks at bedtime, you will only have to get up and change them as soon as your error is discovered.

save yourself time and energy. be prepared.

i know i have helped you.

this is what it's like

yesterday i got up on a sunny day feeling GREAT and after church my chicken guy's wife gave me not one but TWO dozen boxes of eggs which means i have enough eggs to do some of the other things i was maybe going to go with them, but was kind of saving them out for things i HAVE to use them on...

but anyway, i was going to go to the grocery store to do my shopping after church and now i don't quite know what to do because it's warm out and now if i leave the eggs in the car i have to leave them in the cooler, but i always put my cold things in the cooler when i shop and i hadn't brought an extra because i wasn't counting on the eggs and now i don't know what to do so i start to go home and then i turn around and go back because i'll just figure it out, whatever, but then i'm crying.

really, really crying. and so i pull off into the nearest parking lot which is the town office (closed because it's sunday) and it's the kind of crying that short circuits something in my brain and i just start barking out words or parts of words and i know they're the beginnings to sentences i'm trying to say but after a while they're meaningless tics and i can't go forward with other thoughts and i can't make them stop and at this point since i am so close to the police station i'm afraid an officer will come and talk to me and i won't be able to do anything but bark and yip and twitch and up until this point it's just paranoia

-and i'll interrupt here to tell you that while i am always willing to consider that it's just paranoia, i HAVE been hunted by the police and if you have that reality to toss into your paranoid delusion, that is just not a good mix.


so anyway, i'm afraid the police will come and i'll be unintelligible and the next thing i know i'll be cuffed and transported when all i need really is to calm down and rest a little, maybe, or at any rate we all know that's how it goes since if there's a drug out there that works, i'm allergic to it.

yeah. so. i'm sitting there in my car crying and i'm thinking that i'm maybe not in a safe position when this police cruiser goes by me a little and then turns around with his lights on. he goes by me, but i go into panic overdrive. what follows is the whole of the williston fire department and rescue squad resopnding to a call somewhere down the road, but all the siren and lights are not making me feel any better.

so i think: i have to get out of here.

and i head out, back toward the church, on foot, because i think maybe i shouldn't drive. i think i will be safe at the church.

but it's locked up and although i know how to use the key box it's at least cool on the lawn and what i really want is just to stop crying and go home and have a nap or something and i try to cal my mom who can figure that i'm in bad shape, but can't figure out the barks and yips and i try to call cr who can sometimes calm them and in the end finally i get home somehow and watch some youtube videos until i feel better, and then since i'm in a bad mood, the only thing i can think of to cheer me up is to make some exquisite little dishes.

so i made a lovely tomato-basil sorbet and a balsamic reduction and a roasted garlic pasta salad that is so good you'd sell your grandmother for a second taste.

and now because i have a splitting headache, i'm going to go make popovers.

i've never made popovers.

it should be fun.

return to my usual programming

wow, that was some week.

somehow i managed to get signed on as the head instructor for the essex rec department's week-long geocaching day camp. i am still a little fuzzy as to how that happened, but it did.

if you are interested in seeing my online materials for that, you may find them here.

without crashco i think i would have been dead in the water, but with him i think it went all right. i have all my experience in education and all that to draw from, but when it comes to putting all the containers and clues and such out in the field, it becomes a mighty big job for one person.

with many of the other camps you can just take all the kids outside to play a game and one adult is sufficient oversight, but geocaching done properly means a lot of wandering around in the woods and if you need to keep track of twelve middle school kids, three adults is just about right.

anyway, today was my first day back to "normal", and i have celebrated by catching up in the reading of the blogs i read, doing some light housework including laundry and cleaning the upstairs bathroom and washing the windows (inside and out) in the front room as well as organizing and clocking the january 2011 photos from the thirteen project, and editing them into video.



normally doing a month of thirteen photos takes me three days if i don't dawdle, but i guess i'm just on fire today, nevermind that last night i celebrated the end of the week by making split pea soup, zucchini bread, a batch of ginger ale, and a new experimental lavender-rosemary cooler that i hope will be light and refreshing.

now if you'll excuse me, i have to go make a different zucchini bread and maybe some more soup or maybe some cookies or something.

and i have to call my chicken guy because i'm out of eggs.

art and artificial intelligence

art. where to start? art. art. art.

so i was doing what i always do, which is a lot of random stuff, and i saw this website that takes images and "textifies" them. simple enough. it's fun to play with, and you can configure it a little and save the image.

here's a photo i took, modified with textify it.

kind of nice, yes?

and then i saw to really astounding interactive art projects:

the first is an interactive film that uses google earth imagery and music video. you should run it in chrome, but it is so cool that it's worth firing up a second browser and shutting down everything else you're doing just to see it.

the wilderness downtown

the other is the johnny cash project, which i might could describe, but you really should go see it for yourself. i am not kidding about this.

but yesterday i was listening to a radiolab podcast about talking to machines and heard about cleverbot. it's fairly astounding, and you can talk to it from here.

cleverbot is pretty far along in its learning, but if you want you can talk to a newer avatar called evie. she isn't trained as well, but every conversation you have helps her learn.

you may not wish to assist in developing artificial intelligence. it's interesting, though.

i had a very weird experience with her tonight in which she asked me my name. i told her i was called flask, which i am. and she said "hello, (my given name)". given what little i know about how her training works, that's a really bizarre coincidence, even if she did follow it up with asking me why people call me harper, which to my knowledge nobody has ever done.

that's it for me.

you can call me harper if you like. evie says she only did it because she's nice.

it isn't just chimps and us anymore.

there's been a lot of hoo-hah about lots of species using tools, which is one of the things we used to think made us special.

as far as i know, though, we are still the only species to construct tools for use and distribution on the internet, although there are lots of videos these days of various critters from octopus to lion recording themselves and lots of discussions about who holds the copyright for images that a gorilla makes.

uh, anyway.

my point? it was really to talk about some little tools i have open on my desktop but was waiting to tell you about.

of course there's a cute little map tool that tells you how far two points are from each other, which is super handy.

and if you're worried about security, you might think about your passwords.

and librarians? librarians are awesome. they care about your privacy, even when the government doesn't.

and maybe this isn't so useful, but it's kind of cool. the colour clock. and as long as i'm talking about clocks (wasn't i just?), i just heard about this today. i am sad that it is not playing near my house.

simple solutions

aside from stopping the stupid stinking expensive war that is the death of the republic and the downfall of the empire (didn't ANYBODY learn anything from rome?)

-uh, aside from THAT, we could actually be helping people. here are some projects that take small practical approaches to big problems, and while they don't solve the cause of world poverty, they increase the standard of living for people who really need it.

these people make and ship low-cost wheelchairs to people in developing countries. it's not state-of-the-art-insurance-is-paying-for-it perfect fitted medical supplies, but a lawn chair fitted with bike wheels is perfectly serviceable and a cheap alternative.

and even during daylight hours it's DARK inside a lot of people's homes, where electricity is either expensive or unavailable. these people have come up with a cheap solution that helps.

and while we're at it, the problem of clean drinking water is a major one in much of the world. you don't hear much about this solution to the problem, but i think one of the reasons you don't hear a lot about it is that nobody is going to make a lot of money from it.

and in the developed world, people with diseases like ALS or MS typically can't get access to those spiffy computer-assisted communication devices that would make their remaining days better. those machines are expensive and your insurance won't cover them, so unless you're rich, you're out of luck.

so these guys developed a cheap DIY version you can make yourself or have made for under $100.

hard travelin'

here's today's work:



this is the posted video of december from my thirteen project. it is difficult to wade through those images and see the hours crawl by knowing what it was like to be living in that room with barred windows, to be separated from my loved ones, and the general grimness of the atmosphere in the halfway house over christmas and new year's.

since they took my camera away while i was inside, i snuck some illegal external shots later and modified those to represent the hours i was still marking inside.

there are "normal" pictures taken in parking lots, but i know where they are and when they are: they are the hours between session and curfew when i had to go out to get groceries, medications, supplies, and just to get out.

checking my email meant sitting in a parking place curbside at an open network, usually at the library.

you see pictures of sunshine and ice fisherman, but they're taken from inside a session room. it's done quickly, under the notice of the staff. the patients don't care; they're not in the picture.

it's hard to see those images.

temperature

i don't care how hot it is during the day.

really,  i don't. over a hundred degrees? awesome day for a road bike ride.

but it's nighttime and i want to sleep, you know?


i wouldn't bother to mention it, except  that there's an interesting little temperature thing going on here:

if i walk out my front door it's just about as beastly hot outside as it is inside, but here at my desk only one floor up and on the same side of the building what's coming through the window feels like a cool breeze. there is some difference between the upstairs temperature and the downstairs temperature, but not enough i don't think to account for the difference.

in the basement, however, it's about twenty degrees cooler, so i'll be sleeping down there.

overnight the temperatures are supposed to fall into the low 60s so it will give the rest of the house a little chance to cool before i shut it all up in the morning starting on the sunny side of the house and then all the way around when the outside temperature draws near the inside temperature and of course as the evening cools i go through the reverse process, testing every window and door and opening everything where it's cooler outside.

yes, i have considered a/c.

...for about ten minutes.

what? i should get a/c for the three days a year it's above 50 degrees here at night?

i don't think so.

i don't even bother most days to wear short sleeves, let alone shorts. today called for short sleeves, but still long pants.  as far as i'm concerned, if it's july and i can wear turtlenecks, i'm happy. if there's a light frost on the grass in early august i am ecstatic.

wednesday night my friends and i were laughing about our definition of what constitutes "the south": bennington and brattleboro counties.

and beyond that, you might as well be at the equator.

we're having a heat wave!

tonight at my race i was talking with my friends and while we're not really happy about the temperatures, we thought it would be really funny for all of us here in northern new england to get on the interwebs and complain about the heat.

and the weather.

today it must have been eighty-five degrees here at my house! and it's sunny every day except for the afternoons when it rains, so the grass is lush and green and at this time of year golden topped in the sunset hours.

blast the heat. eighty-five degrees is about fifteen degrees warmer than i like it.

it's july, which means i watch a lot of TV. the whole reason i pay for he cable package i do is because i have to watch the tour every july.

every day.

today i have to catch the primetime coverage because i had to miss the live coverage because yesterday i got a flat tire on my way to my race and today i had to get it fixed AND i had to take my bike into the shop for repairs.

in my spare time, i'm editing the song i wrote and i'm organizing and clocking photos for the thirteen project. if you're just joining us, i take a picture every thirteen hours. i have been doing this for eighteen months now. i'm behind in the organizing, mostly because i got bottled up behind the Very Bad Thing; in order to clock the photos from november and december i have to come face to face with it and the subsequent prolonged stay in the crazy house where they took away my camera, so i've had to come up with a way to represent the weeks behind bars in a way that preserves the spirit of the project.

yesterday i posted november to youtube; tomorrow i'll get a good start on clocking december.

old news

since i took five weeks off, i have kind of a backlog of things on my desk. none of this is particularly fresh, but i think it's worth mentioning.

first, i heard a really interesting podcast on studio 360 about three-dimensional sound. it's worth going to their page to have a listen.

and i don't care if you are allergic to cute and fluffy kitties and fuzzy puppies give you hives. you should go play sissy's magical ponycorn adventure, which is a game designed by a five year old girl. if you're interested in the story of how it came to be created, her father wrote about it here.

recently i burned up a lot of time looking at some maps. uh, really, if you know me, you know that i habitually burn a lot of time looking at maps. in this particular instance, though, i had been to campobello island, NB and eastport ME among other places and i had taken a picture of a navigational marker out in the channel by the old sow and i thought i'd look it up and the next thing i knew i had two things on my screen: a complete description of the coast of maine and new brunswick from quoddy narrow to calais, and the accompanying chart 13396. taken together, you can have hours of charty fun.

if you like your maps on a smaller scale, you maybe would like the atlas of the habitual.

time off

ok, so i took five weeks off.

if you really wanted to follow what i was writing, you could have been reading my geocaching logs, which are now all caught up. it's kind of like blogging, except that each entry is attached to a place i went and tells part of the story of a day. most of my logs also include pictures, many of which i post to panoramio, and many of those get onto google earth.

speaking of google earth, i also did a little map project with that about our two days playing geocache battleship.


View battleship! in a larger map

i also made a little tour in google earth, which you can download as .kmz here and play for yourself.

tuesdays and wednesdays i still go out and run a 5k trail run and mountain bike race, respectively, and i still go out and play disc golf a couple of times a week.



in other news, i made a  new ice cream flavor that's kind of complicated but very good. i call it "hot chocolate".  basically it's a very chocolate ice cream with arbol peppers and cinnamon. it's complicated because in order for the custard to hold as much chocolate as it does, you have to melt the chocolate in the milk and temper it. in order to get the pepper taste in there properly, you have to slow simmer the peppers and cinnamon and other spices in scalded milk. and in order to carry all that chocolate, you have to use egg yolks, which have to be tempered as well. then the whole thing has to be combined cooled and after it cools you have to run the combined custard through the blender because some of the chocolate will have precipitated.

THEN you can add the cream and toss it in the ice cream maker.

it's time consuming, but very, very good.

 the thing about it, though, is that it is so smooth going down you don't even hardly notice the peppers until you have already swallowed it, so if you don't enjoy a stealth kick, you ought to be careful. and for heaven's sake don't get any in your eyes when you're busy licking the bowl.


oh, and i wrote a new song.

outside of all that, though, things haven't been going so well for me and i just didn't want to write to you about that. it's bad enough that i have to know about it without depressing you, too.

les paul and google

i was (maybe) going to post about some other things, like geocachng, or some chartalicious things i found, or the power outage map that isn't very informative if your OWN power is out, but then i was looking at today's google doodle. do you ever look at the archive? and i was wondering: what does that commemorate?

oh. les paul's birthday. cool. (beware auto-play)

but here's the REALLY cool thing: it's not just a pretty doodle. you can PLAY it! and it records! here's mine, from a few minutes before i discovered you can take lessons.

way cool.

most awesom spam bless honestly veracious.

with only a few edits (in parentheses), here is the most awesome spam comment i've gotten to date:
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honestly, even if you WERE looking for those services, would you use those links?

rollin', rollin', rollin'

tonight i went to run my usual 5k trail run (doesn't that sound hardcore?) and went down hard right out of the start. i have no idea how i managed that; the terrain was flat and grassy and there wasn't so much as a dip to lose my footing on.

but i went down, rather dramatically.

it probably looked a lot bigger than it was, because i am a very good roller. at least that's what the guy in the oncoming lane said when i got run over by the dodge durango on route 2 a number of years ago and my choices were basically roll or die.

it is my opinion that once a fall is already in progress, there's no point worrying about it. you may as well roll. if you roll well, you can keep the tender bits from hitting and you can keep the long bones from breaking, and you can keep the connective tissue from snapping. a few bruises and cuts will heal right away, and with a kiss and some bandaids you can race again tomorrow.

tomorrow we'll race the same course on moutain bikes. that will not suck.

tonight was our first look at this year's blue course, and it's my favorite of the three, even though i have not yet seen the third course. i've been around long enough to know that the third one, next week, will be, uh, climb-ier. that course, no matter what trails they put it on goes up and up and up and then just when you think you can't take any more it goes up some more and then there's a short hard downhill and then you go up again and again and then it's just a long flat mile and a half run from there.

but tonight's course is in the woods, on the lowland. sure, it goes up and down, but it's the flattest of the three and while it has its twisty moments, it flows and swoops and in general is very fast and fun.

tonight, though, it's painkillers and muscle relaxants. and  benadryl, too, for my allergies, so no matter how i cut it, tonight i'm going to SLEEP! woo-hoo!

mishmosh

right.

so i'm still writing geocaching logs, like that's any big surprise. the big surprise is that i am now only about a month behind in logging, so i may actually catch up. i have also posted the videos that go along with those logs.


in other news, here are two really cool optical illusions.

yesterday i made some baked cheese things that go around olives (pretty good) and i am still experimenting with some other things, but tonight i am happy with the dulce-de-leche-with-butter-brickle flavor ice cream i made, and i adapted this recipe for a shaved asparagus pizza.

the ice cream is very, very, good.

the pizza is to die for.  it is so good i ate the whole thing myself. oh, my goodness gracious me.

ok, that's enough dawdling. i have to go write more cache logs.







assorted other videos can be found here.

debridal suite

tonight's mountain bike race did not go well for me. i wasn't even a mile into it when i just didn't have the speed to go over a little shelf that i've gone over without problems for YEARS and i went over at slow speed onto my left elbow leaving a deep cut that isn't very long, didn't bleed much, but that i had to debride with a toothbrush when i got home.

and now i can't rest my arm anywhere because even though it's dressed, it's weeping and tomorrow there's gonna be a very festive bruise.

of course i took pictures and at some point if you're very nice to me i'll show you.

meanwhile, back at my desk, i wrote a lot of geocaching logs today, which doesn't just mean writing geocache logs. it means updating my website and posting to panoramio and ordering the november photos from the thirteen project because now i'm just getting to all the pictures from the days surrounding the Very Bad Thing and while i was at it, i posted the video journal that i started and never finished because i got to the day of the Very Bad Thing and then just stopped filming.

you can see it in my eyes, though.



this is the before of the before and after shots. these are what my eyes look like before something in them goes dead.

these are the pictures i have been avoiding looking at for seven months and there's no way to go forward besides through.

can you put a number on that?

today's activities:

write lots of geocaching logs.
process video.




watch a documentary about data visualization.
write more geocaching logs.
go run a 5k.
and more geocaching logs.

that's my list. this week the run felt marginally better than last week; last week in the fog of pain it simply ranged from "excruciating" to "subsuming" and tonight it only went from "severe" to "extreme", so that's progress.

when you go to the doctor, they always want you to rate it on a scale from one to ten, or one to five, or some other managed care claptrap. i always want to ask: what kind of scale? is this meant to be expressed as a percentage of the relative pain i've EVER felt? the relative pain i imagine there could possibly be? or just in relation to a general baseline? 'coz let me tell you, i am no stranger to pain but that night i nearly froze to death i learned there were whole new dimensions to pain that i never thought possible, so if i have to judge my present pain in comparison to THAT, it only come sin at about a two, but if i rate it according to a scale on which five is the level where i can't function too well, this comes in at about an eight.

or is your scale based on exponential growth?

by the time i'm done talking, they have made a little tick in the checkbox labeled "pain in the ass."

fine. NOW may i have the refill for the muscle relaxant?

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.