notes from the glitch diaspora: fleck

i've been playing a little game called fleck.

what i like about it is that is is played on real-world maps, and i have chosen to place my little fleck house and garden near my real life home, expect pretty close to the bouse i'd buy id i could live anywhere and money were no object.

so it's kind of cool to place my imaginary trees and flowers on my real life landscape, although i wish the game offered me more opportunities to plant birches and maples and pines where i live, instead of peaches and oranges and bodhi trees.

game play is basically this: you plant things and prune or harvest them and you have to water them unless it's raining (the game has a cool live weather feature) and while you're tending them, zombie plants spring up which then have to be killed.

so it's cute cartoon gardening with large weapons and a lot of shooting.

plus if you're not there to water your plants they will die, which kind of sucks because those plants either cost you ingame money you earned by harvesting or by killing zombies, or they cost you real life money.

some people buy objects in this game for real life money; don't ask me why.

there is a lot of cooperative killing of zombies, but even though all the areas are public except for your backyard, most players seem to feel entitled to claim public areas and chase out interlopers.

the weird thing is that there's a game-wide veneer of a culture of happy-shiny cooperativeness, but mostly it's about me-mine and GET OUT. unless i need help, in which case you'd better come equipped with special features you paid cash money for so we can all get better drops and collect ALL THE IMAGINARY THINGS.

short version: i like the maps and the weather, and the ability to play on my real life landscape.

everything else is kind of a snooze.

giant love

on the 40th of bruise, in the year 25 somebody discovered that if you went to a giant's shrine and said you loved the giant, the giant would declare love for you in return.

it was kind of like that night near the end when pot came on and said he's like a sandwich and i fell all over myself getting to the nearest pot shrine to bring him sandwiches, not even knowing what he wanted with them but just knowing that he felt like a sandwich, so i ran as fast as i could and started throwing sandwiches in.

it turned out that he was only preparing to announce the rollout of the new recipes, but dozens of us, it turned out, had run to pot's shrines all over the world just to bring him sandwiches.

and none of us regretted the loss of the sandwiches.

pot loved us.

so on this night i got it into my heat to go to a shrine of each giant and tell them i loved them. later on i learned that dozens upon dozens of us did the same, all over the world.

i went to shrines to my giants in groddle meadow, because i was first imagined in groddle meadow and i wanted to be there instead of the savanas or highlands or caves, no matter how lovely those places were.

i lived in groddle meadow.

anyway, i'm still digging out the snaps and videos of that beautiful little world. and today i've gotten to the day i went to the giants and told them i that i loved them.

love them.

i still do.

so here are three videos of the same thing:

this one is a little walk along the street and the giant conversations, without much else.




this one is just the giants:




and for you hardcores, nearly all of the footage. i wouldn't have bothered, but i know some of you are homesick.

open letter to my phone company

dear watisfield champlain valley telecom,

you have been my phone company my entire adult life. when i moved out of my mom's house, i happened to have moved to waistfield, back when you were still waitsfield-fayston telephone.

and then on the day i bought this place, you bought this calling area from GTE which made switching my phone service a little tricky because the sale had only gone through at midnight and nobody who knew anything was saying anything about it until somebody over at AT&T took pity on me and told me about the sale so i called your offices and told you that i knew about the sale even though the announcement hadn't been made and could you PLEASE just hook up my phone?

and you did.

took you about ten minutes.

*sigh* good times.

anyway, i went ahead and used you as my internet provider because back then i didn't have very many alternatives.

you probably don't remember the day i went and got myself an airport extreme because i had decided i finally wanted to be wireless here at home and i couldn't get anything to connect up and apple tech support was friendly but unhelpful and as a last hail mary pass i called you up and it took someone on your staff about three minutes to get me all configured properly even though it wasn't YOUR equipment and therefore not technically YOUR problem?

that was sweet of you.

so sunday night when my aged moden sputtered its last and i spent an hour in hold hell and another accumulated hour speaking with your after hours tech support office offsite somewhere in iowa, they were very lovely and they told me they were "escalating" my ticket, which i was told meant that you would be getting back to me as soon as you could.

since it was sunday night and monday was president's day, the nice lady warned me that i might not be hearing from you until tuesday but if i had not heard from you by then, i should call back and refer to this case number.

it seemed reasonable.

i settled in for a coupe of internet-less days.

ten minutes later (bear in mind this is a sunday night) i got a call from your office. the nice man asked me what color my modem was.

"black", i said.
"you need a new one."

this was not really a surprise to me. what WAS a surprise was that even thought the office was closed for president's day, i could come down first thing monday and get me a new modem.

so i did.

and i plugged everything in just how he told me to and it works just fine.

now, i don't have a choice about who my local telephone company is.

but this is why you are still my isp as well. if i could buy my heating oil and groceries from you i would, because you are reliable and kind and a lot of things you maybe don't HAVE to be, but you are anyway.

thanks.

love,
flask

election day 2012

well, no. this isn't very timely.

next question?

it's not an election analysis, either, nor is it a political piece.

if you'd like to know what i said about it back then, you can read that here.

what this is is an account of how i spent election day, because i was going through my pictures from election day and it turns out i have a collection of stuff.

first thing in the morning, apparently, i took a picture of a pair of popovers that i have had sitting in a ziploc bag since last may. i don't have pictures to show you of that yet, because i took pictures of the progression of that and don't want to get ahead of myself here.

then i got my stuff together to do a little light geocaching.

i took the liberty of putting together the pictures from that into a nice little flickr set that you can view here, but you should be cautioned that there is a spoiler image for one of the caches.




i found three caches, went to vote, and then found two more caches. my town clerk (on the left in the photo) gave me permission to take that picture in the polling place, which was otherwise deserted.

while i was looking for the last geocache, i saw an interesting drill hole through a rock and decided to play with depth of field and because that sort of thing is interesting to me, i am making all those pictures available to you.




then i took a pretty picture from my desk,

worked on a project,

and watched election returns.

you know the rest.

ricker 3400

at some point later on (maybe much later on) i will get around to writing up my geocache log for this cache, but in the meantime let's just say that i took the vista chair up, mad a lovely walk over, and didn't find the cache.

i did, however, take some lovely pictures of the whole thing so i have all that to share with you in the meantime.


photo album:




video:







ricker 3400 take 1 at EveryTrail
EveryTrail - Find hiking trails in California and beyond

does it make a noise?

last saturday morning i had to go into town to see my mechanic because my car was making a worrying long digital beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep that was coming from under the hood but not apparently related to anything and if you go out to the garage right now you will hear the sound right up until the point you turn the car on or even get in, because the sound is best heard some feet off the port bow.

when the car is off.

of course i made this noise in the mechanic's parking lot and then mysteriously stopped making the noise as soon as they had it on the lift. so we took it back out to the parking lot to have a listen.

nothing.

and i got it home.

nothing.

next day? it's baaaaaack. tomorrow i will probably bring it back to the mechanic.

anyway, it was COLD saturday morning. and of course i had to go out and find a geocache, but there was one conveniently located in the woods behind my mechanic, so i went there.

and near the geocache was one of those many trunk trees and it was making the most cool cracking noises. so i thought: i should put my camera in there and record that.

so i did.

tow truck

last friday i went out in the fizzard.

the storm itself was a great disappointment because, quite frankly, i'm just not happy unless there's a couple of feet of snow coming down.

and there wasn't more than six or eight inches here, which is TOTALLY UNFAIR.

but it was enough friday for the roads to be bad on account of all the wind and the drifting. it was two-handed-pay-attention driving, and even then you needed to be a little lucky.

on my way out to go geocaching i got stuck behind traffic while a tow truck pulled a blue car off of a pond.

i say "off of" because happily the pond was frozen enough that the car did not sink in. the guys has sailed off the road in most dramatic fashion, though, and was down there pretty good.

and the AWESOME thing was that when they got him towed out he just got int the car and drove it away. it didn't even look like it had a scratch on it.

depot deer

it's a good thing neither of you reads me for any sense of temporal continuity, because i skip around a lot.

i am, however, cleaning up a lot of the photos and videos i took in october.

on one of those days near the end of the road trip i was looking at the quality of light and thinking that if i went just then, i'd get up to the seneca falls depot just in time to see the deer at sundown.

sunrise and sunset are very good times for deer activity, but also if you catch the white deer in a good sunset, they are fiery and red which makes it even cooler than just plain seeing them, which is pretty cool already.

sadly, there was no red sunset, but there was some good deer viewing.

we managed to see a white buck bump antlers with a brown one, but they quit fighting before i had my camera going  and those boys prefer not to do a lot of antler fighting if they can help it.

antler fighting is dangerous business and you only want to do as much of it as you have to to assert dominance, so a few bad stares and a little head butting is usually all they have do in order to know who would win in a real fight.

sometimes a ballsy young buck will insist on a real fight, but mostly everyone knows herd order already.

so here's the video of those two boys, and another video where i was trying to get a shot of the white buck but a brown one came waltzing into the shot big as day.

the secret to sammidge making

today my friend gohawk reminded me that i have not yet posted the secrets to making fabulous sammidges as i promised last week.

a long time ago i was on a boat some friends and our friend elaine (whose boat it was) had brought the sammidges.

let me just say this about elaine: if she ever volunteers to bring the refreshments, let her. she is very, very good at refreshments.

better than you, probably. it's not that you suck. it's just that she really is that good.


anyway, we were all on the boat and there were turkey sammidges and they didn't look terribly fancy but we all agreed that OUR turkey sammidges are NEVER that good and elaine told us the secret to sammidge making.

it's really simple, and it goes a little beyond just using good bread and good fillings.

i have been using this secret for years and now people always want to know why my sammidges are better than theirs.

elaine's secret rules for making awesome sammidges

1) coat with inside of the bread with a thin layer of some kind of fat. this is usually butter or mayo. the purpose of this is to keep the bread from absorbing moisture and also fats transmit flavors. thin layer. gotcha.

2) put anything that will leach moisture (like tomatoes) between the meat and the cheese or in the case of vegan sammidge-making, between items of relative waterproofness.

3) and this is the important, least known rule: ADD A SECRET INGREDIENT.  it does not matter whether the secret ingredient is mango chutney or a splash of miso or a smear of tomato paste. whatever it is, pick up something besides the expected fillings and just add that extra note of "something". just a little. it wakes up the other flavors and maybe you can't figure out what it is but it is a whole nother sammidge.

elaine was trying to explain this to us, and were all, like, secret ingredient? what ingredient?

it doesn't matter.  a tiny bit of anything that's sweet or bright or salty or sour, anything that's flavorful and unexpected: that's your secret ingredient.

when people ask you about it, you can be coy and say "secret ingredient",  or you can just tell them.

soldiers' lot

last october i was in the valois cemetery, because there is a geocache at the back corner, up where the vineyard borders it.

i think i have mentioned before that it is my habit to look for the civil war dead and that i sometimes look them up.

on my way i stopped at the soldiers' lot to read the monument and the headstones. despite the fact that every so often new flags get put on the graves, the men who are buried in the soldiers' lot typically do not have people to remember them.

the men buried in the soldiers' lots often did not have families to be buried with or else they were too poor to afford cemetery plots. occasionally it is a matter of pride to be buried with the other veterans, but usually these lots are marked, as this one is, "dedicated to the burial of indigent soldiers and sailors".

we do not look too closely at why these men were indigent in such large numbers.

anyway i can't say for sure why i picked just these three men to look up when i got home, but i have spent the better part of a day finding their records and thinking of their lives.

samuel lindsley (var. linsdsey, lindsly) served with the 109th NY infantry, company G. although this unit was present at spotslyvania courthouse, wilderness, and cold harbor, its casualty listings for those battles suggest that this unit was not among those thrown into the thick of the fighting. they saw their worst casualties in the siege of petersburg where they took daily losses and fought in the battle of the crater.

have you seen that thing? the crater?

he was discharged with his unit so he made it through the war standing up, but there's an 1883 invalid pension record for him.

john d. pulfrey was a challenge for me. it was hard to read his headstone, which was maybe why i chose to take its picture. a lot of the time if i can't make out the soldier's full name on the stone i can figure out who he is by his regimental history.

it's tricky with the 19th new york infantry, because the regiment was redesignated the 3d light artillery after a little disturbance regarding terms of service that ended up with some of the men being sent to prison camps for it. there's an interesting newspaper account of it and the subsequent celebration of the returning soldiers.

clearly pulfrey was among the soldiers returned to duty, since the record indicates that he was discharged with disability at newburn, north carolina some time later.  regimental records show that his company (K)  met action at whitehall bridge and it is here that i believe he was injured.

on the 1890 census of surviving soldiers his disability is listed as "varicose veins" and he is described as "old, lame, deaf and poor".

i was only able to find records of him through the listing of the valois cemetery, by searching men buried in the soldiers' lot from this regiment. there's only one of him, so the trail runs back from there.

edward d. hall served with the 23d ny infantry, company I.  the regiment saw blessedly little action and took relatively few casualties.

hall mustered in and out with his regiment, and the 1890 census of surviving soldiers makes no special note of him.

in the 1875 census he is seen to have a wife and children living at home, but in the 1900 census he is widowed, living alone, and 4 months unemployed.










view album

GAR in vermont hill cemeteries

i'm from vermont.

i'm not a vermonter, because i wasn't born here and we make that distinction. but we have a lot of hill cemeteries here in the old towns "offrum" the main roads. it's been a thing i do, ever since i was a kid, to look at the old headstones, trace the families.

and one thing you notice here is that a LOT of the old graves are civil war veterans. you get used to it. you just expect to see clusters of graves with GAR stars and death dates that tell you those boys died far from home.

one thing i have noticed travelling in some other states, new york in particular, is how many civil war dead there aren't. i know my history; i know that new york men died on those battlefields just like everybody else and in many places with extreme valor.

but you just don't see the density of graves.

there are a number of reasons why vermont men went off in such large numbers to fight a war so far away. vermont was an early and strong abolition state. a lot of the trouble in kansas was caused by vermonters who wanted to spread their abolitionist views there. but also vermont was an isolated state, a prideful state. and boys wanted to go see the elephant, and some just wanted to show they were as good a group of men as from anywhere else.

but the arithmetic of it is shocking and sorrowful.

vermont sent roughly 9.7 precent of its total population to that war, and out of those fifteen percent died. can i break that down for you?

let's just say that of the total population roughly half were male, and of those boys and men let's just say that 40% were of soldiering age.

that means about 43 per cent of vermont's men went to that war, and three out of every twenty who went died.

the "old brigade", the First Vermont Brigade, the only brigade in the army of the potomac known by its state name, suffered more casualties than any other brigade in the history of the united states army.

over a thousand men died in one afternoon alone at a god-forsaken crossroads in virginia.

that is a lot of water for a small state to carry.

vermont schoolchildren all learn this by the time they visit the statehouse.

in the south and in the border states you had to go to the war because the war came right up to your doorstep whether you wanted to go see it or not, but in vermont they went in huge numbers and took by far the largest casualties per capita of any northern state.

so it's a habit for me to look for the GAR stars when i visit old cemeteries. and there are a lot of them here.

not so many in new york, where maybe they had more sense and less dogmatic views about abolition and union.

often when i visit an old cemetery in new york state there are few civil war veterans and of those veterans very few war dead.

the reason i'm writing this post, i guess, is that back in october i was in a handful of new york cemeteries and did find some civil war veterans, but none of them were war dead. i looked up their service records as i often do and i started to write a post about that, but i got to thinking about the heavy toll of the war on vermont, which is my home.

later on i will tell you about those new york men in a post of their own. the two trains of thought are related, but they are not the same. and those three men i spent my afternoon researching deserve their own place, regardless of their state of origin or their luck in having been assigned to regiments with low casualties and high survival.

they all threw their lots in the same.

nashville road

some of my internet friends live in places with flat landscapes, and i keep wanting to show them the drive out nashville road, which is more or less how you get to my house. i live at the edge of a long high flatland that sits right at the foot of bolton mountain. of course, i'm defining "long flatland" in the way that vermont hill framers define it, and not the way, say kansans do.

because out on the praire a five mile stretch without a mountain in it wouldn't be remarkable.

anyway, this is the trip out nashville road. about halfway through the video you'll see a half dozen houses together. that's nashville.

when you get to the stop sign, that's downtown west bolton.

in real life the trip takes about six, but through the magic of video, it's timelapsed just a little.

sunday morning in trumansburg

one fine sunday in october i went to church at the first presbyterian church of ulysses, where i sometimes sit in with the choir.

on this particular sunday the bell choir was playing, and here are some clips from their rehearsal.

the director is andrew mattfeld.

city of vaughn

this is just too funny and maybe neither of you follows social news media from the suburbs of toronto.

this morning i was hanging out with my invisible friends (ok, it's an IRC chat) and somebody laughed that the city of vaughn, ontario had just posted an amusing tweet on its official account:

we had a laugh about it, we did.

someone
That's a highly professional city representative.
someone
I totally want that person representing my city.
someone else
hey, he can write
flask
yeah, because saying "fucknuts" in official communication is a sign of professionalism.
flask
newsflash: your twitterfeed is not your persoanl notepad.
flask
if you are a public official, you are representing your agency.
someone
nods
someone else
in this case, badly
person who lives near toronto
yeah, that was likely someone having the wrong profile up when they posted
person who lives near toronto
haha
flask
government representative son;t need to appear hip and edgy. they need to appear competent and professional.
person who lives near toronto
yes, that's why people are so amused by it.

and then we went back to talking about knitting or whatever.

and then the twitterfeeds and news links started to be funnier.

https://twitter.com/search?q=city_of_vaughan&src=tyah

http://www.cp24.com/news/vaughan-deletes-twitter-account-after-obscene-snow-rant-1.1148441#ixzz2KK3f6g00

their facebook page got all full of stupid:

https://www.facebook.com/thecityofvaughan

and we were very amused at his line from the city's official website:

Now you can find even more ways to connect to the City of Vaughan! 

well, apparently now one less.

morning moon

look, i don't know what you do when you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think is "HOLY CRAP! what is all that light?!?!?"

i do not know what you do, but i grab my camera (yes, i sleep with it) and i run downstairs and put on shoes and rush out to the back of the house without bothering to put on a coat and then mess with a bunch of different exposures.

because.

pretty, that's why.

never mind freezing cold and no clothes besides pajamas. if you stopped to put on a coat, you might lose the light.

so here are three of those shots.

27 january.

i thought i was special!!

you know i was engaged in a correspondence with mr. wang, which was very entertaining, at least to me.

i am very sad that he has broken it off. i was really hoping that as my responses got progressively more bizarre he would continue to send me instructions in his fraud.

really and truly, though, i doubt anyone bothered to read my carefully crafted emails until the very last round. what i think happens with this particular scam is that there are set responses and it matters not one bit what you write so long as you do write, until they get to the part where they ask you for actual information.

and of course i took a moment or two to google mr. wang and found a couple of interesting things.

mr. wang hongzhang is actually this guy, a legitimate chinese bank executive. the CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK, i am surprised to learn, is a legitimate bank.

i had never given internet scams much thought before this because i don;t give an awful lot of thought or analysis to what goes directly into my trash bin.

but it makes sense that a scammer would use the names of real persons or institutions just in case the greedy credulous of the world wish to google the project and check for legitimacy.

first, a word about to greedy credulous of the world. if there are big wads of cash floating around in the world, somebody has found a way to claim them. they do not need you to pretend to be next of kin or open an account or help to make transfers in any way. big wads of cash have plenty of claimants and big banks have procedures for just that.

duh.

i also learned that email scammers LOVE to pretend to be mr. wang. here is a correspondance with my very same "mr. wang" and someone else, and here are two instances of either a different "mr. wang" or at least a "mr. wang" with a different address and text body.


in this second listing, i particularly like the note way down at the bottom:

NOTE TO DUMBASS SPAMMERS: My scam e-mail filtering system is pretty good but it isn't perfect. Occasionally a regular spam e-mail will get mistakenly published here as a 419 scam. This is inadvertent. If you are a spammer and you don't wish to have your crap mistakenly published on this website as a 419 advance fee scam, the solution is simple. Don't mail your crap to harvested e-mail addresses.

later on, maybe, i will analyze soem of the spam emails and talk about what's really going on.

in the meantime, i may just write mr. wang one last letter about my sadness over not hearing from him for lo these many days.

a day at the museum: PRI

i think what i said to you is that the part of the day in which i went to the museum of the earth deserved its own post.

i do not think i was fully prepared for the visit, because even though i know that the Paleontological Research Institution is home to one of the world's finest fossil collections i was just not prepared for the scope of the thing.

yeah, i get that we exist in a tiny little slice of time and occupy a tiny little biological niche and that there were things before us and probably things after us but i was just not prepared for the sheer hugeness of it to be laid out so graphically and solidly.

i had spent some time in the maine highlands casually looking at some of the geological formations there and of course because i was around ithaca i was looking at some geological formations because, really, if you're in ithaca and you are not looking at the geologic history you really have to be purposely looking away since everywhere you go there are displays of the geologic eras right there in the open.

so pretty soon after my museum visit i wrote a post that was kind of about my being all agog and i promised loosely to write another post with some pictures and junk and this is that post.


the first thing you notice when you enter the building is the giant whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling. you can't really say it's in the entryway, because it takes up rather a lot of space on two floors. it is very, very big.

it is not a fossil, but the remains of north american right whale #2030.

that's right. there are so few right whales left that each one of them is assigned an identity number for tracking.

this one, when she died, was acquired by the museum so her bones at least could be seen.

so then the next thing you notie it the really big mind boggling multi-panel painting that occupies the ramp down toward the display areas. if you are a patient person and have the time, the museum offers a doohickey (free of charge) that you can hold to your ear so you can listen to an audio tour of the painting and i really recommend it. it's an amazing painting and it illustrates some stunning life science concepts.

it kind of blew my temporal tracking gasket, though, because it turns out that i am not very good running a story time line in reverse. iam not able to think seamlessly in reverse time; i have to start where the story starts and go forward and then think "ok, but before that?' and then i can run the chunk of the story before that and link it up and i know when you're looking at the painting the idea behind setting it up in reversing time is to put you in the frame of mind of going back through the geological record from the surface where we live down to places that were exposed long before we lived and it works to illustrate depth and passage through time in preparation for looking at the exhibits, but sometime i will return and look at that painting starting at the bottom and think about that story seamless and moving forward.


and the first thing you get to after that is the dinosaur coprolites, which is an amusing placement of some things you don't have to think too hard about before you dive right down through the eras and have a hard look and a long think about the stunning scope of life on this planet and the life OF this planet and it's really hard not to notice all the mass extinctions.

i took some pictures for you, and made a little video of an interesting and nicely mounted ammonoid fossil.




and one of the things i notice about my pictures is that often i take pictures that serve no apparent purpose except to remind me to look something up later, because while the seismograph drums were very interesting and i understand the general concepts, there were some very specific labels with some terminology i did not understand, so i took pictures of those so i'd remember what to look up.

old macdaniels had some nuts

last october i was looking for some geocaches over at the macdaniels nut grove up on cornell plantations. first of all it is way cool that a university has these incredible areas. it's the kind of thing universities with ag schools just have, but that doesn't make them any less cool.

but cornell does a really fabulous job welcoming the public into a lot of these areas so we can not only enjoy what are essentially working parklands, but also see for ourselves the kinds of plants they're working on and learn about it a little ourselves.

so i come over the hill and all of a sudden it's like disneyland for me! there are trails! and plants with labels! and work areas! and - get this- MAPS AND BROCHURES AND INFORMATION KIOSKS!!!!

oh- em -gee, oh- em -gee, right, right? i know!

i am hopping up and down on one foot excited and i sort of forget to look for the caches because i'm too busy going around to EVERY part of the garden and taking pictures and reading EVERYTHING and i'm even somehow pleased to see a handsaw belonging to the professor on the project, like it's a sign of work in progress and he might be back at any minute.

and now i'm looking at their website and i notice they have a link to the UVM extension service which is fun because i live very near a UVM research forest and there's also a link to a lovely little map of noertheastern mushroom growers, which makes me think i will grow those mushrooms i got for my birthday.

winter vegetables

yes, i know you are all asking the question "how can i cook more like flask?"

because flask is an awesome cook.

anyway, yesterday i made a thing that is delicious and filing and lovely to look at and oh, so nutritious, so of course you will want some.

i got my first slow cooker recently, so i'm learning how to use it. this represents a bit of a challenge for me, because when i'm thinking about making dinner it is not usually eleven in the morning.

so it's a discipline.

i had a bunch of things in my fridge that i wanted to use up and i thought a little winter vegetable stew would be just the thing.


so here is how you make it:

take inventory of the things you have to use up. in my house that was half a butternut squash, some spinach, some cabbage, two carrots, two parsnips, and a sweet potato. i also wanted to use up potatoes and onions because while they keep a while, they don't keep forever and i try to use what i have.

toas a tablespoon or so of olive oil (or whatever) into a pan and hot it up. drop your cut up onions (i used one large one) in there and cook them down until they;re translucent and maybe browning just a little at the edges. make a space in the middle of that and toss your spices in. stir it around and coat the onions with that mixture. cook it for a minute or two until the spices smell nice and fragrant.

just in case you're curious, i used some red curry power, a pinch of garam masala, some smoked paprika, a little allspice, some ground black pepper, some cayenne pepper, and a wad of minced garlic. it's not an authentic any national cuisine, but that's what struck my fancy at the moment.

use some wine or vegetable stock or even water to deglaze the pan so you get all the flavors out of there and dump all that in the slow cooker.

then add around a quart of vegetable stock (really any kind of stock will do, but i use my own vegetable stock which is cheap and delicious) and toss in the toughest of the vegetables in the kind of sized chunks you would like to eat.

in my house on this day, i knew the parsnips were going to take by far the longest to cook, so i put them in the pot a full forty minutes ahead of everything else.

after a while toss in the next hardest of the vegetables. carrots and then maybe twenty minutes later put in the sweet potato and potato.

toss in a can of beans if you feel like it. i waffled over this for a while but in the end i decided to put in a can of black beans. if you are using both beans and tomatoes, though, save the tomatoes until later because tomatoes will stiffen those beans right up.

let it cook a while - an hour or so? because you're cooking that stuff for four honkin' hours, maybe five and there aren't any real critical values here- and then add the cut up squash and cabbage. squash doesn't take nearly as long to cook as parsnip, so you'll want to put it in relatively late so it doesn't get all mushy.

all along the way (every hour or so) you may wish to stir and adjust seasonings. i did. i added a tablespoon or so of miso (umami and salt), a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste (umami and sweet), and some umeboshi (umami, salt, sour).

cook it until the vegetables are tender.

the spinach gets added gently just at the end, and cooked down until it just wilts.

then you toss it into bowls and eat it.

it's good.

golf and fall planting

i am all caught up not in my geocache logs to october 19, which means i'm looking at october 20 which according to the record was a day of a few different activities.

apparently in the morning i went to find a geocache that was near where i woke up and then i remember going in pretty urgent search of a restroom, and no, there aren't pictures of that.

you're welcome.

then apparently -(i am judging by the photographs i took because quite frankly i rely on notes and pictures to tell me where i have been)- apparently i went up east hill a ways to play disc golf at a course behind a school which is thoroughly unremarkable except for the pretty views and also while i was there i saw a bunch of brown paper bags in the school garden and i don;t know what you do when you see a whole bunch of brown bags placed out as if they might be bulbs waiting for planting, but of course i look in the bags. and take pictures.





 the trail of pictures then indicates that i went out to the slaterville spring to try to fill my water jugs and i know from talking to people that it had been a droughty summer and it was being a droughty fall and although the spring was flowing just fine when i was there on monday today there is no water.





then, on a whim, i decided to go out the the paleontological research institute, otherwise commonly known as the museum of the earth.

you know, i think that probably deserves a post of its own.

fraudutainment!

you know, i really thought that my last  response to the spamscammer was going to lead him to write me off as a bad mark.

but no.

HE WROTE TO ME AGAIN!!

i am apalled. apalled and delighted. here is the text of his most recent message, along with his attached "documents":

How are you doing? Great I suppose! Thanks for choosing to do this project, you will never regret this decision you’ve made because we are truly doing the right thing. Also, thanks for the information you sent of yourself. I have now harmonized them with our record here at my bank and i have also sent the needed information to the attorney for the WILL of testament at the Probate registry, it will be ready by next week and everything will be in your name. Everything is just perfect as there’s no call for apprehension now. Everything is under control and there is absolutely no risk because our record now proves you as the valid next of kin and beneficiary to the funds I transferred to the private banking arm of CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK. I will be sending instructions to you with secret numbers along with an ATTACH DOCUMENT (FINAL WILL). Those shall be the information/documents you’ll be making available to the private banking arm of CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK for them to authenticate you as the beneficiary to the wire remittance that I made to their bank. It’s that simple.  All you need do from then onward is to always consult with me and follow my instructions as we proceed so that there won’t be any mistakes. Also, once again I expect our correspondence to be 100% CONFIDENTIAL, this is because of the nature and circumstances of this project. May I have your word(s) on that, please?
I will not attempt to contact you by phone or fax except it's very important. As a matter of caution, it’s very important that I and you are not linked in anyway except maybe on an official level. Even this email address I am contacting you with is an anonymous one that can't be traced to me in anyway. You are the only that I communicate with here as no one else has this my email address except you. For an even better understanding between us, I will like to know the following:
(1) Your occupation and how old you are?
(2) Assurance that I can get your total devotion and trust to see this through?
(3)Have you handled large amount of funds before?
(4) Do you have the ability to open strategic accounts within or outside your country for the purpose of safe guarding the funds?
(5) Can you truly keep this to yourself only? Even keep from your partner? Till we secure the funds at least. Can you do that?
Please, once again, ensure that you keep this project confidential; do not discuss it with anybody because of its nature. It's going to be our secret forever.  For your perusal and as a gesture of my sincerity and dedication to this project, I’m attaching a scanned photograph of me and also that of my international passport. Please send same of yourself too. Any ID at all will just be okay. I’m sorry but I need to be 100% sure that I’m dealing with the right person. This is for my protection please.
Yours Sincerely,
Wang. 

so here is my answer, along with my "license of drive" and "passport":

i am very fine, thank you for asking. i am practicing holding my breath underwater for short periods of time, say, 6.5 seconds because gelatin. it is really no choice to do this project because obviously i am heir legitimate and i could do not other thing than my to honor the memory of  deceased decedent your domicilary account client by me, mr. fabian fabian surname entering into marriage with you.
darling.
i am very happy that your records are properly harmonized and i think you will find your car keys also if you look underneath the laundry hamper where you droppend them last week. i feel so lucky that you are fully in control as i am just now going through an awkward time in which some of my leaves are falling off and my friend susan is skiing CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK in palau.
i am proved to be a small yeast organism WILL probate registry CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK auspicious totally legal no risk toaster.
beneficiary secret instruction numbers! i LOVE secret instruction numbers!!!!! can we have a secret handshake too? and a hat? it proves valid authenticate confidential and no apprehension you are.
ATTACH DOCUMENT i am so happy and also crenellated.
here are my words: woot woot meezlehooper funderthins
very simple no mistakes.
yes, please do not contact me by phone unless it is social since we are very close or if i am actually on fire and i am so glad i have sent you all my phone informations forthwith authentic #4 combination plate. you are the only one i communicate with because quite frankly i am just not that good at it and i am lucky to have found in you such a close friend and CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK totally legal 100% CONFIDENTIAL remittance and for greater understanding and deep intimacy between us i will tell you:
1) i am a size six angiosperm technician
2) you have my devotion and trust and please pass the lotion.
3) i was once a cashier at a large discount store and i currently have twelve united state dollar and fifty six
4) if i open a saving account at my bank my new bank will give me a toaster oven. or free checking.
5) i am very sorry. i know you said to tell no one but all my friend are in awe of your true greatness of spirit and with such champion honest man doing good in  i can only tell, tell, tell of my great fortune to finally meet you and i, mr. fabian fabian surname have written a song of your greatness which i have perform nightly in our public square for you will bring much good fortune to me and my elderly grandmother and our town, where we are preparing to unveil a statue in your honor.
of COURSE you are dealing with the right person!!! do your records not harmonize with my name? you found me by this very email, did you not? you are such a talented finder of persons that you have found me, the one and only valid next of kin and totally legal beneficiary!!!

so of course since we are to be married you here is my driver license and passport.
love,
mr. fabian fabian surname.

storytelling of the geolocated kind

i probably won't get around to writing the actual log for a good long time, but this week i went to the vista peak geocache, which, oddly, is at the top of what they're calling vista peak even though it isn't really a peak and doesn't have a view.

one of the great things about bolton valley is that once you get to the top of the lifts you are surrounded by both the bolton valley nordic trail network and the catamount trail.

and at the top of the vista chair the old tower looks like it'f falling out of repair but it is both sturdily built AND i notice that it is being maintained. it gets a lot of traffic in ski boots which are hard on the ladder rungs and even though the thing looks all fall-apart-y i've noticed that periodically rungs get replaced.

anyway, when i'm out i'm always taking pictures and stuff and i am always looking for an interesting way to tell the story or just to show where i was.

f'rinstance, a couple of years ago i made some annotated maps of two of the chairlifts at bolton just because i could.

and then a little while ago i wrote you that i had learned to use some little online doohickeys so i could map a couple of bike loops and show you.

it takes three doohickeys to make that: one is garmin basecamp, which i do not particularly recommend but i have to use it to turn my garmin data into data i can play with in other formats. i really, really like my garmin GPS receiver. i would have to, because i hate garmin's sucky customer "service" and garmin's  restrictive policies regarding maps you have already legally bought from them.

it turns out you have to buy the maps and then purchase the right to use the maps on the garmin devices that you also own. and if one of your garmin devices breaks or is lost, you cannot deauthorize one of your permitted uses and transfer it to another device. you have to buy a new license.

to use a map you already paid hundreds of dollars for.

WTF, garmin?

i think what i'm saying here is that if you like the devices in the delorme line at all, you should maybe look into buying one of those. they are very good units, have excellent maps, and good customer service. the only problem with starting out delorme is that they don't have much in the area of starter units and you have to go whole hog high end at the outset.

unless a lot of my devices break all at once i am too heavily invested in the garmin line to make the change easily.

uh, anyway.

once i get the .gpx files extracted there are a lot of ways i can play with them. for my cache trip, i took the .gpx file and loaded it into this cute little site that lets you do a LOT of fun things with the data, but it won't let you store or display the results, so i tossed it up onto a third site that not only lets you store the map data, but it lets you attatch pictures and video and i am not sure how i will end up using it, but it sure is fun.

vista peak geocache

EveryTrail - Find the best Hiking in Vermont

more fun with canned meat products

so if you were following this story, you are perhaps surprised to learn that even after i told him i was a teapot, the spammer for some reason still contacted me.

if you would like to read the full body of text of his lengthy and bizarre explanatory email, i have put in in a googledoc that you can read  here.

but here is his shorter email:

Thanks for your response, I will need the exact address during 20th April 2002 because that is what we are going to use in the documents in our office. please send it as soon as you can. Thanks for everything once again.

and my reply:

most excellent nematode. thanks for your response to my response. i am very épinard to happlily work with.
very sorry i am to hear of you domicilary investment predicament and decease of decedent CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK client customer very sad mustard CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK just tell me how to apply for the funds and i will most sure to tell all my friends of your great generosity and trustworthiness. surely you are a great humanitarian and cephalopod.
the informations with which you seek of course to help you in our beneficial aims CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK totally legal of course are that i, mr. fabian fabian SURNAME during the period of during from 20 april 2002 to time ending have many places (BOCHK) lived but for sure my address have been exactly
133 State Street (this is the street address for the vermont department of taxes)
Montpelier, VT 05633-1401

Äyritie 8D, 5th floor (this is the address of the finnish office of a norwegian arms manufacturer)FI-01510 Vantaa, FinlandPhone: +358 (o)50 3499864


354 Hunter Street Ossining, New York 10562 (this is the street address of sing sing prison)
happy for your document assist do brasil.
i look forwared to hearing how next APPLY FOR FUNDS in mutual benefit of.
wooo!
CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK
you are my large squishy potato for good everything #1 champion mayonnaise. 

i sort of hope this is the last i have heard from him.

then again, i sort of hope he still thinks i'm a good prospect for his scam, because that would be even funnier.

videopad

today i thought i would like to download and test a new piece of video editing software.

well, new to me.

because i've really outgrown imovie (who hasn't?) but i was looking for something free and useable and     of course i spent some time on the interwebz reading about it, and i found videopad.

their tutorial can show you what it looks like.

so far i like it. it isn't the robust full-featured intuitive interface i'd like in editing software, but it is VERY nice for free and in an hour or so i've figured out enough of the basics to know i can do some cool things with it as i learn.

my test project (which i will show you later) is the video of my cache hunt for the day.

i may or may not have told you that i'm trying to fill in the days on my calendar for which i have never found a geocache and 28 january (yes, i am writing my posts a day or two ahead) is a blank day.

...but i wanted to go skiing!

so i checked the geocaching website and darn if there isn;t a cache just a little ways off the top of the vista chair.

so i went.

later on i will tell you about it.

and there will be video.

spamspamspamspam

so. you guys will rememeber that i posted a thing in which i promised to tell you if anything fun happened on the front of the spamscammer.

i haven't heard from him, but yesterday i got an email from a different scammer and i fired off a response and gueswhatguesswhat?!!?!?

today he wrote me back!

so for your amusement and/or horror:

POST PRIVATE:
Greetings,
  I am a banker with Bank of China. I have an interesting business proposal for you that will be of immense benefit to both of us. Although this may be hard for you to believe, we stand to gain eleven million five hundred thousand united state dollars between us in a matter of days. Please grant me the benefit of doubt and hear me out. I need you to signify your interest by replying to this email.
 Most importantly, I will need you to promise to keep whatever you learn from me between us even if you decide not to go along with me. I will make more details available to you on receipt of a positive response from you. Do contact me only at my private email address: (redacted)
Warm regard.

and my response:

hello!
i am  a teapot in the bank do brasil. i am very interested in interesting things, especially things of immense benefit. it is not hard for me to believe at all that we stand to gain eleven million five hundred thousand united state dollars between us and i think you will wish to ausipicious know we also stand to gain many happy calendar dropping. i am replying to this email most gratefully to signify both interest and moistness.
i know you very importantly ask me not to share with anyone our secret but with such good fortune i share with my aged grandmother who very much enjoys wealthy and our stffordshire terrier also await available details positive response.
blistering observation.

and he sent me a reply today!!!

I have just emailed you with an introduction to the project I wrote about in my first email to you. The email is quite lengthy and your email system might easily mistake it as junk or spam email. So I need you to check your bulk, junk or spam email folders for the email. Its subject is “Thank you for your response to my email/Further information about the project!” and it’s from this very email account. Please read and understand it in its entirety. Then, be sure to reply with your full names and address as I requested. Cheers.
Wang

so i IMMEDIATELY wrote back:

yes! i have just immediately received your fingerpainting and there was no mistake!!! i was waiting up all day and all night hopping up and down on one foot to hear how our new partnership will proceed!!! i shall buy a new hat to wear for this special occasion which is more awesome than the time i was elected lord high topiary to his majesty carl.
i am so excited to have my tortoise read to me the content of your project and i will be sure to understand every word plus the secret transmission for which you have specially chosen me.
it is from this very email account but i am sending it through brain waves so the toaster will not overhear.
chicken fans! in the stands! dance! and sing tonight! stamp your feet and raise your hands! we.... gonna be all right!
goooooooo, chickens! goooooo, chickens!
chickens #1 champion going to win!!!!
WOOOOOOOOO!!!!

midnight rain

i'm still catching up on my cache logs from october because i've never been able to just write TFTC. no, i have to tell the story of it. with links. and pictures for nearly every cache. and sometimes video.

and some people think that finding a lot of caches somehow excuses them the basic courtesy of writing a few words because, after all, they're so busy finding lots of caches that they have no time to do anything but write one log and cut and paste it everywhere.

someone mentioned once that not all caches merit more than "found it, thanks" but how will people know the difference if every log is the same cut and paste?

anyway, i'm all about narrative so for me going caching is about going to see and also telling what happened. and showing pictures.

and because that takes time to sort out properly, i'm often many months behind in the writing.  and i don't always remember what it is that i took pictures of or what i said at the time until i go back and look through my pictures and my notes and sometimes there are some surprises.

like this video:



you may wish to just watch it unexplained, but you also may wish to know that i am sleeping in my car with a bad cold. and that even though i have not clocked any photos for my thirteen project in a long time, i still take a picture every thirteen hours.

i say that as if is explains everything.

burying beetles

well, since your sunday morning just isn't complete without some footage of insects having sex, here's a little video i took of what appear to be a pair of north american burying beetles in flagrante delicto.

while i was at that location i also took some pictures of a shoe and a rusty golf club because they seemed interesting to me at the time.

you know, because i went there to look for a geocache.

the fact that the beetles are mating apparently suggests that there is a small carcass nearby, which makes me happy that i was wearing gloves.

and that i remembered to wash my hands before dinner.

oh, the horror!

yesterday i wrote about my short adventure with linkedin.

it was cute, really. but that thing is scary. it just links you and keeps linking you as if you had asked to contact people.

today i got an acceptance of my "request" from someone i have very carefully cut out of my life. at some personal sacrifice. i actually left a circle of friends i enjoyed just to get away from her.

she wrote to me last sumer with this long rambling email about how she'd really like to get back in touch with me and how much she LOVES my friends and parents and i simply did not answer but apparently i should have said "do not contact me again for any reason" because now she thinks i requested her through linkedin.

ewwwwwww.

adventures in networking: linkedin

ok, so yesterday it was cold out. i wouldn't really care about cold because i LIKE cold weather, but when it's 40 degrees one day and -10 the next it doesn't really give you time to get used to it. i had an appointment in town and i wanted to find a geocache because it was an empty day on my calendar but i think what i'm telling you here is that it was cold out and instead of playing outside i messed around at my desk.

and there was somebody or other with a linkedin profile i wanted to look at, which means you have to sign up and i was feeling jaunty so i went ahead and signed myself right up under the name flask ehrlenmeyer

-because what the hell? as far as you're concerned, it's my name-

and they ask a lot of professional questions.

now, i'm not looking to be all professionally network-y. i just want to look at a profile, you know?

so i tell linkedin that i live in richmond, VT, which is the closest town to where i live where i can order pizza. i say i am self employed in the field of arts and crafts.

yes, i did. these are options on the drop-down menu. they are. i swear.

and for job title, i say that i am chief cook and bottle washer.

and i hit the "skip this step" button for everything else. no, i do not want to be connected with everyone in my email contact list.

more specifically, everyone i know does not need to be hassled by me through linkedin. but either linkedin is unusually aggressive and predatorial in this regard, or it might have to do with that second browser window i had accidentally opened and started to log in from there, but all of a sudden i was getting a lot of acceptances from people.

really, people? you are accepting network contacts from self-employed crafters who obviously are not serious?

and then, oh.

funny they're all actually people i know in one way or another, many of whom know me by my given name and not my public name, and they're playing along.

it's kind of sweet.

so, hi, professional networking people!! sorry to bother you at work. thanks for accepting me!

carry on.

have a nice day.

more about gun violence

there's a lot of public debate, in the states, anyway, about what to do about gun violence.

the debate centers mostly on the question of whether there should be fewer or more guns available.

...which is all wrong.

ALL wrong.

because the key word in the phrase "gun violence" is not "gun"; it's "violence".

the problem is a culture of violence. guns are not the problem. guns are tools.

a culture in which violence is accepted and applauded is the problem. a culture in which our sports and other entertainment media feature violence is the problem. a culture in which violent acts or threats of violence are near the top of our list of stress responses instead of our last resort, that's the problem.

the problem will not go away by legislation or by angry mobs or, oddly, by more violence. the problem only gets reduced when we stop to think: is there a better way to do this? do i want to support the culture of violence? how can i opt out?

is hunting about meat or the gutpile? when children play cops and robbers, is it a game about crisis and mastery, or is it about shooting? is life about mastery of ourselves or domination of others?

if you are about violence and enjoy violence and accept violence it does not matter one bit if you have lots of guns around or not. violence will get done even with less efficient tools.

likewise if you are not about violence, it wouldn't matter one bit if you kept a working artillery piece on your front lawn and used it to announce cocktail hour every day.

the tools are what you make them. the attitude is yours to choose.

next time you get into the gun violence debate, make sure you are arguing about the right thing.

choose less violence.

once we have done that, the argument over guns becomes useless.

maybe you shouldn't but i did: spam file

so i was just sitting here at my desk watching a large man walk by with an axe in his hand, which out of context might be alarming, but it's cold today and whoever that guy is (i don't recognize him with the ski mask and all), he seems to be headed over to where my neighbor keeps his firewood.

so i return to what i'm doing, which is casually going through my spam folder.

no, really. there's a thing i wasn't really expecting that might have gotten lost in there and everyone says to check the spambox every now and then just in case.

so i was checking and i found this fine missive:

Good day Sir/Ma,My name is Staff Sgt. Gary Bourland; I am an Americansoldier that served in the US military in Iraq with the army's 25th infantry division, I have some amount of funds that I want to move out ofthe country, e-mail me at (address redacted) for moredetails.Thanks and best regards.Staff Sgt.Gary Bourland

and i know you really shouldn't respond to these things, but i did. here is what i wrote:

good day staff sgt. gary bourland, my name is flask and i am a small brightly colored lizard living in a coffee mug in 25 planes of existence. i have a great interest in moving funds. what funds would you like to be moving? from which countries would you be moving them? will you be moving them back when you are done? will you need a truck? or would a bicycle with a really big trailer suffice? thanks and big wet sloppy kisses, flask

i'll let you know if anything fun happens.

meanwhile, my neighbor is carrying kindling back to his house.

orange, brown, and tasty.

no, it's not the punchline to a bad joke.

yesterday i had the energy to make an actual recipe of real food. from scratch.

i used to do this sort of this all the honkin' time, but while the Very Bad Thing still takes its toll, having the energy or the will to do it just isn't all that predictable.

but i saw this recipe and decided i should make me some of that.

so i did.

and it is so good that i toyed briefly with the idea of NOT packing even a little of it away to share with my mom, who would love it.

but i love my mom, and she loves things with sweet potatoes, so i did pack her some.

it's good a flavorful and filling. it bakes up all bubbly with savory gravylike stuff on the edges. you should make some. and eat it.

sharing is optional.

mysterious lights

so last night i was sitting on my sofa and i saw this light.

it is not unusual for there to be light there, because, as you can see, there are parking places pointing in the area of the light.

but it looked weird, because none of the cars has their lights on.

so i looked around to see if maybe a car father across the road was shining its lights up there, and no. the light appears to be coming from behind that pine tree. and something is moving in that shadow. i never do see what person is out there, but i see them in the shadow.

the plausible explanation is that they are shoveling snow off of the pond for skating, but it does not seems to me that it has been consistently cold enough for that to be safe to do.

it's a mystery.

man at work

i told you back in october about going to my choir reunion so there's not much to say about it except that i have finally processed some of that video.

i was there to sing and not to be a documentarian, so i just took a few minutes of video from an unobtrusive angle, just to show and to have a memory of what it looked like to be in that choir.

the best of the work in the choir was not in the concert hall, really, but every day at two.

it's a thing larry says over and over: "every day at two".

because for all those years there was this one monster choir and each of us added our spirit and our work as we passed through it but we never left and we were never subtracted and the work went on.

every day at two.

at when we started the reunion rehearsals, larry got up in front of us and said "it must be two o'clock somewhere" and we all knew our places right away.

this video is just a few rough clips from the two days of rehearsal. there is nothing fancy about it and other than it's larry at the helm of the choir, there's nothing particularly special.

it would have been awesome, maybe, to capture a flashy gesture or an insightful comment, but really most of the work was only ever made of the steady quiet work being done all along.

so maybe it's fitting that there's nothing stunning or dramatic.

but there he is.

and we are there.