crocuses up.

march meh-ness

it's the NCAA men's roundball tourney! yay!


it's not that i'm truly indifferent; i'm uh, limited in my fandom. i am wildly interested if syracuse is playing. i am a big syracuse fan (but only for men's basketball and no other sport) (no, i am not trying to explain that to you.).

i am moderately interested if UVM is playing, because i live near burlington, VT and grew up in that particular college town.

i am casually interested if KU is doing really, really well, because cr went to school there and while she cares litte for sports of any kind, she remembers some of the boys that used to play them and has some vestigial fondness. cr useta be friendly with the cheerleaders and had a close call with being little jay. (YOU look it up if you want.)

in other sports, i only care about baseball if the red sox are playing. my enthusiasm for the sox does not extend even so far as to give me the energy to hate the yankees, which is what you do around here: you love one and hate the other.

not me.

i hate american football of every kind, regionality, and age level. i extend my antipathy to football players, cheerleaders, and the entire superbore weekend.

i have a passing interest in soccer (or football, as it's called nearly everywhere else), especially if the revolution are playing.

WWF extreme fighting is the gayest thing i have ever seen.

bear in mind that i have no objection to gay things and am entirely gay friendly. i can see gay male porn with equanimity but mixed martial arts cagefighting embarrasses me with its intimacy. every time i see it on tv it feels vaguely and uncomfortably like i have walked into some couple's bedroom at an awkward time.

i adore watching canadian curling when i can find it on tv, and i will watch the tour de france obsessively, every day it's on, every year, no matter who is riding. the tour is the whole reason i have satellite tv in the first place. if you want to know where i am in the entire month of july, i am at home watching bicycle racing.

i'm willing to watch other races too, but they just don't give the other big classics or even newer races much full coverage and televised bicycle racing is weird: it is stunningly boring to watch unless you watch the WHOLE THING, in which case your glacial attention span is rewarded by amazing awareness of subtle drama and breathtaking courage.

and golf? i watch a lot of golf, but not on tv and only on one particular hole. i wouldn't bother, but i can see the 7th green from my sofa.

btw, i cannot find proper attribution for this comic. i am still looking.

eat more pi

today is pi day.

if you are paying attention to the world of mathematics at all, you know that this is an increasingly controversial day.

there seem to be fewere and fewer holidays that don't involve controversy of some sort.

the opposition on this one comes from proponents of tau, which makes sense to me, except this morning i was laying in bed (not snoozing, mind you, these were my first thoughts on waking) and i do not think i have seen the arguably more convenient tau used to describe the area of a circle. seems like that's not a simplification, but i haven't had time energy to really think about it.

instead, i'm going to provide you with some little links about pi and tau and let you sort things out for yourself.

 

i was going to say that i'm simply going to retire to the sofa, but today some men came to take it away for reupholstery.

be sure to check back

i have decided to learn to pee standing up.

at its fundamental level, this isn't too hard.  all of you who never pee in the shower, please raise your hands.

thought so.

anyway, a friend of ours swears she has a friend who can do this with accuracy about as well as the boys and that was at the back of my head a week or so ago when i read an article about river rafting and it mentioned that on these trips women learn to pee standing up, since you can't pee on the shore because of environmental concerns and you can't get in the water to pee because of safety concerns.

i wish i could remember the article so i could link you to it, but someone asserted that if you took a picture of a line of pee-ers from the back, you wouldn't be able to tell from the streams who was male and who was female.

so i thought that would be a handy skill to acquire. i don't imagine it will ever be quite as handy as having point and shoot apparatus that one can just pull out of a conveniently placed portal in the clothing, but it's supposed to be an improvement over simply squatting in the woods.

while i won't be reporting in any great detail (you're welcome), i'll keep you posted.

three days running

it turns  out to be six calendar days, since i can't run two days in a row.

i just can't. one little mile at this point brings on an asthma attack of the proportion that makes me think suddenly about reconsidering my attitude that asthma isn't all that serious.

even with the inhaler, it starts an hour or so after the run and doesn't let up entirely for two days. that's ok. i don't like running enough to do it every day.

i have some other issues with what your dentist calls "discomfort", and if you've been following the story you already know about my feet and knees and my point isn't to whine about how much they hurt, but to marvel at how progressively less they hurt.

the first day i started out in "discomfort" and the real pain -the kind where you grind your teeth and start to cry came on even before i was to the top of the "hill"... and i use quotation marks with the word "hill" because even though i live out here in the mountains, my road runs pretty level along the bottom of the mountain and although there are some elevation changes, it's pretty flat.

i estimated the elevation gain might be all of 20 feet, but i went and made a handy chart of the profile of my half-mile out-and-back and it turns out the elevation gain is twice that!

woo-hoo.

anyway, the second day the real pain didn't show up until i was nearly at the turnaround and today i kept waiting for the real pain to show up so i could tell you about it comparatively, but it just wasn't there.


soon, i hope, i will graduate up to a three mile run. that would be nice, because when race season starts i hope to be in better shape. today the sun was at just the right angle so that i could see the shadow of my massive thighs jiggle with each stride.

hey, at least i'm moving fast enough to jiggle them.

here's my handy chart:

pain in the neck

i do not remember when it started. it was unremarkable. it happens often enough: you move wrong and something catches in your neck and for a few days you can't turn your head all the way, and maybe your shoulder hurts but after a few days it gets worked out.

over years i learned that it will come out in a big fat hurry if i have a ski or biking crash, but also (and more helpfully) i have learned that a dose of muscle relaxants at bedtime on that first night usually sorts the whole thing out and no harm done.

because this i'm prone to muscle spasms in my neck and in my back and because one night of muscle relaxants usually sorts it out, i have script written for them.  i'm written for one a day, but when things are good 30 last me three or four months.

in a rough ski or bike season or when i'm sleeping in my car i might take one every three or four days or sometimes two nights in a row. a beer or two would probably do the same for me, but i don't drink.

so all i remember about when this started was that it was two sundays ago, and i remember that it had been going on for more than a day or two and i heard somebody two pews back complaining of exactly the same thing.

so it's around three weeks now. for sure this spasm has pinched something in my neck because i have pain and swelling and numbness all the way down my left arm and back into my shoulderblade and ribcage.

there isn't a comfortable position to sit or stand in, but the worst of it is when i'm lying down, partly because i do not have a complete rotator cuff in either shoulder. i have no huge deficiencies, no gigantic tears ro missing bits, but just enough so that i don't have full support of my shoulders, so lying down is a challenge.

i found a position in which the pain passed relatively quickly, but it only aggravates my reflux so that's unpleasant.

i know from the number of podcasts i am listening to each night that it takes on average and hour an a half for the pain to subside enough to sleep. it's an interesting meditative exercise. i know that the positional change alone is hard, and i have taken to lying down for short bursts during the day just to get used to it. i also know that while i am moving there is less pain, but when i am still the throbbing, pounding, aching starts and i have an interval of subsuming pain.

yoga helps. the exercises from physical therapy help. i've taken three of the muscle relaxants, but i don't like to take too many in case there's something worse around the corner.

but i needed a refill.

and i called my doctor's office and left my message on the refill line.

they called me back a day or two later with some questions. then they called back a couple hours later.  and again about an hour later, to tell me i need to come in for an office visit to get my refill.

ok, fine.

their first available opening is may 5.

seriously?!?

model citizen

oh, right, that.

i was keeping a blog and it's not like it would be so hard to just write down what i'm working on.

right now (read: for the last three weeks or so) i am working kind of obsessively on what barbara is calling my snowfort, since this year there isn't enough snow to make a fort and this fits the pattern of doing SOMETHING obsessively at this time of year.

-did i even show you all of last year's snohaus pictures, or did i shelve them until i processed all the pictures? eh, probably that second thing.

anyway, i'm making a little sketchup model of a friend's house and it is a challenging project. most houses are basically a box or two with some sticky-out bits but my friend lives in a house that's five boxes with a slightly asymmetric T and a quarter-round room and some sticky-out bits. add to that the challenges of the original builder having been the original homeowner who was an engineer but not an architect or a building professional and what appears to be his natural predilection for dividing spaces by threes or fives and it gets interesting, never mind that for some reason no roof anywhere on the house is a standard common pitch.

and there are places in the house where everything goes fine until you draw that line out to its logical conclusion and - uh-oh! - the basic geometry of those things do not form intersecting planes in any universe, but a multitude of rough edges (up to two inches!) can be covered over with putty and tape before painting.

the upshot is that as i work my little model, i am having to make a lot of guesses as to what the actual framing of the house might be and i'm just drawing most things to standard lumber dimensions, nevermind the siding or sheetrock.

idiosyncrasies aside, it is a very pleasing house to the eye, lovely and gracious, even if you know that the stringers were inexpertly cut.

if you want to see the progress on the model as i go along, i'm posting the dailies here.

gentlemen:

today is valentine's day.



while i am in favor of love and enjoy expression of same, rest assured that nothing you can say or do on that day or even the week preceding is going to buy you my favor in the bedroom.

trust me, if i wish to have your companionship there, you will already know about it and you are already a frequent traveler to that land of delights.

i am sick to death of the mass marketing and raised unrealistic expectations about this one fraught holiday and its assumptions about gender normative behaviors, the spiraling cycle of profit from the hopes and disappointments of both men and women, and the underlying subtext of sex in exchange for gifts.

THAT said, i am not against romance. life is too shot not to throw yourself into lavish romance EVERY. DAMN. DAY. and not just on my birthday or for some holiday manufactured by the greeting card and jewelery industries for the exploitation of your insecurities about us.

i do not presume to speak for all women when i say this, but television has us wrong. you do not have to spend piles of money to make us feel loved and respected, and you do not have to come up with something special for the day, especially since  (this is true if i have given you a second thought) you often come up with something special just because it's tuesday.

so here's my handy gift guide to help you guys out.

flowers:

• unless you have noticed that i keep cut flowers around the house, don't bother.
• same with potted plants.
• try these: duct tape roses.

chocolate:

•  do not pester me with those horrid little boxes of filled chocolates.  if you insist on buying me chocolates, GO TO A REPUTABLE CHOCLATIER and buy me something they make. if you are wealthy, buy me a lot of them.  if you are an average joe, two or three will be fine.
• even bar chocolate is acceptable, if you know how to find good bar chocolate. what i'm saying here is that i know chocolate and if you're going to bother with chocolate, make the effort to find chocolate that i will want to eat.

jewelry:

• don't bother going to jared.  i don't kare how you spell "kiss", and no matter what jane symour says, mass produced bling is NOT a personal statement of love. it is not a personal statement of love unless you designed or made it yourself. some guys do this. props to them.
• you know those little earring backs? the little doodads that keep post earrings from falling off? i'm always losing mine. if you were an observant intimate companion of mine, you would know this and you might stop off at the craft store and buy me a bag of spares for something like $5.

dining:

• i'm pretty happy with an evening at home.  if you have the skills and inclinaton, we could make something special together.
• if you really want to take me out,  it doesn't have to be expensive. a really good hotdog is just as good to me as anything a chef will send from the kitchen. what will matter to me is that you took the trouble to take me somewhere to have me taste something AWESOME.

dancing:

• take me to a contradance.

sporting goods:

• yes, sporting goods. you have to know which sports though. some of my favorite gifts are sporting goods.

tl;dr:

BAD: anything that looks like you're trying to impress, fulfill a social obligation, or get into my bed.
GOOD: anything that shows you care about me, not just today, but EVERY. DAMN. DAY.

music of the spheres

today i spent a lot of time making a little model in sketchup. you know how i love toys.

i did a little bit of clocking on june 2011, but mostly i was just playing with my model. then i thought i might go back into my pictures and see what i have waiting around for processing to show you, and i came up with some very pretty windchimes that john has in his yard.

the video doesn't come close to doing them justice. when you stand near them, your whole body vibrates.

plus john went to some trouble to get the brook to babble just so.

they're from a company called "music of the spheres", and they deal in precision tuned chimes.

not current, not funny

yes, i do have that many fingers but yet i am afraid to count how many months i am behind in the thirteen project.

when i first started it, i thought: i will do this for a year.

we are now firmly into year three and i am not sure where this is going exactly and yet i can't quite stop.

here's last may.

in the unlikely event of a water landing

while we're on the topic of things unlikely to happen, if you wish to propose marriage to me, just ask. do not whip up some big theatrical production or spend your hard-earned money on a ring. do not expect me to start planning a big ceremony for a perfect princess day, either.

if you know me at all (and i'm assuming you do, if you are proposing marriage), you already know that i will prefer a quiet, private ceremony followed by a quiet, private dinner and while i may wear nylons and pretty dress and everything, don't expect much in the way of floral arrangements or jewelry.

or manageable hair.

and heaven help you if you think valentine's day would be a good time to propose!

as far as i'm concerned, valentine's day is just one more advertising campaign designed to make you buy me stuff i don't want. a diamond will not tell me how much you love me; only your commitment over time and your treatment of me in general will tell me that.

if i do not feel special to you just because it's raining or it happens to be tuesday afternoon, i will not feel special to you if you buy me something expensive for valentine's day.

diamonds! chocolate! wine! the advertising all shouts. if you spend your money on these things the girl will love you forever!

because it's not about caring or loading the dishwasher or having common interests or not noticing that i stole your favorite sweater.

it's about making you feel bad if you don't measure up to some imaginary standard and it's about making me feel unwanted unless you buy me things.

a lot of things.

expensive things.

if you were really paying attention you'd know that my favorite gifts from you are rocks you found in a parking lot and that what i REALLY want is to make your damn dinner and get to see the look on your face when dessert is THAT good.

so pardon me if i ignore valentine's day.

orange

although it was beautiful on the mountain today, it was photographically uninteresting, so i have nothing to show you. instead of taking pretty pictures from the lift, i played with camera setting experiments with  and without gloves, which will come in handy on colder days.

of course i have a picture of the elbow of peggy dow's, because i take a picture there every day i go up there, but you probably do not need to see it since it looks a lot like it does every other day when it's sunny with light clouds coming in, which is often.

i'm still working on codeyear, and i am even clocking photos from the thirteen project, although i am monumentally behind.

the day before yesterday i went to buy a springform pan (how did i get to be in my late forties and have no springform pan?) and nearly got run over in the parking lot. happily, i saw the woman start to back and began taking evasive measures early on.

i was on her passenger side and in retrospect the smart choice would have been to turn and run in the OPPOSITE direction, but i didn't realize she would be backing so fast and usually it's enough to just swing out and give them a wide berth.

not so much this one. by the time it was finished, i'd had to run three-quarters of the way around the back of her huge SUV and jump her left rear bumper, which landed me right next to the driver's side door, which was the first time she noticed i was there at all.

do NOT ask me how she missed me in three windows and three mirrors, but she did.

anyway, i'm thinking i might could share with you some of the things i've been saving up to share with you, so i went back only a couple of weeks in my photos before i found something.


i saw a little posting last week about candles made from orange peels at about the same time i saw a recipe for an orange cake, so it seemed a good fit, plus cr loves candles of all types and we were talking briefly a few weeks ago about primitive oil lamps so there was no excuse NOT to try them.

my first couple of tries went pretty well and my second one burned for about four hours, but the peels i make ahead of time so i could show them to cr didn't start up at all well, which was disappointing.

and the cake was pretty good, but i wasn't completely happy with it.

maybe i just need more practice.

come to think of it, i still have oranges...

two shorts

here are two short open letters:

to americans who can't understand why everyone hates us:

here's a good start figuring it out.  please do better in the future.

love, flask.



to all the bloggers participating in this month's tedious blog challenges:

see you in march when you return to saying something original.

love, flask.

still without comment

open letter to domino's and frito-lay

dear huge corporations,

i notice that you are marketing products as "artisan" recipes.

i realize that legally there is no defined meaning of "artisan" and its related words in terms of food packaging, but there is actually a definition of the word "artisan" that is generally accepted and a meaning of "artisan" as it applies to foods and while i guess you're free to declare oxygen not just visible but mauve in color, it doesn't make these things so and shame on you for trying.

according to dictionary.com, here's the definition of "artisan":

1. a person skilled in an applied art; a craftsperson.

2. a person or company that makes a high-quality, distinctive product in small quantities, usually by hand and using traditional methods: food artisans.

 

 

artisanal foods are made in small batches by skilled craftspeople. these are pizzas, cheeses, breads, beers, and what-have-you made in small batches by real people with care and attention. even if you take a recipe used by an actual artisan maker, the second you scale it up and mass produce it in a factory, it isn't artisanal anymore.

 

"artisanal" is not a term that means "we put a buncha stuff on this and expect you to pay more for a longer ingredient list".  it isn't even a term that means "we'd like to call to your mind what you'd be getting if you were eating real food instead of this crap".

 

if you're going to call your products artisanal, i'm going to redefine words, too.

 

here's my definition of "visible": it goes in and out of the lungs.

as you see, oxygen can most certainly be made to fit my definition. i am also defining "mauve" as "the color of anything that can be put into a balloon". 

 

now that you and i have paused to redefine words to suit our  whims, let's invite everyone to do the same and soon nobody will have any idea what anyone else is talking about and maybe we'll all just be reduced to eating foods that taste good and can be easily identified without marketing.

 

one can hope. 

prêtre

this is kind of rough draft of a thing i was working on today.

best to offer it without comment, i think.

listen

calling audaria

yes, i miss you, too. for some reason my formspring thingy isn't working reliably, but at or near the time your question came in, i was thinking: i miss audaria, and do not know how to contact her.

so. if you like, you can make a comment with your email address in it, and i will write to you.

i don't publish comments i get with emails in them.

for the record, i also do not publish spam comments and for the both of you who are probably wondering, although i WILL publish hostile comments, i will not publish anonymous hostile comments. if you want to disagree politely, you may do so anonymously. if you want to be unpleasant, you have to do it under an identity of some sort.

those are my rules.

today i was going to write an open letter to some corporations, but i decided instead to try to talk to audaria and -oh, look, a squirrel!- ended up outlining my (until now) unwritten rules about which comments get published and which do not.

maybe i will go now and organize some photos from october or something.

today on the mountain

it was beautiful this morning on the mountain, all dark and broody under the morning clouds but with the sun coming out and over the mountain.

it was all light and hoarfrost and the snow was surprisingly good, too, given the weather lately in which we have two days of really cold temps and then a day of rain. i wasn't even going to go, but these days they're pretty good about putting out a ski report that actually TELLS you what the conditions on the mountain are so you can decide if it's going to be worth it before you leave home.

so it was a couple of inches of light freshies on top of reasonably nice corduroy and temperatures approaching 20 and the sun coming out. and the thing about it is they were spinning the number one chair, which they often don't do on a weekday, but that's my favorite chair (otherwise known as the wilderness chair) and it's the only way to get to my favorite view at the elbow of peggy dow's unless you want to walk.

i love the view at the elbow of peggy dow's so much that i take a picture of it every day i am there and i even wrote a song about it, which you can see here.



while i was up there, i took a few other pictures, which are in a little album over here. they're pretty; go look.

pinking shears

a while ago i was on a tear about this: those blasted pink ribbons are all over the place, and i have a low opinion of them. the more i listened, the more i realized that i'm not alone.

this week there's more to be irritated about.

pz meyers wrote this excellent post on it this week, in the wake of the outrageous decision by the susan g. komen people to cut funding to planned parenthood because, let's face it: women's health care (which is most of their work) is a lot less important than satisfying the christian conservative moneygivers over preventing abortions (which isn't really what planned parenthood is about, any more than your north american GP is about treating you for malaria. she WILL provide that service, but it's not her primary function, you know?).

in related news,  janet howell is one of my new heroes. her excellent amendment didn't get passed, but it came close, and it made a point. it cheers me up every time someone brings out a clever amendment to an idiotic bill, kind of like what happened recently indiana.

ah, indiana, that shining star of legislative brilliance!

a few little things

i'm still working on web-ish things.

it is week four of codeyear, which means i'm starting to have a clue. just one, mind you, but it is a clue.

i'm trying to work with the half-functional site i mentioned last time and although it doesn't have much to offer in terms of ease-of-use, with a good FTP client it becomes almost manageable.

i'm using two nice free tools: a simple editor called textwrangler  (mac) and an FTP client called filezilla (mac and windows).

you can do a lot with those if you've a mind to. so far i'm not doing a lot with them, but if you want to see the little half-formed site built from scratch, it's here. please bear in mind that it isn't functional at all; it's just a little scaffolding on which to hang a little html and css. i'd like for it to do nothing a little more smoothly, but right now at the host site i'm getting a lot of "read-only file system" error messages both through filezilla and through the super slow and ungainly online file manager.

in the meantime, how 'bout i close some tabs?

i totally adore this poem and it makes me giggle every time i read it, which is a more impressive statement now than it was a couple of months ago when i first left it open on my desktop meaning to tell you about it.

curvy is a lovely little html5 game you can play, but be prepared to spend a number of hours at it.

and if you've ever wanted a unicode character to represent whatever little image is in your mind you need this tool, and you need it NOW.

and for no good reason and with absolutely no explanation, here's a little picture of khalil: