Teleidoscope

Also useful:

emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ echo $DISPLAY
:0.0
emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ export DISPLAY
emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ xhost local:db2inst1
non-network local connections being added to access control list
emgrasso@ykchaua:~$ su - db2inst1
Password:
$ DISPLAY=:0.0;export DISPLAY
$ db2cc

That gets me into the DB2 Control Center GUI, but DB2 itself is throwing some weird errors when I try to start up the database.

This is still the version 9.5 I restored from my backups -- I needed to install a down-level version of libstdc++ (libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb) to get it to run at all.

I have downloaded db2 9.7. I'm going to google for the errors I'm seesing. But I think my next step is to uninstall 9.7 and see whether 9.7 behaves better.

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Tue, Nov 03, 2009

Belief

Posted at 6:15 pm MST to Miscellaneous

There is an online questionaire Belief-o-matic that rates your compatibility with different belief systems. My results seem pretty accurate. Maybe I ought to check out the Unitarians some time.

How did the Belief-O-Matic do? Discuss your results on our message boards.

I found this at a Science Blog: Living the Scientific Life.

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Mon, Nov 02, 2009

Samba

Posted at 7:32 pm MST to Technology

Argh. I finally got samba working, but it took all day and isn't based on making sense of the documentation (which is very sparse). At least the permissions bug that broke things after the transition from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 seems to be fixed in 9.10.

I tried settings from a bunch of different sites that I googled, and even reinstalled pam, krb5 and samba when things had gotten very hung up at one point.

The final set of settings that worked were from HowtoForge.

There is still a problem with samba (even though it is working enough for the windows images to see the files on the host now). The utility for starting and stopping the samba services does not seem able to stop nmbd.

Tomorrow I will reinstall db2, the last major piece of infrastructure I need.

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Followups -- Upgrades

Posted at 7:17 am MST to Technology

The upgrade to Windows 7 and switch to Avira as antivirus seems to have fixed the processor-hangs. Other than that, Windows 7 is extremely annoying: Micrisoft is doing their usual thing of making it as difficult as possible to get anything done unless you are using nothing but Microsoft software. Since I use as little Microsoft software as possible, this obviously leads to problems.

The clean upgrade to Kubuntu 9.10 seems to have fixed the video hangs. It has been up three days. It has been a long time since I went a full day without X windows going unresponsive on me and being forced to hard reboot. I may be rebooting soon to see if that will bring dns-masq online (I need to recheck the config files first: I may have missed one), but it will be a clean boot, with everything -- especially the vmware images -- shutdown properly beforehand instead of having to crash them. Even if I still get an occasional hang, the improvement is wonderful.

Reconfiguring my main KDE apps -- KMail and Konqueror -- to behave the way I like after the clearing the config has been a pain. But they are also behaving much better now in the clean KDE 4.x environment than they had been with the settings that had been through the migration from 3.x.

For a while I was worried because I was getting very bad networking bandwidth. But I think that was an aftereffect of some power glitches and outages during the big storm last week. Power-cycling both the DSL modem and the router seems to have fixed things.

I can't really reconfigure samba and try to see if the permissions problem is gone until I have dns-masq working, but at the moment I am very hopeful.

I have much of my working infrastructure back in place. The main piece that still needs to be reloaded (also after DNS is fully working) is the DB2 database that provides the ClearQuest backend.

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Wed, Oct 28, 2009

Wood-stove

Posted at 8:48 am MDT to Weather

I have a good wood stove in my living room. And a cord of firewood out in the yard that has been sitting there for a couple of years and should be well seasoned.

I haven't actually used the wood-stove much in the past few years, but it is nice to have it for backup. My furnace went out on Monday and wasn't fixed until yesterday (they needed to order a part) so I burned some wood for two days.

I may burn some wood later today, just because it makes things cozy, because we are having a major storm. But I will have to dig some firewood out of a drift to do so, so maybe not.

This year's Halloween storm came a couple of days early, but it seems to be trying to make up for timing with volume. Yesterday they were predicting 8 to 14 inches between midnight today and tomorrow evening, but the latest weather report said 18 to 24 inches.

The reports are that the south side of Denver is getting hit hardest, but I think I already have 6 or 8 inches in my yard. There will be less snow on the roads on top of ice because the weather was fairly warm for a few days (it was 60 yesterday afternoon) and the snow melted at the beginning of the storm.

I'm going out now to sweep the front porch and shovel the walk (it's nice to have a walk to shovel) and maybe excavate some firewood.

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Sun, Oct 25, 2009

Snowy Sunday 2009

Posted at 2:51 pm MDT to Weather

Man, this is shaping up to be a nasty winter. It's not even Halloween yet, and this is already the fourth snowy day.

It melts fast at this time of year and today it isn't even accumulating yet. But this does not bode well for the season.

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Sat, Oct 24, 2009

Melon Float

Posted at 8:00 pm MDT to Technology

A new use for melon sorbet: 8 ounces of ginger ale (I used good stuff -- Canada Dry) and a couple of scoops of melon sorbet.

I spent half of today trying to trouble shoot the video crashes and lockups my laptop has been having. I think part ofthe problem is the transition from KDE 3.x to 4.x: I'm not sure the Ubuntu upgrade processes cleaned out the obsolete stuff thoroughly. I tried forcing a reinstall of all of the KDE components, but I'm not sure it did any good..

The official release of the next version of Kubuntu is due this week. I think I'm going to back-up this laptop completely and do a clean install next weekend, or as soon afterward as I can manage to download Kubuntu 9.10. Hopefully, that will fix both the video problems and the samba permissions problems I have also been chasing.

The samba problems may be related to a cluster of new samba config paramters called "idmap config". I'm looking for detailed documentation...

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Variables

Posted at 4:07 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Yesterday I had a delayed allergic reaction to the oats with raisins, allspice and brown sugar. Today I tried cream of wheat with the same additions, and I seem to be having a partial reaction. I'll try oats without the additives next week and see if I still get a reaction.

I'm pretty sure I tested ok for allergy to oats when they did the scratch tests last year... I'm tending to suspect the allspice.

At the same time, I'm ending an experiment with Dinah's food. She has been eating dry Iams Weight Control for years, and I tried her with dry Iams Natural Weight Control. Dinah did not approve.

She has been leaving most of her meals in the dish and spending a lot of time in the basement catching mice instead (so I don't think she is actually going hungry). But the disapproving looks at meal times finally got to me: I tossed the last of the 'natural' food and opened a sack of the regular stuff.

I've given her a new automated feeder, too, in case I need to travel again. The old one only held 5 meals -- two and a half days of her usual meals. The new one is supposed to have more capacity.

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Tue, Oct 20, 2009

Overnight Oats

Posted at 9:03 am MDT to Technology

I can't stand the texture of regular oatmeal, not even real as opposed to instant oatmeal, which is even more vile. I keep some real oatmeal in my cupboard for use in recipes, but don't use it as cereal. I like steel cut oats, but they take forever to cook at this altitude, so I don't make them very often.

Target was having a clearance sale the last time I shopped there. One item marked down was a basic 1.5 quart slow cooker for about 8 dollars -- the price of a lunch. I picked one up because it looked like a good size for overnight oats as recommended by Alton Brown: a reasonable-sized batch of oatmeal would be spread too thin on the bottom of my big 5.5 quart crock pot that I use for stew and be sure to scorch. My rice cooker -- being from Costco and therefore huge -- would have similar problems of scale.

Last night I tried the little slow cooker out for the first time.

At about 11 pm I put 1 cup of oats, 4 cups of water, some raisins, a small pich of salt and a dash of ground allspice into the cooker and plugged it in (this is a very basic slow cooker with no controls). At 6:30 when I fed the cat and took my morning meds I stirred the oats and unplugged the cooker to let it coast the rest of the way.

At 8 am I added some brown sugar to some of the oats and tried them for breakfast. Yum.

Next time I need to use more salt and spices, but the texture of the oats was fine and the flavor was good. The raisins had almost plumped back up in little grapes.

I'll store the rest of this batch in the fridge and nuke them for breakfast later in the week.

Another trick I found online is to put a spacer between the bottom of the crock and the heating element, to make the bottom of the oats even less likely to scorch. People with large cookers talked about using empty tuna cans, but I don't need any that large for the little cooker. I think if I try this trick, I will use a metal canning jar band -- probably the small size I use on jelly jars. I had been thinking of using something like a biscuit cutter or metal cookie cutter, but the jar band will be sturdier, and I have LOTS of them in various nooks and crannies of the kitchen and pantry.

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Mon, Oct 19, 2009

Antivirus and Progress

Posted at 7:37 pm MDT to Technology

It looks like the lockups in the XP image weren't entirely the fault of XP itself. I started seeing the same pattern of pegging the processor and hammering the hard drive in the other windows virtual machines.

Googling led me to believe that the problem might be with the AVG antivirus I have been using.

I downloaded samples of Avira Antivir and Antivir server and loaded them into the 2003 server and Win7 images after uninstalling the AVG tools, and things seem to be behaving much better. It will be a day or two before I know for sure whether the lockups are gone, but the disk isn't running constantly, and it is nice to have reasonable keyboard and mouse response again.

Uninstalling AVG was ugly: I had to reboot the Win 7 image about 4 times to get the uninstall to take.

In other news, I'm now doing my TomTom updates from the 2003 image. The Win 7 one can't see the GPS, probably because the VmWare tools module is tuned to 2008 server rather than Win 7 itself.

And Samba on Ubuntu seems thoroughly hosed. I'm trying an installation of a newer version, which I will try to reconfigure from scratch. I really need to mount a share from the ubuntu server to get the Rational tools installed on the new image, though I have some ideas for workarounds. It's very annoying: samba worked fine on ubuntu before the 9.04 updates, and I can't find anything in google that explains what has changed. The next ubuntu update in at the end of this month... I hope they have fixed whatever the problem is in 9.10.

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Sun, Oct 18, 2009

Windows 7

Posted at 1:12 pm MDT to Technology

I'm loading a Windows 7 virtual image.

My Windows XP image has been getting erratic, as well as obsolete, and I need to do some script development and testing. I have never put any flavor of Windows Vista on any of my machines or images.

I decided it was time for a new Windows workspace: the Win XP image is several years old, which is problematic for Microsoft products at the best of times. I'll move the XP image from the laptop to my server once the new image is populated.

I have to admit, the installation process has improved a lot since the XP/2003 days. The Microsoft downloads are very fragile and fussy about the DVDs they get burned to, but once I had a clean iso the install went quickly and smoothly.

The VMWare tools seem to be working well even though Windows 7 isn't officially supported yet, except that the video for the console is insisting on being fullscreen mode.

I have the OS installed, and linked into my Active Directory domain. And Firefox downloaded and installed. Now I'm working on the rest of my infrastructure.

• Firefox (done)
• AVG anti-virus
• Textpad
• OpenOffice
• winzip and its commanline utility
• apache
• TomTom
• ClearCase 7.1
• ClearQuest 7.1
• printer drivers

I will probably move my 2008 tax software across from the XP image so I have it readily available for reference, too. The previous years can stay on the Xp

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Sat, Oct 17, 2009

Anniversary (and Ads)

Posted at 10:08 am MDT to Miscellaneous

This week is the third anniversary of this blog. The first content went live October 13, 2006.

I apologize for the sprodic posting over the past several months. I'm going to try to improve that. I doon't expect to return to daily postings immediately, but I will try to ramp up to several postings per week on the average.

I am also going to redesign my sites a bit, both this blog and the Astral and Data-raptors main sites. I'll add some links to things like my LinkedIn account during the revamp.

I will probably also be adding small google ads to the frame for this blog and some of the other less archival pages.

Feel welcome not to click anything. This is partly a case of wanting to play with the technology.

It is also partly a hope for a tiny trickle of income to keep my business bank accounts active. For some reason the bank gets cranky if you put a small amount of money in a business accont and just leave it there earning ridiculously low levels of interest without making additional deposits and withdrawals.

I finally moved my business accounts from a bank where I haven't done any other business in years to one of my credit unions that had a fair deal on business accounts and very good online access. We'll see how it goes.

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Wed, Oct 14, 2009

Porch Rail and Roof

Posted at 12:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The front porch deck now has a railing that matches the one on the bedroom deck. This gives the front of the house a much more balanced appearance than it has ever had before. I'll post some pictures at some point.

They also restabilized the side of the porch that had been undermined by the second round of putting the powerlines underground.

The next round of upgrades was going to be more hardscaping, but it looks like I need to do some roof repairs instead. The shed roof needs to be replaced. And the west edge of the flat roof needs some rework where the high winds have disrupted things, especially where it transitions to the sloped porch roof. I noticed during one heavy rain this summer that water was leaking down the joint.

I've got a bid in from my roofer. I ust need to decide whether the cash flow works.

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Sat, Oct 10, 2009

First Snow 2009

Posted at 9:30 am MDT to Weather

I'm not at the farmers' market this morning, and I'm glad of that. The first snow of the season began over-night and is still falling. It is very pretty to watch out of the windows, but I'm glad I'm not out standing in it.

Nanette and Rowan have started the Jay Hill Farm pumpkin stand for this year, so they decided trying to work market would be redundant -- as well as unpleasant -- given the forecasts.

I'm going to spend some time in the kitchen today. I want to make one more batch of melon sorbet, using tequila and agave nectar instead of rum and sugar so it will be more diabetic-friendly. And I have some pumpkins that need to be made into pies.

I think I'm going to start defrosting some chicken giblets and livers to make a batch of dirty rice, too. I got some nice bright red bell peppers and fresh celery at the supermarket for it. But I probably won't make the dirty rice until tomorrow if I spend today in the kitchen making pies.

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Terra preta

Posted at 12:46 am MDT to Garden

There are patches of rich soil (often 2 meters deep) throughout the Amazon basin that were created a few thousand years ago by people. These are called terra preta. (Like the Mississippi valley, the Amazon was densrly populated by argicultural socities before the Old World epidemics swept through.)

A major ingredient in creating these patches of soil is charcoal generated by slow burning of trees and plants and then soaked with organic liquids. There are fungi and special earthworms in the Amazon that get into the act and make the fertile soil patches self-sustaining against anything but the most intensive agriculture.

I don't know if this will work in dry temperate zone soils but it might be interesting to look into it. Googling provides pointers that may be interesting and useful -- most of the information above was abstracted from wikipedia, but the article is very citation-heavy.

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Tue, Oct 06, 2009

Meat

Posted at 5:30 pm MDT to Technology

I seem to be hungry for meat this week.

I've got some meat in the chest freezer that has been there for a long time. It's mostly a few big pieces like roasts that were left as I worked my way through the 1/4 cow, 1/2 pig and 1/2 lamb I previously stocked the freezer with.

A few days ago I pulled out a beef rump roast. Yesterday I cooked it using the convection mode of my fancy oven, which I haven't used before. The surface texteure came out a little peculiar (but delicious), but I'm not sure if that was due to the convection of the length of time it had spent in the freezer (though the roast was very well wrapped and showed no signs of freezer burn even after all the time).

The center of the roast came out rarer than I expected: it may not have been thawed all the way through. (Something to keep in mind when I tackle the next roast.) But that OK, since I will be reheating it and don't want it to turn to shoe leather. The end slices I had for dinner yesterday were tender and juicy.

Today I baked a pound of the old bacon -- less pink than commercial bacon because of the lack of nitrates, but it seems ok. If I order another half pig at some point, I'm going to ask for my bacon sliced thin. I like my bacon crispy.

The oven baking method works really well: spread the bacon on a cooling rack in a half sheet pan, place into a cold oven. Set the thermostat to 400 and the timer to 15 minutes, and check the bacon every 3 minutes after the timer goes off the first time. Drain the bacon on paper towels and pour the fat into a canning jar for future use when cooking eggs or greens. (Chard sauteed in bacon fat is delicious.)

I think I'm going to toss the old soup bones and one package of ground pork that was hiding in a corner: I don't think they will have stood up to long freezing as well as the larger chunks of solid meat.

I want to restock the freezer at some point, probably with buffalo instead of beef, and another half pig if Nanette will split one with me. But I want to use up whatever of the old meat is usable first.

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Alternates

Posted at 10:41 am MDT to Media

Two great bits of online fiction out of LiveJournal:

A darker, haunted Little House and a Buffy/Secret Garden crossover.

I want to be able to find these again.

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Sun, Sep 27, 2009

More Sauce

Posted at 11:14 am MDT to Technology

I brought home 30 pounds of tomato seconds and leftovers -- mostly San Marzanos -- from farmers' market yesterday. It's cooking down now.

I've promised to give Nanette and Rowan a few quarts.

I've got bread rising, too, so the Kitchenaid mixer is getting a workout today. It should rise well since the kitchen has three burners running.

It is so nice to be making tomato sauce in late September instead of late August. The kitchen is warm but comfortable, not unbearable.

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Tue, Sep 22, 2009

Refund

Posted at 10:30 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Cool.

I checked my car loan account over the weekend and found there was a large payment made on September 2 that I didn't make. More than two payments worth.

I sent a message to their secure 'contact us' site asking what was up, and learned that the deposit was made by the car dealership. I'll follow up with the dealership to make sure there is no mistake, but it looks like for I owe a bunch less on my car loan than I thought I did.

Pulling down the principal balance this early in the loan can make a big difference in how fast it gets paid off thanks to the wonders of compounding.

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Sun, Sep 20, 2009

Melon Sorbet

Posted at 5:37 pm MDT to Technology

Nanette and Rowan are growing some delicious small melons. They are green and smooth on the outside (lightening as they ripen) and bright orange on the inside, with a small seed pocket and a wonderful flavor.

Most of them are softball size or a bit larger -- the largest are about 6 inches in diameter -- so they make nice single servings. They are either safe in their skins, or being eaten: I don't end up with a chunk of cut melon slowly dying in the fridge.

The seed company name for the variety is Serenade, but one of our customers said they resemble melons she had in Provence, so they may be originally a French variety.

Melons are sort of hard to preserve (although I think I've heard of melon pickles). But I have my ice cream maker attachment for the trusty Kitchenaid, and Alton Brown did a melon sorbet on one episode of "Good Eats".

The Kitchenaid ice-cream maker wants a larger batch than Alton's recipe, and I didn't have vodka in the house (must remedy that) so I used a couple of tablespoons of rum. (The alcohol is supposed to help bring out the flavor despite the chill, and also control the ice crystal sizes.) I use an organic sugar that has faint molasses overtones, so the rum should harmonize well with the that.

I needed 6 and a half of the little melons to get the 5 1/2 cups of fruit the Kitchenaid manual recommended for making sorbets.

There are 4 and a half pints of soft sorbet hardening in the freezer now. I'll bring a couple of them over to Nanette and Rowan sometime this week.

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Canning Sauce

Posted at 5:14 pm MDT to Technology

1. lbs tomatoes, quartered, salted, drained, and divided between a 12 qt and an 8 qt stockpot (the San Marzanos drained in the smaller pasta insert, while the other tomatoes were in the larger one, but I distributed both kinds of tomato into each pot)
1. large onion cut into 8ths in the large pot
1. medium onion similarly in the smaller pot
1. bunch parsley divided between the pots
1. large rib celery cut into chunks in the smaller pot
1. medium ribs celery cut into chunks in the larger pot
1. red bell peppers cut into chunks, 1 in each pot
1. Anaheim pepper, starting to turn color, ribs and seeds removed, divided between the pots.
1. sweet Italian frying pepper (green) divided between the pots

a little garlic in each pot

Cook until onions and celery are soft, stirring occasionally. Once the tomatoes released their juice and started to break down, each pot was about 1/2 full, so spattering wasn't much of a problem. After an hour or two I consolidated everything into the big pot.

I am very glad that tomato season runs later in Colorado than it did in Connecticut. Processing bushels of tomatoes around Labor Day when it was 100 degrees F in the shade (and the weekend we processed tomatoes ALWAYS was the hottest weekend of the month) was really exhausting.

The routine is: Run hot veggies through strainer. Have another stock pot or a huge mixing bowl available for the strained sauce from the first stock pot. Then clean out the emptied pot and use it for the strained sauce from the next stock pot, etc. I have accumulated lots of stock pots due to my quest for a good pasta pot, so I didn't need to use the small canning kettle for sauce this time around.

Actually, due to shopping at Costco, I have some large stainless steel mixing bowls available, too.

Canning is so much easier with enough equipment available. And sane sized batches. We always ended up using every large pot and bowl in the house. And hot sauce spattered a lot because we ended up overfilling them. The Vittorio strainer spattered a lot too, and it didn't have tight seals around the crank, so it also dripped. We used to carpet half the kitchen in newspaper.

The Kitchenaid strainer is cleverly designed to not spatter or drip much. The mesh cone that the good stuff comes out of is enclosed in a housing that leads to a spout at the right height to fill a standard mixer bowl sitting on the counter under the grinder. Much neater than the open tray the Vittorio uses. That's good, because I canceled my last newspaper subscription a couple of years ago.

It helped that when I ordered the strainer parts, I also ordered and optional wide tray for the grinder's food hopper. It also helped that I stood on a footstool when I was using the strainer, so I could see what I was doing and reach over it easily. Standard counter height is actually a little high for me to work at comfortably.

I decided to use the 8 qt stock pot that came with my set of pots and pans (which doesn't have a pasta insert) for the second round of cooking down instead of the 12 qt one (that has the insert), which is kind of hard to work with (a bit tall for me to see into and reach into easily). Also, using two 8 qt pots, not overfilled, means things should be happening at about the same time in each of them. All of the strained sauce would fit into the large pot, but this way I have twice as much surface area for the cooking down.

One nice thing about a gas stove and good quality pots with built-in heat-spreader disks: I was able to cook the sauce way down, very gently, without any problems with sticking or scorching. I have 4 quarts of sauce in the canner (I should probably have done pints) and about 2/3 of a quart in the fridge, from 18 pounds of tomatoes. So it works out to about 4 pounds of tomatoes per well cooked-down quart.

A full canner batch is 7 jars, so if I want to do a full batch of tomato sauce quarts in the future I should probably aim for about 30 pounds of tomatoes.

Or not cook them down as far (having the canning gear ready ahead of time would help).

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Mary Traver, RIP

Posted at 10:34 am MDT to Current Events

The very best eulogy for Mary Travers that I have seen is atUser Friendly.

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Sat, Sep 19, 2009

Tomato Sauce

Posted at 10:16 pm MDT to Technology

Nanette's tomatoes have come on gangbusters. Last week they didn't sell out which I found very annoying.

I decided that if it happened again I would can some tomato sauce from the leftovers.

I have a Vittorio strainer like the one I helped my Mom and Nonna use when we used to turn bushels of tomatoes into a year's worth of tomato sauce over the course of a weekend. The strainer is sort of like a meat grinder with a long snout: the seeds and skins from the tomatoes (or apples if you are making apple sauce) come out the end of the snout, and the sauce comes out the side. This is really nice, because there is a lot of flavor and nutrients in the skins and seeds, and you get a better sauce if you leave them in during the first phase of cooking down. And not needing to peel everything saves a ton of work.

But the Vittorio is kind of messy to use and really needs at least three hands to work it. I learned recently that there is a strainer attachment for the meat grinder attachment for my Kitchenaid stand mixer. Just as with the pasta maker attachments I got earlier this summer, the mixer motor serves as the third hand. I ordered the strainer attachment last Saturday -- Amazon is sometimes very useful. (I told Nanette -- either we would sell out of tomatoes this week or I would make sauce.)

Today I brought home 18 pounds of tomatoes. They are now quartered and salted and set to drain in the pasta inserts of my stockpots. My Mom used to put the tomatoes into a clean peck peach basket lined with cheese cloth standing in the kitchen sink over night. I have fewer tomatoes to deal with, and pots with pasta inserts to use, which my Mom never had.

Tomorrow morning I'll start cooking down the sauce in the stock pots where they are draining now. Mom used every stock pot in the house, and started things off with some of the tomatoes in the canning kettle. After they had started to cook down they were consolidated into the other stock pots so the canning kettle was freed up for the actual canning. We used to bail the watery stuff at the top of the tomatoes in the canning kettle into saucepans to boil it down faster without scorching the tomato solids in the main batch.

I won't need to cook things down as much as we did with the juicy tomatoes Mom and Nonna used, which were just whatever was available locally. About 40% of the tomatoes I got from Nannette are San Marzanos: actual paste tomatoes bred for a lower water content for sauce making. Most of the rest were an heirloom variety that are fragile and ugly, but very flavorful.

I'll add some onions and celery and green peppers to the tomatoes when I start cooking them ... maybe some parsley and a little garlic, too. We made a fairly plain sauce, and added herbs and spices when it was used to make actual spaghetti sauce or whatever.

When Mom and Nonna made sauce, they also made bagniat or bagnat(not sure of the spelling) which was a hot sauce. I'm not into hot sauces, so I never paid that much attention to that part of the operation. I think it was mostly a matter of adding a bunch of hot peppers to the basic tomato mixture in one of the stock pots, but I don't remember what kind of hot peppers were used, or what other ingredients might have been added. Maybe some parsley and other herbs. The mixture that went through the strainer had more green stuff in it than the tomato sauce did, and I don't think it was just the hot peppers. Maybe some extra garlic? Maybe a lot of extra garlic?

In those days I don't think I ever heard the name of the variety of hot peppers. They were just "hot peppers" as opposed to bell peppers. I suspect if my brother ever wants to recreate the bagnat he remembers, he needs to find out what kind of hot peppers were grown in Connecticut in the 60s and 70s.

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Fri, Aug 28, 2009

Cool

Posted at 6:56 am MDT to Weather

The weather has been unseasonably cool for August. This has been a weird summer.

I was awakened last night by a charliehorse. I don't know why my left calf muscle decided to tie itself into a knot at 4 am, but I wish it wouldn't do that. This is the second time since I've been back from Mobile. Ow.

I noticed that I was laying on my left hip when it happened, so it's probably a sign that the hip is slightly out. I'll give things a day or two tounkink, then start some exercises to strengthen the muscles around the hip.

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Thu, Aug 27, 2009

Zombie

Posted at 7:02 am MDT to Exercise

I did some yoga this morning for the first time in about a week, partly to try to work loose a muscle cramp up between my shoulder blades that gets annoyed by the mousing I do at work.

I have been feeling ... strange ... for the past couple of weeks. Hot flashes. Cold flashes. Low-grade headaches. A sort of swimmy sensation that isn't quite being dizzy, but isn't really not being dizzy, either.

And a sort of fading in and out that isn't quite dozing off and taking naps. But in the evenngs I suddenly find I've lost 20 minutes of the TV show that's running in the background and the screensaver on my laptop has kicked in. I don't think I've faded out at work (I hope) the focus there seems to mostly be enough to prevent it.

It isn't exactly lack of sleep. Last night I staggered to bed at about 9:30 after one of the fadeouts, but I just seemed to have fadeouts in reverse. I kept waking up every hour or so. Though some of that was the hot and cold flashes.

There's stuff I need to do around the house and stuff I should be working on for the comapany that isn't getting done. I think I'm going to make an appointment with my acupuncturist: regular medicine doesn't do well with symptoms that are this squishy.

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Fri, Aug 21, 2009

Sluggish

Posted at 6:54 am MDT to Miscellaneous

After a couple of weeks where I was full of energy and getting very little sleep, this week has been the opposite. I've been sleeping a lot (8 hours a night is a lot for me) and dozing off at odd moments, and generally feeling a bit off. I suspect allergies are part of it: I've been sneezing more than usual.

I really did not need my employees trying to poison me on top of everything else.

Last night was the Colorado Rational Users' Group meeting that our company sponsors. I arrived a little late because of traffic, and very hungry, and found that the food we were providing was pre-made sandwiches with cheese in them. And I'm pretty sure I don't trust the bread they were made with to not have malt in it. I picked out the cheese as well as I could (it was sort of smooshed into the bread and meat) but by the end of the evening my skin and eyes were feeling tight and itchy and I was having mild dizzy spells.

This morning, I was still itchy and my fingers were a little swollen. I don't like to think about what the lining of my esophagus was doing at that point. I have taken some Advil to try to knock down the inflammation before I try to swallow my breakfast.

Fridays at the office tend to be very quiet. This may not be a good thing: when you're not feeling well to begin with, a slow day stretches out forever.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about food at the next CRUG. I may be on another gig, with different travel conditions, by then, so maybe I'll just have to make a point of bringing my own food. Or return to what I did a few times last year when I was working from home and bring my own food to the meeting.

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Sat, Aug 15, 2009

Foxy Car 2

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Technology

Man. The Forester is a zippy car, even though it has only a 2.5 liter engine. It wants to go fast. I'm going to have to keep an eye on my speedometer until I get used to it.

And it is really nice to park after the Dakota, too -- today I pulled into the parking garage near the farmers market, parked, got out, looked at how I was parked, and got back in and pulled about a foot and a half closer to the wall.

The driver's area is very well designed. When I am in the driver's seat, with it adjusted properly for reaching the clutch, etc., I don't see any part of the hood of the car. It is all below my sight line so all I see is road. And none of the gauges and meters are hidden by the steering wheel at all.

And the height of the mount for the seatbelt shoulder strap is adjustable, so I could make it stop sawing into my neck. (The shirts I wear to work have upstanding collars, so I hadn't noticed the rubbing until today.) I may lower it one more notch, but the current improvement is already wonderful.

I've made an appointment for Tuesday to take it in to the dealership to add some options and accessories: towing package, roof rack, engine block heater (much cheaper than building a garage) and a cover for the cargo area.

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Silly Bee

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Weather

The weather today was very strange, and felt more like late September or early October than mid-August. It started out cool and cloudy, but the sun went in and out, with occasional bursts of cool breeze and a brief period of rain at the farmers' market (it doesn't look like I got any noticeable precipitation at my house).

THe crowd was strange, too. Lots of out-of-towners,and (therefore) a lot fewer dogs than usual. There seemed to be a lot of parent and grown child combinations... I wonder if the out of state students are beginning to arrive for the university. Our sales were as sporadic as the weather.

The most persistent visitor to out booth was a bee, or possibly a series of bees. We had a small, clear clamshell box of nasturtium flowers out on the table -- they are edible and good in salads: they taste like radishes. The box had some small air holes in it, and there was a bee that kept crawling into the box and rummaging among the flowers for a while, then coming out again for a while.

I think it was always the same bee: the breaks in its hovering around our table weren't really mong enough for shift changes unles the beehive was very close by.

Our booth is across the street (maybe 15 feet) from a florists' booth that was full of bouquets of all kinds of flowers. But the bee didn't want those flowers, even though they were out in the open and readily accessible. It wanted the flowers in that little 5x7x1 inch box.

Maybe it likes a challenge. Or really likes nasturtiums for some reason.

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Mon, Aug 10, 2009

Foxy Car

Posted at 9:35 pm MDT to Technology

I have my new car. It's a color they call Paprika Red: more or less fox colored. It has all the cool modern features (radio aux jack, external temp) and one that I hadn't expected: a backup sensor that is supposed to beep if there is something behind me when I back up.

They took FOREVER to get the paperwork set up.

Now I need to update my insurance and see about getting the Express Tool transponder account updated. I also need to find out whether Forresters use truck plates (so I will re-use my old plates) or car plates (so I will need new plates).

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Sun, Aug 09, 2009

Trimmer Line and Shop-Vac

Posted at 3:56 pm MDT to Garden

I've remembered another reason I haven't used my string-trimmer lawn mower much in recent years. It is amazingly hard to find 155 mil string trimmer line locally. The smaller gauge stuff I tried isn't going to cut it (literally).

Even McGuckins failed me, which is a little annoying since they sold me the trimmer mower (years ago, granted, but it's still annoying.

I'll swing by Earl's Saw Shop before work tomorrow and see if they have some in stock. If not, I need to order some other stuff from Amazon so I can get free shipping... otherwise, the shipping will cost as much as the string.

I got a new garden hose to replace the ripped one, and a nozzle-repair thingy for the hose with the squashed nozzle. So now I have two usable hoses.

The truck is cleared out, and ready to be traded in tomorrow.

While I was at Lowe's getting garden hose stuff and the new gas can for the mower, I also picked up a new 12 gallon Shop-Vac for the basement. The old one (an 8 gallon model taller than the new 12 gallon one) is about 20 years old and really won't deal with the dust and grit very well anymore. And the new one has a drain plug for wet mode! No more tipping over the big cannister of sludgy water to empty it down the floor drain. Modern filters for both wet and dry modes are better, too.

The Forrester has a fair amount of cargo space, especially with the back seats folded down, but the box for the Shop-Vac is pretty large. I decided I might as well take advantage of the truck's volume while I still have it available. And I really need to bring the basement to more presentable state.

With the wet/dry vac (and new, working garden hoses) I'll be able to vacuum up the loose dirt in dry mode, then wash the cement floor and suck up the dirty water in wet mode. And once the new doors are installed the basement will be more weather-tight and should accumulate less dust going forward. The lack of new avalanches (because of the beautiful new retaining wall) will help too.

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Sat, Aug 08, 2009

Costco Books

Posted at 9:52 pm MDT to Garden

The books department at Costco usually has a fairly banal mix of books in the fiction section, but they sometimes have interesting cookbooks and special collections at very good prices: not long ago I got the new edition of "How to Cook Eveything in hardcover (which is a HUGE book) for less than 20 dollars. I was able to get the Complete Far Side for my brother one year for Christmas at a fair proce, too. And the Complete Calvin and Hobbes for myself.

Their garden books are excellent, too, and very well localized to the individual stores, which is impressive for a big warehouse operation like Costco.

Books I have acquired at the local Costco in the past: Rocky Mountain Gardener's Guide and Xeriscape Colorado: The Complete Guide.

Most recently they have had copies of Durable Plants for the Garden by Colorado State University, the Denver Botanic Garden and Green Industries of Colorado.

If I ever get my deck, grading and hardscape work completed to a point where I can start planting, these three books should be very helpful. And in the meantime, they are full of beautiful photos of plants and gardens to admire.

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Tasks

Posted at 6:59 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Accomplished today:

Retrieved weed trimmer (lawnmower) from repair shop

Started paperwork for cashing in my clunker, ordered a red or green Forrester after test drive

Visited Harlequin's Gardens to look at native and xeriscape plants

Tasks for this evening and tomorrow:

Clean all the miscellaneous stuff like tool and first-aid kits, flashlights, etc. out of the truck

Buy gas for lawnmower (and maybe a new gas can)

Mow weeds in at least part of front yard, measure areas for beds, patio and labyrinth

Buy an intact garden hose: my old ones give me a choice of a hose that is torn but has working end connectors, and one that has a squashed connector on the end opposite the faucet, and a couple of hoses that have been buried in the fill dirt pile that came out of the retaining wall hole and are useless (gee, thanks guys)

Water square foot garden and grapevine

Plant carrot, parsley, and thyme seeds, and mums and marigolds

Plan landscaping (the Territorial Seed catalog arrived, and I found my books on Xeriscaping and Rocky Mountain Gardening)

Start sorting clothes from dressers and closets: the Viet Nam Vets truck is coming Thursday, and anything I no longer wear or that no longer fits is going to them or the trash, as appropriate. I'll give them my old manual pasta machine, and tire chains for vehicles I no longer own, too. And a lamp and fireplace tools and some other stuff that have been cluttering up the basement for a long time.

Fix the XP image on my laptop so it will stop locking up the rest of the system.

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Tue, Aug 04, 2009

Progress

Posted at 7:55 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I have planted most of the nursery plants in the squarefoot bed. Tomorrow I'll plant the last two plants (the mums and marigolds) and the carrots, parsley and thyme seeds. Garlic, onions and peas can wait a bit, but I'll put up the trellis tomorrow.

The deck is making progess, too. The old railing has been cleared off, and I can see preparations to for the new support posts and railings.

Sunday evening I made homemade pasta with my new Kitchenaid pasta gadget for the first time. It came out pretty well, and having the mixer do the cranking made things much easier. I think in the future, rather than make a full size batch and deal with leftovers, I'll just make one egg-worth per person. Though the leftover pasta is also yummy. And making the large batch gave me enough practice that I think I'm getting the rhythm down.

I should try ravioli one of these days...

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Mon, Aug 03, 2009

Tomatoes

Posted at 11:27 pm MDT to Garden

I bought a small tomato plant at the farmers' market on Saturday.

It isn't actually in the ground yet. The planter box is assembled and filled with dirt, but I need to soak the planting mix once more, thoroughly, before i put the plants into the squares. And the ones that came out of green houses need another days of partial sun before they move out into full sun conditions. I may actually plant things tomorrow.

But I have eaten three golf-ball-sized vine-ripened tomatoes from my very own tomato plant.

Other plants waiting to go into the square foot garden include:

sage
rosemary
marjoram
oregano
portulacas
chrysanthemum
marigold
summer squash (already flowering, like the tomato plant)
iceplant (a flowering ground-cover)

I also have garlic cloves to plant, and seeds for fall crops of carrots and parsley, and thyme. And Nanette has promised me some pea seeds (which she buys by the pound) and onion starts.

Besides the grapevine...

Some of these plants will move into other beds, once I have other beds to move them to. In the mean time, it's nice to have some herbs and flowers.

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Sun, Aug 02, 2009

Deck Jack

Posted at 8:42 am MDT to Miscellaneous

The deck outside my bedroom looks crooked to me, but that is because it has been sloped in the other direction for so many years. It is actually level now (I checked with an actual level).

The deck was built oddly, like so much about this house. It doesn't have ordinary posts holding it up, but is cantilevered off the main house structure. And the cantilever support is off center, so the deck has torqued over the years.

Yesterday while I was at farmers' market I got a call from a guy at the company that is supposed to repair the deck. He wanted to try jacking the deck so they could start to judge how extensive the repairs were going to need to be. By the time I got home from market, he had been and gone, and the deck was propped and leveled.

It looks to me like we are in pretty good shape to put in the permanent supports (actual support posts to keep it from torquing again) and the new railing, without having to dismantle and rebuild the whole deck. I suppose I'll learn the official verdict next week.

I am psyched to get this done. I can't really work on the parts of the landscaping farther from the house until the counctruction work near the house is done.

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Sat, Aug 01, 2009

Labyrinth

Posted at 6:44 am MDT to Garden

I have been trying to decide what I am going to do about the area of my front lawn that was scraped bare by the bozos who did the digging for the power-line burial last year.

I really want something there other than weeds. (I'm amazed that bare spot has grown so many weeds this year -- some of them must need very little organic matter in their soil, just minerals and water.) But I don't really want a lawn, especially not one that I would need to inflict my horrible well water on.

I was looking at a website about xeriscape ground-covers which cautioned against mono-cropping them in imitation of a lawn, and something in my memory went "ping".

I could do a xeriscape meditation labyrinth! I have wanted a labyrinth for years, and now I have a good spot for one. If I'm going to put money and effort into the yard, it might as well be for things I want.

I went to the Labyrinth Company website, which sells (among other products for building labyrinths) weed cloth preprinted in labyrinth patterns to use when laying a labyrinth out in your garden. I ordered the pattern for my favorite labyrinth, an octagonal 5-row model that harmonizes well with the Net of Mirrors symbolic system.

I'll do the paths in gravel and the boundaries in river rock and xeric ground covers. And I can put a flagstone in the center, and elemental symbols in the 4 corners outside the octagon, to make it an even better ritual space.

It probably won't really be set up until sometime next year, but I need the pattern now, so I can lay out the over-all landscape design. (I am terrible at visualizing things like this.)

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Thu, Jul 30, 2009

Vermiculite

Posted at 10:34 pm MDT to Garden

I have the final ingredient I needed to set up my first square foot garden bed: Nanette had a partial sack of coarse vermiculite she was able to let me have. And we are putting in a combined order to her supplier: fine vermiculite for her seedlings and coarse for my garden beds. So by the time enough of the heavy landscape construction is done and I can create the planting beds I want, I should have the materials available.

One nice thing about having a friend with an organic farm is that Nanette knows sources for things you can't get at ordinary garden centers. I don't understand why the garden centers don't supply vermiculite in other than tiny quantities.

I also received a new seed catalog in the mail today, from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Looking at seed catalogs is a good activity for a cold damp evening. It's just that usually the cold damp evening is in March or April, not July. The Denver Airport recorded a record low high temperature today, breaking a record from sometime in the 1920s.

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Wed, Jul 29, 2009

April in July

Posted at 7:01 pm MDT to Weather

The temperature at my house was 50 degrees F at 5:30 PM when I got home today, July 29. It's raining, too.

This summer has been ridiculous.

A few days ago, the radio said that Denver was already having the fourth wettest summer since records started being kept. I think we're heading higher in the record books.

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Tue, Jul 28, 2009

Cash for Clunkers

Posted at 7:22 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My plan to take advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program has hit a snag.

On Friday I received a call from the Subaru dealership: "We're in the program. Come in and talk."

Yesterday I sent them an email, to make an appointment for this evening.

Today I received an email: "Sorry, but we have left the program."

I tried calling the other local Subaru dealer. Their website said they were in the program but on the phone, they said the program is already running out of money, but if I want to buy one of the cars on thier lot, not necessarily with the features I want, they might be able to make me a deal. I am convinced the salesman was trying to pull some kind of scam: it seems very unlikely that a 1 billion dollar program is running out of funds 2 business days after it officially took effect.

I guess I need to spend some time looking at the specs of other brands of small SUVs and crossovers. The Honda CRV and Toyota RAV-4 are apparently the closest competitors to the Forester, but slightly more expensive and with slightly different features.

Grr.

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Still Not Menopausal

Posted at 7:37 am MDT to Miscellaneous

Yesterday I found out why I had a really vicious headache Sunday evening and a frenzied burst of reorganizing the house and yard for a few days before that.

Drat. That makes twice in less than 3 months, after a 19 month gap.

If age at menopause really predicts life expectancy, I'm going to need to plan my finances for a looong retirement.

At least I seem to be mostly missing out on my usual hellacious cramps this time around.

And the housecleaning thing is at least a usful PMS symptom. I have always thought that one reason bachelor pads are stereotypically messy is that guys don't get hit by periodic bursts of "Gah! this place needs to be reorganized! Now!!!" Sometimes the manifestations are pretty odd, though. Hard drive defragging as a PMS symptom (which I have engaged in in the past) is really peculiar when you think about it: not something one would expect to have a evolutionary basis.

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Sun, Jul 26, 2009

Shane

Posted at 7:58 pm MDT to Garden

My business partner's son came over for a few hours and worked on the yard with me. I paid very well because i was very pleased with the progress we made.

My little dumpster is full and the yard and front porch and basement (and dining room) are bit tidier than they have been before. The firewood racks are full of firewood. And preparations have begun for a number of different projects.

There is a metal plaque with the house number at the foot of the driveway now. White with brass letters. It is currently held onto steel stakes with cable ties. If those break, I'll check my electronics supplies for insulated copper wire: I think I've got a spool of something fairly stiff.

The back of the truck has been emptied out, and the lawnmower (actually a sort of weedwacker on wheels) is in the truck ready to be taken to the repair sho tomorrow (It's been a few years since I used it, and I'm sure it needs to be oiled and lubed and tuned up before I try using it again.

The front porch has been tidied and organized, though there are currently bales of peat moss and sacks of compost piled neatly on it, ready for the squarefoot garden and other planting beds I am planning. I need to order some serious quantities of vermiculite before I can assemble things, though. I'll try to do that tomorrow.

The dead waterbed mattress is in the dumpster and will soon be out of my life. So are the steel pipes that were a swingset on the property sometime before I bought it in 1985. And a number of other objects that have been cluttering up the yard and basemnet for a very long time.

The aquarium that has been taking up space in the dining room even though it hasn't actually contained any fish since 2002 has also met its fate, though I'm storing the aquarium stand and most of the associated equipment in the basement. The dining room looks much larger. I think I'm going to enjoy the space for a while, then get my keyboard out of the pantry, where it has been making a nuisance of itself since I got back from Boston in December 2006, and set it up in a playable configuration.

The half-barrel that has been waiting to be possibly made into a fountain since I started travelling in 2002 has been moved to a new and better location to potentially be a fountain in. The liner is fine, but the barrel itself is very weathered. I noticed when we were buying peat and compost at Lowes that they have half barrels for less than $30. If/when I finally create the fountain, I will get a fresh barrel to use, but the existing one is helpful for designing layouts.

Also, a 24 inch round cement stepping stone that was in the front yard has been moved to the back, where I can use it in building a platform for the rain barrel.

Once the lawnmower/weedwacker is back in service, this place will begin to look shocklingly civilized.

I still need to figure out what to do about the three dead commercial compost bins. And what to do about an active compost bin that will be functional and survive the wind and UV here. I think I need to get some steel fenceposts and seriously anchor whatever bin I get or build next. My Mom's compost pile had stone walls -- in that part of New England you build walls with the stones that come out of the place you want to put plants, to get the stones out of the way. The stones here are not useful for wall building.

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Fri, Jul 24, 2009

Projects

Posted at 10:30 pm MDT to Garden

Wednesday evening Jason from the New Creation Hardscapes company came by to pick up the final check for the retaining wall work and discuss future projects. He's going to provide some estimates some time next week, but it looks like things will be more expensive than I had hoped. I am so used to this place that I long ago stopped noticing how badly it is graded.

Jason stopped by this morning to pick up some of the materials that were left over from the retaining wall project. I suggested window wells as a partial solution to some of the grading problems on the east side of the house, and he agreed that they would be useful. The problem is that the bottoms of the basement windows are too low to allow the dirt ro slope away frm the house properly. Windows wells will allow the grade to be higher than the bottoms of the window frames.

Also on Wednesday evening, a salesman from Lasting Impressions come by. Their company redid all of my windows on the main level in 1996, working around various problems of the original perversely designed windows, and I have been very pleased with both the work and the windows. The current project is to rebuild the bedroom deck and replace the sliding patio door that goes from the bedroom to the deck and the French door that opens from the basement to the area that is now made usable by the new retaining walls.

Ross looked at the existing deck and said, "You realize this design is totally illegal, don't you?"

I hadn't, exactly, but I wasn't surprised. The windows that were replaced in 1996 cannot possibly have been to code... Two of the bedrooms had single windows that were 4 feet wide by 8 feet tall, extending from floor to ceiling without being shatterproof. And because of the way they latched (or didn't) I am sure they were designed to be mounted horizontally instead of vertically. (The people who were renting the house before I bought it had little kids. Looking back, it's amazing no one was ever injured.) The original living room windows were just (badly) homemade double-pane units that had lst there seals. And they only opened at the top, so there was litle crossventilation in the room, which tends to turn into an oven on sunny days.

I have a standard rant about the house: I was told that it was built in 1974 "with his own hands" by a CU professor, and I am convinced he was a professor of something like English or American History, not anything like engineering or architecture. Every contractor I've ever had work on the house ends up saying "Why did they build it that way?" at some point.

The Lasting Impressions Guys are going to 'repair' the deck, which may turn out to require totally rebuilding it -- there's no way to tell until they start taking it apart. What I end up with should be a lot more functional and at least within shouting distance of code.

Thursday and today I took deliveries of stuff for the yard: a rainbarrel from Home Depot Online and a garden kit and tomato trellis kit from Squarefootgardening.com. The packages are still on the front porch (the box for the 60 gallon rain barrel is huge). I'll unpack them tomorrow and start preparing the places to install them. This will involve a trip to the local Home Depot or Lowes': I'm going to need a staple gun.

I also need the ingredients for the planting mix that goes into the square foot garden. Which happens to be the same mixture that Nanette uses for starting seedlings, so she was able to point me at sources for the ingredients.

Sunday afternoon, I have a strong college student (Shawn's son) coming over for a few hours to help with some yard work. So I'll be able to do some cleanup projects that need more strength than I have (the dead waterbed mattress will finally get put into the dumpster. Yay) , or more than two hands.

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Mon, Jul 20, 2009

Cloudburst

Posted at 10:12 pm MDT to Weather

Man.

We are having an impressive cloudburst at the moment. I am seeing occasional flickers of lightning in the distance, but for a while I could not tell if there was any thinder because the noise of the rain and hail against my roof and windows was so loud.

I have no attic space -- there is only about 8 inches or so between my ceiling and the roof surface -- so there is not a lot of sound decoupling that can happen.

I hear the hail ping against the metal chimney of the woodstove and the vent cover of the range hood, too.

I suspect this is going to give me a reminder of what the next landscaing project needs to be. There is one side of the foundation that tends to leak water into the basement. I noticed this morning that even though the dirt has been mounded up against the house along there in the past, it has now sunk down. That's probably why the leaks have been more common lately.

I'm planning to have a small paved area added at the problem location at the foot of the steps from the back porch. The project should probably include a French drain there and along the rest of that side of the house, along with the regrading. At least I won't need to buy fill dirt for the regrading: there is a huge pile of dirt that came out of the hole where the ne retaining wall was built.

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Apollo 11 40th Anniversary

Posted at 10:12 pm MDT to Current Events

I remember watching the TV coverage with my parents and brothers. We got very little sleep because important information kept becoming available. It was handy that the landing happened on a Saturday: no one needed to get up early the next day.

It'ds a little sad that Walter Cronkite died just a few days before the anniversay, but it is hard to complain about a 92 year lie-span.

On Sunday I stayed glued to the TV while my parents (and brothers?) went to pick up our new puppy at the breeders'. We named him Buzz: it was pretty much unthinkable to get a dog that weekend and not give him a name that referred to the landing.

Looking back, I'm not sure why he didn't end up just named Apollo. Maybe that wouldn't have been specific enough. (His name on the official kennel club papers was Buzz of Apollo.)

Buzz was a pure-bred toy fox terrier (short-haired), but the genes had recombined oddly. When he was 3 months old he was already as big as his mother, and he ended up about midway in size between toy and standard fox terriers. Basically, he came out looking a lot like a Jack Russell terrier in his size and markings -- when I see Jack Russells, I always think they are fox terriers.

He had one ear that stood up like a chihahua ear, and the tip of the other ear flopped down, so he also looked a lot like the RCA dog, except his tail had been cropped.

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Sat, Jul 18, 2009

Grapevine

Posted at 8:02 pm MDT to Garden

I own a grapevine. It is a seedless green variety from Ute Trail Greenhouse, one of the dealers at the farmers' market. It already has little grapes on it.

The place I want to put it doesn't quite exist yet: not until the next phase of landscape remodeling. But I wanted to be sure they did not sell out of the plants.

It should survive in its pot for a few more weeks provided I remember to water it. I'm leaving it on the porch near the front door so I will see it.

Since I am actually trying to start a garden, for the first time in years, I have added a Garden category to the blog. It seems odd to be starting a garden in late summer/early autumn, but according to the Square Foot Gardening website this is actually a good time to start. Germination times are supposed to be shorter in warm soil. And you don't need to worry about seedlings and starts getting frozen.

I'm going to be using square foot gardening techniques in parts of the garden I'm setting up, though not the part where the grapevine will be. I've got some of my garden books out, and this weekend I will be measuring and planning, so when Jason from New Creation Hardscapes comes on Monday to finish out the retainingwall project I will be able to gives him some specs to bid on the next phase.

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Jimmy Carter Has Left the Southern Baptists

Posted at 6:01 pm MDT to Current Events

A group called the Elders that he is a member of is pushing for better treatment of women, and he has decided that working from inside the system is not working. His announcement is here.

The Elders was apparently formed in 2007, with funding raised by Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel. Other members include Desmond Tutu, South African archbishop emeritus of Capetown; former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan; Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel laureate and founder of the Green Bank in Bangladesh. Also Indian microfinance leader Ela Bhatt; former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland; former Chinese ambassador to the United States Li Zhaoxing. And they left an empty chair for Aung San Suu Kiy.

I found the link to Jimmy Carter's decision on Making Light.

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Thu, Jul 16, 2009

Alice's Restaurant

Posted at 9:57 pm MDT to Current Events

One of the bloggers at the history blog Edge of the American West has posted a great little Youtube video in honor of the 42nd anniversary the the debut of the song Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie.

Note: Muppets are a running theme on "Edge of the American".

The lyrics to Arlo's song are here.

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Wok

Posted at 7:38 pm MDT to Technology

Today I attended a technical conference in the Tech Center (south Denver). As I was driving home, in rush hour traffic, on a hot afternoon, in a truck whose AC has gone wonky, I realized that by making a slight detour I could visit Pacific Mercantile.

I got the 12-inch round-bottomed wok I've been wanting, and a lid for it, and a donburi (a sort of Japanese casserole dish) and some groceries that are hard to find elsewhere.

Driving back to the highway, I passed the building that used to be Restaurant Mori. The building is still there, but appears to be empty. The landlord forced them out by being greedy, but doesn't seem to have had a new tenant lined up. What a waste.

I suppose it's possible they were planning to redevelop the site and things stalled when the economy tanked.

When I got home I had problems swallowing my supper for the first time in a long time -- I was insufficiently careful and paranoid when eating the meals that were supplied at the conference. But this is more evidence that the swallowing problems are related to the food allergies.

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Wed, Jul 15, 2009

Range of Motion

Posted at 7:20 am MDT to Exercise

I seem to have about the same range of motion in both arms now. There are some (beginners') yoga moves that still hurt a little on the right side where there is a narrow band of tissue running from the collarbone to the armpit that has never loosened up since the radiation treatments in 2005, but the actual range of motion seems to match on both sides now.

I really need to find a new massage therapist -- it's been a year since Marti left. There's a tendon or something in my left shoulder that goes sproing during one free-weight exercise which it probably shouldn't do. It feels like a belt slipping out of the groove it's supposed to be in, or as if it is hopping from one state to another instead of moving A to B. I don't think I have the leverage (or knowledge) to work on that myself. I should probably look for a therapist who breaks loose scar tissue (ow) while I'm at it.

It's amazing how I can tell when things are slightly out of whack when I do yoga, even though they feel 'normal' the rest of the time. My hip has been slightly out the past few weeks, but I think I finally got it back into shape (so now it feels weird). The trick was to take some Advil about a half hour before doing my PT exercises and yoga, so the inflammation was knocked down and didn't keep the joint from shifting back where it belongs. It took two days of the Advil and I think it is trying to slip out again, so I need to keep at it.

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Sat, Jul 11, 2009

Attachments

Posted at 10:09 pm MDT to Technology

I'm old enough to remeber my Mom getting savings stamps at the supermarket. There were 'green stamps' and another variety provided by different supermarket chains, and you got stamps in proportion to the size of your purchase. You pasted them into little booklets, filling up the pages with low denomination stamps. or putting a single high denomination stamp on a page. And when you had enough books filled, you traded them for stuff from a catalog.

I don't remember most of the things my Mom got in exchange for stamps, but there was a white ceramic statue of a horse that stood on our coffee table that came from the catalog...

We don't get savings stamps at the supermarkets now -- actually, one market tried to reintroduce them sometime within the past ten years and it didn't work out.

What we get now are credit card reward points, which act a lot like green stamps in that you need to make a huge number of purchases to get enough points to get anything useful. And the stuff that's available for points is often ... um... lame.

A week or so ago I got an email from American Express about a number of special deals, including 30&percent; off on purchases from Cooks.com, which would make the purchases 'cost' halfway reasonble. There was free shipping available, too. I clicked through to the products that were available and found they included Kitchenaid stuff.

I ordered a 12 inch non-stick skillet. I usually use cast iron, but some moern recipes really mean it when they say touse a 12 inch non-stick skillet.

I also ordered some attachments for my Kitchenaid mixer: a pasta roller set and an icecream maker.

I have a manual pasta machine, but the operation really needs three hands: one for the crank and two to handle the pasta. And storing and setting up the pasta maker is a pain in the neck. The Kitchenaid attachments are much more compact for storage, and the Kitchenaid mixer will eliminate the need for a hand for the crank. Making small batches of homemade pasta shoud be a more spur of the moment kind of operation. (Mario Batalli always used the Kitchenaid attachment when making pasta on his shows.)

The icecream maker is to let me make frozen deserts that won't trigger my allergies. I've promised Nanette (who also has a Kitchenaid mixer) that she can borrow it for occasions like the July Fourth picnic: an icecream maker for each of our households might be overkill.

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Thu, Jul 09, 2009

Jeeves

Posted at 10:29 pm MDT to Media

I think I first read some of the works of P. G. Wodehouse when I was in high school, but it might have been college. I do know the first Wodehouse I read wasn't Jeeves and Wooster stories. It was an omnibus of the Psmith stories the local public library had in stock.

I soon worked my way through the rest of their Wodehouse collection, which was not extensive -- I think Wodehouse was mostly out of print for a while in the 70s, then his popularity picked up again later. I think they had more Lord Emsworth than Jeeves, actually.

I've read more Wodehuose, over the years, mostly from libraries and in no particular order. I'm not sure order really matters much with Wodehouse's works -- Wodehouse is pretty consistently silly. I own a two physical volumes of Jeeves and Wooster that I picked up on a whim a while back when I was in the mood for something light and episodic.

Last month when my brother Larry was here for a visit, he spent some time reading a Jeeves omnibus Life with Jeeves.

We talked about how good the BBC Jeeves and Wooster adaptations were, and I mentioned that I had seen some of the episodes on PBS but not all of them, and did not own the DVDs. (I think I saw one season of the three that were eventually shown.) That has changed now: I just received my birthday present: the complete Frye and Laurie Jeeves and Wooster DVDs. I think I know what I'll be watching this weekend.

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Tue, Jul 07, 2009

Palm Pre

Posted at 9:08 pm MDT to Technology

Today I upgraded my cell phone from the rather plain one I had been using to a Palm Pre. Access to the Internet and other smart-phone functions are too useful to ignore.

And I really need to get my address-book on-line where I can avoid misplacing it. I sent my brother's birthday card late this year because I had managed to misplace my dead-tree address book. I really need something portable with PDA functions. My old Palm Pilot died of neglect a few years ago because carrying an additional gadget around was really more trouble than it was worth (and the scribbly input method was annoying). When I did carry it, it got buried in the bottom of my briefcase, and ignored.

With lots of functions combined in the smart-phone, including ones that are handy but not used frequently, I may actually use some of them on occasion, because they will be available in a gadget I carry and use regularly.

Not that I use phones as much as many other people do, even as phones... I was raised in a very phone-averse household and have never really recovered. And now if I ever take up texting (which is really after my time) it will be on a device with a qwerty keyboard.

The most annoying thing about getting this phone now, is that I have just begun a gig at a site where cell-phones are not allowed. My transition to the world of smart-phones functionality may be slowed as a result.

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Thistles

Posted at 9:07 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

My yard is looking a bit more civilized.

On Sunday afternoon one of my neighbors stopped by and asked whether I intended to do anything about the multitude of thistles in my yard. He had been working on cleanng them out of his own property.

I asked whether he knew anyone one I could hire to attack them, and he recommended a college student who had been helping him.

Yesterday, when I arrived home from work the thistles that had been barricading my front porch like the roses at Sleeping Beauty's castle were gone, and so were all the ones along the driveway. Some of those thistle plants were taller than I am, with very hard stems.

There are still some thistles in the rest of the yard. Quite a lot of them, actually. He is coming back tomrrow to tackle the rest of them.

I think this is a good time to cut the thistles: they are blooming, but just before going to seed. All of the energy of the plants should be in the parts that are being cut off and thrown away.

When googling, I found a rhyme from Britain: 'Cut thistles in May, they'll grow in a day/Cut them in June, that is too soon/Cut them in July, then they will die.' So I guess I got the timimg right.

I suspect that the plants that are being massacred will try to grow back from the roots. I should probably get my weedmower (a sort of weewacker on wheeels) serviced so I can attack them again in the next round. The mower should be able to handle them if I don't let the regrowth get too tall and woody. A normally dry season next year would be helpful, too. I've owned this house since 1985 and nver seen thistles like this year, thought he stirring of the soil when the power lines were put underground undoubtedly encouraged them.

I may just invest in some black plastic for the area near the house where the barricade grew in the

I wonder if the enthusiasm of these plants means that artichokes or cardoons would do well here. Probably not. That would be too useful. And I suspect the soil here is too cold for the edible kinds of thistle.

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Sun, Jul 05, 2009

July 4 2009

Posted at 3:47 pm MDT to Weather

Man, the weather has been weird lately. We've had rain almost everyday and the weeds in my yard are flourishing (think Sleeping Beauty, but with thistles instead of roses).

This weekend has also been chilly, though we had actual summer temperatures early in the week. Today,at 3:30 pm, on July 5, the temperature has not reached 70, and yesterday was about the same. I borrowed a long-sleeved shirt from Nanette because I was freezing in the breeze

There are also occasional "showers" where it rains cats, dogs and hamsters for a while. Nanette's picnic yesterday had to move indoors for a while, just before a downpour that made it look like someone had aimed a garden hose at her north-facing windows. And today there has been some thunder along with the rain.

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Macaroni Salad

Posted at 1:38 pm MDT to Technology

Yesterday I attended a very nice July 4th picnic at Nanette's. Her second eldest daughter had come in from California, and her two youngest arrived (unexpectedly) from Europe on Friday in time for the celebration, so all four of her kids were there, with various friends and associates.

I brought my Mom's macaroni salad, and part of the cake I baked for my birthday.

The macaroni salad is very simple. The batch I made yesterday was:

1 pound elbow noodles
7 very large hard boiled eggs cut into small pieces
all the stalks from a celery heart, chopped
3 small-to-medium onions chopped
mayonnaise
sweet paprika
smoked paprika

Everyone seemed to like it, but I think it came out a little too oniony. Two slightly larger onions would have been better, if I had them. Or maybe only 2 and a half of the ones I used.

Sometimes when I make this salad, I add a little mustard to the mayo, but I used the basic version this time.

The other food at the picnic was excellent. Nanette makes a great barbecue sauce. And one of Rowan's friends who came is a professional chef (one advantage of having a business that supplies restaurants): he brought bouillabaisse and mashed potatoes with truffle oil.

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Fri, Jul 03, 2009

Republican Governors

Posted at 5:48 pm MDT to Current Events

Damn.

I wonder if there was something in the water at the last Republican Governors Conference meeting.

Neither Sarah Palin nor Mark Sanford seems able to hold a coherent press conference.

Sanford is not resigning yet, despite dereliction of duty and profound public stupidity.

I wonder what the investigators were about to dig up that led Palin to resign so that the state need not spend lots of money investigating her?

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Ai Sushi

Posted at 1:16 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Nanette took me out to dinner for my birthday yesterday, to a restaurant called Ai Sushi and Steak.

The food was excellent, and reasonably priced for the portions, which were huge.

I had a tempura, udon and California roll combo. The miso soup at the beginning of the meal was smooth and flavorful. The flavors of the green onions, seaweed and tofu were not buried under the miso itself.

The tempura (shrimp and vegetables) was light and not greasy, and the dipping sauce had a nice tang in addition to the soy sauce in it.

The eight small pieces of California roll were well made and had a nice balance of ingredients and a complex flavor -- the crab part seemed to be a crab salad, and I'm not sure what all of the ingredients were.

The bowl of udon soup was huge (this meal failed the 'don't eat anything bigger than your head' rule) with very good noodles, an excellent broth, and plenty of cabbage, carrots and broccoli.

I brought most of the meal home in boxes. I had half the cali rolls and tempura pieces for breakfast, and I'm working on the soup for lunch.

And I think I need to plan on a very small supper tonight.

Our favorite Japanese restaurant in Denver, Mori, closed a while back, but I really think Ai is nearly as good, though their menu is less extensive. (I miss kitsune udon, which I used to get at Mori. And the Japanese pickles that used to accompany every meal.)

And I need to find a source of the thick udon noodles you get in restaurants. The ones I can find locally for home cooking are all skinny. The good Japanese grocery that probably carries them, Pacific Mercantile is still in existence a couple of blocks from the site of Mori, but Denver is a long way to go for noodles and pickles and a few other items. Maybe I'll go down to the art museum one weekend this summer (which is at the other end of the downtown shuttle route) and stop by the market while I am there.

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Wed, Jul 01, 2009

Double Nickel

Posted at 11:38 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Tomorrow, July 2, is my birthday.

I have baked a cake in my fancy bundt pan for the first time since my allergies were diagnosed.

I started with Alton Brown's pound cake recipe (from I'm Just Here for More Food , with goat milk with lemon juice instead of buttermilk, and goat butter, and added orange peel and orange extract to the pound cake to stand up to the goat taste.

The cake came out of the pan beautifully and is cooling now. (I won't taste it until it is completely cool. Cutting it before it is stable would be a bad idea.) I have sprinkled it with some powdered sugar now, while it is still steaming, and I'll add more when it is cool.

One of the nice features of my fancy stove is the timer. It rings several chiming tones, pauses, then rings some more. The groups get farther apart, but they don't stop until you do something about them. The timer on my microwave just beeps once, and I often miss it if I am in the other room and the radio or TV is playing.

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Mon, Jun 29, 2009

Grinder

Posted at 8:59 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

In Connecticut, where I grew up, the kind of sandwich they sell at Subway and Quizno's was not a sub or a hoagie, it was a grinder. Don't ask me why they were called that: I don't think anyone really knows.

Today we bought lunch at Quizno's. I ordered a small Classic Italian on wheat, no cheese (God, I miss mozzarella) and more or less kept my fingers crossed for the next few hours. I wouldn't have dared try this 10 days ago when I was having major coughing and swallowing problems because of allergies, but I've been doing pretty well for the past few days.

The verdict, after about 8 hours, is that Quizno's does not seem to use stuff I'm allergic to in their wheat bread.

My throat was a little scratchy for a while, but I think that was the lettuce (which I am not officially allergic to, but sometimes react badly to. I wonder if that's partly agricultural chemicals rather than just the actual lettuce).

It's nice to know that I can probably count Quizno's as an allergy-safe, inexpensive place to eat.

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Sun, Jun 28, 2009

Water Softener

Posted at 3:59 pm MDT to Technology

I have a new water softener. Not an expense I really needed right after I contracted for the retaining wall work, but the old unit lasted nearly 24 years, so it's hard to complain. This new one should last the next 20 years.

The new water softener has some nice features.

The new controller has valves made from modern composites (fancy plastics) instead of brass, so it should be corrosion-proof.

The new salt tank has a float valve shutoff instead of an overflow hose, so I won't need to worry about tripping over it when carrying baskets of laundry.

And the control mechanism is smarter than the old one, which cycled automatically ervery 3 days regardless of how much water was being processed. The new unit tracks the water flow and should cycle only on the first night after 800 gallons have been processed since the last cycle. This means that it should use less salt, and it will not cycle (and use up its salt) when I am out of town and not using water. This will also decrease the salt that ends up in my septic system -- also a good idea.

The new installation has a more sensible plumbing layout in the basement, too, and is more compact and tucked into a corner than the old water softener was.

On the whole, I am very pleased with the new system.

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Cell-Less Gig

Posted at 3:59 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This has been a hectic week.

Monday morning I verified the landscaping contract.

Late Monday afternoon I learned that I was starting a new gig on Wednesday, at a work site where cell phones are forbidden.

Tuesday I had a plumber check my water softener, which had been misbehaving, and learned that 24 years of my horrible well water had actually corroded the brass valves. The plumber went away to investigate options.

Also on Tuesday, I had lunch with my business partners and a real estate agent: our office lease is up in October and we need to decide what to do about it.

Wednesday I started the new gig. In the secure building with no cell phones allowed. I contacted the plumber and landscape guy, since the numbers I had given them would no longer work during working hours.

Thursday evening we had a meeting of CRUG, the Colorado Rational Users' Group, which our company sponsors.

Friday, the plumber came back and installed a new water softener. I also got in touch with the landscaper: his projects are running behind -- probably due to the violent weather we have had amost every day lately -- and the work on my retaining walls is now tentatively scheduled to start on Monday July 6.

Saturday I worked the farmers' market, and the weather, for a change, was beautiful.

Today I'm cleaning everything in the utensil drawers that the mice invaded while I was in Mobile: I need to use enough hot water to clear the untreated water out of the hot water heater before I try to do any laundry. There is so much iron in the untreated water that my clothes will be ruined if I use it to wash them.

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Sat, Jun 20, 2009

Retaining Wall

Posted at 8:21 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Starting to track the latest phase of home improvement/repairs. I have hired New Creation Hardscapes to fix the stairwell to the basement door, where the dirt-slide happened last week.

Their bid was reasonable, and their design proposal showed that their rep had been listening to me. Unlike the other bid I got from a landscape architect who did not pay attention to the preferences I expressed during our conversation.

It remains to be seen how long this project will take to get started and to be finished, of course. I just faxed over a copy of the proposal with my signature Friday afternoon.

I don't know whether to hope they will be able to do the work immediately (which might suggest they are desperate for work) or that they are busy (which would probably be a good sign for the economy).

When they are finished, I should have usable steps down to the basement entrance and a paved walk from the front porch out to my driveway, which will be nice when the weather is wet and makes the clay in the soil all sticky.

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Thu, Jun 18, 2009

Allergies

Posted at 9:13 am MDT to Miscellaneous

I have been having a miserable time all week. My old coughing and swallowing problems seem to be back, full force. It is really annoying (and a little scary) to have problems swallowing chicken noodle soup.

Taking my morning meds, with water, set off serious coughing that seems to be a reaction to the physical act of swallowing. My fingers seem to be swollen, too, so my whole system is reacting, badly, to whatever is going on.

I don't think I have been eating anything I shouldn't -- though just to be on the safe side I am going to try taking eggs and goat's milk back out of my diet for a few days. I think the problem is actually the wet, rainy weather we've been having, which has caused an outpouring of pollen and mold in the environment.

I would prefer normal hayfever symptoms, though I have some of those too: puffy, watery eyes and occasional sneezing.

I'm going to take some Advil to try to knock down the inflamation so I can actually eat some breakfast. I should probably try taking an antihistamine, too, though I'll need to buy some.

At least I'm better off than I was last spring in that I know these are allergy symptoms.

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Wed, Jun 17, 2009

Charity of the Month -- Planned Parenthood

Posted at 3:31 pm MDT to Technology

Planned Parenthood is having a funds-matching drive this month, which I agreed to take part in even before Dr. George Tiller was murdered.

Their website is here. Clicking Donate takes you to a secure site.

They would probably have become this month's donation after the murder even if I hadn't already scheduled this payment. I'd consider making a specific donation to the Boulder Abortion Clinic (Dr. Hern is apparently just below Tiller on the wingnut hit list) but it looks like they don't take direct donations.

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Wed, Jun 10, 2009

Cashew Chicken Salad

Posted at 12:31 pm MDT to Technology

It just recently occurred to me that I can have this again because I can have mayo now that I no longer react to eggs. When I regularly took lunches to work I ate this a couple of times a week, carrying it in small thermos containers. At least it adds some protein to my diet, which is way too carb-heavy, especially now that I can't live on cheese the way I used to.

One batch makes about two lunches. The second day tastes even better because the flavors have had time to meld.

Dinah likes to drink the broth from the chicken can.

1 12 ounce can of chicken, drained and the chunks broken up

1 11 ounce can of mandarin orange slices, drained

a few ounces of salted cashews, broken up

soy sauce

mayonnaise

This is a Costco meal: most of the ingredients are cheap, by the case, from there. It would work with leftover roasted chicken that wasn't cooked with herbs that conflict, of course.

My other lunches were a modified Waldorf salad made with yogurt, apples, grapes and celery (I could probably make that with goat yogurt) and a salmon salad with ranch dressing that will take more modification: ranch dressing has buttermilk in it, so it is out of my diet.

I wonder if I can find a recipe for ranch dressing that I could modify to use things I can eat...

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Forever Stamps

Posted at 11:21 am MDT to Miscellaneous

I need to run some errands later, including mailing the few monthly bills I still pay with paper checks.
I don't need to buy stamps to mail them.

I won't need to buy stamps for a long time. Even allowing for special events like sending Christmas cards, at my current rate of stamp use, I won't need to buy stamps again for at least a couple of years.

A few months ago (before the postage increase) I picked up 100 forever stamps at Costco, where they were even discounted from the official price. Since they are now worth 44 dollars instead of their 42 dollar original value or the 41.50 I paid for them, I have made over 5 per cent on the transaction already.

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Tue, Jun 09, 2009

Noisy

Posted at 4:45 pm MDT to Weather

It's been cool and cloudy -- almost misty -- most of the day, but things got
noisy a little while ago.

Lots of thunder, some very close, and pings and clunks when little hailstones
hit the stovepipe and vent covers. When I looked out, I saw one of the bunnies
taking shelter under the truck.

Now the sun is trying to come out for the first time today.

The lights blinked once as the cell passed by. I'll need to reset the microwave
clock, but the stove clock is OK. The computers and AV stack are fine.

I wonder why they make the clocks in microwaves so sensitive? It seems like
they start flashing 8s or hyphens (depending on the clock) at the slightest
excuse.

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Mon, Jun 08, 2009

Basement Door

Posted at 6:56 am MDT to Miscellaneous

Dinah Kitty is freaked out. Her pupils are very dilated and she sort of prowls around lashing her tail.

First we had a guest in the house -- my brother Larry arrived midday Friday and I drove him into Denver Saturday evening for a professional conference he's attending. Then some time yesterday the French doors to my basement were forced open by a combination of wind and a minor avalanche of the dirt that was loosened by the powerline excavations last year.

I didn't notice the door being open until this morning. Dinah had not slept on my bed last night at all, which is very unusual, so when it got light I went looking for her.

When I found the open door I was very worried that she had gone outside and gotten lost or been eaten by a coyote or something: she is an indoor
cat who does not know how to handle herself outdoors. Fortunately, she was hiding in the basement. I'm not sure why she was hiding in the basement when it was something in the basement that was upsetting her, but that's OK. At least she is safe.

I used a spade to clear enough dirt to mostly close the door. It doesn't latch properly (I need to do some more digging to get the second door to close all the way) but the biggest gap is at the top. I have the spade braced under the doorknob to keep the door from swinging open before I have time to work on it some more.

Dinah ate a little of her breakfast and then went downstairs again. Maybe she thinks she is guarding her territory, but I'm not sure how she thinks she can do that from her hiding place in the far end of the basement.

I think the urgency of getting those retaining walls replaced has just increased considerably. I wish I believed there was such a thing as a reliable contractor. Neither my experience nor Nanette's is very encouraging.

They say that there were severe storms in the area yesterday afternoon, including some tornadoes. I don't remember hearing anything here, but I suppose a gust of wind might have helped push the door open. There are more storms forecast for today. I'll have to pay attention to things.

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Mon, Jun 01, 2009

VMWare and Ubuntu 9.04

Posted at 9:27 pm MDT to Technology

VMWare is being flakey. I'm not sure whether the problem is actually the interaction of VMWare with the new version of Ubuntu, or whether my problem is internal to one of the Windows images.

In either case, one I bring up the virtual machines on the laptop something hammers the drive and sucks up a lot of processor time.

I need to recheck some DNS settings that got muched during the Ubuntu upgrade, and tweak some network settings that can be different now that I'm back on my home network (I had to adjust a few things when I was in Mobile connecting through Comcast). But I don't think either of those is related to the resource hogging.

I'm going to try some troubleshooting tomorrow.

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Sat, May 30, 2009

Broiler and Wok Burner

Posted at 8:24 pm MDT to Technology

Yesterday I used the wok burner of my fancy stove for the first time in wok mode. I need to find a 12 or 14 inch round-bottom wok without a heavy handle to really use it properly.

I used my rice cooker, which has fuzzy-logic that can handle the altitude without burning the rice. It's way bigger than I need for just me, but it was cheap at Costco and it is very useful. One thing I will miss from sealevel (like Mobile) is being able to get rice and pasta to cook in reasonable amounts of time. The rice cooker knows when the rice is done and automatically switches to warmer mode.

Today I worked at the farmers' market for the first time this year (last week, Memorial Day weekend, the Boulder Creek Fest tookover the market space and parking). The weather was beautiful (unusually, for weekends this spring) and I stocked up on lots of goodies.

Apple cider. Dried apples. Rhubarb. Fresh mushrooms. Swiss chard. Green garlic. My favorite goat cheese for grating over pasta now that I can't have parmesan (Whole Foods doesn't carry it for some reason, though they carry other cheeses from the same dairy). And chicken: both bone-in breasts and the giblets and livers for making dirty rice, now that I know how to do that.

I had Sister's Pantry checken dumplings for breakfast, and vegan papusas for lunch.

I made a chard frittata for supper, with some goat cheddar on top. I think when I put it under the broiler to set the top of the eggs and melt the cheese, it was the first time I have used the broiler in the new gas stove. It is very powerful compared to the broiler in the old electric stove, and I love the way it heats up instantly. It actually has a lower setting, too, which I will have to try using some time.

Chard frittata:

1. bunch chard, rinsed, and leaves stripped from the stems. Salad spin the leaves to drain them. Chop the stems into 3/4 inch pieces, and begin sauteeing the stem pieces in a cast iron skillet, adding a small pinch of salt. Roll 3 or 4 leaves together at a times, loosely, and cut the rolls at one inch intervals. Add the sliced leaves to the stems, sprinkling with a little more salt, and toss to coat with oil, then cover. Stir occasionally until fully wilted.

Remove the chard to a storage bowl and wipe out the skillet. Add more oil and begin heating it.

Whisk eggs with water and add to the heated pan. When the eggs are about half cooked, add a thin layer of the chard and sprinkle with salt and fine-ground black pepper.

Turn on the broiler. Grate cheese on top of the eggs and chard. Place the skillet under the broiler until the cheese is melted and the tops of the eggs are set.

Slide the frittata onto a plate and serve immediately.

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Fri, May 29, 2009

Charity of the Month(s) April/May 2009

Posted at 1:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The Habitat for Humanity folks called because they were having a matching-fund drive, so I made a donation. (I've apparently been donating to them for 10 years.) This is prime building season so the money does more good now than waiting until later inthe year.

I also made a donation to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, since there was a recent earthquake and we are coming up on hurricane season. Their donation page doesn't work with the Konqueror browser -- they use one of those CAPTCHA things, which Konqueror blocks (It's picky about Flash apps) -- but I was able to make the donation by switching to Firefox.

This puts me just about exactly on track for my goal of making charitable donations equal to 10% of my net pay for the year. I'm really trying to get out of the bad habit of doing most of my giving in the 4th quarter when Christmas shopping is also happening.

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Fri, May 08, 2009

Non Menopause

Posted at 5:12 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This week my body informed me in no uncertain terms that I am not finished with menopause. This is very disappointing. After more than a year without needing to deal with cramps and such, I had thought I was done. The total gap was 19 months.

The cramps are really annoying: I don't know whether it is just that I am out of practice dealing with them.

Better this week than next: driving 22 hours with cramps would not be fun.

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Wed, May 06, 2009

Wesleyan University Shooting

Posted at 4:52 pm MDT to Current Events

Whoa.

There was a shoooting at Wesleyan University in Connecticut this afternoon: a junior woman was murdered. It technically took place just off the campus, but the building is the one that serves as the university book store. I spent a lot of time in that bookstore, once upon a time, though in my day it did not include the cafe where the shooting took place.

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Mon, May 04, 2009

Routes

Posted at 8:16 pm MDT to Travel

Today I got a call from the Eldorado Springs Company asking whther I wanted them to resume deliveries of bottled water to my home this week. I said "No, not until the next scheduled delivery on May 20".

While I was thinking about it schedules, I called the trash company and arranged for trash pickups to re-start the week after next.

I've been looking at routes for the trip home.

The default route offered by my TomTom GPS uses interstates as much as possible. The route (going back the way I came) goes through Lafayette and Shreveport Louisiana to Dallas, then heads north on I-35 until it hits I-70 in the middle of Kansas. It has a predicted driving time of 23 hours 50+ minutes.

Rand-McNally offers a route going through Jackson Mississippi to Shreveport, then to Dallas, etc. and taking 23 hours 20 minutes.

Google maps and Mapquest prefer a route through Jackson Mississippi, Little Rock, Arkansas connecting to I-35 in northern Oklahoma that supposedly takes 22 hours 7 minutes.

The AAA triptik calculator offers a route through Memphis and north up the Mississippi to pick up I-70 at St.Louis, then it's all I-70 west to Denver. That route is supposed to take 22 hours 27 minutes. But I'm not sure I want to drive I-70 all the way across Missouri and Kansas.

Fiddling with the online maps, it looks like Mobile to Memphis, to Oklahoma City (by way of Little Rock) then I-35 to I-70 in mid-Kansas won't cost much time (10 minutes out of a 22+ our trip isn't much) and I think driving through Arkansas should be prettier than driving across the plains.

Now I need to fiddle with the GPS and get it to give me something approaching that route. (I think I need to use the app that lives in the computer to calculate the route and download it into the TomTom.)

If I was travelling without Dinah Kitty, I'd think about spending part of a day in Memphis. Oh, well. Maybe some other time.

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Sun, May 03, 2009

Software Plumber

Posted at 2:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

In preparation for an interview this past week, I have finally thought of an analogy that can explain our business model to someone outside the business. There is another business that a lot of people have experience with that works a lot like ours.

I am like a master plumber for software, and ReleaseTEAM is a plumbing company.

People who have problems in our area of expertise, or want to remodel or put in an addition, hire us to do the work, and I get sent out to various project sites to do the actual work.

Sometimes we get hired directly by the customer who wants the work done, but more often there is a prime contractor and sometimes additional layers of subcontractors between us and the client.

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Intuos3 on Ubuntu 9.04

Posted at 2:19 pm MDT to Technology

I needed the following changes to get the rotation, buttons and eraser working properly for my Wacom Intuos3 graphic tablet. I did a lot of rummaging in the Ubuntu forums vefore I found something that would work for me.

In the old method of configuration using xorg.conf, the Wacom tools have names like "pad", "stylus", "eraser" and "cursor", and that is what the wacom control utilities expect to see.

First set up a translation to take place during boot:

sudo vi /etc/init.d/wacomtohal

Cut and paste this into wacomtohal:

## find any wacom devices
for udi in `hal-find-by-property --key input.x11_driver --string wacom`
do
type=`hal-get-property --udi $udi --key input.x11_options.Type`
## rewrite the names that the Xserver will use
hal-set-property --udi $udi --key info.product --string $type
done

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/wacomtohal

sudo update-rc.d wacomtohal defaults 27

Set ~/.xinitrc to:

#!/bin/sh
xsetwacom set pad Rotate HALF
xsetwacom set pad StripLDn "core key up"
xsetwacom set pad StripLUp "core key down"
xsetwacom set pad Button4 "core key SHIFT"
xsetwacom set pad Button3 "core key ALT"
xsetwacom set pad Button2 "core key CTRL"
xsetwacom set pad Button1 "core key space"

and make it executable.

Reboot to activate wacomtohal, and make sure ~/.xinitrc is run before firing up krita or gimp. (It needs to be re-run if the tablet has been unplugged and replugged since the last boot or log on.)

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Kubuntu Upgrade to 9.04

Posted at 8:26 am MDT to Technology

I upgraded Kubuntu to 9.04 yesterday, and it went very smoothly, except that it left me with an unbootable menu.lst file for the GRUB boot manager. Fortunately, I had once edited the old menu.lst with an editor that generated a menu.lst~ backup file. Forcing GRUB to use the older version of the file got me in to a point where I could edit the broken file.

I don't think this is a problem with the current update. I'm pretty sure something got broken in one the previous updates and I've been sort of limping along with boot problems after every major update.

I like a verbose boot process, so I edit my menu.lst to remove the 'quiet' settings, and then I have to keep manually hacking the scripts forever after. I'm pretty sure these problems have been around for a while, but because I kept tweaking versions of a bootable menu.lst they weren't fully apparent. This time I let the update tool give me what it thought was a clean copy of the menu.lst.

The update tools for Ubuntu do not have as good a mechanism for reconciling differences in config files as the RedHat/Fedora tools do. The Fedora tools always put a file with their proposed changes on the drive and keep a copy of your customized file there, too, regardless of which version of the config file you told it to use during the update, so it is possible to go back and audit the config changes later. The Ubuntu tools clean up very aggressively and there is no way I have figured out to tell it to leave a copy of the config alternative that was not selected around for reference purposes. If I hadn't had that menu.lst~ I would have had even worse problems, because it turns out that my LiveDisk for rescues is back in Colorado, not packed where I thought it was.

In the current case, the broken menu.lst contains a boot stanza like:

title           Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=32d73b5c-3672-47b7-b704-105947811a7f ro splash resume=/dev/sda2
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

and the working one looks like:

title           Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro splash resume=/dev/sda2
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

The boot error was from initramfs, complaining that a device with UUID=32d73b5c-3672-47b7-b704-105947811a7f did not exist.

The update (I also like my updates verbose) had complained about the resume device:

update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
cryptsetup: WARNING: found more than one resume device candidate:
                     /dev/sda2
                     UUID=b025b5c2-02cc-481b-b663-06eccb3b0235

Interesting that cryptsetup was smart enough to know that it was hosed, but update-initramfs apparently was not. I have never had any luck using hard drive UUIDs on this laptop, so I suspect the configuration has been hosed forever. Time to fix it.

I found a thread in the Ubuntu forums that explained how to fix the resume device problem, so I attacked that first.

Running 'sudo blkid -c /dev/null' (no quotes) in a command window gave me the current actual UUIDs:

/dev/sda1: UUID="daee274f-d8bf-447c-914a-e3db8ce84f62" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" LABEL="/"
/dev/sda2: TYPE="swap" UUID="29e7c127-6729-4009-a201-03fa84b54ad9"
/dev/sda3: UUID="01c67fb7-9818-4a6e-b71c-4597f3ec54ad" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" LABEL="/home"

The -c /dev/NULL forces it to look at reality instead of using a cached value. Note that the output values don't resemble the ones in the broken menu.lst nor in the error message (final digits are wrong in all cases).

Update /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume to contain the UUID of the real swap partition.

Check /etc/fstab and update UUID values as needed. I had cleaned out all UUIDs on this laptop long ago, so this was not really necessary. If I get the UUIDs working properly, I should put the UUIDs (which are unique) back in /etc/fstab instead of the names and labels, which cannot be trusted to remain constant across system changes. LABELs like / and /home might be duplicated on an external drive, and the current architecture of the hard drive device drivers does not guarantee that the same physical drive will always be sda (I ran into problems with that when I was having those drive failures on the my server last fall -- the sda values for specific drives changed when I rebooted after a drive failure).

Ran 'sudo update-initramfs -u' and edited menu.lst to put the UUID back into the boot line (carefully saving a copy of the working menu.lst first).

Rebooted. It worked with the UUID in the boot stanza. So I ran 'sudo update-initramfs -u -k all' to make sure all of the kernels in my choice list have current UUID info in them.

Then I tried suspend/resume to disk. It didn't quite work, but I think that was due to interference from vmware on the way down and up. I'll experiment more with this sometime in the future.

For now, I need to figure out what they have done to the configuration of the Intuos. It's supposed to be more flexible now, but the commands I use to rotate the pad don't seem to be working.

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Mon, Apr 27, 2009

Continental 2

Posted at 2:43 pm MDT to Travel

I had the alarm clock set for 4:30, but awakened at 4 and saw snow covering everything. I decided trying to get any more sleep would be hopeless, so I headed out to the airport earlier than I had originally planned.

There was snow everywhere and the rental car said the external temperature for most of the trip was 32 F, but the highways were wet with occasional patches of slush. I drove well below the speed limit, being in an unfamiliar vehicle, but still made decent time.

By 6 am I had returned the rental, taken the shuttle to the terminal, passed through security, and bought some breakfast. I ate in the seating area that served Houston.

After the 7am flight had loaded, the gate attendants came around to the few people left in the seating area and asked: Were we scheduled to fly to Houston?
Did we have connections? and Had we checked bags?

My answers were Yes, Yes and No, so they put me on the earlier flight. That was just as well, since by the time the plane was de-iced and took off it was after 8.

I was able to watch them de-icing the Frontier jet with the white rabbit on the tail while we waited to be de-iced. It was fascinating. There is one tanker truck on each side of the plane being de-iced. The trucks have guys in booths at the top of big cherry-picker arms riding up and down and around controlling the nozzles that spray the de-icer solutions. They have to stretch the cherry-pickers all the way up to spray the top of the planes tail, but they stay lower when they are working on the wings and ailerons and plane body. First they spray some pink stuff that melts ice and snow and colors any snow and ice that hasn't melted yet, so they can see what they missed. Then they spray some green stuff that helps prevent additional ice from forming.

Even after we finally took off, the plane flew the long way around to avoid bad weather over central Texas, so we arrived a half hour later than the 8 am flight's original arrival time. But that still left me a comfortable amount of time to reach my flight to Mobile.

I heard the Houston gate attendants telling people they already had printed out new boarding passes on later flights for people with connections to Newark (and, I suppose, other destinations). That was unexpectedly well organized -- I'm even more impressed by the Continental staff in Bush airport in Houston. (Though I tend to think that flying from Denver to Newark by way of Houston is a prime symptom of what is wrong with aviation in this country...)

I'm going to add Continental to my list of favored airlines, along with Frontier.

After all that, my flight from Houston to Mobile actually arrived 15 minutes early.

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Sun, Apr 26, 2009

Unfinished Symphony

Posted at 8:32 pm MDT to Media

Last night was the final concert of the 2008-2009 season for the Boulder Philharmonic. They played three pieces, and the soloist also played an encore.

The first piece was "Lyric for Strings" by George Walker, a living African American composer. There was a family connection in this piece: the Concert Master of the Boulder Phil is his son.

Next was Schubert's 8th "Unfinished" Symphony, followed after the intermission by Brahms Second Piano Concerto, with Jon Nakamatsu as soloist.

Nakamatsu was an excellent pianist -- more showy in his encoure than during the Concerto-- but I have to confess that the Brahms did not really grab me.

I loved the Schubert, and the Lyrics for Strings, though, so I may just have been in the mood for melody. Being tired from travelling probably didn't help.

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Continental

Posted at 8:31 pm MDT to Travel

This weekend is my last weekend home before the end of the contract. The trip from Mobile would not quite have been faster if I had driven, but it was 11 AM before I reached my front door.

And I am really not fond of landing in thunderstorms in commuter jets. The plane from Mobile had 57 passenger seats. Things got very bouncy at the end of the flight from Mobile to Houston. And then, already running late because of the weather, we sat outside the gate in Houston until after my flight to Denver (which was on schedule) took off.

I have to say Continental treated me very well. They gave me vouchers for a hotel and a meal, so I spent the night in a bed in a Marriott, not in the airport terminal.

They were giving out a number of vouchers. I guess the storms disrupted the evening flight schedules pretty badly.

The weather in Denver was drizzly and cold, and I got home late enough, and tired enough that I gave Nanette a call at the Farmers' market and told her I wasn't coming down.

The weather was nicer today (Sunday), but now another front is moving in. I'm worried things may be nasty when I head to the airport at 5 am tomorrow.

I'm glad I'll be driving the next time I travel from Mobile to Boulder, which will be May 16th.

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Tue, Apr 21, 2009

Browser Crashes with Kubuntu 8.10

Posted at 6:21 pm MDT to Technology

I was having huge numbers of browser crashes with Kubuntu 8.10. Both Firefox and Konqueror were having problems.

I tried every fix I could find by googling

What finally seems to have worked was editing nsswitch.conf and removing the value "wins". I've had only one browser crash in the few days since I did that.

It's weird that a problem with Samba (which allows connections between Windows and other machines) would break the browsers. But somehow it is not surprising that something Windows-derived is the problem.

The next version of Kubuntu is due out at the end of the week. I'll back up the laptop while I'm at home this weekend in preparation, but I probably won't try to update until at least a few days after the release: the servers are always swamped at first, so the download would take forever.

It will be interesting to see what works differently and which bugs are fixed. Also what ends up newly broken...

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Mon, Apr 20, 2009

Dirty Rice

Posted at 6:01 pm MDT to Technology

In honor of being on the Gulf Coast, I've made Zatarain's dirty rice from the box a couple of times, but I thought I should try making the real thing at least once.

1 pint package of chicken livers, diced
cooked until pink goes away
1 large  onion diced, cooked until translucent
1 large rib of celery, diced and
1 large red bell pepper, diced, cook a couple of minutes
1 1/2 cup rice
3 cups chicken broth
dash of red chile flakes
fresh ground balsk pepper
salt

The traditional recipe would also include chopped up chicken gizzards, but the packages of gizzards were huge.

I'll have to try this at home with the chicken from the Farmers' market. And dice the veggies and meat smaller next time, when I should have my good knives available.

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Sun, Apr 19, 2009

Work in Progress 04/19/09

Posted at 5:06 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Here is the current state of the first image: The Trickster. There are a lot of things I want to do with shading and such that I know are possible, but I haven't figured out how to do them yet.

I also desperately need to rework the hands and foot. The general anatomy is iffy, but the hands and feet are just placeholders at the moment.

The head came out pretty well, mostly because it is semi-traced from an illo of an actual Japanese fox. (The internet contains everything.)

And I haven't quite made up my mind whether he is just an animal-headed god like Anubis or has a fluffy tail. I'm leaning toward adding the fluffy tail, but haven't quite figured ot how to handle it.

See more ...

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Sat, Apr 18, 2009

Lefty Tablet

Posted at 2:48 pm MDT to Technology

The Intuos3 works very nicely except for one problem: it has control buttons on the upper left that provide things like "Shift", Control", "Alt", "Space" and a touch strip that acts like a scroll wheel. Unfortunately, that location is where my writing hane naturally rests, since I am what is called a hook-handed lefty. Things kept going nuts.

With a bit of googling, I learned that I could use the "xsetwacom" utility to adjust things.

I could probably have turned off the buttons, but that would be a nuisance: the art programs use those control keys a lot.

Turning the pad upside down puts the buttons at the lower right, which is safer. I could probably learn to draw upside down (especially since I am not used to using a graphics tablet at all, and not much of an artist in physical media). I used a trackball with my first laptop that fit between the top of the keyboard and the screen, but only if it was rotated 90 degrees. You look at the screen and your hand does whatever is needed to make the cursor go where it need to go, and even if the necessary motion is not "logical" it quickly becomes normal.

Fortunately, with xsetwacom available, I don't need to learn to draw upside down. With the following commands run automatically when I log in, the pad will be rotated 180 degrees, the touch strip swaps end for end so "up" means "up" from my point of view, and the shift and space keys are swapped so "Space" is sort of bottom center and "Shift" is above the other control keys. Alt and Control are OK where they were.

# invert graphics tablet for left handed use
xsetwacom set pad Rotate HALF
xsetwacom set pad StripLUp "core key down"
xsetwacom set pad StripLDn "core key up"
xsetwacom set pad Button4 "core key shift"
xsetwacom set pad Button1 "core key space"

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Thu, Apr 16, 2009

Insomnia Again

Posted at 6:35 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Gah. Last night I went to bed at about 11. I was awake enough to look at the alarm clock at 1:30, 2:30, 3:30 and 4:30. Also 5:30, which is near enough to when the clock goes off that it was basically the end of the night. There's been way too much of this for the past few weeks.

I'd say that I was eager to get back to my own bed and quiet house with no upstairs and downstairs neighbors, but I'm prone to bouts of insomnia even at home.

But I'm feeling very worn. I think I need to spend a lot of this weekend napping in bed or on the couch.

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Tue, Apr 14, 2009

Tablet

Posted at 9:11 pm MDT to Technology

My new toy, the Intuos3 graphics tablet has arrived. I edited xorg.conf to activate it, and rebooted.

Both the Gimp (GNU IMage Processing) and Krita (the KDE painting program) are able to see it. So tomorrow I'll be able to start playing with it. (I didn't sleep well last night, and won't get sleep tonight if I start playing with it this evening.)

The tablet is called a 4x6 model, but it is a widescreen model so it actually has more active area than that. I don't have a ruler (annoying) but the active area is a little larger than a standard paperback book. The unit as a whole measures about 8.5x10.5x0.5 inches, so it will be easily portable. The next size larger tablet (nominal active area 6x8) is 13.5x10.5x0.5 -- basically the size of my laptop but thinner -- which seemed like overkill, aside from being more expensive

I also got a case for for the tablet, and an accessory pack with spare stylus points, etc., because they were available now. They might not be readily available in the future since the model is no longer current.

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Mon, Apr 13, 2009

VMWare on Ubuntu 8.10

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Technology

VMWare server wasn't passing CTRL-ALT-DEL to windows clients since I upgraded Ubuntu to 8.10. (I was able to log in to my RedHat 5 client, so I could tell that the basic keyboard handling was not broken.)

I checked for vmware update and upgraded to VMWare Server 2.0.1, but that did not fix the problem.

Googling the ubuntu forums, I found a note that "The solution is to add "xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true" to ~/.vmware/config or to /etc/vmware/config".

Once I made the change and restarted VMWare (the restart may not have been necessary) I was able to get into my Windows clients.

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Muggy

Posted at 8:04 pm MDT to Weather

I awoke this morning to darkness and thunder. The sun came out for a while at midday, but mst of the day was cloudy.

I would be miserable in this climate without airconditioning, and even with it, I find things unpleasantly humid. I'm glad there is only another month on this contract. If this is what the Gulf Coast is like in April, I shudder at the thought of June.

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Sun, Apr 12, 2009

Waffles

Posted at 11:26 am MDT to Technology

I made sourdough waffles for brunch, using the Belgian waffle plates for my George Foreman grill. The only ones that released well were the waffles where I brushed the plates with oil immediately before adding the batter. Next time I'll use plenty of PAM before the plates are hot.

That may be a long time from now -- I leave for the drive home on May 16, and the frozen leftovers from this batch of waffles, may last until then.

I don't use the George Foreman for waffles when I'm at home: I prefer the regular (non-Belgian) waffles from my regualr waffle iron. But it is nice to have the one piece of equipment that is multi-use when I am living remotely.

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Iconography

Posted at 9:16 am MDT to Net of Mirrors

I seem to be about to commit iconography.

I've always wanted a set of the Net of Mirrors with Asian imagery.

Last week I ordered an Intuos 3 graphics tablet (it was on sale, probably because the current model is the Intuos 4) and I've been reading up on digital art. The tablet shold arrive this coming week. In the meantime I'm playing with designs and symbolism and doing some preliminary setup in the tools. I'm planning to use Krita (pixel graphics) and Karbon-14 (vector graphics): they are both part of KOffice, so they are supposed to work well together (especially in the forthcoming 2.0 versions). And Krita 2.0 will have a sumi-e mode.

Maybe by the time I am ready to do anything elaborate, they will be ready for me. In the meantime I can be learning and practicing techniques with the existing versions.

I'll be starting with images for the 4 seasonal gods, not because they will be easy, but because I more or less know what their iconography is, unlike some of the more abstract mirrors. Five Confucian Virtues? Images for the I Ching values? Not so much.

The gods really want to be a set, so I can put them in variations of the same setting. Each of them will be sitting on a verandah and wearing more or less Heian style robes. Each of them needs to be holding a musical instrument: flute, stringed instrument, drum, hammer-and-bells. And they will have animal(-ish?) heads. Spring is a fox, Summer is a hawk, autumn is a bear. I'm not sure if winter has a deer's head, or a man's head with antlers.

There will be a garden with at least one seasonal tree in the middle distance and a forest and mountains farther back. The skies will be different: daylight and blue sky for summer, either full daylight or night with a full moon for winter (the shadows for moonlight on snow may be a stretch), sun setting beyond the mountains for autumn. The Spring trickster gets mist or rain or -- if and when I can manage it -- a rainbow.

The nice thing about digital art is that I will be able to go back and adjust the images as I get more practice and experience and my skills improve. With 160 images in the Net (more than twice as many as a full Tarot deck!), I'm going to have a lot of practice by the time I have a full set. And I can play with levels of realism over time: I think I want a sort of Ukiyo-e feel (and of course all of my Ukiyo-e books are in Colorado, but there should be some online) but that may change over time too. Fortunately, with digital images I can go back and play with the shading and detail.

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Tue, Apr 07, 2009

Kubuntu 8.10

Posted at 10:08 pm MDT to Technology

I backed up the laptop when I was home over the weekend, and Sunday evening I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.10. I had been running 8.04 with the KDE4 alternate interface, and was a little worried that the update might choke, but I wanted to get things stabilized and cleaned up before before the next release of Kubuntu is available and 8.10 downloads become less accessible.(9.04 is scheduled to be released April 23)

I was actually pleased with how well the upgrade went. I had to migrate my emails and Konqueror bookmarks back from alternate space, but everything pretty much worked, even though the upgrade tool spewed warning messages like crazy about the KDE pieces.

Konqueror is being flaky, but it was flaky before (part of why I moved to the experimental interface in 8.04 was Konqueror being flaky) and at this is a less annoying flakiness. At least Restore session works well when things die.

I've spent the parts of the past couple of evenings cleaning out some of the nooks and crannies of the experimental KDE that weren't cleaned up automatically by the upgrade tool and trying to make sure that I am using matching version of all the KDE components. I think I've got KDE itself up to a pretty consistent 4.2.

Next step is to try to get Koffice consistent, but first I need to google and see if I can figure out which set of the available files I should be using.

The one bit of the software installation that is still throwing updater errors is the configuration of the "at" program, and the dependencies of the kformula program which is part of Koffice are acting weird. I may try forcing both of those packages to redownload. I suspect they got corrupted somewhere along the line but I haven't found any similar problems by googling (though googling for problems with "at" is a little tricky) so it ought to be a problem with my download not with the package in the repository.

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Fri, Apr 03, 2009

Storms

Posted at 8:36 pm MDT to Weather

Yesterday was a long day and a stressful one. There were thunderstorms and flooding and tornado warnings in Mobile up through midafternoon.

When I got to the airport the weather was still engaging in special effects and precipitation. By the time my flight was due to leave the sky was clear, but that didn't help much: the storms had disrupted things enough that the plane we were supposed to ride to Houston didn't arrive until 45 minutes after we were supposed to take off.

This was worrying, since I only had a 55 minute layover. And the plane from Mobile arrives at the B concourse and the Denver-bound plane leaves from the E concourse.

I didn't have a wheelie bag, so I couldn't run, but I managed a rapid trudge. Fortunaly, the Denver plane was delayed 20 minutes. I arrived just as they were loading the back of the plane.

So I made it to Denver, and was able to take care of the task that required this trip.

Getting back to Mobile may be equally exciting: they are predicting a blizzard for Colorado for this evening through much of tomorrow. Getting to the airport on Sunday morning may be interesting. (At least Shawn thought to warn me about the weather, for which I am very grateful. We were able to change my car rental to specify a 4 wheel drive vehicle -- so I've got a decent chance of making it to the airport.)

My back isn't complaining as badly as it was at this point of the last trip.I have figured out a way of schlepping my non-wheelie bags through the airports that bothers my back less. Oddly, carrying the two bags -- by the handles doesn't work, even though they are about about the same size and fairly close in weight.

What does work is to use the shoulder strap for the bag with the laptop, which is a bit heavier than the other. But I have to put my head through the strap so the weight of the strap falls on my right shoulder and my left hand steadies the bag on my left side and supports some of the weight. The other bag is carried by the hand grip in my right hand, hanging straight from the shoulder.

This makes no sense at all. Why does a method that seems to put most of the strain on my right side bother my back less than a balanced load?

I'm tempted to use the small wheelie bag for my next trip home even thooough I don't need anything mearly that big for these trips, and I'll have to gate check it between Mobile and Houston. Actually, I should gate check the overnight bag for the morning flight from Houston to Mobile: it's a very small plane with overhead storage that it pro forma rather than useful.

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Wed, Apr 01, 2009

Charity of the Month -- Boulder Phil

Posted at 9:31 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Cash flow was a little odd in February and they are usually my biggest single donation, so February and March are the Boulder Philharmonic.

April is going to be a bunch of smaller donations: I've made a start with PBS and NPR memberships: WHIL, which has inhabited my clock radios and car radio here in Mobile, Colorado Public Radio, and both Denver PBS stations KRMA and KBDI (my DVR has been accumulating cooking shows while I am away). WHIL has been having pledge season...

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Tue, Mar 31, 2009

Flash Floods

Posted at 7:13 pm MDT to Weather

After the few days f storms, we had a couple of nice days. Then it clouded up again, and today we had occasional bursts when it rain cats, dogs and hamsters.

At least this front has less thunder and lightning.

All the waterways were already full from the previous round of rain, so there are flood and flash flood warnings in all of the counties around here. Nothinglike what Fargo is getting, of course, but 4 feet too much is still a flood if it takes out the roads and drives people from their homes.

I'm not in an area in danger of flooding, as far as I can tell. The biggest nuisance I have is that the weekend storm knocked out the traffic light at the corner so it flashes yellow and red. (I've gotten spoiled. The first couple of week I was here there wasn't a traffic light there: they just installed it. But I've gotten used to having the left turn arrow to help when I come home from work.)

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Sat, Mar 28, 2009

Digger

Posted at 12:52 pm MDT to Media

I had been hearing about an online comic called Digger that was supposed to be very good. It recently moved to a new site that made it more accessible, and I finally looked into it.

It is very good. Very philosophical and with great charcaters who are vivid both individually and culturally. The art (black and white only) is beautiful.

The heroine, Digger, is a sentient wombat who inadvertently tunnels to somewhere strange.

Other characters (so far: I'm about 3 months into the archive) include: the statue of Ganesh, a "shadowchild" who doesn't know who or what he is, Ed the outcast hyena, Second Librarian Vo, the Oracular Slug and the temple rats (little furry librarians).

It seems to have started in February 2007, but generally updates Tuesdays and Thursdays so the back story is not huge. The beginning is here.

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Lightning

Posted at 9:56 am MDT to Weather

Thunderstorms along the Gulf Coast don't mess around with half measures. I was awakened at about 4 am by a thunderstorm that produced lightning flashes every few seconds for several minutes. There were a couple of bursts like that yesterday, too. Most of the thunder seemed fairly distant, but that means the lightning bolts that were lighting up the sky.

There have been problems with flooding because of three days of heavy rain. And there were tornadoes in Mississippi and further inland in Alabama because of the strength of the storms. But the weather seems to be clearing up for a while

It was cloudy when I got up this morning, but now the sky is blue and the sun is shining. Trees and bushes that were just bare sticks a week ago are putting out green leaves.

Weather.com says there may be scattered thunder showers on Tuesday and Wednesday, but it should be sunny until then. This will be a relief after the past several days of very dark cloud cover.

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Thu, Mar 26, 2009

Precipitation

Posted at 7:33 pm MDT to Weather

The weather report a couple of days ago predicted 100% chance of rain for the Mobile area. I was amused, since in Colorado they seldom call for more than a 70% chance of rain even when it is actually raining.

We have had rain. Also thunder and lightning.

And there must have been a power glitch last night: this morning I discovered the hard way that the apartment's alarm clock does not have battery back-up. My furry backup alarm clock also failed, since cats are solar powered and the clouds, rain, and recent timechange made the room very dark. Fortunately, my internal clock works pretty well. I awakened (out of a very strange dream) only about half an hour later than usual.

Meanwhile, Colorado has been hammered by a blizzard that has most of the major highways officially closed and most other roads just impassible. I'm glad I travelled home last week.

It turns out I'll be travelling back to Colorado again next Thursday (and arriving very late i the evening)-- I hope enough snow melts by then that I can get into my driveway. If not, I'll stay at Nanette's.

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Tue, Mar 24, 2009

Hero Parrot

Posted at 8:17 pm MDT to Current Events

The Denver Red Cross has given an award to a Quaker parrot that saved the life of a toddler his owner was babysitting. The little girl started choking on a piece of pop-tart while the sitter was in the restroom, and Willie the parrot squawked and flapped his wings and yelled "Momma Baby" and made noises his owner had never heard him make before, so she hurried back into the room in time to perform the Heimlich maneuver.

Willie was only about a year old, so he didn't have a huge vocabulary, but according to the original report he did know how to say things other than Momma and Baby. It seems that he not only recognized that there was a problem and gave the alarm, he used words that were contextually appropriate.

Clever bird. I wonder if he knows it is himself he sees in mirrors...

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Sun, Mar 22, 2009

Tabla Concert

Posted at 12:15 pm MDT to Media

Last night's concert by the Boulder Philharmonic was outstanding.

The opener was the Estancia suite by Ginastera: sort of an Argentinean equivalent to Copeland's Rodeo.

The symphony was Dvorak's 8th, which is inspired by Central European folk music.

In between, they performed two world premieres -- pieces that have never been performed in public before. The other pieces that have premiered at the Phil over the years have been a mixed bag, but these were both amazingly good. Both pieces got standing ovations.

The Concerto for Tabla and Orchestra was written by a local composer, Bill Douglas, who is on the music faculty at the Naropa Institute, our local Buddhist University. It included rhythms and melodic themes from Africa, Celtic music, Medieval themes and others (all different uses of 12/8 time) and included a spectacular tabala solo. Also some interesting vocal percussion performed by some of the orchestra musicians.

The second short piece, Beirut Sensations, was written by the tabla soloist, Rony Barrak. The percussion was less spectacular, but the music was beautiful.

I appreciated the diversity of rhythms in last night's concert. Formal European music evolved with a lot of melodic and harmonic complexity but was fairly bland rhythmically. Adding influences from more rhythmically complex traditions (Including European folk dances) produces a wonderful result. (I'm sure they would not have been appreciated by 19th century concert-goers whose ears have not been trained by exposure to jazz, rock, and world music.)

Ironically, the Phil announced next year's concert, and because of the recession they have had to pull back to programs of mostly standards to try to put lots of bodies in seats. Interesting programming like last night's concert and the other programs of the past couple of years is not going to happen again for a while.

It's odd to look at a schedule that includes

Night on Bald Mountain 
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique
Brandenberg Concerto #3
Beethoven's Fifth
Brahm's Piano Concerto 1
Ravel's Bolero
Carmina Burana
Chopin Piano Concerto 2

and think it looks bland. It reminds me of the Time-Life Treasury of Classical Music my parents owned, which is a little disappointing after all of the neat stuff I've been exposed to by the Phil over the years. I hope they can afford to be a little more adventurous for the 2010-2011 season.

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Sat, Mar 21, 2009

Budget

Posted at 5:34 pm MDT to Travel

The Denver office of Budget Rent-a-Car is amazingly inept. My trip home yesterday went very smoothly until I reached the car rental office, which was effectively understaffed: there were 4 people on-site (5 if you count the one in the exit booth) but it seemed like there was only one who could actually get anything done. And she was monopolized by a 45 minute conversation (at 10:30pm) with a customer who wanted nitpick about things on a bill that the local office has no control over anyway.

I have to confess, I hope this unknown turkey will get audited by the IRS: I'm sure he will enjoy nitpicking their. ON his time, not mine.

My back and arms are complaining a little today because because I didn't use a roller bag and ended up carrying my small bags through the Mobile, Houston and Denver Airports. I'll probably be fine by Monday... when I have to do the whole thing again in the other direction. But it is nice to be able to keep my property under my control without having to gate-check it for the commuter-airline flight.

And it's annoying that I can't even eat the tiny packages of pretzels that are all they serve on the flights any more. (There was barley malt flour in them.) I'm going to buy some buffalo jerky at Costco tomorrow so I have it for the trip back to Mobile.

Other than that the trip went well. It's nice to be able to sleep in my own bed, surrounded by all of ny stuff. I picked up my accumulated mail. I'm reading books I had left behind, unfinished, when I headed out, and watching stuff that has accumulated on the DVR. I'm going to the Philharmonic concert this evening. And tomorrow evening I'm going out to dinner with Nanette.

And I'm breathing air, not water vapor.

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Thu, Mar 19, 2009

Flying Home

Posted at 7:05 pm MDT to Travel

I'm packing for a quick trip home. Air connections between Mobile and Denver are pretty gnarly, so I'm flying Friday evening (arriving very late), and Monday morning (leaving very early. But it means I will spend 3 nights in my own bed.

Dinah Kitty will be annoyed.

I'll also be attending a Philharmonic concert.


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Iditarod

Posted at 6:58 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This year's Iditarod finished this week and one of the news sites had a bunch of photos.

I was pleased to see that the sled dogs' equipment includes little jackets and booties when the conditions get really bad. And there was one picture of dogs at a rest stop laying on top of hay in little yellow sacks like sleeping bags. They were very cute, with just their heads sticking out of the yellow covers.

The hay seems to be standard procedure, so there is something between the dogs and the snow while they rest, but the sleeping bags (or maybe little tarps wrapped around them?) only showed up in one picture.

The Iditarod is a sporting event I'mm a bit ambivalent about. I'm sure the sled dogs enjoy racing, just as race horses do. But I think humans sometimes take excessive advantage of the animals trust. The weather turned bad near the end of this year's race, and at least three dogs died.

If it is available on DVD, I would like to rent the movie "Attla/Spirit of the Wind", (about the famous mucher George Attla) which I saw years ago. It's a beautiful film. And I remember being surprised to realize that what sled dogs ate in the old days in the native villages was mostly salmon... George Attla and his father built an amazing waterwheel salmon catching device to get the fish to feed his first competitive team.

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Wed, Mar 18, 2009

Car Window

Posted at 6:32 pm MDT to Technology

Today was a dry, sunny day, and also a payday. These were both helpful, because this morning the power mechanism for my passenger side window broke, with the window in the lowered position.

The window is now closed, but the inside panel of the door is still at the repair shop. The mechanic couldn't get the part he needed today, so he closed up the car so I would have it this evening. Tomorrow morning I will take the truck back to the repair place and he will finish the repairs.

Driving a vehicle from the 2000 model year has its disadvantages. This is the second time this year that I've had to wait while a part was ordered. I think the truck will last a while yet -- I've only got about 72000 miles on it -- but I think I need to plan to get a new one in a year or so. It seems to be starting to self-destruct from age, and I want a reliable vehicle.

Checking online, I've learned that (unlike the rest of the world) there are no front-wheel-drive based pickups sold in North America, not even by the Japanese companies.
How annoying. Maybe if I hold off buying until the next model year they will have at least improved the gas mileage.

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Tue, Mar 10, 2009

Fog

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Weather

It's really unfair to have a morning of really dense fog so soon after Daylight Savings time started. It was dark this morning.

And it's a little depressing to run the windshieldwipers to clear the condensation and have them leave yellow streaks of pollen. No wonder I'm having occasional bouts of sneezing and watery eyes.

I have noticed that a lot of shrubs and trees have started flowering during the past few days, so I suppose I should be grateful this is not an ecosystem I'm very sensitized to.

It could be worse: they're having deadly blizzards in North Dakota and Minnesota, and according to weather.com the weather here in Mobile at 10:25 pm was 64 degrees F and 86% humidity. And sunrise was at 7:07am, with fog... no wonder it was hard to get up this morning.

There ought to be a rule against having daylight savings time sart before the equinox.

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Sun, Mar 08, 2009

Gadgets

Posted at 8:06 pm MDT to Technology

My google-fu has improved, so I finally got USB working with VMware. The key was to search for the error message "vmware remote usb device disconnected". And it turns out the VMWare Infrastructure GUI needs to do the connecting explicitly.

The TomTom has updated its software (finally) and is now downloading the latest maps. While out shopping today, I got it a case, so it won't get all scratched up if I toss it into my bag or briefcase.

I also got a cable to connect my MP3 player to the aux jack of the new car radio. (I still need to figure out how to reset the time on that: it's now two hours off, since I had never changed it after I arrived here from Colorado.)

And I'm now using a different Targus mouse because the old one had gotten very unreliable. (It takes a lot of mousing to wear out an optical mouse, but the old one was several years old.) I bought the new one when they were on sale a while back, and I'm glad I remembered to toss it into one of the travel crates. I don't know whether switching mice helped the USB problems... it probably didn't hurt.

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Sat, Mar 07, 2009

Raise the Camels

Posted at 12:50 pm MST to Media

"Raise the camels" is apparently what you say when it's time for a caravan to get moving, because when they stop to rest they lay down to chew their cuds (or whatever camels do instead of chewing cuds). There's a lot of raising of camels in the movie I just watched.

My back has been complaining a little, so I dug my yoga DVDs out of the travel crate this morning. (I think I am either losing a little weight or it is rearranging itself: I got in my own way less than the last time I did the last time I did yoga.)

Next to the yoga DVDs in the crate was Warriors of Heaven and Earth which I bought when I was living in Boston last and never watched or unpacked. I watched it this morning.

The movie is an excellent "Chinese Western" set along the Silk Road in 700AD, with swords instead of rifles and Turks instead of Indians. You can tell it's a Western (and aimed at an international market) because not quite all of the main characters are deadat the end. I've gotten used to the fact that Chinese movies tend to have body counts that would impress an Elizabethan tragedian, so it's refreshing to have someone survive.

The scenery and costumes were gorgeous. (Including some of the fanciest male hairstyles I've seen since the elves from Lord of the Rings). And there are lots of excellent sword fights, major battles, and horses (and camels). The battles were sort of John Wayne stylized, not over the top wu xia style.

According to the 'making of' special, the "helicopter" shots were done with an ultralight aircraft and a hot air balloon, since they were out in the middle of the Gobi.

And it's nice that the female lead got to take part in the climactic battle, not just serve as a love interest or baggage. (She was in charge of setting off ballistas and rockets, etc. while the men fought with swords and bows and arrows. Very reasonable.)

I will want to rewatch this on my big screen TV when I get home. I'm sure there are details I missed on the smaller screen.

I also find myself wanting to learn some Mandarin. One of the characters (Played by Kiichi Nakai) is a Japanese warrior whose letters home had Japanese voiceovers. Chinese movies are generally subtitled, sometimes in more than one dialect, even for home consumption, so the Japanese parts would not bother the audience. But it made me miss being able to follow along with the subtitles, which I can do, to some extent, in Japanese and many European languages.

The DVD comes with soundtracks in Mandarin, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and subtitles in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese... I watched in Chinese with English subtitles, but it might be interesting to mix and match. Watching a Chinese movie with a Spanish dub and Spanish subtitles might be an interesting way to refresh some of my very rusty Spanish. I seem to be able to read it better than I hear it, these days.

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Fri, Mar 06, 2009

Couscous Stir Fry

Posted at 5:53 pm MST to Technology

A very, very fast meal.

frozen tilapia fillet
Birdseye Steamfresh veggies (carrots, broccoli, cauliflower
salt
couscous
soy sauce

Thaw the tilapia fillet and cut into small pieces.

Heat a little oil in a wok.

Boil 1 cup of water. Add salt and a cup of couscous, cover and set aside to hydrate.

Put the tilapia in the wok and stir it around.

Meanwhile, nuke the veggies to the low end of the recommended cooking time. Add some of them to the wok, along with soy sauce and stir for a minute. Serve over some of the couscous.

Voila. A tasty, balanced meal in about 5 minutes.

If more time is available, start cooking rice about 15 or 20 minutes ahead of everything else and use that instead of the couscous.

(Actually, I think I like couscous better than rice. Thank goodness I'm not allergic to wheat along with the other allergies. I don't think I could live without real bread and pasta and other wheat stuff. Or maybe I just wouldn't want to.)

The new frozen food packages designed for microwave steaming are really handy. I suspect I'll need to play with the times in Colorado because of the lower boiling temperature.

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Thu, Mar 05, 2009

Mortgage

Posted at 7:41 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I have refied my house a few times over the years, but most of the money went back into the house, and not for bling.

Over the years since I first moved in I have:

jacked the foundation
replaced the posts that hold up (and down) the porch roof
replaced the roof when it was leaking badly
put stucco siding over the original cheap plywood
replaced the doors
added the back door and back porch
replaced all wondows (some twice)
rebuilt the front porch larger and added railings
replaced the water well pump twice and the water softener once
replaced the unusable wood stove with one that works
replaced rotting living room carpet
put in piped gas instead of propane and replaced the furnace
replaced that furnace, added central air
replaced the electric water heater with a gas one
moved the breaker box from the bathroom outdoors (per code) 
put the power lines underground
replaced supercheap cupboards and counters in kitchen and bath 
replaced sinks 
added utility sink in basement
installed washer, dryer and chest freezer
installed dishwasher
replaced kitchen appliances twice
replaced all light fixtures on main level
had the septic system redesigned and rebuilt

I owe more on the house than I originally paid for it, but not a lot more. I have just completed 4 years of payments since my last refi. I have paid off 1/4 of the principal in these 4 years. That's one year ahead of the amortization schedule.

The current mortgage is a fifteen year mortgage, but I have prepaid enough principal that even if I only made the official amortizing payments I would only have 10 years left instead of 11. (I have never made a 'real' payment on the mortgage: I always have at least rounded up to the next hundred dollars.)

If I can maintain the monthly payments I have been making for most of the past year, I will have the house paid off within 30 years from the original purchase in 1985. I might even be able to cut another year off that if I can increase the payments a little more.


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Sun, Mar 01, 2009

Pizza Kit

Posted at 10:01 pm MST to Technology

Amy's makes a non-dairy frozen pizza with roasted vegetables. It's not bad, but I think that next time I will try grating some goat mozzarella on top before it goes in the oven.

I cooked the pizza using the pizza kit which is part of my traveling gear: stone, peel, cutter and a serving rack that the pizza stone can sit on. Leaving the pizza on the stone after it came out of the oven helped keep it warm.

I have never actually used the kit for baking a pizza (homemade or frozen) before. It is in my traveling gear so I can use the stone and peel when baking bread.

Other things in my traveling gear (usually because I ended up buying them while in previous corp housing even though I already had them at home):

coffee mugs (corp housing never has large mugs)

magic timer for hard boiled eggs

coasters

trivets

spoon rest

can opener

kitchen shears

measuring cups and spoons

flyswatter

bandaids, generic neosporin, aloe vera ointment, etc.

plastic storage canisters for flour and sugar

salt and pepper grinders

electric kettle

teapot

stick blender with carafe and attachments 
   so it can play the part of a regular blender 

I haven't bothered to unpack a lot of the small utensils from my crates, because the kitchen in this apartment is actually fairly well equipped (it even has a wire whisk and a good cork screw). I've had mixed luck with that in the past: Minneapolis was the best before now, Portland and the first Boston place were pretty mediocre, and the second place in Boston wasn't really a corp apartment and came with no equipment at all.

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Sat, Feb 28, 2009

Ambivalent

Posted at 10:41 am MST to Weather

It's warm here in Mobile, but today it is cloudy and very humid. They are warning about possible severe weather this weekend.When combined with this crud I've got, it makes breathing annoying.

I don't want to make the apartment too cool, but I have turned on the air conditioning in the hope that it might take at least a little of the moisture out of the air I am trying to breathe. 75 degrees didn't really feel bad (though 75 at 10 AM suggests things would be a lot warmer later in the day.) 72 with the noise and the draft from the AC is kind of annoying, but the dryer air and the movement from the fans does seem to be more breathable than static humidity.

No fever (I had a little bit of one Tuesday). No sinus problems or sneezing that seems to be associated with the crud as opposed to pollen allergies. My symptoms are coughing, sore throat, lack of voice and a slight headache. No symptoms that seem to be asthmatic (I've been good about avoiding foods I'm allergic to) or pneumonic.

But I hate being sick away from home.

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Fri, Feb 27, 2009

Hotdogs

Posted at 6:30 pm MST to Technology

Tonight, for the first time in a long time, I had actual hotdogs on buns with mustard and relish. It made a nice change from treating hotdogs as just another kind of sausage meat.

I stopped at SuperTarget after work and they had a brand of 100% Whole wheat hotdog buns that didn't contain anything I'm allergic to. The brand is Cobblestone Mill -- I hope it's a national brand that I'll be able to find at the SuperTarget near home.

This is going to be a quiet weekend: I've been sick all week with some kind of laryngitis/bronchitis bug that left me with no energy. I'm finally getting better, but I don't want to push things too hard and give myself a relapse.

There are radio reports of a whooping cough outbreak in the area, too. I'm glad I got that DTP booster last summer.

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Possums

Posted at 6:29 pm MST to Miscellaneous

This may be migration season for the locl opossums. Driving to work I saw two dead animals at the side of the road that looked like they might be small opossums.

More evidence I'm in a different ecosystem than I'm used to, though there were wild 'possums moving north into Connecticut when I was growing up. One very snowy winter a hungry opossum with frostbitten ears came very close to the back door of our house. We felt sorry for it and didn't know what opossums might like to eat so we tossed it several different things. I think there was some bread, and fruit: slightly overripe bananas.

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Thu, Feb 19, 2009

Busy week

Posted at 6:33 pm MST to Technology

I think I've been jinxed this week: the TV cable stopped working on Monday, broadband hadn't worked since I got into this apartment (I've been using a cell modem), and the GPS stopped working Tuesday.

Yesterday evening was spent dealing with Comcast to get the cable and broadband working -- lots of waiting around -- and then trying to get the GPS working again.

I got the GPS working, too, but I'm not sure how. The TomTom uses Linux internally but their support software only works on Windows and Macs, and my XP image couldn't hold a USB connection long enough to see the GPS. Very annoying: since their internal software is Linux-based they obviously ave people on staff who know Linux.

This has been a busy week:

Monday I went out and bought two new eyeglasses (readers and bifocals). It turned out there was a health food store and a PetsMart across the street from the Lenscrafters, so while I waited for them to manufacture my new glasses I got some other errands taken care of.

Tuesday I went to the Mardi Gras parade.

Wednesday I dealt with the cable guy... over the phone, but I was still stuck waiting for him when he didn't call when he said he would.

Today I went grocery shopping. I now have a Winn Dixie customer card to add to my growing collection of supermarket cards from different parts of the country.

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Tue, Feb 17, 2009

Mardi Gras

Posted at 8:36 pm MST to Travel

I can now say that I have been to a Mardi Gras parade. Mobile Mardi Gras is an older tradition than New Orleans (the first New Orleans krewe was formed early in the 19th century by people who had m oved there from Mobile) mellower, and aimed at families and local people not drunk tourists.

The parade I attended tonight was put on by a women's crew, with floats on a Las Vegas theme.. The weather was nice (61 F at 6:30pm) but they ran into some problms. There was a long gap i the parade ( the rumor was that a float had blown a tire) so we left a bit early: the people who very kindly took me to the parade with them had small children whose bedtime had been reached.

Next Tuesday, which is MardiGras itself there will be parades all day, put on by the 6 oldest Mobile krewes. That sounds a bit much to me. This little taste while a lot of fun, was plenty for me, though I am assured that you haven't really experienced Mardi Gras unless you have also atteneded one of the balls.

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Sat, Feb 14, 2009

Rainy Alabama Saturday

Posted at 10:44 am MST to Weather

Man. When it rains here, it RAINS. For the past few days we have had occasional downpours when it rains cats, dogs and hamsters interspersed with long stretches of steady rain. I feel sorry for the people who are scheduled to be in Mardi Gra parades. I have the heat turned up higher than I ever do in Colorado: this thick, damp seacoast air really sucks the heat out of you.

I need to start carrying my folding Italian umbrella, which may have been manufactured in China or someplace, but was purchased in Italy when I was there on a cruise a few years ago. It happens to be in the truck.

I think one of my other umbrellas may be buried behind a truck seat, too. I'll have to look for it. Maybe tomorrow when the rain is supposed to stop, or at least be more intermittent.

I'm planning to attend at least one Mardi Gra parade: it would seem silly to be on the Gulf Coast in Mardi Gra season and not attend any parades. I already have some Mardi Gra beads and stuff: my supervisor at work went to one of the Thursday evening parades, before the rains started and brought me some beads and cups (also Moonpies, but I can't eat those so she gave them to somone else). She has promised to show me a good place for parade watching on Monday.

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Sun, Feb 08, 2009

Mobile

Posted at 8:47 pm MST to Travel

I left home yesterday morning just before 8am and arrived at the housing office in Mobile just before noon Colorado time, 1 pm local time. This was just about perfect timing: the office hours are 1 to 5 on Sunday.

Twenty four hours after I left home, I was having breakfast in a cajun restaurant in Lagayette, Louisiana. I just had ham and eggs (and a few token bites of grits), but there were three Cajun good ol' boys (I wonder how you say "good ol' boys" in Cajun French) doing a sound check. Fiddle, squeezebox, and electric bass.

Notes from the trip:

I think Dinah prefers the CD player to the radio for some reason. She was much less restless than usual on these long trips. She spent most of the afternoon hiding under the bed in the new apartment, but seems to be coming out now.

The GPS worked well.

There were no usable rest areas between Dallas, Texas and well into Lousiana. I ended up napping in the parking lot of a truckstop. Louisiana truck stops seem to almost all have casinos.

The causeway across the Atchafalaya Basin is impressive. Wonder if some of it is WPA work from the 20th Century Depression.

For some reason I never think of the bayous and swamps being all grey and leafless and dormant, but they mostly were grey today. There were signs that spring is nearly here: many of the trees had the misty reddish lookthat means they are biddung out, and a few even had the misty greenish look of very new leaves.

Travelling across western Kansas on I70 makes travelling across Nebraska on I80 look positively cluttered. You know its a bad sign when there's a big billboard for a Nebraska tourist destination on a Kansas highway ("take the next exit and drive north 67 miles") and most of the billboards that weren't for truck stops were for craft and yarn and quilting supply stores. And politician birthplaces. And job websites for people looking for work.

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Thu, Feb 05, 2009

Cartoys

Posted at 7:53 pm MST to Travel

I will be heading out Saturday morning for the drive to Mobile for a 3 month consulting gig.

Our company has some GPS units on order, but they won't bein until next week, so I stopped at CarToys, which was in the way home from my optometrist appointment. They have been advertising a sale all week on the radio.

I now have a GPS for the truck: a TomTom One 130.

I also have a new radio with a built-in CD player and an aux jack. The factory radio just had a tape player (which tends to eat tapes) -- the truck is a 2000 model and car stereos with CDs were expensive in those days.

The new stereo is not a luxury. According to Rand-McNally this trip is going to take 23+ hours of actual driving time. Now I can be sure I will have something to listen to other than country-western music and Christian stations when I am driving across Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas this weekend.

The new radio doesn't include a clock (or maybe it is hidden: I need to check the manual) but that is a small price to pay for staying sane across Texas...

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Supreme Court

Posted at 1:02 pm MST to Current Events

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been hospitalized with one of the deadlier forms of cancer (pancreatic).

I am sooo glad her replacement, if one is needed, will not be nominated by a Republican. The thought of having a supreme court justice selected by the same process that came up with Sarah Palin as vice presidential candidate is scary.

Mind you, it would be nice to have a Chief Justice capable of performing a public ceremony without flubbing it, but I'll settle for the likelihood that any Justices appointed in the next few years will be moderate to liberal and acquainted with the Constitution..

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Vet Visit 2009

Posted at 9:04 am MST to Miscellaneous

Dinah Kitty had her checkup and rabies shot today. She's in very good shape for a 13 year old cat. Unlike me, she doesn't need dental cleanings.

She's even lost a little of the extra weight she had been carrying: losing more than a pound out of 15+ is like a human losing 10 pounds. She could probably stand to lose another pound.

The Allpets clinic has a special deal to test her blood for 30 different things. I last had the tests done in 2006 so I had them do them again this time, just in case the weight loss is not a good sign.

Dinah was not happy to be at the vet's, of course. She complained all the way there in the car and did NOT want to come out of the 'sherpa' carrier I use for taking her to the vet. (I use a larger hardbody crate, meant for medium-sized dogs, for the long trips so she has room to move around and stretch out.)

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Wed, Feb 04, 2009

Dental Tech

Posted at 7:41 pm MST to Technology

My Mom worked as a dentist's recepctionist before she was married and we always went to Doctor Kasler for dental apointments, even when we had moved across the state (Connecticut is a small state). If you get rid of the actual torture instruments, the dentist's office in "Little Shop of Horrors" looks really familiar. Doctor Kasler was very nice.

What I remember most about him was his glasses: he had extra pairs of glasses that swung down in front of his regular glasses for close work.

I needed a lot of dental appointments: due to genetics, possibly combined with the local water, the biting surfaces of my molars were all very weak. I remember being told that Mom and I had extras branches of the valleys on the tops of our molars, but there is no way to check that now: I have 7 gold molar onlays and one porcelain one that are all sculptured. They replaced a lot of little separate amalgam fillings on the tops of those teeth and gave me solid biting surfaces.

The porcelain molar onlay needs to be replaced in the not too distant future. All the gold ones are in good shape, and my gums and teeth roots are good, though. I think that procelain one was an early version of the new technology where they create the onlay while you wait instead of making a mold and making a temporary piece that gets replaced after a week, and it may not have 'taken' properly in the first place.

Today I got another procelain onlay, on a tooth that was a bicuspid before one cusp was replaced by a lower piece of amalgam. Both the amalgam and the tooth were cracking, so something drastic needed to be done. Now it is a bicuspid again. after forty years or more, which feels kind of strange. I watched the technician 'sculpt' the onlay on his computer screen before they fabricated it. Fascinating.

I think I'm about out of amalgam fillings now.

I thought rubber dams were a wonderful innovation when they were added to the dental experience. I gag easily, and probably swallowed more little bits of amalgam when I was young than I really should have. Now rubber dams are being replaced by fancier technology: a double layer barrier for the back of the mouth with suction down the middle and a thick block to bite on on the opposite side from the teeth that are being worked on. It took a little getting used to, but the brace is nice: my jaw always used to get wobbly during a long procedure. And it stays out of the dentist's way more than the rubber dam did. I do wonder how well it will work for that back molar that needs its onlay replaced.

Dental technology has definitely progressed. I kind of miss the spit bowls, though. Somehow the modern use of suction gadgets doesn't feel as thorough as the old style swish and spit.

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Tue, Feb 03, 2009

Tax Refund 2009

Posted at 9:41 am MST to Miscellaneous

I have received my federal tax refund, which was a bit of a surprise since I had been told to expect it after Feb 6. I guess by filing last Sunday I made it into Friday's disbursement group. They probably aren't very busy sending out refunds yet.

The State refund may take longer to arrive.

Once tomorrow's pay gets deposited I'm going to move some money including the Fed refund into a CD -- current savings and checking interest rates are pretty much non-existent. I already moved some money at the other credit union into a CD this past weekend. I'm going to try to save up to put another $5000 into a CD in April, when there are 3 paydays in the month, while still pulling down my credit and mortgage balances.

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Sun, Feb 01, 2009

Seed Porn

Posted at 8:06 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I spent the afternoon over at Nanette's farm. She's going away on vacation for a week next Sunday and I may be gone to Mobile before she gets back.

I brought the rosemary plant that I bought at Christmas -- she and Rowan will transplant it into the greenhouse where it will have space and sun and water. It would not be likely to survive if I tried to haul it to Mobile and back.

We spent part of the afternoon going through seed catalogs looking at beautiful pictures of vegetables and herbs. Corn and cucumbers and eggplant and chard and bulb fennel. New varieties and species to try -- Rowan wants to try some new fruit varieties, too, things that aren't usually grown in Colorado.

They've been working on cleaning up the greenhouse and getting it ready for the season and it looks beautiful. And it's really strange to see nasturtiums in February here.

The Territorial Seed catalog has plastic corner pieces for making raised beds. They hold two rows of 2x6 planks to make a 12 inch deep bed, and they are quite reasonably priced. If I weren't going to be out of state for the next 3 or 4 months, I would order some. As it is, I will factor them into the plans I am making for fixing the retaining walls a:round my basement stairs and the other areas that were dug up during the electrical work last year.

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Sat, Jan 31, 2009

How Screwed We are

Posted at 12:33 pm MST to Current Events

The Calculated Risk economics blog has a lovely summary of the economic results that have been reported in January.

CR does wonderful graphs. Very depressing at the moment, but very thorough. There have been a lot of headlines lately about things cliff-diving or falling off cliffs. Or setting nasty records.

Another ongoing series at CR is Four Bad Bears, which compares the progress of the stock market in the current (S&P 500 values) recession (-51.9 percent at the bottom about 300 trading days in, currently -47.2 about 360 days in) with the 1973-1974 (-48.2 at the bottom, 420 trading days in) and 2000-2002 recessions (-49.1 at the bottom, 660 days in) (S&P 500 values) and the Great Depression of the 20th Century (-89.2% 840 days in)(DJIA values).

Those weren't the only recessions we've had, of course. Just some of the bad bear markets.

Can I just say "Arrrrgggh."

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On the Road Again

Posted at 8:41 am MST to Travel

This has been a busy week. Monday was slow, but since then I had 2 and a half days of billable work, 2 long business meetings about the direction of the company, and a phone interview and conference call follow-up about an out-of-state gig. And a dentist appointment.

It looks like I will be spending 3 to 4 months on a gig in Mobile, Alabama. It's a good thing I never broke up the crates of kitchen gear, etc. I used the last time I was in corporate housing. (I came home from Boston almost 26 months ago. Wow. It's been nice to be home this long.)

My taxes are done for the year. The car registration and insurance have been renewed. The property tax bill for the year is in and I will pay it this week. House insurance doesn't hit until June, and second half car insurance gets billed in August, so those bills should not hit until after I am back.

I'll need to put bottled water deliveries and trash pickup on hold, but I don't get hard copy newspapers any more, so I don't need to worry about them.

I do all my regular bill paying online these days. Even the water and trash -- which had been the last holdouts -- as of the past few months. (If other people are like me, no wonder the post office is going broke. I used to use about 10 stamps a month and now it's down to basically none except at Christmas time.) I'll have my incoming mail forwarded to the office, and Heather, our office manager can forward anything that looks urgent on to Mobile. The rest I can sort through when I fly home every few weeks.

My semi-annual appointment with my oncologist is this week. I should get Dinah into the vet for a checkup before we leave. And the dentist said I have two fillings that need to be repaired, which I will try to have done this week, too. I may also get my eyes checked -- there's a potential complication from the tamoxifen the doctor is on the watch for and I think I'm about due for the next checkup. My next thyroid checkup doesn't need to happen until July. I have an appointment with my allergist the morning of Monday March 9, that will need to be rescheduled or built into my travel schedule.

I may need to do some clothes shopping. I should email the client's representative and ask what their dress code is. I think I'm OK on shirts and t-shirts, and such, but my office slacks are geared for Boston, not Mobile, and I may need another weight of coat or jacket, and a raincoat. And Casual Corner went out of business a couple of years ago. Drat. I should email the client's representative and ask what their dress code is. Maybe I should wait and shop in Mobile: it may be easier to find clothes appropriate to the local climate.

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Wed, Jan 21, 2009

Cute

Posted at 3:12 pm MST to Current Events

This image of Obama fighting Darth Vader reminds me of a couple of jokes that were going around yesterday.

People kept comparing Dick Cheney in his wheelchair to Dr. Strangelove.

And political blogger atrios asked "Who invited Mr. Potter?" referring to the wheelchair-ridden villain of It's a Wonderful Life. People were making separated at birth jokes even before Cheney ended up in the wheelchair.

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Charity of the Month -- Jan 09 -- ACLU

Posted at 11:08 am MST to Miscellaneous

President Obama's (ooh that feels good to type) inaugural address was very encouraging. So was the fact that one of his first official acts was to request a 120 day suspension of military tribunal hearings at Guantanamo.

This seems to be a propitious time to renew my membership.

Membership in the ACLU is not tax deductible, which allows them more freedom of action. They also have an American Civil Liberties Foundation that is tax deductible. I may send some money to that later in the year.

And I hope the courts eventually do something really unpleasant to Bernie Madoff.

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Tue, Jan 20, 2009

Helicopter

Posted at 11:09 am MST to Current Events

I took a break to watch the inauguration...

Shrub is gone. Finally. He is on the helicopter and leaving Washington. The news guys are saying that people were cheering him, but I think it is likely that many of them were cheering the fact that he was leaving.

Last night in Dupont Circle people were throwing shoes at a giant inflated effigy of GWB.

President Obama's inauguration address was impressive, and well-delivered, which is still refreshing.(Talking Points Memo has the full text.) I hope that he follows through on cleaning up corruption and inequity (and iniquity) as he claimed he would.

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Mon, Jan 19, 2009

Fiat Chrysler

Posted at 11:40 pm MST to Current Events

Fiat is reported to be buying a chunk of Chrysler.

But that's not what I came here to talk about today.

The cars my parents owned that I remember the makes of were a Fiat, two Plymouth Valiants and a Volkswagen Beetle (a real one, not one of these remakes they sell now) which overlapped with the two Valiants.

The Fiat was white, the first Valiant and the Beetle were very light blue, and the car before the Fiat was a light blue and white station wagon. The second Valiant was gold with a darker top because after 15 years or so of driving pale colored cars my parents finally realized that pale cars tend to disappear in the snow fogs mist and drizzle that make up a lot of Connecticut weather.

I hate the fact that rental cars are very often white, and I've never owned a vehicle that was weather-colored. (Medium green Maverick, medium blue Escort, gold Subaru, red Dodge Ram 50 with a white topper, red Dakota with a red topper.)

But that's not what I came here to talk about either.

I don't know if it still happens now that everything is built up, but I can remember when a moose would occasionally wander down the Connecticut River into the Hartford area. It usually ended up in among the big gas and oil storage tanks near Hartford, and the Fish and Game people would shoot it with a tranq and it would drop dead because its heart couldn't take the stress.

I suspect it doesn't happen as often now that the river is lined by roads and urban and suburban construction instead of farms. I can (dimly) remember when there were fields of shade tobacco growing where a lot of the highway interchanges around Hartford are now. Before the interstates and their surrounding development came in, the gas and oil tanks were the first complete break from woods and agricultural land a moose wandering down from Vermont through Massachusetts would encounter along the river.

Of course, we would never have heard about the moose that came down the river, took one look a the city and turned around and went north again.

The particular moose I have in mind came wandering down in the spring of '64 or maybe the fall of '63.

There was a period of several months before the new house was finished and we moved to southeastern Connecticut when my Dad was driving the little white Fiat every morning from Manchester CT, across the river from Hartford, to New London where his job was. He left very early in the mornings (five-ish?), and at that time of year in Connecticut he was driving in the dark.

One day Dad came home from work and told us about a close call he had that morning. I t had been foggy that morning, and he had nearly hit a huge dark animal, too big to be a horse or cow, that loomed up out of the mist ahead of him.

That day or the next there was a newspaper article about a moose among the oil tanks again and we realized that was what Dad almost hit. Or vice versa: that moose probably weighed as much as the Fiat. Considering the damage that hitting a deer can do to a car, I think the Fiat would have lost the fight with a moose completely.

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Taxes 2008

Posted at 12:02 am MST to Miscellaneous

I'm getting my taxes done early this year. My W-2 has already arrived, and I have the tax and interest info, so I filled in the federal forms.

The TaxACT State tax package for Colorado is supposed to be finalized and ready for download later this week. Once I have it, I'll fill it in and check everything, and e-file both returns.

With e-filing and direct deposit of the refunds everything should be done by the end of this month or early in February.

I've got my car registration for the year, and paid the first half car insurance taken care of already. The property tax bill for the year hasn't shown up yet: should arrive by the end of the month. House insurance doesn't hit until June.

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Sat, Jan 17, 2009

Not Sinatra

Posted at 10:43 pm MST to Media

Actually, the title of tonight's pops concert by the Boulder Phil was "Simply Sinatra", but I like my version better. I was never a big Sinatra fan, but I grew up hearing his music and seeing him on TV, and this tribute concert wasn't quite as solid as the Beatles one the Phil did last January.

The vocalist, Steve Lippia, has a voice that strongly resembles Sinatra's and he mostly uses Sinatra's arrangements and phrasing (I think he uses phrasing from fairly late in Sinatra's career: a lot of longer notes were cut off rather than sustained).

But I kept having a nagging feeling that the tempo was very slightly too slow. It was oddly distracting. I kept feeling like someone needed to get out and push.

I think people forget how FAST the musical 'standards' of the mid-twentieth century were performed. Which is silly because it was all recorded. There was a rock cover of "Get out you're rocking the boat" a couple of years ago that drove me nuts because they slowed the song down so much compared to.the version performed in the movie of "Guys and Dolls". (There is something wrong when a rock cover is a lot slower than the original.)

Despite my minor quibbles with the performance, the concert made a nice change of pace: I've been struggling with reluctant downloads and software installs the past few days and needed the break in routine. Watched pots may not boil but at least they don't have progress indicators so that you can see they really are slowing down, for no apparent reason. Grr.

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Mon, Jan 12, 2009

Compiz

Posted at 2:45 pm MST to Technology

I have been having problems with the video on my laptop getting hung, generally when it is trying to run a screensaver. When it happened today I was able to ssh in from the server to look at what was going on. Killing the compiz.real process loosened things up enough that I was able to save my work and do a clean reboot.

There are some references in google to problems with compiz on KDE4 Kubuntu systems. I don't really do anything that needs fancy 3d compositing (which may be why it only died in screensavers: they are often designed to show off fancy video effects) so unless there are odd dependencies I should be able to eliminate the entire module.

I disabled desktop effects and removed compiz from the system completely, then logged out, restarted X, and logged back in. It doesn't seem to have broken anything. In fact, some of my desktop config settings that had been ignored now seem to be working as specified.

It remains to be seen whether this has really fixed the hangs. I may experiment with enabling the screensavers that seemed most prone to lock up. I may be travelling to a gig in Mobile soon, and it would be nice to have a stable system.

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Squall

Posted at 10:12 am MST to Weather

This is one of the days I'm glad to be working from home.

There were no forecasts of snow for today, but we got about an inch an hour for about 4 hours beginning at 4 am. The snow was fluffy enough and the wind was strong enough that the plows weren't ablle to deal with it well: it kept blowing back across the roads .

The morning rush hour traffic reports were amazingly bad.

We need the moisture badly, as shown by last week's wildfires. This has been a very, very dry winter along the Foothills, though the high country has been getting plenty of snow.

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Sat, Jan 10, 2009

Spanish Test

Posted at 10:01 pm MST to Miscellaneous

There is an online Spanish test.


Take The Spanish Test at Hello Quizzy.com

I got 85 %, but it uses pretty basic vocabulary. I took Spanish in high school 40 years ago, but I figured out a few of them etymologically.

Actually, I can still read some Spanish, but I can't understand my cleaning ladies at all when they talk to each other. Some of that may be dialectal, though. Local Hispanics are Mexican, but I grew up in the Northeast, where the Spanish is more Puerto Rican (And I had a Panamanian Spanish teacher for a few years.)

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Freezer Stash

Posted at 4:47 pm MST to Technology

I think I am going to hold off on ordering any meat. There was more left in the chest freezer than I had remembered. (I think I loaded everything from the upstairs freezer into the chest freezer before one of the times I got transferred out of town.)

I discarded stuff that I now know I am allergic to, and fruits and veggies that were clearly freezer burned. That leaves a lot of frozen pesto, a couple of canning jars with soup or stew in them, and a fair amount of meat. I'll need to thaw the pesto to salvage the canning jars it was packed in -- most of it was made with cows' milk cheeses.

Some of the meat may be freezer burned, but some of it may not be: most of it was purchased in bulk and better packed than supermarket meat. I've got a couple of stewing hens in there that may render adequate stock if I trim off the freezer burned wingtips. And the other meats may be salvageable for soups or stews after trimming off the freezer-burned bits, even if I decide against grilling or roasting it. I'll explore the meat packages over the next few months: it doesn't make sense to toss the meat without thawing and investigating it.

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Fri, Jan 09, 2009

MidWinter Market

Posted at 8:44 pm MST to Technology

It's now about halfway between the end of the 2008 farmers' markets (first week of November) and the beginning of the 2009 farmers' markets (first week of April). But I'm having a sort of farmers' market weekend.

While I was out running errands, I stopped at Nanette's farm to pick up some eggs and veggies. The chard and onions weren't really in sellable condition, even in the greenhouse, but I count as staff (and don't need a full-sized bunch of chard just for me) so Rowan was able to let me have some.

And when I stopped at Whole Foods I got some Haystack Mountain goat cheeses -- varieties I get at the market in the summer -- and some Sisters' Pantry chicken-basil dumplings.

I've got some Sisters' Pantry Vinaigrette in the fridge, so tomorrow I can have a brunch of dumplings, which are my favorite breakfast on market days.

And I've got chard and Egyptian Bunching Onions and eggs to make a chard frittata, which is my favorite after-market supper. (I haven't had a frittata since last spring before my allergies were diagnosed, but my experiment yesterday was very encouraging.)

And I don't need to spend 6 hours out in the cold selling veggies...

On Sunday I'm going to make a buffalo meatloaf with some of the horseradish packed and sold by the guys at the market who bought the horseradish from Nanette's farm.

Tomorrow I'm going to start cleaning out and defrosting my chest freezer. Next payday I'll order some buffalo meat from HighWire Ranch, another market vendor: they have a deal for 100 pounds of meat for $650: ground meat prices, but the meat you get includes steaks and roasts. They call it a "buffalo quarter", but I am sure they get more than 4 of them off one buffalo: their bulls were 1400 pounds, live weight at the age of 18 months.

A hundred pounds of meat will last me a long time, but in the current state of the economy, high quality food feels like a good investment.

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Thu, Jan 08, 2009

Experiment 1

Posted at 1:07 pm MST to Exercise

When I was at the conference in November I didn't think I was having allergic reactions to the eggs I ate. But that was before I figured out the delayed reaction effects -- the couching and swallowing problems are not really noticeable until a few hours after I eat the offending food.

I just made scrambled eggs (cooked in light olive oil) for lunch, and I'm going to be very careful not to challenge my system with anything else today.

Breakfast was cheerios and almond milk, which I have been having for months without problems.

I'm only drinking water today. No tea or juice.

The only other thing I ate for lunch was some plain bread I made yesterday evening. I had a slice in the late evening, and it did not cause a reaction within 12 hours, so if I react to lunch it will be the egg yolks.

I'm not sure what I will have for supper. Maybe a grilled salmon fillet and some steamed or sauteed veggies, with more fresh bread.

My diet is carb-heavy, very low-fat by American standards, and moderate protein, but I think my metabolism is weird. I ate very carefully for several years -- complex carbs and veggies and protein, and 'sensible' meals, and serious portion control -- and gained weight the whole time even when I was exercising daily. My weight stabilized when I switched back from wholewheat pasta to regular and from all whole grain bread to some white bread and some whole grain.

I'm stuck about 20 pounds above the point where my body usually wants to start exercising. I kept exercising above that weight on the way up --though less regularly -- until the surgery in 2005. Now I'm recovered from the surgery, mostly, but I can't seem to get the momentum or habit of exercise going at this weight. I'm going to try free weights again, to see if that will break things loose.

If not, I may look at Atkins and South Beach, to see if either of them is workable with my food allergies. my weight stayed stable or dropped slightly during the week when I was eating my buffalo roast, and before that when I was working on the turkey. Shifting my diet toward more protein might help the exercise, too:

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Wed, Jan 07, 2009

State Of ...

Posted at 11:15 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Bumper sticker I once saw: "Where are we going and what are we doing in this handbasket?"

Less than 2 weeks until the regime change in Washington ... and maybe there is a chance the entire global economy won't have melted down by the time the bozos in Congress produce the legislation to try to slow the collapse. I really hope they do something sensible about health care funding while they are at it. The current state of things really doesn't work for doctors or hospitals or patients or employers or just about anyone except the executives of insurance companies who want to make profits.

It's been windy on and off for days. Today was bad: 100 mph gusts, and there was a fire in north Boulder, so they were evacuating people and doing reverse 911s, and a stretch of Route 36 was closed north of town. You know it's bad when they start making radio announcements that no one should call 911 or the Sheriff's dispatch center in Boulder county except for major emergencies.

First payday of the new year. I've got my GNUCash files updated through the end of the year and reconciled. And I ordered this year's tax software. As soon as they finalize it and I get my W-2, I'll be able to file my taxes.


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Mon, Jan 05, 2009

New Teeth

Posted at 10:02 pm MST to Current Events

I inherited fairly bad teeth from my Mom's family. The original biting surfaces of my molars had lots of little branching valleys on top, instead of the few big ones that are normal. The biting surfaces I've had for years have been metal (7 molars) and fancier materials (1 molar). But all of my teeth have live roots-- it was just the top surfaces that went.

I'm supposed to get one of the gold crowns replaced soon. It was the last one that went in, and I think the dentist waited to long to replace the surface of the adjoining tooth, which is the one with the spaceage crown instead of gold.

Based on an article linked from Slashdot, it now looks like scientists are about a year from regrowing new living teeth-roots from tooth stem cells for people who have lost the real ones. They are predicting 5 to 10 years until they are able to grow teeth on demand to replace missing ones in adults.

I never knew my mother's parents when they had their own teeth. I only remember them with dentures.

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