Bitching my way to the Brightside

Math for the Masses

2012-02-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

The president has made remarks in several speeches this year about promoting education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM Education). He's mentioned yhe idea of a technology expert as a Cabinet post. This is all well and good in theory. I have some thoughts on it as follows. He then made some noise about forcing people to go to high school until age 18 (presumably allowing one to graduate younger than that but not explicitly stated). This, I think is madness. There are better things we can do for people that aren't successful at high school that hold them in a failing stasis for more time. Here goes!

Reasons why education in science, technology, engineering and math might flounder in the upper levels, from someone who successfully graduated from from MIT.

1) STEM courses are cumulative. If you learn 12 concepts and only master 10 of them, you could be floundering in your next course. Then you either have to do extracurricular studying to catch up, retake a class, or you're unable to complete the work at higher levels. If you partially fail at an english course, the concepts and skills are still cumulative to some extent, but a "C" level writer can continute to be a "C" level writer in their next course, and has some hope of improving to a B. A "C" level mathematician is more likely to be a "D" level mathematician in the following course.

There's some ability to choose to continue where your interests and talents lie, but sometimes you get tested on things your brain just doesn't want to wrap itself around. (My nemesis is electron tunneling. I've seen the equations to work it out but cannot reproduce them with any understanding of what I'm doing.) Two courses down the line, either you've caught up, chosen a path to avoid your problem areas, or given up.

2) Status. STEM = geek/nerd. If your chosen university doesn't reward STEM students with some sort of social status, only the most dedicated will pursue these degrees. At MIT, you can geek out to your heart's content and be socially rewarded for it. Also, in that environment, failure in one STEM track can lead to a different STEM major. (My Bio major roommate hated Physics more than any English major I know.) But at most universities, the social structure does not reward sticking it out in STEM, but in transferring to a more socially rewarding major.

3) Money. Our current high paying jobs are in finance and "business". I make a decent living as an engineer, but am doing nowhere near as well as I expected to be. Many of my contemporaries have gone on to get MBAs because it's the only way to break into the jobs where you make top 10% money, and it's hard to live in a major city and feel successful if you've excelled at school your whole life and are only earning a median salary for all the effort you put in. A colleague used to reminisce about trudging home with his engineering text to go do problem sets and passing his business major friends already at the bar. Upon graduation, the business majors earned more than he did, and spent more time at the bar drinking with clients. It turns out their college bar time was preparing them for life on the job after all. He felt a little cheated.

I know a fair few STEM PhDs. Unless you love, love, love it, I don't recommend it. You live pretty far into your adulthood on a paltry stipend in substandard housing, with no guarantee that things will substantially turn around later. (One silver lining is that STEM graduate studies are more likely to get funding than humanities students, who have to pay out of pocket.) Contrast that with doctors who make the same upfront sacrifice, but have much higher earning potential down the road. At least one friend completed a PhD in biology at one of the top 5 universities in the country, only to find that this qualified her to be a glorified lab tech. She felt a little cheated.

Both of those "cheated" friends went on to get MBAs and nearly double their salaries.

4) Encouragement. At least one study has shown that women continue in the STEM courses if they are excelling; men continue in STEM courses if they are passing. So women who are getting Cs and low Bs are either likely to conclude that they are not good at this and go do something else, or there is less support for them to continue, or they have false expectations of how good they need to be in school to be successful in industry.

If we want to successfully get students to stick with STEM educations, and I think we should encourage more to do so we need to:

1) Acknowledge that one doesn't have to be good at all science or math to be good at some branch of science or math. We need current practitioners to talk to younger students about the diversity of available options.

2) Give more chances to succeed. Start science classes earlier - like 4th or 5th grade, when kids are really curious. Even if they don't do so well the first time, by the time they hit the standard bio-chem-physics in high school, they've already had time to become familiar with the concepts, if not the details, and are much more likely to succeed in building on established foundations.

3) Monetarily reward STEM majors. Right now, engineers are cogs in the machine that can often be outsourced to India. Before outsourcing, the big thing was to fire older engineers and replace them with 2 new college graduates who would work 80 hours a week for 40 hours pay. Even people taking these jobs knew it wasn't a great idea - the older engineers are often more efficient, getting done in 40 hours what it takes 2 new engineers 80 hours to do because they don't have the work experience - not because of technical qualifications.

4) Socially reward engineering. Right now, it's assumed that engineers are people lacking social skills. And they're right a lot of time time. So how do we convince social people to major in engineering too? A presidential focus is a good start, a cabinet member for technology is a good start, but I don't know how we fix it. Maybe other readers have some ideas.

On a related note, the longer I went to college, the more I realized it wasn't for everybody. I think we should be rejuvinating more vo-tech programs that produce capable people through more applied fields starting around age 16. And the training should include fields that primarily attract women as well as men. I don't want to go back to the days of exploiting child workers, but adolescents are not incapable. Instead of doing straight classwork 8 hours a day, why not offer half days with accredited apprenticeship opportunities. These would start as, perhaps, unpaid for school credit, but move to being paid so kids aren't hitting the college years, or their first apartment with pocket change and a placeholder fast food job.

Is is Wet? Is it Yours?

2012-01-24T22:01:00.000-08:00

Still in the spirit of happiness blogging, here's a brief takeaway from yesterday.

The equipment tech supervisor came in person to tell me that he appreciated my communication.

The day was going pretty well, then some things happened to harsh my mellow. Silver-lining it,
Being worked up meant I got through my workout rather more enthusiastically than usual. (And my trainer didn't cancel.)
I didn't mean to rant and rave when I called my mom, but I was still worked up. She let me rant and rave and didn't disown me, or even hang up early. I think if I were her I'd be tired of this by now, but maybe she's decided to find it charming. I think I burnt through it, which is good because all this angst over teapot tempests isn't a great use of my energy.

Today wasn't bad either.
- I woke up on time - early enough I was able to get into the earlier CPR refresher class on standby so I don't have to take it tomorrow and mess up my routine. Done!

My "Hollywood Diva" stilletto, pencil-skirt, & heavy mascara wearing instructor has moved on, sadly, and the refresher was just a class. But I retained most of the info from last time on First Aid, CPR, AED use, bloodborne pathogen training, and fire extinguisher training. They've simplified the CPR a lot - 30 compressions, 2 optional breaths. If you don't have a barrier and don't want to breathe? Don't. Still good to go with chest compressions alone. They've also added the tourniquet back into the instruction after a decade of recommending against it for urban use. (Any ideas why?)

- I got my fastest time yet for putting out the test fire, 4.4 seconds! Must have been the leaf fire experience from thanksgiving. heh.

Lastly, I remembered to pick up my mail. Go me. I even had two cards - one thank you and something from my mom written on elephant poo paper! Then I paid off my non-questionable bills as soon as I got home so I can poke around online without guilt.

Hollyhock House

2012-01-22T22:39:00.000-08:00

I've just heard an NPR interview with Andrew Weil, where he didn't sound crazy. He mentioned the things that can help reverse or alleviate depressive sypmtoms:
- Vitamin D (check)
- Anti-inflammatory food (sometimes)
- Anti-inflammatory supplements (sometimes)
- Anti-inflammatory medicines (sometimes)
- regular exercise (check, sorta)
- writing down things you're grateful for at the end of everyday for a week. (hrm. that sounds familiar.)

Today was Excursion Day. A friend, formerly "friend of a friend", puts together excursions to LA points of interest roughly once a month. So it came to pass that I get together with a bunch of folks, or just a few, from the OC including a book club friend. I really enjoy seeing classic Los Angeles bits of history. Category, effort, and frequency wise, it's on par with going out with a good Boston friend on local area hikes, which were often in historical locations.

I'm grateful for friend K for taking me into the excursion group on the say-so of my internet book club friend. I enjoy the company and the new things I learn. I'm grateful to have a replacement activity for something I used to enjoy but can't replicate exactly.

Today, I learned that there's a little hill in Los Feliz, adjacent to a space where I once lost cell signal four times while talking to another book club friend in Alaska. I was quite surprised to find I had been literally across the street from this location and hadn't realized I was standing by a little slice of decaying heaven called Hollyhock House.

Hollyhock House was the home and vision of Aline Barnsdall, who identified with the flower as a strong independent sort. By virtue of an oil inheritance, she was independently wealthy, never married (did have a daughter) and was able to produce art. Olive Hill was envisioned in the 19-teens by Aline as a place where she could have a house, a couple of theatres - one "regular" live, one new "cinema theater". Also there would be housing for actors, studios and stores along Hollywood Blvd and parkland around the estate with 360 views of the LA basin from the ocean to the mountains. Today, the view south is blocked by a large medical facility, but the north has two icons in one:

From the rather egyptian crypt-like art deco entrance arbor, one can see both the Hollywood Sign, and Griffith J. Griffith's observatory (where more people have looked through a telescope than anywhere else on earth). If you've come to visit, I probably took you to see these things - it may have been a drive through or we may have gotten out. Now, we have another viewing location - if there's parking! I parked on a side street that looked close by on my Google map. And it was, but I had to hoof it up about a hundred stairs.

I'm grateful that I was able to huff and puff up the stairs, more so since I had to miss dance today, and even though I was reminded that I used to walk up that many stairs pretty much every day. I'm grateful now for my first floor abode, but I do need to find myself more stairs. Today was a good start.

Frank Lloyd Wright did the design for this enclave. Only part of it ever got built, then there was some backing and forthing with the city on ownership, and like most of FLW's architectural masterpieces, it has issues with decay and self destruction, not to mention the havoc wreaked by various owners. The place is currently half under scaffolding, giving me some flashbacks to Rome the summer before they hosted the World Cup. Nonetheless, there was still evident beauty.

The house itself is highly art deco, but with the FLW twist. Long, low ceilings, which I dreaded given the resemblance of the exterior to an Egyptian or Mayan tomb, wound up being kind of interesting and not prevalent throughout. The least covered side is the western view. The spiky designs around the edge of the mansard-ish roofline are art-deco stylized hollyhocks. The water feature, which also goes in to the fireplace area, is not currently holding water.

On the north side, the Japanese garden next to the entrance "arbor" which is through the "pierced screens" (wooden slat trellis dividers) on the right. There are some really fabulous stained glass windows on this dining room. The balance of viewing window to stained glass and arrangement of design really worked for me; minimalist enough to be functional and not overwhelm when used in repetition, decorative enough to add interest, well designed and well placed enough to really work in the space. And I'm a sucker for clerestory windows.

The backside of the house had a playroom with more of the great windows. Due to scaffolding and muddy lawns, this was the best angle I could get. The website probably has better. But I could get used to having these windows around.

Inside, the somewhat odd docent explained that FLW kept the ceilings low where he wanted people to move, and heightened them where people should settle. That did work in the few rooms we saw in the house. The built in storage was excellent and well integrated (he didn't want folks buying an ugly catalog hutch to put in his house, apparently). The ceiling in the living room is a marvel. There's uplighting all around, and it's not just a vault or arch, but a multi-angled, multi-surfaced affair which just suited the space quite well. (Insulation might suit the house well too, but one must suffer for art.) The funky moat around the fireplace was drained, but they'd had the furniture re-created. I was struck by how there were about 6 desks built into the sofas, probably for artists to spend time creating there.

I'm grateful for finding something about Frank Lloyd Wright's designs that worked for me. There was some true genius in that design, even if there were places I would have bonked my head. And true to the original intent, the city has erected buildings for art, theater, and dance at the top of the cliffs of insanity stairs.

All in all, it was a really good day. I saw friends, I saw art, I had a burger from Umami burger that was funky and ordered without eliminations or substitutions of ingredients (one of my rarer small joys). I was able to stop in and see another friend on the way back and swap the book I read for the next in the series (Kushiel's Dart --> Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey). I stopped at the grocery on the way back to pick up noodles to pair with a stew I made last night, and found some standard items on sale, so I saved about 40% on my standard pantry/stock items and even remembered my noodles.

Today was a good day.

Dog Whistling Dixie

2012-01-22T02:28:00.000-08:00

Because apparently nothing else is going on but some snow in the north, the interwebs have been all over the 18 million Republican nominee "debates" and the 3 election circuses. Presumably something like this overabundance of airtime happens every recurrent season, but in my lifetime, I've never, ever, seen anyone be as blatantly racist* - then double down on it! - than the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

When I first heard NPR rebroadcast Newt's "food stamp president" speech , my jaw literally dropped open. It was a good thing I'd just finished parking or I might have run clean off the road it was so awful. I'm not going to repeat all his shockingly hateful comments here, you can find them online if you want. He's so proud of them, they're in his ads now. And NPR just went blithely on their merry way, not even saying boo. I don't think they should have abstained from the clip, but I would have liked someone to come on and give context and call it out for the hate filled rabble rousing that it is. (The interwebs are also firing up about journalists now being stenographers, and I can only say it's about damn time.)

Republicans railing against "food stamps", if you're one of the 3 people out there who didn't know, is code for "those freeloading blacks who aren't like us good white folks who have have to bail them out with money the gov'ment snatches from our hardworking hands to give to those lazy mofos". The choice of words was not accidental. Codes like these are known as "dog whistles" because it tells the in-crowd what they mean with plausible deniability. "I didn't say Obama's a useless taker, we all know there are lots of people using foodstamps". We know that anything to do with actual foodstamps wasn't your point. You know that wasn't your point. And certainly the crowd that went crazy with anti-black-person rhetoric got your real point. And this anti-black speech was given on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. WTFMFWTHAYT?

What shocked me even more was that the crowd LOVED it. (I guess that's what he was thinking...) Yeah, these are southern base Republicans (which these days means pretty much Christianist bigots), but this, this truly shocks me. I'd thought the dog-whistles would be pitched higher, and they'd at least know better than to be openly racist on camera, at least. Not so much. I'd be surprised if Newt doesn't slip up and call President Obama "boy" in the near future. Maybe give him a nickel to go hang up his coat.

I think it says something about your party's idealization of "real America" rather than truly wanting to help ALL of America when in a state that's 28% black, only 1% of the Republican primary voters were black. And the venom isn't just leveled at the black "usurper", but the Mormon too. Romney lost by 15% or so to this foul serial adulterer who was run out of Washington for ethics violations. Yes, there are other factors like Romney isn't lockstep Republican even if he says the right words, he's from librul Massachusetts, etc, etc... But once again, exit polling showed that people who thought religion matching was important in their candidate (again, a base Republican primary notion) overwhelmingly voted for Gingrich or Santorum and Gingrich wound up with quite a lot of votes. (The youngin's went for Ron Paul, and the wealthy went for Romney.)

I'm not a Republican voter. I don't watch Fox News (except via Daily Show clips or blogs). Mostly this is because I find their definition of "real America" insufficiently inclusive and their policies to overwhelmingly favor the really really rich at the expense of the health and wealth and welfare of the majority of our citizenry, our environment, and our ideals. So I was going to bitch about these candidates no matter what. But I might not even have mentioned them on the blog at all - and there's plenty bad to say about the hypocrisy and bad governance of Gingrich. But I probably wouldn't have bothered to give them that much of my attention.

But this behavior is unacceptable in a leader of the so-called "free world". You can think whatever you want, but if you're running for President, you'd better not be in the habit of making casual racial slurs against large swaths of your populace. I'm not sure if I'm just able to determine bad actors better now in my (gulp) middle age, or if the pitch I can hear at increased, or if this pack of morons is just an exceptionally bad group of bad actors. But based on the openly racist rantings from one of this group gaining a 15% leading win, I wonder what we mean when we say we "won" the civil war. It's been 150 years, when will we believe that the pursuit of happiness and equality under the law applies to all Americans?

*Someone more eloquent than I wrote well on this topic. If you want to argue whether or not these racist words were racist, go read those linked posts first, do a little Googling, then come back.

Happy New Year

2012-01-05T22:23:00.001-08:00

Work surprised me this week - I have a new boss! I had liked working for my old one, but I think a change will be healthy. As long as I remember to get my B12 shots and stay healthy myself, this year could go well. Last year, I did as well as I could, but to quote a "fortune" from Jenny Crusie, "He loves you all he can, but he cannot love you very much". My year last year was kinda like that too. My review is tomorrow. I'm hoping for a fair to midlin' result, but since we're doing it last thing on friday, I worry that it's some bad news. We'll see if I get stock options this year - that's where you know something's gone off the rails. (Please, I really want options this year, the stock is trading really low.)

Anyhow, my new boss is a colleague from my group. He completed an MBA recently and has been doing half process engineering, half management in the interim. He has grown a lot as an employee since I started working and has become really pleasant to work with, so I'm hoping we can manage to build from where we are and not screw things up. (This week, he's still bribing us with chocolate...) My former boss got promoted to a higher management level, and I think these choices will be good for us.

As for the not-work stuff, I need to set some goals. Resolutions if you will.

Finish my handy project around the condo
Figure out long term financing for the condo
Continue to work with organizer to polish my space
Date! Try to date at least 4 guys (or so, until I hit it off with someone. Please send any likely candidates my way.)
Continue to dance and work out whether or not I lose weight.
Find a way to blow glass at least 6X this year
Bake stuff (again, at least 1/month)
Visit my grandmother, and call her at least every 2 weeks
Keep up with my B12 shots, try to resolve lingering issues.
Continue to make local friends and keep existing friends.
Outside the top movie marathon, see at least 1 movie a month

I will also be getting #1 wisdom tooth pulled, leaving me with 1 remaining (#32), but that's not really a goal.

With all my "at least once a month" items, I should really start scheduling stuff in, like a regular baking night, movie night, glassblowing weekend, etc... That list isn't even full of all my wishlist items, but it was starting to get crazy long. I should also add "get back to blogging more" but can consider it a sub-task to 'keep friends'. If any of you have "visit friend in SoCal" on your to do list, I have a couch you can crash on, and no particular travel plans as yet (although still hoping for Boston in April or so.)

Share any heartfelt or unusual resolutions you've come up with this year, or tell me what you think of mine - overdoing it or just right?

SoCal Snowman

2011-12-22T22:22:00.000-08:00

B12 appears to be key to my ability to get things done. I've been sluggish again, but after my B12 shot Tuesday (and 3 allergy shots and my final Hep-A booster wednesday - just call me pincushion girl) my energy levels have recovered a lot. I was productive at work, ran errands, went to the gym, ran more errands and ... built a snowman!

I had intended to make a globe snowman ala Emily Henderson on her Secrets from a Stylist holiday special. I was at Cost Plus World Market picking up a couple last minute gifts when I saw 3 globes, very small, that I could use to make an 18" high snowman for about $50. Then I noticed the paper lanterns and a lightbulb went off in my mind. I already had a very large and a rather small Regolit lantern from IKEA (probably $10 for both). For another $7 I picked up a medium sized lantern. I already had a 10' string of no-heat LED lights. The existing outdoor lights on a timer had one more plug location available so I set to work.

The hardest thing was finding the small lanterns that had slipped to the bottom of my hoarder pile in the patio closet rather than being in the box of electrical and lighting supplies. Putting it together required a pair of needlenose pliers to slightly bend the internal frames for better attaching the balls together, and the twist tie that came on the LED lights to secure the attachment points. And one tiny picture hook.

This could be put together more carefully, but I need to finish wrapping gifts and packing. Oh, and sleep. With more time, I would take more care with the connections and use white lights instead of multicolored, leaving none outside the snowman feature. Maybe put on a scarf or something. It would probably be less unwieldy to thread the lights thru the, well, lights with two people working on it, and probably take 10 minutes or less with everything laid out. But this is what I got done in about an hour (including the scavenger hunt) and I'm ridiculously proud of it. Happy Holidays, Enjoy!

il communication

2011-12-19T20:53:00.000-08:00

First, Please can we put the crossbars back on capital i's? They aren't serifs, but structural to avoid confusion with a lower case L. My title should read "il communication" with capital I, but looks like "Two communication" that way, so I had to uncapitalize a name. It makes me want to cry.

But not to cry as hard as the Kim Jon-Il mourners I heard on NPR. Two seconds of that and I was wondering if they'd hired paid mourners. That was some over the top wailing. Or perhaps, it's unseemly to be seen dry-eyed there today, and it's a political necessity / safe practice to out weep your neighbors. Possibly, their culture of grieving is much different than what I'm used to, making the tears seem crocodillian. Now who fills the power vacuum? And how soon until they provoke a war?

Well, I need to do laundry, grout some kitchen tile, clear out some bulk on the DVR, and want to read a new Lorelai James novel (extra, extra spicy she is). How well can I multitask?

Serve Myself

2011-12-16T19:13:00.000-08:00

The last post had the unintended consequence of my getting a Christmas present of "Serve Yourself", a cookbook for one. I'm really excited to try it, but tonight, I'm going with tried and true, which is to say, pizza.

Homemade pizza got a lot easier once I realized you can make it on nearly any bread. I like making bread, but pizza dough has always been unnecessarily time consuming and complicated for my tastes. Not worth the effort. I've tried other things, cooked and fresh. My mom used to do little pizzalike things on english muffins. While great for little kids it felt like cheating, and not big enough for toppings. Plus, I rarely keep them on hand. I went to a funky little bar and restaurant in Corning NY that served lunch pizzas on a tortilla. This was game changing for me. I prefer a thin crust with many toppings and to realize I could just throw down some stuff on a tortilla (I keep a stash in the freezer, often) meant I could have pizza anytime.

But what to throw down?
I keep a stash of shredded cheese in the freezer, (Usually mozarella, sharp cheddar, Trader Joe's parmesan, and sometimes crumbled feta or a round of goat cheese) so that's taken care of.
I usually have some form of tomato sauce, or pesto, for the base.
Options: Spaghetti sauce (the meatless ones last a very long time in the fridge) or a little tomato paste to which I add stuff if available: Bruschetta spread, or an olive tapenade (more TJs), chopped sundried tomatoes, a spoon of pesto or fresh basil. Any or all of these things will jazz up the sauce.

The top can be anything. I love me a good sausage-mushroom-pine_nut- artichoke pizza, but can also go to town with blanched broccoli, olives, avocado, or ham or bacon (the pre-cooked bacon works great), banana peppers, or whatever happens to be fresh from the farmer's market or in my fridge or freezer. I've been known to top it with a chiffonade of basil or arugula (especially an avocado pizza) after it's removed from the oven. The one I'm finishing now had minced chili pepper from my neighbor, mixed in with sundried tomatoes, olive tapenade and Prego. I topped it with my last two slices of ham and Jarlsberg, which I'd rolled up and cut into wheels, then some mushrooms, because most food is better with mushrooms, IMHO. I topped with 3 more cheeses, and baked it.

Baking temperature is another key. It's almost impossible to bake a pizza at too hot a temperature. I used a 475F oven tonight and it wasn't quite enough given that I cooked it on a thin Al baking sheet. I don't bother with a pizza stone figuring it'll take too long to pre-heat, and I like my cookie sheet pizza sufficiently well. A 500+ pizza oven will cook pretty fast, so watch for it and use protective hot pads and things, but see how much better it is when the temp is cranked up.

I'd show you a picture of my pizza, but it's almost all gone now. Urp.

Because I was also messing around with baking a pumpkin and roasting pumpkin seeds tonight, which killed time between the steps, I made my own dough. I make it up as I go along because, as I said, most bread like substances will work. Tonight I used a couple small scoops (coffee scoop sized) of semolina flour, half a tablespoon of yeast, a splash of water, and enough warm water to make a paste. I let this sit, covered for a few minutes, then mix in in a dash of salt, and bit of sugar and a drizzle of oil and regular flour until it's not sticky. (For some reason, most pizza dough recipes use oil, so I went with it.)

Rising. This is where most pizza dough recipes go off the rails for me. I'm too impatient for my dinner to wait up to 1.5 hours to raise dough. My cooking class even suggests resting the dough for 24 hours or more to get it really stretchy. That would be fine if I made a bunch and stashed it in the freezer, but I was working from a clean bowl here. This month's Cook's Illustrated had a hint for proofing/rising dough in a warm damp place: put the dough bowl in the oven over another dish; pour 3c boiling water into the dish and shut the oven. Well, I had a giant pumpkin headed for my preheated oven, so I improvised. I had a little metal bowl with my dough in it. In the manner of a double boiler, I picked out another bowl that would serve as a base, and poured less than a cup of boiling water into it and covered it with a silicone lid for a while. When the lid gathered up some condensation, I moved the lid to the dough pan, blew across the hot water and made sure it had cooled to a touchable temp, then stuck my covered dough bowl over it. With the breadmaker yeast (couldn't find any other kind in a jar), and this warm environment, my bread raised nearly double in 20 minutes. So roughly 40 minutes after walking in the door, and one hacked up pumpkin later, I was ready to make my pizza. Roughly a half cup of flour(s) gives enough for a thin crust pizza for 1-2 people.

Honestly, I started using the semolina flour when I bought some for another baking experiment, then didn't have masa for a flatbread recipe in "Big Small Plates" that I'd had fun with. That recipe is:
1 c flour
1/2 c masa harina (or semolina...)
1/2 t ground spice (toasted cumin or caraway or...)
1/2 t salt
1/2 t finely ground black pepper
1/2 c + ~2T water, as needed

Mix all the dry ingredients. Start working in the water until dough is moist but not sticky. Let it rest, covered, for 30 minutes. (This relaxes the flour so you can roll it out.) Divide the dough into 8 pieces, and roll out each like a tortilla on a floured surface until quite thin. At 475 F, Bake 1 or 2 at a time for 60-90 seconds on a baking stone, or if using a baking sheet, 2 minutes then flip and cook another 1 minute until they're all made. At this point you can use them for anything, including little pizzas cooked also at 425 for 3-5 minutes.

This recipe was the inspiration for my dough - I top my dough raw, although I'm thinking the center would be better if I precooked it a tad or cooked it hotter or on a stone. I figured adding a little yeast wouldn't hurt things, and if I didn't want to wait for it to fully rise, I'd have a flatbread thincrust pizza and be perfectly happy. And I am perfectly happy with how tonight's pizza turned out.

Three Cheers for Microwave for One

2011-12-06T20:36:00.000-08:00

There's an internet fascination this week with "Microwave for One", but I've been giving it some thought, and have wound up being really annoyed by how it is being portrayed. First, the cover:

Stylistically, there's a lot of mocking potential. I get where this is coming from. With the image quality and the hard to miss hair and plaid shirt, It's really hard to see if she has a lovely smile or not. The microwave is seriously Old School. The production values look a little on the slim side compared to these days where anyone can self publish and make something that looks 10 times the quality.

The problem is, the derision goes deeper than the surface of a not-quite-hip 80's look and not so subtly reinforces the notion that adult women who don't have a man are sad, pathetic creatures to be pitied. Some non-trivial listmaking group even listed it as "the worst/saddest book of all time". Which might have been ok had they actually acquired and read a copy, but they admit they did not. All they had was the poor quality image and snarky Amazon reviews to go by.

But this book is from 1987, people, and that attitude was horseshit then and it's deeper, stinkier horseshit now. I haven't read the book either, but if real publishers can make horseshit assumptions about an old book and, worse, mock the author, I can make the opposite assumptions with as much validity and give her some props.

I'm here to stand up and cheer for Sonia Allison. "Microwave for One" was probably one of the (if not the) first cookbooks aimed at Independent Women With Jobs who were Comfortable With New Technology. How cool is that? (Very, in case you were tempted to answer wrongly.) Back in 1987, women were finally getting into the business world in significant numbers. Women were getting divorces to get out of awful marriages that they'd have stayed in even a decade earlier. Women had the option of being less defined by their husband, husband's career, and their children and being defined by what they could do for the world at large, if that's how they wanted to work it. Not to diminish the choice of being a mom and housewife, it's just not everyone's bailiwick and for the first time, large numbers of women could realistically choose to either not be a mom, or put off being a mom and find herself first, and not be considered a total freak. (Then again, maybe I spoke too soon, because here it is 2011, and people still think an independent woman is a lonely freak. Hence this blog post.)

But even single women setting the world on fire gotta eat and almost every cookbook in the world is geared toward feeding 4-6 people per recipe or meal. I know, I've tried to find books just like MFO, and they are not thick on the ground. For an independent young woman, probably living in a tiny city apartment, a 4 course meal for 4 is a waste of time and money. Few people want the same thing for dinner Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, if they had the wherewithal to even make a full meal after work on Monday. If there isn't a cookbook out there, you have to make everything up on your own, and I can tell you from experience that it's a hassle and takes a lot of time and energy to figure out.

(sidebar: The microwave would be handy for reheating dinner 3 times, I suppose. Even today, most people reheat with their microwave rather than cook. It's another example of a revolutionary advance that everyone can see should be awesome, but we only use it to about 10% of its potential.)

Ms. Allison saw the potential in microwaves and in a growing audience. Who better than an independent woman with a small place and lots of demands on her time to use a time and space saving kitchen appliance to craft a nifty meal for herself. If you're going to set the world on fire, you need proper nutrition, and Ms. Allison was there to help you out.

Maybe this touched a nerve because I've been thinking I could write a great cookbook on how to cook for one. I cook for one because I live independently, not because I'm lonely; I'm betting Ms. Allison was the same. She put her book out there because she had good ideas for healthy, timesaving meals that young women and men, or the recently divorced could use to chart a course that hadn't been charted before. The derision behind the mocking is frightening with its persistence and intensity into this day and age. Can't we move past the notion that single women are lonely old spinsters who need to be pitied? I kind of don't want to think about how much kinder people would have been if her image showed a more classic beauty, either. Pretty please, with sugar on top, let's grow the hell up! Instead of mocking someone who is probably a lovely woman, if not a beautiful one, let's celebrate the accomplishment of a talented, motivated woman who embraced new technology, figured it out, translated the old patterns into new, and gave the world of independent working women something they/we could use.

Stuff...ing

2011-12-01T22:03:00.000-08:00

I'm edging up on 40 pretty quickly, and it occurred to me that while my mom has been cooking gourmet meals since she was a teenager, I usually cook for one and don't really know any of the classic family recipes and am not adept at cooking for any sized group. At grandma's house for thanksgiving, I tried to remedy that. It helped that grandma was sidelined by arterial blockage - significantly remediated by the first stent as of this Tuesday. My mom and I cooked the dinner.

I still don't know for sure what she puts in the mashed potatoes. It's a butter and milk mix of some sort. The turkey is easy-ish. Thaw it in a tub of water, clean out the cavity and double check it- this one had a bag of gibblets, a bag with the neck in it on the other end, AND a bag of gravy helper. Next year, it might come with free wi-fi. Put it in a floured baking bag after dumping garlic salt and pepper on it, tie closed, and bake per directions on the turkey wrapper. We stuffed celery and onions in on the bottom this year, and that added good flavors so I recommend that too. This method makes a solid B to B+ turkey. If you want an A to A+ turkey, brine, smoke, fry, or magic your bird however you like, but if you want easy and forgiving, garlic salt and baking bag.

I made the cranberry relish. Having made it almost annually since college, it went smoothly, if sloppily. Sloppy because we used a manual grinder that dripped juice all over (we caught it and it was delicious). The grinder gives the relish a really delightful texture I prefer to a food-processed version, but it's really the taste of the cranberry-orange-celery-pecan mix bound in orange jell-o that's the star. For a really close flavor analog, get the Trader Joe's Cranberry Orange Relish and mince up some celery and pecans to mix into it. Or just eat it plain. Or over ice cream. It cost's more but it's easier and delicious.

Which rather leaves the stuffing. My mom makes GREAT stuffing. If you've eaten it and somehow thought it was vegetarian, you should stop reading now. If you've eaten it and want to know the general gist of how it's done, here 'tis, after the jump.

Mom's Sage Stuffing

supplies: Medium saucepan, Large pan with high sides, sharp knife, cutting surface, spoon. (Gigantic mixing bowl is optional.)

1 loaf of cheap white bread, dried
2-4 large stalks of celery, preferably darker green
1 medium-big onion
1 package gibblets (about a pound of gizzards, hearts, whathaveyou)
about 1 pound of raw sausage.
4 eggs
4-6 multi-leaved stalks of fresh sage (or one pack from the grocery store if you don't grow it in the yard - mine says 0.66 oz) a rough handful, or a third of that if dried.
8 oz mushrooms (optional) either a can or a small box worth.
salt
pepper
water

All of these amounts are somewhat flexible. The gibblets can be a half pound to a pound and a half - whatever size package your store sells that isn't meant for cafeteria sizing. If you have sausage on hand, use that. Sage isn't even my favorite thing, but do make sure you use it. Fresh is nicer, if you have access.

Stuffing is essentially "leftovers casserole", which is why my instructions are a little loosey-goosey. I actually used some bread crumbs because I didn't use as much bread in my smallish pan, and I had some old bread crumbs that needed using. To make it even more of a one-dish-meal, I suppose you could add carrots or some other hearty veggie. I intended to add some jicama because I got a huge one at the mexican grocery, but forgot. It's just as well, but mom says water chestnuts are good for adding crunch, if you prefer.

Stage 1: Dry the bread.
You can leave it out overnight for a couple days. (I have childhood memories of my mom laying it out on paper over the washer and dryer.) You can dry it in the oven on very low. You can also microwave it. (Try 6 slices for 2:22 - I'm lazy like that - turn the bread over, wipe down the condensation, and do it again.)

Stage 2: Make the broth
This can be done ahead of time and refrigerated.

Dump the gizzard-heart mix, including any bits from the turkey, into a saucepan and cover with water. Add 1/3 to 1/2 the onion, roughly chopped. Add the two ugliest celery stalks, cut only enough to make them fit. (Put in a touch of salt if you don't like celery.)

Boil this mix, skim the froth off the top (spoon!), and keep boiling until the meat is cooked, the room smells delicious, and the liquid level reduces some.

Reserving the broth, scoop out the meat (and onions, if you like - discard any other solids) and trim off any grizzly bits, and dice as finely as you have the patience for - minced to rough cut, you decide, just don't leave them whole.

Stage3: Assemble
Start preheating the oven to 350F.

Chop or crumble the bread into half inch dice, or thereabouts. If you're starting with a big bowl, put it in there, otherwise just move it right to the baking pan.

Crumble the raw sausage over the bread. We had uncased sausage that just came in a pack like hamburger this year, but mom has used cased sausage links as well. If you favor a particular sausage, it's fine to use that flavor if it won't fight with sage, but any ol' sausage will do.

Chop the remaining onion and celery stalks. If your celery stalks were puny (from the "bag o hearts", say) add a couple more. These should be in smallish, bite sized pieces. Chop the sage leaves. If you didn't buy the mushrooms pre-sliced and want to use them, slice or quarter those. Spread the onion, celery, sage, (mushrooms), and giblets over the bread and sausage. Sprinkle salt and pepper to lightly cover the surface.

Crack in the eggs, and add a little broth. Get your hands down in there and mix it thoroughly. Or be prissy and use a big spoon. I'm not totally certain how much broth to add here, but start with a half cup. (I'm pretty sure my mom mixed and layered without much broth, then poured the bulk of the broth in afterward to avoid making the mess goopy and dense.) If you've been mixing it in the gigantic bowl, transfer it to the gigantic pan.

Step 4: Bake
Level the stuffing mixture in the baking pan. If you forgot the salt and pepper earlier, add that. Pour on maybe another cup of broth - about half to all of what you made with the gizzards, strained. Bake at 350F until done, about an hour. More, if like me, you put in too much broth while mixing and got the bread all soggy. At any rate, when the place smells delicious, and the surface starts to brown, and the sausage in the center is cooked, it's done. Hopefully mom will read this and give me some insight into the broth mixing and timing, but it appears to be very fault tolerant. That's a good quality in a dish when you're juggling others where the timing is more critical.

We don't put stuffing in the turkey for many reasons, so I can't say how this would turn out if you tried that. But it's plenty delicious without turkey guts dripping on it, and easier to deal with.

Step 5: Eat!
I'm not a particular fan of onion or sage, but this is delicious stuff with not too much of either. Mom claims this isn't "gourmet", but I think otherwise. Chances are, it won't last long, and make sure to share freely.

Pack Rat

2011-11-18T22:10:00.000-08:00

It's time to pack for my Thanksgiving trip. I try to pack all carry-on because I don't like to lose my stuff. Interestingly, I just read a friend's blog on packing light and it's not surprising that we're friends - we have similar priorities on what's important to pack, after all! Still, my stuff winds up taking about twice the space hers does, I think.

A few months ago, the family decided to plan a gettogether at thanksgiving. As of a couple weeks ago, this plan hit the skids, but I'd already decided on something else for Christmas, so we're going to make it work, sort of. The plan is a little crazy.

Step 1: Getting There
We all fly into STL sunday afternoon, get 2 rental cars and head to grandma's in southern IL. The 'rents fly standby, so this may or may not go smoothly. I couldn't get a direct flight at all, so mine may or may not go smoothly.

Step 2: Grandma's House
We spend a couple days with grandma and pop. Mom has some notion that we'll cook an early Thanksgiving dinner. I hope we do because my mom is great at that particular meal. I'd say you have no idea, but you probably do if you've met my parents. They like feeding people, and mom can whip up a turkey dinner for 12 on a moment's notice. It's her superpower.

Step 3: Traveling
Dad takes rental car one back to STL, the flies back home to go to work, the thing that lets my parents fly without planning in advance.
The following day, my mom and I head out for Kansas City. If all goes well, we'll stop to see friends of mine in STL, then we'll roadtrip across the state. I'm wondering if we'll be snacking on turkey drumsticks.

These plans aren't set in stone. The options for mom are

fly back early with dad
ride with me to STL and fly back
ride with me to Kansas City and fly back that night
ride with me to Kansas City and fly back the next morning
something unknown to science.

It took rather more planning skills than we usually muster because dad flies standby and cannot miss work on wednesday, I'm flying into STL and out of MCI, mom doesn't want to get stranded somewhere, and we don't want to spend a fortune on rental cars. We don't want my dad to miss out because it's his birthday as well as Thanksgiving. (Do I have a card yet? No.) Fortunately, we figured out that a 2nd rental car would be a trivial cost (1/10th my one-way cost...) so mom and I get more time with grandma. Who sounded more disappointed than I expected that I wouldn't be there on Thanksgiving. Step 4: Thanksgiving! My good friend from high school - she of the children named for Norse gods, as opposed to my good friend from high school whose child is named for a Norse god - invited me for thanksgiving. Her other friend that I stayed with when I went to her wedding will also be there, and we got on well, so I'm looking forward to this. The bonus will be seeing her youngest boy in an awake state, and meeting the 4th boy, who they adopted last year. Mostly I know her oldest boy, who visits grandparents in SoCal. And since I'm more mobile than a family of 6, it feels like the right thing to do. Apparently her husband is good at the Thanksgiving meal too, so that will be nice. Step 5: Return Hopefully this goes smoothly. I turn in the car and get another 2-segment flight back, but get back at a reasonable hour and have a day to decompress before headed back to work. Which brings me back to Step 0: Pack I'm mostly good with the toiletries from my CO trip last month, but am halfway through the laundry (quick pause to rescue delicates from dryer...). Thankfully I just read my friend's packing list for a reminder, and have a good handle on what to take. I even baked cookies using the last of my oats, so I have room for new oats at the cookie party.

The only real trick is that my brain somehow still thinks I have a week before I need to go, but really, I'm headed to LAX at 3am on sunday. In between now and then, the handyman is coming over for 8 hours of project finishing - I will finally put the range hood up! - I'm just not sure how my focus and energy will hold out. I try to remember that if all goes badly, I should keep my charged phone and credit card close to hand and they sell toothpaste where I'm going.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving*, all. Got any good plans?

*(A much belated Canadian Thx.)

I take one, one, one cause

2011-11-11T00:11:00.000-08:00

Yay! It's 11/11/11, in both Europe and here.

It is also veterans day, or close to. The Navy SEAL Foundation just got a high efficiency rating; if you're feeling like sharing the wealth they'll use your donation efficiently.

7,000,000,000 700 & 0

2011-10-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

In order, the world's population; the number of blog posts I've written (including the precious few unpublished ones); and the number of trick or treaters at my condo. In reverse order, the comments.

[be on the lookout for autocorrect errors, posted from phone.]

My brother and I learned early the efficiency of trick-or-treating in high density housing. It's a safe bet that the house with skull and pumpkin lights will be stocked. I do not understand how people are passing up free candy. Oh well, after a dinner of bloody guts (spaghetti) it was all the Muscato and Reese's for myself. My mom reminisced about the good 'ol days when the adults brought shot glasses along for an adult treat on Halloween night. Good thing I got some costume action this weekend to avoid total disappointment :)

Wow. 700 blog posts! Roughly 160 a year until this year. Lower rate is part no energy, part not blogging as fast from the new phone and using the phone about 10x the amount I used the netbook. But I'm going to try to get back into it. It's not ideas I'm short on. Like the next one.

With the population hitting seven billion, the question of fertility limits keeps being bandied about. Usually on the same day, one can also find an article on insufficient births for replacement rates (Russia, Italy). Overblown populations are problematic, so how do we slow the growth rate? It bothers me that everyone leaps on China's One Child policy as a guide, completely overlooking the multitudes of countries that have birthrates averaging "replacement rate" which is about 2.1 kids per woman.

China's policy means that couples who are significantly wealthy can leave during childbearing years and have an extra child or two. The remaining women either give up their non-lineage-continuing daughters to orphanages, have abortion forcibly done to them, or go along and have just the one. It's a horrendous invasion. I understand the reasoning, but the reality of it is beyond troubling.

So let's look at the plentiful other examples that dont use forcible coercion. What makes a birth rate trend toward replacement rate? Women with educations and power over their own bodies. They are neither being forced to bear children (arguable with restrictions to abortion) nor forced to give up or abort children, they (we) just choose how many kids to have. Some have a lot, some have none, but when left to make their own choices, most women don't have the 8-10 common a mere 2-3 generations ago.

The other thing that turns the tide is having a reasonable expectation that your children will live to adulthood. That means sanitation, education, vaccination, antibiotics, and clean food and water. It means girls get feminine hygiene products so they aren't barred from being at school for one week/month after puberty. It means women have access to birth control and both the legal and social power to enforce the use of birth control with male partners.

I'm not totally sure how all this plays out when in my own country my ability to control my own reproduction is under constant attack. Here's one clue: abortions don't have rights, women have rights. Or rather should have rights. But that aside, investigations show that on average the more educated a mom is, the healthier her children are. Where they've introduced TV into rural areas of India, wife beating drastically decreases (either because they see other ways of communicating or because they have something to occupy free time has not been determined).

Cultural expectations do play into birth rate. Individual choice most often conforms to cultural norms, so it's not a decision made in isolation, and social/political pressure can raise and lower birthrates. There are cultures still where birth rate is tied strongly to women's status. They may not easily trend the birth rate to 2, but my bet is that 3-5 would be where they settle down. We went from 8 child families to 2 child families in about 2 generations. If we can empower women worldwide, our overpopulation problem will almost certainly cease to grow too fast within 50 years. Fewer children per family will almost certainly reduce the desire to support participating in armed conflicts. Just value women, provide access to birth control, and support our decisions.

Lessons Learned

2011-10-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

There are a LOT of TV crime, law, and police dramas on TV. I particularly like Bones. Even given that I'm usually rooting for the authorities to find the bad guy, here's what I've learned from watching these shows.

Never, ever, ever cooperate with the police prior to legal assistance. Not if you're innocent, not if you're guilty, not anything. Name, rank, serial number, get a lawyer.
Be careful about eating or drinking things they give you. Or touching anything, really. OTOH, if they don't give you a bathroom break, just pee in your pants, even if it does give them DNA.
If someone shows up at your house citing a bunch of random letters, don't let them in. In fact, don't let the police into your home; don't let them inspect your car. They get a warrant or they don't have access. Period.

I've got some philisophical musings about the level of trust in local police to the level of justice seen as it translates to vigilante justice and sermons on hellfire, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

What's your favorite cop/law/detecting show and why? I like Bones because they do a pretty good job with the science, the chemistry between the characters is excellent, it consistently holds my attention, they do good layering/mirroring in major/minor plots and character arcs, I like the writing, and I like the characters. I should probably not watch as much of it during dinner as I do, though.

Indecision

2011-10-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

I've been dithering mightily about the upcoming weekend. There's a Cued Speech Intructors class I want to take as a refresher but I was making up all kinds of excuses. I finally decided, bought tickets, got friday off work, and I guess I'm going. It would have been cheaper if I'd booked everything when I'd first decided to go. Because I'd decided about 90%, and I'm not sure why the last 10% was so hard. So my halloween costume will be mostly about dressing in black and orange, I think.

Three good things from today:
Met up with friends at an OC Oktoberfest and had a good chat. I snuck in some cookies I made yesterday because I wanted a second opinion on them. They didn't work out as expected and my expectations were getting in the way of my judgement, well that and I overcooked nearly all of them. Turns out that they were ok. I may have to try them again.

Was able to make my reservations online for a reasonable price. I've learned that direct flights trump aggravating airport security for me.

Traffic was actually pretty tame today. I was able to maintain cruising speed from home to Alvarado St on the freeway headed out. Even then, it didn't slow much. Coming home, I scooted over to the coast and drove up Malibu. I didn't get a sunset due to the marine layer, but climbing over the mountains into my valley, I got to see the abrupt top of the marine layer nestling into the hills and it was really interesting. I debated stopping for a picture, but I'd just passed 5 cars and it seemed rude to stop. (They were really slow cars going uphill.)

Whatever, Nevermind

2011-09-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana's album that launched the grunge Seattle rock scene nationwide. I was sort of a college freshman when that happened. Sort of because I got relentlessly ill my freshman year which led into depression. I can tell you firsthand that MIT is impossible if you're sleeping 13 hours a day. I took that next fall semester off to get medicated and remotivate myself by working at Taco Bell where I made origami out of the wrappers and used them to decorate the drive thru. My freshman advisor Alice was the best advisor ever and got me a third term as a freshman. So when I returned to school in the fall, I still had her as my advisor, I integrated seamlessly into the next year's cohort, and got a third term on pass/no record to use for sorting myself out.

Which is to say it was also a great time to discover Nirvana's signature music. I have a clear image still of the first time I heard it played directly from a CD. It was one of my few trips to visit a friend at college in MN. She had been my best friend in late elementary school and we kept up but not well. The off term gave me a chance to see her at college - now a senior living off campus in southern MN and still cooler than me. I remember the big entertainment center in the living room that housed her stereo as she showed off her new album.

I don't remember if there was anyone else with us. I don't remember if I even liked it right away or if the memory just stuck because I was hanging with my cool friend, feeling like all that for being in on a new thing for once. My other strong memory is also tied to off campus housing, but it was back out in Boston, rocking out to Smells Like Teen Spirit at an older alum's party. That may also have been the time I learned how random and inane the words if the chorus were. SLTS was definitely a song I liked more before I learned the words - which puts it in large and comfortable company - yet I retain a strong attchment to it even today.

I'm not the only one. I hear the web is filling up with remembrances today. The local station KROQ has at least one Nirvana song on rotation every day, from my observations of their playlist. One has to wonder if they'd still be mythic had Kurt Cobain stuck around - or if even more greatness would have come our way. The eternal question from lives cut short. Since I still feel the music mire than hear it, I suspect the latter. It's a good day to reflect on the awe and mourning inherent in the anniversary of Nevermind. Go now, and listen to some music that moves you.

Ask, Tell

2011-09-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

The repeal of "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" is today! This means that gay/lesbian members of the military can now legally serve their country as a soldier or sailor, airman, guard, or marine. This is a big damn deal.

Almost 20 years ago, DADT was supposed to help service members because it removed the question of sexuality from the intake forms. Despite the fact that recruiters heavily encourage new recruits to lie on the intake forms for various reasons (primarily because (a) they know how bureaucracies work and (b) they need their numbers) a service member can be dishonorably discharged if those lies are brought to light. So DADT meant that new recruits didn't have to lie outright on a signed statement that could be used against them. Progress, right?

Well... kinda. Because people still got kicked out of the US armed services for being gay - and still got dishonorable discharges for being gay rather than something more dignified that allowed their service records to speak for them. It also meant that they didn't get the pension or other similar benefits provided for years of service to others. The witch hunt was still going on, and going on strong.

It's my hope today that the military brass will realize that this big damn deal for society and justice really isn't a big deal for them. Their soldiers will keep fighting and marching and wearing crisp uniforms with short hair. Where it causes dissention in the ranks, the ranks will get over it. Here's hoping the witch hunt stops, today. We all know that people can be discriminated against in subtle ways, and no doubt that will still happen. But here's hoping that not only will it happen less, but without the legal threats hanging over the gay service members, they will have more legal recourse, more allies, and a fighting chance to ride through the drama and focus on business.

Congratulations to all the gay and lesbian service members who can now serve openly. To all their friends and colleagues, please remember to stand proudly with them. We're all on the same side, it turns out.

[For celebratory reading, Suz Brockmann has a short Navy SEAL love story, available by Ebook, "When Tony met Adam" available for your favorite ereader.]

Basics

2011-08-29T23:54:00.001-07:00

Happiness post, long overdue.
Previous post was entirely handled from my iPhone. I was able to easily download and use the appropriate apps. And I played with some editing features to mask out the background detritus and punch up some color.

Texas finally sent us some summer heat! Turns out that I'm not slow at entering a pool if I've been basking in the sun for a half hour in 99•F heat. And sunbathing is actually *doing something* even if it is remarkably like napping in the condo. I'm making vitamin D! And after four weekends of basking, my tan areas don't readily burn now. They either tan or freckle. And my freckles make me smile.

Recently renewed my gym training credits. Still cost a lot but not as much as it could have. I should be set for another year. I like not thinking at the gym; so much better for me to show up and do what I'm told. My other gym activity, the dancing, does make me think, but it's different thinking than I'm used to, being primarily about physical learning. This latest dance sequence took me three classes to get all the moves learned, rather than the usual two, but was quite satisfying. And cardio inducing.

Money Money Money

2011-08-29T22:59:00.001-07:00

My brother cracks me up. In his current sales job, he has an assistant. He pretty much works all the time on weekdays. A couple weeks ago he wanted to take a day off and asked his assistant to handle everything that day. To avoid being *that boss* who starts taking off for golf and dumping the work on the assistant, he gave her a cash bonus. Then, he went insane.

He explained to me that the payoff had been delayed because the vault wasn't open at the bank. I wondered why he needed vault access - just how big was this one day bonus? Yeah, it is during one of his best quarters ever but c'mon.

Turns out he was looking for $500. In ones.

Then he labeled up a lunchbox.

Hrm... How to arrange?

First arrangement is the classic flat stacks.

But my favorite is vertically stacked bills all in one row.

He says his assistant both loved and hated it - rightfully so because it is a little evil to give out 500 dollars in ones. But it's also hilarious. And the FedEx guy keeps asking if she's got her moneybox with her because he perpetually needs the change. I'm willing to bet this isn't a bonus she's ever likely to forget.

Trader Joe's Pasta Recipe

2011-08-25T18:09:00.000-07:00

This tastes amazingly delicious for very little effort. Buy a hard avocado once a week, and 3-9 days later, you'll have a perfectly ripe avocado and a new hard avocado. Aside from that, everything else in this recipe can live nearly forever in your pantry or fridge. Asterisks are for notes at the end for my helpful hints.

Trader Joe's Pasta Recipe (all ingredients available at or speciality of TJ's)
Serves 1***, from the kitchen of Cranky Otter

Ingredients:
TJ's Lemon Pepper Pappardelle - 1/4 package, boiled in salted water to desired doneness.
TJ's Grapeseed oil - 1 glug (t to T as desired)
TJ's Olive Tapenade, 1T. or Marinated Artichokes, 2-3 segments, chopped
Dorot frozen garlic cube
Avocado, 1/3*, chopped
TJ's pine nuts, 1-2T
TJ's shredded parmesan cheese**, small handful
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Can be made in the pasta pot after boiling if one pot cooking is desired. Otherwise, while pasta is cooking, put a glug of oil in a shallow pan. Add the pine nuts and coat with oil. Add frozen garlic cube and stir to unfreeze. Add in the avocado and olive tapenade (or chopped artichoke). Stir until heated through and pasta is done. Drain pasta and toss with warm ingredients in pan. It's ok if some of the pasta water gets transferred - just cook until it boils off.

Transfer to plate and sprinkle with shredded parmesan**. Enjoy!

*Note 1:
To get 1/3 of an avocado, slice it like a mango: put the stem end up, place a finger over the stem, then slice down at the edge of the finger.
This leaves an easily refrigeratable portion with seed still in place. Doing this on either side slices off about a third on either side and leaves about a third surrounding the seed. Instead of having to whack at the seed with a butcher knife to remove it, after slicing off either side which exposes a little of the seed, merely slice out the stem with a shallow v cut, peel the middle section, and slice or peel it off the seed.

**Note 2:
Keep shredded cheese in the freezer; when needed for topping, it's then always at the ready. To have very hot food, add frozen cheese before removing from pan and keep covered for about 30 sec to heat it up. To make freshly cooked food the ideal temperature for immediate eating, toss the frozen cheese right on the serving. As it gets stirred in, the food cools to edible temperature as the cheese melts. I also use this trick with frozen peas or corn - but only one is left unheated if using all the options.

***Note 3
Easily scale this dish up to 4 servings (whole package of pasta) by roughly doubling the oil and nuts, tripling the olives or artichokes, using the whole avocado, and more handsfuls of cheese.

Cheap Shot

2011-08-24T21:41:00.000-07:00

I finally got my giant flat-screen LCD HD TV hung up on the pivoting bracket. Switching TVs necessitated a new cable box and I decided to spend the $5/month extra fee to get the DVR capability. Now, like TiVo, I can record shows and watch them later, while fast forwarding through the boring bits. I've found that I'm more willing to try unknown shows if I can record them and check them out later. (Latest excuse for not blogging...)

In such a manner, I recorded the second episode of "Top Shot", which pits sharpshooters against each other (but not on opposite sides of the barrel) in various shooting contests: sharpshooting, speed shooting, varied weaponry, etc... It looked like an interesting way to see some entertaining "Old West Exhibition" style shooting and get an overview of modern weaponry. It turned out to be not only a lot of bullshit, but a lot of sexist bullshit. You want an example of how women are drummed out of boys-club experiences? Watch Top Shot. Scratch that; I can't recommend it.

Admittedly, I didn't see the first episode, I just know that it ended with one of the two women going home. I caught the second episode that ended with the second of the two women going home. If pressed, the producers could hardly have picked an elimination exercise more likely to get women kicked off. Apparently in the first episode, they did individual shooting and the top 8 got on "team blue" and the bottom 8 got on "team red". Then they pitted the teams against each other. The loosing team, individually votes in front of everyone who they want to kick off. The top two vote getters are pitted against each other in a shoot off. On the surface, it's fair. In practice? Anything but.

When you have 7 guys against 1 woman who are asked to pick their team, and BOTH teams give the lame "I don't think she's strong enough" excuse, that's blatant sexist bullshit. The lady I saw was deadly accurate when she shot, and was no faster or slower than any of the guys when doing the paltry obstacle course. You're not carrying 100 pounds through miles of quicksand folks, you're running 20 yards through dirt. Anyone, man, woman, girl, boy, in any reasonable shape would be "strong enough" to be competitive in these challenges.

I also have to admit I don't like elimination challenges that start by joining competitors into "teams", forcing a false dependence and comraderie that will have to be shattered as soon as the bonds are formed. I find it cruel rather than entertaining. I find that the people perceived as strangest are kicked off first independent of talent, then the strongest are drummed off when their threat level starts getting up, then the winner is the most conniving of those with the mediocre skills. I can tolerate the pair challenges in Project Runway or Design Star because the pairings only last one challenge and part of what they're screening for is the ability to work with difficult divas. Here, they're just looking for ways to torture the contestants and get off easy in setting up challenges.

Back to my complaints about Top Shot specifically. Admittedly, I didn't listen to most of the bullshit blather when the "team" discussed who they were going to kick off. But from watching the team interaction during the practices and challenges, I wouldn't have picked either of the ones they chose to drum off. For one, the woman was a SWAT instructor, current police sargeant, and former deployed Army. She has shot things, things that matter. They kept playing up how one of the guys was a former SEAL, but had she been a man, she'd have been ranked second. But being a woman, they majority good ol boys voted her off from the first shot. Frankly, I was stunned. Although, I could kind of see why they picked the guy - he was self taught and had no official shooting credentials, has awkward form and isn't particularly precise. He's an enthusiastic puppy who likes to shoot shit in the yard.

Now for the single and only reason that she's a woman, they've picked off as "weakest link" someone who would have been *celebrated* as among the most valuable had she been a man. And it was allowed. Because they didn't need to give good reasons, logical reasons, or fair reasons, they just had to have enough boys that thought women couldn't hack it and it only took 3. Not even a majority.

I wish I could say she blew through the competition and came out victorious but she did muck up the elimination challenge. In practice, she was at or near every bullseye, and clearly excelled in accuracy. She was informed that it would be a speed competition and given some pointers for being speedier. When it came down to it, she didn't take to the pointers and she didn't shoot fast enough. But looking into that specific challenge, I can see why. The challenge was a "friend/foe" shooting gallery, and she's spent the last 15+ years of her life learning that it's better not to shoot a foe than to shoot a friend. The point calculus due to her background is between "shoot any friend and you lose" and "a friend shot is 10X as bad as a foe shot". Given a choice between a bad shot and no shot, she won't shoot.

The shooting setup was blue and red lightbulbs on a rotating rack. There was 10 seconds for each of 6 rows of bulbs, and the contestants had to shoot as many red bulbs as possible, and they probably put in around 30. The scoring, however, was red=+1, blue= -1. I'm almost certain that her training made her so reluctant to shoot foes that she undershot significantly for fear of the -1, which wasn't that big a deal. To call in another TV analogy, in the charming "Suits", an excellent test taker is counseling a testing-phobic co-worker on test taking strategy. "You're so worried about the trick questions that you overthink the easy questions. Even if you miss all the trick questions, there aren't so many that losing them would cause you to do worse than you're doing now by overthinking the easy ones." It was exactly the same situation here. She was so concerned about not hitting the blue lights that she didn't hit the red ones either because she didn't shoot fast enough. It was painful. The only reason I think the contest in itself was fair is because the light bulbs were small enough to demand accuracy, and they were really at the limit of what quick-draw-boy was capable of, based on his practice sessions. But he was more flexible, focused on speed, and didn't let the fact that he hit "friend" targets slow him down.

It makes me wonder what the score would have been if "friend" targets were -10? With the scores from above, he still would have won. But if he had known that blue lights were -10 instead of -1, would have have made the same number of red shots? If she had had more time to digest the fact that "-1 for foe", the last instruction given before starting, is not a flat out lose, would she have shot faster? In the end, she choked and got eliminated, but by damn, she didn't hit any friendly blue lights. But had she been a man with the same qualifications, she never would have been in that elimination round to begin with.

Now how would this contest be less sexist? First, until women have about 30% representation, they're seen as "generic woman representing all women" rather than as individuals. I don't expect male dominated endeavors to solicit 50/50 men/women for shows like this, but I do expect them to make more than a token effort at recruiting enough women that they'll get a good selection for the final cut. They needed 5-6 women, at least, for the 16 final numbers to reduce the chance that all the women will be cut before they can make themselves known. Because the guys who voted the ladies off? Did not distinguish themselves in any way. Just by virtue of being a boy they were "proven" and not subjected to excess, skewed, unwarranted scrutiny and bullshit assumptions. Having at least 5-6 women means that at least one woman will make it to the top 50% - because all these shooters are good enough that the wins and loses are nothing more than a weighted random number generator and therefore mostly probabilistic - and by the third show, some guys are going to piss off some other guys sufficiently to overcome the "she doesn't have a dick" factor.

Were I to do this show, I would, as stated, do better recruiting of women so that the final field had enough women to be representative. Then, I would change how the eliminations were handled. Even keeping the team situation, I would make sure that no woman wound up alone against 7 guy "teammates". Further, the first 2-4 elimination challenges would be random draw - only the team could vote for one person with immunity to the draw. That way, the top vote getter would *not* be eliminated rather than the reverse. Either that, or have some way of scoring individuals within the team events and taking the lowest two scorers, and make sure those scores can be fairly obtained by both sexes. (Holding a rifle at arms length for several minutes, for instance, would not be a fair screen. Using a gun too small for one's hand might be...) After those first couple of eliminations, then they could switch to some other method, like voting for who goes, but not until they have a chance to assess the other people through enough actual challenges so that there's a chance that the /voters will be assessing skill and risk to themselves rather than on surface differences. I would make the first two challenges less physical, more about mental and shooting acuity, so that the assumption that women "won't be strong enough for the team" doesn't get a foothold in the thinking. Lastly, I'd spend a lot more time talking about guns, targets, ammo, and shots, and spend a lot less time on all the bullshit playground/MTV "reality" show bullying and pop psychology. These people are there to shoot, let them shoot. If I hadn't DVR'd this show, I'd never have even made it to the competition, it was that awful.

Interestingly, there weren't that many men of color, and one was the former Navy SEAL (now football coach) installed himself as "leader" of the blue "team". It pissed me off that he voted to shuffle off the woman, but he's a man's man all the way, so it's not surprising. I do kind of wonder how the black men will fare now that the women are gone. The excuse to get rid of this guy will be that he's an overbearing ass, which will be true, but he's game, into winning, and as good a shot as the rest, and I think he'll either be ousted because he's good and therefore a threat or because he's black and therefore different, but the underlying reason won't be deconfoundable. If one of the black guys makes it to the top 4, I'll be convinced that their color wasn't a factor. But since I'm never watching the show again, I'll never know.

I Have a College Pal

2011-08-11T12:39:00.000-07:00

Another reason for not blogging, which should be a reason *for* blogging is an absolute embarrassment of visiting friends.

A couple weekends ago, a friend flew through LAX on his way between South Korea and Boston. Being a good friend, I hauled his jet-lagged ass over to the open street vendor section of the X-Games and made him wander around in the heat. It was worth it for the "Shark Week" foam had and 3 samples of Loctite, along with my awesome record. Yes, I have and X-Games record. Ok, it's made of vinyl and has dripped paint spun on it, but I love it. In my defense, I bought him wine and food afterward.

The next day, other friends were in town. I'd flow to their wedding but haven't seen them since around the existence of their oldest child. She's now 5 (or maybe near 6) and has a younger brother. Cripes! We had a fun, low key time hanging out in Pasadena, his old stomping grounds from back before the urban renewal efforts. I hadn't noticed the pawn shop and adult store a ways down Colorado as being anything odd until he pointed out that they're the last of a dying breed in that part of town. Huh. Their kids were well behaved at dinner despite having a long day and being 3 hours time shifted, so we also had a good time. And wine. It was good wine, and it was good to see them doing their thing.

This last weekend, I spent a couple days up at Yosemite. It took about 3 hours longer to drive there than I'd expected, but I went anyway and was glad of it. I met up with a friend whose wedding I was actually in (chorus), but had only kept track of via her/their christmas updates to mutual friends. But she's on Facebook and now lives not far from my parents, so I saw them briefly in March and they invited me to hang with them at a cabin in Yosemite. Excuse me. The Cabin. It was an awesome Cabin. It had a spare cabin. Between The Cabin and the bunkhouse there were 5 bedrooms and two bunk areas and enough space in the common area. And enough space was needed because there were about a dozen adults and half again as many offspring. My friend and her hubby have 4.

I managed to squeak in just after midnight on thursday and bunk in the loft. We got up early on friday and rented rafts for cruising down the Merced river and seeing the big sights. (I need a less cumbersome way to upload pictures, or there would be some here.) The great thing about having kids along is that I can say "we swam in the river" without actually having to get in over my knees, myself. Because that is one frigid river. But it was great fun to raft it and get pictures of us kicking around in front of internationally beloved scenery.

To top that off, we spent a couple hours swimming in a nearby lake (in this case, I was full in the warmer water) and jumping on and off the bouncy diving rafts provided. The we cooked s'mores, took in the stars, played games, and generally had a very fine time. I tagged along the next day to see Bridal Veil Falls and the Tunnel View, then we split ways - them to the San Fran area and me to the Glacier Point overlook and Giant Sequoia grove before heading back to LA. I'm so glad I got to hang out with my friends and their gigantic extended family and have such a pleasant time.

And that I got to drive mostly in the dark when most of the traffic has gone home so I can cruise at my desired pace without someone blocking my way for no good reason. Yet again I made it up the grapevine without hardly any encouragement to my car at all. It's favorite thing to do is cruise fast up hill apparently. Even after I'd treated it to about 5 hours of switchbacks next to cliffs and wildfires and campers.

Next up I need to visit my grandma, and I've been trying to see a friend in Oregon but the air fares are kinda pricey. I'd also like to kick back over to Boston, but didn't get to go for work, so have to make other plans. Anyone coming to LA sometime soon, sing out. I have couch space (with real sheets) and like excuses to show my friends around.

[Title is the start of a Moxy Fruvous song, known to all Fruheads. Imagine I used two umlauts.]

I Shimmer on Horizons

2011-08-10T22:37:00.000-07:00

Still working on the Thailand update, no longer willing to put it on the critical path to getting other blog entries out. It's been almost a month since my last ~~drink~~ post and I'm full of excuses. I'm feeling much better, but that means I'm doing other stuff. But not enough other stuff that shouldn't be tossing up blog posts especially since I've composed about 40 in my head.

This one is about gold. I just heard on the news that gold hit $1800/t.oz. They did mention that back in the early '80s, the then high $800 price would inflation adjust to $2400, so it's not an all time high as such, but it's damn close. It was around $300/t.oz when I started paying attention. It didn't do much for a while, but did trend steadily up. Shortly into Bush's second term, it angled up fairly sharply. Prices fell again after Obama's election, but then took off even more steeply than before. Last week, I think the slope up is higher than it has ever been.

People buy gold when they think their reserve currency isn't going to hold value. The US$ is the reserve currency of choice. Many countries also peg their currency to the dollar - their exchange rate changes as ours does. Only the fact that there doesn't seem to be a strong contender for runner up reserve currency (yet) makes me think we'll be able to stick it out and squeak through the rest of the recession without falling from the top of the heap. We've toppled lots already, it's just that we've taken everyone else out with us, for the most part, so the relative positions aren't that different. So what the high gold price says to me is that people are dumping dollars for bars. This is not good news. Anyone holding gold will be able to jump into a different currency.

Another point in our favor is that we're currently "too big to fail". The countries with money pegged to our currency would prefer we don't fail. At this time, China doesn't want the top currency slot as it makes their goods too expensive (and for a million reasons I don't know). But people buying up gold, and perhaps deciding not to track our currency is bad news for us.

I'm still not totally clear on the ramifications of countries "defaulting". Iceland's banking economy crashed, but people still live there, in houses, and go to work like they always did so how is that different from any other place with high unemployment in this economy? I can't quite wrap my mind around it. But what is clear to me is that when the US economy tanks, there's significant collateral damage. And we have bullies in congress willing to throw our economy in the toilet to avoid asking people with money to part with some of it. It's a line that I don't think has ever been crossed before - willing to risk default at all, regardless of the stakes or conditions. And it's a batshit crazy thing to do.

By proving that we've got batshit crazy folks holding our economy hostage, especially to avoid taxing wealthy folks, we may have hit the tipping point in whether or not people are willing to ride this bad economy out with us to the "not so much" side of the equation. But lacking better options, they buy gold and hope someone grows up and starts talking sense. We can argue all day about what wealthy is or isn't, but for me it's someone who has a steady income that is substantially more than they need, and enough to get through several minor and a few major disasters. If you're one car accident or bad cold away from financial ruin, you're not wealthy. And given the lack of health care coverage, even for many "covered" folks, more of us are in that situation than not so probably some people reading this are thinking "I would really rather not pay more taxes right now" and I'm thinking you're not who I'd be taxing.

As I understand it, most known civilizations fall when they've either consumed all their protective resources (trees on Easter Island and Haiti) or the rich get so rich that they no longer give a damn what the peasants think. The strongest civilizations have a middle class that is educated and economically well off (although everyone can't be "wealthy") and enough resources to care for the truly poor and unfortunate. What I didn't even really ponder much until recently is that with the size and relatively recent mining of resources, the US isn't "great" just because we're "free". It's because we have so many natural resources that we haven't destroyed all our options yet and had to pare back. Surely the democracy thing isn't nothing, but we can't keep treating mining the country and expecting more to be around the next corner. Mining isn't like harvesting. Some stuff won't grow back.

And this ramble has gone a bit off topic because I'm out of practice with blogging coherently. At any rate, I look at the gold price and I'm pretty afraid of what it says. The only thing that keeps that fear in check is that we're too big to fail right now. That and burying my head in romance novels. Which is where my head is going right now. Feel free to school me in the comments. To quote a favored blogger, Ta-Nahisi Coates, talk to me like I'm stupid.

[Quote from Shimmer by The Throwing Muses which includes a line about being dressed in shiny gold. I can listen to that song as often as 3 year olds can watch The Lion King video.]

Carmageddon that wasn't

2011-07-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

The 405 is back open almost a full day ahead of schedule, and the LA freeways were almost never this clear. However they're doing this shutdown again in about a year. What I hope people remember is that it wasn't Carmageddon because the publicity for this event was aces. Everyone knew, everyone tried to plan around it where possible, and people stayed the heck out of the way.

Humans have a problem processing non-events as successes. So I expect next year, someone will say "well, it wasn't such a big deal last year, so why should we spend all this money and time putting up extra freeway signs in LA AND San Fran for a month ahead of time?" And next time will be the Carmageddon this year wasn't. Because this year was successful and someone with signatory power will only remember that this year wasn't as bad as it could have been and forget all the work it took to make sure it wasn't as bad as it could have been. As someone who has spent 45 minutes on a saturday afternoon traversing that 10 mile long closed section of freeway, I can attest that it is a highly popular route.

Thankfully for me, all my traveling was done last week: Trips to LAX and San Diego via that section of freeway, and SanFran via Burbank.

Editing

2011-06-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

I'm home from my grand Thailand adventure with my friend and am editing the photos. I'm also somewhat narcoleptic from jet lag.

Yay Cathay!

2011-05-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

Still not in Bangkok. Delta flight yesterday couldn't retract the landing gear, so we took a scenic tour of the local valleys and channel islands while testing it then dumping fuel to land. The pilot and crew handled everything quite well, but the rebooking was a clusterfuck. Got booked onto a special make up flight today and it too was canceled. Thanks to mobile phone technology I could wait in line while checking my options. Turns out I could get a Cathay Pacific flight to get in a half hour behind the only delta flight, and since I hadn't moved in line in 2 hours, I booked the alternate. There was a small kerfuffle trying to get American, the booking company, to give CP my flight number but Hee Kim was super sweet and helped me out and I am at the bar near the gate sipping (gulping) my gin and tonic. No guarantees but I'm hoping for both better results and better on plane entertainment options. If all goes well I'll make my BKK connection to Chaing Mai after a bit of a nap.

I'm out one vacation day, one night in Bangkok, and the extra shuttle money but have some pictures of the local landscape, and talked with any number of nice folks yesterday, and found that taking anti-motionsick meds helps my tolerance of imperfect plane comfort. And people talked up Chiang Mai left and right, so I have modest but good hopes for the rest of the trip. Even if I wind up needing a dewormer.

Memories, frontside

2011-05-26T23:11:00.000-07:00

I'm going to Thailand, Thailand; Bangkok and Chiang Mai, I'm going to Thailand. (to tune of "Graceland" by P. Simon)

I've been distracted by facebook, medical issues, and re-reading books about Navy SEALs. The health stuff seems mostly to center around having a very persistent UTI and no vitamin D or B12 in my system to speak of. Everything else is pretty much fine, so my fears of wearing slowly away to nothing appear to be both fixable and unfounded.

For the last couple days I've been in a packing frenzy (see sidebar for twitter link to prelim layout of clothes to take). I managed to, ahem, only pack 6 pairs of pants, 3 dresses, 1 skirt, and roughly 2 dozen shirts (selection of sleeve less, short sleeved, and long sleeved, some of which layer), some sandals and appropriate undergarments. For a 9 day trip. Yep. Fortunately these are all the thinnest pieces of clothing I own so they don't weigh a lot or take up space. If I took that many things to Minnesota midwinter they couldn't get the plane off the ground.

The trickiest part is packing all my meds. My regular stuff is straightforward and no different from the last 3 times I packed it. But now I am on one antibiotic for the infection that the doc *finally* found and which seems to be helping somewhat. I have another antibiotic for just in case I get sick. I also have prescription vitamin D in 50,000 IU size, prescription anti-motion-sick meds, prescription sleep aids.... I asked my friend if I should be worried about traveling with this stuff to Thailand but she reminded me that Thailand is where you go to GET all the illegal stuff so not to worry about taking normal stuff in. Oh, right. D'oh. At any rate I had to pack the emergency purse stash, the carry on stash and the check through stash (like tylenol) and sorting that out was kind of a pain.

My clothes, shoes, toiletries are all done though. All I have left is to finish charging my electronics, pack the cords, figure out if I'm taking any other stuff for entertainment, then make sure I have my comfort items and food and I'm done. the flight is at 1 but the shuttle comes at 8am, god help me. I think the key for the food is to not overpack, but I'm not sure I can manage that; I've hit my decision making capacity for the week.

I'm ready to sleep now. This is one thing where I can just keep plugging away until it's done because now I think everything is just a random task to do. Hope you all have a safe and pleasing Memorial holiday. My favorite was still picnicking at the Old North Bridge with some sandwiches Martha Stewart explained how to make and watermelon and a batch of friends. One of whom is going to Thailand with me. Yay! Thanks for letting me tag along on your visit!

Women in History

2011-05-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

Been running into oddball "women are screwed over by history" stories this week.

XKCD on female mathematcians you've probably never heard of (I hadn't heard about one of them in the comic until a friend tweeted recently that she was his favorite and I checked her out on Wikipedia. Crazy.)

There's a paper where men can't handle the idea of powerful women, so they edited out Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the recent situation room photo. Seriously, this shit happened in 2011.

Lastly, if you think 72 female virgins are awaiting you in the afterlife, my mom asks that you question pretty hard their motivation for waiting for you to martyr yourself. Surely you're not their idea of heaven.

Worse Before Better

2011-05-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

I'll post some pictures soon, but one of my good things for this week was (finally) putting up the closet system across my bedroom wall. My organizer helped me start it out and get through all the tings that needed two people - plus she's great at cutting in, so we even got the painting done. It was very chaotic looking room for a while though, with all my stuff strewn everywhere, boxes being emptied, and whatnot. Whew! It's pretty impressive though. I'm also happy with the paint color I chose. It looks like suede. Thanks again to the customer at the checkout counter for letting me run off with her paint chip.

I managed to fly up to San Jose and back for a vendor audit without having to go through a mugging machine at the airport. I did get a swipe test for explosives - and passed - which made me wonder what would happen if I had been doing some target practice. But the travel was totally incident free, no stress at all, and our hotel was nice.

I spoke to both my mom and grandma today and had good conversations with both. Apparently my grandma's brother-in-law is only 6 months younger than her and they have an unofficial contest to see who lasts the longest. She claims that him being Italian gives him an edge, but I think that at age 94, it's even odds. It's probably more tied to the lifespan of their spouses at this point. Hopefully Pop will continue to do well enough with regular "oil changes" (aka, a pint transfusion every couple weeks).

That makes three. I'm going to try and do some more of these happiness posts, interspersed with the topical posts. Upcoming are grandma's peanut brittle, my dining room furniture, and the closet install.

High Speed Speed Bumps

2011-05-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

Switching to more quotidian trials, I'm a little perplexed by the method CalTrans is using to "improve" the freeway I commute on. Each night, they tear up a small patch of freeway and replace it with a concrete patch/repair that is slightly lumpy and dragged with traction lines so squiggly, I'm just waiting for them to take out an unwary motorcyclist. They're only working on one lane at a time, which I get - they're leaving the others open for the lighter night traffic. What I don't get is why they're doing non-consecutive patches. These patches are roughly the length of half a car to to 3 cars, with similarly sized unpatched areas in between. If the patches were a little smoother and didn't jiggle my treads sideways, I would still be curious, but I might not be as concerned. As it stands, I find this process concerning.

See what I mean? That's odd, no?

I'm not given any indication that they plan to fix the shoulder where it has literally crumbled into rubble. Certainly the shoulder isn't the priority, but there are places where it's pretty bad. Perhaps they will do that last? One can only hope. Given that they fixed the end of the nearby offramp that *didn't* cause my visiting friend to clutch the side of the car in terror and scream "Oh my god, It's not even a road!" when we exited there, I'm thinking my hope could be misplaced.

Doubling back on the access road, one can see the patchwork effect in the far lane, no patches in lanes 2,3 and the patches in lanes 4,5 hidden by the hill. Crazy, though, right?

The only time I've ever driven over something similar was when the U of M was testing road paints near the VoTech. I'm impatiently waiting for the whole plan to be revealed - will they eventually also fix the shoulder? Will they pave over the whole shooting match? Will they fill in the gaps? Will they resurface it? I have no idea. But there are several dozen people employed to do this every night for the forseeable future, and they finally got to the really bad spot in the #3 lane this week so who knows what the endgame is? But for now, I'm going to have to tag this CalTransFail.

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Only related because it includes a partial picture of my car, my odometer hit a fun number this weekend after my post carwash spin up Mullholland. It was chance that the trip odometer corresponded.

Better Stuff to Do

2011-05-02T23:51:00.001-07:00

What a day of conflicting emotions. I woke to the news that Obama had ordered the takedown of Osama bin Laden, who took a double tap to the noggin. I both felt satisfaction in a job well done and sensed that I wouldn't be feeling giddy. (That said, go watch the Daily Show from today.) I have to admit to being pleased that the Navy SEALs were the team to do it - having the most affection for that group of the JSOC, despite being acquainted with a few of them. (My new emotion is surprise that Google dictionary does not yet recognize "takedown", "Osama", "SEALs" or "JSOC" despite nearly total coverage of those things today. I suppose I am also relieved that it finally knows "Obama".)

There's pride in knowing that the entire operation was (1) kept quiet - no one leaked critical information that could have endangered our guys or tipped off the targets, (2) well planned, and (3) successfully executed. And that the target was a man that these guys who "live for the suck, not for the glory" could actually get some credit for killing. It's what we have them for, and I can't tell you how relieved I am that our current president knows how and when to use special forces. It makes be believe that he also knows when NOT to use them, which might be more important. In the case of Osama, I think his death was inextricably linked to our narrative of success. My stance on his demise is along the lines of "don't bait the bear".

If I'd had any energy at all on saturday, I'd have blogged about the Wedding. I still might, but suffice it to say, it was the feast day of a generation and people need these occasional spectacles. It's good for the mental health. I did spend a few minutes this weekend wondering what manner of newsworthy items would be buried under the deluge of the Royal Wedding newscaster-distract-o-tron-2011. Usually, corporations and countries take these opportunities to announce unpopular things so the news gets buried under the fold, as long as it's less marketable than the flashy event. In this case, I think Obama used the distraction strategically to reduce the risk of press leakage of this operation. Because even if it did get leaked, how could it compete with such a stunning dress? Or those crazy hats? Unless someone knew the whole story, such a rumor wouldn't be sufficiently newsworthy to overcome The Spectacle, and even then it might not fly. I was pretty impressed that someone finally used the media lull to accomplish something impressive. (Despite thinking it was the necessary thing to do, somewhat like an emergency C-section, I can't call it a good deed as such.)

Next comes some trepidation. I've been staunch anti-war-on-the-tactic-of-terrorism from the get go. Honestly, I would have been fine with going in, taking out Osama, and calling it a day. (I'm actually ok with black ops, when used IN MODERATION, by someone I trust to make an adult decision, when they know they could be called to account for what gets done, and feel it's necessary to do them anyway.) After 9/11, I could see limited engagement in Afghanistan. But Iraq? Clusterfuck from start to ~~finish~~ residual troops who may one day leave.

What I had hoped for then, was that we'd become even MORE American - more free, banding together, not being scared, willing to take a risk here and there rather than give up our hard won freedoms. Instead, I got a government spewing fearmongering nonsense for nearly a decade, and a media utterly and absolutely complicit in spreading the the fear. Instead of taking a statement from the White House and giving it in context, and making some sort of reasoned comment on it, especially with regards to how much bullshit it contained, I was being fed a steady stream of "the White house says this" soundbytes. Even from NPR, that "liberal" bastion of broadcasting. These preposterous soundbytes like "The Healthy Forests initiative is good for trees" would land in my ear and wake me up shaking with rage nearly every morning. (I only get one station in the electrical dead zone where my alarm clock lives, and it was the least worst option.) The rage was at the combination of flat out lies given out from our government echoed back, without question, comment, or analysis, by the journalists who are supposed to be critical to the point of irrationality. Since Obama got elected, the rage making is less, but now it's mostly about things that are commonly agreed to be false. At least someone points out the nekkid guy in the parade once in a while these days.

I've got a long and involved rant against the way we handle the security theater around flying and travel generally, which I'll forgo for now. But has anyone compared how difficult it is to fly these days with what we all condemned about the soviet government control on the flow of people? You can still drive around the country, but flying, or even taking the train requires an Official Government ID. Really? How many years will it be before they're making movies about the goodhearted rebels in America who require underground suppliers of forged documents to travel around the country, or smuggle deserving folks over the wall to safety, without being targeted for destruction? I'm not real thrilled with the average citizen being required to produce supplemental, official ID on demand all the time, for routine transactions. Reminds me too much of Escape from East Berlin docudramas.

So my hope for the future is that the GWOT will ramp down (and with it, can I hope that the GWOD, or global war on drugs will similarly be rescinded) the travel restrictions will ease to something less ridiculous and more effective, that we won't condone past or future torture of anyone in the name of America. That we can make decisions based on facts, not lies. That we can eject the people who keep trying to make us scared and call them out for working against the interests of the country. The biggest boogeyman of all has been removed and tossed overboard. Can we all agree that however scary the next boogeyman is, that he or she is not scarier than what we'll allow to be done in our names? Can we all agree that they are not scarier than giving up liberties for marginal illusions of safety? Can we all agree that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself?

Vitamin D and BKK

2011-04-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

My energy levels have tanked recently. I seem to have enough energy to read, but not enough for much else. A friend mentioned taking vitamin D for hand weakness, which I've started to have, and I know that if I make vitamin D via tanning I feel a lot better, so I started taking some this weekend and I've had much better daytime alertness and evening tiredness, from just a couple days of taking it.

I saw a rheumatologist this morning who actually seems interested in helping me figure out what's going on. He took a really comprehensive history and asked some very good questions. Right now, he's trying to research to figure out what tests to do. in the meantime, I'm not sure how much vitamin D I should take, but we'll see.

In the meantime, I'm really hoping I'll feel better soon because I invited myself along with my friend to Thailand. If you have any advice on which airlines are better for transpacific flights, sing out. I need to book my flight to Bangkok ASAP.

Campsite Rule

2011-04-13T21:41:00.000-07:00

I've had several things to say recently that leave a better taste in the mouth than my last bitter ranting, but am having a patch where I'm feeling a tad overwhelmed. I'm trying to remember that not every post needs to be a major production.

Tonight's update is inspired by the SWE seminar I attended. A local entrepreneur (4 'e's in that word!) gave a talk on how to network and it's the first helpful seminar on that topic I've been to. It also reminded me how important it is to keep up with the people I already have in my web and like to talk to and that would be my loyal readers here.

What I learned tonight:

Getting Started
Allow myself time and space to assess a room before joining a group. Walk around (with a small plate of food or cup of courage) and just assess what's going on. See who looks fun or interesting to talk to; see if there's a group of 2 or 3 whose body language is open and/or engaging. Don't be worried about looking like a single freak walking around by myself - and I won't now because I'll be on my assessment mission, not just going around in a 'pleasesomeoneloveme' panic.

Breaking the Ice, solo
With a group of 2, one can always ask to "cut in". It's funny and pleasant and allows them the option of saying "maybe later" if it's not a great time.
Other recommended lines that I like: "what's your all time favorite ethnic food?" "What trends do you see coming in your business?" "What do you find exciting/rewarding in your line of work?" "What got you interested in [your area of expertise]"?

Breaking the Ice, partnered
Another strategy is to attend a place with a partner, but split up for 15 or 20 minutes. You each work the room singing the praises of the other person, then get back together and approach the people again as a pair, where they're already predisposed to like you and know something about you and whom your friend has already found to be pleasant conversationalists.

Exit Strategy
Instead of running for the bar or bathroom, use the "Campsite Rule" of "Leave 'em feeling better than when you found 'em." When the time is up - and leave them wanting more, not wanting to shuck you - politely say "thank you for sharing your [experience, expertise, opinion, story], [you're a great storyteller, that was fascinating] and I really enjoyed speaking with you". And move on gracefully.

The seminar advice dovetails with something I learned from Tina Fey's interview with Terry Gross on rules of improv. "When do you join in a scene?"
"When they need you."

I really could have used this advice a month ago at the all-engineer's engineering society dinner when I couldn't seem to find anyone to speak to and felt like a freak hovering near people to see if I could break in. Now I have "permission" of sorts to hover to see if there's a place for me in someone's conversation, rather than trying to force my way in somewhere uncomfortable. Even if the first minute is uncomfortable, a few general-but-specific open questions at the tip of my tongue will help.

So what's your favorite ethnic food of all time?
Or rather, what's your favorite way of keeping up with long distance friends?

Taxes and Deadlines

2011-04-01T12:05:00.000-07:00

Got the Roth funded for 2010! Thanks again to my friend for letting me know about the income cap workaround. Because by the time I can spare enough funds for a Roth, over paycheck to paycheck, I've hit the income limits. Yeah, yeah, poor baby. But I find it pretty frustrating that after buying one of the ten cheapest condos in my county (which is now worth half of what I paid for it) I have to supplement my income with stock options to get unrestricted disposable income. (Restricted disposable income going to food and gas.)

When I check against national statistics, my income puts me in the top 20% of earners and possibly in the top 20% of households. Granted, this is national, not local, and I have always contributed to my pre-tax retirement savings, but I seriously can't imagine trying to live comfortably on half of what I make. I'd have to downgrade from my condo (rated as 'affordable housing' in the area) to the mobile homes next door or rent a room in someone's house. I'm sorry, but a single person in her late thirties, with an established carreer, with a technical degree from one of the country's top universities earning in the top 20% of earners shouldn't be feeling as lower middle class as I have. In the last year, I've started to feel more regular middle class given that I was able to hire maids and an organizer and a trainer at the gym, but that was because my company's stock skyrocketed and I sold some options and all of that money was unrestricted disposable income.

Maybe my perception is off, but shouldn't I at least feel like I *could* by a car worth more than $20K, like I *could* afford a home on my own that's bigger than my 720 sq foot 1 bedroom condo? Like I *could* hire gardeners if I bought a bigger place? I don't so much have a problem with living within my means as being upset that my objectively considerable means don't get me enough margin to save without pain, or shop in moderation without worry.

This year is different. It's the third year of my adult (whole?) life that I've had freely disposable income. I'm inclined to dispose of most of it given that my retirement savings, diversely invested in the recommended "smart" options would have done better had I shoved cash under a mattress or bought scratch lottery tickets. Playing by the rules doesn't seem to have gotten me where the rulemakers promised and I'm feeling a little bitter about that.

But at least for 2010 I was able to save money in a Roth by making a post-tax contribution to an IRA then rolling it over into the Roth, thereby utilizing the legal loophole on earnings limits. And I can afford someone else to do my taxes.

This is why I'll never be an Adult

2011-03-28T23:54:00.000-07:00

For the last 9 months or so, any piece of paper I couldn't deal with right away, for whatever reason, got stuffed into a cabinet, or a bin under the cabinet. The intention was to go through it every 3-4 weeks, get everything settled and move on. It has recently spilled elsewhere. One reason I needed a weekend to deal with taxes is digging the relevant stuff out of this stash. I think I've got most of it, and the rest I can print off the computer at work tomorrow.

Of course, now my living room looks like this:

(TBI= to be installed, aka in a box on the porch because I have enough projects to last a month of sundays.)

Fortunately, I only had a couple of late payments and they didn't lead to significant charges. One reason I could deal with the pile fairly quickly is thanks to the wisdom in "Taming the Paper Tiger" about not bringing crap into the house in the first place. I drive to my mailboxes, and strip out all the filler paper (unwanted ads, extra pages, unwanted checks, useless envelopes) and just keep the truly necessary stuff. Since most of my important stuff is set up on autopay or goes to my UPS mailbox, I open it at lunch and pay it right away if I can. Probably 90% of the delivered bulk goes straight in the trash. And 70% of it is unsolicited so "going paperless" wouldn't help much and only let me miss more deadlines at this point.

So. I pretty much have what I need to get my taxes done, submit my last $400 from my health care account to be reimbursed, and make the recipe I made up for the Trader Joe's lemon pepper pasta that I've looked for twice so far. (Boil LP pasta, toss over medium heat with 1T TJ's olive tepanade, glug of favorite cooking oil, diced 1/3 avocado, 1 Dorot frozen garlic cube, & salt until heated through.)

But it's not pretty. And this is why I'm not living up to my potential. Hopefully once I get my cabinets in place and have file drawers that aren't hidden behind a sofa, things will improve. Stay tuned but don't be holding your breath.

Last Minute Tax Advice

2011-03-27T22:45:00.000-07:00

It turns out that in 2010, one can get around income limits on ROTH donations by converting a regular IRA to a ROTH. If it's pre-tax money, you get 2 years to pay the taxes on it. A good friend clued me into this, I just have to remember to do it tomorrow... She also told me about the trick of creating an IRA with after tax money then converting it to the ROTH. So if you had a good year this year and didn't fund a ROTH yet, or think you're going to hit income limits, try this trick before March 31st.

What I don't know is if there's a $5000 limit on the Roth conversion. I assume there is, but my brother is hoping that he can convert a whole IRA account. Anyone know?

Regularly Scheduled

2011-03-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

The last two months have been a blur of visitors, visiting, Angry Birds, and reading. Most of the reading has been in the last two weeks because all the book from authors from my recent post became available. I interrupted the quite enthralling Pale Demon to read my Suz Brockmann when it showed up, then read that furiously, stopping only to go to work, nap, and have one session with my new trainer. I enjoyed the book and after a brief stint last night to finally get three stars on the pesky levels 10-8 and 10-10, meaning I've hit 3 stars on the first 13 angry birds levels, I was able to get back to the demon book.

I've said it before but it bears repeating, I really like characters who march to the tune of their own drummer, then pull other people/beings in with their drumbeat, crafting a community for themselves. The stories that are most satisfying to me have this happen, and I also think that's one of the draws of a series. Not just seeing the main character, but see who they charm, protect, draw in, or otherwise gather into the fold and how this ragtag band of misfits manages to defeat the reigning power who has grown out of control, growing up and growing together while they're at it.

I'm still cobbling my own community together here in SoCal and having some of my older friends come visit was good for the soul. Even back in MN, I managed to hook up with a college pal, braving the wrath of the almighty to hang out at their catholic church for a trivia event. (We won.) We calculated it had been 11 years since we'd seen each other, and she's up to 4 kids from the 1 I'd met. (They're whip smart too and have good manners.) My mom actually left MN before I did, having a birthday invitation to join friends at a time share in Cancun. Seeing as she left behind a couple feet of snow for Chichen Itza and the beach, I can't say I blame her!

Sometime sooon - maybe next weekend, it looks like I should go see my grandmother. Her husband is having some trouble, and we're all worried for them both. My brother found a flight for this weekend but I couldn't swing it. Plus I *really* need a weekend to get my house in order - turn in my tax paperwork, and everything else I can get done after weeks off duty. Part of me worries that Pop won't hold out and that I'll think it was crazy to prioritize tax paperwork and a very expensive, awkwardly timed flight over a visit, but I'm holding out some hope that something can be done to make him feel better. At 91 they're reluctant to do more surgery, but he was pretty vital until this latest issue, so it's not like throwing good money after bad if his quality of life will recover.

In the interim, I also have my short story from Suz, which will likely suck all of my attention until I finish. So if I can keep away from the Angry Birds, put the book down once in a while and get my taxes and projects done, it will be a good weekend.

Plugging away

2011-03-15T00:17:00.000-07:00

Apparently 'tis the season for authors I like to publish books. If you have any interest in reading stuff I recommend,

Breaking the Rules by Suzanne Brockmann is Izzy's book. I love Izzy. He sings a lot and he's irreverent and competent at his job but still kind of not fully grown up in his personal life. I've been waiting for this one. You can order a signed copy from the author if you do it by Friday. It comes with a bonus "short" story of 20,000 words. If you have the borg connection, the facebook page apparently works better for the pre-book countdown updates, but I'm still in denial about posting fb links here.

I bought and read River Marked by Patricia Briggs. I enjoyed it, it was well done (maybe too short) but the biggest news that one of the characters was wearing a Dresden Dolls T-shirt. A local dancer taught a funky dance at the evening hip hop class maybe two months ago. It went to a song that sounded like Cibo Matto meets Laurie Anderson, but until I heard the song and even sometime after that, I thought we were going to be dancing to . . . and I couldn't for the life of me remember the song. All I had was "I think it was about a marionette and it was popular in Boston when I lived there and it's sung by a woman." After paging through my visiting friend's ipod, it jogged my memory and I asked her about it and she got as far as "I think it's "something something boy" and the singer has tattooed eyebrows". "yes! That's it!' (aka I'm not crazy! but I still don't know the song). I spent a while surfing Teegan and Sarah songs not finding it. Then the day after that conversation I started reading "River Marked" and the instant I read "Dresden Dolls", put down the book and found my current grail: Coin-Operated Boy. And I'm right, the weird dance would totally go to this song.

Thank you Patricia Briggs and Dresden Dolls.

I also picked up the latest Kim Harrison Pale Demon. I read the first half dozen in the series from the library but picked this one up on the kindle and the "Hotter than Hell" anthology from the Borders closing sale. You can read excerpts from this site.

For completeness, both Catherine Mann and Virginia Kantra have new books out now or soon, respectively.

Aside from now trying to get 3 stars on my Angry Birds - NOT as obsessively as before since there's no star at stake, just, well let's call it practicing finishing things. I've been playing scrabble and surfing from the iPhone. Really, I should be sorting out my tax papers to turn in before the last minute, since I will be traveling this weekend. Maybe tomorrow. But it's early bedtime now.

Put a Bird on it

2011-03-06T21:17:00.001-08:00

My visiting friend clued me into a bit from the new show Portlandia called "Put a Bird on it" where the characters rampage through a store putting birds or bird motifs on everything to make them trendy. Like so

It was great because we went up to Santa Barbara to hang out and look at art and shops and found a lot of birds on things. We almost laughed ourselves completely out of Anthropologie which was bird-tastic. We hit total BINGO win squared when the store "Rooms & Gardens" had ACTUAL BIRDS: three chickens live in the garden behind the store! Here's one of them. They were all rather good looking chickens.

We were able to retire from browsing after that major success. We'd had the bird scavenger hunt while we killed a couple hours waiting for my current favorite place, elements on Anapamu, to open for happy hour at 4pm. I started to panic that it wouldn't be worth the wait, but they came through. We started with cocktails like "satsuma lime mojito" and "farmer's market bellini" and noshed on a triple cheese plate that came with nuts, honey in a honeycomb and crostini along with excellent olives and pistachios. We stayed long enough to get the dinner menu and thoroughly enjoyed that and the fried apple pie dessert before heading back.

Another fine weekend day in Santa Barbara.

Airplanes as Shooting Stars

2011-03-05T12:49:00.000-08:00

My last post on wishes reminded me of the song lyric "Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now." If you haven't heard the song, the chorus is sung by a female vocalist and the verses are performed by a male rapper. It plays on hip-hop stations (and possibly on pop stations but since I don't have one of those I don't know for sure) and I like it a lot. Or at least I think the chorus is hauntingly beautiful.

I listen to hip hop for 2 main reasons: of the 3 radio stations with good reception in my town, 1 is NPR 2 of them are hip hop; I like hip-hop dance. The genre has grown on me - I listened to very little of it in Boston where I had good access to alt rock stations so I only got the crossover songs.

(But don't you live in LA? Well, no. I live *near* LA in an electrical signal Bermuda Triangle. I get some sort of broadcast to nearly every frequency but almost none strong enough to overcome the static. I couldn't get TV without cable even before the digital crossover. To be fair, there's also a spanish language station that comes in fairly well. But I have to drive a couple valleys over to get the main LA area programming, or listen through my computer which was not a good option until I got wifi, and I have yet to set it up to make it workable and I'm insufficiently motivated to search it out most of the time. Plus, the station that convinced me I could find "my" music in LA folded in the recession.)

But Cranky Otter, you're a super-feminist. Why would you listen to hip hop? Isn't it all misogynistic hate crap? Well, no. There still is a lot of that kind of thing, but the times, they are achanging. Well, that and if I can't make out the lyrics, they can't bother me, can they? And sometimes, they're so overthetop I can't take offense. I like "Golddigger" as much as the next fan.

This year in particular, however, there have been multitudes of hip hop and pop stars who have hooked up in male-female pairings to create some songs that have broader appeal. Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg, Emininem and Rihanna, "B.o.B" and Haley someone (who sound to me like E & R...), and I think there are others. Have you noticed other stars joining forces this year?

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(side rant - I'm now forced to use my google login for youtube. I don't want to use my google login for youtube. And google? I don't want to watch a 15-30 second commercial before I go to a video that I only want to watch maybe 15 seconds of to screen to see if it's what I'm looking for. Overlay ads are tolerable, delay ads will make me stop using your product whenever I can get away with not using it. When your product is snippets of 10 second to 4 minute things that people may or may not watch all the way through, 30 second commercials can absorb more than 50% of the time alotted to that websurfing and completely derail me from my path. Plus, it will make me hate that ad. Ads several minutes into a show, meaning after I've committed to something like a full 22-44 minute episode on Hulu, are perfectly acceptable. When I'm just trying to find something in the first place? They will stop me cold and not achieve any of the goals of watching either the clip or the commercial. And that's why I haven't linked any youtube clips to this post- it was too annoying to vet them. /rant)

Wishes

2011-03-04T23:58:00.000-08:00

I just took a long nap, now need to go to sleep for realzers as I have a guest coming tomorrow and should make some attempt to be civilized. But what did I do? Downloaded some books from Autobuy authors that recently came out. Will probably be reading for the next two hours. Although after all the anagrams and angry birds recently, it'll be nice to get back to my usual timesink.

One thing that is helping me be civilized is that I can afford to have someone clean my place every month or so. They came tuesday so all I *have* to do is wash the guest sheets and tidy up. But I have so many projects, and there's only so much tidy to go around. At least I don't have to worry about the shower being icky.

It's got me thinking of what else I'd like to hire done, though.
1) bookkeeper - I tell you what needs paying, you execute the payments. I *know* I should pay off the balance, I just plan to do it tomorrow but I'll forget about it tomorrow and then I'll have to pay a late fee. I had one for a while but she stopped doing that sort of thing and I haven't searched hard for another affordable one. They would make sure I turn in my reimbursements on time and remind me to donate before the end of the tax year and the like.

2) personal assistant - like the bookkeeper but not in charge of finances. Would set up and maintain my calendar, check through all the crap emails I get to find the ones I want to read, would set up my email folders so that less sorting is necessary. Would also copy all the files off my old computer onto a backup harddrive and get rid of ye olde eMac. Would compile all my pictures into one main storage space and one backup storage space and would re-back them up after I renamed them. Would also help me search dating websites for likely candidates, and "around town" periodicals for the concerts, museums, events, and restaurants I'd like to hit up and actually get me some tickets and whatnot.
(To be fair, my instigator friend in Orange County fulfills that last one nicely, but it's all stuff more local to her than me. Plus, I have a great organizer, but she's kind of expensive for doing the more rote things.)

3) handyman - or handywoman. Or a friend who just likes doing stuff. I have heapo plenty projects, lots of ideas. I like doing them. Sometimes I just like doing them better with others, sometimes I need more hands. I would like to have a regular buddy for this sort of thing, but would also be willing to hire some help.

4) Personal chef. This one is iffy because it would only be good if it helped me remove some decision making. "I guess I'll have stew because that's what's here". But my mental health requires me to not eat alone in my condo too often, so I eat out and if I'm just as happy with a Taco Bell chicken burrito, a chef seems like overkill when I can find them at restaurants. The bigger goal here would be to have a better food routine so I'm not always dreading deciding what to eat. maybe I should add that to my PA role - set me down once a week and figure out what the food plans are for the upcoming week. Have experimentation day on a day I can accommodate it.

The goal here would be to have someone help me impose order where it's hard for me to do it on my own (bookkeeper/PA) and make my fun projects less chore like. I'm making good on my goals from last year to finally get my place set up like I want it. I'd like to finish the already in-house projects within the next 3 months. This will allow me and my organizer to get me set up better to deal with incoming papers and scheduling, and I think at that point I'll be able to look into grad schools (and refinancing the mortgage or buying a cheaper place).

After attending the local Engineering Societies' Week dinner last night and being inspired all over again about the future of energy research, I need to make grad school a nearer term goal. (Or at least the regular watching of TED videos.) Particularly, our Keynote Speaker talked about how energy efficiency is progressing faster than engergy generation and storage technology. I've long thought I'd be psyched to do research and development batteries/fuel cells, but it might make more sense to work more on energy efficiency because I could get it to tie in better to my existing background and skillset. If one makes a more energy efficient cell phone, the same old battery doesn't have to improve as readily, for instance. And our CEO says we have something in the works, just like all other companies, so it makes me think it would be an easier career upgrade than trying something completely new. In the meantime, it might be cool to get involved with something like Unite to Light which donates solar rechargeable LEDs to schoolchildren in areas with poor local infrastructure so they can study after sunset when the day's chores are done.

Assimilation

2011-03-02T02:17:00.000-08:00

It has happened. My twin made me a facebook page. I updated it some. I have not worked out any kinks or learned how to navigate, but it's 4am in Texas and my brother just accepted my friend request so we'll see how the pace continues.

I read about an organizational scheme for controlling privacy settings and will be trying that. (Note to brother- if you keep posting pics of you ~~dancing~~ wrestling drunk and they get to my page somehow, I may have to demote you in my friend hierarchy...) If you think I should alter it some, feel free to let me know, just try not to post details here. While one can link to my real name from here, I'd rather try to keep this semi-anonymous, so my deepest public thoughts take some effort google search. Because time was that 7 of the top 10 Google search results for my name actually were about me.

But I could use some advice on how to navigate Facebook to get useful, timely or otherwise ultra-super-important information in a timely manner without doing too many irritating newbie things. I still have the notion that I'll be posting here still, because I like blogging. All my life all I ever wanted was a time-date-stamped diary, and here I have one from Blogger and I want to keep it.

Cranky Birds

2011-02-28T22:53:00.001-08:00

Um, I've been playing Angry Birds. Like, a lot. For the last 3 days or so, I've been going back to the first three layers to get 3 stars on all the puzzles, which gives the dubious reward of a golden egg level. Each layer had 1 nearly impossible puzzle that made me even crankier. 1-5, 2-17, & 3-5 were all devilish.

I didn't like the 5's because they were both puzzles that could almost never be solved at all and trying to get 3 stars was essentially doing the same maneuver over and over to hit one bird at the exact right pixel at the exact right angle and hope that things go well. If this first bird didn't clear the screen, it usually left it in a state that was unclearable. On 2-17, even hitting the targets dead on didn't guarantee success - each result was variable and didn't always result in pig destructions despite the exact same hit doing it the last two (hundred) times. The board could even be cleared, on occasion, with 2 birds and it still wasn't enough points for the 3 stars. I solved it the 3 ways shown on the web and ways I made up myself, and it was just doing those sequences roughly 80 times that probabilistically eventually stacked up to enough destruction to get the last 100 points or so I needed for the third star.

In general, the puzzles that can't be advanced if the first bird is off by 2 pixels are not good fun. Even if some particular pig is hard to get, getting practice on clearing the others is fun. After the repeats, one has the ideas that will solve the level, it's just a matter of getting them all right in the same game. These are good games. The puzzles that can be solved multiply ways are the most fun, especially if the high point and lower point versions use quite different strategies. The pigs that get whapped and don't disappear, but just balance a giant load on their piggy faces are the worst. I think if a pig is trapped under, say, 5 or 6 things, it should get crushed. Take that, little piggy.

Anyhow, I think there's a good reason I don't own an xbox or wii - because I would play them while the place decayed around me. It's bad enough when it's a series of 60 second levels or geometric shapes that fit together or random websurfing, or reading that can suck up hours of my time. But interesting games? Real danger. Like for chips, I have no off switch. The phone turned off on its own most nights or I might not still be employed. So.

I'm trying to vow to Be a Better Person and slack on the Angry Birds some. And blog more - I have at least 5 topics saved up from before I started this crazy game playing stint (including the word anagramming thing on the kindle during which I wore the letters off the keys). Things like the ex helping me build stuff, a house guest, the Oscars (I/we saw all top 10 films), feminine hygiene product comparison update, an upcoming houseguest, snow in the local area, and my current reason for not joining facebook yet. Some of these things even made me happy!

For today let's celebrate:

my golden egg for getting 3 stars on my first 3 levels.
I may have made progress on a tool problem at work. I really, really hope so.
I made an executive decision without debating it to death regarding an issue that could get annoying if not done well, but is very likely only of interest to a few of us, so deciding it is better than debating it to death.

Collection of thoughts

2011-02-14T23:41:00.000-08:00

I've been mostly sleeping, working, or making anagrams on my kindle. The games chew up the battery life, though, so now that I have an iPhone I should start playing games there. Plus, for a few days a month, my body chemistry changes and my fingers exude a powerful solvent. There are a few letters on the kindle keyboard that are all but wiped off at this point. I've gone so far as to download Angry Birds, but haven't started playing yet.

I have TONS of work to do on the condo. Putting together the furniture that has accumulated in flat pack boxes, as well has hanging the new TV, and installing the new closet. I tried to measure out the drill locations for the closet support rail tonight. (The rail supports the uprights so nothing sits on the floor.) turns out that my studs are not exactly 16 inches on center. Some of them are, they're just interspersed with some 6.5" and 4" studs. Wacky. The rail is in two parts though, and I can get most of the lengths lined up because of that. It will just take more doing. Then I need to mark and/or drill the holes, move all the clothes, paint the wall, THEN hang the closet and put all the clothes back.

I was going to do the closet on sunday, but it was my day of being insensate. I was able to answer a call at 11am, woke up with cramps at 1:30, took tylenol, woke to a phone call (hi mom!) at 5ish. I actually woke up at that point, had some drive thru dinner and went on a bit of a scenic drive...in the dark. But at least I got out of the condo. Then about halfway through my planned route, lethargy struck again. I made it home and floated in and out, mostly out, between 7 & 11. Due to sleeping all day, I did take some sleep aid at midnight, although it did lead to me oversleeping my 7ish alarm and waking up just before 9am. Fortunately, I made it through the day today, although it did take a hefty supply of more tylenol.

Just as I'm the last person in the world to get a smartphone, I'm also nearly last to find HyperboleAndaHalf, which actually illustrates quite well why I haven't blogged for HALF OF FEBRUARY. I mean really! As a friend once said, "February is the longest three months of the year."

And I have guests coming! I'm SO excited about guests! It's going to be great! If I get the boxes freaking opened, built, positioned, filled.... All of which makes me want to go bury my head and fall over asleep. Which I'm going to go do right now. Right after I point out that my last post was my 666th post. Maybe it was cursed.

Blame Canada

2011-01-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

Or, blame it on the gin and peer pressure. I met up with traveling friends last night, and with their friends as well. After a nice Indian dinner in the Valley, we headed to a karaoke bar. Turns out there's another gay bar in LA I haven't been to. Who knew? But we had a good time, and I got coaxed into singing. One problem with that is that LA is full of frustrated performers, so the quality level of karaoke, in my experience, is rather high out here with some hilarious exceptions.

It's not super hard to coax me into singing casually, but I'm not much of a soloist. I tend to get stiff on stage and freak out, so I like to sing with other people. I've done trios and sextets and choral music, but I really don't sing solo. Karaoke is extra weird because I might know 80% of a song really really well, but of that 80% I probably have 10% of the words wrong, and the other 20% will trip me up. Improvising is also not one of my native or well developed skill sets. (Also why I'm generally quite truthful, I'm not quick enough to lie well - that and it rarely occurs to me that I could or should.) At any rate, karaoke makes me nervous because I'm enough of a singer that I want to do well and can do well, but unpracticed enough at solo work that my ability to hold a whole song is rather questionable. And since I should be able to do better...I wasn't sure I'd have fun if I didn't do reasonably well.

One thing in my favor for this place is that most of the music I'm drawn to is also big with gay British men. If the GBMs liked it, I probably did too. I only found that out maybe 6 years or so after my tastes were set, but there you have it. So I considered doing a Pet Shop Boys song last night, PSB karaoke at a gay bar being a "perfect storm" according to one of our guys. But it's been a while since I'd done anything they had on their list (Nightlife is the album in current rotation, mostly for the song "You only tell me you love me when you're drunk"). I could have done Death Cab for Cutie's "I will follow you into the dark" (quiet) or the Indigo Girls "Galileo" (won't net me a date of my preferred gender), plus they and other choices were too mellow. I couldn't coax anyone into doing the Carpenters "Top of the World" as a duet either and I didn't want to be the one to cause drunks to cry.

Showtunes would work, except it turns out I don't know many. Most of my current showtune knowledge is from Drag Queen Theater, not Broadway. I do know most of the music to Anything Goes, but it's been years (decades) since I've sung any of the songs all the way through with verse and chorus both. Plus, I really wasn't drunk enough to go over the top with "Blow Gabriel Blow".

Despite singing the chorus in a different octave every time, my friends assured me I did a good job with "Blame Canada" from the South Park movie. Of course, they're my friends and want me to feel good. Since I had drunk enough to compromise my short term memory, I'll choose to believe them. It was actually a shorter song than I'd remembered which was nice. The added bonus was that I went directly after one of the hilarious exceptions, not the Patty LaBelle mimic. My friends got up and did "Monster Mash" which can mostly be spoken, and swore it was the longest version of the song they'd ever encountered. Fortunately our group did contain at least one seasoned karaoke singer so we were able to lay claim to some talent from our table.

No hangover, but I did sleep to noon without restlessness meaning I feel awake now for about the first time this week. And my friends are winding their way back to San Diego, for which I'm a mite jealous. I'll have to conjure up another San Diego trip soon. After the cabinets and closet get assembled.

Otter Cuteness

2011-01-19T23:06:00.000-08:00

From icanhascheezburger, teh kyoot

Kindle vs. Nook Smackdown

2011-01-19T21:49:00.000-08:00

Short version - I prefer the new WiFi-only Kindle. The nook's benefits of pretty cover art in the navigation panel, that it can be bought at a local store instead of being shipped, and that one can read books for free while actually in the Barnes & Noble aren't good enough to make up for the bad battery life, slow and imprecise interface, bad thru-device shopping, and it's general "also ran"-ness. I suspect I would have liked the nook more if I actually spent any time at my local B&N, but I really don't.

For long version

keep reading

On a surprise afternoon off last spring, I went looking for the second book of a series. It turned out that it wasn't anywhere reasonable. Not at the stores (new and used) in my valley or one valley in either direction; not at the library either. It was, however, available as an eBook. Wanting something in my hand right then, and something that used eInk instead of a backlit computer screen, I went with a "nook" from Barnes & Noble. The B&N in my town is fine, but I liked the Borders better (until it closed last week) and I didn't go there very often, so I had some reservations.

I had more reservations when I hurt myself a little opening the packaging. The packaging made me kind of angry, minus the kind of, seeing that it was pure punishment. Not too long after that, I read about how Apple makes their packaging complex but friendly, so it's like an easy puzzle on your way to opening a gift, the puzzle part invests the new owner (and discourages quick theft), and the friendliness leaves good feelings. I only had to glance up from the article to my old iPod mini packaging that's sitting on the shelf to this day to realize how true it was that the packaging mattered more than it ought to. (I have also since bought the offset shears from BB&B for opening clamshell packages without cutting myself on the clipped edges and they have already made my life nicer.)

But I got the nook charged up, bought my book, sat in my lounge chair (patio recliner, yep, super white trash day) and read it. I liked it. The flash between pages took a little getting used to, but I got used to it. Then I went to get the 3rd book in the series and it's the only one in the series not in eBook form. I bought it from Border's in a fit of pique.

I have since bought and downloaded some free books for the nook and read them. It mostly goes fine, except that my battery drains at an alarming rate. I returned the first nook the first week and got a new one. I had to go through the dread packaging again, but this one at least had the instruction sticker on it so I knew how to avoid injury. The replacement nook sucked down battery a little less fast, but not by much. Any paperback over about 300 pages would, in nook form, run out of battery about 7/8 into the story. Yes, the wireless was off - it took several menu keys to do it, but it was almost always off. Even in airline+sleep mode, the battery runs out in a matter of a couple of days.

I didn't take the nook out much, so before I got the WiFi hookup for my cable, it didn't get timely updates. One update took me by surprise and gave me sudoku! Hey, a game! Unfortunately, the game has a flaw that if you hit the back button at the wrong time, it will void your game and this is easy enough to do that 1 in 3 games ended in me just exiting by accident. Not very satisfying, and should be easy enough to fix because if one exited with the home key, the game got saved.

Then I started avoiding buying things for the nook because I was feeling non-committal, and the platform specificity required commitment. And I wasn't particularly thrilled with the "shop from nook" feature (too hard to find most recent book in the series if I didn't already know it) and the B&N website isn't my favorite either. Meanwhile, Amazon continued to roll out update after upgrade for the Kindle. Finally, over Christmas, my friends gave me the WiFi box and talked up the Kindle again (as have other friends) and I decided to make the jump.

I bought a WiFi-only Kindle for $139 (a MUCH more reasonable price than the early $300 price point). It arrived in 2 days, took one satisfying rip of a zip strip to open, charged in about half the time of my nook, and in the meantime I went to Amazon via their recommendation page and bought 3 recent releases I wanted to read. And for the heck of it, a few games that were cheap, and a couple books I'd been thinking about for a while.

Interface:
The nook has a fancy color touchscreen that shows a pretty picture of the books' covers as you scroll through, if you choose that mode. That's about the only thing I like better about the nook experience than the Amazon is that I get a thumbnail pic of the cover. I like to see the cover art.

But everything else? Better on the Kindle. So much better that I'm going to look into how I can get rid of the nook. I just don't want to deal with it anymore. The touchscreen is slow and the scrolling can be quite annoying (it often snaps back to the starting point or whizzes past the middle to the end). Most of the books I got left all the copyright and advertising crapola at the beginning. I skip that when I read real books and go straight to the acknowledgments which I also sometimes skip. Amazon eBooks put that in the back and give the story up front. (I haven't tried the non-fic chapter books yet to see their format, but I was dreading navigating one on the nook.) I didn't think I'd like the fixed keyboard better, but I do. It allows for faster response time and it's an interface I don't have to think about much.

Also, there are lots of little features that the Kindle throws in that are quick and easy- when highlighting, one uses the cursor keypad and it advances word by word. On the nook, highlighting goes letter by letter with a tap on the slooooooow touch screen. That's one example, but rather emblematic of the experience as a whole.

Then there's the battery life. I'm charging the Kindle now for maybe the 2nd time since I got it - after reading 3 books on it, and it wasn't even at the halfway point yet. I had just connected it to my netbook to copy a .pdf to it and figured that recharging would be a good idea since I was already there. This new version of the Kindle is also much thinner and lighter than my nook and the page flash is noticeably faster but that could be just about being 9 months newer. It's not the most perfect thing, but it's more perfect than the nook and that's good enough for me. Plus, I like shopping on Amazon.

Now that I have the Kindle, I feel like the guy who wrote to Dear Prudence saying how he'd quibbled about having kids with his wife for 7 years then got divorced, met someone new and was thrilled that she was pregnant when they'd only known each other for 7 months. This feeling, plus my dislike of updating multiple platforms, and my preference for buying via Amazon makes me think I'll be more successful in using the Kindle than the nook, and my organizer won't glare at me for buying more paper books. In the organizing process, I'm trying to let go of things that I don't really love, damn the sunk costs.

I don't know what happens if I sell the nook. Do my books stay on it? Is there any way to copy the books off and move them to a kindle? Will that work, or am I just out all the money? If someone else buys it, do they wipe out the memory? Actually, I only care about that if the nook goes to someone I know, but after reading this, who would want it? (if you do, email me.) Plus, they now have color screen nook. I'm not sure why - the reason for the eInk is that it's less strain for one's eyes than a backlit screen and if you want the backlit screen, get an iPad or and iTouch or something that can also navigate you to Mars.

New Year Nesting

2011-01-16T23:27:00.000-08:00

If you've been following the blog recently, you know that I've been
A) sick
and
B) nesting

Part of the nesting is *finishing* things, hence this post so I can be finished with 2010. I'm not really sure where the nesting instinct came from, but its been really fun to have time to look at my space and see what it and I need to really make it work for me. I always knew it could. Out of the 5 condo complexes I looked at, this one had the best fit for me. Despite the fact that the very best thing I could do financially is buy some other place at a good rate then walk away from this, I think that's low on the possibility list. Not due so much to sunk costs and effort, but because I honestly like this place. I'm sure there are other places I could like as well, or even better, but I don't know that I could afford them, it would take time to fix them up, and it will have taken nearly five years to get to where this place is how I want it.

Granted some of that is due to money. Not having enough money is like being a little bit sick. You know you aren't operating at full capacity, but you still get out and do everything you can manage and are reasonably happy with the result, kinda, but it's not until you feel well, or have enough money that you truly realize how much you were [avoiding, declining, not attempting, not starting, not finishing, not dreaming of].

This post turned into the "how was last year update that ate Los Angeles" with odd and gratuitous punctuation, run on sentences, and just everything. If you like me, really like me, and want to continue,

click through.

Looking back on last year, I know I spent a fair chunk of it being really sick, but honestly, I think I spent most of last year partially sick. My temper has been quite near the surface; the idea of doing anything requiring energy filled me with dread so my primary projects got done but my secondary projects (at work and home both) languished; I got re-sick at the drop of a hat as if the partial-sick equilibrium had been disturbed; I gained 35 pounds - 15 of which happened AFTER joining the gym and working out 2-4 times a week for at least an hour each; after taking antibiotics (again) at Thanksgiving, the cloudy pee I've been worried about for two years stopped being cloudy; I went for long stretches between blog updates, which while it can mean I was busy doing stuff and having fun, it usually means I've turned turtle and don't wanna come out to play or expose my neck.

That said, there were also good things about the year.

I was able to spend more time with friends!
- I made a local friend and was proactive about keeping that relationship up. She invited me to her friend's Oscar party, and the host of the party came to my cookie party, so the secondary benefits were also satisfying.
- Friends came to visit and I enjoyed that very much and hope for more of the same next year. I've added memory foam under my sofa cushion to make it a more comfortable bed, but still have an air mattress for those so inclined. Also, with the bathroom reno, it's now a changing room so if you're staying with me, you can have privacy in more space.
- The cookie party was the best yet.
- I got to see my SanFran friends for what are now "usual" events, and spend Christmas & the New Year with good friends who are bad at keeping in touch, but great to be with.
- My very good friend got married to someone who makes her happy and I was able to be in the wedding.

I have disposable income!
- This is the second year of my adult life that I've had any disposable income to speak of. In general, I earn enough that I don't have to watch every penny, but I pretty much have to watch every dollar.
- One of my life goals is to have enough money so that I don't have to watch every dollar but just have to check in now and again to make sure I'm not depleting the reserves, and am spending toward goals, not just throwing money away on trivial effluvia and clutter.
- The last half of this year, my stock options were worth real money and I cashed them out. After setting aside a reserve, I intend to spend half of the remainder.
Already good things have happened: My "anchor point" for spending on movies has gone from $6 to $12; for gifts and events has jumped from $20 to $50. I acknowledge that sometimes spending up to $100 on a concert ticket can be worth it because I like live music and that's how much it sometimes costs. I can afford an organizer, a personal trainer, voluntary medical expenses, visits to the family, movies, and reasonably priced furniture (rather than the cheapest possible option).

I can see!
As of my 6th month checkup, I have 20/20 vision. I'm still using hydrating eyedrops daily, but I had to do that before LASIK too, so whatevs.
I still have some oddness with the really near vision and my left eye has a grey spot in the center where not only doesn't focus, but doesn't get anything but grey. That only sets in at about 6 inches from my face so isn't a great hindrance given the other benefits. Some of which are that camping and swimming are way easier and my eyes don't get as tired at the computer.

I'm working out and have sunday morning plans!
I recognized the "avoiding doing things that require energy" as as (sadly) familiar feeling and knew something needed to be done. And I did try to do things:
I signed up with a gym I like to go to and got a trainer. Then we started doing hip-hop dance classes and my workouts doubled. With the exception of sick days, I dance for an hour every Sunday morning, chat with folks after class, then go get french toast at IHOP. It's pleasing to have a routine for the weekends that gets me up, out, moving and socializing and my brain likes it better than church for all it performs much the same function. I'm very happy with this situation, and I feel better than baseline, even when baseline is lower than it should be.

I was actually attracted to a few guys this year!
Part of my not-dating problem is that there seem to be fewer and fewer men that I find attractive. While I could stand to have more friends out here, I would really prefer a friend with benefits, aka a regular date. While I haven't yet got a new date, I've been proactive about giving my number out and telling people I'm looking. (My grandma even sent me a potential contact!) And I have been remembering to look when I go out. (I'm still not good at looking when I'm at the gym because I find that to be awkward, but I'm trying.) If you know a decent guy, preferably 45 or younger with a snarky sense of humor who likes to get out and do stuff that isn't football game related, send him my way. Local would be nice but isn't necessary. Cat free is necessary, but dogs are ok.

I was able to hire help!
After working with an organizer (yay!) for several months, I was able to set up the place in such a way that I could hire house cleaners. Because I like to live in a clean space and I don't like to clean beyond once or twice a year when the urge strikes and once or twice a year is not often enough, and I resent every moment of the time I spend cleaning except for when those urges strike. And they change the sheets. For some reason I hate changing sheets. Or rather, I hate changing sheets by myself and since I live by myself, I hate changing sheets. The cleaning ladies do that for me and I love it. Plus, my organizer and I have found a good rhythm. When we work together, we get done about 3-4X what I could have done on my own in the same amount of woman-hours, and I enjoy it more.

I presented a paper at a conference!
I finally was able to write and publish and present another professional paper. When I was younger, I thought that was a natural consequence of working. But not so much when one is in manufacturing. My presentation was ok but not great or as smooth as I would have liked, but I practiced, I revised, and it was as good as I could do it on the day I did it. I would like to do it again, and shake a little less next time.

In the broader world:
DADT finally got repealed, Obama has been doing his community organizer thing and built quite a buffer around Iran, so even with a the tensions we're in a better place to avoid military conflict there, the American stock market has recovered enough that it was worth having money in the market rather than under my mattress, two highly competent women were appointed to the Supreme Court. There were earthquakes and mine collapses and floods and snow to spare (that's in the not-so-good column) but maybe if we work on specifics (reforestation, safer mining and oil drilling), it'll help stall the global weirding in general. And while there were 2 fires kinda close to my home (the hill on the other side of the freeway, and the dry cleaners just down the road) none of the really bad stuff happened right here. And while a lot of people are still having a tough time finding a job, including some friends, most of my friends and family are actually doing ok.

So really, there was good stuff.

However, my grandma did die (the one who wanted to, so mixed feelings there), work went ok but I was not a Bright and Shining Star, my good glass studio closed with the recession so getting out to blow glass was nigh on impossible, I didn't have any actual dates (or unactual dates), there was that being sick thing, and in general, I was not overly fond of this year.

On the other hand, mistakes were made and we/I learn from mistakes. So I think in general, I grew more adult this year even if I felt like I was regressing to college student patterns. Work and health got me down, but I've managed to set up my home life to be less chaotic and it's paying off; I've been able to complete projects that make being at home even nicer which makes doing more, fun projects easier. I think that will significantly help me be able to focus in general, meaning it will help at work when I'm not worried about home, but instead have a strong, restful foundation at home. I'll have space to invite people over where they'll be comfortable - another of my life goals is to have the place where people like to drop in and hang out. Maybe by the time I'm 45... Well, at any rate, I arranged with one friend that when/if her kids have a teenage rebellion period, they can come stay with me. ("I'll start looking for a bigger place" I said. "Not too big," she said, "I want them to be safe, not comfortable.")

That was my year. If you read this far, you have a great attention span! I don't even think my last year held *my* interest that well. On a scale of 1-5, it was a 3 because it was an average of 2s and 4s with some 1s and very few 5s. ("Can I go now?") I did leave out a few things (although given the length of this, not many) which may get covered in the next post: New Year's Resolutions. How would you rate your 2010?

Kitchen Bling

2011-01-15T10:47:00.000-08:00

For some reason when I'm recovering from being sick, I get bursts of energy where I like to do repetitive tasks. Often, that's baking or cooking, but that can be tetchy if I'm actually at risk of spreading contagion. Plus, this particular sick has pretty well put me off food, so I put the remaining 14 handles on my kitchen cabinet doors and drawers. Counting them up made me realize why I didn't get to it earlier - it's a lot of work! Also, I'd been having a crisis of confidence in my measurements due to the rounded edges making it hard to find centers, particularly on the drawers. Until I wised up and realized I could measure in from each edge by the same amount and find center from those marks. Duh.

It's been almost exactly 2 years and 1 month since the kitchen was "finished" enough for my cookie party, so how have I been getting the drawers open?

There's a reason my favorite tape is currently electrical tape. This makeshift solution, viewed from above and slightly behind, has been in place and working pretty well for 25 months. The only time it gets sketchy is when my hands aren't perfectly dry because they slip off the tape. The slipperiness has been getting on my nerves, so I was feeling some motivation.

Well, that and it's not as pretty as the handles I bought. No comparison, really.

Getting into the homestretch, you can see more mix of handles. The only tape handle that failed was on the bottom drawer of this stack because the drawer fronts were a little too close. Since I could open it from the bottom edge, I took the tape off.

Here it is, all finished up. Prior to today, there was only the handle on the vertical cabinet with glass. Now there are 6 more. And I made an effort to straighten and align the drawer fronts a little more. Done!

All but the corner cabinet handle are new here. I put all the upper ones horizontally - well it's obvious why on the horizontal cabinets - but on the one over the microwave, for some reason the embossed lines are rotated 90deg from the other doors relative to the hinges. I figured that spanning over that line would look weird, plus, it's in the same visual frame as the horizontal cabinets, so it works for me.

After looking at the photos, I realized that the left side has the upper handles horizontal and the lowers vertical, and the right side of the kitchen is the opposite due to all the lower drawers.

Before showing the last of the handles, here's a reminder of what the right side of the kitchen looked like when I moved in. One 4 foot wide, 1 foot deep pantry. Seemed like a good idea, but wasn't. Also, that extra height wraparound on the opposite counter was bad too. As was the 25 year old white grout. My design works much, much better. (so there!)

And the best part of the upgrade - the bumped out pantry with counter space, a couple of actual silverware drawers, and the manhandles. And now (but for the toe kick) it's finished! And I'll be able to get at my silverware (technically flatware, yes) with damp hands.

Design wise, I really like how the square cutout detailing of the Atlas Homewares Craftsman handles in brushed nickel mirror the gridded pattern in the IKEA Adel glass cabinet doors. The mountain climber handles are manhandles from Soko. Not cheap, but I use 'em every day and love 'em every day. Thanks also to the local kitchen store who had the display of manhandles that first caught my eye, and was able to lead me to the "boring" handles for the rest of the drawers. Now I can use my beautiful "boring" handles every day too, especially easily when my hands are not perfectly dry.

Half n Half

2011-01-13T09:11:00.000-08:00

So I'm in that weird state of recovery where it's hard to tell how useful or useless I'll be. I don't feel good. But I don't feel as bad as I had been.

Yesterday and the day before, I tried working. Tuesday, I plowed through some email, got some projects that needed prodding after the holiday prodded, then came home at noon and slept for 7 hours. I felt better yesterday, and made it through lunch and our weekly engineering meeting, when I started to feel nasty and went home to find I had a fever. Once home, I developed a rash.

This morning, I'm still trying to figure out how I feel. The fever is gone, but all the sinuses in my head are moving and either draining or refilling and I can feel my patience on a really, really short tether. Not a good state in which to go to work if I don't absolutely have to. And so far, I don't absolutely have to. I thought about telling my boss I'd try to come in this afternoon, but I can't see that going too well.

Now I'm left with enough energy to do *something* but don't really know what I could do without getting frustrated with it. Then, there's the guilt that if I'm functional in any way I should be at work, so do I not do things I could do to "prove" I'm sick? Or do I just do things (errands, mostly) because they really just don't take the same level of energy, commitment, and temperament that being at work does? I'm thinking about the second option pretty hard, but only after a shower and a nap and time for the daily meds to work.

Looking at the brightside:

Unlike some friends, I don't have 17" of snow. I do love snow, but I don't like digging out of it on school days. And when one works in manufacturing, they aren't keen on one working from home.
My sick time just reset so I actually have sick days to use.
Thanks to my new wireless router and the price our company stock has been at, I can shop online in the comfort of my pajamas. I'm so excited about the new dining room I can hardly see straight. Or maybe that's the sick, but still. This is really only the second year of my adult life that I've had any disposable income to speak of, and I'm finding a lot of satisfaction in using it to set my place up the way I want to live, rather than the way I have to live with what I can scrounge up for pennies.
A gratuitous 4th item. Laundry in my unit is a continued miracle. Also for most of my adult life, I didn't have laundry at home. I would do it at friends' homes while we watched movies together or at the laundromat, or finally, take it to the wash-dry-fold. I can't tell you how relieved and grown up I feel being able to do laundry overnight. I have a mostly dry load in the drier waiting for the final zhush then it can be put away. Now to decide if it's a good time to get a front-loading washer. I'm thinking maybe yes. I can shop online and all... (If you have recommendations for/against any stackable frontloaders, let me know!)

Dining Room Storage

2011-01-12T16:36:00.001-08:00

I made it through 6 hours at work today (including wonton soup for lunch, just like mom used to buy!) and at the engineering meeting started feeling kinda hot and lousy. I came home at 3, and have a temp of 99.2F. Since my "well" temp is generally around 98.2F (like on monday at the doc's office), that means I am running a fever. gah. Oh well. On to the fun stuff.

I've been asking friends and family what to do about my dining room storage situation and the answer is pretty much unanimous at "wall of cabinetry". But just plain ol' kitchen cabinets weren't the right solution. I need low rise drawers, and lots of them, for tools and craft things. Bigger drawers for paper, smaller drawers for screwdrivers and brushes. "Map drawers" are my ideal, but they're a little too specific and just won't fit or function.

Before I became lousy with illness, I'd received a Home Decorator's catalog. The cover had the craft hutch I've been looking for lo these many years. I really dug the green color (which, in its defense, matches my couch), but it's going in a line of otherwise white cabinetry, so I had to go with white. I suppose I could always gunk it up with color later. It's Martha Stewart, if you can believe that, and it's wonderful. It's in two pieces - the image on the right below. A sewing machine fits in the lower right, and paper or fabric on the lower left, then all kinds of crapola in the upper hutch.

If you click though to polyvore (the first link after the picture as I accidentally deleted the link to the pic and don't have the patience to restore it) then click on the hutch, then (yeah, right) look at the alternate images, it will show you the thing loaded up for the catalog, and why I love it already. I ordered it last night.

I also ordered 2 3-drawer filing cabinets and a 6+2 drawer that I'll get to use for tools inside (finally!) as well as pens and brushes and whatnot. They're both 41" high, and leave just enough width that I can cram in a shelf to hold my stereo (but not the speakers) and some 12-packs of soda (which don't quite fit under the sink anymore). And it will be beautiful and work great.

Dining room Storage by CrankyOtter on Polyvore.com
New cabinetry for dining room wall - while I like the curio cabinet (up left) the rest of the stuff is what I actually got. I totally would have gone for the hutch in green, except I had to go with white to not make the space look insane. I think the tall 6+2 drawer set will be good for both screwdriver type tools and pens and brushes.

The only decision left is what to do for upper cabinetry to hold my cookbooks (and whatever else). Options are 2 rows of open, white shelves, a closed "Varde" cabinet from IKEA, or closed IKEA Adel cabinets that match my existing (but with no glass inserts) in either 36 or 66 inches wide (1 lg vs 2 small + 1 lg).

I'm so excited I'm just burning up!

On the Mend

2011-01-11T22:38:00.001-08:00

Well, the barfy feeling is going away. The doc said something was going around and the only thing to do about it is wait it out. The digestive enzymes and papaya seem to help. While I'm still bloated on very little food, I have been able to eat and keep stuff down.

I tried going back to work today. I lasted until lunch. I'd optimistically planned to head back for our group meeting at 1:30 then see if I could stick it out. Since I usually get chinese food for lunch on tuesday, I went over, got a giant bowl of Wonton Soup, decided that the meeting wasn't going to happen, called my boss and went home.

A friend had given me a pile of audiobooks for christmas ("Only if you take ALL of them...") and I was nearly through the last of the three Jennifer Crusie's that were in the stacks. I put on the second to last CD of Bet Me, laid down for a nap, and woke up 7 hours later. Heh. I back calculated that I'd lasted roughly 8 minutes between getting home and being dead to the world.

I felt somewhat better after waking up.I ordered some Pizza, forgot to ask for thin crust, but did remember to ask for none of the vile oil they put on the edge - it has the barfy parmesan smell to it that makes it inedible. (It turns out that I actually like the parmesan sold shredded by Trader Joe's. It doesn't have a strong essence of bile that many other parms seem to.) I managed to wolf down three pieces!

Since then, I've listened to the rest of the audiobook while playing Freecell or drafting out closet and dining room cabinetry layouts. I'm feeling better but really shaky. Like "still sick" shaky. I may or may not attempt another half day tomorrow. The water for my unit will be off between 10-2 (or some fraction thereof), making it not great to sleep in too late, but maybe I could go for a swim at the gym or something, then hit the steam room - normally not my favorite, but might be a good idea given my current status.

Anyhow, hope everyone else is ramping into the new year with better energy than last year.

Germtacular

2011-01-08T23:33:00.000-08:00

I had plans to do year end/new year posts. But I visited friends and ate too much crab and played too much LEGO Indiana Jones, instead of blogging. Then I had a friend visit. Both of these were good things. But at some point, I picked up some germs and the hair trigger on my nose sprouted a sinus infection. I was pretty miserable with that on wednesday and thursday, but still managed to get some work done at work thanks to tylenol and sudafed and sinus rinse. I was starting to feel better thursday night. But with the hope of not oversleeping friday, I didn't take some meds to help me sleep, and I lay mostly awake for the night. My guts were burning a bit because I caved and ate an orange. When I woke up friday, I didn't feel good, but assumed it was just residual sick and sleepiness. [Do not read further if you are squeamish.]

Until I threw up. A lot. The odd thing was that I could identify things from 2-3 days beforehand. They hadn't been digested AT ALL. I drank some tea to try and calm things and get the gak taste out of my mouth. I called the gastroenterologist and got some good advice from the nurse practitioner, who spoke with me for about 20 minutes. She chuckled a bit when I described going off my diet while on vacation and sneaking in a little salad, a bit of corn on the cob and an orange. I agreed it's hilarious that I'm confessing to breaking my diet by eating salad, but that's what seemed to be the most problematic. She told me to get digestive enzymes either at the local health food store or by prescription, then wrote a prescription and request for testing my pancreas for enzyme production. I told her I'd come get it.

Then I fell asleep for the rest of the morning. When I woke up, I yakked up the rest of the food in a series of desperately unpleasant purges. After that, I was too weak to do anything until after the doc's office closed, and they were too far away for me to feel comfortable driving there anyway. I managed to get to Lassen's for some digestive enzymes, then stopped by the McDonald's for some comfort food - 2 plain hamburgers and a small fry. I was tempted also by the little blizzard thing too. I managed to get down and keep down about a third of a baby oreo shake (say 2-3 oz), then about half the small fries and half a hamburger. So far so good with that. I slept longer on the couch, then slept in bed, still semi-sitting up (a position I hate to sleep in, btw).

Today, I drank some tea and that didn't feel great but it wasn't awful. After sleeping most of the morning, I made some grits with brown sugar. Those went down ok but only for half of the quarter cup I made. A little more sleeping and I tried more grits and enzymes later. A little more HGTV design show watching and some more sleep and I finally started to feel gross externally (which is a good sign in that I was feeling well enough to care) and decided to brave taking a shower.

Of all things, my doorbell rang while I was in the shower. I should have guessed who it was - because the ex-boyfriend would almost always manage to show up while I was in the shower, and he did it again. I haven't seen him in a year and he decided to stop by to say hi; I'm still not sure why. I dried off, got dressed, let him in, showed him the bathroom reno, ("Whoa, it's like a room in here now!") and we chatted for a while. I offered him a drink. I had a couple of low presence beers on hand and we had those. Strangely, the beer was the most soothing thing I've ingested in a few days.

I sent him on his way and decided to test out my other hamburger (frozen since yesterday) on my beer soothed tummy. I got the whole thing down!!! Of course, now I'm washing it down with mango nectar, so it's anyone's guess if it'll stay down or come up.

But that's the current sitch. I was extremely sick yesterday and felt like death warmed over. If I still felt like that today, or stopped being able to ingest liquids, I would have checked myself into a hospital, but I'm feeling somewhat better. and I can drink beer, so all's not lost.

Here's hoping that despite getting off to a germy start, that I am less sick this year than last year because last year had a lot of sickness related misery. And I have stuff to do! People to see! And I want them (and you) to be healthy.

Eccentric Badger

2010-12-30T23:58:00.000-08:00

I have wireless internet! Merry Christmas to me. I spent most of a week with my good friends up in Seattle, and they had an old wireless router with an automated setup key (for those like me who have no patience for nor interest in setting up computer components). Now my friend visiting from Boston can't hijack the single available internet cable, and we can safely ignore each other while surfing social networks simultaneously from the same room. Progress is grand.

After starting the day with a round of "Sumo Ham Slam!" we headed to the coast for some expensive mediocre food at Paradise Cove with such great views we could see Catalina Island. A nice scenic Sunset Boulevard drive and a stop in Westwood for hot beverages and 3 for $1 cookies and to pick up another friend. We then joined perhaps half of Los Angeles at the Griffith J. Griffith Observatory after sunset and my friends waited with me in the biting cold gusty wind, huddled like penguins, looking out over the glittery city, until it was our turn to look at Jupiter from the 12" telescope. Even though the wind made it blurry, I still got to see Ganymede get occluded by Jupiter. Then we went downstairs to the new section and watched cosmic rays hit the cloud chamber. I love that.

Now to go donate some end-of-year money. What's that you say about last minute? Nah...

Headliners

2010-12-21T00:54:00.000-08:00

Whew!!! The lame duck congress swam across the finish line on DADT, getting the Senate to repeal it this weekend. I'd been worried enough to write my senators and ask them to make it a priority, even though repealing it has been their position for the entirety of the time the law has been in force, because I didn't want to see it slip through the cracks and get squished by the incoming freshman. That the vote came on a weekend worried me some too, but maybe that turned out to be smart. Instead of a bunch of 'sky is falling' headlines, these were the top headlines in yahoo news as of my late lunch, monday, pacific time:

Early Christmas treat: 2010 solstice lunar eclipse (which I could see right now if it weren't raining for the umpteenth day in a row)
Dog in Germany gives birth to 17 puppies (well, dogs do love to eat the feminine hygeine products out of the trash. Maybe someone was taking hormones.)
Winter disruptions turn travel bitter and chaotic (there is a ton of snow this year.)
Tonight's lunar eclipse comes with a twist (I kind of expected one DADT headline- good or bad - but being edged out by 2 eclipse headlines? c'mon!)
Pope: Church must reflect on what allowed abuse (not who? or why? I'm all for systemic abuses, but the question seems distancing in and of itself.)

Those were the most emailed news articles. I checked the top 5 most viewed and most recommended as well and they were similarly devoid of interest in the DADT repeal.

Just for kicks, I went over to HuffPo. Number one most popular article?
DADT repeal passes senate procedural vote.

Other topics were photos of things likely made by child labor, Al Franken's words about civil liberties related to net neutrality, Palin "jabs" Michele Obama's anti-obesity campaign, photos of things we accidentally learn while watching crime dramas (including my favorite: zoomed in shots of grainy photos get clearer!), and something by Michael Moore (trying to surf in on Wikileaks page hits?).

Completely different sets of interests. And the one where a loud minority of people were predicting global meltdown barely made the front page. Which is good and bad.

Now to get the law signed and implemented.

I've been thinking since I ran my poll on this (was it two years ago now?) where the majority reaction was that Obama would wait for congress to repeal it. The slowness of it has been almost as frustrating as the intermittent nature of my spacebar (grr, argh! Orrathergrr,argh!). But it kind of makes sense. One, now it will be a law that will take a great deal to overturn and probably no one will make that effort in a significant way. The other is that if the president had just stated from the start that he wouldn't enforce it by some magical executive privelege, it would have lessened the urgency. Since it doesn't look like many bills get passed without some urgency and urging from a riled up populace, leaving the discriminatory practice active kept it urgent. Two years was a long time to do this, but maybe not so long as it could have taken, and I think it will go easier because of the time and effort put into the studies and repeal. I do think that if they'd accomplished it before the elections that democrats would have been more supportive. I'm not sure they realize that this sort of thing is important for straight citizens too and we expected more vocal, public support for the repeal than we saw. Still and all, it's mostly done. As for implementation, sooner is better than later. Now we can work on repealing DOMA.

Cable Car Caroling

2010-12-18T00:03:00.000-08:00

I'll be headed up to San Fran in about 9 hours, depending on whether or not I can make a decision about what to wear, which might extend that a tad.

I had some plans to make more cookies, but I punted that for laundry and shopping for the charity work is supporting. Most years they pass out a list of things foster kids want. I'm the one who gets someone the dark purple sheets or arts and crafts kits. I love buying that stuff but don't really need it for myself, which makes it fun for me too. Now if I can only get that freewheeling with the kids of friends I actually know!

Present

2010-12-16T23:41:00.000-08:00

I'm working on Christmas presents. I'm doing ok, but it's still in progress. And I was going to make great strides this weekend. But decided that it was more important to hang with some of my peeps in San Fransisco, doing some cable car caroling. I'll be driving up, because hey, driving. The sign near my house on the freeway tempts me every morning saying it's only 394 miles to San Fran.

But that means my grand plan of doing christmas cards this weekend may be up in smoke. Unless I get back sunday and still have energy. The box of card stuff is still on hand from last year because I had something like 2 more people to send cards to and the year kind of snuck by.

So the good news is that I think I'm more organized than last year, and I made good plans to do stuff in time. The bad news is that I'm blowing it all to go sing drunken carols in the rain with friends. There would probably be cardiac arrest if you all got cards before the actual Christmas holiday anyway, right?

Cookie Party

2010-12-13T22:53:00.000-08:00

With the help of my organizer, I got the bathroom reassembled and gussied up, then neatened up the rest of the condo in time for the Cookie Party. Every year I get a little more ready a little earlier. The first year, I was frantically scrubbing the bathroom floor at 11:30 for a party starting at 12 - and not a single person went into the bathroom. This year, I had cleaners come over and just worried about rearranging stuff, and that got done sufficiently before the party started that I actually got started on a batch of dough before people showed up, for the first time ever! Plus my AC managed to keep up with the ovens being on even with the SoCal temperatures soaring into the 80s for the first time in weeks.

With my new stools and chairs and the reno'd kitchen, it went well. Turns out that about 6 people + me is about right for max productiveness without verging too far into chaos. And we were really productive this year. I got a volunteer to time the cookies (I'm too distractable and can't do it well even when I'm not hosting) so we had 3 racks going in the two ovens and cranked out the goods. I'm always surprised at how little people take when they go, but since almost everyone takes the same amount, there must be something to the choice. I guess I only wind up keeping about twice what the other guests take home, which is enough to get through a week without inducing a sugar coma. The rest I load into decorative bags and hand out to my coworkers.

While I remembered to take pictures of friends, I tend not to post people here. For you, we have the food. This year's menu:
Overview of the take, after guests have taken their share

Zaletti (Venitian rum-currant-cornmeal. Delicious and compelling but I got pushback on using cookie cutters with the currants. A google search shows others cut them in diamond shapes. Maybe I'll do that with the last of the dough.) with a patch of Earl Grey cookies (yes, with ground up tea! but this dough got melted and turned kind of green...)

Chocolate Hotties (triple chocolate with chili) and Molasses balls (friend's special recipe which I called Reindeer nuts.)

Oatmeal with Butterscotch chips (lush, double batch)

Coconut Macaroons

Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti (fewest broken ones yet!)

Stained Glass (hard candies melted in center cut out - new)

Happy Holidays! Thanks again to everyone who came. The Glee christmas soundtrack was delightful. Here's hoping that next year I will actually host those dinner parties, now that the place is in relatively good shape for having guests.

Irrational Predictions

2010-12-09T23:46:00.000-08:00

The MIT club of SoCal managed to snag Dan Ariely on his way out of town, and had him speak to a gathering of MIT and Duke alums and friends. I took the coast road down to Santa Monica in less time than it took another attendee to get there from Westwood, which is nearby. Crazy. For various reasons, I got there early for the reception, getting to talk to some nice people, but got into the lecture room late. It was a hotel conference room set up with chairs. I decided that front row was better than back row, and actually wound up talking to him a little before he went up when he sat down right there to put on his microphone. Cool.

You can find his talks on TED and other sites and he's a good speaker. Inspiring too. I've read his stuff but still had ideas while he was talking tonight. His topic was cheating. He and his cohorts have found that pretty much everyone/every population cheats at about the same rate for non-cultural tasks. That rate is about 10%. Given a chance to lie with impunity and make money at it, most people won't be obvious - instead of taking the whole $20 possible when they "earned" $4 at the task, they're likely to as for $6. What they've found is that it's a combination of cost-benefit analysis, self assessment, and social acceptance. If everyone is doing it, you can do it too and still feel that you're honest.

Then you can mess with this baseline in a few ways. Cheat at something long enough, and suddenly you hit the "What the Hell?!" point (as they've named it), and you start to cheat a lot more. There are things that can knock you back into baseline, though, like confessing, even if no one ever knows what you confessed. Or not cheating long enough to get there. Culture plays a role - some things are cheating in one culture that aren't in others. Being reminded of morality or given a chance to feel superior to a rival will get people to not cheat as well.

There are cumulative effect to cheating though. The research was started in response to Enron. It turns out that there are very, very few people who cheat because they like to and for the sport of it. But since nearly every cheats just a little - and about as much as their peer group, groups that cheat a little can spiral into cheating a lot. One group cheats a little for a while and either hits the WTH threshold, or another group cheats just a leetl bit more than them, then a third group cheats just a little bit more than them, and the next thing you know, Lindsey Lohan is making bail. Everyone's doing it, she's just doing enough more than the next person to stand out. Enron was similar (my words, not Dan's).

This says to me that we really do need regulators and watchdogs. Not because we're evil, but because people inherently cheat a bit. (Like speeding.) We cheat less if someone's catching us, or when we're reminded to be responsible. So we need mechanisms for that reminder, to avoid blundering into situations that spiral out of control, like subprime mortgages.

While he was talking, he also brought up how people feel pain when they pay for something as they do it. It seems to me that this is what prevents internet paywalls from working well. If we just funded an account with something like $50 and had, say, green links to paywall sites and normal blue links to free sites, then paywall sites grabbed a penny or two every time you went to their site (once a day) or a new article (not for each page of an article you greedy guys) or every hour you spent there, they could get money with your consent, but without you having to stop, enter all your personal data, and interrupt your thought process. Every so often, the site would remind you when you're at your last 10% and you can refill. Or have auto refill from paypal up to a certain amount per month. This way you get more content, less advertising, less clicking, and they make money to bring you more content. the account could maybe even work in fractions of cents. Say every youtube video is 1/10 of a cent. For protection, the account would be such that it would only allow fractions of cents to go out, and only if you clicked something (they can't just come and grab it), but with low enough $ amounts that it wouldn't be life ending if you had to cancel a compromised account and make another.

Seriously, if youtube is getting 10 million hits a day and each hit paid (let's go lower!) 1/100 of a cent, they can basically print money. The New York Times could actually hire editors that would allow them to use the word "torture" when reporting torture and keep sending reporters to the scene. Things like that. Because it's not that I'm unwilling to pay for content. I'm just not willing to pay as much as most sites want, upfront, for unknown benefit, after tons of interruption. And I don't want to be using my high limit credit card for a $2 charge.

I think that brings me to 3 types of credit - your basic credit card for medium/large purchases from reputable places, your mini-credit card for the $2-5 purchases in places likely to steal your info, and your micro account to bleed off hundreths of a cent at a time. It's like paypal, but easier and more invisible. So I can surf to a hundred sites and it only costs a dollar. But I don't have to see that dollar leave.

I had a couple of other genius ideas, but I'm too overtired to remember them. I did figure out what to get my brother for christmas that could potentially rival 12 pounds of birthday bacon for awesomeness.

Sleepy

2010-12-05T22:44:00.001-08:00

Today's mostly just a rant. I had a nice time yesterday at a party that I almost punted on due to feeling "meh", and slept most of today. (Eon't know why, really - could be new meds, could be the sick, could be that I was just tired.) Want to update the blog but my brain is stuck on health issues. Since I probably need the happiness help, I'll give it a try, then rant.

My neighbor invited me to a party of someone I'd met through her. I didn't wind up meeting a date, but I did maybe make a couple of female friends.
There was a white elephant gift thing, and I got the "rave toys". We put on and played with the glowstick jewelry last night. My fav, though, is the "Wiggle Worm", a yellow rubber tube with widely spaced koosh ball like flaggela. Inside is a light that turns on when it gets moved around. It's great.
A medical symptom I've been concerned about for two years went away this weekend after my antibiotics were rev'd up a notch.

I've been on antibiotics for nearly two weeks now. My sinus infection is thinking about maybe sort of finally going away, but it's not gone-gone yet. The side bonus from ramping up my antibiotics is that something I've been concerned about for two years cleared up this weekend. I spent about $600 on diagnosing and treating that side condition with no actual diagnosis or relief coming from it.
paraphrased conversation with doc, a specialist in the field:
Me: I have symptom A.
Doc: That symptom is in the normal range of experience.
Me: But it's not normal for me and started suddenly a couple weeks ago.
Doc: it's nothing to worry about
Me: can you tell me what's causing it?
Doc: it's normal. don't worry about it.

Finding that it was an antibiotic resistant infection gives me a huge case of the I told you so's, but it also means I've been fighting this infection for TWO YEARS. Presumably I was in some equilibrium state where it wasn't necessarily overtaking anything else, but I do think it might contribute to my sudden onset of superbad restless leg syndrome a couple years ago. When you wonder why, when I have medial issues, I try to solve the problem myself and go to doctors as a last resort, this is why; I have vastly more experience with doctors dismissing my concerns and not helping than with them helping me.

That said, my internal med doc seems to do ok most of the time, when my insurance allows him to. I've had 4 medicines outright rejected for coverage in the last 6 months. This means that my doctor, his/her staff, my pharmacist and I all have to scramble to deal with it when I'm sick and in need of meds. Blue Cross Blue Shield? I really really resent your policies. They're horrible. At least cover a "test" prescription so I can see how the actual drug is supposed to work while I get a chance to work with people on whether or not the substitution is warranted. Don't make me force all these other people to drop everything to help me *right* *now*. Let me start the treatment and give me time to work it out.

Black Friday

2010-11-26T19:12:00.000-08:00

Any event that gets excited about how early it can start is not one that gets me excited. My family spent the day driving around the Ft. Myers and Sanibel Island area today. In our one and only stint at shopping, we made a stop at The Shell Factory, which aside from shells, sells a bunch of other randomness. I nearly took some pictures but you kind of have to see it to believe it. Suffice it to say, if you're in southern Florida and need medieval coins, fossils, fudge, taxidermied safari animals, seashell toilet seats, or just some place to goggle at for an hour or two, The Shell Factory is your place.

For me, the vacation has been good but slow. I managed to see two sets of friends and their SOs located a bit up the coast, drive over the Sunshine bridge south of Tampa, practice some Cued Speech, celebrate Thanksgiving and two birthdays, and get a sinus infection.

I'm not sure if it was the airplane or the air in Florida starting my nose tickling, but staying with my cat-owning friend put me over the edge and I woke up with a sinus infection tuesday. After finding an urgent care place that would see an out of state visitor (where other patients wondered about the sanity of a Californian vacationing in Florida), I got some antibiotics courtsy of Publix. Thank you Publix! I'm feeling better, but not good yet. Then my mom asked if I blow my nose like that every day. Well, only when I have a sinus infection, so no. I'm still not sure why she asked me that.

Also, everything I take except the tylenol, sudafed and antibiotics kicks me into an extreme case of restless leg syndrome. So my usual jet-lag cure of Lunesta puts me to sleep for 30 minutes then wakes me up with the RLS. The chlortrimeton does the same. As a result, I haven't slept much on this vacation. I don't fall asleep until about midnight pacific time even if I'm tired at midnight atlantic time. Makes me glad I'm flying out at night tomorrow because I'm not sure I'd make it in the morning.

It hasn't been all rough, though. We had a potluck Thanksgiving at the condo/yacht club's club house. One neighbor made a "Florida turkey" decoration where she drew the turkey body and made the tailfeathers out of palm fronds. The weather here is nicer than where I live. It's about 85 and just humid enough to hold the heat in. My aunt's place is on the water, where we just had drinks and snacks with the neighbors out on the dock. My brother and the neighbor between them caught 3 sailcatfish and a ladyfish. The ladyfish (a "she-fish" per my bro) became bait and the sailcats went back in the water, but it kept them occupied. My skin is liking the moderate humidity, of all things. Pretty good.

To condense, the "happiness items" in today's post:

Seeing friends and family
Shell Factory outing
Drinks on the dock
Happy skin

Here's hoping everyone out there is surviving the harvest celebrations and time with family. This is one of my favorite holidays. How is yours going? Ready to escape the family by shopping or seeing movies? Or is everyone still getting along? What are you thankful for?

Bathcave Revision

2010-11-20T23:53:00.000-08:00

My dad, assuming he goes online before Thanksgiving, will be pleased to note that I got the drawers back in the relocated organizer.

The bathcave, while still windowless, has made great strides. The vanity/ laundry/ closet area used to feel like a closed-in hallway that I did not generally spend time in. Remeasured with the stuff out, it's about 11'x6' which is 9% of my square footage and I didn't much use most of it. By taking out one side of the closet, the header, and moving the organizer parts to either side of the room, there's now a great space when walking in. You can see above that it doesn't looked cramped anymore.

When entering the bathroom previously, this is the view - with curtains closed to keep the clutter from total obviousness. Also, the laundry sticks into the room several inches. It's masked slightly because the oddball closet wall sticks out so far on that end.

Opening the curtains and walking in further, you can see the nice organizer. Well, the components are nice, but they allowed a roughly 9" gap through which to access the 3 foot deep corner storage on one side and 11 on the other . They'd put in garment hanging racks so the things being stored could actually fit through that gap, but it wasn't workable for a daily use situation. Essentially, I had the organizer and very little else.

There's so little in that space now that this picture doesn't quite do justice to the space, but notice that there are no cluttered shelves on first view. And yes, I did paint that far wall white. Even I can't handle *that* much orange sherbet.

More details after the jump! Click below.

But to get the white wall, I had to take off the cedar lining planks because they just made no sense without the closet being there, or without a sauna furnace which was not happening. Underneath were the remnant images of old shelves where wall patches had never been primed, and roughly 50,000 nail holes from the planking. Some patches were pretty bad, like so.

I've got a little brass hammer with one pointy side and one flat side (as opposed to a claw and a flat strike plate) with nested screwdrivers in the handle. It was a gift from dad and winds up being a fantastic hammer for driving little nails into backer board on IKEA and similar cabinets. At those 50,000 nail holes, the drywall paper would tuft out and make a bump in the spackle. Dad had the genius idea of using the pointy end of the hammer to dent in the nail holes so they would fill easier with spackle and no bumps. It worked great. It was easier to aim if I just positioned it then hit the back with another hammer. Then after that: more denting, spackling, wetsanding, filling again, texturizing, priming and painting. The vast majority of timesink on this project was resurfacing the various pieces of wall including all the white walls below.

This is the view of the left hand side of the deep closet that was blocked off previously by the shelves. I put some of the cedar back up because it's going to still be deep storage, but now where there's that jog in the left wall and forward will house some pull-out shelves on wheels. That leetl wall took a LOT of work. It was too big before. I pulled off one of the several 2x4s off the front so it sticks out 2" less now. The 2x4s behind it were sideways, so I pulled off one of those to get the jog. The jog means I have 25" for the pull out shelving instead of 23" which leaves a more useful sized space in this world where things are built to fit even foot measures. It actually looks a lot better now than it used to because the proportions work better.

I'd originally hoped to take down all the headers, like this one over the laundry.
But unlike the other header, this one was original and would require a ceiling patch. Then we moved the laundry unit and found out that the ceiling inside was a hasty patch job already and I didn't have the desire to do all of it, so I left both walls and the header, and it works now that the right wall doesn't stick out as far and is less chunky. Moving the laundry knocked the vent off the wall, and when we replaced it with a more flexible one, we were able to get the machines moved back 4 whole inches. Much better. I'll post that after I finish the shelves.

The other critical path timesink was the tiling. I'd used up all my good tiles in the kitchen. I had to take out the partial tiles where the old wall was and patch with a full one from the closet. That left no tile for one course along the far wall.

If both bits of the organizer had covered the whole gap, I'd have put a toe kick in front of the vanity and called it a day. However, one of the shelves is recessed more that the other, just enough to show about 3" of tile. I managed to cobble together a cracked tile and several remnants, including a couple half tiles I removed from the removed closet, to patch the whole course using matching tiles where it would show, and the closest match currently on the market where it wouldn't. Like so.

The newly removed partial tiles came in handy here. Fortunately the mastic chipped off reasonably easily (meaning about 30-40 minutes a tile) chiseling with my 20 year old "Do It Herself" standard screwdriver and "the persuader", my rubber mallet. The dying purple bath mat not only was great cover for the sink and vanity cabinet during the destruction, it was also a good pad for holding the tile during cleaning so I didn't damage it or myself.

That tile and the other half tile went in where they would show. When I started dry fitting things, I found out the new filler tiles are 1" less wide than mine. I also realized that the tiles that had abutted the original vanity were not full tiles, as I'd thought. So I had to decide between leaving the same grout joint or lining up the two tiles. I went with the uniform grout joint and it's almost totally invisible because it doesn't stand out now. I think a wide grout joint would have drawn attention. This doesn't. Probably only my mom will notice.

So, the walls got done, the tiling got done, and this morning all that prep was done sufficiently that we (my organizer and I) were able to resize the small shelves with my new 12" sliding compound miter circular saw my brother got me for my birthday, and get in the easy, easy (no sawing) reinstall of the hanging shelving in the cedar lined bit.

If you've made it this far, here's the before, during, and after shots of removing the far wall.

And here's dad cautiously nibbling the little wall away a little bit at a time.

Even with this gaping hole, the room was SO MUCH improved by this non-obvious but straightforward change,

It just became a joy to walk into the room, even when it was a mess. And now that the plastic drop cloth is no longer taped over the entry, it feels like the homestretch. Stay tuned. I would like to have it done by the cookie party, so when it's all done, I'll do a thrilling adventure video for my loyal readers.

For now, here's my favorite bit again.

Of course if you were to come over, you'd see that I've already filled up the area over the drawers with towels and the small shelves are filled with boxes of toiletries. Which is great because I was able to find my hair dye and color it in time to whack the bejezus out of it with some scissors and a clipper with a dying battery. Eventually, though, those shelves will have a door, probably with a full length mirror which *won't* reflect the laundry, and my hair will grow back.

In the meantime, I'll be in Florida for a week at my Aunt & Uncle's house on the gulf coast. They claim there are no tar balls. We'll see. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Bathcave

2010-11-15T23:48:00.000-08:00

One of my recent excuses for not updating the blog is that whenever I could be working on the blog, I think about how I could be making progress on the bathroom and go do that. I was stalled for a while while working some long hours, but am back in the swing of things.

This weekend, I purchased baseboards, including one for the kitchen. The bathroom took a bit of a backseat to the fridge project. I had to pull the fridge completely out to get the adjacent baseboard out and while I was there, did the annual filter change on the icemaker line. I was pleased to note that there was only a little bit of dust and a lonely craisin under the fridge after a year of lost food possibilities. After about 18 tiny adjustments with the new sliding compound miter saw (due to trying to shove the baseboard partly under the cabinet but needing room to angle it in), I finally got it in.

I'm attaching the pre-primed baseboards with construction adhesive, which is going ok, but has enough width to it that I need to fill in a gap at the top. I figured white caulk would do the trick. At the home depot, the person at the paint counter, who would help me find such things, was probably the most butch lady I've seen in my little red-state-socal town. After a momentary pause during which I decided there was no way in the world I could ask her for caulk, I settled on "caulking" instead. Two seconds later, I had waterproof white caulk. ing. An hour later and the kitchen was reassembled.

The baseboard on the big wall was tricky to do without nails - I hadn't prepped enough support pieces so there's a screw in one corner, but it went alright, and now I can measure my shelves that will go between that and the sink. (I couldn't stop the baseboard at the cabinet or the lowest drawer wouldn't open.)

Taking down the closet wall and the built-in vanity left a row of missing tile. I managed to cobble together enough partial pieces to cover all the bits that show easily, and filled in the rest with a similar tile. The fill tile isn't a total match, but I figure anyone who finds it under the cabinet is going to be replacing the rest of the tile anyway. It took a while to figure out which tiles would go where and whether they'd even fit under the legs of the back cabinet. They did fit - by the hair of my chinny chin chin, but I got them in. Tonight was the night to actually stick them down, and it went twice as well as I'd hoped for. It was very satisfying to see the puzzle I'd had to solve actually work out in reality. Tomorrow will be grout day and I'll try to start posting pictures.

Due to having an appointment at 6 and doing an utterly wacky dance class t 7:30, I got the tiles in but posting pictures is outside my abilities for the evening. I could show you how to dance like a whacked out marionette that can do a little "house" style jig, however.

Homemade Hot Pockets, Apple edition

2010-10-31T23:17:00.001-07:00

I haven't updated my baking resolution records in a while, but suffice it to say that june and july were not good baking months. I did get some done in August and September (including making my own recipe for "pina colada" bread, which, while it could be improved, disappeared completely at a house party so clearly wasn't bad). October has been pretty good so far including some flatbreads (new), and these tasty apple pastries:

Which came from these 5 apples. Jazz and Galas are the two smaller reds in the back left. The red striped monster on the right is a Honeycrisp which is aptly named. I liked its texture and flavor the best of them all when I sampled them. The others are Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. (There's a glass color called "granny apple green" exactly that color. It's hard to work with and easy to overuse, but so much fun.) You'll notice I leave a little of the peel behind. It's because I like the color, not because I don't know how to peel.

The how and why of it all, along with an apple coring tutorial, if you

read more.

Several things came together to inspire this. One, it's fall and it's been feeling like fall. Baking is good in the fall. My mom called to talk about tidbits including the "secret" for award winning apple pies which is to use "one of each" apple when making the pie filling. Mixing it up mixes up the good and bad qualities. Also, she always doses hers with a bit of lemon juice to give it a little life. I also read in the Cook's Illustrated that pre-cooking apples on the stove, far from making baked apples mushy or mealy, actually prevents that fate. The trick is to heat them mildly to activate the pectin, then they can withstand baking better. And I went to Nick Malgieri's baking class at my local cooking school a couple saturdays ago which included a practically perfect bacon-spinach tart, and bought his cookbook "bake" which had a yummy looking apple dessert in it.

After seeing that it started with pre-cooking the apples on the stovetop, and not finding my Cooks recipe (which is behind a bunch of bathroom reno supplies), I decided to give it a go, using mom's new hint of the selection of apples. This was pretty fun with apples in season - I bought 2-3 each of 5 different kinds of apples, and still had more to choose from.

I'm lucky in that I'm good friends with someone who used to work on an apple farm, so I learned early in my baking days how to quickly "core" an apple. It requires 4 straight slices and leaves a square core. No twisting, turning, nor carving; no specialty tools. It goes a little something like this. Place your thumb and forefinger in the stem and flower ends of the apple. Move your hand directly over the apple and line up your knife with the edges of your knuckles. Slice down from there.

Repeat on the other sides. When the second cut is made with the first cut side flat to the cutting board, which is nice and stable, the result is asymmetric and great for chunking or slicing.

Requiring one more balancing act, it's possible to get a more symmetric set of pieces, which can be useful depending on the slicing needs of a recipe.

There you have it, quick and easy cored apples. You might think it's a little wasteful, but not really especially once you add in all the time saved for a little smidge of core. If I leave too much on the core, I cut off a couple corners to use for my sample bites. I also used to give those corner pieces to my hamster.

This technique is also great for other foods. Mangoes can be easily sliced by lining it up the long way under your finger and slicing down either side of the seed. Doing this on avocados portions it almost perfectly into thirds (slicing around the seed a bit on either side) and makes seed removal trivial. No more whacking a knife at the seed - and my palm - I just use either side then peel the center band off last. They actually last in the fridge for a few days this way. Moving on...

The filling calls for 2T of butter in a large skillet for 3# of apples. I had 2# 8oz and called that just fine. I have a large wok so I used that. It worked great. This is them on med heat being stirred together with the butter, 1/3 c sugar, and bit of cinnamon.

Inevitably I went off-recipe and added lemon juice and zest from one lemon, a bit of nutmeg, and a dash of salt. After that, per the instructions, I put a lid on and cooked them on low for 5 minutes to sweat them. With the juices out, one is supposed to add a half cup of currants. I couldn't find currants at either TJs or Ralphs or Vons, so I tossed in raisins, craisins, and dried blueberries because why not? I also added pecans because I like baked nuts. That got stirred up and cooked, still on low, until there was very little juice left.

The next step was to make 2 logs by rolling the filling in a danish pastry. Well, I didn't feel like making a danish pastry which, incidentally, called for a stick and a half of butter. I had some filo dough languishing in the freezer, so I moved it to the fridge this morning and it was perfect by the time I finished texturizing the bathroom wall and airing the place out. I thought about the log idea, but decided to see if I could make self contained individual serving sizes instead. Using 4 layers of filo for each, I sliced the large rectangle in half and tried various wrapping schemes with the idea of getting 8-12 layers on the bottom side and sealing the edges.

The one with the gaping hole only had 3 layers, which wasn't enough. Ironically, to brush *each* *freaking* *sheet* of filo dough, which took more time than making the dratted danish dough in the first place, I wound up using at least a stick of butter. The big win was a 15-17 minute bake time at 400F instead of an hour or more for thicker dough. I pierced the tops a bit (the log was to get decoratively sliced). Brushing the tops with egg white and dusting with sugar helped the browning, and using my small oven with the closeup burner placement got the bottom brown too.

The holey pie burst open in the last minute of cooking, making it an excellent sample with turtle ice cream.

I'm not quite sure how to store the remainder, but maybe freezing them? They're perfect right now, but even I can't eat a full dozen of them in one sitting.

All Hallows Week

2010-10-31T22:25:00.001-07:00

The great thing about a sunday Halloween is that the whole preceding week and weekend can be legitimately co-opted for themed events. This week involved decorating the office, a full costume dance recital, attending an artshow with pancakes and booze, MY FIRST TRICK-OR-TREATER!, and baking apple goodies. I also made progress on the bathroom reno, remembered to buy toilet paper, consider the upcoming election, and, well, I'm pretty sure that's it. Here's the rundown again, with pictures.

I liked my cat pumpkin so well last year that I did one again this year. The face I wasn't happy with, so I tried a ghost. Shortly after this picture I used a melonballer to remove more squash from the backsides to let the light shine through the cat eyes and the ghost a bit better. Immediately after that, my camera battery demanded recharging so this is my only shot.

Putting them in the window was successful since I actually got a trick-or-treater this year. I had dropped my guard and barely got the candy to the door - no "ooh, pretty princess" or anything. I may as well have grunted at her. But she did get candy, so I assume she was cool with it.

My office likes halloween. One colleague has a holiday birthday, and the rest of us take advantage of the supplies.

More pictures after the jump:

For my own cube, I like to use "fall themed" items that can last until thanksgiving. I got a little smack talk about their lack of scariness, but I'm happy with the longevity.

I wore a lot of black and orange. I have a lot of black and orange, but I don't usually get to wear it all together like I did this week. For the dance recital (encore performance of the dance crew routine and participation in the "Thriller" dance), I wore my standard black workout pants, and a blowsy orange shirt that made me look like a pumpkin. I didn't get around to putting black face shaped patches on it, but one of my friends brought extra makeup. I drew the face on my face. From a distance, it looked a little like the Joker, but it worked surprisingly well. I drew black triangles over my eyes, a little black dot on my nose, and a toothy grin over my mouth and cheeks. One toddler told me I looked funny. She was right. I considered a picture of that, but what you get is me getting a glitter "tattoo" on my only non-face exposed skin at the art-n-pancake shindig.

Lastly, here's a friend of mine with a trio of excellent costumes: Jack, the King, and the Colonel. (...in the box, Burger..., and KFC respectivley)

My favorite costume of the night was this guy with a killer smile dressed up like Tiger Woods. I went over to ask if he was waiting for a lady to whack him with a golf club, and he turned the other cheek to show me the golf club "imprint" there. We chatted for a while. I gave him my number and would be psyched if he called because he was gorgeous. Pretty much the most attractive guy I've seen in a long time. And he likes to travel. Talking to him, he got more attractive. Here's hoping.

Rough Draft

2010-10-28T23:23:00.000-07:00

Our dance finally got posted to youtube. It was super fun. This isn't the best angle, but sometimes done is better. If I run across the gussied up version, I'll add that too, but here's what I spent two months of weekends working on. The guy in the group is my trainer which is fun for us. We usually practice our routine after my workout, which we both need.

All in all, I was really happy with it. Having been a dancer for 2 months now, I think I need to make my moves bigger. I look kind of timid here; I thought I was going all out and I certainly sweated enough. So practice, practice, practice. Bigger, bigger, bigger. Hopefully we can remember enough to do it reasonably well for the class recital event this weekend. The new dance (to Thriller, for helloween) is finally starting to take root in my muscle memory after an extra hour of practice today. I'm glad it was my 3rd time with the moves and not the first as work has been hellaciously busy this week in a challenging, use the brain kind of way. It's good, but I don't have a lot left over.

Awake

2010-10-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my neighbor for the ride to the doc this morning. I had about 10-20 minutes under anesthesia to get my throat/stomach scoped. They found some ulcery bits in my esophagus and, continuing in the tradtion of only having things wrong with me that are annoying and not generally fixed by doctors, it turns out I inherited the family hiatal hernia. This brings with it a greater likelihood of acid reflux, which most of the family has too, but I thought I'd mostly escaped. Probably the ulcers are from all the advil I've been mainlining since march. So I'll be sticking with the liver killing Tylenol. Oh well. I think I'm also getting arthritis in my right middle finger, so if it looks like I'm flipping you off, it's more likely that my finger just doesn't bend anymore.

The surprising thing about today was that I came out of the anesthesia slowly for about 20-40 minutes then felt totally normal for the next 3-4 hours. I even considered going back to work, except that I was warned by my colleagues (who have all had this procedure) to take the whole day. I was feeling energized, although not interested in doing anything too complex like bathroom reno or baking, then I passed out on the couch for 5 hours. Now I feel fine again, save the scratchy throat that is barely a 1 on the scale if "tonsils out as an adult" is the 10, but I don't trust the feeling fine. I'd had a crackbrained notion of "sweating the poisons out" at the gym, but my trainer made other plans, which was smart.

So here I am, not driving today, not making any financial or legal decisions, and watching Raising Hope, twice. I like this show, it's smart humor. It's usually followed by some show that had characters so moronically dumb it was impossible for me to watch it. So two episodes of people with bad-good intentions raising a baby and TPing the neighbors gets two thumbs up from me. Oooh. Time for the Good Wife! A TV show that actually stars a competent, sexy, adult woman or three. Crazy.

[Edited to Add] Oh nuts! I missed the Sound of Music sing-a-long night tonight. Although my throat probably wasn't up for it, I like SoM like most geeks like Rocky Horror.

Thank You Blogger

2010-10-22T23:41:00.000-07:00

While I'd like to update more often, and don't get to it due to not wanting to even breathe near a computer some nights, usually, Blogger is one of those applications that just works. It took them a while to get the cutaway, but aside from very few aggravations, there was very little learning curve for a basic blog, and new ideas increment in effort appropriately.

By contrast, I spent the night trying to download 2 programs to get a free "pocket PC" to sync up then read PDF files, and then get a couple PDF files to read - I already had the target files in mind as the reward. But holy sunday, I've been working on this since about 6pm when I got off a very looong work week. My touchpad is hot to the touch, but using the Blogger software is so easy, I actually looked forward to this update, despite it being not what I'd planned to say.

My new-to-me work tool got intial data back on tuesday afternoon. In a show of goodwill to the group getting us the annoying data and to keep things moving, I hustled, worked late, and set up the quals for the following day. My part (until results come in) was done by thursday, which was good because I had a measurement tool install/setup/training session today AND we're dealing with a multi-area production challenge that is interesting but time consuming. Oh, and a third of the line is backed up behind one of my tools, which keeps going down for 24 hours at a time. And today was my day to bring breakfast.

In that weird way of things, I actually enjoy working hard like this for bursts of time, but I cannot sustain it. (Major reason I don't work for myself or blog more consistently.) I had my dad here for 4 days last week and I have a ton of stuff going on this weekend: a baking class tomorrow, further bathroom reno and cleaning, bill paying (mostly sorting paper, which I haaaaate), dance class, another trip to the tar pits, and a swing by Pasadena to visit an East Coast friend. Tonight, I thought I'd be able to just download a couple of short stories and book excerpts to my new-to-me pocket PC (Dell Axim X30) so I didn't have to read them on the device I'm using now. The hope is the ergonomics and eyestrain will be improved and I could just relax. I charged it up already, had the parts and everything.

Well, 6 hours or so later, and I have the fool thing set up and I can barely keep my eyes open. Hopefully I'll remember to go to the baking class in the AM. Good thing I was only aiming at short stories because the SD card isn't compatable either. It's things like this that keep me from wanting to have multiple electronic devices. I don't have 6 "leisure" hours to kill being my own IT person when I don't much like doing it. Every so often I think it won't be *that* hard, FCOL total morons can figure out how to steal crap online, but I can't seem to do anything with computers without drama and hair pulling.

In the meantime, I'm still mentally composing and revising blog posts about:

hoarding (including the recent CSI episode with a crime scene in a packed house)
voting YES on prop 19 (free the weed; prohibition doesn't help)
Democrats not using ANY political capital to help teh gays, so far as I can tell
But Obama at least said something nice to them on ITGETSBETTER
updates on my baking resolution (yay for yogurt in banana bread)
Hoping someone posts the video of our fun dance from friday.
Halloween decorations at work
My wonky digestion where twinkies make me feel better than plums.

Sadly, I'm in the blathering without much direction phase right now, and I want to go read my stories. (yes, say that like I'm smoking my 2nd pack for the day and am heading off to watch soaps. Nothing against soaps, really, those folks work hard too.) Have made zero progress on planning a Galapagos vacation or buying cheap tickets to Seattle or Kansas City. I did finally get my brother his birthday bacon though. And if nothing else, work is engrossing.

Shake it Like a Chorus Girl

2010-10-11T20:47:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling tense recently - physically - in that my muscles feel tight, so I got in a massage after work today. The masseuse thinks all my tendons feel inflamed, which is consistent with my lay diagnosis of tendinitis of the everything. I don't think the gastroenterologist I'm seeing thursday will necessarily know what to do, but maybe the doc can recommend someone who will know. Probably, I'll wind up doing some CA inspired cleanse. I'm pretty sure my problem is yeasty overgrowth. What I don't know is if that's also affecting my allergies.

Ever since last Thanksgiving, I've occasionally been reacting badly to my allergy shots, particularly if I've missed an appointment. Well, I missed an appointment. Most times if I do, my arms just swell up more. This was another overreaction where I started sneezing, coughing, and wheezing enough that I got an adrenaline shot which has made me more jittery than usual. Another stellar day in allergy land and one massage shot to hell.

But my dad's coming wednesday to help me with the vanity and I'll be bringing him along to the dance competition friday. We could use some people cheering for us, so please let me know if you plan to come too. If you're on the way, I can even pick up 2 other people. It'll be fun. If I don't shake apart by then.

It Gets Better

2010-10-08T00:44:00.000-07:00

For anyone who hasn't heard, Dan Savage started a video project to help LGBT kids know that life is better after high school. If you're having a tough time, go to YouTube, check out the videos posted by all the regular people living regular lives and the occasional famous person too - go Tim Gunn!

Really, stick it out, it does get better.

Me, straight grrl here, I had an ok time of it in high school, despite moving to the other high school in our district mere weeks before school started and joining the math team. I have a very specific memory of sitting in a pep rally, probably junior year, when they'd brought in a motivational speaker to tell us to enjoy high school, as it would be the best time of our lives. I had two thoughts: "this goober's rather doughy" and "this better not be the best time of my life". To paraphrase a Jennifer Crusie line, I enjoyed it all I could, but I could not enjoy it very much. I had some good times and some blah times and overall high school for me was fine, and still, it got better.

With My Hoodie On

2010-10-07T23:32:00.000-07:00

The "reality" shows I actually like tend to be the ones where people with mad skilz are asked to do something that would be totally easy for them if they had 4X the time limit, but tends to make a good portion of them look incompetent. For instance, on "America's Handyman" there are only 2 of them that I'd let near any project of mine. "Chopped" makes chefs who are otherwise probably awesome get *very* *near* to genius dishes and somehow have something go horribly wrong. Austin and Santino roadtripping to small towns to make dresses for deserving women who are mostly not thin makes me giggle. Then there's "Project Runway".

Project Runway routinely drives me crazy, but I keep watching because every so often they go to the circus and come out with some of the best funky looks I've seen in fashion. (2nd from left is the winner, deservedly.) Every once in a while, the event just gels with one of the designers and they make something fabulous, and we get to see how it happened.

Today, with the 6 designers left, they asked them to design something in godawful-grey for Heidi's baggy loooking "active wear" collection that left me thinking someone left the fabric in an ashtray somewhere. It seemed an odd choice for a show that is looking for the designer's voice to come through, to ask them to design for someone else - even if that winds up being their day job next year.

Often, I disagree with the PR judges about the lower ranking people. However, I so totally agree with their winning choice of Andy's design that I want that hoodie!!! The one with the round shape on the body and the stripey sleeves. Super flattering, and fun. Can't find it on Amazon, even though they said on the show it would be part of the line. Maybe Heidi's executive decision got shot down? She probably doesn't sell stuff in my size anyway...

That said, I really didn't appreciate the focus on negativity and mocking that occurred with this episode. Most of it was in the commercial, which almost made me skip it because I'm not watching to see these people be jerked around in front of their peers in their field. Constructive criticism is all well and good, but I could do with a lot less "creativity" on the negativity. Although grumpy Gretchen's bike shorts topped with puce ruched skirt hurt my eyes a little too, so they aren't always wrong there.

Now I'm rambling. I just caught a nice episode of Chopped while writing this, one of the rare ones where everyone either has a good idea or good execution making the choices best of the best, not who screwed up the least. If anyone knows how to get that hoodie, let me know. It would be easier for you if I could find the picture, but alas and alack, my googling skills are not bringing it up.

In My Head

2010-10-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

I'm not dead; I've been spending time in my head. And at the gym. Two weeks from now, my white belly will be dancing in a gym class hip-hop contest on Sunset Boulevard. You can't make this stuff up. More abbreviated updates follow.

I've once again had many, many, many ideas for posts, but I've been avoiding being on-line. I'm asymptotically approaching a Facebook page now that literally one fifth of the planet has one. I'm still kind of bummed about using my regular guy name for it, which is one major reason for my holdout. I'm an open, very honest person and things can be taken out of context. But many people have stopped blogging, and almost no one sends email anymore. Since everyone's still connected, my assumption is that if you're not on Faceborg, you don't exist in the collective consciousness and my conscientious objection just hurts me.

My brother is getting bacon and bacon accessories for his birthday. I'm committed to a bacon sampler or bacon of the month club, but have to put the order in still. In the meantime, the bacon floss will have to hold him over.

While I still need to have a dinner party, but my baking resolution is getting back on track after a summer with minimal baking (I have to include microwaved candy sushi to make July's) with banana bread (new version) and ham & cheese crescent rolls (repeat) and new spiced flatbreads (small plate cookbook), and other things (working on a pina colada bread).

Thanks to the low-low prices at Harbor Freight and my brother searching the sales, I just got the 12" compound sliding miter saw my brother found for my birthday. With the leftover (mine was $75 as-is for having an ugly box) I was able to afford a trim router and bits that fit it. Whee ha! My dad is coming out to help with a project in a couple weekends (where he'll also be taken to see me "dance") that will be helped by miter saws and trim routers. Wish us luck.

Musical overlaps that grate on my nerves, still:

The 4 note sequence from the Emperor's Theme in the Harry Potter theme. It just makes me think John Williams phoned it in. I'd been so excited when he was tapped to do the music, given how endemeic to the culture the Star Wars music is - this dance I'll be in mixes the main theme - but aside from the "Something Wicked This Way Comes" in number 3 or 4, I can't get the emperor out of it.
Ben-Bridge jewelers advertising engagement rings and Pristiq advertising antidepressants use much the same tune.
Two of the optional ringtones for our very lousy portable phones at work are the lead ins to "Things look swell; things look great" and "We Want a Rock" by TMBG.

In my head, I wrote several very excellent blog posts on topics I'm sure you'd find fascinating, a least one on why we should legalize pot: it's just sensible, and of all the dumb things CA lets us vote on, this one is a good idea. Even if this law is imperfect, I think we should legalize it. We ruin good lives for no reason by persecuting *use* of drugs, and ignoring the difference between use and abuse.

I seriously considered going to DC for the comic bit "Rally for Sanity". I think my $ would be better spent going to my friend's adoption party. Yep, my friend of the three norse gods is adopting a boy to make 4. Although I could still be convinced about the DC thing. I've got a friend there who has probably been a little too in her head as well, recently.

It's a lot easier to live in my space as I get rid of stuff. It's appalling how much new stuff I bring in though. (New portable sweeper, circ saw, router, two cabinets for books with the intent to replace other shelving sets, more exercise clothes - but I'm still having problems throwing out coupons I'll forget to use? sigh.) All in all, though, my place doesn't look like a train hit it, and watching TLC's "Hoarders" keeps me throwing stuff out.

What's up with you? You wanna be my friend? sheesh.

When to put a sock in it

2010-09-09T23:58:00.000-07:00

To all the mass media outlets: there are all kinds of meanspirited kooks in this country because, despite ourselves sometimes, we try to keep it a safe place for kooks of all stripes. Just because some doofus with 50 people who listen to him on a regular basis is going to do something wrongheaded doesn't mean he should be getting every-hour-on-the-hour coverage. You know what makes his wrongheadedness important? Hint. It's not him; it's you.

So, blog fans - I seem to have roughly 25 regular readers, meaning 10 repeats with 15 people who get here following Google alerts - which means I have just half the audience of someone I won't name and should be spanked and sent to the corner without a snack. What kind of wacky thing can I do that would get me every-hour-on-the-hour coverage for 3 days?

Bear in mind that my 9/11 event last year was challenging a traffic ticket in court and getting traffic school, and this year my plan was to see Serenity at the Can't Stop the Serenity event, but it got moved to 9/10 so I'm going to an art show, and maybe a "western" gun show (ad: new and antique! just for fun! ...and for serious collectors...). So there's potential of me strapping some sidearms to the thighs and putting on a long brown coat. (Or there would have been if I didn't just donate my long brown coat to goodwill.)

No idea too crass. In fact, that seems to be the primary requirement to be a news darling so have at.

Carbonated Grapes

2010-09-06T18:54:00.000-07:00

Ages ago, I took a road trip from Boston to the __ folk festival in NY. On that road trip, we had a cooler of food in the back seat. We wanted it to stay cool for as much of the weekend as possible, and there was an ice vendor down the street so we were able to get dry ice. We put dry ice over the bottom of the cooler, covered it with water ice, put frozen stuff on that, then a shelf, then the fresh food. About the time we hit Sturgis, I was getting peckish and reached into the cooler for some fruit. I grabbed a nectarine and some grapes.

I bit into the nectarine and almost spit it back out because it registered as rotten, even though I'd bought it not 4 hours before and it was superfresh then. I tried the grapes and got the same input, but not the same reading on it. It turned out that the cooler held in enough gas to carbonate the fruit as the dry ice sublimated. I just couldn't make myself finish the nectarine, even though I tried, because it really gave the sensation of eating food that had started to decompose. But the grapes? Fabulous fun. I don't know if everyone would have the same reaction - I had previously bitten into bad peaches but my reactions to fermented grapes remains entirely positive to date.

Recently, I learned that high altitudes can kill the ability to sense carbonation, as can some anti-altitude-sickness meds (and likely other things as well), which means that we have carbonation sensors in our tongues that are separate from other things. I think that's pretty cool. And I think of carbonation as another thing we can taste since it registers partly between sensation (hot/cold/wet/dry) and flavor. It makes sense that some people don't like carbonation given my inability to finish a perfectly good carbonated nectarine due to the association with rot. Fortunately, I have more positive interactions with carbonation.

Ever since then, I've wanted to try carbonating grapes again to see if I could get it to work. Last night, while picking up some supplies (for key lime cake) I noticed a cooler of dry ice at the supermarket for $1.49/lb and bought about a pound of it. I tried 3 different containers.

Initially, I wrapped the dry ice in some paper towels, put it under a makeshift shelf, put grapes on top and wrapped it in 3 layers of supermarket plastic bags and stuck it in the fridge on a towel to keep the glass shelf from shocking. About 4 hours later, there was a smidge of carbonation.
Figuring that a pressure vessel with a relief valve would be better, I stuck them in my pressure cooker. But it never built up enough pressure to seal well, so the results were kind of paltry there too.
Lastly, I just stuck the remaining hunk of paper towel wrapped dry ice with the grapes in a gallon ziplock and stuffed it back in the fridge figuring that if it did explode from pressure, it wouldn't do much damage. And if the grapes froze instead? I like frozen grapes too.

The grapes in the ziplock seemed to work the best. It didn't take a lot of dry ice, either. I totally recommend carbonating grapes for a funky party treat, where putting it in a cooler with a tight fitting, but not locked, lid would probably be the best of the options.

UPDATE: If you try this, and want to share, don't do it more than a day in advance, and try not to freeze the grapes. The frozen grapes are good frozen, but not if they thaw out, and the CO2 seems to encourage browning as well (seeing as it feeds plant life, that makes sense). I did vinegar rinse (swish in 1part vinegar/3 parts water, rinse, dry) all my grapes before carbonating to be on the safe side and they're still looking a little miserable two days in. Some still look ok and they are still carbonated but the bag is no longer puffed up.

SAFEY UPDATE: If it wasn't perfectly clear - don't confine dry ice in anything that won't leak at least some, or pop open harmlessly at a low-ish pressure. Soda bottles? Right out. They will blow up into bits of shrapnel. Fun outside, not so much in your fridge or your face. Stick to flexible things or unsecured lids. See comments for technical details if "don't" is insufficient for your rebellious nature.

Just Stop Already

2010-08-30T22:55:00.000-07:00

I'm getting sick unto death of all the "marijuana is evil and causes evil to come forth" nonsense that is plaguing the airways these days. I turned away from the final commercials of the CSI:Miami tonight because the cause of the fatal accident? Hiding MJ under the hood. This led to cutting the power steering line (which I have to say, as someone who has pillaged through an engine compartment with tools and duct tape, is totally bogus with regards to hiding a dime bag) which led his underage sister into crashing a car and killing two people. It's only the MJ that makes it a crime. Otherwise, it's just tragedy.

But really, how much longer do we have to hear crap about the demon weed? I even wrote into the local radio station after 3 solid weeks of hearing about "major marijuana busts!!!!" when we're just **two months shy from pretty well legalizing it. The point of view I expressed what that if the growers are paying for their own water and electricity for plants grown on their own land, as their neighbor, I don't care. I care when someone grows crops on parkland, just as I would be upset with someone growing commercial strawberries or grazing cattle there without permission. And I care when we waste police and prison resources on this.

Giant ass rant after the jump.

The local radio news host kindly wrote back with a nice try. He told me that there's a lot of coverage right now because this is the time when the plants are large and harvestable, and presumably easier to find. Ok, but that doesn't address the waste of resources. 'But 4 of the 5 major busts were guarded with guns'. Well, 1 major bust wasn't. And I'm pretty sure the town's major employer, a pharmaceutical company, has a few armed guards too. Sure, they're not out terrorizing the neighbors, but that's because their products are legal - and arguably more dangerous - not because their products are drugs. So the fact of linking guns and MJ is about the legality, not the product. Which we learned (not well) with prohibition.

The other objection was that these grow houses were so large that they couldn't be medicinal. Well, the town's big pharma player made $1,700,000,000.00 in 2007 from their top 4 products, the first two of which are the same product in different delivery vehicles. Yes, that's 1.7 Billion Dollars. And even so, their number 1 product was only the number 49 brand name drug moneymaker that year. The top 37 brand name drugs, and the top 9 or so generics, all made over $1 Billion each. So that's $50 Billion in the top legal drugs, so why would the size of a growhouse discount it's likelihood to be medicinal? Last I heard, the pot market for US users buying from Canada was only $15 Billion.

Marijuana's not perfectly safe: it's a mind altering drug. But it's a relatively mild one compared to everything else, including asprin and Tylenol which probably 90% of households have and take. Even more, any doofus can grow it and get it to a useable state, just like any doofus can make drinkable, if not good, alcohol. The reason I object to all the crap marijuana laws lies in those two realities, coupled with the fact that people like mind altering substances. We know, through hard lessons, that people will go to extraordinary lengths to get such things. Most people are in fact fine with the easiest ones to get. And that's why the over-the-top prohibition of MJ is such a good correlate to alcohol prohibition. When literally anyone can make or grow this product, even by accident, and can do it effectively in secret, you cannot have effective control of supply. For those cases, prohibition is worthless at best and harmful at worst. It's a little easier to spot gigantic fields of poppies or coca which also need funded processors who know what the heck they're doing, but ignoring reality by thinking we can make it all go away is a ridiculous fantasy as well as harmful.

I think doing something that can or does physically hurt someone else should have a bigger fine/punishment if you're doing it drunk, stoned, or coked up. I think workplaces can insist you don't come to work high or smoke up at work. But the fact of your being drunk, stoned, or coked up in your off time is not something I can get worked up over. Particularly if you're not so much one of those things as lightly buzzed. People do all sorts of things that might not be particularly healthful, but don't really impact me, and we allow most of those dumb things to happen without criminalizing them. When we make the average citizen into a criminal (I'm also talking to you, TSA. And speed limits.) then our laws become ridiculous and a society of laws needs to get rid of ridiculous laws that cause people to lose respect to our legal system.

We find over and over that when common, desirable things are restricted, people tend to binge on them rather than use them sensibly. A couple decades of "Just Say No" education has eliminated the idea of use without abuse, when that is actually the most common thing. The other JSN notion that marijuana is bad and should be avoided because it's a "gateway" drug to other drugs, or causing your SUV to crash on TV, is also misguided. It's a gateway in that once people take it and realize the world doesn't end, they think all the bad info about heroin is wrong too, so they try that without knowing that there's some truth to the fact that heroin really can cause some immediate life threatening harm and is physically addictive. It's a gateway when people wind up with criminal network connections to get something that isn't that bad. ("Criminal" connections to alcohol and tobacco tend to grow up and not be criminals 5 years down the road.) Criminal connections to drug dealers may more easily lead to other criminalized drug connections. Don't teach people how to circumvent the law when engaging in normal behaviors like getting buzzed (or taking lotion or water thru airport security). It's just dumb to do that.

Speaking of which, when we ARE dealing with drugs that have an immediate danger component, do we want criminals telling us the dose and purity? Or if not us, then our neighbors, our kids, or our colleagues? No, the cigarette industry is not the stand out example for how to give out non-addicting doses of mind altering substances. But we do have a better shot if the production is regulated and controlled for dose, type of effects (Munchie vs. artistic visions), age, purity, etc... than if we leave it to cartels and street dealers, one presumes. And if we make marijuana legal, my local pharmaceutical company will have all kinds of local suppliers, which will be great for our local economy and maybe my condo will be worth money again.

A less ranty treatment of this topic can be found in Jennifer Crusie's book "Charlie All Night", recently re-released, and one of my favorites.

** Honestly, I think that my state will vote to free the weed before we vote for civil rights for gay adults because even the red-staters here get high.

Maybe This Time

2010-08-30T22:36:00.000-07:00

Maybe this time
- I won't go so long between blog posts, especially when I have material
- I'll actually sign up on facebook, where people live these days
- I'll figure out why I'm getting extra cranky at work.

Maybe This Time also the title of Jennifer Crusie's first solo novel since Bet Me. If the link to her blog and books wasn't enough, here's a quick interview about the book. I think she has one of the best pro-women voices in romance, or literature generally. That she also does good snark and has quirky characters who know happiness when it bites them on the ass makes her a great read. In this case she's added ghosts, doing a fresh take on The Turn of the Screw. I haven't got a clue what they'll be like, but I'm picturing nearly-headless Nick in attitude.

Barnes and Noble didn't offer a pre-order for my nook, so I bought a hardcopy from Amazon. With the free shipping, it may still take a while, so I might be sitting in the B&N with my nook, reading what I can while I'm there.

Orange Stars

2010-08-23T23:15:00.000-07:00

I was trying to think of a title that references "lucky", but I may have found my next tattoo... I'm inordinately fond of 5 pointed star tattoos, particularly the ones around Kat Von D's left eye. I can't really see myself tattooing my face with stars, but I could find someplace. And maybe I should get some orange in it.

As I was relaxing tonight in one of the dozen or more "foot massage" places that has popped up in my town (I know of a dozen, I hear there are more) and charges $20 for an hour's relaxation I thought about how lucky I am. I was able to go do this when I felt iffy. I broke myself taking a walk. I managed to bruise the bones in my big toe by, um, walking around in shoes that weren't perfectly comfortable.

Then, knowing that my existing Chaco sandals are one of the few shoes I can wear without inserts, I was able to buy more via Zappos.com who has free return shipping if they don't fit exactly as I'm expecting.

And I have this cheap little netbook and an expensive cable connection that allows me to surf the web from Already Pretty to Whorange to I'm Revolting who posted a picture of Abby Walton's funky painted fingernails that I was able to emulate after "rehydrating" a couple old colors with the butyl acetate/ethyl acetate mix I was able to buy at the store next to the Trader Joe's (since I can't get it from my chemist friend anymore... and TJ's doesn't carry my favorite sundried tomato bruschetta topping or frozen black raspberries anymore either. I can still buy my favorite Pop-Secret Homestyle snack sized microwave popcorn.)

So, there are minor slights. But I'm learning hip-hop dance routines despite the toe, have enough money this year to ease up and get things I need when I need them, even if they aren't on sale, and there are all these fabulous people out there curating links on blog sites so I can follow the most bizzare but interesting things instead of sleeping. I'd just like to acknowledge how cool this all is.

American Cuisine

2010-08-09T21:34:00.000-07:00

There are not really any pictures from rafting - I have the pic I bought of me looking too serious in the big rapid, and maybe my friend who'd brought a disposable camera will send some shots my way, but while that's lingering, let's look at food. Turns out I'm not the only home canner this year. I brought a jar of plum jam and my friend had made apricot and strawberry. Funnily enough, they're all in different sized jars. Breakfast was delightful, like so.

There are more pictures of happiness thru food if you click through.

I've never been a huge fan of cupcakes, mostly because I like the cake better than the icing and they almost always have a preponderance of bad icing. These were different. Jennifer Weiner brought cupcakes to her booksigning for "I'll Fly Away" and the one I had, lemon, was delicioso. Marvelous, even. It was marked with green and pink circles on top. I'm pretty sure the bakery is "Sprinkles" (fun name for cake bakery, not so much for a cat).

I really thought they'd go faster than they did. Turns out other people have more self control around cake than I do. Plus, we'd gone to see JW and she'd left us in stitches. Probably some people were still laughing by the time I got to the cupcakes.

In other news, while I own stock of Costco in my 401K, I've never been in one. Well, until recently when my co-workers decided to have our group lunch there a couple weeks ago. So here it is, my first purchase at Costco: $3.15+tax. Cheapest group lunch yet.

But if you want to see meat, my equipment engineer had me over for smoked/grilled ribs and tri-tip. You can see one of the tri-tips has some fresh looking meat. That's where I got sauced on tequila and started cutting meat off while it was still over the fire. It's a good thing I did that as I passed out before having the actual meal... But still, here he is, tending the oak grill (as opposed to his charcoal grill or gas grill or older oak grill). The grill bed winches up and down to change access and adjust heat. Pretty cool, eh? Delicious too.

Other good BBQ foods include corn on the cob. Here's one of the gigantor cobs I got last week at the farmer's market. I broke and cut it into 4 segments to get reasonable servings. I cook my corn right away to set the sugar and then eat the stumpy bits throughout the week, or shave it into salad.

And it doesn't get much more American than seeing the Air Force Thunderbirds at an air show. Here they are doing the job that lasts longer than their show: signing autographs and making nice with the public. I made sure to thank the mechanics, particularly. While there are a few women on the team like the announcer and XO, this year none of the main pilots were women. (If they can't have at least one, they aren't looking hard enough, IMHO.) I did get to notice some details, though. The pilots and crew for each plane have the plane number on their uniform and their boots. The guys (and they were all guys this time) with plane number 5 all wore their numbers upside down, because 5's the one plane that gets clearance from the Air Force to actually fly upside down 100 feet or so over the runway. They're all pretty cute. And look about 12 to me.

It might seem like an aside, but it really all comes down to this last shot here. I've just finished reading "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles" by Jennifer 8 Lee. I'd seen her talk at the LA Festival of Books, and you might have seen her on the food channel. Her book talks about how American Chinese food really is in this country, from the takeout container to the beef with broccoli to the fortune cookie, this stuff wouldn't exist if Chinese food hadn't come to America. You can also find them anywhere, with eerily similar menus despite almost all restaurants being mom-n-pop shops; they're twice as common as McDonald's! For me, particularly, Chinese food is my go-to comfort food.

So when I showed up at the air show and saw seas of uniform blue tents over the hot dog, hamburger, beer and funnel cake tents, one vendor in particular caught my eye. The very busy "Thai-Chinese-BBQ, Teriyaki Bowl", right next to the big American Flag flying over the Air Force Thunderbirds souvenir tent. It made me feel good about being American.

(Fair warning, if you read the Fortune Cookie Chronicles, make sure you have money for Chinese take out handy. I had to go out for mu-shu pork and wonton soup, myself.)

Do, Done, Did

2010-08-08T23:40:00.000-07:00

I've been racking up some pictures to share, and it's about time to have something happiness related and not political, so here goes.

First, the pop-art pins I selected from grandma's vast collection of costume jewelry have been mounted and put on display!

For the rest of the pictures,

Read More.
I can't remember when I first started mounting stuff on foamcore for display, but I've done seasonal cookie cutters with straight pins, and I keep my necklaces on a similar arrangement. When I picked up the pins, I tried to mostly do flower based ones that screamed "pop art" to me. Still, I couldn't resist the two piece phone, and grandma was well known for wearing circle pins so I needed a sampling, plus I passed over 15 other gold leaves to pick this one, and there were holiday pins, then the similar themed earrings.

I laid the pins and earrings out in various patterns on foam core, took pictures, and tried again. Here's my first effort.

The green foamcore was an attempt at a "meadow" color from the owner of a sign store where I stopped in to inquire about a banner for an art fair booth, (assuming I get back into the glass studio again...). I asked if he had colored foam core. He didn't but he did have this plastic coating, and made me up this bit gratis. Thanks sign guy! I finished it off with white and green electrical tape. (Both greens adjacent were a little too much.) Did I mention how happy electrical tape makes me?

While I liked that arrangement with the focus on the flowers in the middle, it seemed too cluttery and random. In this next version, I decided to group the earrings to make a feature.

I liked the line, but I didn't want the earrings to be the dominant focus. So I tried about 6 other arrangements that I won't be sharing with you, but suffice it to say, this one was my winner. There's room for improvement, but it's good enough and I like it, and I got it DONE and hung up. The "hung up" picture was first, so here's the closeup.

The pins are hanging up, looking cheerful, right where I can see them from my bed (not on purpose, but I like it), right over my new shoe rack. The rack is also visible from the front door and used to look like this. Notice the arm-banging, over-full basket on the right hand side among the cluttery look.

I've been looking and looking for a solution. I'd even drafted a closet with moveable sides so I could maintain access to the overhead furnace filter. (It would have been an awesome closet.) But I think this is better. That half day off, which I spent shopping online, bore fruit. Much cleaner looking, no?

Thanks to Overstock.com with $1 shipping, and a cabinet that exactly fits the space (or will once I fix the trim situation). Only 13" deep (perfect), it has little drawers on top to hold my orthotics (why does that word always make me think of adult diapers? It's awful.) So now my shoe modifiers are in drawers where they don't snag me on the way to the bathroom. I think I need to put in one more shelf, if I can swing it because then I'll be within 2 pairs of the storage of the previous rack.

Speaking of the bathroom, my toilet sprung a leak. The porcelain god is a jet flush version, so I wasn't sure I'd be able to find or fix the leak.

Fortunately, the knob on the right hand side with a hole in the middle was beading up water. It was easy to twist off, and I found a little vent valve/gasket inside that was looking worse for wear. The contact info was all on the top, and Flushmate has a website that let me order the duckbill valve for $1.35 each (minimum order of 4, but whatever), and they came in 2 days. So I only had three days of shutting off the water to the toilet after each use and the new valve works like a champ. I taped the bag of replacement valves in the tank, behind the mechanism, for when this one needs replacing. Here I'm holding the old valve which is all bent and buckled instead of straight and thin.

(Those two pics were inspired by NewDoorKnobs car door fix, although we can all agree that taking apart a car door and putting it back together correctly is much more impressive.)

Well, that's enough for now. 3 *finished* projects. Yay!

Yes We K(ag)an

2010-08-06T07:58:00.000-07:00

For the first time evah, there will be three women on the Supreme Court!! Thank you President Obama, and all the senators who voted to confirm her.

Back when Roberts got confirmed (and how the hell he came in as freshman judge to take over the head spot I'll never know), it was after the Harriet Meyers fiasco. Harriet Meyers was, from the start, a feint. They offered her up knowing that, while a smart lawyer, she didn't have the right qualifications to be a constitutional judge in this day and age. They offered her up so that they could say "see, we nominated a woman, but you threw her out, and now here's the white man we wanted to put in there all along." It was, frankly, sickening to watch. And so blatant I'm surprised there aren't books out about it.

There are many reasons we need diversity on the bench, but the biggest one is that our populace is diverse. Most of us value the melting pot nature of our country and society. But it's true that laws don't affect us equally. Someone who has a different perspective of how people are treated under the law based on color, gender, etc... can add to the discussion before a final decision is crafted in a way that someone from the majority may never think to even question. Back to Gavin DeBecker's quote (paraphrased):

Men's biggest fear on a date is that a woman will laugh at him.
Women's biggest fear on a date is that a man will kill her.

This type of thing leads to a difference in experience and that experience needs a voice in the law. I think Elena Kagan will be a good legal voice.

Plus, I've also read that once a minority hits about 30% representation in a group that's when their opinions are attributed to them as persons, and not to everyone from that group. It will be possible now to have more dissent between the women on the court, and their opinions less likely to be dismissed as "just a woman".

Kagan has had an impressive legal and educational history. I don't think I'll always agree with her (although my friends and I cheered her on, not knowing who she was, back when I was at college down the street from her's and she helped block the military recruiting on campus) but I don't have to. I do trust that she knows the constitution, knows law, and knows how to think. She seems like the sort who will try to look out for everybody. She may fail sometimes, but on the whole, I'm optimistic.

To everyone who thinks that two women nominees in a row is too many, recall that every woman who has ever been appointed has been so since I was in the third grade, and I'm not old. Before then, there had never been a woman on the court. That's funky to think about.

Bending Toward Justice

2010-08-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

Prop 8, the vote to disallow my gay friends and neighbors to marry in CA, has been overturned without equivocation! There is a stay on the decision until friday, at which time the Judge will hear arguments for whether or not to continue the stay until the appeal. Now, or at least pretty soon, I can tell all my lesbian techs back in MA about job opportunities out here.

Restless

2010-08-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

So it seems like every time I turn around something else is causing me to have restless leg (RLS) problems. Most notable are allergy meds. Despite taking 12mg of chlorpheniramine every night for a third of my life, for the last couple years, it gives me RLS. I can take it to help me (a) breathe and (b) sleep, but I have to wash it down with tonic water to cut the leg jitters or I can't sleep.

I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping recently, as well as getting angry a lot, and I think I've figured out that it comes from the OTC Safeway brand Zyrtec. WTF? I've taken Zyrtec and generic Zyrtec before and not noticed anything out of the ordinary, but I took it for about 3 weeks in a row this time and it was like I turned into a stranger. Yeah, I'm used to not sleeping right, but this was excessive. I tried not taking it for a couple days, got the sniffles, took it again, and had not only bad sleep (waking up constantly, enough to regain consciousness every 40 minutes at least) but the next day I got *so*angry* I could barely see straight (even with my special eyes). It took me a while to realize that what was making me toss and turn in bed was actually restless leg syndrome but I finally figured it out. Add the Angry? I'm off that sauce.

Over the weekend, I got several extremely itchy bug bites. The ones that didn't get meat-tenderizered early still itch. (The later, treated ones are gone already.) They were keeping me up, despite the anti-itch cream, so I took Benadryl. I've had mixed results from Benadryl (diphenhydramine) before - in that it makes me sleepy, but not. But it knocks the allergic reaction six ways to sunday, so sometimes it's worth it. Last night? Not worth it.

After a long drive and not-sober weekend, I drove out to Pasadena for a booksigning last night. It was wicked fun (even though I didn't get my eBook signed...) and I'm glad I went but I was pooped. I was in bed by 10:45. I was taking benadryl by 11:30. I was up, jumping around shaking my legs from 12:45 to 3:30 this morning. I'd get up, drink a few ounces of tonic and try to sleep only to be wrenched from sleep by nerves in my legs that would not freaking stop until I got up and marched around, jiggling my right leg. The tonic did nothing, I just had to wait 4-5 hours for it to wear off. I was a total wreck today.

I took a few minutes at work to look up RLS and it turns out that Benadryl is a well known RLS multiplier. Yay. But Zyrtec? And chlortrimeton? ugh. I wonder if the allergy shots are making me more likely to flare up because some alcoholic beverages' breakdown products give me RLS about 4 hours after I drink them, as well. The magical internet advice fairies also suggest taking iron and/or magnesium supplements. I do tend to run low on iron and have been craving MEAT recently, so I figure that's worth a try as well. Anyone else have ideas? When my quinine fails me, I'm lost. And tired.

To top that off, my jet-flush toilet has a leaky valve. The part is cheap but has to be mailed to me, so I have to turn the supply valve on and off for a few more days. I'm too tired to cope with that but what can you do.

I'll check back in a bit with the regularly scheduled happiness posts, but until then, it's all cranky.

Teva Tan

2010-08-02T12:23:00.000-07:00

Technically, my sandals are Chacos, so it's a Chaco Tan, but Teva Tan is both alliterative and better known. I had been tanning for a couple weeks prior to the trip to get my skin less likely to fry in the sun. It worked so well, along with my heavy handed reapplications of sunscreen, and wearing of a hat that I'm a little disappointed that I don't have more color! But I have some and in reality land, I'm thrilled not to be burning.

The Cache Creek rafting trip this year was fantastic. I got to hang out with friends, got to meet new people, see rafters from previous years, and get wet. Recently I've gotten really nervous in advance of rafting trips where I'm sure I'm going to die - and this is not the way I want to go. But I sit my ass in the boat and I'm perfectly comfortable. It's strange and the yo-yo of emotions from "this isn't a good idea, you should feel sick about it" to "wow, this is an awesome way to spend time with friends and nature and look! I can steer this raft!" keeps me a little off keel. Next time, I'm going to try and prevent the psych-out so the sum total of emotion over the trip is more positive. (Despite all my readings that it's the boundary conditions of the trip that set your memories and feelings of it.)

My reasons not to be afraid:

I'm pretty comfortable in water.
I can swim, well.
I wear my lifejacket religiously.
I can steer a small boat reasonably well and these 2-man kayaks are inflatable.
My friend in front is a strong and competent boater as well .
And this river is mild enough to do a lot of it drunk and backward. So we do.

There was no shortage of intoxication this year. The question came up on sunday morning if 10:30 AM was too early for a second beer... My personal level was a sustained buzz for most of the day with a bit of a crash around dinner time, making the whole day really quite pleasant. It turns out I yell (whoops and hollers yelling) when I'm well lubricated.

The trip was also great because the water was high enough to make it more fun. Last year was spent getting an ab workout scootching over various rocky shallows. This year there was more bobbing and flying over big water waves. The weather was lovely. Quite warm, but not freakishly hot - exactly a good temperature to be in the water. The water was chilly when we first got in, but not cold and for any part after the first 10 seconds felt great. We spent most of the weekend wet. I packed very little but took everything I needed. Someone else came with 100 cans of beer and was good about sharing... I think even the guy who split his head open on a tree branch had a great time. (I'm pretty sure that was our only scary injury, and he got it messing around in a tough rapid and still insists he "won" whatever bogus contest he and his boatmate were messing around with...) It think the age range for our 40 person group (not all of whom I met) was 21 to 51 or so. Mostly I hung out with a core group of 10 or 14 people who stuck together, when possible, down the river, shooting water at each other and sharing beverages.

Anyhow, I wish I hadn't spent all that energy making myself sick with worry beforehand because the trip was good, good fun. It was lovely to be away with friends, even with the 800 mile round trip drive with some portions of heavy traffic. (It's a beautiful drive, for what that's worth.) Maybe I'll see you there next year?!?

Discover is Dead to Me

2010-07-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

I understand that the financial environment has changed and creditors can't be as lenient as they used to be. However. Discover has just been evil to me for the first time ever, and it's bad enough that I won't be using them again for the forseeable future, if ever.

I've been making a lot of purchases recently: airfare to a funeral, mattress, lighting, shipping costs. I use Discover for every in-person expense unless the business doesn't take their card or I pay cash. (I have a MasterCard which is my online card and backup daily card.) I paid off the full balance at the end of June. I set up an automatic payment through my bank to pay at least a minimum, starting in August. I thought I'd covered July and the last time I checked, I had no payment due. Turns out I was wrong, and I missed my payment date by a week. Yeah, I screwed up, but it was an honest mistake and one they're fully equipped to ride out until I take care of it, which based on my history will not take more than a month.

In the past this has no big deal. You pay your outrageous $39 fee, get 20% or higher interest mounting up until it's paid off, and everyone's fine. I've never been more than a month late with a payment in 20 years, and I've never, ever been in default. I have never failed to pay all that I owe, but I have occassionally been a week or three late because I'm not good at keeping track of time. Discover has been a good card for me because they'll take a payment by phone the day the payment is due, and credit the payment that day. They give cash back and don't make me mess around with credits, miles, or whathave you that need to be exchanged for something, it's just cash. On occasion (not often) they'll waive a late fee, even. Their operators are generally helpful. But all of that is not enough to outweigh the latest transgression.

This time, Discover - with a single late payment 7 days overdue - cut off my credit. I called them, put through an automatic payment for the full amount due at the last payment, and spoke to an operator. The operator was not allowed to extend me any credit at all. Not even the $25 I needed to send some packages at the after hours Post Office drop.

Excuse me? I've used your card every week for the last 4 years and have a dozen years credit history with your company. You know (based on my credit report where the last time I checked my score was 798) that I will pay you. And you can't extend me a hundred dollars of credit until I sort out my 7 day late payment that I've already authorized????? Fuck you, Discover Card.

I'm heading up north for a vacation this weekend. And while I always carry two cards, sometimes I pare down and just carry one for a meal or jaunt somewhere. What if I'd been in need of gas or a meal 400 miles from home? What if I'd really had an emergency and needed a small portion of the $8400 of credit I should still have had available? You would have been no help. In fact, you shutting down my credit with no notice could have been way more horrible than me having to spend a half hour in a deserted parking lot with a mobile phone.

I've been an expert credit user for 20 years and I've never run up against this situtation. Did you warn me? I'd argue that you didn't. I try to skim all the "here are upcoming changes to your credit agreement" for at least the highlights and no where did I see "We shut down your credit if your payment is 7 days late". It's possible it was there, but it was not prominent and was mixed in with so many other changes that don't affect me that I didn't/couldn't see it. This one, however, is not a good way to do business. I understand that you don't want to hemorrhage money to someone who won't pay you. But there is nothing in my history with you that would suggest this to be the case. I would understand if you wanted me to call in and ask for an extension or something, and offer only a limited amount. But for me to call in and you to not offer me even $25? Fuck you. You knew you could trust me, but I can't trust you. This is not how credit cards work. You're dead to me, Discover card.

If it turns out that all credit cards now do this, I may be more lenient and go back to using them after a year, because they do have their good points, like not sending bills after the due date. But as I said, I haven't seen this policy being announced. And it could put someone in a rather dangerous situation where they're expecting to be able to pay for something important and can't, with no wiggle room. That's unacceptable.

UPDATE: Just got the bill for this month. My overdue amount was $188.56 which wasn't enough to even charge the full late fee - the fee was "only" $19. This is the month after I paid a $3000+ charge in full. Um. Whatever, assholes. I know Citi probably isn't any better but they haven't cut off my credit for no good cause and I already have their address in my bank bill pay system, so that's what I'm using now.

Infamous

2010-07-27T23:58:00.000-07:00

Oh, and if the insane toaster videos don't sufficiently entertain you, Suzanne Brockmann's new (non-SEAL) book is out NOW. It's called Infamous and the link will let you read chapter one.

My copy came in the mail today but I haven't read it yet. After work, I hit up the tanning salon (I'm trying to colorize my fish-belly-white self so I fry a little less when rafting this weekend.) Then I worked out at the gym because the trainer who was so nice as to carry a heavy thing for me expected me to show up. On the way back, I stopped to get cash to leave for the cleaners tomorrow who will be sweeping up all the styrofoam bits and realized that "Transformers" (the first one, live action) was playing on the inflatable outdoor screen on the lawn at the *very nice* neighborhood strip mall and I've been wanting to see it. So I got a 50 cent popcorn from the Claim Jumper guy (actually named Guy...), put my pants and shirt on over my workout gear, grabbed a picnic blanket and fleece jacket from the car and settled in. For HOURS AND HOURS. The little dog next to me got tired of exploring and fell asleep this movie took so long. Still, it was pretty good, even if I couldn't distinguish Decepticons from Autobots for most of the scenes. See what I mean?

Following that, I hauled out the detritus of the new shoe shelf packaging (the heavy thing which was recently carried in, pictures in later post) to the recycling dumpster, packaged up some things to mail to friends, then made toast and had the idea that I should record the toast coming out of the bottom of the toaster. So I did that, and used the last bit of my June jam on that slice. Yadda, yadda, yadda, and it's 1am (for all the timestamp is an hour ago - the book is out on Tuesday, so I had to backdate it a smidge) and I've made and uploaded two toaster videos and still need to shower off this godawful Right Guard "Fresh" spray deodorant I used at the tanning place which gasses me every time I lift my arms.

And I was ready to sleep at 7pm. Now if the pattern holds, I won't be able to sleep a wink. At least I have my new book. (Infamous!)

Technology Win

2010-07-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

I'm always annoyed when the crumb trays in toasters don't span the whole area I need to clean. This solves that problem because everything slides out the bottom. Here it is, my new toaster, in live action, toasting bread!

This one's for West. Everyone else, fast forward to the end around 17 seconds. (Ignore the comedy central ads playing in the background, if they're audible. You may need to beef up the brightness or contrast to actually see the toast at the end. Apparently proximity to Hollywood is not influencing my movie taking ability whatsoever.)

Ok, the glow works out better on the viewscreen than uploaded to YouTube. Here we are again, with the lights on this time and South Park playing in the background.

My Precious

2010-07-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

The light above my dining room table doesn't work. It's actually a fan with a light, and the fan works, but the downlight, not so much. July is a 3 paycheck month so I went out and got lighting. The dining room light is here, but I need an electrician to also put in the pendants over the "bar" and recess a light over the kitchen sink before that story is complete. So this is actually the story of my new bedroom chandelier.

A lighting store down the street (remember, I live in the contractor-retail section of town) had a big advertising sign drawing me in, thanks to the mattress store being nearby and me needing a new mattress. I also need new lighting because mine's godawful and always has been, but it's pretty much the last thing to do in the design so I hadn't thought much about it yet. But I do watch design shows on HGTV and I know what Candace Olsen can do with a sconce. Really, though, their ad mentioned fans and I thought maybe I could fix mine, so I stopped in. While at the lighting store I saw a sparkly light.

This was not just any sparkly light, but a glittery, shiny, beautiful bouncy light. And it would not work at all as my dining table light. Gloom! Despair! But I have seen the HGTV folks putting chandeliers in other rooms, and I couldn't walk away from this light. So I bought it for my bedroom. My friend from Phoenix has an even more elaborate one in her bedroom (more inspiration) but she also has vaulted ceilings and an opera theme. This is the perfect scale for my place! Since I have yet to pick a theme, I'll make sure it works. Even with the clearance + floor model discount though, it's still two orders of magnitude more expensive than my previous bedroom light. But oh, so worth it. I picked it up 2 hours ago, and it's already up, lit, and I'm telling you about it. See for yourself.

More pictures after the jump.

Here's the haul from the lighting store. The bottom box is my precious. The middle box is my new dining room drum shade, and the top two boxes are pendants.

Opening the box, we get the first glimpse.

While the paper lantern from IKEA on a Target lamp kit worked well enough, it was always supposed to be temporary and only cost $6 or $8.

This is the room with new lighting! The bulbs are a little strong and throw a lot of heat, but they'll do for now.

Without the flash, you can better see the pattern it throws on the ceiling.

Up close, the crystal details are prosaic enough. It's just having a thousand of them on bent, bouncy wires that makes them awesome. Plus they make rainbows.

And that's My Precious. I kept the long cord so I can shut it off from bed, and take it with me when I move. Once more, with feeling:

The Sky is Falling

2010-07-24T01:23:00.000-07:00

After cleaning all those plums off the walk last week, I had to do it again. I went out yesterday to carve a path through the pulp with my trusty 3-for-$1 paint scraper and removed 151 plums from the sidewalk. You read that right. That's a gross (a dozen dozen) plus 7. Including the one that fell on my back while I was tending to its brethren. Criminy!

This morning? I counted 13 new plums on the walk. I went out later to get those off too because they were particularly juicy and I had to haul something in from the car and thought I might be using my wheeled dolly. The something is a cabinet I bought for my shoes and the unwieldy, oblong flat-pack weighs a ton; I had more difficulty getting it into the car than many other things I've hauled over the years. The heavy duty dolly at UPS didn't seem thrilled with it, so I thought my little folding one might not do so well through an obstacle course, or at all, really. I was lucky and my trainer from the gym (such a sweet guy) helped me carry it - after I got the plum juice off the sidewalk after my workout. I really thought they'd all be gone by now, or that I'd at least cleared out some reasonable quantity of them. Next time we have a mild spring with lots of rain, I might need to get a bigger ladder and some fruit picking tools with some reach to them.

Yum

2010-07-21T00:14:00.000-07:00

Huh. I was in need of food, and leftovers were pretty much all there was unless I wanted canned food or cereal. I nixed the leftover pizza because I had it for dinner last night and lunch today. Pulled carelessly out of the freezer two containers yielded deliciousness. One was half a pork tamale from the farmer's market vendor I ate with hoisin because I have no BBQ sauce. The other was a hotdish (once I microwaved it) that I wish I'd written down how I made it because it was delicious, especially since I was expecting frozen leftover hamburger helper.

Here's what was in it:

egg noodles
stewed tomatoes
fresh shitake and oyster mushrooms
ground meat, probably buffalo
cauliflower
kale (not much in the frozen servings as it doesn't reheat well)
maybe some celery

I have only vague memories of making it, which is why I'm pretty sure they were stewed tomatoes and not just canned plum toms. I probably topped the original with frozen shredded cheese (mozarella and TJ's parmesan), but I didn't bother today. Sometimes I can cook! I could even serve that to guests. If I could remember how to make it, and ask people to come over.

FCOL

2010-07-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

In my Health Care plan's list of eligible expenses for Medical Spending Reimbursement, it lists "Laser eye surgery". Yet I just got a rejection from the company saying "Lasik" isn't covered. Perhaps if I re-submit and call it "laser eye surgery"? Seriously? Do I need to fight this fight to get my own money back for something they say they cover? It's that or figure out some really expensive medical need in the next couple months.

Here's the relevant section of the list:

Hospital bills
Hypnosis for treatment of an illness
Laboratory fees
Laetrile by prescription
Laser surgery for the eyes
Lead-base paint removal (for children with lead poisoning)
Life fee to retirement home for medical care
Lip-reading lessons

What part of Lasik=Laser Eye surgery are they not getting? I may have to poke my newly surgerized eye out with a stick.

UPDATE 21July2010 9:20
After 14 minutes and 22 seconds on the phone with Tiffany, who knew that (a) LASIK is "Laser Eye Surgery" and (b) that they cover it, she and her manager unearthed my fax, made sure the form was filled out correctly, and will reprocess the claim and cut me a check. Whew! Now I don't have to manufacture a new, expensive medical issue or fight with the bureaucrats to get my money back.

Plum Tuckered

2010-07-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

My weekend started out energetically enough. I came home friday and stripped more plums off the landscaping. They were a little too close to overripe so instead of cleaning them and putting them in the fridge for the next day, I just went ahead and made more jam. I got fully half the plums off one tree and the other three trees offered up the other half (some of which got tossed out in the quality control process).

Then Saturday and Sunday were somewhat lost to sloth. Biologically determined sloth, but sloth nonetheless. I still got stuff done because my mattress got delivered yesterday, so I reset the bed, and my organizer came today so things got done with or without my cooperation. Then I slept on the couch. I'm rousing myself long enough to post this before heading back to the new bed.

It's a little hard to see the difference in the pictures, but the airbed was oversized for the frame and somewhat blobby and formless. The mattress fits the frame and room better and makes the room look bigger by not being so overstuffed looking. Partly it's because the airbed was a queen, and the mattress is a Full XL (length of queen/king, width of full).

OLD:

NEW:

See? Hard to tell a difference in the photo. You'll have to come visit.

More satisfying is plum jam. Plums stripped from the landscaping (which a neighbor asked the management company about and it's not poisoned to kill bugs or whatnot) were turned into jam with the addition of lots of sugar and some pectin. There were two efforts, 2 weeks apart. The first batch I tried to gather from plums poised to fall on my sidewalk, but still missed plenty having only a 2 step stepstool. The second batch was from 4 trees around the complex because I couldn't reach many more plums on my tree even with the 3 step ladder and by then plenty had already fallen off. I think the remainder will be gone within the week.

I've also been cleaning plums off the sidewalk because they leave a purple mush gauntlet that's not possible to get through without staining something. Yesterday's effort was done just before mattress delivery, making it my third cleaning. I went out this morning to go to my tan and thought there must be at least a dozen more plums that fell overnight. They were still pretty whole so I took the paint scraper out and scraped 33 newly fallen plums off the sidewalk. That's 3 shy of 3 dozen!! That's both a lot of plums for 1 day, and bad estimation skills on my part.

Here are pictures from the two jam making efforts. The first effort ended with me realizing that it wasn't setting up and wasn't boiling hot enough then dumping in a fair amount of pectin then accidentally scorching it a bit. It still tastes fine, but it's pretty solid and the first whiff from the open bottle smells a tad scorched. The second batch got boiled hotter with the skins in it, and had more natural pectin, so I added a very little more right at the end and managed not to scorch it.

I did squeeze in a meyer lemon, as well, but that's the sum total of ingredients: plums, sugar, pectin, lemon. Plus heat and elbow grease turns plums into this:

For more pictures (including an opportunistic shot of the new toaster)

read more.

I gathered the plums in this green basket I got at the Dollar Spot at Target. I can't get out of there without spending $20, it's crazy. Anyway, this basket fit over my wrist and worked fine for the plums, which were just larger than the holes, for all that half the neighbors thought they were big-ass cherries. This is them
poised for cleaning. Even though they were getting boiled immediately, it gave me a chance to dig out anything less than wonderful and discard it, plus make sure I wasn't adding spiders for protein. Observant readers will see my new toaster in the background. I put down the flap where the toast slides out for the picture.

When they start to boil, they look like this. I thought about trying to take the pits out early, but they were firmly attached to the very plum flesh I most needed. So I waited them out.

The first effort had the pits removed with rather too much stuff still on them, and too many skins went with them

The second effort was done after boiling the plums hotter, which got more of the pectin in the skins activated. I ladled them into a strainer over the pot, then picked them out. Labor intensive, but less so than doing it up front. A little tricky to not drip sugary plum sauce everywhere. But the removed pits clearly had more gel action going on, as you can see from me holding them over my used supplies. The canning funnel is key.

It leaves a little something that looks like this, once I run it through a food mill to puree/remove the skins.

Which I put into cans. I needed to "water process" those for another 15 minutes in the canning pot. Canning is not challenging, but pesky. Things that make it less pesky: canning pot with jar rack, can lifter, canning funnel, ladle. If you want to home can anything, I recommend owning those tools, along with the consumables of jars, lids, and lid rings.

Then I played with the pits some more.

One last shot of the jam in the jars.

Special Eye 5 week Update

2010-07-12T00:05:00.000-07:00

The vision is normalizing. Five weeks after quick but mentally traumatic LASIK eye surgery, things seem to be improving according to the doc. The thought of the surgery isn't as raw, and my left eye double-vision seems to have finally disappeared. I can go outside without sunglasses for small amounts of time. (Actually, it's about 6 weeks now, by the time I got around to writing this, but I've been composing this in my head for a while. Yeah, it's still a bit rough and could be organized better, but it's good enough for gov't work.)

I used the anti-inflammatory eye drops for 2 weeks, the anti-biotic eye drops for 1 week and occasional use. I'm still using a variety of tear-mimic, saline, or re-wetting (dry eye combating) drops every day, but not as often as I was at even 4 weeks. Here's what I've learned.

Pred Forte, the anti-inflammatory, leaves white residue on the eyelashes that can reflect light into the eyes, making it look like there are weird visual effects. But those go away after cleaning the eyelashes, thankfully, although I touched my eyelashes as little as possible the first week. My eye doc says that it's better to wean off it than go cold turkey. I used this 4X/day for the first week and 2X/day the second week, and once in a while if my eyes seem itchy.
Anti-biotic eyedrops sting and burn. I've had 2 or 3 brands and they all do. Best way to deal with them is to put in some other drop first, blink that out of the way for a minute or so, then put in the anti-biotic drop. I used these 4X/day for the first week and whenever I got paranoid that I'd damaged or otherwise touched my eye like when I hit my eyeball with a ziplock bag last week.
Blink makes a sample container that is annoyingly hard to squeeze. It's too squat to get a good squeeze on it. The drops will wet the eyes like tears, but the effect is short term and not worth the struggle.
The Dollar Store eye drops work just as well as Blink and are easier to use and cheaper.
The "individual use" containers have about 5-8 drops per eye in them, which is usually too many. I mostly use one or two drops per eye at a time. These can be smuggled easily onto airplanes, but I otherwise recommend larger bottles. (To avoid contaminating larger bottles, don't touch the tip to anything but the lid, but if you do, squeeze out a drop or two to clean out the tip before allowing the bottle to expand and suck in again.)
All varieties of "natural tear" or just plain preserved saline drops are good for rinsing eyes during or after showering. I had an old half-full bottle of saline that I plopped in the shower next to the shampoo just in case I got soapy or icky water in my eyes. (Do not put Lasiked eyes under shower water. If you just get a little in from dripping or your wet face, it's ok, but I flushed mine with saline anyway, just to be safe.)
GenTeal makes re-wetting drops that seem to offer the best healing, and I give them credit for getting rid of the double vision. But they are very strange to use. Vision will be jacked up for about 10-15 minutes after using these drops, with fine/near vision not working great at all, but for the 2-3 hours after that, it's better than ever. Then, my eyes started to feel sticky. This could only be relieved by more drops (either GenTeal or natural-tears type) but the stickiness is getting less as time goes on. So if you need to drive 15 minutes home, use the saline/tears kind. If you need to drive to San Diego, put in the GenTeal and wait 15 minutes. (Fun fact: GenTeal is made by Novartis, who bought out the Necco Factory, of conversation hearts fame, a block from where I used to live then work. )
I have used Systane in the past for re-wetting, but not since the Lasik, so I can't say if it's better or worse than GenTeal, but GenTeal "feels" like it's working better so I stocked up on that. (I got mild-moderate and moderate-severe strengths both.)

Still on most days I think "oh, my contacts are starting to dry out, I should take them out before bed." This was constant for the first month and only just started to become an intermittent thought. It was what triggered me to write this tonight, though.

I've been trying to exercise my eyes with the bead-on-a-string exercises and looking at Magic Eye images. These practice control of focal distance. My close vision is working better but I really can't focus at armpit distance yet, and that close, my left eye still gets a grey hole in the center. I'm hoping if I exercise my peepers, it'll keep the muscles strong. I keep pulling my reading back from my eyes because my muscle memory is to read with things 8" from my face, but I can see clearly to several feet away, so I keep moving books or computer screens and things close then away, just to make sure I practice using the various distances.

My eye appointment early last week (~1 month at 5 weeks due to holiday) showed my left eye vision correction improved without having the double vision in the way. My vision is testing around 20/20. My corneas and lenses look healthy and are mostly healed. I can rub my eyes now if i need to but have only done it once. Whenever I catch myself about to rub them, I just put in more eyedrops and the desire to rub goes away. I noticed today at LACMA, when wandering through the 12' high rusted steel "ribbon" rooms, that I do get some aura still around bright lights when it's dark - the light coming over the top edge really came over the edge - but it's not as intense as the first week. Your mileage may vary.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2010-07-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

Otherwise known as "Men Who Hate Women" by Swede Steig Larsson. My review, one of millions out there: 3 of 5 stars or a solid C. Readable but there were not-insignificant problems. A Boston friend, also a reader, gave me the set with the ok to pass them on when I'm done and a hint to read it for Salander which bore out. If you'd like to try them, sing out and I'll send them to you once I figure out if I'm reading the next 2 installments.

Oftentimes my 3 star reviews mean "readable but doesn't really stand out in any way". In this case, it's an average of 1 and 4 stars, rounded up because it ended better than it started, made some points (if clumsily) that I can get behind, and I'm allowing slack for it being a translation from the Swedish.

The short version is that it's a mystery in a mystery with some story at the end and infodump up the wazoo on the front end making it easy to put down for two thirds of the book. There are characters you want to like doing dumb enough things that it would be easy to give up on them, but they do better things too. There's really nasty violence that I felt was more than the story required, in order to make the point that ignoring and excusing violence is bad and violence poisons lives. The message of how journalists need to investigate, not just fluff those they're reporting on couldn't be more important. We're introduced to Mikael, a writer/publisher who tries to walk that walk, and Salander, an odd young woman with a penchant for unearthing secrets. When they work together, the story works, but until then it's a chore emeshed with wallbanging obstacles. I have the feeling that my desire to start the next book has more to do with the gruesome allure of rubbernecking at a trainwreck than wanting to read it for enjoyment or worthier feeling.

The long version is after the jump. If you're concerned about spoilers, skip the paragraph starting and ending with the word "spoiler". BTW, I generally don't consider anything in the first 20% of a book as a spoiler, especially if it's easy to predict.

The good stuff:
Having once stayed with my friend's neighbors in Trondheim, Norway, and seen people eat open faced sandwiches slathered with fish, fish eggs, and brown cheese, *for breakfast*, I was charmed somewhat by the setting, the food and housing descriptions. I also know that there are some things about daily life that are the same between the US and various european/scandinavian countries, and things that are not. It was pleasing to have the opportunity to read a book that was both familiar yet strangely not in the assumptions about what normal life is.

One of those things was the blase sexual relationships. In the healthy, consenting adults, they were pretty relaxed about things, and went with the flow and the author did not ignore these relationships. There was some drama around that, but not nearly as much as there would be in an American novel, and it was pretty much the least of the dramas in the work. (The Smart Bitches review says they treated sex as if it were a reflex like sneezing and that's pretty on point. It was not danced around, nor was it overblown, and if it caused some need to clean up afterward, there was no shame.)

The blandness of the protagonist Mikael brought a calmness to a book that didn't need him to be overdramatic even if it did make him a bit forgettable. The "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" also had several other tattoos, many secrets, skills, and an oddball way of navigating the world.   She is the real "hero" of the book, for without her, this book would read like a newspaper account of the documenting of the finding of a serial killer. She was the reason I kept reading, even though she was also the biggest reason I nearly stopped reading.

Because the novel was a story nested in a story nested in a story, there were several climactic zones making a long payout for the upfront drudgery. Situations were resolved with more good happening than bad, which is a win for me.

The neutral and issues with translation.
If someone set a novel in California and had the protagonist move from Beverly Hills to Compton, we'd all know they were going from ritzy to a challenging neighborhood. I did not have that background to draw similar judgments about the Swedish counterparts. It would have helped me to have a footnote on the page stating some of the assumed information that would add understanding or atmosphere. Assuming that there was intent for that to happen. It wouldn't be necessary for random street names, but when the author says, "Norsjo was a small town with one main street, appropriately enough called Storgatan." I need to know more. I'm guessing it means "street of stores". This, though, is the Mouse vs. Molehill issue.   If in one culture "don't make something out of nothing" is said "don't make a mountain out of a molehill", do you translate it to Russian using their equivalent, "Don't make an elephant out of a mouse"? Do you translate the idiom-meaning or the literal equivalent? You will lose or at least shift something either way. There were several spots where I felt something like that happened, for which I will not knock the book.

I'm pretty sure the prose is declarative and descriptive because the author intended it and because he was a crime reporter or some such and was used to writing that way; the the style is not a comfortable or usual one for me to read. Just often enough to make me expect it more often than it was used, he'd throw in something more personal than an external description.   In other words, the Point of View was severely detached from the characters, except when it wasn't.   90% of the book was written as if the author were watching a drama in a diorama, but every so often we'd dive into someone's head like "Salander thought that no research she had ever done before had contained even a fraction of the scope of this assignment." Mikael was described almost totally from the outside, but there were snatches of Salander's thoughts that I think made her more sympathetic and understandable, if not actually relatable. I think that's due to the fact that he created Salander to have extremely limited verbal communications, and few people to speak for her, so background information about her appeared to be from her thoughts and memories and feelings.

Someone must have told Larsson at some point that it was better to have dialogue than just infodump sections of story. The problem is that monologues and narrations are not dialogue, they're just infodump in quotations, and he didn't seem to get that. And since even most of the action is described in an expository way more than and active way, most of the book, and certainly the first 400 pages, read as backstory more than story. When Mikael and Salander started interacting, it finally felt like story. And some of that was quite well done.

Personally, I didn't need 400 pages of backstory. It was extremely easy to walk away from the book the instant someone said, "well, I'll tell you, but first you need to know..." for the 18th time. It was infodump nested within infodump nested within infodump until I wanted to rip full chapters out of the book. We could have skipped maybe 6 chapters if he'd put the family chart in the middle of the book and made it a little more detailed. I kept coming back to see if Salander would do something interesting.

Ironically, Salander's path getting interesting was where I nearly gave it up altogether. Salander is, essentially, a ward of the state and has a guardian. She gets a new guardian and does the equivalent of tiptoeing into the forest to see why none of the other girls have come back to the haunted house after they screamed. [yes this is halfway through the book, but it's only a fifth of the way into her fraction of it, so it's not a spoiler by my definition.] Serious, serious "too stupid to live (TSTL) behavior and choices and thought patterns. These thought patterns do not serve her well in the middle of the book. At all. She's a complete idiot and the reasons are a day late and a dollar short. She takes revenge, but it's not nearly good enough. A start, but there may be nothing that's good enough.   Skip the next paragraph if you don't want spoilers.

Spoilers here in my grievance:
The scenes in the middle occur before Salander is sufficiently fleshed out. We need to know more about her beyond the fact that her childhood was traumatic enough that she rarely speaks to anyone, particularly authority figures. Because she walks into a bad, bad attack that she was smart enough not to walk into. Part of the horror of it was that it was escalated so far beyond her and our expectations. But therein lies a problem. The attacker felt he had her at his mercy and I really think there would have been a longer period of escalation. Sure, it could happen that he goes from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds, but not believably. Plus, the only way it is believable is if he's done this a LOT. He's quite confident and decisive and practiced in this matter. He does things that are potentially fatal without killing or permanently disfiguring her. Either with or without the extreme escalation, it's clearly not his first time attacking someone under his influence. When Salander, who is better at finding secrets than anyone, cannot find even whispers of shadows of hints of past crimes, it's utterly unbelievable. She's probably the only person in a million that wouldn't go to a hospital to heal from injuries inflicted, even if only to get an STD test. Someone he had contact with in the past 20 years wound up in the hospital or they disappeared. Plus, this whole scene was character violation from start to finish in addition to being overly gruesome. The author claimed Salander was operating by her own script, but she's a bright gal. She's had 11 years of a well meaning guardian to give her room and encouragement to think of other ways of solving her problems than the one in that tiny, tiny box she uses. Speaking of which, why didn't her other guardian start proceedings to get her official status backed down from full custody as she gained her majority and performed all the necessary tasks to keep a job and a roof over her head? This whole section is full of holes and her excuses for not confiding in any living soul simply do not fly with me. They're excuses for doing dumbass things, not something she shows tolerance for in others with similar provocations. Later on, these same reactions actually work well for the situation that she and Mikael find themselves in, in an odd sort of way, which makes the earlier faults more understandable, but still not excusable. The attack or after-attack action could have been handled more reasonably which would have improved the continuity of character. /rant /spoilers

The bad. Mostly described in the previous paragraphs it can be summed up as unnecessary, clunky, nested infodump added to characters who are insufficiently explained to the reader to justify some really dumbass decisions (let's go run in the spooky woods of the town I'm being warned to stay away from!nothing could go wrong there!), lots of "0 to 60" sex (good and bad) that really needs more runup than "Hi, My name is X, I like your breasts," too many extraneous characters with too-similar/same names. (Yes, Gunnar is a popular name. You don't need 4 of them.) I was able to get through the book after I wrote invectives after the parts that pissed me off particularly. (Force fed foreshadowing! Having a publishing backer isn't corruption until your backer changes your story.) I tried to do it because so many people like the book and it wasn't unreadable, it was just clunky.

As affable as Mikael was, he was kind of a shit too. It might have helped if we'd been privy to more of his thoughts, but his daughter was completely off his radar unless she parked herself in his way. He'd call his married girlfriend 4 times a day for a week, but wouldn't call his daughter for 6 months, even to tell her he was out of jail. Which was clearly not an American hell-hole jail, BTW, but that's a topic for another time. Every other fiction or non-fiction account I've read of someone going to jail talks about how the loss of autonomy in a jail, even if just there for an hour or two, has a profound effect on the psyche, but Mikael preferred it somewhat to his cabin "working exile", even though cabin "working vacation" was clearly an established pattern for him. It didn't impact his psyche in any way, shape, or form. It could, in future, maybe be related to Salanders legal situation to bind the story tighter, but I don't expect that as for Mikael it's a disposable experience.   As are most of his "relationships".   He is kind to people and animals but he doesn't really care about them in the specific. He cut his best friend of 20 years out of the story of his life (not Harriet), and holes up to write it without her input. That doesn't show me him treating her as a partner. It's a damned odd way to operate.

Similarly, Salander is presented as someone with no contacts, no connections (but her boss and former guardian) and no power but we find out that she has powerful counterculture contacts, regular contact with amiable friends who accept what she presents to them, "dates" enough to practice conversation, but can't see past her nose when confronted with authority. She uses her connections to thwart authority all the time, but never for herself when she's most in need - WTF? Then she has an as yet inexplicable insecurity about her breast size, when just about everything else about her physical self seems to be a tool that is/isn't useful. "Of all things" is the phrase that comes to mind. Yes, some people transfer stresses or insecurity about one area of their lives to another, but the late gate breast fixation's just odd. We needed more about Salander to come out earlier in the book. Maybe some will be in the next one, but that gets dicey too as there's serious implication that she was dreadfully abused in her past.

To end the bad, there's a lot of violence against women described in this book. There're also people who treat women just fine or ignore them altogether, but the violence edges into gratuitous. The point he tries to make is that it's appalling that crimes against women often go not only unpunished but unnoticed. I can get behind the sentiment, but I can get behind the sentiment without seeing the details of the horrors. Too many horrors come off like booze ads that say "don't DRINK DRINK DRINK too much"; the message coming through is more "here are more creative ways to hurt women" than "here are ways to be love to women, don't be one of those guys". The sneak peak of the next book features more such horrors, making me wary. I don't need the evil in my head.

Does the good outweigh the bad?
Do I read the next one?
Maybe.
I do wonder if, now that Salander and Mikael interact, there will be more story in the next book and less infodump backstory. Because once Steig hit critical mass of information and encounters, his rhythm and pacing were pretty good, the story became compelling, and ended with some justice. I don't share the misgivings about the ending that seem to be more common in the negative reviews - the series of conclusions seemed to come from what we had been given But it took serious dedication and bitching on my part to get there, and I'm not sure if I'm the better or the worse for it. I can only recommend it mildly, with qualifiers.

Similarly, you may be wondering if you should have read this far. I was clearly up too late finishing the book, and being over-tired makes me over-verbose.