Sunday, October 20, 2013
Hmm...
My thoughts are getting too long for Facebook - perhaps I should dust this off?
It's so very easy, as a working Mom, to end up shrinking your world. When your waking existence shrinks to Work then food-prep then cleaning and are they getting enough fruits and vegetables? and are they getting enough physical activity? Is their homework done? Who is supposed to be where and when? Where do I fit career development in here? And where does the stuff go that I honestly enjoy? Dare I devote time to Fandom, or Fiber? Is that selfish?
I want peace, more than anything.
The problem there is that little nagging voice that, as soon as your husband or parents say, "I'll/We'll take the kids, we'll get them out of your hair!" says, "Go get something done, you don't dare waste this opportunity..."
Monday, October 17, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Minus one feline...
RIP Pittising
1997-2011
She was the smallest kitten I'd ever seen, not much bigger than my fist, and she had a coat the texture of a Brillo pad. She was ill when we adopted her; she had giardia, which meant, in quick succession and despite the ridiculous amounts of handwashing, we got giardia. (I have never felt so awful, and hopefully never will again. I can remember that it was the summer of 1997 because I ate the first solid food I'd had in a week on the day it was reported that Princess Diana had died.)
She didn't stay small, though. She was a big gray cat of indeterminate lineage, a 20lb monster. (She did, however, eventually get a nice soft coat.) When this cat jumped on your lap or on your stomach in bed, you damn well knew it. She would be petted on her own terms, when she wanted it, and was one of those cats who would lie across your hands on the keyboard. All twenty pounds, on your fingers, on the keyboard. The shoving-of-the-butt-in-your-face-while-watching-TV was another favorite game.
But she was a sweetheart. She adopted the new kittens as her own, even carrying them in her mouth and grooming them. She accepted the advent of the hairless kittens with reasonable grace, though I would get these looks like, "I don't mean to tell you your business, but those things ought to be hunting for themselves by now." She was the first cat to accept the kids and seek out their affection. The two boys were so thrilled the first time she deigned to sit in their laps.
She hated the vet like no other animal I've ever known. She never attacked, but would sulk to beat the band, and go hide and hiss at anyone who came near. Extracting her from under the waterbed was always an interesting challenge.
But 14 is pretty old, even for an indoor cat. I hope she wasn't uncomfortable, towards the end. I don't think she was. Even tonight, before it became clear that a trip to the veterinary ER was in our immediate future, she singled out and snuggled up to each of us. My grandmother always said that animals would say good-bye to those they loved before they died, and I hope she was right.
That's all I have to say about that.
1997-2011
She was the smallest kitten I'd ever seen, not much bigger than my fist, and she had a coat the texture of a Brillo pad. She was ill when we adopted her; she had giardia, which meant, in quick succession and despite the ridiculous amounts of handwashing, we got giardia. (I have never felt so awful, and hopefully never will again. I can remember that it was the summer of 1997 because I ate the first solid food I'd had in a week on the day it was reported that Princess Diana had died.)
She didn't stay small, though. She was a big gray cat of indeterminate lineage, a 20lb monster. (She did, however, eventually get a nice soft coat.) When this cat jumped on your lap or on your stomach in bed, you damn well knew it. She would be petted on her own terms, when she wanted it, and was one of those cats who would lie across your hands on the keyboard. All twenty pounds, on your fingers, on the keyboard. The shoving-of-the-butt-in-your-face-while-watching-TV was another favorite game.
But she was a sweetheart. She adopted the new kittens as her own, even carrying them in her mouth and grooming them. She accepted the advent of the hairless kittens with reasonable grace, though I would get these looks like, "I don't mean to tell you your business, but those things ought to be hunting for themselves by now." She was the first cat to accept the kids and seek out their affection. The two boys were so thrilled the first time she deigned to sit in their laps.
She hated the vet like no other animal I've ever known. She never attacked, but would sulk to beat the band, and go hide and hiss at anyone who came near. Extracting her from under the waterbed was always an interesting challenge.
But 14 is pretty old, even for an indoor cat. I hope she wasn't uncomfortable, towards the end. I don't think she was. Even tonight, before it became clear that a trip to the veterinary ER was in our immediate future, she singled out and snuggled up to each of us. My grandmother always said that animals would say good-bye to those they loved before they died, and I hope she was right.
That's all I have to say about that.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Sunday Miscellany: National Creamsicle Day Edition
The word "zany" dates from the 16th century, and comes from the name of some of the peasant class characters in the Commedia dell'Arte.
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Southern Utah is beautiful. Remote, but beautiful.
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I bought a CD of dirty jokes, songs and stories recorded on Edison cylinders at the turn of the 20th century, and WOW are some of them blue. There's nothing new under the sun...
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There was a legit reason for the no brown M&Ms clause.
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I'm currently reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It's easy to forget that most of the really interesting hippie stuff happened before 1969.
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There is a Circle of Hell in which you eternally shop for school supplies.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
For my once and future Iowa peeps: Green River recipe
I got to thinking about these after reading an article about soda jerks and old-style soda fountains (read it: it's got recipes) and after hearing about a friend's RAGBRAI experiences.
These are SO good. You may want to scale the recipe down a bit, though.
Green River
Lemon Syrup:
1 gallon boiling water
15 pounds granulated sugar
1 1/2 oz lemon extract
1/2 oz citric fruit acid
Lime Syrup:
1 gallon boiling water
15 pounds granulated sugar
1 1/2 oz lime extract
1/2 oz citric fruit acid
Crushed ice
Carbonated water
To make the lemon syrup, pour boiling water over sugar. Cool and strain. Ad extract and citric fruit acid. Pour into gallon jug and store. Follow the same method for preparing lime syrup. When ready to serve, pour 1 1/2 oz. of each syrup into an 8 ounce glass. Fill with crushed ice and carbonated water. Stir and serve.
Makes 88 servings.
(From A Cook's Tour of Iowa by Susan Puckett)
These are SO good. You may want to scale the recipe down a bit, though.
Green River
Lemon Syrup:
1 gallon boiling water
15 pounds granulated sugar
1 1/2 oz lemon extract
1/2 oz citric fruit acid
Lime Syrup:
1 gallon boiling water
15 pounds granulated sugar
1 1/2 oz lime extract
1/2 oz citric fruit acid
Crushed ice
Carbonated water
To make the lemon syrup, pour boiling water over sugar. Cool and strain. Ad extract and citric fruit acid. Pour into gallon jug and store. Follow the same method for preparing lime syrup. When ready to serve, pour 1 1/2 oz. of each syrup into an 8 ounce glass. Fill with crushed ice and carbonated water. Stir and serve.
Makes 88 servings.
(From A Cook's Tour of Iowa by Susan Puckett)
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Sunday Miscellany - I can haz new toy!
So I formatted the laptop and slapped Ubuntu 11.04 on it - the "Natty Narwhal" release. So far so good, though the touchpad just sucks in this OS. I mean, the touchpad just about sucks in every OS, but this is remarkably bad. Oh well, USB mice are cheap. (On the A+ exam, one of the questions asked about troubleshooting touchpads, and one of the multiple choice answers was "Plug in a real mouse." I knew this wasn't the correct answer, but I wanted to choose it anyway.)
The only tricky things so far have been the install of the DVD playback support and the wireless drivers. And man, for a Linux install, finding the terminal window is a lot trickier than it should be. After some false starts I was able to dredge the remnants of what UNIX commands I learned back in the Wild Wild West days of the internet and successfully navigate the CLI. That, and remembering about case sensitivity, should be my big challenges. :)
I've gone purely Linux on this, and removed Windows completely. If I may channel Marko Ramius for a minute, "When he got to the New World, Cortez burned his ships. As a result, his men were well-motivated." If I have to use it, I'll get better faster than if I have the option to slip back into the familiar. So we'll see what I can learn here.
(Wow, is it just me or does this OS handle graphics a lot better? I mean, I knew it always did, back in the day, but VGA wasn't that hard to beat. There's a noticeable difference from even the Win 7 ATI driver.)
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I actually have another new toy! My tabletop warp-weighted loom came in from Lacemaker USA. I haven't had a chance to warp it up yet - I'm reading through Marta Hoffman's The Warp-Weighted Loom first. The nice thing about this model is it has holes in the beam, so I can warp it without having to weave the threads into an inkle band first. I'll give that a try at some point, naturally, but I'm keen to get started.
Looking at the design, I'm pretty sure I could tweak it to do a 2/1 twill, though I'm going to start with a tabby and see how that looks. Without the top selvedge, naturally, it's impossible to prove whether something was done on a warp-weighted or a horizontal loom, but they're pretty sure people were doing 2/2 twills in the Bronze age, if not the Neolithic.
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I'm woefully behind on all Things Fannish, lately. I haven't even seen the new Pirates of the Caribbean, much less the new Harry Potter. DH said that there were people dressed up for the premiere on Friday. I have GOT to get a Minerva McGonagall outfit together.
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Cool stuff I found recently:
A fascinating article on city-wide pneumatic tube systems. Seriously, a literal system of Intertubes.
The Prague Pneumatic Post. I have GOT to go see that someday.
Questioning the Inca Paradox. In which is discussed the possibility of the Inca using knotted strings as a type of written message. I learned a new word: any system of notation that conveys information without being related to the speech sounds of a particular language is a semasiographic system. (The article uses the examples of musical notation and Arabic numerals.)
A remarkably even-handed article on fanfiction. Look, I know a lot of people on my various f-lists are NOT fanfiction, em, fans, but I am. I will freely admit, the vast majority of it is complete dreck. I mean, you end up staring at things going, "Really? An actual person wrote this, or has someone gone crazy with a Markov generator?" But the stuff that's good is really, really good; it feels like you've found another episode of your favorite show, or that your favorite author wrote another chapter. And that gets addicting.
Plus, it's people trying to write who might not otherwise. And is a more constructive hobby than watching TV. So there.
The only tricky things so far have been the install of the DVD playback support and the wireless drivers. And man, for a Linux install, finding the terminal window is a lot trickier than it should be. After some false starts I was able to dredge the remnants of what UNIX commands I learned back in the Wild Wild West days of the internet and successfully navigate the CLI. That, and remembering about case sensitivity, should be my big challenges. :)
I've gone purely Linux on this, and removed Windows completely. If I may channel Marko Ramius for a minute, "When he got to the New World, Cortez burned his ships. As a result, his men were well-motivated." If I have to use it, I'll get better faster than if I have the option to slip back into the familiar. So we'll see what I can learn here.
(Wow, is it just me or does this OS handle graphics a lot better? I mean, I knew it always did, back in the day, but VGA wasn't that hard to beat. There's a noticeable difference from even the Win 7 ATI driver.)
----
I actually have another new toy! My tabletop warp-weighted loom came in from Lacemaker USA. I haven't had a chance to warp it up yet - I'm reading through Marta Hoffman's The Warp-Weighted Loom first. The nice thing about this model is it has holes in the beam, so I can warp it without having to weave the threads into an inkle band first. I'll give that a try at some point, naturally, but I'm keen to get started.
Looking at the design, I'm pretty sure I could tweak it to do a 2/1 twill, though I'm going to start with a tabby and see how that looks. Without the top selvedge, naturally, it's impossible to prove whether something was done on a warp-weighted or a horizontal loom, but they're pretty sure people were doing 2/2 twills in the Bronze age, if not the Neolithic.
-----
I'm woefully behind on all Things Fannish, lately. I haven't even seen the new Pirates of the Caribbean, much less the new Harry Potter. DH said that there were people dressed up for the premiere on Friday. I have GOT to get a Minerva McGonagall outfit together.
-----
Cool stuff I found recently:
A fascinating article on city-wide pneumatic tube systems. Seriously, a literal system of Intertubes.
The Prague Pneumatic Post. I have GOT to go see that someday.
Questioning the Inca Paradox. In which is discussed the possibility of the Inca using knotted strings as a type of written message. I learned a new word: any system of notation that conveys information without being related to the speech sounds of a particular language is a semasiographic system. (The article uses the examples of musical notation and Arabic numerals.)
A remarkably even-handed article on fanfiction. Look, I know a lot of people on my various f-lists are NOT fanfiction, em, fans, but I am. I will freely admit, the vast majority of it is complete dreck. I mean, you end up staring at things going, "Really? An actual person wrote this, or has someone gone crazy with a Markov generator?" But the stuff that's good is really, really good; it feels like you've found another episode of your favorite show, or that your favorite author wrote another chapter. And that gets addicting.
Plus, it's people trying to write who might not otherwise. And is a more constructive hobby than watching TV. So there.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Sunday Miscellany
2D Goggles: pure unadulterated awesome. Seriously. Make sure you read the footnotes, too.
(I <3 Steampunk. The only reason I don't have a full costume/persona is the distressing lack of free time lately, and well, Victorian-era corsetry is beyond my current skill point level in sewing.)
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This is a funny commercial.
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A 19th Century LOLcat.
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The more I read about late 19th century counterculture, the less I'm impressed by the Hippies. Seriously, your grandparents did it first, Boomers!
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