Sculpin

If only!

Okay, maybe racism hasn’t ended forever. But I’m still thrilled that Obama’s headed to the White House.

These are my links for October 19th through November 3rd:

• Cook and Eat - Udon with no Shoes On - The key is to walk all over the dough. KAM-RON STOMP!
• Zojirushi Bread from The Bread Beckers, Inc. - A bread recipe for the Zojirushi that uses home-milled whole wheat.
• The Most Radical Thing You Can Do | Rebecca Solnit | Orion Magazine - “From outer space, the privileged of this world must look like ants in an anthill that’s been stirred with a stick: everyone constantly rushing around in cars and planes for work and pleasure, for meetings, jobs, conferences, vacations, and more. This is bad for the planet, but it’s not so good for us either.”
• Politics of the Plate: Greens of Wrath - gourmet.com - “We all want safe spinach. But the measures now being adopted may destroy the land without solving the problem.”

These are my links for September 17th through October 14th:

• Fafblog: Giblets explains Obama. Scary, scary Obama! - “FACT! The previous fact was made up. But doesn’t the fact that it was so easily made up prove that a kernel of truth must exist within the lie, and doesn’t the existence of that kernel of truth prove that the lie is, in fact, true? Think about it! But not very hard!”
• THE MINIMALIST; In a Stockpot, Home Brew Beats Store-Bought - New York Times - Recipes for vegetable stocks.
• The Dish on Deliquescence in Coprinus Species :Cornell Mushroom Blog - SPLAT! Love the time-lapse sequence.
• MykoWeb: Getting Started with Mushroom Cultivation - How to start with a mushroom, grow bits of it in agar culture, make grain spawn from that, and use the grain spawn to make a fruiting culture.
• Talk To Action | Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith - “Last Sunday our research team released a video, a ten-minute mini-documentary focusing on the Wasilla Assemblies of God and the video seemed on the verge of a massive ‘viral’ breakthrough when YouTube pulled it down, citing ‘inappropriate content’.” (Link includes video)

Well, it’s been a month and my knees never really did get all that much better. I guess that means it’s time for me to haul my carcass in to physical therapy. Just as soon as I get dug out around here. Hmph.

It’s almost certainly my own fault for not letting my knees rest. They’ve been just good enough for me to stump around on them; it’s only bike riding that really obviously aggravates them. But I probably did them no good when I was building the latest incarnation of the compost bin.

The new compost bin is designed to insulate the compost somewhat over the winter, and it’s basically a three-sided structure made out of sod, reinforced (barely) with cheap plastic-covered steel rods, with inside dimensions of roughly 3′ x 3′ x 5′. Properly speaking, I should probably drive some pipes through the sod walls to increase air circulation, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m enjoying how ancient and Celtic it looks now.

These are my links for August 5th through September 16th:

• EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect - Sarah Palin, whom John McCain has said knows more about energy than “probably anyone in the United States of America,” doesn’t actually know how much energy her own state produces.
• ?Alaska Women Reject Palin? Rally is HUGE! « Mudflats - The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever in the history of the state.
• Kermit Software Assists in Hurricane Tracking - Kermit still exists: “The EM-APEX float uses Embedded Kermit with an Iridium data modem, a Motorola model 9522. C-Kermit is used ashore on a Linux box with several serial ports and modems. The floats phone home, log in, then give shell commands to start C-Kermit for data transfer.”
• Techskeptic’s Data Daily: Fractal Wrongness - Fractal wrongness: the state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. From a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as wrong.
• strawberry chiffon shortcake | smitten kitchen - This.

Wow, I really screwed up my knees last weekend. Good job, me. And then yesterday I overworked them. I’d forgotten that the level of pain that usually means, “Hm, maybe be a little bit cautious,” means, in my knees, “Back off now or pay the price, bitch.” I wish I’d remembered; I found it out after a yoga class, years ago, when we had a crack-brained substitute teacher who decided to whip us gimps into shape. I’d thought I might be cutting it a bit fine that day, but in fact I was cutting it way past fine and had bad knee pain for a week. Had to mostly stay off my feet for about three days, as I recall.

Let’s hope this one doesn’t take that long. In related news, I think I won’t be climbing hills for a while. Frankly, I am not sure I’d even want to hobble down to the parking lot to work on bike riding skills today.

Today’s lack of fun:

1. Get on the bike, fail to gain momentum fast enough, fall off shrieking.
2. Try again. Get on the bike, fail to gain momentum fast enough, fall off shrieking.
3. Give up for the time being, because there’s no point rubbing my nose in failure.

On Saturday I biked with Josh on the tandem to Wallingford. On Sunday, we took the tandem up the hill to the Blue Saucer, which is near the second-highest point in Seattle if I recall correctly. For me, this is a hell of a lot of hill-climbing, and my knees feel it. I’ve even got some minor limping going on. Maybe that’s why I failed today. Failed failed faility failed, friends. I was more or less on the flat here, with a very slight uphill grade; next time, I’ll point myself downhill.

I’m not sure that this forty-pound bike is the best thing to be learning on, either. I could turn on the motor, but OH HELL NO am I adding a motor to this learning process. Like I don’t have enough to think about.

I was about to add, “And I can’t find the charger anyway,” then turned to the right and saw it where it has been sitting there looking at me for months. Seriously. I can’t find anything in this house.

What I need is an electrician. Can anybody recommend an electrician?

See, once upon a time we were going to have a hatch put in so we could store things in the attic. For my birthday, my mother gave me a few hours of handyman time from the husband of someone we know. That was last October. Hooray. Josh bought attic stairs and everything. We tried and tried to get on the same page with the handyman, but he had this and that, hernia surgery, extra work, a family reunion, etc. So that took about seven months. Then we realized that the only place we could put the stairs was in the hallway. That meant moving a light. “I’ll do that this weekend,” said Josh, and then he took a good look at it. Oh, God, it all goes down the rabbit hole from there, but the upshot is to do much of anything to the wiring, we’ll need a bunch of electrical work done. We took bids, accepted one, and the guy put us off for weeks before admitting that he was really too busy to do the work.

Meanwhile, no attic storage space. And my mother has moved from her three-story house into a two-bedroom apartment. I, foolish only child, have said, “Oh, sure, you can store that in our attic.” Which we will have any day now, right? No. No. I live in a storage depot. Not to mention that she’s given me about fifty pounds of random papers and photographs to sort through. (”This is yours!” says Lady Bountiful, dumping another load of old report cards my way. Oh joy.) It doesn’t help that Josh was laid off in spring, and the contents of five years of clutter buildup in his horrible office has now taken over the dining room. I am going mad, I tell you, mad.

And because I live in a storage depot, I don’t have enough room to do my Pilates exercises. Basically everything has gone to hell here.

I’m going back to bed.

I hate to rag on one of my favorite institutions, but this was not one of the more successful Tilth Harvest Fairs I’ve gone to. We went up there hoping to get a case of the world’s best pickles from China Bend and some cranberry honey from PSBA. Mostly, though, we were going there to clean out the China Bend stall — they make these great salsas, good enchilada sauce, some killer dips… it’s all good. We brought the trailer so we could really stock up.

But China Bend wasn’t there (boo!) and the PSBA booth appeared much reduced. No cranberry honey for me. Shoot. Poor Josh looked a little shocked; he’d been looking forward to those pickles for weeks, and (so he tells me) he had plans for that salsa.

Maybe it’s been a rough year for China Bend, what with the fuel costs and the bad weather. Therefore we should mail-order extra pickles.

It wasn’t a total loss. We came home with a bag of keeper onions and some decent-looking plant starts. I picked up some kind of loom in a free pile on the way back. Most satisfyingly, we made it up the hill to Wallingford without feeling like we were seriously overdoing it, which was a big change from the last time we dragged ourselves up there.

The tandem gets a lot of attention with a trailer on the back. We’re practically a parade. One woman even went sprawling on the pavement because she was looking at our bike instead of at where she was going.