Sculpin

Josh and I bought a used tandem yesterday and rode it today. And either we were surprisingly good at riding it, or it’s surprisingly easy. Hooray!

It seems to play well to our strengths. I have good core strength (being a Pilates ninja and all) but not much upper-body strength yet, while Josh is exactly the opposite. My job today as stoker was mostly to keep my balance extremely steady while Cap’n Josh handled the steering. Works out great! And Josh is very good at taking in my feedback about how he can communicate with me better on the bike. I think we have the makings of a good tandem team.

It was so much fun!

My One Local Summer meal is a day late. Either that, or the week starts on Monday. Why? Because last week was doomed. First, I had the flu all week, and hardly ate at all until Friday. (Damn relapses, anyway.) Because of the flu, I missed the Thursday market. And then, though some bizarre database error, my SPUD order,which should have been full of locally-grown goodness, arrived with only a few canned goods. And then Josh and I had a misunderstanding about when things were happening Saturday, so I didn’t get a ride to the Saturday market. Ordinarily I would have simply hopped on the bus yesterday, but I was still getting an awful lot of dizziness, and that’s just no fun on the bus.

But today, at last! Today I can stand up long enough to cook, and I recognized that I had a few things around worth cooking. For lunch I had a very simple dish of cauliflower braised in its own juices, oop-style, with garlic, thyme, olive oil, salt, and pepper. The garlic and thyme came from my back yard; the cauliflower came, iirc, from Growing Things in Carnation, about a 25-mile drive. It’s pretty good. Josh says, “A++, would eat again.”

I made it in my brand new solar cooker. Finally, after meaning to make one for almost 25 years, I just went ahead and bought one already. It’s a neat way to cook food without heating the house or fussing with a grill. I haven’t quite figured out how to focus the thing, but it still gets up to 300 with no problem whatsoever, and when I get it focussed I expect it to be a fair bit hotter. I don’t know that I’ll ever get enough control over its temperature to bake well in it, but it’s functioned excellently as a slow cooker. I’m looking forward to slow-roasting plums in it next month.

“As for us children, in order to keep us away from the forest, we were told that any nosy boy or girl who ventured in there would meet Aguê, also called Azizan. This is the name of a fabulous creature of the bush who has only one eye in the middle of its forehead and only one arm; it also has only one leg, on which, we are warned, it can hop around with the greatest of ease and speed, ceaselessly patrolling all the forest paths. Its foot is back to front — that is, with the heel turned forward, the toes backward — so that its footprints deceive. Whenever it meets an intruder it has only to look him straight in the eye to scramble his memory. Then the intruder can’t find his way back and wanders in circles until the medicine men come for him. We were also warned that as soon as you catch sight of Aguê you must take all your clothes off and begin to dance, before it can fix you with its eye. Apparently it entertains the creature to watch you dance naked; it doubles up with laughter and forgets all about you. This is the only way to escape its clutches.”

– Tété-Michel Kpomassie, An African In Greenland

Chris Clarke of Creek Running North writes:

No! I’m not Instapundit, nor was meant to be;
Am an impudent turd, one that will do
To stack a Congress, start a scene or two,
My words to mince; no doubt, a sullen mule,
Small potential, raves without excuse,
Politically fractious, teeth with calculus;
Full of big words but find the truth abstruse;
My grasp on the real world pediculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall see my drunken, stale one-liners trolled.

Go on. Read the whole thing.

Koalas have sharp claws but they are weak. They all small and fat and they be climing trees.

(via Jtron)

I’ve been given to understand that wild koalas actually tend to be some mean SOBs.

Fun koala fact: “Koala cuddling has been banned in New South Wales since 1997, but cuddling is still permitted in Queensland.” (source)

Well, I take it back. It wasn’t a tetanus shot reaction that I had, apparently; it was some virus that happened to hit me hard that same day. Josh is now down with the same symptoms. He looks like he’s been dragged backwards through a knothole. Poor guy’s laid out in bed with a cold washcloth over his forehead.

At least he managed to get the antiperspirant from hell off of himself before he got sick.