The Rose Garden

Movie night, check. Bike ride, checkity check check check. We did the route in 2 hours of actual biking time (ca 24 miles) -- don't recall how that compares to last time, particularly since I dawdled over gadget and grocery shopping afterwards last time. (The fancy bike odometer gadget is capable of tracking riding time -- and hence average speed -- for only those periods when the wheels are revolving.) It looks like I'm well enough matched with thread_walker to be a good training partner after all.

Of course, "2 hours of actual biking time" doesn't include the 35 minutes between when I left my house and arriving at Orinda BART (must remember that I can leave 10 minutes later than I've been budgeting and still make my train with time to spare). And it doesn't include the hour spent getting from Concord BART back home (including a stop-off at Arizmendi Bakery for late breakfast). And it doesn't include the hour basically crashing and showering and changing. And it doesn't include the hour finally having breakfast and reading things on-line. But, hey, I made lots of progress yesterday on item 3 (slide show for costume lecture) and I've still got 8 or 9 hours of working time in the day. (Well, minus a grocery shopping trip at some point.)

The weekend accomplishments have also included Freecycling some assorted office supplies and electronics (printer ink for printers I no longer own, Palm keyboard for model I no longer own, portable CD player that has long since been replaced by iPods). I have one more item to get rid of which I'll offer here first.

1 GB RAM for Apple iMac G5 (the full part description seems to be "1GB DDR400 PC3200 DIMM"). Not the current silver-tone iMac but the previous white plastic model (if it matters, which I think it does). Brand new, unused, still sealed in packaging. The deal is that the original chip in my machine had to be replaced but I decided to upgrade to 2GB instead (which is a single-unit replacement rather than simple adding a second 1GB chip), but by warranty they still had to give me the replacement for my bad original ... even though I didn't need it. The thing is serving no earthly use sitting on my desk, so if anyone could use it, let me know. It's light enough I'd even be happy to ship it. And, yes, I know I could probably get some cash for it (the box seems to indicate it has a $300 list price) but that would require a great deal more effort on my part ... which means it could be another year before I get to it.

Here's my to-do list for the weekend:

Item: Create slide-show for Costume Lecture #1 (Surviving Garments as a Costuming Resource -- A Guided Tour)
Item: Evening social event involving movies
Item: Sunday morning bike ride with thread_walker

Should be enough to keep me busy.

I should have written this up first thing in the morning when it was more detailed. The dream had multiple layers of reality -- the sort where each preceding scenario is revealed to have been "the dream" but the new context is "reality". But really, the core scenario stood nicely by itself and would have made a nice little horror flick.

Basically, there was this severed arm, significantly decomposed. As in, the three main arm bones were all visible, but strung together with tendons and bits of muscle. The hand was whole. And the arm crawled. It chased me around ... and various other details happened that have faded now. And I kept trying to alert people to the danger with the message, "The arm is evil! The arm is evil!" Unclear exactly what the danger was, other than the existential horror of being chased by a rotting severed arm.

Then we back up a layer, and I'm trying hard to remember that I have to journal about the arm, to let people know that it's evil. Or am I supposed to journal about a dream about a decomposed arm chasing me around? No that's the third layer, when I'm aware that the evil arm was a dream, but I'm still trying hard to remember to journal about it. Then we back up a layer where I think that I've journaled about the dream about the arm, but I realize that I only journaled about it in a dream, and I still have to remember to do it for real.

Somebody pinch me so I know I'm not still in the last layer.

It didn't feel like a "meaningful" dream (despite one of my favorite motifs of skeletal bits) -- just a very vivid one. I do wish I'd remembered more of the details, though.

Wow! Nice ride! ( Of course, there are more details than that. )

One of the weekend's projects has been to pull the several Boxes of Holding from the car and sort through and update what I really need to be carrying around these days. (E.g., the new car no longer requires that I carry a jug of radiator fluid at all times. And it's been a couple of vehicles since I really needed to carry extra oil as a general rule. And I really need to find a safe and eco-friendly way to dispose of a semi-used aerosol can of "super start spray" -- I believe it's basically pure ether -- which I picked up on some trip or other to snowy mountains when I was having trouble with starting. But today is about refurbishing the first aid kit and sorting through maps. The GPS now makes most of my map-hoarding proclivities unnecessary, so here's an inventory of what I'm discarding. (It will become obvious that I almost never throw maps out.) ( I added a few more items, but since this is really a for-fun meaningless post, there's no point in doing more than adding them. )

So although thread_walker has higher priorities (which I wholeheartedly support) than another jaunt along Bear Creek Road tomorrow, I've decided I want to put in a couple hours of moderately strenuous bike riding tomorrow morning (if for nothing else, to work off some of yesterday's excellent BBQ). I'm thinking of BARTing over to SF and checking out how much time/effort it takes to bike to various museum and park locations (e.g., Presidio, Golden Gate Park) that I sometimes visit and where I generally haven't biked because I'd never checked out the logistics in advance. Hmm, this may require the picking up of a good route guide. I wouldn't be averse to adventurous-minded company on the ride. I'm not aiming for speed (since this will be largely urban) or massive hill-work (although one never knows), but definitely something more than a leisurely Sunday stroll. Tentatively I'm thinking of starting at the Embarcadero and working roughly counterclockwise around the city with the end-point determined by whim (and BART proximity). Anyone interested?

My 4th of July BBQ & games was a fun little party (and, as usual in my social circles, ended up with twice as much food as half the number of people could eat). We ended up with 8 people (although one retreated to his sick-bed with a cold), ran through Settlers of Cataan, a roll-the-alphabet-dice-and-form-words game whose name escapes me, and a couple rounds of Trans America, interspersed with grilling, ice cream, and a walk out to the Emeryville Marina to see fireworks.

Grill review: I need to work on pacing for my grilling (particularly if it's to be a primary social activity rather than a get-the-food-on-the-table activity). The corn took longer than I expected, and the grilled veggies needed to be being plated as they came off rather than being stacked in the warmer. The meat (of many varieties -- everybody brought enough to share) generally worked out well. I'm starting to get the hang of the temperature variation on various parts of the grill surface, and how to alternate open-hood and closed-hood temperature manipulation. Since I have a stack of ungrilled leftover ingredients, I figure I'll do some more practicing this weekend.

Fireworks review: The fog was fickle. We walked out along the south side of Powell St and could see both the Jack London Square show (except for the lowest stuff which was hidden by intervening buildings and port equipment) and an assortment of probably unauthorized items from the West Oakland trajectory. As we got out past the fire station (where a couple of enterprising fire crew were hawking refreshments in support of the Special Olympics) we could see occasional cloud-glows from the San Francisco show, but it was clear that there wasn't any point in trying to position ourselves for a better western view. So we crossed over to the boat harbor by Trader Vics, then wandered slightly south to avoid the actual harbor view to take in the Berkeley show. Alas, there was a fairly solid fog river flowing in right over the Berkeley Marina, so we saw the lower half of about the first half of the show, and then the fog thickened and all we were getting was cloud-glow. We actually got a much better view of something roughly up Richmond way. I don't know if it was in Richmond proper (I wondered if they might be doing a show at the racetrack in Albany, but it could have been all the way out to the Hercules/Pinole area. And, of course, there were a lot of random (if less ambitious) unauthorized items sprinkled across the horizon. So it was a good evening for getting a sense of the scope of Bay Area firesworks in all their forms, but not as good for seeing a single show in all its glory. I keep thinking that some year I should bike off to the Berkeley Marina proper to see that one up close. (You do not attempt to drive around the waterfront to try to view the shows. In fact they usually barricade most of the relevant streets just to forestall the issue.)

I love rhubarb. I dislike adding large quantities of sugar to perfectly good fruit. Hence, my delight at discovering that roughly equal quantities of rhubarb and strawberries result in a perfectly edible compote. Here's a slightly more elaborate version.

Slice 4-6 stalks of rhubarb into 1/4-1/2 inch pieces.
Take a pint of the ripest strawberries you can get your hands on, remove the stems, and slice.
Put these in a saucepan with a small amount of liquid (e.g., apple juice), maybe half a cup or so.
Simmer over a very low heat until mushy.
Add a small handful** of chopped dates, another of raisins, and half a small handful of diced candied orange peel.
Also add a bunch*** of "pumpkin pie spice" (or other favorite sweet-spice mixture).
Continue simmering until mushier.

May be served hot or cold. Hot, it is set off very nicely by a dollop of vanilla ice cream above and some sort of sweet baked good fresh out of the oven underneath.

**Handfuls may vary according to taste. I think my latest batch use approximately 1/3 c as the handful equivalent.
***A bunch means "more than you think it should be, but not so much it's inedible". I think it was at least one teaspoonful.

I neglected to mention that on Saturday's outing, I was able to confirm that the hands-free-phone function on my new GPS does, in fact, work as advertised on incoming calls. The sound quality is not ideal, but then, I often have problems with phone sound quality, no matter what sort of line and device I'm using. (One of the things that led me to ask for a hearing test at my recent 50-year-tune-up appointment. Alas, my language-interpretation problems are not blamable on any hearing impairments. I'm at the same place I was back in grade school: "I can hear you perfectly; I just have to ask you to repeat it several times before I can figure out what the words are.")

And I'd like to remind readers that I'm holding a 4th of July games-and-BBQ party at my place (on, duh, the 4th), starting noonish and culminating in walking over to the Emeryville marina to see how many fireworks displays we can spot. The downstairs tenant has a couple of German friends in town who are delighted to partake in our quaint local cultural celebrations, so I have a core group no matter who else shows up.

So what do I do with an "unscheduled" weekend? Let's see. Saturday: slept in until 10am or so, then cooked a nice complex breakfast. (Reason #37 I want a girlfriend: so I can have someone else enjoy my weekend breakfast cooking, too.) Mid-afternoon, off to go furniture window-shopping in consignment stores with scotica, culminating in her buying a nice oak "lawyer's bookcase" that she'd had her eye on for some weeks. (Since I had the Element there, she actually had a way of getting it home.) Then off to a new (to us) sushi place in Palo Alto: Fuki Sushi. Really excellent food. We sat at the bar and stuck to nigiri, asking the chef to give us whatever he thought was good. (We had to persuade him that we really did mean "whatever".)

Sunday, it was up at workday hours to take the bike on BART to Orinda where I met up with thread_walker and a couple other friends of hers to take Bear Creek Road up around Briones Park, ending up in Concord. Gorgeous ride! Two significant hills and several milder ones. Great scenery. Road-kill count included a couple of long-dead deer and a much fresher turkey vulture, plus many assorted squirrels and a large lizard. I ended up very tired but not even close to exhausted. Sometime around when we were coming into Concord my cell phone rang so after I peeled off to do some shopping at Fry's (printer ink and looking for a bicycle mount for the GPS with no success) I returned the call and it turned out to be cryptocosm following up on my idea of commissioning him to build the camping-gear/sleeping platform for the back of the Element. Since he was calling from Sacramento, I figured I'd be home by the time he got there, but what with Fry's, taking the time to have breakfast (ok, I guess it was lunch by then), then getting off BART at Rockridge to do the grocery shopping on my way home, he actually got to my place before me.

So we have a design for my platform and the various lumber and hardware acquired. My job is to try to locate a neighbor with a table saw to make cutting the plywood topper a bit easier, then he'll come over some day in the near future to do the construction. I'll post pictures when it's finished -- that'll be easier than trying to describe the thing. The basic idea is to have a removeable framework that supports a sleeping platform, with space for gear storage underneath. The innovation is that the platform will compress sideways when not being slept on to allow a little less than half the rear of the vehicle to be open when desired. (For, e.g., convenience when dressing, and for the ability to transport, e.g., my bicycle inside the vehicle.)

And now I get to collapse and vegetate for the rest of the evening.

I could swear I already made this post, but I think I must have been working on it when the DSL went out Wednesday evening. I got two fun new transportation-related gadgets this week. My bicycle now has a speedometer thingie (also does odometer, trip odometer, average trip speed, max trip speed, and clock). Unlike the bike speedometer gadgets of my youth, this one doesn't rely on mechanically using the wheel to drive a mechanism (thus making you work harder), but instead has a small magnet fastened to one spoke with a sensor on the fork nearby to time revolutions.

And the new car now has a GPS (Garmin's Nüvi 760). I'm still mostly playing around with it on known routes (to evaluate how smart it is). In theory, I can also use it when walking or biking (although I don't have a bike mount for it yet). It does have a few quirks. It gets a bit discombobulated if you turn it on in a different location than it was when you turned it off. (Has to re-acquire the satellite fix.) Although it's perfectly happy to do Bluetooth pairing with my Treo, it has not yet managed to actually respond appropriately to an incoming phone call. And in theory it will transmit the audio directions to my radio, but this hasn't actually worked yet (possibly because it isn't happy about the station I picked). On the other hand, I'm utterly delighted to know that it will provide me with driving directions in several dozen different languages, including in some cases multiple dialect and gender options. So if I should need to know how to get somewhere in Estonian or in Serbian, I'm good to go. (No Welsh, alas.)

It's only fun if I can come up with three really oddball things -- and no fair coming up with things that involve Medieval Welsh.

Rules: Post 3 things you've done that you believe nobody else on your F-list has done.
Indulge in remorse if someone calls you out on a listed item.

1. I had the cops called on me for participating in a dog-fight ... as one of the dogs. (There is someone who could call me out on this one, but I don't believe she's on LJ, and I know she isn't on my F-list.)

2. I turned in a homework assignment written on a clay tablet in cuneiform. (It was an assignment for Hittite, so it wasn't an entirely random act.)

3. I made a bobbin-lace doily from linen thread that started out as flax seeds in my garden.

nah, not oddball enough; let's try again

3.1 I smuggled an ice-chest full of pelican skulls into the U.S. from Mexico with the collusion of a border guard.

One forgets. So quickly one forgets the gnawing, ichor-dripping, Lovecraftian horror that is dial-up on the internet. Ah, but hope gleams brightly. After nearly 24 hours of no DSL, no sooner had I dredged up the phone-line splitter, the extra long cord, and the dial-up utility -- no sooner had I suffered through the downloading of a hundred e-mails at near-manuscript speed -- than Earthlink relented and released the DSL from its prison.

I know most people already have plans of some sort for 4th of July, but I'm going to have an "Open Grill and Games" party (sort of like an open house, but revolving around the grill) at my place on the 4th. Basic concept: show up with a chunk of protein to throw on the grill, a side dish to share, and an interest in some sort of board/card/whatever game to play (bring your own or see what I can lay hands on). And when it gets near dark, those interested can walk over to the Emeryville marina (ca. 1 mile) and -- fog permitting -- see anywhere between one and four fireworks displays at various points of the compass. Starting time will be nebulously noonish with the grilling starting whenever we get critical mass.

If you're interested, drop me a note (e-mail or via the LJ message link) so I can make sure you have directions. Otherwise this is rather low key: if people show up, they show up; if they don't, they don't. This invitation is explicitly extended to anyone reading it, whether or not you're on my LJ "friends" list. But if I can't figure out who you are, you'll need to tell me before I give you my address.

Well it was annoying to translate all the questions about my "leading man", but at least they answer came out right:

Your result for The Classic Dames Test...

Katharine Hepburn

June Crown this weekend was the last in a very long series of fixed weekend commitments. Now I can crash and relax for a while. Somehow even when you're scheduling individual events on the basis of "would I enjoy doing this?" they all end up ganging up on you in a lump. It was hot. It was fun. I mostly hung out and schmoozed, with a session working the heraldic consultation table, plus being in the procession for a laurel ceremony. But mostly hopping from shade to shade, sticking feet in cold water whenever possible (primarily callistotoni's Goddess Party) and chatting. My good deed for the weekend was introducing a couple of musicians who needed to know each other. thread_walker invited me to join her household's potluck dinner Saturday which was a nice change from my usual routine. But by the time dinner was over and the temperature had finally fallen to around comfortable (at maybe 10 pm) I had barely enough oomph left to get to ldyanna's vigil then melted into bed.

I have another data-point on Viridium's (the new car) mileage to add to the ca. 20 mpg city-driving from my first fill-up. I gave layla_lilah a ride to Crown to split costs so it made sense to fill up on returning in order to have number. So I have a couple hundred mile trip, essentially all highway driving, kept at 55 mph for experimental purposes (except for the bit going through Davis where a series of other-vehicle mishaps resulted in a crawl), with an overall average mpg of 28 -- a little better than the official rating of 25mpg highway. Purely in the interests of scientific experiment I figure I should do a similar trip at the posted speed limit (i.e., 65 mph) and see how it compares.

In theory, I was planning to get to sleep (or at least to bed) on schedule -- or even early -- all week to help shake off the last bits of the cold. I failed utterly on the "on schedule" bit but do seem to have managed to shake the cough. But Sunday night I was up late catching up with e-mail and newsgroups; Monday, as previosuly mentioned, I met up with ursule for dinner; Tuesday ... I forget what came up; Wednesday I got sucked into trying to debug some minor little issues on the desktop that may be related to Leopard (e.g., podcasts won't download, conduit file for new Palm program won't install). I picked up a cool little car log program for the PDA: tracks gas purchases, service, etc., tracks trips, calculates mileage. I've been thinking for some time that I wanted to convert to an electronic car log, and the only way it would be convenient would be on the PDA, but it turned out I can't do it in DataViz's Documents-to-go using an Excel file. This is because you have to synchronize all your Docs-to-go files in the same direction and most of the files are ones I keep actively on the computer and only transfer to the PDA for reference (e.g., my book catalog). But the car log has to synchronize in the other direction. So it made more sense to get a dedicated application. (And it can export into a spreadsheet file, so if I want to do anything fancier with the data, that's possible.) Well, you can see where Wednesday evening went. And tonight there were various preparations for Crown Tourney this weekend, including getting the clothes packed and cooking up my contribution to a dinner potluck. (Decided to do a more elaborate version of 2-15thc-cookbooks' "Joutes", which is basically "assorted spring greens cooked in broth with a little bacon for flavor".) But on the up side, I've been getting some yard work in this week (mostly finishing up the re-setting of the brick walkways). Still, I really must slack off a bunch at let the body catch up next week.

It's bright and sunny, and the air out at the Berkeley marina smells of warm pine needles and salt water. And I'm sitting beside the bay taking in the view and thinking, "If I had met the woman of my dreams by now, we could get married today. We could do all those silly sentimental things that straight people take utterly for granted and the State of California would treat us exactly the same as everyone else. And wouldn't it be wonderful to get married on a glorious summer day like today?" Ok, so I haven't yet met the reciprocally-considered woman of my dreams yet, but back when I first came to the conclusion I was gay, there were a number of things I figured I just had to give up in order to be true to myself. But today, and for some as-yet-unknown number of days (potentially stretching into indefiniteness), there is one fewer thing.

( Oh, and other stuff, too. )

I'm feeling pretty much prepared for A&S this weekend (or, more particularly, for cryptocosm's pelican). Relevant information and objects are in hand. Sewing project is complete (as of lunch break today). I haven't put my class kits together yet, but it's trivial enough I can do it on site. I haven't packed, but since I'm taking Friday off, this is not an issue. What with one thing and another, I don't have to worry about any meals at the event except for Saturday lunch. The new car is off getting its options installed, including the roof rack, which will mean I don't have to figure out what to do with the tent ridgepole. This means I actually had to "commute" this morning, getting up early enough to drop the car in El Cerrito when the service department opened at 7am, then walking across the street to BART and picking up the company shuttle van at the Ashby station. Yeah, cue the tiny violins. Mind you, it's a good thing I'm this ahead of the game since tonight is the first performance in the Cal Shakespeare series (for which I've again joined thread_walker and assorted cohorts in getting season tickets). And I can see the light at the end of the long series of over-scheduled weekends.

I went with a dish inspired by the recipe that hudebnik offered. Wash and trim about a dozen ramps (comes out to about a quarter cup in the end), slice the thick part into coins and the green part into manageable pieces, but keep the two separate. Mince a thick slice of bacon and heat it very gently in a skillet, then add a little water (maybe a quarter cup). Add the sliced ramp bulbs and cook over a very low heat (covered) until tender. In the mean time, cook about 100 g pasta in rapidly boiling, salted water. When the ramp bulbs are tender, add the greens. Instead of the pepper, I added some grated fresh galingale (kept in the freezer from a previous mystery produce adventure). Continue simmering until tender. Drain the pasta then add to the ramps and toss (still heating) until the liquid is gone. Serve with grated hard cheese.

The ramps have a very delicate, but clearly oniony, flavor. The dish was good, but not quite good enough to merit the "exotic produce" price on the ramps. If I were really into them, I'd try growing my own.