firecat

I'm drinking white tea with rose petals, and I swear it tastes like blood.

jennet made an awesome post about how people with illnesses/disabilities need more useful health information and support. Go look.

http://jenett.dreamwidth.org/1254551.html

Below is a photo of the San Mateo TechShop that appeared in the cover story of the Feb 2010 edition of Wired Magazine. The cover story is "The New Industrial Revolution" by Chris Anderson. My dad is seated just to the right of the yellow coiled cord on the left. (I may get around to uploading a scanned photo from the actual magazine at some point.)

http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/18-02/ff_newrevolution3_f.jpg

I went on a vacation by myself last week. I stayed at a small inn (The Inn at Maverick's) near Half Moon Bay. I liked the inn a lot. During the day I sat around near the water in various places mostly around Pillar Point Harbor, shopped at the Paper Crane, a paper & card shop in Half Moon Bay, and ate various kinds of fried fish. (The Mayan fish taco plate at Cafe Capistrano [warning, web page plays music]) was my favorite.) In the evenings I watched TV and knitted. Here are some photos:
( photos )

We haven't had TV reception to speak of at our house since we got our new roof put on and removed the satellite dish (although the OH did manage to get about six local channels by hooking the cable up so it served as an antenna). I didn't realize it but I guess I was kind of hungry for TV.

On PBS one evening I became the last person on the planet to discover the show Life on Mars (the British version) and I really liked the episode I saw, so I put it on the Netflix queue. That same evening I saw the Serena Williams/Victoria Azarenka quarterfinals match of the 2010 Australia Open.

The next evening I watched most of the 2008 VH1 top 100 hip-hop songs countdown and discovered how woefully small my hip-hop knowledge is, because I had only heard about ten of the songs before.

The final evening I watched three episodes of Wild Russia on Animal Planet, then I found various episodes of the kind of show where they take you to farms and factories to show you how things are made. One show featured the elements of a Chinese takeout meal (Peking Duck, soy sauce, oyster sauce, the takeout box, and the fortune cookie) and another featured potato products.

I was working on these knitting projects:
Sivia Harding "Follow the Leader" Faroese shawl (I'm working on the bottom band now)

A top-down sweater from Barbara Walker's Knitting from the Top using a mosaic pattern from Barbara Walker's Fourth Treasury of Knitting Patterns

A pair of socks from Ditto yarn "Purple Cascade"

My dad is cooking a tongue twister. (No badgers involved.)

http://donpjones.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/post-8/

http://donpjones.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/post-7-chicken-pielets/

Dad and I are having problems finding a restaurant that serves good chicken pie. (The English Rose in San Carlos does an OK one, and the Creamery in the Stanford Shopping Center does one, but only for dinner.) So he's taking matters into his own hands.

via

brooksmoses

42 questions, with answers

1. What time did you get up this morning?
11 am.

2. How do you like your steak?
I don't often eat steak but when I do I like it medium rare.

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
Sherlock Holmes

4. What is your favorite TV show?
It's still Babylon 5 after all these years.

5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
Here is pretty nice. I would probably slightly prefer to live over the hill in Half Moon Bay or Pacifica. I have a deep fondness for Hawaii but it's probably too hot for me to actually live there.

6. What did you have for breakfast?
Since I got up at 11 am, I didn't have breakfast per se. I had coffee with milk, and then the OH cooked farmer cheese pierogis with ground beef and veggies.

7. What is your favorite cuisine?
Most of them.

8. What foods do you dislike?
Brussels sprouts, seafood with skeletal material attached

9. Favorite place to eat?
My favorite place changed owners and is no longer open for dinner, and I haven't picked a new favorite yet.

10. Favorite dressing?
Creamy garlic, but if they don't have that I usually get ranch.

11. What kind of vehicle do you drive?
Prius

12. What are your favorite clothes?
Cotton knit pants and shirts

13. Where would you visit if you had the chance?
Traveling is hard for me right now but if I had the time, energy, and so forth I would visit (in no particular order) Japan, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, the Galapagos, Thailand, Alaska. And I would visit again England, Scotland, Wales, Portland OR, Seattle WA, NYC, Boston, New Mexico, Colorado, Los Angeles.

14. Cup 1/2 empty or 1/2 full?
1/2 full, which doesn't mean I'm an optimist, it's just how I describe liquid in a cup.

15. Where would you want to retire?
What is this "retire" of which you speak?
I will probably stay more or less where I am.

16. Favorite time of day?
Sunrise, because I am hardly ever awake to see it.

17. Where were you born?
Somewhere on the East Coast

18. What is your favorite sport to watch?
Baseball, football, or whatever obscure sport happens to be on.

[questions 19 and 20 were about tagging people to also answer this, and are elided.]

21. Who are you most curious about their responses to this?
Anyone on my reading/friends lists

22. Bird watcher?
(Answer stolen from

brooksmoses.) I don't seek them out particularly, but I do tend to watch them when they present the opportunity.

23. Are you a morning person or a night person?
Night person

24. Do you have any pets?
Two cats

25. Anything new or exciting you would like to share?
I'm going on a little vacation this week.

26. What did you want to be when you were little?
A physical anthropologist. I loved my books about the evolution of man (they called us "man" back then).

27. What is your best childhood memory?
I have fond memories of watching the stars with my grandmother at her summer cabin on the lake.

28. Are you a cat or dog person?
Both, but I only have cats in my home because the OH doesn't like dogs.

29. Are you married?
Yes but we didn't tell the government.

30. Always wear your seat belt?
Unless I'm only going a few feet.

31. Been in a car accident?
A couple. Only one of them involved another car, and none involved injuries to people.

32. Any pet peeves?
Fewer than I used to. Today I am exercising my pet peeve about the frequent misspelling of Gandhi.

33. Favorite pizza toppings?
On the one hand, I think that the only allowable pizza toppings are pepperoni and mushrooms. But I can't eat pepperoni any more. The OH and I get a pizza with linguica, mushrooms, olives, and pineapple that I like.

bastette_joyce and I get a pizza with just olives that I have come to be very fond of.

34. Favorite flower?
Fuchsia

35. Favorite ice cream?
I don't have strong ice cream preferences. If I'm left to my own devices I usually pick coffee flavored.

36. Favorite fast food restaurant?
Pollo Loco, at the moment. They have good mac & cheese.

37. How many times did you fail your driver's test?
I passed the test on my first try, on my 16th birthday. (We lived in Detroit, what can I say.)

38. From whom did you get your last email?
Wiscon dev list

39. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card?
http://www.oxfamamericaunwrapped.com/

40. Do anything spontaneous lately?
I don't plan my days to the minute so I do a few small spontaeous things most days, but nothing major.

41. Like your job?
I like the freedom to set my own hours and workplace, and usually the work is somewhat interesting, and it pays well enough. I don't like that I don't feel like I'm making an important difference in the world through my paying job. But I try to make a difference in other ways.

42. Like broccoli?
I like the flavor, and I like the texture of the stems, but I don't much like the texture of the heads.

Wellness Council of America (WELCOA) is not the place I would expect a well done introduction to HAES to show up. (Apparently there is quite a backstory as to how it got published.)

What I appreciate even more than the text are the pictures of fat and average-sized people being active.

http://welcoa.org/freeresources/pdf/10thingsyoucandorightnow.pdf

Edit 1/19/10: Turns out I don't have to activate a data pack in order to send pictures. VM eventually suggested that I try a hard reset on my phone to fix the problem where it wouldn't send photos, and that worked.

I'm still cranky at them so I appreciate the suggestions of other pay as you go services.

Wanted:
1 pay as you go cell phone service
that doesn't require you to register a credit card or PayPal account
and that isn't Virgin Mobile

Features I use on my phone:
phone
text
keyboard
take and send pictures

I'm unhappy with VM because it seems they have changed their pay as you go plan so that you have to activate a data pack ($1.50 per 24 hours) in order to send pictures. I used to be able to send pictures for 25 cents each, without activating a data pack, and I'm sick of their adding extra charges to my plan. Plus, the picture sending isn't working anyway.

Dad is experimenting with a cheese "souffle" recipe that Mom used to make. (It does not involve whipping any egg whites, but it comes out of the oven puffed up because of the steam.)

http://donpjones.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/post-6/

Wombat poo paper!

(Ganked from

tedesson, who notes that if you want to buy poo paper online, you have to be satisfied with kangaroo poo.)

Dad discovers a way to improve a recipe with leftovers.

http://donpjones.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/post-5-yummy-tuna-casserole/

There is some music I love but I can only listen to it rarely because the feelings I have when I listen to it are overwhelming.

(At the moment, it's "Echoes" by Pink Floyd)

Trader Joe's runs out of stuff regularly, and sometimes it's a while before you can figure out if you've had a run of bad luck looking for something, or if it's discontinued. The OH and I like their frozen chicken pot pies. We haven't seen any for a while. Today I went there and again I found no pot pies.

The checkout person made the mistake of asking me if I had found everything, so I said there were no pot pies and asked if they had discontinued them. She said no and asked another staffer to check for pot pies in the back. But the staffer hadn't reappeared by the time I was checked out, so I headed to my car.

I was very surprised when the checkout person chased me down in the parking lot and handed me a pot pie, saying "They found some in the back, this is on me."

I thought that was a very cool gesture. It won't make me shop at Trader Joe's more, because I already get practically all my food there. But it makes me a little bit happier about shopping there.

Current Mood: impressed

My dad wants help making pasta sauce.

The Vermont Country Store was pretty high up on my list of "catalogs where I would not expect to find a Rabbit Pearl vibrator."

My Dad is experimenting with a so-called curry recipe that my mom used to make. When I was a kid it tasted really spicy to me. I expect that I wouldn't taste any spice at all now, as the recipe is written. This recipe is pretty much the only memory I have that lets me compare my taste sense today with what it was when I was a kid.

http://donpjones.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/post-2-to-learning2cook77/

This is largely a response to this Body Impolitic post, but the issue has come up recently in some other places I hang out too, so I am discussing it in my journal.

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

There are certain things that people try to make more simple than is possible.

Specifically, there is no "the [fill in the blank] community" unless you're talking about a single group of people who meet for one purpose only.

There's no "the fat acceptance community," "the poly community," "the Buddhist community," and so on.

People say "the FITB community" as a way of shorthand when they're talking about all the people interacting around certain ideas. But sometimes they seem to start believing in their own shorthand. Sometimes they seem to act as if all the FITB people will be forced to spend the rest of their lives together in a small confined space so they'd better all think a lot alike.

But if you're talking about many people geographically distributed who share an interest in a certain idea, and especially if that idea is complex, then they do not form a single unified community. They have multiple different relationships with the idea and multiple different ways of interacting with other people who are interested in the idea. For most ideas, that's not only OK, that's good.

When I embrace this understanding of how people interact around ideas, I feel a lot more relaxed. If I believe in X and Z, and someone else believes in Y and Z, we don't have to fight it out about whether the community should be either X+Z believers or Y+Z believers. We can both take part in groups interested in Z and retain our beliefs about X and Y. Then we might be able to discuss X and Y productively instead of feeling like we have to stomp out all those X-believers or Y-believers.

If you are so inclined, please go to http://donpjones.wordpress.com/ and leave a comment.

The abbreviation stands for "because all knowledge is contained in social networking sites".

My dad has been living on his own for the first time in 50 years, since my mom recently had to go into a memory care facility. When they were together, his cooking repertoire was mostly limited to barbecue. Now he is turning cooking into a hobby and I'm really proud of him. I suggested that he start a blog, "Learning to cook at 77" and he seems interested.

He uses a Mac and is fairly computer-savvy, but I think a simple blog would be best. Which blogging site/software is easiest to use, in your opinion? I don't think he would need the privacy features of LJ or Dreamwidth, but he might need comment-spam management. The cost should be no more than $50/year.

It's close to midnight and something evil's lurking in the firecat.

Which song was this lyric from?

You know that we are living in a firecat world
and I am a firecat girl.

Which song was this lyric from?

Do you think society puts too much pressure on people to be in relationships and/or have children? Do you think this ostracizes people who would be perfectly content to remain single and/or child-free? Is this pressure worse around the holidays?

More interesting questions:
"How does social pressure happen?"
and
"If you perceive social pressure, what do you do?"
and
"Do you have ways to defend against uncomfortable social pressure? What are they?"

( but I answer the questions anyway )

Originally published in a different form as a comment here.

My mom often confused her preferences and mine, especially where clothing and gifts were concerned. (I'm using the past tense because she doesn't have a reliable memory for much of anything any more, so I don't have expectations about her remembering my preferences.) This used to frustrate both of us. At some point it stopped bothering me.

(Note, I never had a particularly good sense of her preferences either.)

My dad often seems to see me as an individual and understand what I like. I remember a few times that he bought me a gift that was exactly what I wanted but not something I had asked for or would think to buy for myself. (The LJ icon shows one of those gifts, a clay sculpture he gave me a few years ago.)

I think it has helped me a lot to have a parent who sees me as an individual more often than as reflection of themself.

I wish for everyone to have someone like that in their life, if not a parent, then another person they care about.

This post at Sociological Images discusses how Hitler deliberately chose to target Jews as part of his political strategy, and it goes on to discuss how his regime defined people as Jewish.

What I see is science and medicine used to define the limits of hatred. There's a photo of an "instrument for measuring facial features." It looks kinda like a pair of "body fat calipers."

We moved the cats and their litter box into my study because there are workers in the house. We've done this many times before.

My cat Biscuit just scraped one of my hand-knit sweaters into the litter box.

We clean the box three times a day!

Silk Road: A Novel of Eighth-Century China by Jeanne Larsen

Silk Road is a beautifully written, richly descriptive, meandering story of a young woman who is trying to find her family and who, along the way, finds her own power. It weaves together history, story, mythology, and poetry. Interspersed with the story (the chapters named "Parrot Speaks") are a number of fragmentary 8th-century Chinese texts, translated by the author, along with prose poems that address the reader directly.

The story itself and its writing style kinda scratched the same itch for me that Little Big by John Crowley does. I'm failing to come up with the right words to describe the similarities, though.

In Silk Road's descriptions of the life of a courtesan I am reminded a bit of the popular Memoirs of a Geisha (which was written quite a while later). But Memoirs of a Geisha is in the end a thoroughly conventional romance novel. Silk Road isn't conventional and isn't a romance-genre novel at all.

I don't know very much about Chinese culture, history, or mythology, except what I learn from watching Yimou Zhang (House of Flying Daggers) and Jet Li movies. I expect people who know more about those things would get more out of this book.

Finally, I'm going to describe how I found out about this book, because it amuses me. I am involved with a Buddhist sangha called Insight Meditation Center. A frequent guest speaker at this sangha is Thanissaro Bhikkhu, abbot of Metta Forest Monastery in California. I really like his dharma talks. So I was reading about him on the Web one day and I came across this interview with him in the Oberlin alumni magazine:
http://www.oberlin.edu/alummag/spring2004/feat_monk.html
In the interview, he was asked whether he reads for pleasure and he said that the only fiction he reads is Jeanne Larsen and Harry Potter. That seemed like a good reason for me to check out Jeanne Larsen's books.

One of my parents' miniature Schnauzers, Pepper, was just diagnosed with diabetes. He's at the pet hospital for now. But once he is released, I am wondering what treatment regimen will be required. (I have diabetes, so I know in general, but I don't know if there are significant differences for treatment in dogs.) Will you share your experience?

leftoverresearchquarterly: An awesome idea for information magpies and fiction writers. I hope it gathers many contributions.

From the profile:

We want to know all about all the cool stuff you found researching your latest piece of fiction, especially the stuff that didn't get used in the end because the subplot it was going to support got dropped.

Thanks

snippy!

In this entry I was asking people for opinions about dyeing sheets in the washing machine. I haven't dyed sheets yet. I ended up buying some "iDye" prepackaged dye + fixative and dyeing some of my T-shirts to see whether the iDye is colorfast enough.

I dyed three cotton T-shirts. Two of them were white with some dye stains from a previous dyeing project. One was pink and had some black ink stains on it. I used iDye for Natural Fabrics-True Red.

I agitated them in the washing machine on hot for 40 minutes (the package said to agitate for 30 minutes, the web site said more time would be better for bright colors and colorfastness).

The white shirts came out not quite red but richer than pink. The pink shirt came out bright red. The stains on all the shirts are still visible although not as obvious as they were before.

I washed and dried two more loads of laundry after the experiment and no dye got onto that laundry.

The big test still to come is whether the color will bleed when I wash these shirts with other items.

Now that Twitter is letting me organize the entities I'm following into lists I might actually use it. I'm firecatstef on there. Pretty much everything I post there is cross-posted to Facebook.

Signs that you are becoming a vampire, #27

What would meaningful health support look like?

My dad's in Wired Magazine. Where next, Burning Man?

Vacation report

Mustard Mushroom

Dad makes mini chicken pies

miscellaneous questions

Health at Every Size brochure from Dr. Jon Robison and WELCOA

The knowledge of the social network is requested

Dad cooks cheese souffle

Just what I always wanted

Serendipitous recipe improvement

Being a delicate flower

Trader Joe's rocks

(no subject)

In which firecat finds out she is behind the times

Not vindaloo

Not so simple

My dad's new cooking blog

bakicisns: easy to use blogging sites?

Latest silly meme

LJ writers block: noodling about family, relationships, and holidays

Being seen

Medicalization of hate

Everyone's a critic

(no subject)

BAKICILJDWFB: dog with diabetes

Research Junky Stef sez: Ooh shiny!

iDye experiment

i haz twitter

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February 2010

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