Rants and Ramblings

tylik — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 20:24:36 GMT

I am not going to delete my account at this time - probably not too long, but I have some accounting to do - though I might delete content on this account. Not sure.

But I'm going stop cross posting. I'm tylik at Dreamwidth. Or tylikcat on twitter. Or various permutations elsewhere.

It's been a good run.

tylik — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 14:44:13 GMT

Anyone who is not aware of the macabre but wonderful best carcass hashtag trending on twitter right now is missing a hell of a show. (Biologists have the best twitter wars.)

https://twitter.com/hashtag/bestcarcass?src=hash

(It is possible that I think I have too many friends and am trying to get rid of some. This is exactly what is sounds like, plus weird inappropriate biologist humor.)

Spirit Corner Little Free Library

tylik — Sat, 28 May 2016 19:13:05 GMT

I am hugely greatful that DS stepped at the end and took over some of the finishing work (and then installation.) I was finally feeling up to it... but it was just such a load off my mind to be able to hand it off. Then A came and did the artwork adorning the peak. Now various folks are filling it up, and when I rode home yesterday it was to see a father and toddler aged child at the picnic table reading (apparently this is their evening ritual).

It's kind of amazing how Spirit Corner itself has gone from pretty unfinished to really looking quite lovely. I do wish my attempts to grow runner beans up the poles hadn't been so thoroughly thwarted be deer last year.

...Oh, and suggestions for appropriately subversive books, especially aimed at middle readers, will be much appreciated.

tylik — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 16:10:37 GMT

Apparently I totally overlooked my 14th LJ-versary.

*blink*

(I am still a firm believer in the LJ/DW renaissance. Also, I mostly post under filters - part of why I like the platform. So.)

tylik — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 01:43:52 GMT

I have a number of filters. Some of them are conditionally opt-in -- if someone would like to be on a filter, I'll probably put them there, but no guarantees. Some of them are more of a mix of how well I know you versus how much stuff I think you want to hear.

So, wrt requesting be added to filters:

How much do you want to hear about the personal detail of my life?
How squeamish are you (you can define axes - most likely discussions of injuries, medical procedures or bodily function, but could be sexuality as well)
Philosophical musings?
Anything special I should know about things you may or may not want to hear about? (Say, health/fitness, medical, research, whatever - I don't promise to make sure you never see them, but I might at least use cut tags.)

Potato Leek Soup (soymilk maker edition)

tylik — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 03:00:51 GMT

So since last time around I was just playing and having fun (the soup was awesome, and I enjoyed cups of it for the next few days, but it was composed, and not the most minimalist version of itself) I decided to focus on two things: getting a somewhat thicker consistency, and going for simple.

If you can chop vegetables, and have a soy milk maker, you can make this soup, and it is fabulous.

What I did:

Chop up two medium leeks¹
Chop 6 smallish yellow finn potatoes²

Okay, really, I chopped up the leeks, and then I added potatoes until the chopped veggies filled the soy milk maker more or less to the water line.

Pour a generous amount of olive oil over the whole thing (1-2 T?)

Fill with water to the higher water line. Put on the cover/grinder piece, and start on the porridge setting.

When it beeps, add salt and lemon to taste, and garnish with fresh herbs if you're feeling fancy. (I add salt and lemon right before I eat it, not to the quantity, the rest of which is now in my refrigerator. Except I think I need a second bowl. Ah, bliss.)

¹ Usually after I remove the rooty bits on the bottoms and the tough upper leaves, I'll cut them open lengthwise to see if any dirt has gotten inside, and then wash them further if needed.
² I didn't remove the skins. Flavor and vitamins, I say! Also, laziness!

More Soup

tylik — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 01:58:28 GMT

I have a serious case of Autumn. By which I mostly mean nesting instinct. This is turning into all kinds of useful things like getting one of those portable radiator space heaters for the library (it's the room I work in the most, is kind of underheated anyway, and this is a good excuse to keep the rest of the house cooler, which I prefer for training) and proper curtains for my bedroom, and putting the air conditioners away for the year.

I decided to play more with soy milk maker as soup maker, this time seeing how far one could push a non porridge style soup. This was my first attempt at anything like this, but then I knew the device pretty well (well, and it's certainly not my first squash soup.)

Squash Fennel Soup

500 ml (2 and a bit c) uncooked butternut squash, cut in small cubes*
3 10 cm (4 in) fennel stalks, chopped
5 large cloves garlic.
2 walnut sized scoops almond butter (okay, I used peanut butter, but I would have used almond butter if I could)
1/4 t fenugreek seeds
1/8 t corriander seeds
pinch vietnamese cinnamon
some aleppo pepper

Water to water line, hit porridge button, go do useful things until it beeps at you.

Salt to taste, garnish with a decent olive oil and a bit of lemon (if I hadn't been in a hurry to eat, there are a number of green herbs that would have both tasted lovely and provided pleasant visual contrast.)

I was a little worried about the correct mix between water and vegetables. This was a little more like a very rich broth rather than my usual thick soup - like, it was elegant and such. The kind of thing that gets you ready for a meal. (I can build absolutely lovely broths. I just happen to have peasant tastes. I could have added a bit of rice... but I might see how much more veggies I can get in there, because the brightness of the flavor is intriguing.)

Potato leek would seem like the obvious place to go next... though there were these sweet potatoes...

* A sturdy potato peeler will take the rind off of a butternut squash, or many other squashes of sufficiently smooth surface.

tylik — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 19:26:39 GMT

A couple of days ago a friend posted about making juk (or jook, or congee - savory rice porridge goes by many names.) And I was reminded that my soy milk maker makes any entirely decent juk within its limitations, and its limitations work very well for me. It will not support all varieties of juk - it's probably best to think of it as a cooking blender. But as I'm making vegetarian versions anyway, and I'm just cooking for me, it's wonderful. I just finished a bowl made with this recipe:

Into the soymilk maker went

1.5 cups uncooked rice (brown basmati, because it was on hand)
a few cloves garlic
a couple of slices ginger
a couple of walnut sized chunks of miso
several fresh shiitake mushrooms.

Water was added to the marked line (About 1.5 liters total?) and the porridge setting on the machine punched.

When it came out, I added a handful of chopped jiucai, a bit of salt, a bit of lemon, and some pepper oil.

The big limitation is that you can't simmer things that you don't want pulverized (or, as in the case of ham bones, that the machine can't pulverize). And the texture of the rice is much smoother - you don't get that halfway dissolved texture that I so lovingly recall. I can imagine that a crafty person who lived alone could make stock some yummy broths, and then use them in place of water to make a nice fresh bowl of juk as needed, though. ...that it's so little work when I'm not feeling so great, or am short on time is just wonderful.

Standing With Planned Parenthood.

tylik — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 20:41:15 GMT

A lot of people are posting their Planned Parenthood stories, and my initial thought is that I don't really have any, or that mine are just too boring. But then, thinking about it, in some ways, that's kind of the point.

When I was seventeen, and living on my own (or at least, renting a house with a number of friends, as I had been since I was fifteen) I thought I didn't have health insurance because I had been told that my father had removed me from his plan when I moved out.* So when I decided that I wanted to go on birth control pills, I went to the local planned parenthood.

And the people were just so sweet. They listened to me. They were really glad and encouraging that I was informed and proactive about my own sexual health. They answered all my questions. (That particular branch was only sometimes picketed, but the contrast between the sweet and encouraging people inside, and the really mean and nasty ones outside - who tended to make assumptions about me and call me names - is the kind of thing that stays with you.)

I worked out my insurance situation while I was back at the university, but then returned to Planned Parenthood soon after I left, before I'd figured out my new insurance (having been with Group Health all my life, Microsoft insurance was pretty confusing.) And I stayed with them from all my gynecological care for several years, just because I liked the people so much and I preferred to receive it in such a supportive environment - and I liked to be paying them full rates when I could afford it, having maxed out their sliding scale at the other end when I was younger.

So... it's really boring. And moreso because I was privileged enough to have other options (even when I didn't know it.) But an awful lot of what Planned Parenthood does is that kind of boring absolutely essential kind of stuff - and often for people who don't have other options.

* Actually, this turned out not to be true - he wasn't actually able to do that, but it's not like I tried to use health insurance I didn't think I had.

tylik — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 21:25:44 GMT

I've noticed that once again there are an awful lot of posts talking about how awful April Fool's jokes are, and how they are cruel and bad, etc. etc. I've been seeing these posts cropping up, usually starting a couple of days before April 1st for the last several years. And I've seen a few instances - especially a decade or so ago when there was a bit less general social knowledge about how to both post and read in a manner that doesn't give or take unnecessary offence - when things got pretty out of hand and ended in tears.

I don't think I've been directly involved in one. My one personal, and occasional, April first tradition is to write something about my father. (It's his birthday. Sadly, the things I've are neither jokes nor tricks.)

But for whatever reason, the outrage density has kind of gotten to me. I mean, hey, I respect that you have your tastes.

I have my tastes. I haven't yet seen an April Fool's joke today that struck me as cruel. Some were a little tedious (maybe they would have gotten better if I read them all the way) many made me giggle. Pac-Map is fucking brilliant. (And playing it centered on the house I grew up in is *really hard*. Like, darn.) The Polyamorous Misanthrope had me guffawing between forms this morning. (ETA: Abe's Market's "Vegan Lip Balm for Meat Lovers" was pretty good, too.)

YoungestLabmate and I kind of missed our chance when we switched the direction of opening of the lab fridge a couple of weeks back - he made me swear that it had always been that way (and we made predictions about which labmates would notice and which would not.) In practice, when people showed signs of being actually upset, we told them the secret, then made them swear it had always been that way. But the whole lab was in on it before today.

(OTOH, the piece I designed and printed to replace the piece he broke in the handle came out beautifully and fit perfectly on the first time... and will never been seen again, most likely, because it's internal. But hey. We know.)

So... Hey, you get to have your tastes. I have mine. But think for a moment that because it's possible for a prank to be cruel doesn't mean that all pranks are cruel. And an awful lot of them seem to be pretty hard to read that way. Maybe the problem is cruelty, or even just not thinking things through, and not pranks? Maybe the solution is thinking about it a little harder?

I'm pretty happy we have a day of more or less official silliness.

tylik — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 17:02:44 GMT

I really love book release days. Yay, books!

I really, really hate DRM.

Seriously, I know this is not something most authors have control over* but dealing with DRM on books I've legally purchased is a giant PITA** and it just makes me so sad.

I mean, I'm lucky. I am physically capable of reading books from a proprietary reader. It's just not my preferred way of doing so, and hugely inconvenient. (I do most of my fiction read via TTS. Because then I can read books while doing all kinds of other tasks. Otherwise I just don't have time to read very much fiction at all.)

But again, I'm lucky, because I have a lot of friends where it's not a matter of preference or convenice but of accessibility. And for the record, no, I don't think "just buy the audiobook" is a reasonable answer. Though it's an answer that I might choose for some circumstances. (Nor, admittedly, is this the only problem I have with DRM. But it's the one that I run into on a near daily basis and it drives me up a fricking tree.)

* Or at least, not beyond the level of "publish with major publishing house or not" and seriously, just not going there.
** There is a better tool chain for removing DRM from most kindle based ebooks, but I go out of my way not to buy from Amazon.

It gets better

tylik — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 15:34:30 GMT

I'm almost embarrassed to post this, because it's so darn positive, really, I guess. Far more than the personal stuff. This morning while eating breakfast I read a random story about women dealing with their history of abuse, and one of the comments was from a woman just starting to deal with her own, and how much she felt like she couldn't even talk about it. So I wrote this.

And then it either didn't post, or went into some kind of approval queue, and I felt a bit silly.

You know how it is when you’re cleaning a closet that hasn’t been cleaned in years, and for a while it just feels like all the junk from the closet is filling the room beyond it, and everything is a mess, and why did I even open this closet?* And then, eventually, you work through it, and throw out the trash, and clean out the grotty corners, and sort the rest and put it away more or less neatly. And then it’s your closet, and hey, maybe you don’t like everything that’s in it, but you aren’t afraid to open it, and eventually don’t even wince when you open it because you’ve taken ownership of it.

It’s hard. If you can, you wait until you have some time and space to deal with it, because yeah, it’s probably going to take up a lot of your life for a bit. But it gets better. And the shame is maybe the thing that for me, anyway, got the most better, and the soonest. Because when I really took things out and looked at them straight on, I had to accept that they were not, in fact, my fault.

For me, and this is twenty-six years after I began dealing with my own abuse, that’s more or less how it’s been. Most of the time, it’s just another aspect of my somewhat colorful past. And at this point, while I absolutely wouldn’t wish my childhood on anyone, I also can’t really unwish it on me, because I really like the person I am, and like the life I have, and, well, if everything were completely different, than everything would be completely different.

A line from a favorite book – “That my uncle was cruel to me and my household taught me compassion.” We are shaped by our pasts. That’s inevitable. But we can also choose how we are shaped by our pasts. Not all at once, maybe, but over time. And if the lessons we learn are hard ones, we can also, sometimes, make them good ones, so that something comes out of all that pain. I’m not saying it can be worth it – but we are worth it. You are worth it.

I don’t talk about the abuse in my family a whole lot (though I write about it somewhat more) not because it makes me uncomfortable, but because it makes other people uncomfortable. A lot of people know a little. (Especially people who think they’re doing the world a service by lecturing me on why I should spend the holidays with my parents. And even then, I’ll usually smile and calmly say “My parents were abusive and criminal in their treatment of me and my siblings. If you’d really like I’ll explain further, but I suspect you would rather not.” It’s kind of amazing how many people respond with “Oh, I wouldn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.” “Oh, no, this is all stuff I’ve put to rest years ago, and I’m happy to discuss it. It’s your comfort that’s on the table.” But, as I said, I have to be pretty provoked to push it even that far.)

But… it’s just a thing now, mostly. A few quirks and foibles that I might explain to a lover. (Or perhaps a housemate. Never, ever enter a room where I am sleeping uninvited short of the gravest emergency. Please.) At times a somewhat dark sense of humor.

I feel like I’m writing from such a different place that I don’t really know if anything I say can really reach where you are now. So maybe I should just stop with this:

It gets better.

* Okay, I don’t have closets like that, though the house where I grew up did. Though the shelves and drawers in the lab where I work are like that, which is pretty terrifying, really. I think most of us have dealt with something like that, though.

tylik — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 16:02:21 GMT

Sometimes the best thing about working in a *nix environment is the selection of big hammers that it gives you. (No, really, I thought I had my modelling environment entirely working before going to bed last night. In fact, I just had all the parts I actually care about working, as opposed to silly things like dropping movies.)

Two bits of randomness

tylik — Sat, 29 Nov 2014 19:18:45 GMT

1. Okay, so it was flaky for me to leave putting my studden tires on until this morning. But to have the only tube in that size - and a new tube, and so far unpatched, to really, I wasn't totally insane to think I was good to go - split along the inside seam? Bah.

Not to mention that the cold weather side of putting the tires on is always kind of annoying, as it's either work in cold weather, or haul it into the house. This was all done in the kitchen, which is actually pretty great but only works when no one else is around. (I only just managed to finish up before K got back.) Hauling the 'bent in and out of the basement either involves really annoying indoor access, or really annoying outdoor access.

Anyhow, so there I was, with an unrideable bike, and the bike store not opening until 11. Which is to say that I didn't go to the farmers market. (OTOH, I did pick up my special order of 25 lbs of dry organic soy beans, which has got to count for something.)

2. Socks!

Okay, so it's serious sock season. When I was last in Seattle I randomly picked up some Darn Tough Vermont hiking socks, because I'd hiked too much in not fully broken in boots with inadequate socks, and got some fairly awful blisters. The new socks impressed me to no end - I mean, seriously, I got all the good blister sticky pads and suck, but I hardly needed them. They're really dense, and fine textured, and my feet adore them.

So, I got a couple more pairs of them... and then realized that I'd totally missed that these socks had a lifetime replacement guarantee. Like, seriously, who does that? I can put a hole in a pair of smartwool socks with casual use* in a single season. So, of course, I am now on a quest to wear holes in my durn tough socks. This might be thwarted by the fact that they have a lot of socks that I like. I mean, they have socks with bees. Bees. And spirals, and vines, and just plain well made hiking socks in cool colors.

* By casual use I mean "not heavy hiking" and not doing anything extraordinarily mean to them. I mean, I still wear them, and my feet do a lot.

People Hiding Alone at Neurosciences

tylik — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 16:07:51 GMT

I gave someone my LJ address, saying I was going to post all these pictures there... and then decided the ello photo handling interface was easier to deal with considering. So I give you, People Hiding Alone at Neurosciences. #SfNretreat

https://ello.co/tylik/post/_2K18D14Kp771KRiJk0vtQ

tylik — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 15:07:02 GMT

As promised, giant slugs.

tylik — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:02:16 GMT

So, how many of you are on Diaspora? Do you use it? Why or why not? (I'm tylik on http://diasp.org )

(as posted elsewhere...)

tylik — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 12:01:13 GMT

Also? The incredible animus that has been being expressed towards geek women over the last bit? Is terrible. And depresses the hell out of me.

Introverts and Extraverts, a small rant

tylik — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 16:41:02 GMT

(I've thought about writing something like this many times. It's possible I already have. If so, sorry.)

Y'know, folks (and I see a lot more of this on facebook, but I don't write longer format posts there, because facebook) could you maybe think a bit before posting your introvert are actually the bestest chosen people comments? Because there's a lot of extravert hate in there, and I'm really getting tired of seeing it. (This has generally been fading, but I just saw a few more of them recently.)

Apparently extraverts prefer small talk to talking about anything substantive, and are poor listeners, aren't socially sensitive, and like conflict. Also, they jabber all the time and dominate any gathering, and follow their poor introverted friends around and try to force them to interact. (Rather than spending a huge amount of time and energy taking care of their special snowflake introvert friends who apparently want social interaction, but only specific kinds of social interaction, and can't seek it for themselves.) Oh, yeah, and introverts are super rare and chronically misunderstood.* This is not even to get into the "introvert or extravert" quizzes that are all "Are you a good, sensitive, caring introvert? Or a brutal, clueless, and mean extravert."

Um, really?

One of the funny bits here is that I'm not really that extraverted. I mean, there isn't an agreed set of definitions here (so almost all of this involves someone talking out of their asses) but while I like my social time, you don't have to know much about my life to know that it's not really structured around social time. I'm fairly outgoing, I'm socially confident, and as least some of the time I'm reasonably socially clueful. None of these things mean that I'm an extravert. (Of course, enough people have told me that I'm *such* an extravert that I'm pretty sure when they post this stuff they mean me.)

Even assuming there's a good way to measure introversion, there's a lot of stuff being conflated here. And you want to watch those conflations, because even if there's some kind of measureable difference in the probabilities of this or that, on a population basis, that doesn't mean they are predictive for any given individual. For instance, men are fairly likely to be sexually interested exclusively in women. That's a way stronger association than most of the tendencies that are being discussed wrt introversion. And yet, I think most people get why generalizing along those lines is fucked up. When we're talking about the more common "this population is slightly - but statistically significantly - more likely to be inclined in foo direction" the generalizations are not only problematic, they're also really weak.

There are awkward, socially clueless extroverts. (Quite a few, really, especially in geek circles.) There are uncreative, oblivious introverts. I've had friends who insisted that they were introverts (and that I'm an extrovert) repeatedly try to drag me to parties when I just wanted to stay home and study. (Which is not to say I always want to stay home and study.)

I get that introvert pride is a thing. And I'm good with that. (Though most being in introvert majority communities, it's sometimes a little odd.) There are a bunch of different axes, here, that are at least partially independent. Also, putting people who are different from you down doesn't really reflect well on you.

* Depending on how you define it - and I distrust all the definitions, frankly - introverts are somewhere between a third of and slightly more than half the population. Of course, introverts might seem more rare if they don't talk to eachother very much. Though, people, isn't that why there's an internet?

Cyteen / Regenesis

tylik — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 00:37:30 GMT

Also... Has anyone read CJ Cherryh's Cyteen and it's sequel written twenty years later Regenesis? And might you be interested in discussing it?

My phone has been reading me Cyteen* and it is confirming my impression that Denys' portrayal there is really not consistant with how he's described in Regenesis. In some ways that kind of bother me. (His brilliant but obsessively retiring and softspoken bit makes for such a wonderfully ambiguous character in Cyteen. And then in Regenesis he's retrospectively described as... not all that. And Jordan's not all that. And I'd shrug this off if I didn't love the first so much. Regenesis isn't a bad book, if, in comparison to the first, not much happens. But... bah.

(And this is the character critque. I have a much more developed science critique, though with the exception of one thematic complaint** it's more a matter of questions I'd like to see addressed than things that struck me as just wrong.)

* For the umpteenth bazillion time. It's a favorite book of long standing, and I re-read it every year or two.
** The idea that rejuv treatments are derived from Cyteen's native fauna just struck me as awfully stale, and not well grafted onto the original.

tylik — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 00:12:44 GMT

So, today I brought in the year's first eggplants,

Which I then roasted along with some peppers and shallots from the market, and then mixed in with quinoa, chick peas, olive oil, balsamic vinegar (I'd have used lemon juice by preference, but didn't have any), a pile of finely chopped parlsey, rau ram and a bit of oregano, and then salt, pepper and some ground coriander, fenugreek and aleppo pepper.

This is damned tasty.

tylik — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 20:33:38 GMT

testing cross posting.

tylik — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 22:44:28 GMT

So, something that I've mulling over for a bit -

Despite the general freaking out about violence, it appears that developed societies are overall getting less violent and have been for some time. There also has been an increase in the expectation that children will be protected, both generically from harm and from many of the rigors of adult life.

On the flip side, we know (and I'm thinking about much of the work that has been done with child soldiers) that people who have been raised in very violent and chaotic circumstances are greatly affected by these experiences, even if what they went through was shared by many others and to some degree normalized at the time.

I'm not certain that everyone isn't traumatized now, depending on how fine you slice it. But I notice that a lot of pseudo-historical fiction (I include pseudo historical speculative fiction) seems to project modern ideas of family structure, childhood and trauma... and yet, really, as far as I can tell an awful lot of violence and trauma was pretty much common and shared experiences in those societies.

So... what does a society where trauma of some degree is an expected part of the experience look like?

And maybe more to the point, what does a society where this is not the case look like?

(And how does this reflect on our culture obsession with violence, for that matter. As an aside, I'm looking at this from the perspective that non-violence isn't about ignorance of avoidance of violence* but the process of seeking better solutions, a process in which understanding violence can be pretty helpful.)

* "Oh, let's be ignorant and helpless, that will fix everything!" Bah. The Morlock / Eloi dichotomy can go die in a fire. Or perhaps perish after a very long time out. Y'know. Something.

tylik — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 01:37:25 GMT

So, the last couple of years I keep asking anyone who sell herbs at the market if they carry rau ram, aka vietnamese corriander, vietnamese cilatro, aka pretty much my favorite herb. Well, at least, my favorite one that I have to work to get. (Fun fact: it's particular associated with Buddhist monasteries, and rumor has it that it's an anaphrodisiac. Having had stretch of my life where I ate quite a bit, and ate none, um, I'm pretty sure it's not. Like, controls and everything.) Anyhow, this year, I stopped by the folks at Glacial Till Gardens, and apparently I'd raved enough about it that they got a bunch of plants in. So I bought a couple of plants. (Also, it apparently is taking off with people in the market. When I was stopping by to pick up some chervil last week, folks were stopping by to get more because they liked it so much. I like this both for spreading the joy and because increased demand means it won't be such a pain to get.) Of course, now my plants are growing gangbusters, and I'm thinking one might have been a better idea... I suppose I will just have to exert myself. Of course, I just invited one of my friends to help herself, too.

Some years ago I realized I did a much better job of growing plants in pots if they were really big pots. (Small ones dry out ridiculously quickly.) So I've been filling up big ole pots with potting soil, and my tea plant, pomegranate and jiucai, have been joined by eggplant, tomato, basil (lime, thai, genovese), peppers, rau ram, chervil and rosemary. (I'll often mix things that mostly use the top of the soil with things that tend to root deeper - I seem to get more plants for my pots that way.) So for the first time since I moved to the zendo I have a nice selection of herbs available whenever I want to throw them in something, which is awfully satisfying. I'd gotten pretty used to having fresh herbs whenever, and it certainly makes cooking more entertaining. (The jiucai both does and doesn't count. I've had since before we moved to the zendo - most of my herbs didn't get inside soon enough that first fall, but it's jiucai, which means it's proof against all kinds of hardship and neglect.)

Oh, and if it sounds like a few plants are producing an awful lot of herbs for the table, well, I'm using the fertilizer Indoor Sun Shop folks turned me on to when I was living on the house barge. Always ask the folks who know their hydroponics. Adequate water and space, adequate light and heat, and decent nutrition. I used to think gardening was about work. Now I realize it's mostly about stacking the deck. Oh, the heartbreak of my teenage years, trying to work in poor soil or window boxes of inadequate dimensions.

tylik — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:40:34 GMT

Free library update.

Between a friend who nabbed leftover shingles from a neighbor's roofing project and realizing that we had a bunch of leftover wood shingles for the siding, it occurred to me that I should really go through all the scrap we have around the place before I work out what I need to buy. So today I did a tour of the garage.

There's usable stuff in there, though not the 2x12" I was thinking of using for the body of the box. However, back behind some plywood I found two 2'x2.5' (very roughly) windows, of six panes each. So! that's actually pretty in line with the size I was thinking of, but now I have specific dimensions to work with, and a front door. A much spiffier front door than I was thinking of making. I am thrilled.

Then I talked to one of my Taiji students, who's a retired carpenter, to see if he had some scrap 2x12 board, and he does, so I gave him rough dimensions. I'm going to have to decide just how elaborate will be my framing for the door, but I might be able to start assembling it by next week.