Alkahest

I’m officially boycotting any retailer using “Santa Baby” in their commercials.  Yeah, it’s an empty threat since I wasn’t going to the mall anyway, but there you are.  Now to get the idiotic song out of my head.  Maybe the Mighty Mighty Bosstones?  Failing that, a power drill may be my best bet.

K and I received our copies of the Yellowstone calendar and they look great.  I’m happy with both the images we selected and also the printing – which was great.  As I mentioned earlier, we went with Zazzle for doing the printing and couldn’t be happier.  My mom got the ones for the folks in Louisiana and she also thought they looked good.  But hey, your mom is supposed to think everything you do looks good, so I was even happier to see that someone I don’t know in Illinois bought a copy on the Zazzle marketplace.  I didn’t expect that, but it was nice to see

Okay, I wasn’t really dead, I had the flu.  But I was wishing that I were dead for a while there. Five days is too long for a massive headache and very high fever. I’m finally recovering and doing some self-imposed quarantine after getting on Tamaflu Monday.  Tuesday afternoon was somewhat interesting.  My doctor’s office had given me a little trick – you can take full doses of acetaminophen and full doses of ibuprofen.  They’ll both contribute to lowering fever and reducing pain, but their side effects are different and you don’t risk ulcers or your liver as if you had doubled up on one.

So, Tuesday, I’m lying in bed doped up on acetaminophen, acid blockers, caffeine, ibuprofen, and tamaflu, feeling better than I had in quite some time.  I was wishing there was a Phish album playing, but was too lazy to go put one on.  Instead, I laid (diagonal ) in my bed and daydreamed about Bill’s in-place, parallel sorting problem.  I think I’ve got the solution and it seems to hold even now when I’m not so dippy.

When we put in the massive wall-eating bookcase, I thought that we had enough book space for the next 10,000 years! Or at least the next 10. Unfortunately, things were filling up a bit too fast, so I grabbed some of the books that I know I’ll never use again and will send them to recycling. Most are completely out of date (from bottom to top, these are from the mid-80s to the late 90s). Linux Application Development is probably still relevant, but a little too basic. Linux Device Drivers goes all the way through the 2.0 kernel series (and may be relevant for the experimental 2.1 series)! Switched LANs (snicker) and In Search of Clusters were given to me by vendors. And if I ever have to program native X-Windows again, I’ll kill myself. I kept the books on C/C++, Python, Perl and PHP – though I’ll probably never buy another programming book. Maybe Celeste is right, I should just get a Safari account… Google works pretty well too. If there’s anything you want in here, let me know…

It’s a good day for the Allman Brothers: great southern rock without the confederate overtones and segregationist b.s. you put up with in Lynard Skynyrd. I could put “Jessica” on repeat and be happy for the rest of the day

Time to assemble the annual Yellowstone calendar.   This year I had a bit of a deadline (and not the shipping deadline this year!).  The company I ordered from (Zazzle) was having a 44% off deal, which expires around 3am.  Unfortunately, because of my grandfather’s death, I never did get around to processing the pictures from this year’s trip, so I didn’t have anything ready to go.  Fortunately, it didn’t take that long to find 10… 18… 26… 28… 29 pictures.  It took a bit longer to color correct and prune them back down to the 13 below:

and that’s the last of the summer veggies:  pickled green (and unripe red) tomatoes (mostly cherry), bannana peppers, a couple of small eggplant (can you pickle eggplant?) and an okra that I hadn’t noticed.  I’ll crack one of these open in a month or so and see how they taste.  FWIW, the pickled bannana peppers from September are great.

I thought about titling this “VD Day” for reasons explained below, but as K pointed out, my mom reads this blog.  More to the point, as I noted, my mom has a dirty mind – which is where most of her children got our sense of humor, so she would absolutely get it.  Anyway, I took today off work, because a) I recently had a birthday and wanted a three day weekend, and b) there were a number of little things around the house that needed doing.  In rough chronological order, I

• finished up the door that I installed in August (September?).  There wasn’t much left, I just needed to bore out the hole for the doorbell without tearing up the doorbell wires, with a detour into making the stupid doorbell work again.  I got that finished and put up all of the old screen door (in case we reinstall it) then piled up all the old door frame, etc.  VD:  Victory over the Door!
• built a new, larger, compost area.  We used to have a reasonable sized plastic compost bin, but that has proved difficult to use (hard to turn the pile) and too small.  The new one is much simpler, just a couple of stakes holding some 4 foot tall hardware cloth in place, but it’s much larger and should be easier to access.
• cleaned out the garden for the end of summer.  Yeah, yeah, it’s the middle of the fall, but the plants were still producing.  It was good that I had put the compost area together, because I definitely needed the space.  I felt a little bad about pulling up the peppers and tomatoes which still had flowers on them, but since we don’t have the sun or the warm days left to ripen anything, it was probably for the best.  The amazing thing was how much produce was still out there:  a couple of small eggplants, some peppers, okra, a number of green onions, and a ton of tomatoes.

• started preserving what came out of the garden.  Some of it went into tonight’s dinner:  Orzo with Veggies.  There were enough ripe tomatoes left to turn into roasted tomato sauce (roast tomatoes, garlic, italian seasoning, balsamic vinegar and olive oil for an hour, then puree and can).  I need to get some quart-sized jars tomorrow so that I can pickle all of the green tomatoes… unless someone someone has another good use for 2+ kg of green tomatoes.

Update: I shouldn’t forget, I also

• cleaned, chopped and froze all of the green onions; and
• updated the “title font” on my blog from “renaissance” to “English,”  as well as updated TWRC’s events

Courtesy of xkcd:

For all of your theological questions, the deity is now on YouTube.  Two of my favorite questions are the problem of evil and how do you explain the trinity.  Respectively answered in the “Mr. Deity and the Evil” and “Mr. Deity and the Identity Crisis,” below:

and