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The Turnip King's Bastard Son
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| Yard sale today, and my awesome spousalbeast |
[Aug. 15th, 2009|11:47 pm] |
I write this around midnight, where today and yesterday start getting rather blurry. The yard sale is 10AM-4PM Sunday the 15th, and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yagagriswold made a truly awesome flyer for it.
Because the tabs don't seem to be pasting elegantly, here's a graphic of it:
Please come by and say hi. |
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| Stupid Beverage Tricks |
[Aug. 4th, 2009|03:55 pm] |
Dumb little things that are giving me inordinate pleasure this summer:
- Coffee ice cubes
- Ingredients: brewed coffee, an ice cube tray you don't mind getting all gross and brown.
- Three-quarters-assed lemonade
- Commercial lemonade is sucky and expensive. Real lemons go bad and/or run out. Sugar refuses to dissolve in cold wather. A bottle of good commercial lemon juice and a bottle of simple syrup in the fridge can be poured into a glass of tapwater to produce something about 90% as good as fresh-squeezed, at about 20% the effort.
- Home-made chocolate syrup
- Whisk good cocoa powder into with hot simple syrup. I add a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla bourbon. Make it pretty thin--it will thicken when it cools. I keep it in squeeze bottles and pour it liberally into all that coffee ice cube ice coffee.
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| Grammah Stumpah |
[Jul. 22nd, 2009|04:26 pm] |
"What is the singular of fæces?" I asked a gathering of Smart People lately, who were largely stumped (as was I). So today I asked Wikipedia, which answered ( cut for grammarspoilertude )which I will no doubt be coming up with the flimsiest of excuses to use in the next couple weeks |
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| Behold...the Quinticycle! |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|11:07 am] |
I caught a glimpse of it a while ago, but yesterday I got my first good look. A young black man--late teens, I'd estimate--came down the sidewalk on Broadway in Somerville on a bicycle modified to replace the front wheel with a full-size grocery store shopping cart. A couple minutes later, with a look of grim determination, he came tearing back the other way, this time in the road's bike lane.
Well, tearing back is a relative term. He was probably going five miles an hour, but you can imagine the clamor that four grocery cart wheels make at that speed.
I can't imagine it's a delight to steer, but it struck me as an elegant and ingenious way to construct a bakfiets analogue, quite possibly out of all trash-picked parts. This guy is definitely not the first to have the idea, but it's the first I've seen, and I declare it Awesome.
ETA: Two (2) more sightings today--one where he rode through the Harvard Square farmer's market. On a closer look, my initial estimate of his age is off by a decade or so--he's closer to 30 than 15.
The second was just now in Davis Square, where there was some sort of SCUL tinfoil hat dance party. He had a giggling woman in the cart, and was taking her for a spin around the block. Both of them were wearing tinfoil hats.
THAT IS ALL, as John Hodgman says. |
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| The Portland Ice Storm video |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|02:27 pm] |
I don't remember who I was describing this to the other day, so, whoever you were, here it is: the wince-inducing multi-car low-speed traffic accident orgy.
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| a perhaps-easier friendslist query |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|02:33 pm] |
Those of you who find yourself handcoding HTML, what text editor do you like for the purpose?
Historically, I've used XEmacs, but I do it rarely enough (it's been almost three years since my last round of updates) that I don't really retain much knowledge in between times, and so the kinda brutal learning curve hits me each round.
I'm sure there exists something much more graphical and friendly for relatively lightweight projects (sites with a dozen or two pages, with basic CSS and minimal Javascript), and cheaporfree. Any recommendations? |
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| Speak, lazynet! |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|12:06 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | Is "Eek!" a mood? | ] |
Can anyone recommend a local tax attorney? I find myself rather in need of one. |
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| On Being Okay |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|03:34 pm] |
I seem to have done it again--slacked off on posting health updates once my own sense of crisis had subsided.
The remaining impacts of my time in the hospital are as follows: Appointments with my oncologist are more frequent than they were last year. I'm only doing barbecue delivery three nights a week, down from four to accommodate the guy they hired to fill in for me. And I'm still hip-deep in insurance paperwork.
I feel as well as or better than I did in March. My blood levels are within normal ranges.
I met with a specialist at Dana Farber last week to discuss possible supplementary treatments, and she advised against any such. So now life returns to normal, with the only substantial change being that now I know with some confidence that the HCL will be coming back eventually, where before I had hoped it might be gone forever. |
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| A Modest Proposal |
[May. 18th, 2009|03:01 pm] |
Hey, if you connected turn-signal levers to the internet, so that you posted an update every time you signalled a turn, maybe more people would actually use them! |
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| Recommendations Backlog |
[May. 13th, 2009|12:10 pm] |
Daisy Owl is a very good newish webcomic in the Achewood vein.
Why did no-one tell me about Highland Kitchen? It's awesome! What's that? You say you did, over and over? Well, why did no-one tell me I should be listening when they told me how awesome Highland Kitchen is? Huh? Huh? yagagriswold did some research and reports that the chef is the same chef who made Green Street Grill awesome back when it was awesome.
Charlie's Kitchen's beergarden is keen-o! Thanks for going there with me, mildmannered.
My Wicked Amber horns were the best 20 bucks I ever spent.
Keep your tires inflated. Seriously--even Barack Obama says so. |
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| Beeb, you perplex me. |
[May. 1st, 2009|04:15 pm] |
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8027269.stm
"[T]"he San have already been shown to have the oldest genetic lineages, suggesting they may be descendents of a population ancestral to all modern humans."
As distinct, presumably, from people who are not descendents of a population ancestral to all modern humans. Seriously, what was this guy actually tryng to say? I'm kind of stumped. |
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| Consent only counts if you're young and pretty, right? |
[Apr. 12th, 2009|07:50 pm] |
Massachusetts state Rep Kathi-Anne Reinstein (D--Saugus/Chelsea/Revere) has added an amendment to a state bill originally about child porn. The altered bill would impose a ten-year jail sentence for anyone taking nude pictures "with lascivious intent" of anyone over the age of 60 or with "a permanent or long-term physical or mental impairment that prevents or restricts the individual’s ability to provide for his or her own care or protection."
The thing that really blows my mind is the professional-media near-silence about this one. The Herald provides it's usual nuanced and sophisticated perspective on the story (headline: STATE PUTS PORN PERVS IN SIGHTS), but other than that this seems to be a blogger-only story.
Perhaps, if you think that disabled or older folks are capable of consent despite Rep. Reinstein's opinions, you may want to have a word with your own representative on the matter, and save the courts a spot of bother reminding the legislature of basic constitutional rights. |
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| Augh! My head! Get it off me! |
[Apr. 9th, 2009|01:21 pm] |
Two headlines on the Globe editorial page today:
A carbon cap with teeth
The thorniest mine in the drug war |
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| Happy Numbers; De-Cyborgization |
[Apr. 8th, 2009|02:12 pm] |
My ANC is now pushing 2500; Wikipedia says anything above 2000 is "normal."*
My hematocrit, or "crit" as the kids are calling it, is a modest 25.9, bu that was enough for Dr. Weissman to authorize the removal of my PICC line. The minor downside of that is that the blood draws this Friday and next will involve actual needles. Nonetheless, I shall not be missing it.
She has also authorized one drink a day for the time being.
The Flagyl pills for the C-Diff** also end today, so all-in-all this feels like a big turning point. I'm in no state to go back to biking quite yet, but other than that, my life returns to something rather like normal.*
* I guess there had to be something normal about me, someday.
** The J-Lo of stomach ailments. |
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| Home. |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|05:57 pm] |
Arrived home about half an hour ago, driven by the superhumanly patient dreda and rising_moon, who had been on-call for this purpose for something like 84 hours straight now, including an hour spent in the MTA parking lot after I had said "Definitely definitely four no fooling" at two or so.
My morning hematocrit reading had been 19.6, enough to provoke one unit of transfusion. I found this out about nine AM. Three hours between that nine and that five of my work day were the actual red fluid. The other five went to red tape.
But now Yagagriswold is making me dinner, while I sit in my freshly-cleaned living room on my own sofa, under my own lap blanket, with a cool drink in my hand. Bliss! |
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| My So-Called Status Update |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|06:33 pm] |
Chemo bag 3 of 7 has been installed. Still feeling pretty much normal. Hydrating like a mofo and running to the bathroom every half hour to help my kidneys flush out the dead cells we are helpfully producing for them.
Wifi makes everything better. My spousal-type person makes everything even betterer. I have never been so grateful for the amazing timeskinkitude of Civ IV. Sam & Max Season One turns out to be only moderately amusing.
Have resumed using Google Calendar to try to keep track of scheduled visits as that starts getting complicated. Unfortunately, almost no-one knows what time of day they're going to arrive. Fortunately, it's not like overlaps are an actual problem.
Does anyone have a copy of Dark Light by Ken MacLeod? I'm within a day or so of finishing Cosmonaut Keep. |
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