Wow, just wow.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8672036982442311095
…and then there’s this one…
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3089052509929253331
Wonder why the human is always wearing a white coat? Cat funny farm?
And what about this one?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1264602418842822953
Thanks (?) to Noel for alerting us to this bizarre phenomenon…
On Saturday Noel brought over two new games he just got: Cleopatra and Colosseum.
We warmed up with a couple games of Blokus (I was red, Noel was blue)
Then moved on to Ticket to Ride: Switzerland
At this point the battery in the toy camera died and I discovered that I’d left the spare (and charger) at work. So we switched to using the SLR on the tripod with the cable release, taking one frame every time we either put down a tile or a meeple. Frames were stitched together using Photolapse, which was amazingly fast and easy (and how can you beat free?)
Then we played a couple games of Carcassonne:
When we started it was pretty sunny, but by the time we finished a rainstorm had moved in and begun spitting. In hindsight I wish I’d used the UV filter instead of the polarizer, because the exposure is kind-of dark.
We snacked on tinapa paste on toasted homemade sourdough (this combination was unbelievably good) while waiting for the ribs to BBQ. Which were also good, but not quite smacking up against this side of gourmet, the way the happy accident of tinapa and sourdough did.
Then we took naps on living room chairs, aided by purring cats, started a Bundt cake, and played Cleopatra while munching on it.
After Noel left I finished making some sourdough dough and stuck it in the fridge to wait until I’d bake a loaf on Monday evening.
A very pleasant way to spend a Saturday, if I say so, myself!
Oh YES. That is the stuff.
I made a sponge on Saturday, dough out of it Saturday night, and it’s been in the fridge proofing and getting punched down ever since.
Today when I got home from work I chopped off a hunk of dough, formed a loaf, and let it rise for about 6 hours. It wasn’t done, but I was (it was midnight) so I baked it anyway.
MMMMM. Yes, that is the flavor I’ve been missing. And I love that spongy texture.
Hurray!
Since last August I have been listening to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books in the car, on planes, in buses, and probably on trains somewhere, too. The only place I haven’t listened to them is on boats, oddly enough.
Sadly, today I heard the last, unfinished sentence of the last, unfinished book. It will be a hard series to replace. My little Civic will be strangely lonely and empty, without the benefit of an entire ship’s company in there with me. I’ve gotten very used to sharing the quarterdeck with the officers, and how on earth will we manage any broadsides, let alone three in five minutes?
Fortunately, I may have found a timely solution, via bookofjoe. Using the Literature-Map, I have a suggestion to look into historical writer Dorothy Dunnett.
Using gnooks at the same site and entering MFK Fisher, Patrick O’Brian, and Mary Renault, I’ve gotten the following additional suggestions:
* I assume they mean Robert D Kaplan?
I’ll let you know.
Well, I tried again. This time the rise was 5 hours, and I measured the salt so there was more, which slowed things down considerably.
There’s more sour than before, but next time I think I want to try an 8-12 hour rise - that might even fit better with a weekday schedule, anyway:
And talking about convenience, check out these suggestions…
I forgot to save back some starter before adding the oil and salt and so have been nursing a tiny bit back with gradually increasing amounts of flour and water (and at the beginning, a tiny bit of sugar). Looks like he’s recovered, though - there are lots of little bubbles.
Also, Lisa sent me a copy of her current favorite baking book, Dough. It comes with a DVD so you can watch how he kneads and handles the dough. He spends his effort on incorporating lots of air into it. I bet those loaves would rise in the oven, even without yeast, they’re so bubbly. Lisa says she isn’t going to try that experiment, but I think I might, just to see.
Ugh. Wednesday night I ate too close to bedtime and woke up with reflux.
I’ve had this problem ever since my mid-20’s when I used to chain-eat ibuprofen for my cramps. In those days ibuprofen was uncoated, and I’d take it even without fluids, let alone milk. Eventually the ibuprofen burned a hole into the lining of my esophagus, and aspirin was suddenly off-limits, as well.
It used to happen only when I took aspirin or ibuprofen, and the doctors prescribed Carafate, which stopped the pain very well. As the decades advanced, I started having problems if I ate too much, or if I ate oily food, or certain spices, or sometimes, even just popcorn. About 5 years ago a friend turned me on to Pepcid AC, which also stops the pain well, and doesn’t require a prescription.
So yesterday morning I had it because I’d eaten and then gone to bed. Last night I did not make this mistake, but unfortunately woke up with it this morning anyway, and even worse. The first two Pepcid AC taken at 6:30am did not help. I took numerous hot showers to distract me from the pain.
At 8am I took one more pill, and by 8:45am the pain finally started to subside. I was exhausted from the pain and did not go to work - I was afraid it might come back, and I need to be well enough to travel Saturday-Tuesday. So I stayed home and laid low all day.
I think it’s time to consult the doctor about this - according to the internet, I might have H. pylori, and GERD can lead to nastier things like cancer.
Well, the loaves I baked today rose just fine,
I also had fun with seeds and slashes,
and the crumb is good.
But the flavor just isn’t tangy enough. In fact, it’s hardly sour at all! Next time I’m going to let it sit in the fridge overnight before raising. Or just punch-down and re-raise, as my mom used to do.
BTW, the second picture is especially for Lisa, and she knows why. Hehe.
It’s interesting how foods that rot on their own seem disgusting, but the ones which result from humain-aided fermentation are often delicacies: wine, cheese, bread.
Having grown up in the SF Bay Area, I suppose it was inevitable that I would develop a taste for sourdough bread. It helped that my mom made it weekly, baking it in round coffee cans, the tops rising up and over like enormous mushroom caps. Later, when the public were informed that the soldered lead seams on the cans could be toxic, she unfortunately switched to standard bread pans. I still have them.
In college one summer I lived in a co-op house where there were seven of us, mostly graduate students. Six nights a week one person would plan and cook dinner. The seventh person was in charge of baking bread for the house. I was this person.
My favorite and familiar source is the Tassajara Bread Book, written in the early 1970s, cataloging the breads made at the oldest Zen monastery in the US.
A few weeks ago a colleague brought in a loaf of “Amish friendship bread,” which very much resembled a quick bread. He is also from California, and the conversation turned to sourdough, which also typically involves shared leavening culture. This made me start craving sourdough again, so I sent off for some free starter, and it arrived this week.
Following the instructions for how to wake it up, I have been nurturing what started as a teaspoon of the dried culture. The rest of the dried culture is living in two ziploc bags in the freezer, in case I need to restart it. You begin with very small amounts of flour and water. It took about a day for the yeasties to start growing and making bubbles. Gradually I added in more flour and water. This morning I was able to add a whole cup of each, and I anticipate by this evening that there will be enough to start a batch for baking.
If you want to try this too, I highly recommend the book. If you just want the basic sourdough recipe, there’s a version here.
I promised my friend’s son that I would look up hydrogen cell technology and figure out how they get the hydrogen in there, and how the hydrogen is used to make a car go.
We speculated together that electricity can be used to generate the hydrogen, and this is true. It is more efficient to do it in other ways though (chemical, biological, heat, etc.) You can start with hydrocarbons like oil and gas, or you can start from water.
In turn, the fuel cell uses the hydrogen plus oxygen and produces electricity, which drives a motor, which makes the car go.
You unfortunately can’t make a perpetual-motion car using hydrogen cells, because it takes 2 1/2 times as much energy to make a hydrogen fuel cell than is obtained from it. (It’s that pesky 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, rearing its ugly head, as it so often does!)
Last year I took a Tai Chi class held on site after work. There were a number of advanced students in there, and I used to come early and watch them before my (beginner) class.
This year the Tai Chi did not resume, so I enrolled in water aerobics at the local Chiropractic College, which is 30 min away. In the weeks between sessions our water instructor lets us join her during the free swim time. We often go out and eat as a group afterwards.
Tonight she said she had to eat fast because she was due at a friend’s poetry reading at the local library, and invited us along. I thought, “what the heck,” and came. The woman doing the reading looked strangely familiar, but I just could not place her. A club of some kind? An outdoors thing? Finally when I got home, I realized she had been in those Tai Chi classes I observed. This really is a small community.
The poet is named Patricia Roth Schwartz, and I did very much enjoy the reading and the poems. She is animated when she reads - in contrast to her Tai Chi style - and before each poem explained the context, especially when there were references to historical items. There was a mixture of material, some about her family and about growing up in West Virginia, some about aspects of Auburn prison history, from the perspective of the prisoners. She had books for sale. I bought one of each for her to autograph and for me to read.
I have so much fun with my SD750,
I’m thinking about other things I could do.
Look at these examples…
The problem with the current toy camera is that it only does 1 or 2 second intervals. (Besides the fact that it also can’t do shutter dragging, and I can’t change lenses, or put a neutral-density filter on easily.)
So maybe it would be fun to get an intervalometor and convert it to work with my digital Rebel.
There’s a very nice tutorial on lapses, here.
I don’t think I’d bother with the Quicktime, though - Photolapse is free and it sounds like it works just fine.
And I’ll leave you with this, which is one of my favorites.
Chris sent me this quiz today. I got 17 out of the 25 right.
Also, today Sunny turned 1. It’s kind-of strange to think that my spider-chomping little pest is exactly the same number of years younger than Miaumoto as I am to my closest sister Rose. We were both born when the older one was 15.
Somehow the age gap seems bigger between humans than between cats. Perhaps because the size and mentality are closer for cats? Perhaps because I’m a human, so I know exactly what it feels like, while I’ve never been a cat (not that I recall, anyway), so I don’t identify with their experience as closely?
Looks like I’m one of the last few rats leaving - most went in mid-2005:
Better late than never, I suppose!
Here’s how I moved all my files (almost 10MB) from Upsaid to here, and fixed the links to them in my archived posts.
I went to my file directory on Upsaid (http://www.upsaid.com/files/origamifreak/) and downloaded all of them to my computer.
Then I pretended I was writing a post here, and clicked the little icon next to “Add media.” Then I selected all the files to upload and told it to go. Then I went and made some soup, unloaded the clean dishes from the dishwasher, reloaded it with dirty dishes, and came back and waited for the last few files to upload, all the while fending off bored cats.
Next I will do a find/replace in the Upsaid archive files, and change all instances of “http://www.upsaid.com/files/origamifreak/” to “http://origamifreak.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/”.
Also, you have to pay attention to case in filenames. The files uploaded will have lowercase letters in their names. For example, “IMG_1554_smaller.JPG” becomes “img_1554_smaller.jpg”, so I need to do a find/replace for “IMG” and “JPG.”
Then all I have to do is upload the Upsaid archives to this site (create a page and paste the archive html into it), and I should be Done. In order to get the archives to show up in chronological order, it helps to use the “page order” tag at the bottom.
Unfortunately some themes do not allow the pages to be viewed at optimal width, so you have to try a few out. I recommend the ones with a flexible width.
In one of my last Upsaid posts I embedded some Google Video. This code did not transfer. So I just used hyperlinks to take the reader to the appropriate video at Google, and also used the native WordPress method for embedding the material.
There is one final problem that I can’t solve unless I download my archives post-by-post; links to previous blog entries still point to Upsaid, and it would be a pain in the @ss to create all the internal links necessary to make them work over here. We’ll just have to live with the search function or domain search by Google.
We’ll give this blog-hosting service a try. Upsaid was basically functional, but I wasn’t getting much for $24/year. Capacity for hosting files/photos (10MB) has remained the same for several years and was almost full. There were small issues with the functionality, the forums have nothing but spam, and overall it seemed like a service that had grown stagnant and basically abandoned. The usage has dropped noticeably, as well.
The only thing keeping me there was the fact that there isn’t an elegant way to export my old posts into a new format. In the end, I just saved them (and their comments) as HTML and uploaded them as “files” on here. (See “ancient dusty rumples.”)
It’s taken me much less time than I’d anticipated to reformat this site to resemble the old one and aid the transition (for me as well as you). And what’s not to like, about the 3GB of free storage?!
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