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Souper Solstice

Happy Birthday Unconquered Sun

Good riddance shortest day of the year! Here in the valley the sun set before 3:30 today. I took a few pictures. Judging from all my solstice pictures, it was a hell of a lot snowier here this time last year though judging from friends' reports, it's snowier almost everywhere else in the US besides here.

My sister is coming up tomorrow from Massachusetts and we're doing our traditional xmastime stuff a little early because she has to go back to work at the Crime Lab on Tuesday (I love saying she works at the crime lab, so cool!). I still miss being able to go up to Alaska easily for the holidays but there is something about being in New England that feels like how this time of the year is supposed to be.

While she's up I figured I'd introduce her to some of my friends. There has been a certain amount of concern in my family and elsewhere that me living alone in this spooky old house might be some sort of... problem. The fact that when they ask me about it I say "No actually IT'S GREAT, REALLY REALLY GREAT" doesn't help. So, Kate's coming up and she'll see how great it is and we're having people over for soup. This means a bit of tidying up, and a bit of recipe planning. Here is my crib sheet of recipes, some or all of which will wind up on the table tomorrow along with some sweet potato fries, xmas cookies, candied ginger, mulled apple cider and some good crusty bread. Here are soups I like, some of which I may make. You are invited.

Ari's The! Science! Of! Vegetable! Soup! recipe - don't know shit about soupmaking but don't want to embarrass yourself? start here.
judith's understated lowercase pumpkin soup - not much could make me pay $7 for an organic squash, but Judith can.
Some sort of red pepper/lentil soup. Two likely candidates from epicurious - Lentil and sweet red pepper soup or Lentil soup with garam masala
Matzoh ball soup - from some random box, though maybe I'll try this recipe since it has me laughing by the second paragraph.

twelve days of geek glee in 50 words & four symbols

• new lapotopo + arRsync
• Meebo t-shirt in the mailbox
• joshua in my mutual del.icio.us network
• Wireless @ my library
• me, a Wikipedia pundit?
• Upcoming puzzle hunt
• ego search machine
• #1 most interesting harbl
• #3 for naked photos
• NPR likes Ask MetaFilter, so does Anil
• HURF DURF Question Authorities
• low tech leftover: the lemon pig

Earflaps!

 

Earflaps!  - Originally uploaded by Muffet.

How is my Mom doing? She's great. She's ridiculous. She knows what makes me laugh, even from a distance.

How to remove the LNBF in teeny tiny type

How to remove the LNBF in teeny tiny type
Originally uploaded by jessamyn.

Dear Dish Networks,

I was mightily impressed when our Dish was installed. Watching your installer guy climb around with heavy tools on ladders and rooves was inspirational and even somewhat mystifying.

When my landlady moved on and I decided I no longer needed a zillion channels of television, imagine my surprise when I realized that I would be expected to climp up on my own roof to remove the LNBF from its position at the center of my Dish. Fortunately, you provided instructions and a box.

However, while I am pleased with your concern and your entreaties to "use caution when climbing and working at the dish mounting location" I was less pleased with being told I had ten days to accomplish this task or pay you $149. You see, it's wintertime in New England and climbing and working are two things that we New Englanders like to do less of when there's ice on the ground, roof, ladder and Dish.

I exaggerate for effect, actually it was only pouring rain today. However, since snow is forecast for later in the week, I thought it might be good to get this out of the way before the freeze. You see, I enjoyed satellite television while I had it, but I am not willing to die for it. I'm a little concerned that climbing up on the roof of my Victorian house with a phillips head screwdriver in hand might be considered suicidal enough during a rainstorm.

Your directions were less than clear. I'd like to blame my own failing eyesight but alas even with a close inspection in good light it appears that the arrows and labels that you used to identify the various parts of the LNBF were blurry even at significant magnification. This may have been due to your "one sheet for all eleven varieties of Dish" schematic approach. Next time you might want to consider maybe limiting the diagrams to five or six per page.

Next time you might want to mention what LNBF stands for.

Next time you might want to mention in your directions that while your diagram shows a "switch" as being part of the items that MUST be returned, in fact not all customers will have a switch. The nice man on the telephone informed me that I did not have a switch.

Next time your installer guy might want to say "Take careful notes because if you ever cancel your service, this will be your ass up on this ladder!"

I say next time, but there will not be a next time, Dish Networks. I got my LNBF taken apart -- after first removing the protective "shroud" -- and I unscrewed the coax cables. Now I'm returning the remaining Dish to the klatsch of ladybugs that seemed to be happily nesting in a place that I was less than happy to be.

After I drive the 40 miles round trip to my nearest UPS drop-off location with the prepaid box, I will go home and sit by my darkened television and I will turn on the radio. The radio is free, and its antenna works comfortably from inside my house. No hard feelings, I hope.

Your former customer,

Jessamyn

what I did instead of swimming today

I like machines
Originally uploaded by jessamyn.

I swam on Wednesday.
I was away Thursday and Friday.
I got home on Saturday.
The pool was too hot to be open to the public on Sunday.
It was still too hot by Monday.
Today it was open, but closed by the time I was done with a meeting. Tomorrow it is open and I will swim.
Today I took this picture where they are building a new addition to the gym and some sort of student center.
Mmmmm earth moving.
I love the smell of dug up earth more than almost any other smell.
Just testing the Flickr to Vox posting. Seems to work.

QotD: Holiday Shopping

When do you start your holiday shopping?
Submitted by Murphy.

what to do with the old books?

Never. Or always.

I make postcards, write letters to friends and sometimes do some baking and special meal-making during the holidays. I have a collection of kids' books that I've picked up here and there that go to my younger friends. My biggest expense is stamps. I'm not a churchgoer, but Bill McKibben's Hundred Dollar Holiday idea always resonated with me.

If I'm spending the holidays with family Kate and I will often make something out of stuff we have around the house, hers or mine. It's a little hand-made-ashtray-ish but we're pretty talented and everyone knows we're like this. Otherwise I'm an impulse "Hey this thing just screamed your name at me" shopper, and that can happen at any time, but most frequently at the library booksale and not today, because today is a holiday.

Sorry friends and family, it's books again this year. When you're done with them, would you please pass them along to someone else who might like them? Thanks.

So Long Ola

Ola & a bottle of Jim Beam

If my landlady were on MySpace, this would be her photo there. However, she is not. She does have a new gmail account and satellite radio in her car. I helped set her up with both of those. She left today on a big driving adventure, down to Tennessee to see family over Thanksgiving and then off to California with her dog to visit four of her five kids on the west coast. If all things go well, she'll be entering the Peace Corps in March 2007 and heading off to the South Pacific. If that happens, I'lll be minding the place here. If it doesn't, she'll come back sometime in the winter and we'll move on to Plan B.

There was a big going-away party at the neighbor's place down the street and this picture is from that. It was mostly the local area Democrats (Ola's license plate reads DMOCRAT) who were happy for a change, and very happy to have a party to see Ola off. There was a lot of great food that people made, and our two local elected officials -- the local rep and the local senator -- were there. I bent the ear of one of them talking about my blah blah digital divide stuff and offered to come by her place any time and fix her computer. Free tech support is the coke vial on a chain equivalent here in rural noplace; I'm sure I'll be able to make inroads with her.

Overheard from the local senator "It's too bad that we overused and wore out the word 'facist' in the sixties when it just meant anything we didn't like, because it's really apropos now"

Then Ola and I hopped into her car with part of a bottle of Jim Beam and were happy to find that the satellite radio had finally populated itself with all the stations. We got home and I programmed in the 40s channel, CNN, CSPAN, the old time radio channel and whatever passes for NPR on XM radio. She went to bed early, like she always does, and we said goodbye since I knew she'd be leaving in the morning well before I got up, before the sun got up. We had been getting to the point where she was getting up almost when I was going to bed, each of us having a different manifestation of our restless minds.

I woke up this morning to a quiet and empty house, a clean kitchen and a to do list forming in my mind (get rid of extraneous hutches in kitchen, install programmeable thermostat, feed birds, INSULATE) and I've been picking away at it for a while now. I'll probably still be picking away at it when she comes back.

who lives here?

my house

I got home yesterday to a leaves-off-trees Vermont that was an unseasonable 60+ degrees. I opened the door to my room and it was like cracking the seal on a time capsule, though I'd only travelled a few months into the past. I haven't been here for more than four days in a row since August. As I fluffed up my pillows preparing to get into bed (bed! my bed! the best bed!) I noticed five little seeds underneath one of the pillows. I am not a nocturnal seed eater, but clearly someone or something had been. The mystery was further revealed when I moved the other pillow and found a small assortment of sunflower seed husks, pillow feathers and the wings and legs of tiny insects. My friend the mouse must have had a field day with the big empty room and the soft and quiet place to sleep. Sadly, now that it's my turn to have a field day with the room, he or she will have to go elsewhere. It's a big house, we may be able to go some time without running in to each other again.

a Brautigan poem, and a pool in Lansing Michigan

whirlpool

KARMA REPAIR KIT: ITEMS 1-4

1. Get enough food to eat,
And eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.

4.

_____

I was going to remove the STFU picture of me so that I could demo Vox as
part of a talk I was giving to librarians about blogs, but instead I
just told them there was a picture of me standing by a sign with a
dirty word and figured they'd mostly go look at it anyhow.

I'm wrapping up the two week trip tonight and tomorrow and
getting hom on Friday to a car with snow tires and new plugs
and wires and an almost-empty house. I came back from my
last-of-five talks and listened to poetry in my room before
dinner. I might have gone to the pool but it didn't look too inviting.

[note: damnit, copying and pasting from a page with in courier font makes it
impossible to have word-wrap or a non Courier font in the rest of your post.
Am I missing something? Is there a way to fix this with all the cartoony
buttons at my disposal?]

I'm sorry, but I really sort of like this picture...

STFU

I went to Bar 107 while I was in LA. They have this outdoor smoking porch that is bordered on four sides by tall buildings and has sort of a cage-match wire mesh over the top of it, I guess to keep falling debris (and rats?) out. I took a picture of Bryan standing in front of the full wall sign, including the part that says "please" and he sent me this picture that he took of me. I'm sure I'll find a use for it someplace online; I'm just stashing it here for now.