Irrigation canal – after they are done irrigating
For most of the summer, this canal was barely there. You could see all the rocks on the bottom, small sticks were enough to cause a dam to start building.
Now the irrigation is done.
It’s full up to the edges now, roaring through the night. It’s amazing how loud it is. I always forget that the flow can increase like that.
In a very small town with ranchers and folks who work in coal mines, it’s hard to be fancy.
There was a chef who had fabulous skills in the kitchen. Trained as a French chef. When we met him, his specialty was chicken fried steak, because that’s what the people wanted.
Just because you can make something cool, doesn’t mean that’s what people need. Sometimes you want to live in that small town more than you want to impress people who don’t live there.
This is one that totally appeals to the geek in me.
It’s about code, but it’s also about the people who code, and why we end up with what we’ve got.
It’s like lessons in the craftsmanship of code mixed in with a soap opera. You get to know the characters over time.
You can start at the beginning, start at the end, or use the little dicey button to get a random slice of life in the world of The Codeless Code. If you go to the home page, you can sort by geekiness if you are getting lost in jargon.
I can’t tell you how impressed I am by the author of this gem. I am inspired and only hope to one day create something so cool.
Mmmm, smoothie!
Get your blender from whatever difficult to reach place you keep it in. Put the bananas in first, broken into chunks about an inch long. Glop on the peanut butter. Add the chocolate. Add your other stuff if you’ve got it.
Pour the milk over this until you think you’ll get two glasses out of it. I’m not going to tell you how much that is. You might like it thinner or thicker. You might have smaller or bigger cups. Pour accordingly.
Blend it. Choose your favorite slower speed, then ramp it up as the chunks get smaller. Your chips should be itty bitty. You should no longer feel the banana chunks hitting the blade as they circle around in the maelstrom.
When it’s ready, pour it into two glasses. Then do yourself a favor and fill the blender halfway with water. Run the blender with the water to start cleaning up the peanutty mixture.
Now you are ready to enjoy!
Once upon a time, I decided that I was going to go to WorldCon in Toronto, because it was not too far from my home town. ‘Not too far’ meaning about four hours of driving.
I can’t remember exactly how this worked out, but I had a very good friend from high school who wanted to go to Toronto, but could only stay for the weekend. We made plans to drive up to Canada and spend time together for as long as she could stay.
I’m still a bit surprised that I did this, given my history as a very shy person: when my friend had to go, I sent her off and said I would find my way home. From another country. I knew nobody there except some authors and artists I ‘knew of’.
Luckily the name badges had our origin cities on them, so I merely had to find someone from near my home town and convince them to give me a ride. If they had room. If they were willing. To cross the border with a stranger.
As unlikely as it seems, this is exactly what I did. I found someone from my home town and started talking to him. Turned out he was with a couple of friends and they had space in their car. Also it turned out he lived about a block and a half from my mother, who had absolutely all the information I could give her about him before we left Toronto.
I could literally walk to his house from my mother’s house, and I did, several times when I was visiting after that.
So all you have to do to make a friend is go to another country without a ride back. It’s as simple as that.
It takes a lot more effort that I think it does to get basic levels of exercise.
Some days, the opposite is true. It seems to take hardly any effort to get a lot of exercise.
The upshot is: I can’t judge my level of activity by how I feel.
This is a pretty discouraging thing to realize. Especially after learning how few steps I would log on a typical day.
The best days are the ones where I’m hiking, or going to a festival, or at a convention with ridiculous distances between panels.
The worst days are when I’m stressed and I just sit at my desk all day and then I only want to get home and do nothing.
In between are the days where I let the step tracker tell me it’s time to get up and move around, the days when I actually try to hit the goal by parking farther out or taking another trip around the grocery store.
So I keep the darn thing on, because it makes me better. One day at a time.
“People are always motivated. The question is not if a person is motivated but why.”
– “Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work… and What Does” – Susan Fowler
That’s what they called it.
It was a Saturday fun event at a museum.
This is what happens when you give me paper on sticks, pipe cleaners, and a foam base.
My name is on the base, and the art is the 3D expression of it. 🙂
I think it looks like a crazy hand.
This must have been some time early in my first semester at college. The class must have been philosophy or some other subject that encouraged discussions.
The was a young woman who had been through something over the summer, some kind of therapy, I suppose. Whatever it was, she was quite relieved to have found out that life had no meaning, and she shared this with our class.
Forever after, in my mind she has been The Girl Whose Life Has No Meaning.
I have no idea how I found this one day, but I’ve gone back many times because it just entertains me that someone put this together.
http://cam.birchenallhowden.co.uk
Because the Internet is a living, changing thing controlled by living, changing beings, I’m going to tell you a little about what it is in case it goes away.
BirchenallHowden provides IT support and managed service solutions. On this page it tells you that you can watch the technicians at work in real time. You are given five camera links to choose from.
You have to just watch them and see what happens. Each one makes me laugh.
Camera 1 shows someone working on the main switch. Camera 2 shows a guy on the workshop. Camera 3 is the admin work area. Camera 4 is the kitchen. Camera 5 is the server room.
I’m taking screen shots just in case. Maybe some day I’ll have to post them here.
Meantime, enjoy!
