Out of the Frying Pan

Is it worth it to cook from scratch?

Just how effective is it? Money-wise? Taste-wise? HT, Jordana

'Efficient market' thinking...

is inefficient. HT Bob Sutton

Behold, I shew you a mystery... again

It has been a while since my asking, so does anybody recognize this rose? This is a good example of its flower. In Zone 5b it is a thorny, vigorous shrub (aren't all vigorous shrubs thorny? Seems so) about five feet tall. Because I stand at only 5'4", sometimes this rose seems to have a rather menacing aspect. Little Garden of Horrors, mayhap?

Toward mid-summer in the back garden

It isn't its name, but shouldn't this hemerocallis be called "Butter Lily"?

First half-decent photo I've ever managed of the poor callirhoe, which is not terribly floriferous in this setting, even though it's supposed to be a rocking good plant for the region.

Miniature lavender rose peeks out between sage leaves. I'm trying to figure out WHICH miniature lavender-colored rose it is. I miss my garden notes. Maybe they're on the eMac.

The "friendly" skies

Tragic, funny, and entirely, entirely believable. Click through to the YouTube; the blog embed doesn't pick up the 16x9.

"You can't disclose this is a paid review"

Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" is a great way for first world folks to learn what it would be like to work for $0.04/hour, but occasionally a two dollar job turns up. How about getting paid two buckaroos for reviewing someone's rather lame personal finance blog on your blog? Just don't disclose...

Why not disclose that people can get paid to mention your blog? Maybe I'll try it: two cents sounds about right. You know, putting my two cents in your pocket. Heh.

Sometimes I feel very sad about the passing of the Web as it was.

Don't bike after dark, kids

From the TC's traffic twit at 10:06 PM on July 4th: TCtrafficreport55th/Diagonal- Fire dept and ambulance responding to a bicyclist down, possible broken nose.

Various things

• DC and I have made huge strides in digging out and reconfiguring my office. Pretty grand, isn't it?

• The HVAC company I was so pleased with last December turns out to have left the air filter leaning up against the furnace, instead of installing it. That means the furnace ran half a year without an air filter.

Yes, it would be possible to extract something from the HVAC company owner, especially because it was his tech here last week working on the A/C. But I told the owner about it, only because that's the major kind of mistake by an employee that, as a small business owner, I'd want to know about, myself. The damage will be rectified, anyway, by installation of a much more efficient furnace -- but this company will not, I think, handle the install.

• My tour through the Dalgliesh series by P.D. James is coming to an end. This is such a regrettable circumstance that my reading of the second to last book dawdles and pokes reluctantly along. One book every three years is her habit; The Private Patient was published in late 2008 and has a worrying valedictory note. Her date of birth is 3 August 1920, so you do the math. In all my tours of detective fiction, hers are the stories and hers is the writing most delectable to my catholic palate. God save the Queen and P.D. James.

• Do you know Aldo Leopold? You might find him interesting: more about him anon.

It's 3.11 pm on Friday afternoon

...and I wonder whether the A/C repairman will keep our appointment.

A cold wind

A cold north wind blows
and we have rain.

The rain falls on the just
and the unjust,
but alas, blowing in from the north,
it does not fall
on the plants on the patio.

Still too much information

No matter how often I see this, I just don't seem able to take it in. Here, you try again.

If I need a blood transfusion this weekend

...check with the Mosquito and Miller Coalition here in Northern Colorado. I'm pretty sure the mosquitoes will be able to help: less sure that the moths will encourage such a noble endeavor.

Although a remnant remains, mostly the back garden is...


a pretty rough neighborhood.

Anniversary rose

Joseph's Coat

A golden day

Fifty years ago today, Passionist Father Victor Hoagland was ordained. He is dear to our family, someone we honor as a priest and cherish as a friend. The above picture was snapped on one of his too-rare visits to Colorado.

For a celebration of the fortieth anniversary of his ordination, he concluded brief remarks -- it is a hallmark of great Passionist preachers to be brief, but direct -- by singing Be Thou My Vision. There could be no more sincere testimony to his beliefs.

Years ago Fr Victor caught the idea of casting "Bread on the Waters", in a manner of speaking. He has contributed outstanding content that catechizes and encourages more people than we could have imagined when we started this experiment. Some of his writing about prayer you can see here.

Killing things (or The Millers and the Mortgage)

It's Miller Time out here on the Front Range, and it isn't what you're thinking. This is an outbreak year.

Growing things

One of my all-time favorite plants, which I first saw 16 years or so ago at in the glasshouse at Jardin des serres d'Auteuil, is Alocasia × amazonica. I've seldom seen it, failed once at growing a very expensive specimen, and have since held tight to my pocketbook when plant lust has threatened to overtake common sense.

But there's a new cultivar, Polly, which I gather from googling is becoming more common. Certainly the one I found today at the supermarket was at a very common price, indeed: $12.95. We'll see how I do this time. Perhaps the fact that Polly is the nickname of a good friend will help me be more sensitive to this plant?

The miracle of the re-blooming lilac is reputed to have been achieved in Syringa x Josee. Lilacs are one species that adore our alkaline soil. However, I've lived to regret giving pride of place to Syringa pubescens subsp. patula 'Miss Kim', a stingy bloomer whose few pallid blossoms lean to the lavender-grey of Victorian funeral flowers. We're talking tissue flowers here, folks, and they were a staple of my great-grandmother's. But we digress.

Love the fans...

...but that lamp has GOT to go.

If you twitter...

... please, PLEASE don't do this.

...and more bits

• Speed Test, whose results I referred to yesterday, is a free test of the download and upload speeds of your connection. If you're paying a premium for a fast connection, you might be interested in comparing your results to your ISP's average and to the average of what's going on in your area. It works world-wide.
• Fabulous Front Range Window Washer: Greg Bales, owner of Personal Touch Window Cleaning. His experience, orientation to detail, and professionalism give him a guaranteed return engagement here every year.
• My "new" office is coming along splendidly. Photos to follow.
• New leg elevator (seriously! that's what it's called) arrives today to augment the faithful services of Ol' Blue.

An odd end or two

• This is pretty dire, especially for $60 a month. My d/l average tonight has been 1.98; the state's is 7.58. NG.
• Is it the Front Range's anti-summer that is delivering moths as large and marauding as bats?
• Adam the Wonder Electrician (dba Complete Wiring Services in Boulder) installed two Casablanca Trident fans today and boy howdy do they move air.
• I like my new dentist, Andrew Fiscus D.M.D. in Boulder.
• Can any good come out of Boulder? Well, yes. An electrician and a dentist.

Field trip to Giant Springs

Two places dear to DC's growing up years










Giant Springs


and Ford's, recently called out by Food Network's magazine as home to the best burger in Montana. I wouldn't argue.

Quoi de neuf

The thrill of looking around town for cabinet hardware wears off quickly; even McGuckin's doesn't carry much of a selection these days. A couple of online sources I like: Hardware Hut, the online shop for a brick and mortar hardware store in Spokane, and -- with even more selection -- myknobs.com: over 300,000 items, they say.

The windows are open during these days of moderate temperatures, and the birdsong has been astonishing. The British Library has a great introduction to birdsong and the ornithology lab at Cornell has a jaw-dropping number of audio and video recordings.

A sense of place is one of the things I most enjoy in mysteries. Lately I've been reading P.D. James' Adam Dalgliesh series and recent festivities gave me time to wolf down Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti stories. What especially delighted me about the Leon series was each book's tight focus on an aspect of Venetian life: the floods, opera, housing, Murano glass making, pollution, and much more. OK, so those don't sound like subjects that will interest you. But they will, oh, they will.

It turns out to be possible to clean an acrylic tub: Soft Scrub, followed by scrubbing with Mr Clean pads. It works.

But there's plenty that doesn't work on glass shower enclosures. Trust me on this one. Vinegar works.

Refurbished Hunter fans turn out to be a really bad idea. If you're going to end up with (cha-ching!) Casablanca, anyway, it might as well be the first time the electrician calls.

More on the topic of what doesn't work: on cheap non-wireless phones, you'll probably need a coupler to swap out the too short cords for longer ones. At right, sadly, is my own picture.

I go to the rock

Giant Springs State Park, Great Falls

Home, James

Giant Springs State Park, Great Falls

Taking the chill out of tomatoes

Tonight DC said, "I know enough never, ever to refrigerate a tomato -- but I don't know why." In summary, refrigeration makes the texture mushy, messes with some of the chemicals important to the smell and taste of tomatoes, and brings to a screeching halt further ripening of tomatoes that arrive kind of greenish red at the supermarkets in our little sector of paradise. Robert Wolke at the Wash Post discussed this matter in his column.

The carbon footprint of spam

I'm not big on "carbon footprint" stuff, especially because its biggest proponents seem to leave the biggest footprints. But anything that spotlights spam as the blight it is... well, I'm down with that (even if McAfee, a not entirely disinterested party, seems to be a major sponsor of the report). The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report is a .pdf. HT, Tidbits.

How the numbers ran

BOTW did not reach a million page serves for a 30 day period during Lent; we topped out at about 920,000. Good Friday we served more than 50,000 pages. We're now back to about 12,000 - 14,00 page serves a day, which I think means that this has grown by about 50% for each of the past two years.

"And all this without promotion," I crowed to my sponsor, who smiled and gently suggested that maybe a little promotion is now in order.

There's so much to clean up before I'm ready to do that.

Clever things

• Time zone converter
• Open Clip Art Library
• Simple online database creation - free, for up to 1000 records (200 mb) and two users per month, which is a pretty sweet deal
• Mozy, remote back-up, unlimited for $4.95 per month; totally free (i.e., no credit card requirement or set up fee) for 2 GB per month
• When is good - a way to work out, well, when is good to get together. Useful for groups where scheduling gets a little complicated. Amazingly, there's no signup form
• How to pack a bento box - HT AGT
• Longmont area traffic twitters, just in case you'd rather not get into the 30 minute wait for road construction at Lyons. There's a lot of "auto vs motorcycle", especially taking into account that there's no helmet requirement here

"I used to pay for ________, but now..."

Interesting thread at Ask Metafilter: “I used to _______, but now I use _______ on the internet for free!”. For example, “I used to buy Dover Clip Art books, but now I use Open Clip Art Library and check for public domain images and "freely-licensed educational media content" at Wikimedia Commons.” (Actually nobody has posted the second link yet, but they should.)

Oh, well

At only 877,000 pages in the past 30 days, it's clear I'm not going to make a million page serves for a 30 day period in this season. Maybe next year.

So what about Jay Cutler and the Broncos?

Stefan Fatsis makes a pretty good guess. He knows about the Broncos from the inside, you could say, which distinguishes him from a lot of the folks expounding on the wisdom or foolishness of Pat Bowlen and newbie Josh McDaniels.

To be prepared

Here's what I've learned in the past three weeks.

To be prepared for a sudden illness that takes a turn toward the chronic, it's very helpful to have:

• lots and lots of books you want to read. Otherwise, you'll be surprised at how soon you're satisfied to pull just about anything off the shelf;
• lots of friends who stop by just to keep company and who will run little errands such as picking up something like a bed wedge. It is good if at least one of these friends is an R.N.
• a priest who will come cheerfully, which is to say not in a way that you really wish you hadn't asked, to minister the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick;
• two close family members who, with the support of their partners, will drop everything and travel many miles to watch over you. This is especially important if your husband has to be six time zones and more away on a 17 day trip during the three weeks.

So with these things in place, I think a person is well prepared for this kind of experience.

Without these things in place, you might just be lucky enough that somehow they happen, blessings completely undeserved. And then, even when you feel cranky, you'll take as your dictum: More gratitude, less attitude. Because you will be so very, very grateful. A little cranky, but so grateful that you'll try to keep the crankiness to yourself.

You'll be so grateful.

Dedicated to whom?

Tonight a church out here will dedicate its huge renovation, which ran millions of dollars over budget. It would not have added a lot to construction costs, but the decision was made to build in a coffee shop. The huge debt (including coffee shop) makes me wonder: have we become "conformed to this world"? Romans 12:2, KJV

Detour

Whatever my plans were for the past few weeks, they didn't include having an infection that makes impossible any work (or play, for that matter). Things are much better, but I'm not yet back on the road of my choosing. It seems best to heed the rules of this unchosen road until there is a safe merge with the main highway. I'll see you intermittently for now and soon, I hope, more often.

Did you know?

HT CT

My personal hokey-pokey

Maybe right now this is what it's all about: learning to sit still.

How it's going

Borrowing the words of the Reverend Dorsey: I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.

Things are improving slowly.

Clara the cook

This series of videos features Clara Cannucciari, who demonstrates some recipes her family used during the Depression. I'm impressed by the fact that the production doesn't encourage the viewer to condescend to this woman.

The movies were produced by her great-grandson, according to this article at the St Petersburg Times (the link will probably degrade two seconds from now).

All kinds of things to learn

Whenever I've learned simple math formulas, just that often they drop right out of my head. So before finding what was needed on the Web today, I found learner.org again, a bunch of programs from Annenberg Media about everything: statistics, art history, journalism, physics, and much more.

Well, don't look for anything explicitly about religion.

From the source

This afternoon I learned definitively that the ashes image now being used by some other sites was, indeed, first made available at cptryon.org, that it is an image not in the public domain, and that the rights to the Web image are retained exactly as I assigned them.

I've composed an email that I'm not happy about sending, but these are the reasons I think I have to do it:

• It looks like I might have taken the image from someone else's site.
• One of the people using the image publishes material in paper and might now feel able to use the image in a paper publication.
• Someone else -- that publisher, for instance -- might assert rights that simply don't belong to them.

This isn't a happy situation. I really wish people would not take content from the sites of others.

Evening gratitude, in middle age

Today I did not
break a wrist
or total a car
or have needles shot into my breast
(and worry desperately about the results).

There were no urgent calls to the electrician,
no quick trips to the emergency room for stitches.

The tow truck did not come.
I found the bank's mistake before it mattered.
The primary hard drive did not crash
and there were no unexpected calls from a doctor or hospital.

Today there is quite a lot for which I am thankful.

Ash Wednesday, the image stamped wide on the Web

Tonight I see that the person with the blog whose "Ash Wednesday" comes up ahead of cptryon.org says that the ashes image is "everywhere" (or words to that effect) on the Web. Every image I've seen is, to the pixel, identical to images I put on the Web in 1997 and then again, in a revision of cptryon.org/prayer/season/ash.html.

It makes me want to take a tour back through the old hard drives, because I unfailingly noted sources, even from clip art. Did this comes from a source available to others? I can't say for sure, although it certainly looks like what I've done elsewhere. I'm not excited by the "everyone is doing it" implicit in the response to the comment I left on the blog (not the Catho-blogging woman I mentioned yesterday, but the blog above).

And it reminds me to be diligent about watermarking every damn thing I put on the Web these days. Including, yes, the image above. I'll be trudging back through things here and elsewhere, dammit.

Crabby

Today I found some Dungeness crab at the store, dear but not like jewelry or furs. There was just enough to make up a simple recipe we used to have every year on Christmas Eve: James Beard's deviled crab.

It's not food to make anyone's cardiologist happy, but once in a while for two people (this is about a quarter of Beard's recipe for "4 to 6"!) it seems all right to:

• pre-heat the oven to 350F
• chop very fine 1/4 cup each: celery, green pepper, green onion
• chop very fine about 2 tablespoons parsley
• crush enough Saltines to make about 3/4 cup fine crumbs (getting the "fine" thing here? it really does make a difference)
• pick over about 1/2 pound Dungeness crab meat to remove cartilage and any other nasty bits
• melt 1/4 cup butter
• set aside about half of the crumbs
• mix everything together (except for the set aside crumbs), adding 2 tablespoons of heavy cream, 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard, and a little Tabasco for zip, but not to burn

Put the whole business into a baking dish, top with the set-aside crumbs, and slide it into pre-heated oven to bake for 25 minutes or so.

Here's the wicked part. You really do have to add more butter to make the thing appropriately unctuous. How much depends on your cooking sensibilities and your conscience, I suppose.

When we were younger, probably this was served with bread and hot vegetables. Tonight it went on the table with some fruit and peppery radishes, to cut the richness of the casserole.

You might be thinking, But this is Lent! Just so. But every Sunday is a Feast Day, even in Lent -- a fact I did not take on board when I was young. But now I am not young and I refuse to miss any opportunity to celebrate a feast.

Touching home soil

This afternoon I brought a bunch of Oregon tulips home. Tulip leaves hold a lot of dirt, which spilled out on the counter and made me think of what used to be my home ground.

Free, but not cheap

Tonight DC and I were talking over a couple of business models for responding to offers I have begun to receive for my work. I mentioned How Low Should You Go? and DC immediately jumped on it. "Gifts are great," he said, "but no discounts."

I think he's right. Discounting is a slippery slope, as the article and my own freelance experience show. Working cheap doesn't work out; I think the same might be true of selling cheap.

The Passion of Jesus Christ

Although I'm still finding link errors, I've released the updated design for a project of my main content contributor, Fr Victor Hoagland, C.P. It is the Web version of The Passion of Jesus Christ, which came out in 1997.

The Web version was actually available before the dead tree edition, and the whole project was published seven years before the release of Mel Gibson's film. I mention that just to allay any idea that the project was developed as a response to or augmentation of Gibson's work.

But if you've seen the movie, you should definitely take a look at Fr Victor's site on the Passion and, in particular, this book by him and by Fr Donald Senior, C.P.. (Yes, I've done what Wikipedia eschews, which is to repeat a link in an entry. Oh, well.)

Choices

Annoyed or Blessed, You Choose has a wonderful post about everyday attitudes the precious, but fleeting moments we share.

The remains of many days

This year's ashes come from last year's palms. Heartbreaking, really, to see the physical sign of regrets, broken promises, sin.

For a while, I had taken to carrying around a little book in which I had marked down some grave regrets in my life. I guess I was hoping to show a sign of my sorrow and determination to change. But recently I have realized that the only reconciliation on which I should depend is with God and that, beyond God's, the only forgiveness I can hope reasonably to obtain is my own.

Mug shot

Abstinence

Ash Wednesday. In thinking about a penitential practice, about what I can give up or take on for my spiritual benefit, one thing comes to mind: my excuses.

There's a difference, of course, between reasons and excuses. Lent offers me an invitation to reflect.