Whatever you do, don't say 'Asparagus'!

Aaaaa! (dives under desk)

I just spent an hour and a half dealing with three grocery bags full of the aforementioned vegetable... About ten pounds of the stuff.

A group of us at work purchased a very large box of... you know... from a local farmer. After I got My share, I also volunteered to take away all the little bits and pieces at the bottom of the box. I'd much rather see the *sp*r*g*s in My compost bin than the dumpster out back.

So I sorted out all the nice thin pieces, a large pile for Me and the Astrejurhof crowd, and a slightly smaller pile for My parental units, and put them in the fridge for later consumption.

And then I put a big pot on the stove, and blanched and bagged most of what remained. I filled five, count 'em, five medium-size freezer bags; then I cut the remainder into bite-size pieces and relegated them to the compost heap.

So if a squirrel knocks on your door asking for a dish of melted butter, you know Whom to blame.

Have you mailed your Think Like A God Day cards yet?

Well, you'd better get cracking. Think Like a God Day is July 13, and this year's theme is...

"Omnimax: Something's Gotta Give!"

Your mission: Given the Dilemma of Epicurus, decide which "omni" you would choose to forego. Would you rather be all-powerful and all-knowing, but amoral? Omnibenevolent, but not particularly omniscient?

(For the record, I'm quite happy being generally benevolent with scattered hissy fits, and with limited magisteria and variable amounts of knowledge on topics near to My heart. I don't want to be "omni" anything.)

Emergency music store runs and carrot pancakes

Red and I enjoyed a rather out-of-the-ordinary Tuesday night at Astrejurhof. Well, *at* Astrejurhof is not entirely accurate. An after-work lie-down turned into an impromptu two-hour nap, and upon coming to My senses at a quarter to seven this past evening, I realized that we only had an hour to get to the music store before closing time.

So off we went in My little Cavalier, driving at a breakneck... Uh, 48 km/hr. We got there in good time, and while Red explored the front of the store I headed to the band room in search of some serious clarinet music. After ordering Divertimento No. 1 by Mozart, and playing with virtually every keyboard in the keyboard room, off we went on another Urgent Mission.

A coffee break, of course.

And then... On to the supermarket to pick up some steaks for our Canada Day barbecue.

Somewhere along the way to the grocery store, I decided it was high time to cook up the carrot pancakes that I've been threatening to make for about a month now. Oddly enough, it was the prospect of imminent and severe meat consumption that inspired Me. I've been trying to eat My veggies lately, because I really do feel better when I do. I spent about ten years (1981-1991) as an ovo-lacto vegetarian, until I finally met My match in a barbecued chicken. I used to make vegetable pancakes fairly regularly, so tonight was a trip down Memory Lane. (turns to guardian dragon) The recipe, please, Glori...

• One potato, peeled and coarsely grated
• 8-10 carrots, peeled and coarsely grated
• 5 eggs
• One shallot or small onion, finely chopped
• Enough flour to make batter hold together without being too dry... Two or three handfuls, or about one cup
• Celery salt, garlic salt, black pepper to taste
• Sunflower oil, for frying

Mix together everything but the oil in a fairly large bowl. Alternate vegetables and eggs, mixing as you go, until it looks like enough; then season the mixture and add the flour to thicken the batter. (It should be slightly wet, with a small amount of vegetable juice at the bottom of the bowl, but not runny and not stiff.)

Heat up the frying pan of your choice on medium-high heat, without the oil. When it's hot enough, back off the heat a bit and pour in some oil. Swirl it around in the pan, then put in three heaping tablespoons of batter to make the first three pancakes. Flatten and spread with the back of the spoon, then tilt the pan to get it around the pancakes. If the pan is hot enough, the bottom of the pancakes will harden almost immediately and you'll be able to easily slide them around in the pan.

Cook for 2-3 minutes, or until brown on the bottom, then flip over and cook for a few more minutes. Put the finished pancakes on a cookie sheet that's been lined with parchment paper, and keep warm in a low oven (250F or less).

If the pan looks dirty due to browned oil, wipe it clean before adding more oil and more batter. Reduce heat slightly if the oil starts to brown. Repeat until all the batter is cooked, then serve with sour cream. Makes 12-15 pancakes.

Thanks, Glori.

In other news... The weather has finally settled into "sunny, and not too hot to work outside." When I wake up later this morning (early this afternoon, more likely), I'm going to take advantage of the pleasant temperature and try to finish framing the roof of the Cat Gazebo.

In between schlepping topsoil back and forth across My back yard, and packaging up mass quantities of broken bricks for a run to the dump.

You see, sometime this year, I *really* want to have an actual patio behind the house. There is a small concrete pad back there, but between the Pile o' Many Bricks, and the gate leaning up against the wall, and the wheelbarrow, it's a bit hard to access the...

...Barbecue! *happy dance*

(raises mug of beer) Happy Canada Day, everyone!

The joys of feeding antipasto to the cat

*kachunk*

(checks timecard) June 21, 2009; 00:52 hours. Seven minutes overtime... Aah, not worth the paperwork for seven minutes.

Welcome to summer, folks. Sorry I'm late... I had a particularly onerous onslaught of random equipment malfunctions to deal with. My spring equinox gig ended just after midnight Saturday night; but equipment snafus are 24/7/365.

It all started when I attempted to uninstall some of the programs on My Fedora desktop system. Lo and behold, by the time I noticed that Firefox and Open Office and the *ahem* software add/remove tool had also been uninstalled, there wasn't a heck of a lot I could do about it.

Except boot the system from a rescue CD and get My data the heck off the computer before something really nasty happened.

Unfortunately, My moribund system had been installed with a LVM partition, a rather odd beast that did not auto-mount either under Knoppix or Ubuntu. So I did what any self-respecting geek goddess would do: I installed an FTP server on My Windows XP box and used Fedora 9 in recovery mode to start My network card and conjure up a shell. This enabled Me to finally see the LVM partition. Then, using the command line version of FTP, I proceeded to move four years' worth of novels over to the aforementioned Windows system.

So that's how I spent most of Saturday night, and why I missed the end of My vernal equinox shift and clocked out a few minutes late.

Somewhere in the middle of all this madness and cyber-angst, I did manage to blend up a glorious Havana Frappé (White rum, pineapple juice, lemon juice, and a maraschino cherry) and allowed Ludwig to finish off a bowl of antipasto. And then I went back upstairs and transferred files until I couldn't see straight. For the record, I blame the FTP client, not the Havana Frappé.

Come Sunday evening, I decided to expedite matters somewhat and did some more research on the ins and outs of the LVM file system. A quick scan of a few Linux help forums found this wonderful page that explained exactly how to mount a Fedora LVM volume while booted up from My Ubuntu live CD.

Of course, in order to get access to My own home directory, I had to mount the file system as read-write instead of read-only, and gave Myself permission(s) to wreak havoc with the command sudo chmod 777 ...

... Did a quick Samba shuffle over to the Windows system ...

... And dumped another 30 gigabytes of files across the network.

(CD tray slides out; Astreja K. switches Her KVM switch to other computer) Ah, it's done!

**REBOOT**

I now have a shiny new Fedora Core 9 installation, instead of the rather neurotic FC6/FC10 system that recently expired.

Best of all... My sound card works again!

Life is good.

My computer has been taken hostage by mimes!

As I sit here, frittering away the wee hours of Saturday night / Sunday morning, I ponder the dire fate that has befallen one of My computers.

For reasons yet unknown to Me, I am bereft of audio output. The trouble started when I upgraded this system to Fedora Core 10, long-jumping all the way from Fedora Core 6. The hardware *was* working just fine before I made the decision to upgrade.

Ironically, it took Me a while to notice that the sound was MIA -- I was too busy editing stories and working with My new graphics tablet and ranting on various Internet fora. And then I continued to be too busy to fix it.

*sigh* But I'm going to make the time to fix it. You never know when you might want to listen to a friend's MP3 composition, or watch a Richard Dawkins lecture, or even just hear something go *Click* or *Bloop* -- Yes, you heard that correctly. I am currently clickless and bloopless.

(grabs valkyrie helmet and battle axe, and sallies forth in search of Linux RPM's and sound configuration HOWTO's)

One Hundred Minutes of Solitude

This evening, I actually made some progress on the crawlspace under the house. I went in there with no illusions, and lots of equipment, including goggles, rubber gloves, safety shoes, and a P100-rated half-mask respirator.

In a bit more than an hour and a half, I mucked out four garbage bags' worth of sundry unpleasant substances ranging from wood-chip insulation to nuggets of *bleah* fossilized cat poop.

I also took a hacksaw to some old ABS drainpipes and vent pipes, and capped them off. This clears the way for finally dismantling the unused shower in the mud porch bathroom, and removing the old closet flange. Once the floor has been properly supported from below, the newly-cleared area will become the kitchen pantry, and a new toilet and sink will be installed in a much, much smaller bathroom.

Probably by a contractor. There is a certain charm to doing all of one's own renovations, but I'd rather have a professional plumber do the roughing-in.

Because I really want to have that bathroom operational for this year's Jól party.

I can see My desk from here!

This is... amazing. I actually have more than two square feet of clear space in front of Me, right this very instant!

Slowly but surely, I'm catching up on various projects and not starting any new ones. For Me, this is a bit of a change-of-pace: The usual script runs something like this...

• Decide to move fixtures in mud porch bathroom because pipes keep freezing in uninsulated crawlspace below.
  
• Notice that floor is clearly not level, and defer plumbing until this is rectified.
• Go into crawlspace, muck out a bunch of garbage, go off to do other things.
• Fridge expires of old age. Erect temporary, level pallet in back of mud porch to hold new fridge and freezer, because floor still hasn't been levelled.
• Haul some more crap out of crawlspace. Go off to do more pleasant things.
  
• Winter sets in. Temperature and humidity changes cause back door to stick occasionally. Make mental note to replace door.
• While under the porch in sub-zero weather, hastily installing some extra insulation, make observation that the mud porch floor could benefit from a new beam and teleposts to support that cranky back door.
  
• Spring arrives. Latch on back door deadbolt finally expires and is replaced.
  
• Call contractors for telepost estimates.
  
• Invest in good-quality respirator, in anticipation of a thorough clean-out of the junk in the crawlspace.
• Rediscover bag of plumbing parts originally intended for bathroom re-plumbing. Seriously think about hiring a plumber to do the work... After the floor has been reinforced and properly levelled.
• Finally go into crawlspace to finish that clean-out, and try not to feel guilty about the almost-finished roof on the Cat Gazebo.

That's My story, and I'm sticking to it...

...60% off triple-glazed windows? Where, where? (runs off in search of ladder and measuring tape)