A few days past, in the evening, I found myself in the Badlands of South Dakota, atop Sheep Mountain.

The top is grassy and level, a swathe of prairie that suddenly stops, dropping off to rough precipices cut out by water. The cliffs are striped, even horizontal streaks from different seasons, different compositions laid down on the flood plain this once was.

Now it slowly erodes, the top a level cap of tougher rock and earth above it being slowly eaten away from the sides, roughened as the falling water finds whatever the easiest path is today.

( On drifting in trances and seeing what is(n't) there. )

Rawr. My face itches sufficiently to be edging up into hurting.

It has been doing this for the last... oh, month or so, with a rash gradually expanding from a spot under my chin until it's got pretty much my entire face and a splash to either side of the chest, as well as a bit on my back.

The cause is unknown. It persisted and got worse through three climates, so allergies are unlikely. It doesn't match the behavior of an infection there. I've got a dermatologist appointment next week, but that doesn't help me /now/.

It is making me feel frustrated and tired from the constant itching being a distraction and crossing over into pain. And I don't have anything to do about it; I'm already applying hydrocortisone twice a day. Which only adds to the frustration.

So... yeah. I'm kinda grumpy and can't focus on anythi - itchitchitchow!

Sigh.

First, start cooking the farro. This mostly involves throwing it in with a lot of water and boiling it, then reducing it to a simmer.

Wait about half an hour while the farro cooks. The rest won't take nearly as long.

While you wait, walk out to the porch and gather an assortment of mustard greens, spinach, pea vines, and that green you've forgotten the name of but think may be amaranth. (If your porch is not suitable for this, you may wish to locate substitute greens in a store.)

Mix up a small can of pumpkin, another of pinto beans, the aforementioned greens, and curry-type spices in a saucepan, mix them up, and heat them.

Put this on top of the farro, and serve.

Discover that it is both tasty and extremely spicy. Note that this spiciness is not the sort that derives from curry.

Be impressed by your greens, and happy as they numb the inside of your mouth. =^.^=

---

In other news, life has been pretty good. I'm too lazy to go into detail at the moment, but while there have been ups and downs, it's been trending to good overall.

I'd write something more deep, but I don't feel like it. So there, you get a synopsis of my dinner instead. Nyah.

I looked outside today and thought it looked rather like the right time to start plants; in particular, some peas and cool-weather greens. So I went down to the garden store (discovering, by means of a large sign there saying "Plant Peas Now!" that they agreed with me) and got a number of things.

The first step, after I got home, was preparing the bed* for planting.

I pulled out the last of the old stalks from last year, and put them into the compost bin. In the process, I noticed a few new sprouts starting to grow, of sorts I recognized from last year's crops. This sort of reinforced my desire to, when I have a large enough spot for it, to basically just let some greens grow wild. For now, though, they got turned over as I worked the soil, and probably won't survive.

I also transplanted the oregano that had been living in the bed to one of the herb boxes; it ended up getting mauled a bit, but it's a herb. Those things are hardy.

Then, I emptied out the bottom layer of our vermicomposting bin into the bed, full of lovely dark dirt with a few eggshell pieces the worms hadn't gotten to, as well as scattered worms. I smashed the eggshells roughly and left them mixed in; it's not going to do the soil any harm to have extra calcium. The worms I scooped the most obvious of ones back into the compost bin, but the rest I just left in.

After giving the new and old soil a bit of a stir, I was ready to plant.

This spring, we've got sugar snap and snow peas, which I swirled up with a bit of innoculant before planting. The soil may well be too rich already for them to bother air-fixing nitrogen, but there are a lot of greens being grown, so you never know.

Also, a patch of spinach, some arugula, and a mix of assorted mustards. (I did say there were a lot of greens. Leafy greens are, in my opinion, especially great in a small garden; easy to grow, easy to cook, tasty, nutritious...)

I had also been tempted by the wild strawberries down at the garden store; I've loved those ever since I was a kid and they grew in the field behind my house. So I filled a rectangular bin with three plants, two of alpine strawberries and one of what claims to be a yellow strawberry.

All that, including walking down to the garden store and bussing back, took about two and a half hours. It's sort of weird; I feel like all the gardening books and magazines have the message of "This is hard! But we'll show you how!" and really what I've found is that, at the core, it comes down to "Put seeds or into the ground. Water them. Wait. Oh, look, plants!"

Admittedly, some of this is probably in what I like to grow. Greens are about the easiest thing in the world, and even peas (or squash, like I did last year) aren't hard as long as you aren't too picky about how big the product ends up.

*The bed is a construct of 2x4s and chicken wire filled with soil that sits on the balcony of our fifth-floor apartment. It's perhaps 2' wide by 4' long, with the soil nearly 2' deep in places.

Listening to music suitable to the characters you're writing is all well and good, but I know what sort of music he'd listen to. And I don't have anything that pop-ish. I don't even know what artists to look for, because it's just not my sort of music! I mean, he's a good character, but he's not exactly defined by his musical taste. Or discrimination. O.o

The power of a name to be descriptive-of-self is tied to the requirement of its use and sharing.

A name that is open to everyone - a given name, the name one gives strangers, the untrusted, is a distant name. It's a reference, but it touches the outside - the obvious, the apparent, the open part of the self.

A name that is closed, in some way - perhaps not hidden, exactly, but not one that is required to be shared - can be more descriptive. Can speak to things that are hidden themselves, things which are not the public part of the self. To secrets, to the inner self to some regard.

Mufi as a name touches more on the self, because it is my choice to share it. I do so moderately freely; but that is my choice, because there are many people to whom I do not mind showing some level beneath the surface.

There are many such levels, of course; more open does not mean the same level of openness for every reference, every person I let access me by that name - but it is more me, because it is a secret thing. A personal thing.

It is me defining me, as opposed to me being defined to the world.

Pondering on this, I also ponder on those who change their name to the world - does the secret name to self become the public name? How does it change the feeling of self to share a name chosen by the self?

In search of: Piroshki.

On this week's episode, our intrepid explorers go seeking tasty-things-wrapped-in-bread. The contents of these things have yet to be determined. But theeeeeey wiiiiiill beeeeeee. Preferably by nomming on them until I find out.

Which I will. Just as soon as I convince this fox to get moving so we can go get some. *glare*

'cause, damn, I want me some piroshki. Srsly.

Om. See: Nom.
Nom. See: Om.

Much as I hate for my first post in ages to be a boring request - does anyone know of a good walk-in type clinic in the Seattle area?

I've got a bit of what seems to be an eye infection that I'd really rather not wait in a crowded ER for hours to get seen. On the other hand, I'd really like to get it seen sometime in the next day or two.

The internet at large is failing me, so I'm turning to this subset of the internet..

*hopeful look*

Edit: Went to the Redmond Urgent Care 'cause there was a nice convenient bus running to there. Have antibiotic eyedrops now. Thanks to everyone for the help! :)

Every so often, I get reminded of fundamental decency from people I've forgotten to expect it in.

One of the people I work with sent email last night - to the entire division - asking if anyone could scan in the pages from a math workbook for his son, who forgot to bring it home.

It makes me kinda happy with the world, for a moment. =^.^=

( From the telnet protocol.. )

Buzz, whirr... click?

Creepy bodystealers, explosions, and slick-floored palatial circuses aside, the part of my dream that involved the family of squidling royalty and the inflatable thrones was damnably cute.

Fun: Reading Saturn's Children during lunch at work. Charlie Stross was just having fun writing this one, I think, and it's certainly fun to read. [Bleep! !o.o]

Not Fun: Having the table invaded by a set of people I know just well enough that I can't just ignore them and keep reading.

"Fun": Trying to explain what it is that Charlie writes, anyhow, on the way back from said lunch. More to the point, explaining the concept of the technological singularity to someone who works in computers, but who clearly has never actually thought about a self-modifying computer. (I don't think I succeeded, incidentally, but that's okay. I only had a few minutes, while walking, anyhow.)

It just kind of got me thinking; because not only was how I'd generally describe the genre unknown, so were the concepts I'd explain it via; not that they were beyond theoretical comprehension, but just that they were something that had never come up; never been thought about. When I encountered singularity and postfuture stuff, it never really seemed odd to me - but I realize that some of that is that the just-plain future stuff, the various science fiction and other readings, trained me for the concepts. Asimov taught me about computers making their descendents, and the interesting error states of conflicting instructions. Lovecraft taught me about twisted psyches and noneuclidean spaces. Poul Anderson taught me about science as magic as science. Frank Baum taught me about clockwork men and patchwork girls. The list goes on; and so when I met Jeff Noon and Charlie Stross and Karl Schroeder and John Scalzi, it was a natural step, an extension of world-schemas I already understood. I never had to pause to figure things out; it flowed naturally from what I already knew.

I don't think about knowing these things; they're part of me, how I've been encoded by experiences. There's nothing in the day to day that makes me pause, me notice how my mind and worldview has been shaped by all my continuing exposure to these genres. Except when something like this happens, and I try to interface with someone who hasn't had this shaping; for whom the paths aren't there - even the base paths, the ones that the particular subgenre of knowledge can run along. Someone who hasn't had all the lessons of science fiction shaping their brain.

It's that moment that makes me feel different. Regardless of base architecture, my implementation hasn't happened along the same lines. (I see it too, sometimes, in the things I'm missing from the more popular model - but it goes both ways.) I'm just not quite the same, because of the circuitry that has been laid down inside me through my life, through my experiences. Through making me into me.

Last night, I had a headache, of the sort that light made worse. But I discovered something interesting from it.

Walking down the hall, I started closing my eyes for part of it. Close eyes; walk three steps; open briefly. Repeat. Repeat. It felt better for my head, and so I kept doing it. Three steps blind. Then five.

Leaving work, walking outside, I did the same. Five steps blind. Seven. Walking normally, and it felt comfortable and better for my head and fine. Changing the number of steps blind depending on forthcoming obstacles; picking (with good accuracy) how many I could go, before the intersection or the other person or the door.

Walking further - ten steps. And that's where it gets interesting, because somewhere around the eigth or ninth step something starts to panic, starts to say "You're about to crash!" It's not rational; the space is perfectly clear, I know it's perfectly clear, I take those steps despite the quivering bit of me and it's perfectly clear - but some part of me that doesn't mind three or five or seven steps blind starts to mind, when I go past that.

The sharpness of the cutoff is interesting, too - it's not a gradual increase, just something that flicks on. Once it's on, it's on; eleven, twelve steps isn't particularly different from ten; but on those eight and ninth steps, something starts to panic.

Someone's playing My Sharona. Loudly. I know this, because I can hear it clearly enough to distinguish the words and the various instruments.

Through the wall.

Of course, part of this is that I've played the song on Rock Band enough to train my head in how it sounds, and therefore be able to fill in much of the song from assorted clues. It's really hard to tell how much is one or the other.

I had a similar experience last night, when we stopped at Qdoba (yay, quesadillas!) and, as we got out of the car, the radio was playing Here It Goes Again. I heard that song once before we got Rock Band. Now it not only gives me instant recognition, it makes my hands start doing the drums. (I play all the instruments, depending, but all the parts on that are simple enough that the drums are, apparently, to my mind the best for beating out randomly.)

It's one of the things games do: make triggered experiences. They teach a way of interaction, and then you start wanting to use that interaction. It's not just rhythm games - after I played Sly Cooper, I started figuring out how you'd travel through urban environments if they were levels. Jump on that gatepost, then over to the treebranch, and then up to that windowledge.. because it's a system of interaction that I internalized, and then it can be connected to other environments that use the same conceptual objects. Yeah, a tree and a polygonal tree aren't the same, but they're both trees - and making abstractions like that is easy for the mind.

It's a different song now - less recognizable, but just as interesting, because I'm pretty sure I don't know this song. My mind, though, keeps trying to match the bits heard through the wall. I'm hearing it less well - maybe they turned the volume down. Maybe I'm just filling in less from my head - but I'm pulling out little bits of the melody, the production, the rhythm, the voice, and identifying songs they're like; making little hypotheses about what I'm listening to, throwing them away a moment later as I find something else that conflicts.

(And it changes again, as I write; a drumbeat, demi-regular, with a strong rhythm and occasional (and seemingly erratic) doublebeats, with nothing else I can hear. It's clearly not a song I know; the partial-matcher is throwing up its hands, so I see a bit deeper. There's a part trying to analyze the patterns of when it's a double beat, when a single; more broadly, trying to predict the sound, because it's such a simple soundscape that it leaves me waiting for more, for detail and complexity and flow instead of this unadorned rhythm. I can faintly hear something else, now, a higher-pitched noise playing over and around the bass beats - but not enough for me to hear the song, just one little bit of the underlying instrumentation. It almost makes me want to try meditating to a beat like that - strong and demiregular, distracting bits of the mind to let the others come out and play.)

Am at PAX, at the concert set.

Am online, because, well, it's PAX. Of course there's internet.

The lineup:

The One-Ups - Video game music done with guitar, keyboards, drums, sax, violin, and occasional cowbell. Pretty decent, though the bass used the audience as extra sounding boards, and I didn't know nearly enough of the source material.

Optimus Rhyme - Well, he had rhythm. Occasionally, one could even hear words. I get the impression, though, that it would have been better if you could hear phrases. Maybe even sentences, but that might have been asking for too much.

Freezepop - I had a realization. It goes like this - as synthpop bands go, they're the equivalent of boy-bands; catchy, enthusiastic, but ultimately a show and a set of clever but not terribly meaningful lyrics set to a beat and some tooling around with tunes. That said, it was fairly amusing. Genuine undies were thrown onto the stage at the appropriate time, and the floor bounced quite enthusiastically. No, I don't mean the people on the floor, or at least not exclusively. I mean the floor itself.

The Neskimos - Are yet to go on, being the last band of the set tonight. As such, I know just about nothing about them, though I would infer that they probably have some connection to video game music. A crazed supposition, I know.

In general, am feeling very con. There are hordes of people, and they're all geeks, and it's really kind of remarkable how comfortable that feels. It's not the same as a social group, mind, but it's the feeling of being in a set of people who work, more or less, in a fundamentally similar way. (Or, at least, have better odds and more recognizable markers than society at large.

Met up with a couple folks we vaguely know, too, waved and chatted and all that.

Anyhow, it appears the Neskimos are beginning. With a remix of the Star Wars theme. So I'll be going now; further reports as events warrant!

( For Science! )

That is all.

Hey, Seattle folks!

Does anyone know a good place for laptop repair in the area?

Last night, the hinge on my laptop (IBM T40) snapped. It doesn't look like anything except the hinge itself is damaged, but that's broken off and stuck in an off-center position.

The machine still works, except for a minor tendency of the screen to flop backwards; I'm hoping if I can find a good hardware-repair place, it'll be a fast fix.

Any ideas where to go?

I have a question; and somebody out in the world here might be able to answer it.

So, I'm in Seattle now. But, well, I have some stuff in New York that needs to make a migration out to Seattle.

It's not very much stuff - one largish chest, a big toolbox, and maybe a dozen boxes or things of similar size.

But.. I need to get it transported; and so - does anyone know a good moving company for the purpose? This isn't a rush job; having it in the next month would be nice, but.. there's nothing there I need in the short term, it just needs to eventually end up here. But, well.. I'd rather get to it -now- than realize next year I still didn't. :)

Anyone have suggestions of who to go with (or avoid)?

(I know this isn't very much of a post. Maybe I'll do one with more content soon, but no guarantees. If you find yourself needing some juicy details of my life, poke me elsewhere; you'll be satisfied sooner that way.)