A website I haven’t heard of is reprinting the Gazette coverage of COSine Sci-Fi Fans Embrace Worlds Beyond. We who worked on the convention were pleased with the article, since it lacked that all too typical “look at the weirdos” tone some reporters adopt.
Category: Life
Smoke
This weekend was hectic, becaue I spent approximately 20 hours working as Registrar at COSine, so I didn’t really have the time to worry about Smoke until Monday morning.
I noticed he was acting a little oddly when I fed Sunday morning. (Saturday night I was too exhausted to have noticed anything short of horse being down.) He left some crumbs of his chow after breakfast, which he never does if he has enough time to eat. However, he was about as bright-eyed as a 28 year old horse gets, so I decided to worry about it Monday. Monday morning I found email from Jack (who had considerately not awoken me) that Smoke had once again failed to clean up all his food when Jack let horses out of their stalls Sunday night.
Continue reading Smoke
Missing
No, I didn’t fall off the face of the earth: our Internet connection did. We get wireless broadband access from a relatively small company, and they don’t have weekend tech support. We lost our connection on Saturday, and wasn’t able to get hold of anyone at the support desk until this morning. Half an hour later the problem was fixed when they rebooted an interface card on the tower from which we get our signal. I knew it was probably something simple like that, so it was very frustrating.
Undistracted by the WWW, I spent Sunday converting the static pages of my website to use the Perl Template module for page templates. and fixing up broken xhtml code. The former was a lot faster and easier than the latter. I have plans for a little redesign, now that the housekeeping is done. I only added one page, and you are welcome to visit my recipe list.
Dear AOL
Dear AOL,
I think it was so nice of you to send us that nifty plastic DVD case in the mail a few days ago. It didn’t take more than a few seconds to remove the stickers and the trash inside. I am not sure why you keep sending us stuff, when we have never been your customer, and are far outside of your customer target group, but the plastic DVD case was a winner. (I was about to write that you couldn’t pay us to use your service, but decided we are open to offers.) Anyway, thanks again.
Love, Elaine
Diminished
It has been decades since I was in an APA together with Anna Vargo, but I still remember distinctly my disappointment when she decided to drop out. I was distressed when I learned that she was seriously ill last fall, and grieved when I learned that she died last night. kinzel has a lovely tribute to a lovely person.
Lose a Kangaroo?
I am trying to imagine what it would be like to go out and feed my horses one morning, and find a kangaroo hopping near the barn, like this woman in Wisconsin. (via Pewter Gryphon’s Lair) The horses would certainly freak.
Colorado passing lane law violators now get tickets
Attention Coloradans: A friend warned me about this law that Colorado passing lane law violators will now get tickets but this is the first online reference I have seen.
Furnace Fixed?
Yesterday afternoon, the furnace repair person made yet another call and the furnace may finally be working as designed. Since Thursday, the central furnace has been working, but only when it could draw air from the house, which means we had to leave the front door to the furnace open, exposing the firebox. We gated it off with a child gate, but it was still unnerving to look down and see the jets. However, the furnace fire box is now shut up again, and drawing its air supply from the outside world. Although the weather is too mild to make much demand, the furnace seems to be turning itself off and on in response to the settings on the thermostat.
We had planned to take a trip to visit family in Santa Fe over the New Year’s weekend, but decided that we didn’t want to leave the house when we still don’t trust the furnace to continue working.
Furnace
The furnace was supposedly repaired yesterday. The house was a toasty 70 degrees Fahrenheit when I went to bed last night. This was a good thing, because the outside thermometer was reporting minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit. This may have been the coldest night since we moved here. We just recently got this particular thermometer which is wireless and placed away from the house. Prior outside thermometers were usually up against the house and so reported slightly warmer temperatures. The lowest temperature I had previously seen here had been five below.
About two o’clock, I woke (or Dudley woke me) and had a bad feeling. Sure enough, the furnace fan was running, but there was cold air coming out of the vents. It was about 58 degrees inside the house. I knelt beside the furnace and the flame was out. The kitchen range burner were working so we had gas. I woke Jack because I couldn’t quite believe that the furnace had quit working again and I wanted independent confirmation. The only good news was that the outside temperature was eight above zero, so the warmer front was starting to move in. We turned on the space heaters and went back to bed. What else was there to do?
Making Soup
Jack was in a soup making mood yesterday. He put his first attempt (some sort of vegetable and tuna chowder) on the stove and we both forgot it about. I was in a room where the burning smell didn’t reach and Jack was downstairs. The pot was a mess, but I have manage to clean it using a trick my grandmother taught me: boiling water in the charred pot with a lot of baking soda in it. This loosens the burned gunk so you can get it off without a chisel. I’ve save a lot of pots over the years with this method, since Jack and I are both easily distracted. Curious, I looked up the chemical explanation using Google.
Since I don’t really care for vegetable and tuna chowder, I suggested he make potato soup for his second attempt and we found this recipe for Creamy Potato Soup. It was excellent.