Tell me I'm not the only who, at first glance, interprets this map to mean that Iowa will be having sleet on Wednesday. Please.



(Click to embiggen if you want to be able to read the legend.)

I think it's the placement of the red splotch vis a vis the legend, and that the dark pink ice isn't that far off from the red severe storm color, and that it's a prediction map rather than a current map and therefore the severe weather area is blobby rather than all rectangular. It's just that in the middle of July, I should not have to stop and think, "wait, they're having what later this week?"

I went to the town's annual arts festival. It's the sort of thing where there are a bunch of booths set up and local artists and craftspeople can display and sell their wares. Most of the things there are way out of my price range, but it was fun to browse. I did get a wine bottle stopper. Dad drinks wine but Mom generally doesn't, so when he opens a bottle it tends to sit in the fridge and get used up slowly over several days. Thing is, there's no good place in their refrigerator to stand up a bottle of wine, so he usually lays it down on its side. This is a problem when there is a hole in the cork from the corkscrew.

The real question is whether this is a present for Dad, who drinks the wine, or Mom, who inevitably is the one wiping up the mess.

Anyway, on my way out, I overheard a couple of people who were just arriving. Given that the were coming down the path from a parking lot, they had to have intentionally showed up rather than wandering in from the nearby stores. As I went past, they were being all snarky about the artists not having anything better to do than to "make this stuff". I don't get it. Why go out of your way to go to an arts fair if you don't respect artists?

(And then I went to the grocery store, where they had a "Best of the Mickey Mouse Club with Britney, Christina, and Justin" dvd. I did not buy it.)

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Note to self: "Did I actually add a listener to that button?" should be at the top of the troubleshooting list, not somewhere in the middle.

(Cait has been coding. Lots. Cait sort of wishes that her bursts of creativity would angle themselves towards fiction writing, but one takes what one can get. Cait will stop talking in the third person and post something interesting soon. Really. But first, Cait will have a frontend to her stored-fanfic database that is not in poorly-written Python from before she understood OOP.)

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And I'm back. I decided to get my money's worth out of my AppleCare plan and called tech support. End result: it somehow forgot all my user information, but didn't lose track of any of my files. I have since bitten the bullet and purchased a backup drive, so tomorrow's project is to figure out what the deal is with Time Machine. Many thanks to antennapedia and to the folks in #dw for pointing me in the right direction.

Time Machine is, incidentally, causing me no end of problems by virtue of its very name. I used to have a Doctor Who naming scheme going for all things computer. Thing is, my laptop was the TARDIS, and if anything's gonna be a TARDIS, it ought to be the disk taking the Time Machine backups. I either need a new laptop name or a different naming scheme. ariestess rightly points out that if I go with a Gateverse theme, the router needs to be named "dhd". I suppose the backup drive would be "quantummirror", but that still leaves my laptop and the iPod. Hmm.

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ETA: All gone!

Knitters and crocheters: anyone want two skeins of Cascade 220 in pink? It's color 7805, second from the left in this image. It was extra yarn from a project a couple years ago. I've yet to come up with a use for it, and I'm tired of having it sit around. (It's lovely yarn, really. Cascade 220 is what I use most frequently. It's just that I personally can't stand the color pink.)

Anyone want it? I'd be happy to sell it for whatever it costs to ship it to you.

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My mac just crashed, and when I rebooted it, it wouldn't let me log on. I'm absolutely certain I've got the password correct, and reasonably certain about my username. What I
more concerned about is that I would need to *know* my username. There aren't any accounts listed - just something that says "Other...".

1) Any ideas as to the cause or a fix?
2) Does something like a rescue CD exist for Macs? I am embarrassingly bad at doing backups, and now seems like an excellent time to dump the contents of the hard drive to an external disk.

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I think I'm going to wait until the end of the week and then watch all of this series of Torchwood in one go. It's my last week of class, and if I take the time to watch an hour episode, it won't just be an hour for the episode. It'll be that, and then reading people's reaction posts, and checking the fic comms for the first time in ages, and... yeah. Best to save it and use it as a carrot to keep paying attention for three more days.

The weekend with my family went well. The fact that I have no yard was more or less a moot point, since it rained the entire day. It cleared up in time for fireworks, at least. My parents and sister went, and Radar and I hung out and watched Capitol Fourth and then Pops Goes the Fourth on tv... thus proving that some things never change.

Today, I called about jury duty, to see if I could move it by a week to get it out of the middle of my vacation. I'm glad I called. Rather than "jury duty will inconvenience my vacation plans", I went with "I'm supposed to be in traffic court on Wednesday of that week" as the less whiny of my two possible reasons for wanting it moved. Good call. As it turns out, having a pending court case, even a traffic ticket, disqualifies me entirely. I'm surprised, but I'm not arguing. (And of course now I actually have to show up to traffic court instead of paying by mail, but it's one morning versus an entire week. I'll take it.)

What else... I finished off the second of the two dice bags I owed my sister. The first one was a basic crocheted one, but I kinda like the pattern I came up with for the knitted one. I'm tempted to make another one in a different size and submit it to Knitty or something. Right now, though, I'm debating between finishing off another project-in-progress, or starting something new. I suspect that finishing off my lace shawl will win, if only because the other option is a heavy wool rug.

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Happy Independence Day, to those of you from the States. To everyone else... happy Saturday. Here! Have some fireworks!



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Dude. It takes forever to cook a pound of bacon in a tiny microwave. Put five pieces on paper towels, put on my one microwave-safe plate, zap for six minutes, wait for plate to cool off, repeat ad nauseum. The big time sink is waiting for the plate to cool to a reasonable temperature before starting the cycle again. When I decided to start cooking tonight I was mostly thinking about how I didn't want Radar underfoot when I was cooking something that smells that good to dogs, but geez. I'm glad I started early.

The bacon is for 24 Hour Salad for tomorrow. It's yummy, if not exactly healthy. Take a head of lettuce (any kind of lettuce) and a head of cauliflower, and reduce to little pieces. Add 1/4 cup chopped onion, one pound of bacon (cooked and crumbled), 8oz of shredded cheddar cheese, and a cup or so of peas if you're making it for people who like peas. That's the salad. The dressing is what gives it its name. A day ahead of time, combine 1 cup of mayonnaise and 3/4 cup of sugar in a little bowl, and refrigerate. Pour on salad right before you eat, and toss to coat.

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Note to self: don't do that again.

This summer I've been trying to eat food I already have rather than going to the grocery store. This was partly to save money and partly just to use up the detritus in the freezer and the pantry. In itself, it was a good idea, and I've definitely been to the store less frequently. (Having a farmer's market helps. The farmer's market totally doesn't count.) It does, however, mean that I'm running low on a whole lot of staples.

It occurred to me recently that I've been living here for 18 months, and that this might be a sign to throw out food that has lived here just as long. In itself, also a good idea.

My parents and sister are coming to visit this weekend. I question the wisdom of coming to visit the person with no yard or grill for the 4th of July, but whatever. It'll be nice to see my sister. Having people over requires food, and having my family over for multiple meals requires either buying stuff I wouldn't otherwise eat (what I did) or letting them eat the gluten-free stuff (expensive).

End result: six reusable grocery bags packed full, to the tune of $250. That's like two and a half normal trips for me. Ouch.

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