100 word minimum

Amusements

The other night Oz bought a cup of catnip at the pet food store. Because when life is grumpy-making, you can always perk yourself up by watching cats get stoned. When we got home he dumped a heap of catnip on the rug. The cats said, "Woo!" and began to wallow in it. And slaver.

They spent the night pressing their bodies to that area of the rug. The next morning I saw Sparky's butt projecting out from under the couch. I heard a strange tok-tok sound. When I lifted the dust flap to see what he was up to, I found him gnawing on the plastic catnip tub, which is now perforated.

"Oz! You have debauched my cats!"

"Oh, those cats were already pretty debauched."

"So. Were you thinking about running the vacuum cleaner anytime soon?" There is catnip all over the place. The cats don't mind, but the rugs are looking seriously scruffy.

Spilling the banks

Lehigh concrete silos down on aptly named Water Street

Some developer wants to put condo towers down here, on top of a sacrificial parking deck. How much would you pay for a river view with occasional evacuations? Also, the towers would mess up the view from Libby Hill Park.

Richmond wasn't hit quite as hard as some places by the big mid-Atlantic deluge which washed out bridges, caused deadly floods, and shut down bits and pieces of the federal government. A few streets along the river are closed and tonight the James River was at 14 feet on the gauge down at Great Ship Lock Park. I have pictures of the gauge from tonight and with the river at a normal level back at the end of April.

On the radio they said the James would be up today. I was so busy with work that I completely forgot about it, until I went for a walk about eight o'clock and saw from the park how the Slave Docks across the river were flooded out. Rather than continue with my regular constitutional, I walked down to Great Ship Lock Park and called Oz. He left off installing software and drove down to meet me. We, along with lots of other people, ended up taking a little flood tour.

Nothing brings out the tourists like disaster. "Well, it's more of a disaster-ette."

Oz said, "It's not even that. It's a 'water event.' Twelve feet of water up where we are, now that's a disaster."

Bad brain day

The article I'm translating has caused my brain to shut down. It's not me, it's the horribly written article. There's sort of this exponential decay thing that happens as the number of authors increases and this article has way too many authors. This has put me a day behind in my work which means that the some part of the two-day weekend and July Fourth holiday is going to be not a day off. As usual.

Also, much is going wrong. Car stuff, house stuff, work stuff, health stuff, and Murphy's Law poking into everything that happens. Like a power outage resulting in a need to reinstall the OS on the computer Oz uses at home. Little things like that.

Really, everything will be okay. We just have much to be grumpy about right now.

But, Basil!

This afternoon Oz cut out of work early to catch some of the France vs. Spain match. He was rooting for France. He said, "I don't know why a jersey design makes me so partial, but there it is."

The French team does have excellent jerseys. Japan also.

This was a great match. Both teams had a good style of play, so it was fun to watch. In the end, experience won out over hotness (the old—younger than me, but still—French guys beat the cute young Spanish boys).

Our commentary was provided by a pair of Frenchmen who were not so effusive with the Oh-la-la-la-la's but they were really effusive about everything else. One of them is named Basil. We know this because he kept commentating so effusively that the other one, to get a word in, had to shout and preface every remark with "But, Basil!"

Yesterday Basil and the other guy were also on for Switzerland vs. Ukraine (which I kept mis-speaking and calling "Ukrania"). "J'aime les joueurs ukraniens!" Basil cried, and whenever the camera pointed at pretty girls in the crowd, he sighed, "Ah, une jolie suissesse! Elle est très blonde!" They actually talked about the match too, until the camera picked more girls out of the crowd and Basil sighed, "Ah, les suisses!" (Yes, French people mess up their gendered words too.) And the other guy said, "Non, non, Basil! Les suissesses!"

That match had me wondering about German stadium culture. They played Doris Day singing Que sera, sera over the PA during the break between the last over time period and the penalty kickoff.

But anyway, today France was playing, so the commentators took this match a tad more seriously. They lost it at the end, though, when France was ahead by one in the last few minutes (with that one being from a penalty that I didn't think was fair), and then Zidane scored another goal. Then the commentary devolved into "Woo! France is the greatest! Yeah, the French people will be partying all up and down the Champs-Elysées tonight!" (I have to translate, I don't remember exactly how they said all that.) They managed to intersperse their effusions with "Oh, but it isn't over yet!" I think we heard that twenty times in the last two minutes. Then it was over and Basil cried, "Yes! France is awesome. We beat Spain again, like we did in [list of years]!"

These guys are very much about the exclamation points.

Looking out the window, full of wist

I've been keeping myself cooped up in the air-conditioned shade of my house. Now I have a weather station with an outside sensor to tell me both the temperature and the humidity level outside. When the display says it's 75% humidity and the temperature is 93 °F in the shade, lying around inside and watching soccer is the intelligent choice. But I really miss going out and walking around during the day. How long is it till October?

My need to stay out of the sun precipitated a not-really-serious suggestion from Oz that we move to Vermont. Hah. We've only ever been up there at the end of May. It was gorgeous, all the flowers in bloom which bloom down here in March? But I remember the signs: "Nightly snow removal, November-April" and "No Parking, Falling Ice."

Three months of soggy boiling heat and temperature winters vs. six months of nightly snow removal?

Virginia wins for now.

On the other hand, it's not like we'd have to remove the snow ourselves …

Out in the yard

I have to practically put on hazmat gear to work in my garden. It's not that my garden is toxic (the neighbor's poison ivy, trying to creep through the fence, is being kept at bay), but what with the mosquitoes (West! Nile! Virus!) and the sun, which burns me in no time flat, I have to wear a long sleeve shirt and long pants to go out and pull weeds. It makes summer gardening so much fun, especially with the extra sweat for the dirt to stick in.

Today was a weeding day. I seem to have mostly sweet clover, which isn't hard to pull up, but there's just so much of it. Anymore, though, I only have to clear half my beds since the groundcover took over the rest while I was in engineering school. When I was done and shoveled a layer of peat moss around everything, I had Oz come out and move the peat moss onto the porch where it wouldn't get rained on.

I thought that would take two minutes and then we'd go out for breakfast, but when I looked out the window, I saw him cutting the grass/wild strawberry/violet mix (no un-ecological monoculture for us, oh no!). So I took a shower. A half hour later I looked out and he was wrangling potted plants. He went into a repotting frenzy, scattering potting mix and oxalis rhizomes every which way. Then he watered everything. Then swept. Then got out his electric leaf-blower.

That coffee that I talked about yesterday? With the extra caffeine? He drank a pint and a half of it this morning. He claims he didn't make it quite as strong as I did.

And after we had breakfast, he took a nap.

Big bunny in the sky

Evening clouds over Richmond
Little bunny Foo Foo strikes again!

But today's story is about caffeine.

The market where we buy coffee stopped carrying the kind we like. This came as a big shock, especially because the coffee they carry now is nasty. I got a little bit to try and we were not happy. So we tried some other coffee and it was nasty too. Then we used our big, clever brains and figured out that we could find Jim's Organic online. And so we did, and ordered coffee and all was well once more. Oz did a little extra coffee shopping and found some Kona too.

The Kona packs a little surprise. Like, I don't know, five times as much caffeine as normal coffee? It tastes great, but I haven't been drinking it because I need to be able to sit still and work during the week. I made a half pot today though, since it's Saturday and I figured Oz would drink most of it.

I sipped away at my cup, and couldn't get through more than half, while Oz slurped down a pint of it in ten minutes. Then we went out. Oz drove, pinging around the inside of the car, and said, "So today we should go to the gym. Not do a big workout, but I don't know, maybe. Yeah. Go to the gym and get that musculoskeletal thing going and a good stretch. And take a steam and a shower. And shave. Well, some of us will shave, but others of us won't. Yeah, the gym. That running without going anywhere and—"

"That coffee has too much caffeine! It has made me grumpy!"

"Oh."

He actually did end up going to the gym. I grumpily watched soccer and tried to figure out why Bloglines seems to think my RSS feed has disappeared. I don't know what their problem is, but the feed is fine. I added more feeds too, so if you like that kind of thing, scroll down the front page to the bottom of the sidebar and enjoy.

Easy peasy

So, the site is all on the new host now, the domain's been transferred, and it's running on Movable Type 3.2.

It looks the same, though, doesn't it?

One new thing is an RSS feed for the comments:

http://100wordminimum.org/comments.xml

Not that there are a lot of comments, but if you're using an aggregator to read the blog, there it is. This is something I could have implemented in the old version, but I never got around to it. All I had to do was find a template and set it up.

Another new thing is comment moderation. If you post a comment, I get to see it before it gets published. If you're planning to post 50 comments with links to your online pharmacy/insurance/porn site, it won't ever make it onto the blog, not even for a minute, so don't bother. If you're posting a proper comment, there may be a slight delay between your posting and publication, but that's all.

The MT upgrade and transfer to a new host turned out to be exactly as easy as signing up. I've heard enough stories about what can go wrong, that I prepared for every eventuality, backing up files in different forms for every eventuality, making notes on my file structure, constant obsessing. But all I had to do was sign up (I picked a Movable Type hosting partner) and include a note in the Special Instructions field about how I would be coming to them from version 2.64. They moved my files over and ran the upgrade for me. As far as I can tell, everything is where it's supposed to be.

The one thing I had to do on my own was set up hotlink protection. My new host isn't using cPanel, which would do it for me, and I had to set it up myself because within a few hours after the transfer, hotlinks started popping up in my referral logs. Shocking hotlinks, like the kid (I'm assuming) on a pony forum who had a sig with three screens of hotlinked pony pictures!

Anyway, I looked around and found a site which would generate the necessary code for me, ran into some minor issues (immediately corrected by my host) with my text editor inserting extra characters into my code. I thought I was using a safe text editor, but it seems not.

Now I think I've got things how I want them, but I'm sure I'll find more tinkering to do.

What else did I do today? I got some work done and watched France vs. Togo while I was messing with my code. We picked up the mass market paperback of The Hallowed Hunt yesterday and I've been devouring that. I think this means I've been kind of a lazy slug.

Full time

And then in the second half, Brazil proceeded to flatten Japan.

4-1.

Ouch.

Yesterday, the Japanese news had a little story about the JAL "Two days/Zero nights" package (Go to Germany, see the match, don't sleep, come back). We saw the Japanese fans in their soccer jerseys at Narita and the big JAL plane with a giant picture of Team Nippon on the side taking off. I wonder if tonight they'll show the fans trooping back home, bloody but unbowed and all that. (In truth, the Japanese team played pretty well.)

Half time

I finished my latest job early today. When I emailed it to the client, I mentioned that since I beat the deadline I would watch Japan vs. Brazil this afternoon.

Then I felt silly, because a client who's dumping tons of work onto me right now would probably want to hear that I was working.

But in her reply, she only said she was jealous that I got to watch the match live, and how she'd been losing sleep over the fate of the Japanese team (she's Japanese).

So it's half time now and Japan is holding up okay. They scored the first goal of the match 36 minutes into the first half, at which point the Brazilian play took on a distinct sense of urgency. The Japanese defense stayed strong enough to withstand them until the last 13 seconds of the period, when Brazil got their first goal. The French commentators cried, "Ah, the Japanese, they are too naive! They always watch the ball and never the players!"

And now the second half begins.

It's raining.

Service interruption (?)

I'm in the process of transferring to a new host right now. A really helpful host who is doing everything for me, file transfers and the upgrade to MT 3.2. How nice! With luck, you all won't notice anything. But if you do notice anything, that's what's going on.

ETA: Seems like it's all done.

Sartorial content

It's boiling hot now, not as hot as it's going to get, but still.

Last week, though, it was cool enough that I pulled a sweater on over my T-shirt when I went out. I have some shirts that I only wear inside, and this was one of them. It's a Border Patrol recruiting shirt which was given to me by a friend of ours back when he worked for INS. In fact, I forgot that this was the shirt I had on, until that evening when I walked into our regular, family-run Mexican restaurant, where it was kind of warm. I was thinking I'd peel off the sweater, then I remembered.

I whispered to Oz, "Ah! I can't take off my sweater, I have on that Border Patrol shirt."

Loudly, he said, "Oh, go ahead and take it off!"

"No!"

Some of the wait staff asked him what was up with that. He told them and then said to me, "Show them."

Fine. So when we're seated, I pull the front bit of my shirt out of the neck of my sweater, and show the Border Patrol logo to one of the waiters.

His eyes got really round. "That looks real."

"It is real."

He said, "You shouldn't wear that here. Everyone will run away."

"Right, we don't want that! We want our beer and dinner! Oz."

Later, when we were finishing up, the waiter came back and asked me if I was a Border Patrol agent. No, I explained, and how I got the shirt from someone who wasn't a Border Patrol agent either. So, okay? We are not la migra.

Clothes make the man

NPR had a story on tonight, about Dutch soccer fans having their shorts confiscated at the stadium because the shorts had a brewery logo which was not Budweiser, the company with pouring rights at the Word Cup. I didn't see that match, I'm sure I would have noticed crowd shots of people in their underpants.

Actually, I did see one guy in his underpants. The crowd shots at the opening of the Italy vs. US match (Un match complètement fou! according to the commentators) included a shirtless young man in blue underpants singing along with the Italian national anthem. I had assumed he was just showing off his muscles, but now I wonder whether his shirt and shorts were confiscated for having brand logos from companies which were not World Cup sponsors.

What I'm really wondering about was the (French) guy at the France vs. Korea match, waving a live chicken around during the Marseilles.

Yeah, that makes total sense. Your orange Bavaria lederhosen, no good. Hot Italian guy, depants yourself immediately. But the dude with the poultry gets waved on through.

Where there's smoke

A while back, like a year ago, maybe more, Oz was being helpful. He was vacuuming the upstairs and decided to dust off the smoke detector by vacuuming it too. Ever since then, the smoke detector has been dangling by the wires that connect it to the house current.

This morning I decided to fix it. I was getting the stepladder out to change the light bulb at the top of the stairs, and the smoke detector is right there, so why not?

Well, I'll tell you why not. The little screws that the smoke detector is supposed to fit onto were just loosely clinging to the drywall instead of being firmly screwed into the electrical box or a metal plate. When I tried to fit the smoke detector onto the screws, they wobbled pathetically and worked their way even further out of the ceiling. Oz came up and helped me with it.

I said, "I think we need to get a new smoke detector." There was no place to reattach the screws. Besides, the old smoke detector is all nasty and putty-colored and we don't even know if it actually works.

He got up on the ladder and fiddled with it for a while. A long while. Eventually, he said, "I think we need to get a new smoke detector. Is Lowe's open yet?" He took the old one down. I went and put on my shoes.

When I came downstairs I found him digging at the smoke detector with a screwdriver. "I'm ready."

"I'm busy with this. I want to see how to get the front off it." Dig. Dig. Change to new screwdriver.

"Oh. We're just going to throw it away."

"I know. But I want to see."

"Okay." I got myself a slice of cheesecake. Yeah, it's 10:30 am, but we haven't had breakfast and I'm going to need something in my stomach. "You know, the label says there's radioactive material in there."

"You think Homeland Security will get after us?" Oz popped the top off and looked inside. It consists of odd components stuck to putty colored plastic. There's a place for a battery backup, but no batteries. Not that they'd still work, it's been well over ten years since anyone looked in there. "Okay, let's go."

I've barely started on the cheesecake. "No."

At Lowe's it only takes a minute to find the smoke detectors, but the process of finding screws takes much longer. And here's where the fundamental difference in our natures comes out. I approach the mind-numbing boredom of the fastener aisle in a business-like manner. Oz likes to shop. I hold up packets of various types of screws. He rejects them as too pointy, not the right size, not the right shape head, and browses among the drawers of specialty fasteners. He ended up selecting some of my finds (Hah!), but after all that, along with some sorting through the detritus of the hardware drawer at home, we ended up using the screws that were already in the electrical box holding up a metal plate which had the sole purpose of obstructing the installation of a smoke detector.

Am I conveying all the frustration of this process? I don't think I could. The damn thing kept beeping at us too, after we pressed the Test button, prompting cries of "Augh! Check the instructions! What does this mean?" From start to finish, this took two and a half hours, though that included time spent shopping for mulch while we were at Lowe's.

I now have a dainty white smoke detector, properly installed, and yet another weird thing done by the previous owner of my house has been undone.

Moving on over

Last week I got a note from my hosting service. It seems they're closing down and I have to find another hosting service and transfer my domain. That doesn't seem to involve much more than giving some other service my credit card number. But transferring my site is a bit more complicated (or maybe not, I've never done this before so I don't know). I've been thinking about either upgrading to a newer version of Movable Type or switching to WordPress. To you, the reader, this really doesn't matter, but if you have any experience with either process, please feel free to pass on any tips, suggestions, or warnings.

Oranje

Yesterday I was lying around in the middle of the day, with warm compresses on my leg to draw the poison out of the fang wounds, and watching Holland vs. Ivory Coast. Because I'm really ignorant about soccer, my main impression of the match was: Orange!

Holland's uniform is bright, traffic-cone orange, right down to the socks. All the Holland fans in the stadium were wearing the team jersey and their section of the stadium was like a solid wall of orange. Occasionally the camera angle would drop down and you'd see a Holland player silhouetted against the spectators and he looked like a disembodied head in a field of orange. I thought that the color couldn't possibly be that bright, that my TV must be having trouble with the color (the Holland players were all blurry, but the Ivory Coast team were clear), but Oz said that it looked supersaturated on the TV at the barbershop when he dropped in for a haircut on his lunch break.

The color in this cute shot of some Holland fans just doesn't do it justice.

Also, the French commentators are starting to loosen up now that they've been at it for a solid week. I'm hearing a high rate of "Oh-la la-la-la-la-la." I'm expecting them to be primed for some serious snottiness for this afternoon's match: Italy vs. United States.

How to pill a cat

Sparky is going to be on some medication to help with his anxiety. His anxiety? What about my anxiety? I went to the vet today to pick up his medicine and the receptionist handed me a prescription.

"Where do I get this filled?"

She said, "Oh, any pharmacy."

Then I walked into the any pharmacy in my neighborhood and said, "I have a prescription. For my cat."

One of the pharmacists walked over to the computer to enter the prescription. "So, has your … cat been here before?"

"No."

Another pharmacist stuck his head around the shelves. "Does your cat have an insurance card?"

"No. Ha, ha. You know, they have that now, but I don't carry it for my cats."

So, Sparky gets human meds. They gave me a leaflet about anti-depressants and watching out for suicidal thoughts, and they stuck labels on the bottle warning not to mix the medication with alcohol and not operating heavy machinery.

Now I have to get the pills into the cat. He always was the easiest cat to pill because he was motivated to get the treats. This seems to have changed. Now he's still motivated to get the treats, but also to avoid the pill. I'll have to work on my technique. Right now, for some reason, I'm reluctant to stick my fingers in his mouth.

On the bright side for some, looks like school's out.

Let it bleed

Well, the last several days have kind of sucked.

On Saturday afternoon, I was standing at the counter stirring up some sour cream topping, with fresh lime zest, for a lime cheesecake. The spoon was chiming against the side of the bowl, the cutting board rattling on the counter. My cat was busy having one of his periodic psychotic breaks and was killing a piece of dust with much drama. Kill! Kill! Kill!

Suddenly, little brown paws appeared on the corner at my elbow as if he was trying to jump up into the bowl, then.

Chomp!

"He bit me!" I looked down into a huge hole in my leg which quickly filled with blood. I guess he broke the skin. "Mom!" (My mother was over. We were hanging out and watching Argentina vs. Ivory Coast.)

So much for my pleasant afternoon. We went to the Doc in a Box and I got antibiotics. PSA: If you have an animal bite that breaks the skin, especially a cat bite, go get medical attention immediately. Don't wait around to see if you get infected. They say 50% of cat bites get infected and if you look at my leg, you'll see that's true. Two out of the four fang marks are infected, even with all the antibiotics. And you'll get to hear things you never thought you'd ever hear said in all seriousness, like "There is probably some trauma to the muscle since the fangs went in so deeply."

I've had to return to the doctor twice for shots in the butt of extra antibiotics because the infection kept bouncing back, even with all the antibiotic pills I'm taking (which upset my stomach, so fun nausea too). All that has put me a couple days behind on my work with very tight deadlines and the other things I need to do. And my gutters started leaking again!

Now my calf looks like it was bitten by a very short vampire with a poor understanding of the circulatory system, but much enthusiasm. Sparky has a record with the health department because all animal bites get reported. I started feeding the cats extra, since I think I'd rather have them bloated and logy than svelte and perky. I've got my vet looking up tranquilizers because that cat needs to calm down! I could use some too …

But!

That's not a "but," it's a but, pronounced "BOOT-uh" with the OO like the .ue in "flue" only Frenchier. Say it with your lips stuck out as far as you can and you've said "Goal!" just like a French sports commentator.

I watched most of the opening match of the World Cup today, Germany vs. Costa Rica, on TV5. A proper football fan would have watched the whole thing, but I'm not and I had to do this work thing that one does.

The only sport I really follow is sumo, but I love watching the World Cup with French commentary. Sports announcer talk in languages other than English is fascinating because of how closely it parallels sports announcer talk in English, except where it doesn't. Much of what the commentators say you could translate literally and it would sound just like American sports announcer talk, but some aspects of what the French, Japanese, or whatever sports announcers say are so wildly different that it's nearly impossible to translate. So I put on my linguist hat and enjoy it.

The French commentary is so very, very French. Especially after (if) France gets eliminated, the announcers get really bitchy and you have this regular soccer commentary mixed with snotty remarks about the players' hairstyles or the players' looks in general. Although, if a player is particularly good looking, you get something like this snippet:

Announcer A: My, but that [Korean team captain] is quite handsome.
Announcer B: Yes, he really is (very good hair). And did you know that his wife? She is Miss Korea.
Announcer A: Miss Korea! Honh honh honh!

I'm not making this up. Imagine it with French accents. And the "Honh honh honh" seems to be French for "hubba hubba" or whatever is the current slang. I never imagined that French people actually said that. I thought it was a Mel Brooks joke. In the French revolution section of History of the World: Part I, the peasants say, "We are so poor we don't even have a language. All we have is this stupid accent. We all sound like Maurice Chevalier! Honh honh honh!"

Not that it has anything to do with soccer, but IMDB has other quotes from that movie. This one seems worth copying what with the estate tax vote bubbling up again:

Leader of Senate: All fellow members of the Roman senate hear me. Shall we continue to build palace after palace for the rich? Or shall we aspire to a more noble purpose and build decent housing for the poor? How does the senate vote?
Entire Senate: FUCK THE POOR!

Okay. So anyway, tomorrow is Argentina vs. Ivory Coast. As I recall, the Argentines have excellent hair. Even if you know nothing about soccer, really great soccer is fun to watch. The sheer athleticism is awesome and the crowd footage? Also cool. When it comes to wild fan costuming, American fans really don't stand out amid the line-dancing Senegalese ladies in full regalia, the Germans dressed like wizards, and so on. The opening pageantry for each game, where little children from local soccer teams escort the players out to the field, is cute too.

Even if you're not interested in soccer, get thee to a television and check it out.

Fan Care

Today my fax machine started ringing off the hook.

Usually the only calls to that number which I'm not expecting are junk faxes, so I just reach over and hit the cancel button. When the first call came in, I reached over and hit the cancel button. Then another call came in. I hit the cancel button again. Then another call .

The junk fax people are rarely so persistent. Figuring that actual humans might be calling, I started answering the phone. It was old people wanting free fans. They got my number off the television.

Lots of old people want free fans.

I disconnected my fax machine and did a little research. Turns out, there's a "Fan Care" program which provides free fans to low income senior citizens. Detailed information is not available online, at least that I could find, because low income senior citizens who can't afford electric fans are not likely to have internet access. In between the incoming calls to my fax machine (did I mention I was trying to finish up a big job on a tight deadline?), I made a couple desperate calls to the voice-jails of the state Department on Aging and any other agency that might have something, anything to do with Fan Care. Much as I want these people to get their free fans, I don't want them calling me!

One of the state people called me back. Turns out that the phone numbers at Senior Connections, who administer the Fan Care program locally, are only one digit different than my fax number. She said she'd seen the announcement on Channel 6 and since she knew the pertinent people at the TV station and Senior Connections, she'd call and make sure the correct phone number was being broadcast.

After that the phone calls stopped coming. Either the announcement wasn't repeated, or they got the number right.

Phew.

The Fan Care program runs through September. If I get accidental calls from people missing a digit, that's just life. But I don't want to get all the calls. I think tomorrow I'll call Senior Connections and get the proper Fan Care number so I can pass it on to my next batch of fans.

Pocky patrol

We went to the Tan-A market to pick up some pickled scallions and also to mock the post-dated Pocky. We'd noticed before that they started blacking out the sell by dates on expired Pocky. Maybe they heard us making fun of them in the store, or maybe they read this blog, but they recently started printing out little labels with a date far in the future and sticking them over the blacked out sell by dates.

We are not fooled. Now when we check the sell by dates, we make sure they aren't stuck on. Ha! And no matter how much I want Men's Pocky, I'm not buying any till they get in some fresh stock.

Anyway, we went there to mock and mock we did, because most of the Pocky varietals had stuck on sell by dates. But we found the chocolate coconut flavor, and it was fresh. It is also awesome. The package says it's only available for a limited time, but I bet Glico didn't consider the Tan-A strategy of everlasting stock. The regular Pocky in the red box didn't have a sell by date, just a lot code. We took a chance and found it was fresh too. We also found legal Almond Lucky Mini and Takenoko no Sato (Bamboo Shoot Village). The Almond Lucky Mini is not as dark chocolate as the package implies, but has a smooth chocolatey taste.

I'm kind of amazed at how Japanese chocolate snacks actually taste like chocolate nowadays. Is this for export-only snacks, or is the Japanese palate growing more discriminating with regards to chocolate? Japanese chocolate used to taste like wax (the Bamboo Shoot Village snack has that old fashioned waxy taste). Back when I was an exchange student, I used to haunt the candy aisles of the convenience stores, desperate for a chocolate fix that actually tasted like chocolate. I eventually found a choko-monaka, a sort of ice cream sandwich with chocolate inside, that had the taste I wanted and there was only one store, way the hell out in Kawasaki, which carried that particular brand. I taught an English class in Kawasaki once a week and I would buy a choko-monaka and eat it on the way from the train station to my class. Vessel in the Fog chocolate bars, also not easy to find, were pretty good too. I remember eating one in August at Goshikinuma; it was boiling hot and the chocolate melted all over me.

I'm glad I have better chocolate access nowadays.

The devil is in the details

On the laundro-mat, North 27th and East Marshall Streets

Doesn't the molding in the middle, with those projecting mitered corners, look a little demony? Maybe it's just me.

Anyway, it's June 6, 2006 and I posted my Local 666 picture a couple days ago.

Nothing especially devilish happened today. Even the cats were mostly well behaved. I had a couple half written entries floating around in my head, but they've gone and vanished. The devil must have ate them. Yeah. That's it. The devil ate my brain!

In the process of unpacking, Oz dug out his old film cameras. They are sitting all forlorn on a little table in the entryway with nothing but a little netsuke rat to keep them company. It makes an interesting still life which I'll probably shoot tomorrow if the light is good. I found some old rolls of film left from our trip to Japan in 2000, one of which was finished out with shots of the Egyptian Building. I suppose I should take them in to be developed and see what's on them.

Condemned

On North 25th near Leigh Street

North 25th is being slowly brought back as the "commercial corridor" through the neighborhood. To the right of these houses is a graceful Masonic Temple, to the left is a nicely restored house. Across the street is a humongous church. I'm hoping that the proximity of not-falling-down buildings will help pull these back from the brink, though the tree growing out of the frame house is not hopeful. Well, the tree is looking pretty happy, but the house? Not so much.

When I opened my eyes this morning, and for the rest of the day, I heard the beep-beep and not quite infrasonic rumble of heavy machinery somewhere within a few blocks. I've learned to recognize those sounds as the signal that the city is knocking something down. In the next few days I'll notice an empty, straw-covered lot and try to recall what used to be there.

This past week a little one-story frame storefront on Clay, boarded up since I can remember, disappeared. For the longest time it had a Pepsi sign peeking over where one of the windows wasn't totally covered: a bottle-cap in a field of yellow painted on glass. We'd go by and every time I'd smile at it and think how amazing it was that the glass hadn't been smashed in all these years. Then, one day it was. And not so long after, the whole building was gone.

Another building on Leigh is gone within the last month or so. It was a two-story frame storefront covered with disintegrating asphalt shingle in the popular ghetto brick pattern. There was a sign on the side, lettering in bright blue electrical tape: Bethel Holy Church. Now it's a vacant lot and the only thing left is the phone-less phone on a stick sort of thing projecting from the sidewalk in front of where the building used to be.

These things that are gone are gone. It's not like they looked all that great, though the boat in the lot on Leigh? With the trees growing out of it? I like to look at them. It's fun to imagine them getting fixed up and turned into a church, a shop, a house where people live and plant flowers out front. But I can't do that once the city knocks them down.

I take pictures on all my errands

IBEW Local 666, East Nine Mile Road, Highland Springs, VA

In truth, whenever we drive through Highland Springs, I'm struck by how idyllic and wholesome it looks. I have no idea what the area's reputation is.

We went there after lunch because I wanted to get more details of the Henrico Theater, couldn't resist the IBEW, and then got sidetracked by some neon that I couldn't get a good shot of at all, but the barbershop across the street .

And it always does to have a camera at the Asian market.

I guess that's pretty much what I did all day. That and watch Oz clean things. He also made clean spots on the floors in the process. (Now, if the clean spots would grow and mate, then we'd be set.) He has a few boxes unpacked, but he's keeping them around just in case.

Bread

Today I cranked up the bread machine, which has lain fallow since before engineering school, partly to see if it still works and partly to consider whether it's one of the things we should give away if we're not going to use it. We like bread, after all, and good bread from the grocery store or bakery is considerably more expensive than good bread out of the machine.

With that in mind, I picked up a jar of yeast and some King Arthur bread flour on our last trip to the grocery store, and dug my baking books out from the bottom of the cookbook stack.

Before I could get started with my raisin-pecan oat bread, however, I had to clean out my machine. I've been dusting it off all along, of course, but it got dusty inside. I found cat hair inside. Yes, my cats managed to shed into a closed box. How do you like that, Schrodinger? Put that in your wave function and smoke it!

I was even more in awe of my cats' shedding superpowers when I discovered cat hair in my two-cup liquid measure which I keep squirreled away in an upper cabinet. Also, kind of grossed out. But is that quantum tunneling or what? I ask you.

I'm sure by now you're thinking, "Well gee, lady, your house is obviously a filth pit. What do you expect?" And while you're not entirely wrong, you should know that I do keep the food prep gear clean and my cabinet doors closed except when I'm putting stuff in or out.

The bread turned out great. And since tonight I cleaned out Oz's blender which he brought over from his house, which had cobwebs and dead bugs inside the carafe, I'm not feeling nearly so disturbed by the state of my kitchen.

I'm still in awe of my cats.

Today's lesson

Shoot at the highest resolution you can, given your camera's capability and available memory capacity. Always.

I got an email yesterday about this picture. A person working on promotions for the Amsterdam Dance Event wanted to use it in their posters and flyers. They are developing an international campaign with images from around the world and he liked how the "Tru-Ade" aligned with the acronym for the Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE). They would even give me money!

As long, of course, as I could provide them a high resolution (300 dpi) image.

Wouldn't you know? This shot and all the shots I have of the Tru-Ade sign taken before the sign rusted away are at 96 dpi. In fact, I'm not sure how much higher resolution my Olympus camera can go.

I emailed the guy back and explained the situation. If I'd known that this picture would be so popular, if I'd known that the sign would rust away so fast .

He emailed me back, saying "Oh well." They'll have to find something else. They couldn't convert my image to 300 dpi without making it too tiny to use.

I have learned my lesson. My new camera does 300 dpi and I shoot at the largest image size. I may even switch to the "High Quality" setting, even though I'll end up with 5 MB images.

So. What about you? If you've got a high res shot of the Tru-Ade sign, post a comment and I'll put you in touch with this Dutch promoter.