Overcast, chilly, leaf-killing weather deserves its own quasi-depressing Today theme for PPC.
Summer is so totally over. It never really got that hot this summer; we only ran the window A/C unit in our bedroom for a week of days. I don’t feel like it’s time for Fall yet, at least not the cold, depressing part.
Sigh.
Download the Gray Day Today theme for PPC.
I can go for months and never wear a pair of jeans. I usually wear skirts, and if needed I put a pair of pants on underneath them – usually pajama bottoms or something along similar soft, drapey, drawstringed lines.
Today I’m wearing a pair of jeans I found in my room this morning. I think they’re hand-me-downs from my sister in law, but I have so many clothes I never wear that I can’t remember them all.
Anyway, the point is that jeans are cold. Today is one of those gray rainy days you get in Fall, and every time I go outside I’m amazed at how cold my legs are. I’d be much warmer outside wearing a prairie skirt and some leggings underneath; all that fabric traps warm air. Jeans are a thin layer of non-insulating fabric. They suck for heat.
It’s counter-intuitive, I know: you’d expect jeans to be warmer than two layers of flimsy made-in-India cloth over a pair of flannel pants, but there it is.
Jeans: cold. Skirt and pajama bottoms: warm.
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I love Middle Eastern food. Today’s Link of the Day is to two recipe archives. Yum!
You know how everybody “knows” that DDT is toxic to humans? That it’s a terible carcinogen? Perhaps its not. Perhaps banning DDT causes unnecessary human deaths.
“In 1956, a group of human volunteers ingesting DDT for periods of from 12 to 18 months at 1,750 times the average amount for the U.S. population showed no adverse effects either at the conclusion of the trial or in follow-up studies 5 years later. A 1964 study of the incidence of different forms of cancer from all areas of the U.S. from 1927 to the early 1960s showed no correlation with the use patterns of DDT, nor with its presence in food or human body tissues.
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McDeb offers a gorgeous desktop wallpaper called Festive Winter. I love this wallpaper to death, I really do. Christmasy, but not so damn busy you can’t actually use it and see your desktop icons at the same time.
For some reason she never made a matching Today theme for PPC out of it.
So I did it for her!
Download the Festive Winter Today theme today.
(Now run on over to McDeb’s for that desktop wallpaper too! Matchy watchy!)
If you find that Rants just isn’t enough, and you must speak with the denizens more, you can join the goblinbox.com listserve. This lets you send and receive emails with other members; you can even get all the mail in digest form if traffic gets heavy and you prefer to. Right now the list isn’t getting very much traffic, but you will receive occasional updates.
How do I Subscribe to the goblinbox.com List?
To join the list, simply send a plain text email (not HTML) to majordomo@goblinbox.com with the words “subscribe listserve” in the body of the message!
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I have a cold. A basic, run-of-the-mill Fall cold. This means I’m tired, have a sore throat when I wake up in the morning, and am feeling sorry for myself.
My co-worker Tim has one too, and so does his girlfriend.
It also means that all I want to eat is cheese. Why is that? You get a cold, and all you crave is stuff that will make you even more congested. Argh!
I’ve managed to keep the dairy to a minimum, though. Last night I ate a spicy Egyptian soup (from the Moosewood cookbook) and stuffed bell peppers; save the mildly cheesy feta sauce served over the pepper, the meal had no dairy at all. I mean, the stuffed peppers and the soup were both dairy-free. The sauce was just a condiment.
Today I have my old Nissan thermos full of Cold & Flu tea – I really need to replace it because it’s all dented and the cup’s broken – and while I did have an AM cup of coffee it was very small.
I like autumn clothes: I’m wearing jeans, a pair of those soled moccasin slip-on shoes all the construction guys love to wear, and a hand-me-down wool Intarsia sweater. So cozy.
Mr. Brett got himself drunk last night, unintentionally, and didn’t feel very good this morning. I fed him a cup of coffee and a fried egg sandwich on marble rye with Swiss. He said it helped. Now he’s up in the barn with Jimbo and Brady building custom cabinets for the new coffee shop going into the Telegroup building. (It’s a branch of the coffee shop in the Broadway building, the name of which escapes me. And I think it’s going in the Telegroup building but I wouldn’t testify on it; it could be going in some other professional building.)
I’m still madly in love with my new PPC. It’s so thin! So cute! Such a great screen! *sigh*
Things I want: a new Nissan thermos, a case for my PocketPC, and a cozy nap.
Brownie Reflex Synchro Model
We went to Rutledge on Sunday: Brett & me and Joe.
Joe got way cool retro glassware and some other cool vintage stuff, and I got another old camera, a Kodak Brownie Reflex Synchro Model (mfg. from 1942-1951). I’ve already ordered film for it (custom film, apparently, since Kodak no longer manufactures original 127 film), and am trolling eBay for a flash attachment.
Here’s the manual in PDF format if you really want to be geeked out.
I love the smell of old cameras, and this one smells as groovy as my wonderful old Polaroid (1965-1967). It was so full of gunk that the ‘reflex’ part didn’t work at all until I disassembled the camera completely and washed the mold off of the mirror and lenses with dish soap and warm water. (Not the shuttered photo lense, of course – that I cleaned with a Q-tip.)
The shutter seems to function properly. As it’s basically the only moving part of the camera (besides the latch that opens the film compartment) I think that means the camera will work. (For five bucks, it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t, but I think it would be fun to take some pictures with it.)
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I was hired by Grand Orleans in Burlington to build them a web site. Before I could even find out what they wanted, I slapped up a few pages so there’d be something there while I went on vacation to the Telluride Blues ‘n Brews fest.
When I got back, the guy who’d hired me was no longer working there, and the new manager wasn’t ready yet to continue. Since I’d only been paid a portion of the bid and everybody seemed happy, the site was never finished.
Sometimes, when it’s Thursday afternoon and dull and rainy out, you need a treat.
I just walked across the alley to Mi-T-Mart and totally induged in an afternoon snack from hell: a Heath bar and a Starbucks Double Shot. OMFG, it’s amazing how good two-bucks-and-change can taste!
Now, Double Shot is a strange tasting beverage. It’s not normal, and it certainly doesn’t taste like espresso with cream and sugar. It tastes like espresso with carageenan, skim milk, and corn syrup sweetners. But I like it in spite of all that, and even with my texture issues I think it has a “thick and creamy” mouth feel.
What I’m trying to say is BOY DO I FEEL PICKED UP AFTER ALL THAT CAFFIENE AND SUGAR! FUCKING HURRAH!
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4 random books from my Library!
