Art is my illicit drug of choice. The more I create, the more I need to make to get off.

Okay, so I put it that way to be a touch provocative, but it's also kinda true. I've been doing more illustration work pretty much every chance I get and I'm still getting further behind. What's more, I want to do more. That's kinda crazy.

ETA: Okay, I think I was going to go deeper into this and then change the post to public, but I've lost the train of thought and figure I should just let folks see it as is for now. I can always comment more later if I get that thought back.

I don't bike to work much in the summer--too hot, too crowded. This year (on top of the heat and crowds) both the path and the roads between my office and home were under construction.

But the schools are all back in session (so the crowds are less) and it's finally cool and the construction near my office on the path is complete, so I took Linus to work today.

Only to discover the construction no longer covers the last two miles of my commute, but the first one mile.

I hope it's done by the time the good winter weather sets in.

Hi!

We are back from Burning Man and had a lovely time and are very excited to go again next year.  Lots to report, and a full writeup will likely be coming soonish.

But in the meantime... I have not had a chance to read OPW since right before we left... Say August 24th or so.  I will start reading what y'all wrote and getting caught up... but if I missed anything huge while we were gone, please lemme know!  :)

We are en route to my folks' house today where we'll be until Saturday morning. My mom is having knee surgery tomorrow-- she was supposed to have it done before Burning Man but when she showed up to the surgi-center the morning of her surgery, the anesthesiologist said, "I had no idea you had emphysema and AFib and COPD and all these other risk factors... I don't have the equipment to keep you alive here. We have to reschedule you so we can operate in a real hospital and not an outpatient surgi-center like this."  So tomorrow's the day. I'm praying she gets the relief she's been needing, poor thing.

We then have a wedding to attend Saturday afternoon back here in DE.  We fly to Arizona a few days later on Wednesday the 19th for a week to help my friend Jeff figure his life and house out since his wife (and my good friend) Debbie passed away last month... man. 

I've got a bunch of work travel scheduled between now and early December, so when it rains, it pours travel-wise.

Ok, imma get crackin'.

Hope everyone's rockin' in the free-ish world.

We bought half a bushel of pickling cucumbers Saturday. I was determined to make fermented a.k.a. barrel pickles. Since we don't have a canner any more. I read up on the theory behind the process, studied recipes and synthesised my own. I've got seven small tubs with about 3l of pickles in each.

At this point, all seven pickle tubs seem to be full of happy bacteria turning cucumber carbohydrates into gas and hopefully lactic acid, which is the whole idea behind fermented (barrel) pickles.

The tubs I got have snap lids and they are too air tight and the foam was rising up and seeping out the edges and pouring liquid on the floor. That sucked. I drilled holes in the tops, that should stop the pressure build up.

One should skim the foam off the liquid each day, and yes there's a bit of white foamy stuff as the air bubbles up through the water which is very alive with bacteria.

If I wasn't afraid of a batch going bad, i'd just dump all the tubs out into a kitchen garbage can because it would be SO MUCH EASIER to deal with one big, non-spilling container rather than seven small ones. But, first time, etc and all that. We must see this through for science.

Recipe I concocted:

For each 3.3l capacity tub:

• 5-7 cloves of garlic, halved crosswise
• 3-4 fat dill flower heads
• 3-5 star aniseed pods
• 1/2 tsp mustard seeds
• 6-10 black peppercorns
• 2-3 bay leaves for crispness
• enough #2 cukes to come close to the top, both ends cropped
• brine to cover (2tbsp salt per quart of water)

Put a weight on the pickles so they don't break the surface of the water. Cover the tubs to keep out dust and critters, but not an airtight seal as the fermentation produces gas.  

Supposedly they'll be half-sour in a week and full sour in several weeks, and fermentation will slow down/stop at some point so they don't need to be refrigerated if one is willing to have very sour pickles. I hope so. Our fridge isn't very big.

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This isn't much of an update about moving and stuff. But it's what I wanted to write about.

I made two security fixes just now:

1. Previously, if you knew the id of a post and were a mutual follower of the poster, you could comment on it, even if you did not have the keys to the post. Note that this did not mean you could see the post. However, see below.

2. If you had commented on a post, you would continue to receive notifications of later comments on that post, even if your own access to it had been revoked. Notifications contain roughly 100 characters or so of each comment.

Both issues have been fixed. I apologize for these mistakes in my code.

At no point was it possible to read an actual post you should not have been able to read. But, security issues are never good.

Many thanks to the user who brought issue #2 to my attention, which led me to discover issue #1.

Edited to add: notifications already in the system are still there. I will be working to purge those, and also to purge notifications as needed whenever the privacy settings of a post change. Of course an email sent is an email sent, but I should do what I can do.

Sadly, I don't remember much of my dream last night, but I do recall a single scene. I was in someone's house, and there were at least two other people there. I don't think any of us were the owners / renters of the place.

One of the people had to leave but they were terrified of the massive bulldog that lived in the house. So, I approached the animal and coaxed it onto its back for belly rubs. The person who had to leave did so slowly and cautiously, and the dog occassionally gave them the side eye, but overall was happy to have me rubbing its belly.

A fairly unimportant moment of a fairly unimportant dream, but I found it interesting because [warning - potential GoT spoilers for Season 6 ahead] I just watched the episode where one character unshackles two dragons. They did the scene well, and the body language for the dragons is really fantastic. The creators of GoT have done a fantastic job of getting across "wild but very intelligent creature". So much so that I found myself watching for 'tells' in the body language of the creatures as they were being unshackled.

Clearly, the scene had an impact on me because my dream was all about understanding the body language of the bulldog since I only knew them peripherally. 

ETA: Also, this is fantastic.

I have SO many questions. I'll start at the top:

• As Seen on TV - Really? Someone paid good money to put this on television? Ever? This was clearly a rack toy - just hanging from a pegboard somewhere. For $0.79. Even when this was in stores, that couldn't have been a big profit margin.
• Who is the Woman? - I don't recognize the character at all. Now, I know that there are many out there who have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Marvel universe, but I've got a little geek cred. I don't think I've ever seen her before. Is she a villain? Is she working with Cap? Is she at least wearing a bikini bottom that is conveniently covered by the bill of that plastic duck?
• Pink / Blue Ducks - The only reason to have your targets colored pink and blue that I can come up with is to make them masculine / feminine. That's pretty sexist of me, but "it was a different time" and I can't seem to come up with anything else. Which begs the question: Why in all the holy REDACTED would you care what sex your plastic duck targets are?!
• 3 4 3 - Why would you 'weight' the targets like this? 1, 2, 3 I could understand. 10, 15, 20 - sure. But 3, 4, 3? Pretty sure these folks were on something, or they're sending a message from the past to a sleeper cell that...
• Larami Corp of Hong Kong - Larami Corp is familiar. Didn't know they were right here in PHL. Of course, the toy itself was made in... Hong Kong? I'm trying to envision how much they would have to save on the manufacturing to still make a profit after shipping it to the other side of the planet and only charge an end price of $0.79.
• Oh So Cap or at Least American - Anyone else find it amusing that there is absolutely nothing Captain America about the gun, or the darts, or the targets. Just the cardboard backing which promptly gets thrown out when the kid opens the toy to play with it.
• 2 Darts / 3 Targets - Just noticed this. Editted the post to add it in. This seems... inefficient. It also makes me think: there are two pink targets, but only one blue. Is there a correlation? But why is the blue more valuable? Is that another sexist thing?

It really was a 'different era'...

Oh, and I originally found this here.

Since I have a habit of naming all my cats after Star Trek characters, I give you my pit bull raised cat, Spot. The smallest animal in my house, pushes around all of the rest.

I've got a wasps's nest in my deck post, possibly under the vinyl as well. I've got guests coming in a week and a half, specifically to hang on my deck.

Terminix wants $199 to remove it and a hard push of endless requests for yearlong service (it was $299 originally, but if you pause for a beat, it suddenly drops to $199, which is still too rich for my sensibilities, damnit!) I've dealt with all my own bugs in the past, and also I like my money, so we are attempting to kill it ourselves. The first attempt will be a foaming spray from 20 feet away.

I can't possibly see anything going wrong with this.

We couldn't find it at Blue Box Store last night so Rog is going to get it from Orange Box Store today. In the meantime I put out a trap bag for wasps last night. I looked at this morning: nothing. Crap.

[EDITED, Friday, Aug 31]

I did it! Actually, Rog did it before I even woke up this morning. A $2.49 can of foaming spray from Dries (thank you small local business) did it in one shot. Damn Terminix for upping my stress level. I was just concerned about the distance this time, and my inability to really run. Yellowjackets are f*%ing vicious. Though I've killed small paper wasp nests several times already, for some reason this nest seemed so much more active and harder to spray and get away from safely!

The day the HVAC contractors were coming over to quote out a new heat pump I put my dogs and my foster dog in my back yard so I could finish cleaning around the heat pump. This takes about an hour, but I'm finished in plenty of time for the first contractor's appointment time. I open the back door and let the dogs in. My pair comes inside. 

No sign of Mr. Pickles.

Crappity crap crap crap crap. He's done flew the coop. Squirmed his little body out through a loose picket and run away. I go outside and start knocking on my neighbor's doors to see if he's in their yard. Get a negative from one neighbor and I'm on my way to the other when my contact from the rescue calls. 

"Is Mr. Pickles missing?" I feel about 3 inches tall when I reply "Yes." Fortunately neighbors in my development who know the rescue found him, called them for the number for animal control. Then my contact made the connection with their description of a little one-eyed dog. Hmm, Ray lives in that neighborhood...

So I recover Mr. Pickles in minutes of that phone call. Then I use some tree trimmings to temporarily block the escape path. AND the other one he shows me that evening.

Now, I'd planned to replace the fence anyway. But it just got bumped up to ASAP. Fortunately, neither the heat pump nor the fence have conflicting dependencies. So, I'm going to run two projects at the same time. Not the way I'd prefer to run things, but needs must when the Devil drives.