Up against the wall anchor

Towel bars. Dry wall. Screws. Wall anchors. Anxiety.


Wall anchors, those little plastic ribbed cones you drive into dry wall or plaster so you can attach a fixture using screws, have always made me nervous.

When do you use a plastic one? When do you use the ribbed hammer-in type and when do you use the threaded drive-in type? What about the weird little lead anchors? And when do you use a toggle instead?

Most of all...when you remove a fixture for good, and want to patch, spackle and paint the wall, how do you get the *&%*#-ing anchor out so it doesn't leave a lump?

At last, the answers to all the questions: The guide to fasteners at Natural Handyman.

Turns out you can remove the little plastic cones simply by inserting a long screw a bit of the way in, then using the screw as a handle and wiggling the anchor out. (Did everyone else know this? I must have missed shop class that day. Ooops...when I was in school, they didn't let girls take shop.)

A better approach to tagging?

Tagging still feels like a nuisance to me. Daniel Terdiman of c/net reports on some ideas for how it could be easier and more useful.

Negativity

[warning: this post is relentlessly negative]
You've heard of the "worried well?"

I've just spent five days surrounded by the "whining well-off," middle-class retirees in Southern Florida. Now I am sitting in the Atlanta airport, in the midst of employed people who have real lives, with a ticket for the Pacific Northwest, and I think the pervasive whine is at last fading away. But, just to hasten my personal exorcism, here's a list of the complaints that occupy the waking hours of Southwest Florida senior citizens:

1. Condo developments (other than the ones they just moved into)
2. Traffic that clogs the roadways (making it difficult for them to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner out)
3. Construction of new roadways
4. Crowded restaurants
5. People who don't speak English as well as they do (particularly if those people drive expensive cars and live in their condo developments)
6. The shortage of gardeners and and maintenance workers
7. People who don't speak English as well as they do who are sending their children to public schools to learn English
8. Neighbors who don't keep up their condo units
9. Increasing maintenance fees to keep up condo developments
10. Exorbitant prices the greedy and clueless neighbors are asking for their (inferior) condo units
11. Incompetent real estate agents who can't sell their condo units for exorbitant prices
12. Democrats who are picking on "our President"
13. People who attend church dressed too casually
14. People who eat out in restaurants dressed too casually
15. The red tide
16. Mold in condo units
17. The expense of getting rid of mold in condo units
18. People who are too cheap to get rid of mold in condo units

Monday morning I talked my mom into driving out to the beach. I went for a walk along the water, with deserted mansions on one side and sandpipers, pelicans, and cormorants on the other. I got back from my walk to discover my mother talking with a woman from North Carolina. She told us she comes to the beach every day, feeds the sandpipers, walks, and swims. She was trilling away with delight about how much she enjoys the great weather and the warm water.

We gathered up our towels, said goodbye to the woman, and walked along the boardwalk to the car. "Boy, what a weirdo she was," my mother said. Yes, I agreed. The pleasant, cheerful woman certainly didn't fit in with the rest of them.

WiFi availability test

I'll be in Naples, Florida, for the next six days visiting my mother, enjoying the warm, humid weather that I love, and conducting a WiFi availablity test. You'll see the results right away; if there's WiFi, I'll be blogging and uploading pictures. If I'm depending on my mom's dial-up connection...it'll be email all the way.

Zorg will be holding down the fort at the Shady Rest West, playing Mouse with Kaylee the mini-cat and WoW with his guild.

Flame warriors

(cross-posted on Smile of the Day)

If you are, or every have been, a participant in an online discussion list, bulletin board, or other cybergroup, you will want to take 15 minutes from your blogrolling session to check out the howlingly funny Flame Warriors. Each page of this cleverly illustrated site by artist Mike Reed is devoted to a specific online personality type (Strumpet, Yuk Yuk, Cyber Sisters, and Perv are just the beginning).

Tip: The pulldown menu provides an alphabetical list of all the characters, but it's much easier to cruise through the list clicking the light-blue "begin" and "next warrior" links.

Shiny and fast

This afternoon I did two quite disparate tasks: I hand-glazed the Marmoleum kitchen floor and I installed 1 GB of RAM in my new 12" PowerBook.

Oddly, both tasks recalled people from my past. When I was a child, my family had a cleaning woman (in those days, called "the girl" -- yikes) who scrubbed and polished floors on her hands and knees. Now if I suggested to our current housecleaner that she deal with the floors using anything but a long-handled mop, it would be the last we'd see of her. If we want hand scrubbing, or clean baseboards, it's strictly DIY.

So, that's what I did. Marmoleum is eco-friendly, and so is the Marmoleum glaze. I just got down on my hands and knees and rubbed on the glaze with some rags. Glaze, wait 30 minutes, glaze, wait 30 minutes, etc. Now the floor really does look nice and shiny. Spills will be easier to clean up, and it will probably protect the floor from scratches -- though Marmoleum is tough enough that it's used as the flooring on the newer Metro buses.

Once I'd cleaned up from the glaze work, I set out the equipment for the RAM installation: Nice towel for the computer to rest on, a little dish for the screws I'd be taking out and would like to be able to find to put them back in, and the directions, complete with drawings, that I'd downloaded from the Apple support site. This technique I learned from my father. Though he never installed RAM in a computer, he took apart, and successfully reassembled, just about every appliance and device in our house. He always put the device on a towel or pad, and put screws and other connecting goods into little dishes. He didn't have to tell me to do this; after watching a succession of male friends go ballistic hunting for parts while attempting to assemble Dania bookcases or set up VCRs, I got the idea.

I only install memory about once a year, so I'm careful to review the directions -- and to put the cats outdoors or in the basement so they don't get involved with the bright, shiny things rolling around in the dishes.

Releasing the old 256 MB memory card was pretty easy. It's the part where you insert the new card at that 30-degree angle, get all those teeth to mesh, and then have to squash the card down so it clicks into the metal latching tabs that makes me nervous. Got the screws back in, fired up the PowerBook and, sure enough, iPhoto is noticeably faster.

Thanks, Edna! Thanks, Dad!

Good grief, sweet prince

I lived in New Haven in the 1970s, a time when the Yale Drama School and New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre were pushing the limits and raising eyebrows. Thus I particularly enjoyed this Live Journal posting by angevin2, "The Things I Will Not Do When I Direct a Shakespeare Production, on Stage or Film."

Thanks to Don't Ask Me, I'm Making This Up as I Go Along for reminding me about this.

Everybody's online

Today I made an appointment to have my car window fixed, took the elderly cat in for her annual checkup, and got a quick pedicure.

I also emailed the body shop to get a recommendation for a detailer, received a $1 discount on the pedicure for giving the salon my email address, and got a brochure from the vet for the new website they'll be launching later this month where we'll be able to log on to view our cats' records (including up-to-date test results), see when shots are due, and schedule appointments. At least the cats don't have any privacy issues.

17" G4 iMac for sale - $600

The 17" iMac I'm selling is an older model (see picture) but it's fast (1.25 GHz) with upgraded RAM (1 GB) and the larger 150 GB hard drive. Includes a SuperDrive for reading and writing CDs and DVDs, internal modem, Bluetooth, and an Airport Extreme card to take advantage of higher speed WiFi. I'm the original owner, having purchased it October, 2003. It has AppleCare extended warranty through October 29, 2006.

It comes with the original keyboard, mouse, those cute little round speakers, and even the original box. [NOTE: iSight camera in picture is not included.] You are welcome to come over and give it a test drive with all my apps and software. If you want to buy, I'll erase my apps and data from the hard drive and install a brand-new (hitherto unopened) copy of Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) that can be registered to you.

Price: $600
(bidding on eBay for the same model, with less RAM and a smaller hard drive, typically exceeds $600)

This is a Seattle-area offer only...if none of my readers or their friends are interested, it's over to Craig's List next week.

The soul of the new machines

Oh brave new world! In the past week I've gone from a 15" PowerBook for work/travel to a new 12" bare-bones travel machine, and I'm now in the process of migrating 76 GB of data from my old (half-grapefruit style) iMac to a new Intel iMac.

After consulting with some of the leading authorities on Macs (outside of the reality-distortion field) I made the leap and bought the new Intel machine. Like all the current iMacs, it looks like a big screen (or, rather, a 20" screen embedded in a big plastic frame).

After plugging keyboard and mouse into the machine, and the machine into powerstrip, I found the On button by simply reaching out to where I thought it should be (behind the lower left corner). Once on, the machine asked if I wanted to transfer the contents of an old machine to the new using a FireWire cable. I connected my old and new machines, restarted the old machine while holding down the T key (to put it in target mode) and then clicked to start the data transfer. It said it will take about 4 hours for the 76 GB to transfer, but at the rate it's going, I'm thinking more like 1 hour.

The iMac comes with a Mighty Mouse. I used one of those for the first time last week, and was amused by its teensy track ball. I've been using a very hefty Kensington Optical Elite mouse because the height of it works well for my wrist, but I will give the Mighty Mouse a try.

While the Intel gets up to speed, I'm spiffing up the 12" PB (a refurb that shipped with outdated software) with iLife '06 and iWork '06. I also need to install a GB of additional 3rd-party RAM tomorrow so the machine can handle more graphics-intensive programs. Somewhat to my astonishment, the 12" PB was able to run a 23" external monitor with just 512 MB of RAM.

What's hot

I keep up with several dozen blogs using the blog-reading software NetNewsWire. It lets you group the blogs you follow in folders (Seattle blogs, technology blogs, crime fiction blogs, etc.). When I'm getting ready to travel, I export the folder structure to Bloglines for anywhere access.

One of the folders I've created is for great blogs maintained by friends and colleagues. You'll find links to many of these blogs in the recently updated "hot links" section on the right side of this page. And some of these are really hot: Meg and Natalie's Cute Overload has been nominated for five bloggie awards!

Weekday wonder

OK, now I'm on vacation. Yesterday was spent on the phone, trying to schedule everything from car service (it would be nice if the driver's window could be rolled down) to vet appointments. It didn't feel much different from trying to do the same things in between meetings.

But today I got up and went out for a walk in Sunset Hill with an information architect friend. Then I came home, gathered my lists, and went out to run errands. On a weekday. When roads are driveable, parking is plentiful, stores are nearly empty, and store employees are available to answer questions. Wow, what a difference!

Errands that would have required three or four hours on a weekend (most of that spent circling clogged parking lots, squeezing my way through crowded aisles, and fidgeting in glacial checkout lines) got accomplished in less than two. There was even time to pop in to my favorite eccentric upholstery shop on Holman Road; they're going out of business, so I thanked them for past work and said goodbye.

Tomorrow, it's Thai lunch with "the noodle group" in Fremont, more errands, and maybe some gardening: My Home Depot purchase today was the long-awaited rough-terrain hand truck for moving large pots around in the garden.

Did you feel it too?

Over at Dispatches, Doug recalled the 2001 Nisqually Earthquake. I left a comment. Oddly, both Doug and I were out of town the day of the quake — we both remember trying to make contact with our spouses to make sure they were OK.

Leaving the mothership

My last week at Apple was exhilarating, exhausting, inspiring and fun, right up to the moment that I dashed out of De Anza 6 to catch the cab to the airport tonight. I'll sure miss my Apple colleagues.

The immediate future? It's all about re-arranging my home office and packing for a trip to Florida to visit my mom.

Potlatch

I spent a delightful and relaxing weekend hanging out with fellow science fiction readers (and the writers we admire) at Potlatch 15 in downtown Seattle.

Held annually in Seattle, the Bay area, or Portland, Potlatch attracts attendees from the Pacific Northest, Wisconsin, New York, the D.C. area, and other rather blue states. It's very much a literary gathering, so banish any preconceptions about people running around dressed as Klingons; clever t-shirts were more the thing. There were enough folks from the high tech subculture that nearly every time I met someone, we discovered we had mutual friends. Or felt as though we did. Note: Many of the attendees knew acclaimed science fiction author and Seattle resident Octavia Butler, whose sudden death Saturday was announced at Potlatch Sunday just after noon. That made a very somber ending to an otherwise upbeat weekend.

In addition to panels, auctions, book sales, and food, food, food (much of it chocolate), there was a genre trivia quiz that was downright humbling. I knew the answers to about three of the hundred questions that were tossed out to the audience (followed by Hershey's Kisses, flung in the direction of any correct answers).

The organization of the event (all volunteer) was like clockwork, with very little of the officious bustling about and panicked confabs that usually characterize volunteer-run events.

If you enjoy science fiction and want to spend a weekend with like-minded aficionados, Potlatch 16 (in Portland next spring) is a good bet!

On the road. Again.

I'm in the San Jose airport, waiting for the Alaska flight that takes me back to Seattle. The past three days have been work, work, work, sushi, sushi, sushi, and, occasionally, bubble tea. It's been fun, though sad, to say goodbye to all the fascinating and talented people I've worked with over the past six years.

But...one more thing! I'll be heading back to San Jose Monday morning (on Southwest, this time, and at a reasonable hour) to finish up some project work. Tuesday, it's back to Seattle for real and on to the next big thing.

In Cupertino

This is likely my last trip to Cupertino for quite a while. The weather is, of course, delightful. The trip down here on Alaska (Southwest no longer has a 6:40 direct flight) was bearable. When they made the announcement about how to use your oxygen mask, people seemed to be paying closer attention than usual.

Short and sweet

Check out the Mysterious Traveler's sister blog, Smile of the Day. No long rants, just smirks and giggles. Maybe the occasional snort.

Oh, WoW

Zorg explains the lure of World of Warcraft, from levels and quests to chains and night elves.

WoW-ers can spend days glued to the computer, and it's difficult to interrupt a Wow-er when one moment of inattention means that his/her character could be toasted by a dragon, squashed by a troll, or otherwise reduced to "ghost" status. However, the game does allow breaks, in which a player retreats to a safe area in the game, such as an inn.

A polite way to get a WoW-er to disengage is to say "You have 10 minutes to find an inn." If that doesn't work, I suppose you could call Rent-a-Dragon.

Motorcyle madness

You can get in big trouble with a motorcycle, and a quick trip to the iTunes Music Store makes it clear how.

Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal theater critic, blogged about a favorite playlist that includes a Del McCoury version* of Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning." I went off to iTMS to find the track; no luck, but there were several other versions. Unfortunately, most of them (other than Thompson's) were downright embarrassing.

"1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is so much fun to listen to when Thompson does it that you forget its complicated underpinnings, which include Thompson's masterful guitar arrangement and the song's roots in very old English folk songs -- the kind in which the lyrics and the music reel about one another like a couple of drunks on a dark country road.

Nearly all of the interpretations try to impose a steady rhythm on the song, killing it dead in a few measures. Interestingly, the only version that works for me was one by Alan Rhody. Not sure who he is, but he does duets on the album (Journey) with John Prine and Maura O'Connell; like Prine and Thompson, he has that "less-is-more" storyteller style. Plus one hell of a fiddler backing him up on the Prine duet "That's Who I'd Be." (NOTE: No kidding. The fiddler turns out to be the late John Hartford.)

*a version that became the International Bluegrass Music Association's 2002 Song of the Year.

Avviso!

Google Blogoscoped proposes warning signs for the web including this one:

Oh good grief

You scored as Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix).

You can change the world around you. You have a strong will and a high technical aptitude. Is it possible you are the one? Now if only Agent Smith would quit beating up your friends.

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

Winter window

Are we frozen yet?

It's been years since we've had a real freeze in Seattle, particularly over here on the Northwest rim by the Sound. It dipped into the 20s last night; I left the sink in the basement dripping during the night and this morning I went out with a couple gallons of warm water to unfreeze the cats' patio drinking fountain.

The last truly frigid weather I can remember out here was more than 10 years ago, when I lived in Wallingford. The old bungalow had pipes that ran through an unheated crawl space in the basement; when it dropped into the 20s at night, I'd leave the door from the main floor to the basement open and let water drip slowly in the kitchen sink.

This technique worked until I went to visit my parents in Florida. On the second day of my trip, the catsitter called to report that when he'd gone to take care of the cats, he couldn't get any water out of the sink, and the pipes were apparently frozen. "By the way," he said. "You'd left the door open to the basement. But don't worry, I closed it."

Aaeeeii! For some reason, he'd then waited to call me until after he'd left the house and had driven 20 minutes to work on the other side of town. Fortunately, I was able to contact a contractor friend who rushed over, defrosted the pipes, and then wrapped the pipes in the crawlspace with a special plumbing heating pad.

So far, so good, over here at the new house. But I'd hate to see the temperatures get into the teens.

This post probably sounds totally wimpy to folks from New England, where sub-freezing temperatures persist for weeks on end. When I lived in New Haven, I had an Toyota Corolla with leaky doors that added a particularly miserable twist to winter. Snow would melt, drip into the doors, and then freeze, immobilizing the door locks. I'd have to enter and exit the car via the hatchback, sometimes for weeks, until the weather relented and the doors drained and dried.

Silly sundae

Calories aren't the only thing this sundae has too much of. Even for a foodie, this is just ridiculous.

The bigne pastry puffs filled with fresh vanilla ice cream and drizzled in chocolate at Le Gourmand are nice. And 100th the price.

Tagging

Tonight I went to the Seattle Weblogger Meetup to talk with folks about tagging and how they do it. Tagging is inserting special HTML into your blog to bring keywords to the attention of a site like Technorati. People can then use Technorati search to find blogs (including yours) that have called a particular keyword.

I guess what had been puzzling, and perhaps irritating, me about tagging is that it seems like an overlap with Google. You publish a blog entry, Google spiders (reads) it, and then anyone looking for particular words, phrases, or word combinations can find them via a Google search if you've used them in your blog.

What I learned tonight from Daniel Talsky and Bre is that there are some significant differences. Bottom line: If you want more hits on your blog, you need to tag your entries. Technorati is not the only tagging system; the other major one is del.icio.us.

Here's a page that explains the technical aspects of tagging using Technorati. Also, Technorati now allows people who create a (free) Technorati account to tag an entire blog by listing keywords that relate to the blog itself, rather than to a specific entry.

Nancy's New Age Bargain Warehouse

"The deals are SO life-affirming!"

(NOTE BEFORE YOU CLICK THROUGH: "Nancy's" is a charming little video, but some of the other video's on the goodiebag.tv site are R rated -- definitely not workplace viewing.)

Zorg update

Zorg's sinus surgery this morning was successful and he's home recuperating. I was afraid he'd look somewhat battered, but he looks just like Zorg with a little gauze. Apparently the surgical technique for this has gotten increasingly subtle and sophisticated in recent years.

As for me, there's nothing like spending seven hours at the hospital and at the local pharmacy to remind me how relatively healthy and fortunate we are.

Thanks to all of you who checked in before or after the event to offer encouragement, advice, and assistance!

Dick wits

Here are my favorites of the many, many media shots taken at V.P. Dick Cheney after he shot a Republican crony on a quail hunt and then, in a textbook example of how not to handle the press, kept the news from the media for 20 hours. (Like he figured maybe they'd think it was "old news"?)

"We can't get Bin Laden," David Letterman said on CBS, "but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney."

Headline from Dan Froomkin's column in the Washington Post: "Shoots, Hides and Leaves."

Reported by Holly Rosenkrantz of Bloomberg.com:
"'The idea that you have this vice president who is kind of gruff and willing to cuss out senators meant that it was always within the realm of possibility that he would go off one day and shoot his friend,' said Jeff Nussbaum, a Washington speechwriter and Democratic consultant who also moonlights writing comedy for political and social events. 'This really is a perfect metaphor for an administration that shoots first and then blames the victim later.'

"...The New York Daily News had a front page headline reading: 'Duck! It's Dick.' For the New York Post, it was 'Big Shot.' Comic Andy Borowitz posted a satiric report on his Web site with a headline saying Cheney fired at his fellow hunter 'based on faulty intelligence.'"

Newsday.com reported:
"Jon Stewart tackled the Cheney topic on his Comedy Central show, saying Cheney's shooting made Whittington the first person shot by a sitting vice president since Alexander Hamilton. 'Hamilton, of course, shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.' At the (Ariana) Huffington (web)site, visitors could even play The Dick Cheney Quail Hunting Game, which directs an animated Cheney to shoot a bird in mid-air. Of course, once you press the shoot button, Cheney swings around and hits a nearby human."

The Associated Press roundup of Cheney jibes included:

• "Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer. In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent." (Jay Leno)

• "Now, this story certainly has its humorous aspects. ... But it also raises a serious issue, one which I feel very strongly about. ... moms, dads, if you're watching right now, I can't emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don't care what kind of lucrative contracts they're trying to land, or energy regulations they're trying to get lifted - it's just not worth it." (Jon Stewart)

• "You can understand why this lawyer fellow let his guard down, because if you're out hunting with a politician, you think, 'If I'm going to get it, it's going to be in the back.' " (Craig Ferguson on CBS)

• "The big scandal apparently is that they didn't release the news for 18 hours. I don't think that's a scandal at all. I'm quite pleased about that. Finally there's a secret the vice president's office can keep." (Craig Ferguson on CBS)

Not unexpectedly, the overseas press was having a field day with the story of the gun-happy Americans. Here's a marvelously tongue-in-cheek piece from the Daily Telegraph.

Who needs fiction when you've got Cheney?

I am still reeling over the news that Cheney shot and wounded a fellow member of his hunting party.

There are so many directions a writer can go with this that it's just about impossible to get started. It's like confronting a Las Vegas buffet -- you feel overwhelmed and then a little sick.

Some possible themes:

• gun control and gun safety
• mental and physical fitness to hold office and make decisions
• Red-state ruling class recreation (C'mon, when was the last time you spent your weekend out hunting?)

And, surely, some pundit will riff on Oscar Wilde's observation about fox-hunting in England: "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible."

I can hardly wait.

Cary Tennis

Salon's advice columnist, Cary Tennis, is the Garrison Keillor of the next generation. Today he writes about his penchant for telling long, rambling, stories:

I cannot stand the silence, and I don't really care, so I fill it with junk, like an old redneck pulling up to the rock pit with a truck full of couches.

His column is worth the price of the annual Salon.com subscription; what a potent antidote to the daily newspaper advice crap.

Purrs on Wheels

Our elderly Himalayan-Abyssinian cat, Betaille, has always been known for her impeccably groomed coat of apricot fur, tipped with black. Unfortunately, she's getting too old and frail to groom herself thoroughly. Last summer, when she was recovering from thyroid treatment and particularly fragile, I did some research on cat grooming services and discovered one that will come to your house (we had to pay a small surcharge because our neighborhood lies just outside their usual service area).

At the appointed hour, a big camper van with "Purrs on Wheels" on the side pulled into the driveway, and a cheery young woman wearing a pastel salon smock came to the door. She plugged an extension cord into an outlet in the garage, and then collected an incredulous Betaille. The first treatment was a full lion cut (the cat is shaved, except for head and tail). Betaille emerge from the van bathed, perfumed, blow-dried -- and furious. (Amazingly, the groomer was unscathed, and still smiling.) The cat looked a bit odd, but she was able to keep herself very tidy through the winter.

We had a followup visit from Purrs on Wheels today, for a less agressive trim and no perfume. This time Betaille didn't seem to mind it a bit. In fact, she was her usual self -- well, as soon as I removed the frilly red bow from her head.

The Klopman diamond

I just booked a flight to Florida to visit my mother. This favorite joke of my grandfather's came to mind:

A young woman flying from New York to Miami gets bumped into first class. She finds herself sitting beside a distinguished-looking older woman, tanned, beautifully coiffed and dressed in designer clothing. She can't help staring at the woman's diamond jewelry, which includes a stunning diamond pendant.

The older woman sees her staring and smiles wryly. "This is the Klopman diamond," she says, touching the pendant. The younger woman raises her eyebrows.

"The Klopman diamond...it's like the Hope Diamond," says the older woman. She gazes into the distance. "It, too, comes with a terrible curse."

The younger woman waits, but nothing more is said. Feeling a little nervous about flying in the company of the diamond, she just has to ask.

"What's the curse?"

The older woman narrows her eyes, smiles bitterly, and says "Mr. Klopman."

A day in the garden

The sun was out, and I spent the day in the garden. Removed quite a bit of worn-out foliage from the front beds so the crocuses and short red tulips that are sending up shoots will have room to bloom. Moved the long pearwood poles and camellia poles (leftovers from the professional pruning last week) to the back yard where they'll stay while I figure out what to do with them. The camellia wood is heavy!

Finally, I brought out my extension lopper and pruned the Candice grapevine back to three long leaders. This took a bit longer than it should have because Kaylee climbed into the arbor and was swatting at the lopper. I had to decoy her to the other side of the arbor, then rush back and clip branches before she made it back into the danger zone.

I kept seeing more and more projects in the garden, but by then it was getting darker and cooler and it was time to go inside and take my Vitamin I for gardening (Ibuprofen).

Friday night's windstorm had an odd and unpleasant side-effect I hate to think about. We found pieces of roof shingles the size of small pizzas all over the back porch and patio. It turned out they'd come from the house behind us. The house has a "two-layer" roof, and the top layer had become very dry and damaged, so much of it flew off in the storm. We saw the neighbors picking up asphalt shingles all over the neighborhood, and they came into our yard to pick up the pieces there as well.

The unpleasant part wasn't the shingles in the yard. It was the scratches the gravel-coated shingles made when they slammed into our nice (well, formerly nice) new glass kitchen door.

It's not like there are a lot of scratches, but, on the other hand, there are enough that you'd probably want to replace the door if you were going to sell the house. I haven't decided quite what to say to the neighbors yet; if they were too cheap to replace an ancient roof that was falling apart, I don't think they'll be happy to replace a $1,000 commercial-grade glass door.

My plan is to call the window company and see if there is some reasonably priced way to repair the scratches. Then I want to let the neighbors know that they need to do something about their roof before it attacks our door again.

All you need is toast and bacon

Collision Detection notes that two UK students have posted a recipe for cooking an egg using a pair of cell phones. "Cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone," they note.

Veronica Mars

And now, something I never thought I'd see -- the project I work on at Apple, .Mac membership services, becomes part of the plot on a recent episode of the private-eye series Veronica Mars. Here's the clip.

UPDATE: Ooops. The site hosting this clip has exceeded its bandwidth quota. We are trying to find another site to send you to...

Chop chop

One of the local garden gurus is here this morning giving the pear tree its alternate-year pruning and addressing the problem of the gargantuan camellia.

The camellia is planted in the narrow garden strip that runs along the west side of our house. It's one of those plants that must have looked nice 40 years ago when it was small. Now it's engulfing the electrical service wires on their way to the roof, it's scraping against the dining room and living room windows, and it's growing out into the pathway that leads to the back yard.

Calvin (the guru) originally planned to trim it aggressively, essentially growing a new camellia from the shoots. Today, when he turned up, I asked him if it might not be better just to remove it and replace it with a rhody or Japanese maple. His instant answer was, "oh, yes."

My decision to excise the camellia came about when I was looking at a recent photo of our house. In it, the camellia appears to be a giant, dark green blob chewing on the siding. Ooops. It's obviously another case of planting a shrub close to a house without considering that it would...grow. And this one's been growing, unpruned, for a few decades.

Calvin and I then stood around for five minutes giving each other reasons why we should try to save the camellia. (Both of us hate giving up on any plant.) But eventually we ran out of ideas. "No, it goes," Calvin said, and went over to the truck for his chain saw.

Stay tuned for "before" and "after" photos.

How wet is it in Seattle?

After a month of near-continuous rainfall (we've had one 24-hour period without rain) everything -- stairs, driveways, wood fences -- is edged with brilliant green moss.

How damp is it? Well, I just found a baby slug on the floor the dining room. Let's assume it rode in on one of the long-haired cats. The alternative is too creepy to think about.

It's a bagel

Yesterday I bought something I haven't seen in a long time: a real bagel.

I'm including a picture of the bagel, with a coffee cup, to show scale and to make the point that a real bagel is small. It weighs 3 oz. It is not the size of a sourdough bread.

It also tastes like a dense, dry, European white bread. It does not have jalapenos or blueberries in it, or (shudder) pizza sauce on top.

It has a limited shelf life, and will be dry as a bone in three days. It is not filled with preservatives and petrochemicals.

Interestingly, this particular bagel comes from a Seattle bakery with no Jewish roots (the baker is Asian). However, the baker is a master baker, with a strong knowledge of European (French) breads. Thus, the basic bagel.

More cat toys

The Play-n-Squeak Mouse Door Hanger cat toy chirps rather than squeaks, but the cats love it anyway. Even the deaf white cat Sheba loves it, so the chirping/squeaking is apparently a secondary attraction.

The toy mouse dangles from long elasticized line attached to a short rod that attaches to the top of a door. This puts the dangling mouse about four inches from the door, making it easy for the cat to smash it against the door. With each smash, the mouse bounces and chirps, inciting the cat to yet another attack.

From my office down the hall, all I hear is a pleasant chirping.

This is far superior to the Panic Mouse, a battery-powered cat toy we bought last year that thrashed a mouse around on a long metal wire at variable speeds. The gadget made a grinding sound that drove us mad, and the cats got freaked out, too, since nothing they did stopped the wired mouse from thrashing. We found out later that there was a slightly more expensive version of the Panic Mouse that comes with a timer.

Still, the most popular cat toys in the house are the tiny rabbit fur mice we buy in packs of 12 at Petco. Kaylee and Zoe play with them until they fall to pieces. We have mice under the sofa, mice under the stove, and in the morning I stock my pockets with mice to keep Kaylee busy while I work. (BTW, we've tried the faux-fur mice by the same vendor and the cats have utterly ignored them.)

Pogue on Trolls

Last week, in his New York Times Circuits column, David Pogue took on trolls -- the people who send email rants and post nasty comments. (He took the approach of writing a tongue-in-cheek how-to for aspiring trolls.) Today's column, featuring the best of the comments on the troll column, is even more fun than the original.

One reader sent in his own term for online flamethrowers: e-holes. Others sent Pogue pithy comebacks to hate mail (attributed to Garrison Keillor and Winston Churchill).

It's official

I'll be leaving my job with Apple's .Mac group Feb. 28.

I love the company and love the people, but my group and my job have evolved over the past six years in such a way that almost all of my work is project management — which isn't the most exhilarating way to spend your day if you're a writer.

If you've known me for several years, you'll recognize the pattern: I'm hired as a writer, get promoted to editing other writers, and then to managing a publications production process, thus winding up with all of the stress and none of the fun. But the people in charge of the places I work are managers, not writers; they enjoy managing and think I should, too. To confuse matters, I'm fairly good as a project manager. No one sees me when I end the day limp as a dishrag, too bleary to cook, and all I want to do is get into a hot bath and bury my nose in a science fiction novel.

By contrast, after a day of writing I want to leap out of my chair, scamper around in the garden, come in and cook a gourmet dinner, and then go out dancing or meet friends for drinks. Needless to say, my family finds the writer persona far easier to live with.

This wasn't an easy decision, because Apple is the only place I've worked where I was able to be myself, do my best work, and feel safe, valued, and appreciated. I've been able to get a tremendous amount of work done because I've never had to waste time watching my back. Sure, there are heated arguments, but they're always professional. Each person truly believes that he or she has a plan that puts the best interests of the company, or the products, first. And what products!

After I wind up my work at Apple, it's back to full-time writing. I have a couple exciting offers for freelance writing and editing projects, and projects (specific, intense, and short) are exactly what I want. I'll be attending some writing conferences, and working on some fiction projects as well. In short, my schedule will be just as full, but far more flexible. And I'm expecting to have lots more energy to garden, cook, and go out dancing.

Spotting a trainspotter

Before we had geeks and nerds, the British had "trainspotters" -- harmless weirdos who enjoyed standing by the tracks to log passing trains by time and number, then collecting, cataloging, and endlessly discussing their findings.

The term "trainspotter" eventually came to be a more general British term for a harmless weirdo.

Today I received an email from the American female version of a trainspotter. She and I will be attending the same writing conference back East this spring and she'd gotten my name from a conference organizer. Her paragraph-long email contained the information that she is also from the Seattle area, doesn't really have any experience in the field the conference deals with, is wondering what sort of clothing attendees would be wearing, is so worried about getting there on time that she is planning to fly in a day early, and wanted to if know had I made my travel arrangements yet. Hint, hint.

What a flaccid way to present yourself to a total stranger: As an adult who has no idea what to wear to a little conference and worries about being late to something in which she plays no signficant role. I was sure I sensed a bulky, gelatinous, self-piting leech preparing to glom onto me at check-in and maintain a smothering death-grip throughout the three-day conference.

A small voice inside me suggested that I was being harsh and uncharitable. I shut it up quickly by Googling the woman (she has an unusual, and particularly frumpy, name). Sure enough, she's a treasure hunter, one of those nut cases who runs around with a metal detector at the beach.

All together now: EEEEEEK! I can only hope they capture her at airport security.

Impress your date

Back when I was single and dating, I remember a first date when I was getting into the guy's car and spotted, on the back seat, the Loompanics catalog.

Those of you who know what that is will be chagrined to hear that I got into the car, and the relationship, anyway.

The guy turned out to be not so much the sort of person who would buy Loompanics publications (arranged in categories such as "Heresy/Weird Ideas" "Murder, Death, and Torture" "Head for the Hills" and "Reality Creation" ) as the type who would leave the catalog on prominent display to freak people out.

MiscMedia.com notes that Loompanics is going out of business. Check out their sale, complete with a touching farewell comic strip.

Kitties love HDTV

"But, honey, I'm getting it for Fluffy."

Was this what they had in mind?

Some observations about the effects (intended and otherwise) of the new parking and smoking regulations in Ballard.

The astonishing increase in population density in Ballard in the past two years has led the city to charge for what used to be free parking and the businesses to patrol their patrons-only lots with increased vigilance. Today I stopped in Ballard to go to the bank and shop at Classic Consignment and Bartells drugstore. All three businesses, within a block of each other, have their own parking lots for patrons. The problem, of course, is that you aren't allowed to shop at one while you're parked at the other. The solution is either to park, shop, drive around the block, park, shop, drive around the block, park and shop or to simply pay for street parking and go shopping. I paid for street parking, of course.

Once I was parked on the street, I wandered down Ballard Avenue. It's a secondary street once populated by scruffy taverns serving hardcore Scandinavian riff-raff. It's now populated by scruffy-chic taverns and pricey boutiques serving stylishly disaffected alt-Yuppies. Ironicly, both the grizzled riff-raff and the disaffected alt-Yuppies tend to smoke. Since smoking is now against the law within 25 feet of a public establishment, Ballard Avenue was filled with uneasy looking smokers sidling around with their smoldering cigarettes.

"Is this 25 feet?" I heard one boozed-up old coot snarl at his lady friend, as he went weaving around in the middle of Ballard Avenue. In front of a trendy restaurant, one of the kitchen staff stood at the edge of the sidewalk, puffing nervously.

Now people who go into bars can drink smoke free, but people who walk down the street must dodge smokers and inhale their smog. Huh?

Vampire novel

It was an unusually active and social day. I started with my annual visit to the dermatologist, who froze off all sorts of little patches on my neck and chest. Of course, as soon as I got back to my office, a colleague in California called me into a video iChat. I informed him that I was doing research for a vampire novel.

Hutch came by and we went out for lunch at the Hi Life in Ballard. (After I disguised all the marks on my neck using a silk scarf.) The food was pretty good, the waitress rather spacey, and the adjoining table had a woman with an 18-month-old grandchild who managed to grab and throw her cell phone under our table two or three times.

After work I had my annual eye exam, including the part where they dilate your eyes. I drove home with all the traffic signals and street lights sparkling like Christmas decorations. Zorg was in his office hooking up his second 23" monitor and chortling.

Don't use the "h" word with them!

Want to make a bank customer service person reach for the Valium? Ask him (or her) what it means when they say that your debit card was cancelled because it was "compromised."

I spoke with two customer service drones today who tried to make me feel thankful that they had cancelled two of my debit cards (for two different accounts) because the debit card numbers had been "compromised by a third party."

Like a nincompoop, I kept trying to find out what ATM, or store, or online service I could have used that had caused Visa to decide my cards were "compromised" and cancel them with no notice to me. Finally, at the second "supervisor" level, I got plainer language.

"A third-party database was compromised" and my cards were both listed in that database. Upon further prodding, it turned out that a third-party used by Visa and my bank, not a third party used by me, had the compromised database. And "compromised" is the euphemism for "hacked."

Whew! Well, that only took 45 minutes of my workday to choke out of them.

Anyway, I'm suffering the consquences of their shoddy security -- oh, excuse me, a third party's shoddy security -- as I wait seven business days to get replacement ATM cards. Cards which I must then take into the bank during business hours to get the pre-set PIN numbers changed to something I'll remember. Until the next time the bank gets hacked.

Communicate using iTunes

I often wait to write about things until I can see and express some element of humor. A friend of mine, of similar bent, sent me an iTunes track through the iTunes gift program: "Bill Lee" by Warren Zevon. It's a short, sweet, piece that in its entirety goes:

You're supposed to sit on your ass and nod at stupid things
Man, that's hard to do
But if you don't, they'll screw you
If you do, they'll screw you too

And I'm standing in the middle of the diamond all alone
I always play to win when it comes to skin and bone

And sometimes I say things I shouldn't, like
(harmonica break)
And sometimes I say things I shouldn't, like
(louder harmonica break)

Boy, does that ever describe where I am right now. Lots of harmonica breaks.

Don't leave home with it

Have a WaMu Visa debit card? Don't venture out of state with it — at least not if you expect to use it for wild and crazy criminal acts like a $7.95 internet access charge at your hotel.

I've worked in California for the past five years, and frequently use my WaMu Visa debit card at the WaMu ATM near my office in Cupertino. Nevertheless, when I went to Macworld this past week, Visa detected "a suspicious pattern of spending" due to an out-of-state use and cancelled the card with no attempt to contact me. I discovered this Saturday when I got back to Seattle and couldn't purchase $1.50 worth of metered parking. Using my second debit card, for the linked joint WaMu account I share with Zorg, was not an option, since Visa had thoughtfully cancelled that card as well!

I called WaMu, but they disclaimed all responsibility. Visa makes this decision, they said, not WaMu, adding that both the Visa and the WaMu offices for handling this are closed until next Tuesday.

There is no indication in my online banking records or trip receipts of any purchase in California, though the WaMu folks I spoke with said that they can "see" an out-of-state transaction that apparently triggered the cancellations. I now suspect it was the $7.95 online internet access deposit at the hotel, refunded in full for Macworld attendees, that resulted in a $0.00 charge against the card but got the card cancelled anyway. Bravo, Visa.

Google Earth

We're back from Macworld, tired, but installing all our software updates. Google released Google Earth for Mac, and I just tried it out and took a look at our house. The detail -- right down to garden benches and patio furniture -- is rather scary. The feeling that big brother is watching was dispelled slightly when I noticed that the photo is not current. It had to have been taken more than a few months ago, as our neighbor Steve's car appears parked at it's usual rakish angle in front of his house. (He's since moved into assisted living, and the car has been sold.)

The Mac version is apparently not as full-featured as the Windows flavor. Here's a review by a power user.

I wonder if you can subscribe to a satellite view and have the updated photo sent to you each time one becomes available? I'd be interested in having a record of neighborhood changes over time...

Thursday at Macworld

After two days of work and social activities behind the scenes and around the outskirts of Macworld in SF, Zorg and I made it onto the floor at the Expo Thursday today.

The Apple booth had on display both the new iMac Intel Core Duo and the MacBook Pro. They each look just like their predecessors, but are screamingly fast when running OS X 10.4.4. I can hardly wait to get home and try out the new iLife applications; the iLife '06 Family Pack I ordered Tuesday may make it home before we do.

The Expo was not, as I'd feared, dominated by iPods. It was solid Mac-related hardware and software, much of it from established vendors. The quality of the giveaways was higher than it has been in the past few years, though without the lavish excesses of the dotcom era. The overall impression was glossy (rather than glitzy).

We're staying at the Nikko, in a basic room that is quiet, comfortable and serene. Unfortunately, the Nikko's business center has a printer that doesn't relate well to a Mac, making it difficult to print out our boarding passes for tomorrow. (Boo. Hiss.) But the hotel's sushi bar is outstanding.

Zorg got some cool clothes and software; I got a leather iPod case. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to do any San Francisco shopping.

Snug as a bug in a rug

I am so accustomed to finding clues (if not answers) with a Google search, I was astonished to strike out completely when I Googled each of the first two lines of this verse:

Money is the milk in the coconut
Money is the cream in the jug
Money is your honey, when you've got a pile of money
You're as snug as a bug in a rug.

When I was a child, I often heard my grandfather sing this ditty -- usually after he'd perused the stock pages of the Boston Globe.

I came away with the impression that the bug was enjoying itself somewhere in the vast ruby-red expanse of my grandmother's Oriental rug.

If you've seen or heard this song somewhere, please email me. I'm very curious to know more about it.

NOTE: A reader emailed me with information that this is a folk song, and a blander version of it appears in Carl Sandburg's 1927 collection, American Songbag. I'm going to hunt the book down to see if there are more verses.

Rain rain rain, whine whine whine

Well, the weather is certainly doing its best to render Seattle as miserable as out-of-towners imagine it. We don't often have days on end of steady precipitation, really we don't.

The cats periodically insist on going out in it, as if to say "this can't really be happening." Fortunately, we have several areas under the house and porches where they can hang out -- including, of course, two heated and insulated "cat nests."

Betaille, the elderly Himalayan/Abyssinian who lives in one of the nests, will no longer come up onto the exposed back porch to be fed, so we have to remember to go down to her den every few hours to feed her. She greets us with an irate "meowranh!"

The neighbors who travel all the time seem to be gone on yet a third trip in as many weeks. Their increasingly frenetic cat appeared in our basement at dinner time tonight and, for the second time this week, came on upstairs to demand that Zorg, her specially buddy, feed her a supper of canned cat food. Apparently the bowl of dry food in the basement no longer meets her expectations. Such nerve. Our cats were just flabbergasted.

If it sounds like our days are one long round of attending to damp, pathetic, restless felines...well, yes. And we're pretty damp, pathetic, and restless ourselves.

Next week we turn the whole operation over to various friends and catsitters and head off to MacWorld. The weather in San Francisco promises to be a tad better than this. I'm looking forward to the usual round of dinners and breakfasts with tech friends and old family friends, and luxuriating at The Nikko with Zorg. Plus a private billiards party — more on that later!

Noodle pudding

To make lokshen kugel, you must be a Jewish aunt or grandmother, preferable a bit eccentric, with a refrigerator full of dairy.

I qualify. Here I am, at the end of the winter holidays, with all sort of things you don't usually see in our house, including big containers of sour cream, cottage cheese, and a couple boxes of eggs.

I looked up my version of my family's noodle pudding recipe in the FileMaker database, and then decided to check out some versions on the Internet. I soon realized there are thousands of versions of noodle pudding, each one based on what that person's aunt had in her refrigerator.

Aunt Reva (or Helen, or Sadie) had cooked a noodle pudding based on what was available, someone had complimented her on it, and that version became set in stone for the remainder of her cooking career. When I was a child, our family gatherings included at least two versions of kugel; one included dried apricots and the other was the alternate selection. (My grandmother's version featured pineapple tidbits, and so does mine.) A cottage cheese version can be something like a cheesecake; one with lots of eggs, as fluffy as a souffle.

I stumbled across a great explanation of kugel-type recipes on the blog Sabbath Meals, which explains it in terms of the "shit" method of cooking used by Eastern European grandmothers. (That's probably not what you think, unless you are fluent in Yiddish.)

The bottom line is that kugel is a mixture of wide egg noodles, dairy (sour cream and drained cottage cheese as a rule, but cream cheese, yoghurt, and buttermilk can also come into play), dried or winter fruits (golden raisins, almost certainly, but apples, prunes, apricots, almonds, walnuts, pecans, and canned pineapple can turn up), lightly beaten eggs (usually in a ratio of 1 egg per 4 oz. of dried noodles), and flavorings (sugar, salt, lemon juice, and cinnamon are the most common, but honey, brown sugar, vanilla, nutmeg and almond extract also appear). (The wikipedia entry for "kugel" notes that there is a Jerusalem kugel with carmelized sugar and black pepper — now that's worth trying.)

Boil the noodles, butter them, mix in the rest of the glop (this is where some people want to top it all with bread crumbs) and bake at 350 C for 45 minutes to an hour.

If you would like some kugel, email me and you can come try some Thursday or Friday. (Seattle area availability, only.)

Happy 2006

Favorite Four (meme)

Before I head off to make spankopita for a dinner we're attending this evening, here's a meme via Music and Cats.

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:

• breakfast waitress in a Greek restaurant on Cape Cod
  
• researcher for a study of Project Head Start
  
• investigative reporter
  
• web content producer for an e-greetings website
  

Four movies I could watch over and over:

• Moonstruck
• Amacord
• Duck Soup
  
• The Big Lebowski
  

Four places I’ve lived:

• Falls Church, VA
• New Haven, CT
• Genoa, Italy
• Seattle, WA

Four TV shows I love to watch:

• Tripping the Rift
• Firefly
• Nero Wolfe
• Six Feet Under

Four websites I visit daily:

• eBay
• Amazon
• VersionTracker
• Craigslist

Four of my favorite foods:

• chopped liver
• lobster
• lahmejun
• farinata

Four places I’d rather be:

• on a Holland-America cruise of the tropics
• Roma
• at a dance camp
• at a game party

Four albums I love:

• "We've Got a Live One Here" - Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen
• "Swing '39" - Quintet of the Hot Club of France
• "All Old Friends" - Stacy Phillips
• "Old and in the Way" - Old and In the Way

If you post your version of this meme on your blog, please put the link in comments or send it to mysterioustraveler (at) gmail.com

What's the "consumerist"?

The Consumerist is part of the new and rapidly growing genre of semi-commerical blogs. It's run by a freelance technology writer in New York, and appears to have several contributors. This blog version of a consumer magazine is not to be confused with the non-profit owned Consumer Reports, which has testing labs, scientific underpinnings, and a lot of lawyers.

The Consumerist is taking a purely journalistic approach, gathering consumer-relevant stories from all over the web, and offering links to sites for irate consumers who want to strike back.

At the moment, it's an odd mixture of tips on the hot online sales of the day (Amazon's Friday specials, free shipping at Zappo's) with snarky gossip (about Overstock.com's CEO, and the Catholic Church vs. an artist who draped a statue of the virgin in latex).

Well, I've often bemoaned the hopelessly drab, finger-wagging style of Consumer Reports (which likes to save us money on canned soup and, in the last year or two, finally decided that iMac and iBooks were not necessarily a complete waste of money). The Consumerist, with it's "yo, dude" in-your-face style, is certainly the antidote to that! Though I don't think I'm going to be getting my car-buying advice from them any time soon.

Holiday gifts

A huge "thank you" for all the wonderful Christmas and Hanukkah gifts and holiday hospitality.

We went to some lovely little parties at friends' homes, were wined and dined, saw old friends, and met new ones. Got to see Sally flame not one, but two, homemade Christmas puddings on Boxing Day.

I worked this week, so am just now going through my basket of goodies, most of which have a tag attached so I can thank the giver. The only two mystery gifts are the bottle of ice wine and the box of truffles that arrived with visitors. Thank you, whoever you are!

Zorg said he had a gift for me that I really wanted, but had forgotten that I wanted. And he was right: He gave me a box full of videos, each one a version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Last year we'd watched the Muppet version, and I'd wondered about all the interpretations on film. My stash now includes the 1933 version with Sir Seymour Hicks as Scrooge; the venerated 1951 classic with Alasair Sim, the 1970 Scrooge (Albert Finney); the 1999 version with Patrick Stewart; Bill Murray in "Scrooged"; animations from Mr. Maggoo, the Muppets, and Dr. Suess (Boris Karloff narration), along with one very generic version; and Vanessa Williams' "Diva's Christmas Carol."

Excluding obscure silent film versions (there are many), all I am missing now is George C. Scott (1984 - TV), the 2004 TV version with Kelsey Grammer, the 1938 version with Reginald Owen, the 1971 animation (with Alastair Sim doing the Scrooge voice!); the 1997 animal with Tim Curry and Whoopi Goldberg; a 2000 British TV version that has gotten some good reviews; a 1977 British TV version; the 2004 Italian version (Natale a Casa Deejay); a 1982 TV version narrated by John Gielgud; a 1970 TV animation directed by Zoran Janjic; a 1994 ballet version shown on A&E (one "Christmas Carol completist" notes that the ghost of Christmas Past is "unavoidably slender"); the 1953 version shown on the Kraft Television Theatre; a 1950 British TV version starring Bransby Williams; a 1943 TV version with William Podmore as Scrooge; a 1947 TV version starring John Carradine and Eva Marie Saint (keep in mind that not many people owned TVs in the 1940s); a 1949 TV version with Vincent Price as the narrator (now we are talking the inevitable!); and an obscure 1981 TV version with William Paterson.

There are also adaptions such as the 1964 anti-war special "Carol for Another Christmas"; a 1971 animation with, yet again, Alastair Sim; the New England version, "An American Christmas Carol"; a 2000 TV version with Ross Kemp; the Walter Mattau-voiced animation "The Stingiest Man in Town" (1978 - TV); a (mostly) animation with voices by Simon Callow, Cate Winslet, Nicholas Cage, and Michael Gambon ("Christmas Carol: The Movie" 2001); a 1984 French TV version with Michel Bouquet; "Ms Scrooge" with Cicely Tyson (1997 TV); a 1979 Country music version with Hoyt Axton; a 1978 Canadian TV version with Warren Graves; the 1964 Canadian TV "Mr. Scrooge"; and Rich Little's one-man "A Christmas Carol" for the BBC (1982).

Not to mention the obligatory TV show episodes from Blackadder, the Jetsons, Futurama (with a Tinny Tim robot), the Simpsons (with Mr. Burns as Scrooge), and oh so many more.

God bless us.

Fortified cereal

My day started with a furry toy mouse atop my bowl of Cheerios, and now I find myself looking at everything very closely before I interact with it.

Tea party

The Boston Tea Party commemorates a gathering at which people threw a lot of tea overboard; my annual tea party does much the same thing, though for completely different reasons. I compare all the black teas that have accumulated in the cupboard and throw the disappointing ones out.

The standard for the taste test is Yorkshire Gold, a blend of Assam, African, and Sri Lankan (Ceylon) teas made by Taylors of Harrogate. I buy Yorkshire Gold from the online vendor Blue Moon Tea. Blue Moon's prices are some of the best online, and shipping to Seattle is speedy. (However, the Blue Moon site requires Internet Explorer for full access to drop-down menus.) Another fabulous site for Yorkshire Gold and other Yorkshire teas, including Yorkshire Hard Water tea, is Sarah Woods.

It appears I'm not the only Yorkshire Gold fanatic around. Check out the site of Wallingford Bicycle Parts (named after its original home in Seattle, but now in New Orleans). In addition to saddles, pumps, tools and supplies, you can ordered their favorite Yorkshire Red or Yorkshire Gold!

Here are this year's tea party results:

Top marks: Stash English Breakfast and Tazo Awake

Honorable mention: Twinings Irish breakfast (complex with smokey overtones) and Walters Bay & Co. Pure Ceylon (bright and complex).

Failed in the testing (bitter, monotonous): Swee-touch-nee, Typhoo, Red Rose, and Murchie's Keemun.

I'll stand by my top choices. However, a low rating in the test may reflect old tea or a bad batch of tea. I'm always willing to give a brand a second chance!

If you like to rant and rave about tea, this site is for you!

Mugging as a political act

Blogger and writer Clark Humphrey, who tangled with muggers in Belltown last week (fighting them off with the help the local UPS driver), waxes astonishingly philosophical about it:

I also can't stop thinking of the thieves, not as the opposite-race subhumans the conservatives would claim to protect me from, but as right-wingers without resources. These dorks wanted to take my stuff for no good reason, offering nothing in return, just because they believed they had the power to do so.

Dilbert, the blog

As someone who makes a living writing and editing, I'm intrigued by individual writers' styles. Cartoonist, essayist, and now blogger Scott Adams ("Dilbert") is what I think of as a home run hitter. Like technology columnist Andy Ihnatko, he swings hard at everything and misses about two-thirds of the time. But when he connects, you stand there goggling for a few minutes, then jump up and cheer madly. "This guy is a genius," you think, immediately forgetting that his last two columns left you scratching your head.

Adams, who is absolutely fearless about offending people, did a terrific blog entry that begins as seemingly offhand musings about disliking contemporary Christmas rituals and winds up as a neat little indictment of religious terrorists.

My own style? Utility infield player.

The Mysterious Christmas

Games with Mystical Forest, True Unicorness, and friends...Scandinavian Christmas Eve music party at Anita's...phone calls with my mom and with Nina and Mike...Chinese dinner with Zorg at Hakka Cuisine...lots of kitty cuddles...and listening to the brilliant "Scrooge" monologue from Lord Buckley (Old St. Hip). Another lovely Christmas at the Shady Rest!

Happy Hanukkah

Christmas greetings

Holiday season

Check that spud

Making scalloped potatoes and ham for your Yuletime Swedish buffet? Or latkes for Hanukkah?

Don't reach for the wrong potato.

Scalloped potatoes require waxy, low-starch, small round red or white potatoes, or Yellow Finns. All these will hold their shape after nearly two hours baking the casserole.

Quick-frying latkes, on the other hand, call for high-starch russet potatoes (with those dark thick skins, the classic baking potato) or the Yukon Gold. These will yield a light, fluffy latke (if you could call a latke "light").

Thanks to the Cook's Thesaurus for the useful, and photo-illustrated, guide.

I can hardly wait for 2006!

My mother once accused me of moving (house to house, job to job) for the fun of it. She was right: I love change.

Part of me likes planning for it, but another part of me just likes sweeping away existing structures, and strictures, and seeing what appears on the empty stage, or what I'm inspired to place on it.

It's my deepest hope that 2006 will be a year of bold and exciting new enterprises and new perspective on existing ones. For the past few years, my "big excitement" has been designing things like kitchens and patios and hiring someone else to build them. Now it's time to design bigger things, and build them myself.

Watch this space in 2006.

Friday catblogging, sports edition

Kaylee, the smaller of the two Stripe Sisters, often spends two or three hours in the morning playing her feline version of handball. She goes down to the bottom of the basement stairs, where two doors and a wall form three sides of her court and the open-riser staircase is the fourth. Then she smacks a rabbit-fur mouse around.


Her big sister, Zoe -- best described as "highly energy-conservative" -- sometimes flops at the top the stairs to observe this workout. She looks like a couch potato watching Venus Williams on TV.

Like a pro, Kaylee is very picky about her equipment. Forget synthetic mice: She insists on the authentic rabbit-fur wrapped rodent, with the hard cork core that makes a swatted mouse bounce so wonderfully and renders it light enough to be flung high into the air.

A few weeks ago, Kaylee started a warm-up routine in which she would bring a mouse into the bathroom while I was showering and place it on the bathmat. I noticed that if I tossed the mouse out the door, she'd bring it back and place it on the mat again. Hmmmm....

It took only a few days for me to train her to fetch -- and for her to train me to throw.

That's how the trouble started.

Kaylee's favorite part of her workout is the beginning, where she sends the mouse tumbling down the stairs into the court and races madly after it. Now she's decided this is much more fun if I throw the mouse for her to chase. When they both reach the bottom of the stairs, she retrieves the mouse and dashes back up with it so we can do it some more. I scratch her back and fuss over her, then toss the mouse, and she's off again. Cute. At least the first couple times.

Unfortunately, Kaylee now expects me to play this game with her for several hours at a stretch. If I wander off and get distracted by something like work, she comes and scratches on my office door to call me back to the playing field. "Coach! Coach!"

Signs of the season (blog style)

As the holidays approach, the "recent keyword activity" -- hits on my blog from particular searches -- reflects the season. Today's hits include:

"brandied pears" "kugelhopf pan" "bundt cake mix" "mincemeat" and "lord buckley's Christmas carol"

Betcha Dec. 24 and 25 see plenty of hits on the entry about the bizarre codes that Kitchenaid electric stoves return when their ovens automatically shut off in the middle of cooking your holiday feast.

The gifts of blog

The Seattle Weblogger Meetup featured holiday gifts from organizer Anita and from Jake of 8BitJoystick -- not surprisingly, game, music, and movie DVDs predominated! I got some real goodies, one of which will make a hilarious stocking stuffer for Zorg.

As usual, many interesting topics, including the Ghost in the Shell movies based on the manga by Masamune Shirow. Clark Humphrey told me a little about the process for creating his latest book, the ebook Take Control of Digital TV.

Anita reminded me that Potlatch 15, this year's West Coast SF convention, is in Seattle Feb 24-26 at the Westin. See you there?

Say it with coffee

Pointed out by John Hedtke, this gallery of barista art.

Extreme Christmas

Terra-caching is out, parkour is in. Even for Santa.

Wired underwear

The Cult of Mac blog has discovered iPod underwear. But it turns out to be men's boxers, with a little hip pocket. Hey, what about an iPod bra? That would be a whole new meaning for "underwire."

(There is a concept for the iPod bra, but when you see the design, you'll know immediately that a man designed it and why no woman would ever wear it. Scroll wheel, indeed!)

The Revels

No, "The Revels" is not the name of a new TV show or British pop group.

However, the Revels, which Zorg and I attended today in Tacoma's Rialto Theater, is not easy to explain. If any of what follows piques your interest, you might want to attend one of the performances Tuesday or Wednesday evening (tickets available online) and see for yourself.

The Revels is a Solstice celebration performance grounded in Celtic tradition. It was created in 1971 by a group in Cambridge, MA, and has since taken root in eight other urban areas in the US, including The Puget Sound Revels, based in Tacoma.

Each city's Revels does its own programming, but I gather that most of them follow the tradition of changing the era and the setting of the Revels each year. This year the Puget Sound Revels is set in Elizabethan England, with a humorous and charming plot involving Shakespearian actor Will Kemp and Queen Elizabeth.

What makes the Revels particularly difficult to describe is that each of the songs, dances, and sketches it comprises is of keen significance to aficionados of English folk traditions, but pretty much obscure to anyone outside those traditions.

I realized this when, as we were leaving the theater, Zorg said he'd enjoyed the show but could have done without the monotonous dance, performed in near darkness, by shadowy figures wielding antlers. For much of the dance, they'd simply plodded in a circle, breaking the formation twice to create opposing lines and solemnly clash antlers.

"Good grief, that was the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance!" I shrieked. "I've waited 20 years to see that done!" What was monotonous and dim to him had been mystical and enchanting to me, because I know quite a bit about English folk dancing and the 20th century folk dance revival that rescued the traditions from near extinction. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, first described in writings in 1226 (that is not a typo), is still performed by a particular family in Abbots Bromley using a set of horns that include antlers that have been carbon-dated to the 11th century. If you go to Abbots Bromley on Wakes Monday in September, you can see the six Deer-men, a Fool, a Hobby Horse, a Boy Hunter, and the Man-Woman (Maid Marion) dancing to this haunting tune.

The Revels program summarized Abbots Bromley in a sentence or two, providing little context for the outsider. Similarly, only one of the songs performed ("Lord of Dance") would be familiar to a general audience. With material this obscure, the Revels must depend on theatrical and musical talent to reach beyond the cognoscenti. While the Puget Sound troup offers superb musicians (both brass and strings) and some notable singers, the staging and lighting are undistinguished and the acting (though delightful in the "King George and the Dragon" vignette), uneven.

By involving the audience in the singing of rounds, bringing performers in along the aisles of the theater, and having several actors address the audience directly, the company makes it very clear that the Revels aims to create a sense of community. But, at least at the performance I attended, the audience, while willing, simply isn't equipped to play its part.

I'd be curious to see how the magic happens for the Revels in other cities. In the meantime, I'd recommend the Puget Sound Revels as very special holiday treat for those of you already drawn to Celtic traditions and solstice celebration.

Melting chocolate on a Wolf stove

Chocolate melts at 109 degrees Farenheit (43 degrees Centigrade). I know this because two years ago Zorg dabbled in truffle-making as a hobby and melting the chocolate turned out to be the most challenging part of the process (right up there with potential cacao overdose).

Chocolate is frustrating to melt and maintain at a melted consistency. The process, with the slightly ironic technical name of "tempering," usually requires a double-boiler and some vigilence. Microwave melting can result in a hideous grainy glob of ruined chocolate. Zorg, not the most patient of chocolatiers, looked into chocolate melters, which at the time were limited to professional models of prohibitive cost — hundreds of dollars. (There is now a home model for $30, but reviewers on Amazon rate it as better for simple melting of commerial dipping products than for tempering of chocolate for serious candy-making)

Fortunately, early in his truffle-making phase, Zorg located an electric "crock pot" cooker that had a temperature control and, at the very lowest setting, was able to melt chocolate without burning.

This weekend we've been doing a small truffle project as a Christmas gift for a friend. Last night I made a ganache truffle filling out of raspberry syrup (made from the friend's backyard raspberry crop), sugar, heavy cream, butter, and bittersweet chocolate. Today Zorg chopped dark chocolate to melt for the couverture (truffle exterior). He was headed off to the pantry to fetch the crock pot, but I was determined to try melting the chocolate on the Wolf stove. Would the Wolf reveal yet another amazing capability?

We put the chopped chocolate into a plain Revereware pot and I set the burner to "simmer." In 10 minutes, we had lovely, satiny tempered chocolate. I later dug around in some Google results and discovered that indeed, the "simmer" setting on a Wolf burner is perfect for melting chocolate. Causing me to observe that I now love my Wolf as much as I love my Mac.

I was scooping the ganache fillings with a melon ball tool, dipping it in hot water and drying it between each scoop. Apparently I didn't dry the tool well enough, and a small amount of water from the ganache balls got into the melted couverture as Zorg was doing the coating, causing the pot of melted chocolate to "seize." That looks nearly as scary as it sounds: grainy, uncooperative, dull chocolate. I dashed to Zorg's truffle notebook and found directions for reversing a seize: You add a small amount of butter or heavy cream and whisk, whisk, whisk over the heat. It worked, and we were able to get a yield of 43 really gorgeous truffles. Most of them go to our friend for Christmas, but we are saving just a few, including a pair for our friend John, the fellow who taught us how to make truffles.

Take control of something

What will they write next? The publishers of the Take Control ebook series on computers and the internet are expanding to non-technical topics. Vote for the book topics you'd like to see, or suggest a topic of your own.

Highly recommended: Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac

Adding ads

A couple months back I added Google AdSense ads to my blog. Apparently they haven't offended anyone yet, and I am enjoying watching how the AdSense program tailors the ads to my blog content. If I write about food, I get lots of ads for recipe sites; if I write about travel, travel sites; cats, pet sites, etc.

Today the ads are one big long banner for Shopzilla.com, the bargain-finding site. I'm impressed; AdSense has definitely got my number. This has got to be the most appropriate sponsor for The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out. Perhaps I should retitle it: The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out on a Shopping Trip.

I just noticed that the Shopzilla ad even has moving elements (the burning shopping cart racing around). Wonder of wonders.

Just checking in

I missed Sunday completely because I woke up exhausted, with a mild migraine, and stayed that way all day. It was extremely weird, being so tired I could hardly speak. The cats enjoyed lolling around on the bed with me all day; all I have is a vague memory of the sun being bright, the sun going down, and, then, it being dark.

Today it was as if I were emerging from a fog. I got progressively better, and by late afternoon I was my usual self. When I went to the chiropractor this evening, he commented that he wasn't surprised I'd had a migraine, based on something about my back. But I suspect that it was my annual winter migraine, something I associate with atmospheric pressure changes on the first really bright, cold day of winter. Let's hope so. I'd like to wait at least a year before I go through that again!

Fractal food

A little something for the Geeks: Fractal Food (thanks to Music and Cats for the tip).

A book for a heavily reinforced coffee table

When a book weighs twice what it looks like it should, and has a dust jacket that looks like a museum-quality photo, chances are you're dealing with top quality paper and photo reproduction.

That's part of why I lugged the coffee table cook Culinaria: The United States home from a thrift shop for $7. The other reason is that it's all about one of my favorite subjects, American regional cookery.

The photos are, indeed, gorgeous. And the writing's not bad, either. Plus, there are some unusual recipes. A check of the book on Amazon reveals that it's out of print, and selling for between $47 and $89 used. Yikes. I'll be headed over to the thrift shop this weekend to donate several brand new hardcover mystery novels. That was just too much of a bargain.

Sugar-coating the (cat) pill

Our elderly fussbudget cat, Betaille, has to take metronidazole for 10 days. I couldn't figure out why she was fighting me like a wildcat when I tried to pill her until I looked up metronidazole and discovered that it's Flagyl, one of the bitterest tasting medications around.

We give the cat only 1/4 pill once or twice a day, but the quarter pills are crumbly and thus even more noxious than whole pills. The taste is so unpleasant that there is no possibility of disguising it in cat food.

I did some research online and discovered a webpage about the metronidazole adminstration problem. It was written by a compounding pharmacy in the Midwest that will put the quarter pills into gel capsules for you.

That's when I decided to try to create my own gel capsules for Betaille.

First I tried rolling the quarter pill in margarine. That was pretty funny. It was impossible for me to keep the pill in her mouth long enough to get her to swallow it. It kept sticking to her tongue and then slipping sideways out of her gnashing jaws. I couldn't hold her mouth shut because her muzzle, and my hands, were covered in margarine. Betaille would have been traumatized by the ordeal, except she was distracted by licking off all the margarine afterward.

Then, while cleaning up some drops of honey that had dried on the counter after I'd been baking fruitcakes, I came up with an alternate solution: Roll the quarter pill in honey and let the little coated ball dry in a warm place overnight. This resulted in a coated pill with a sort of a jelly-belly texture. Concerned this might stick, I then rolled the tiny "gel pill" in regular sugar until it was completely coated and dry to the touch.

I grabbed Betaille in the middle of her lunch and popped the sugared pill into her mouth. She swallowed, and I plopped her back in front of her food dish. Even she seemed surprised at how easy it was.

BTW, it is safe to give honey to a full-grown cat, at least in this tiny amount and for a short period of time — unless the cat is diabetic.

Bourbon spice cakes

Inspired by John Hedtke's industrious program of holiday baking, I went into the kitchen tonight and whipped up a batch of miniature bourbon spice cakes. I realized once again that after three holiday seasons of increasingly disheartening experiences with our previous stove, it really is safe to bake again. I'll know for sure at 11 p.m. when the little cakes (they bake slowly, at 275 F) are done.

Anarchy. It isn't well organized.

Click on Dec. 10 at Exploit Seattle (an events site, less ominous than it sounds) and you'll see some sketchy information about the local manifestation of Santarchy, a gathering of lots of Santas. Apparently it's scheduled to begin at noon Saturday at the Ballard Smoke Shop, 5439 Ballard Ave., and end at the Burning Man planning office, 500 Boren Ave. N., sometime later on.

What will the Santas do? Will they progress from Ballard to downtown on foot, by bus, or by sleigh? I guess we'll just have to go there to find out. The event is part of the general bustle that will culminate in the monthly Ballard Art Walk Saturday evening.

Next year, sudoku

The New Oxford American dictionary has announced its word of the year for 2005: "Podcast." That's slightly less of an honor when you realize that the runners up included "bird flu," "persistent vegetative state," and "trans fat." Others in the running were emerging words such as "reggaeton," "squick," and "sudoku." Start now to sprinkle these phrases into your next conversation...or podcast.

Imagine that!

A gem of a thrift shop has appeared at 7739 24th Avenue NW in Ballard/Crown Hill. Imagine That! is on the west side of the street, just north of Soprano's Pizza (follow the garlic).

I don't want to give away too about the place, so I'll just provide some hints. It's a small shop, jam-packed with goodies. It has an unusal mix of clientele. The women in charge are delightful. Everything they have is of very good quality and in good condition, with styles that vary from vintage to square to Pottery Barn trendy. Even though Imagine That! is a tight fit, they seem to welcome moms with reasonably well-behaved tots. The shop is lovingly arranged, and new items are always appearing.

While only a small percentage of their stock appeals to me, the things that do are real finds, because the prices are so very reasonable. Very.

Check it out. You might come away with the spectacular stainless steel heated chafing dish (round) with the vertical stand for the glass lid -- just $35. Unless I dash up there at lunchtime tomorrow and snag it myself! (Hint: If you're a size 8, there's a black jacket with a faux leopard collar that's to die for.)

Help from Blogger Forum

Since the folks at Blogger never acknowledged the problem with their servers today, I was forced to hunt out information at Blogger Forum. It's a great site; it covers all types of blog hosting and blogging software. The folks who publish to Blogger were discussing the outage; some felt that Blogger had been remiss in failing to acknowledge a problem with servers at their end (in their defense, I noticed that at least one of their member info sites, buzz.blogger.com, seemed to be down as well). Others on the board said that since Blogger is a free hosting site, we were getting what we paid for. I don't think it's quite that simple, in part because before Blogger was acquired by Google, I had paid for BloggerPlus service. And now my blog hosts Google AdSense ads.

One participant in the forum mentioned that in the 15 months that he's been using Blogger, this is the first unplanned outage they've had. That's been my experience as well. At any rate, we're up and running...

Testing, testing

The blogger site went haywire today and "published" one of my posts...into the ozone. This is a test to see if publishing stability has resumed.

When Zorg's away

...the cats know it.

Zorg went out of town for a couple days, and the cats immediately shifted into one-owner formation. Betaille came inside for the night and slept on (rather than under) the bed. Zoe, who usually yowls annoyingly at 6 a.m to remind Zorg that it's time to get up and let her out, didn't say a word, and waited for me to get up at 8.

I love the way the cats learn to shift back and forth between different "modes." Sheba can tell the difference between weekends and weekdays. A few months back her calendar got off, and after I ate breakfast she waited, with obvious impatience, at the door of my office under the impression we were about to start our usual "workday" together — with her snoozing behind the computer and me typing away in front of it.

No snow, just owls

The Dispatches blog reports a irruption of snowy owls in Seattle.

Volterra exceeds expectations

This evening Zorg and I dined at Volterra, a Northern Italian restaurant that opened in Ballard earlier this year and has received high praise from the local foodies. It's not for everybody; many of the diners who left comments about Volterra on CitySearch seemed put off by the lack of familiar Southern Italian dishes featured in the couple hundred other Italian-style restaurants in King County.

Zorg and I have quite different culinary backgrounds and interests, but we both found Volterra's take on Italian impressive and tasty.

We began with two of the house special cocktails. Mine featured a homemade limoncello (lemon peel liquor). It was quite smooth and well balanced. Zorg had an espresso martini; too sweet for my taste, but he liked it. Next time I want to try the grapefruit negroni.

The appetizers and salads were small, tasty and inexpensive (about $7 each). I had wild boar proscuitto on a bed of greens, followed by a little salad of greens, sliced roasted beets, and sliced grana parmesan. Perfect! Zorg had the special of the evening, veal-stuffed calamari in a light tomato sauce. The big calamari tubes were as tender as a rigatoni, and the stuffing was complex and interesting.

The main courses were substantial. Zorg chose one of the specials, wide noodles with ragu. It was one of the best ragu sauces I've ever tasted. I had lobster ravioli in a lobster sauce. The ravioli were stuffed with big chunks of succulent lobster. The lobster sauce, with cream and tomatoes, wasn't quite on target, however. Again, both dishes were reasonably priced at about $18 each, and we took quite a bit home with us in boxes. Desserts at Volterra are intense; I had a panna cotta with an extremely fragrant floral honey and fresh strawberries. Zorg went for a semi-freddo, two flavors, with a flavored whipped cream. The combination was decidedly heady, more to his taste than mine.

Volterra's unerring selection of top-flight ingredients, from the tender greens to the out-of-season strawberries, allows them to cook up dishes with vivid and complex flavors -- without covering dishes in overpowering garlic sauces or tsunamis of dark green olive oil that leave you feeling hung over the next day.

OK, so we completely overdid it. The next time I go back, I'll likely stick with a cocktail, appetizer and salad -- in part because those were the most interesting offerings. I wanted to taste every single one they had on the menu!

I mention the prices because the evening before I'd eaten at a similarly priced restaurant in Ballard and the food wasn't half as impressive.

My only caveats: The recorded music -- more industrial trance than jazz -- is just too LOUD. And, like many of Seattle's trendy new eateries, a table for two is practically on top of the table for two next to you. This is not the place for an intimate conversation. If you open your mouth, just put a forkful of pappardelle with duck sauce in it.