Loxosceles

and this:



and this:



Find out what Yellowstone looks like tomorrow.

We went to the state fair.



There were chickens ...



... and even multicolored chickens ...



... but my favorite hairdos were on the ducks.



When chickens have ridiculous multi-colored hairdos, they really look the part. Like, "I'm a rock star!" or "I'm a clown!" But the ducks don't really get into the character. They're like "I'm a duck." A duck with a great hairdo, that is.

I caught a sheep mid-baa:



and some pigs during their nap:



These guys were really rocking their harmonicas



and these seals were trained to plop their heads on anybody who posed for a picture.



I can't forget the butter sculpture



but most amazing of all is the tiny state fair inside the state fair.



I looked, but I couldn't find a tinier state fair inside of it.

More photos are here. The state fair website is here, but you can't see it for yourself until next year.

I love to travel, and I love to fly. Sure, the seats are cramped, the planes are often late, and the TSA staff perpetually uptight and cranky, but you just can't beat ACTUALLY FLYING through the ACTUAL AIR as a method of transportation. It's like an amusement park ride that lasts for hours, and gives you a chance to catch up on your reading.

As a kid, my family lived in a USAir hub city and every flight was a nonstop. Now, I live in a little podunk town and have to take three or four planes for every trip. There's nothing like landing hungry and thirsty, looking forward to a nice lunch, when your plane is late and you only have five minutes to run to another terminal to catch the next flight.

So I learned, early in my podunk traveling days, to always bring a full water bottle with me to the airport. (To keep with the times, I now bring an empty bottle, and find a water fountain as soon as I'm through security.) And on those long, lunchless flights, a bag of scones stuffed in your carry-on is a lifesaver. It doesn't even matter if they get crushed; the crumbs taste just as good.

I have a hard time predicting whether I'll get hungry for food or hungry for candy, so for today's flight I made half my scones sweet and the other half savory. Don't let the unknown scare you: the savory cheese scones smelled almost like a pizza coming out of the oven, attracting both dogs and people to the kitchen, even the people whose reaction was "you put CHEESE in your SCONES?". They quickly changed their tune!

You can whip up these scones in just a few minutes, so long as you have heavy cream in your fridge; no need to soften any butter or bother with eggs or oil. The cream is the secret ingredient, making the scones light and fluffy. They'll be fluffier the less you stir the cream, so if you're using a mixer, only turn it on for a few short seconds.

I firmly believe that these scones are, if not healthy, at least better for you than anything you'd get at the airport newsstand on your way to your gate. Feel free to vary the ingredients. Scallions go particularly well in cheese scones; fruity scones are delicious with lemon juice in place of the vanilla extract.

These two half-batches can replace breakfast and lunch for 1-2 ravenous travelers, with some left over. If you're staying home, that works out to 12-18 medium sized scones to eat at your leisure.

Sweet cranberry oatmeal scones

• 1/2 pint cream
  
• 1/2 cup sugar
  
• 1 tbsp baking powder
  
• 1/4 tsp salt
  
• 1/2 cup quick oats
  
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries (or try other dried fruits or nuts)
  
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
  
• 1.5 cups flour
  

Preheat the oven to 350, and mix all ingredients except the flour. Slowly mix in the flour to make a fluffy dough. (You may have some flour left over; that's fine.)

Transfer the dough to a baking sheet, and pat it into a round cake. Cut the cake into triangles, as you would a pizza (or form the shapes of your choice, say round or square), and space the scones equally on the sheet. Bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes, or until the corners just start to turn golden-brown.

Savory cheese scones

• 1/2 pint cream
  
• 1 tbsp baking powder
  
• 1/4 tsp salt
  
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder
  
• 1/2 tsp dried oregano
  
• 1/2 tsp dried basil
  
• 1/2 cup grated pepper jack or sharp cheddar cheese
  
• 1.5 cups of flour (I used half white flour and half wheat)
  

Prepare as for sweet scones, mixing the flour in last, and dividing the dough into triangles or the shapes of your choice. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes, or until the corners just start to turn golden-brown.

For such a short trip, I sure spent a lot of time in airports. I even nodded off on a plane for the first time ever. (Usually I can't sleep on planes even if I want to).

I sort of organized a herd of cats perl hackers into meeting for dinner. We went to a Malaysian restaurant called Penang (it's the first restaurant you'll see from the train stop in Chinatown). The food was delicious, and the table had a lazy susan thing in the middle. There were ten of us, and everybody shared, so I had a delicious vegetable curry, chili tofu, mango tofu, tofu with peanuts and vegetables, and so many other tasty things I can't recall. Peanut pancakes for dessert, and coconuts to drink. (They THWACK a coconut with a cleaver, peel the lid back, and you drink what's inside with a straw). I didn't have one, but I seemed to impress most of the table with my ability to drink bubble tea without gagging. (I guess that's a rare skill.)

I left my camera at home to save space in my bag. My rationale was "I didn't take pictures of anything interesting last year". Turns out I have another good reason: everybody else is taking pictures, so I don't have to!

Today I packed the lightest I've ever packed for a 5-day trip: 4 sets of shirts/underwear/etc; toiletries; laptop/phone/ipod all with chargers and spare batteries; and a bunch of knitting to keep me busy while in transit. Total volume: One messenger bag that fits easily beneath an airplane seat. Woohoo! The only things I chose to leave behind were my camera, my swimsuit, and a couple of skirts/pants. (It's OK, I still have enough to clothe me for the week).

The conference starts for real tomorrow. I expect to have so much fun I forget to blog it. Wish you were here.

I can't believe I went to a natural dyeing workshop and didn't bring my camera!

I had a great time. We dyed with madder, indigo, and weld (plus a few other additives) and came up with a blood red, a light orange-red, a bright yellow, a bright grassy green, a dark blue, a grayish color (it was supposed to be a light blue but something went wrong), a dark blackish purple, and a deep chocolate brown. I'll post pictures of the skeins once I've washed them.

My coworkers also had a great time, since they got to say things like "Beth couldn't come to work today. She's dyeing."

The workshop was taught by Mehmet Girgic from Turkey. (He had some of his carpets there, and they were just amazing.) It was held by Theresa at Woodscape Artistry in Oneonta, NY. If they do this workshop again it will probably be spread out over 2-3 days. Ideally you mordant the wool and prepare the dyebath on Day 1, and then dye the wool on Day 2. Mehmet also says that a good purple takes two days.

I've been shopping for dyes so I can experiment on my own. The Dharma Trading Co. has madder and indigo, but none in stock right now (sad story - their supplier died. His daughter is taking over the business). Maiwa has madder and indigo in stock, but you can't order online. I haven't found a source for weld yet, so maybe I'll try some other yellow, like marigold.

I have so many pictures of the stuff I saw this weekend at the Strolling of the Heifers in Vermont. Here's a peek:


A strolling heifer.

Of course I had to knit something in the car:


We visited an alpaca farm. Chris bought the fleeces from (I think) these two cuties:


That's it for now. More later, when I'm less tired, or more tired, or not sneezing as much or something. (I think I've either got allergies or a cold. Not sure which, but it's unpleasant.)

I've been perusing some travel-related sites (inspired by onebag.com, the likes of which I will post about soon).

I've always liked browsing through travel gear - the items are often unusual, ingenious, and cute. Some of them skeeve me out, though, and not just because they're only available in taupe.

I guess it's because people who can afford to travel a lot, and can afford to buy special gear to do it with, tend to be old rich hypochondriacs. Or something. Do you really need "money socks" that hold that third copy of every paper you own? Do people in foreign countries really want your important documents that much? The "security" section of any travel-gear website showcases more paranoia than the Loompanics catalog. A doorstop alarm for your hotel room? Security wallets for a dozen different body parts?

I digress. That's not what skeeves me out. What skeeves me out are things like the SeatWrap, which covers your entire airplane seat so you don't have to touch fabric that somebody else's butt has touched. Or how about the (taupe) I Can Breathe Mask that protects your delicate nasal passages from "exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke". But, of course, only while you're traveling - foreign exhaust fumes must be worse than the domestic kind. Meanwhile, the SnacPac silverware kit protects you from the "iffy" silverware provided by restaurants everywhere but home.

I wonder if European travel catalogs sell iffy silverware to use when traveling to America.

Yesterday I biked 25 miles.

After work Teri and I rode from Cornell, through downtown, and up 96 on the other side of the lake. 96 goes uphill for several miles. We passed things that always seemed so far away when we drove to them, like the Museum of the Earth. We got to the place where the cycling club was supposed to meet, couldn't find them, and decided to bike on our own up to Taughannock falls. We asked for directions (twice), and followed them to the lower end of the park (on the level with the bottom of the falls). The lower trail isn't open to bicyclists, and the refreshment stand was closed for the day. Bored with that, we decided to check out the overlook 200 or so feet up. (That was a bigger hill than we expected. I think Teri almost died.)

The falls were gone. We're having a dry summer, and there wasn't enough water in the creek. One tourist, getting into his car, asked me "You pedaled all the way up here for this?"

While we were hanging out, talking, preparing for our ride back downhill, a group of cyclists coasted in. We recognized some of their jerseys. They were the ride we tried to meet up with, only we had the wrong time. We talked to a rider who suggested that we had taken a more hilly route than their ride ever would (well, they are the beginners' ride), and that there is a ridge between 89 and 96, so that by going from the latter to the former we went down a big hill that we had to come back up later. He said we had probably gone up 1400 feet, elevation-wise, since leaving downtown.

So we rode back with the club. Before we left work, we didn't know if we'd make it to the meeting place alive, much less be able to keep up with the group. Now it turns out we had taken a more strenuous route than they had, and we were able to stay towards the front of the pack on the ride home. Go us!

I recently learned how to stencil on T-shirts. (I just had to have an SGN Metal shirt, and inkjet transfers can't do white-on-black.)

This shirt is based on the sheep stencils we saw as graffiti in Reykjavík. I saw a few Icelanders wearing these sheep on their t-shirts, but could never find one in any tourist t-shirt shops. That's just as well, though. I made mine for $7 plus a few cents worth of freezer paper and fabric paint. That kind of money, in Iceland, wouldn't go any farther than 4 or 5 postcards.








close-up photos here.

As Chris and I drove through Iceland, we saw at least as many horses as we saw sheep. That's a lot of horses.

We went riding twice, both times crossing lava fields near the mountains (the inland portion of Iceland is all mountain). Since they're different from most horses you'll see outside of Iceland, I thought I'd say a little bit about them.

They're short (around 13 hands) and fat, but nobody calls them ponies. They are horses, hestarnir. They just happen to be conveniently within reach of the ground, so you don't need a mounting block to get on them. And if you ride through tall grass, the grass may brush your boots.

As you'd expect from reading about them, the horses were strong, sure-footed, and after a while you start to think of them as the normal size for horses to be (we never saw any tall horses in Iceland, anyway). They scrambled over rocks, up hills, across streams, and over various other terrains that I felt sure we would fall onto. Other things you'll commonly hear about Icelandic horses are that they are good-natured and smooth-gaited. This is mostly true: the first horse I rode was good-natured, and the second was smooth-gaited. :)

In place of the trot, the faster sections of our trail rides were done at a tölt, a gait that one guide explained to me as a four-beat gait similar to a pace, but slower and smoother. It differs from the faster "flying pace" in that the tölt has no period of suspension.

Icelandic horses' saddles are placed further back than I'm used to. I was instructed to put one hand on the biggest lump of muscle on the shoulders, then my other hand next to that, and finally the saddle. Many of the horses wore cruppers to keep the saddle from slipping any more forward than that.

According to the Internet, in 982 the Icelandic parliament (the Alþing, which still exists) passed a law prohibiting horses from being imported into Iceland. This apparently had to do with controlling the spread of disease. Icelandic horses can still be exported, though, and you'll find farms selling and breeding Icelandic horses all over the world (a quick google turns up several in the US and Canada).

Once upon a time, a very poor farmer and his wife lived in Iceland. They were so poor, they had nothing of value - except for a small gold ball that the wife used to weight her spindle.

Their next-door neighbor was an elf named Kidhus, who was known to be something of a klepto. You can see where this is going.

One nice sunny day (Iceland gets these sometimes, in the summer), while the husband was out catching fish for them to eat, the wife took her spindle outside to work. She dropped the gold weight, but when she turned around to look for it, it was nowhere to be found. She told her husband about it when he got home, and he decided to go find Kidhus and demand the gold ball back, or at least some compensation for it.

Maybe I should stop and say something about Icelandic elves. Back in the garden of Eden, God came to visit Adam and Eve. He met their little children, and He asked Eve, are these all of your children? She lied and said yes, but actually she hadn't had gotten around to washing up all of the children, and so she told some of them to go and hide in the back room. God saw through this lie, of course, and stated that from then on the descendants of the hidden children would always hide from people. So Icelandic elves are invisible to humans except when they choose to show themselves. Otherwise, they live just like humans. Those that live in fishing towns are fishermen, for example. Icelandic elves are a little bit magic, a little bit vengeful, and they are at the center of a lot of really good stories.

Now, Icelandic elves live in knolls and try their best to avoid humans, but this farmer knew an old trick to force an elf to come and talk to him. It's simple: you just take something big, like your walking stick, and whack the elf's house over and over and over again. So the farmer went THWACK THWACK THWACK all over the knoll, and the elf appeared.

	Who gave my house such a thwack?

And the farmer said,

	Kidhus, it's your neighbor back.
	My old woman must be paid
	For that weight that she mislaid.

Kidhus wouldn't return the weight, so he asked the farmer what he'd like in return. The farmer asked for a cow that would fill a twenty-eight-pound vat at each milking, and Kidhus produced such a cow. The farmer took it home to his wife, who milked it all night and all through the next day, until the vat was full. "What will we do with all this milk?" they asked each other. The wife decided she'd like to make some porridge with it, but of course they didn't have enough oats to make that much porridge, so the husband went over to Kidhus's knoll again, thwacked it all over, and had another exchange as before. He returned with a giant barrel of oats, and they made more porridge than they knew what to do with. In fact, after they were stuffed with porridge, and their animals were stuffed with porridge, the pot was still mostly full, and they sat around digesting and thinking about what to do with so much porridge.

The wife got the idea that they should take it up to heaven to give it to the Virgin Mary. Surely Kidhus could give them a ladder long enough! The farmer went back to Kidhus, and thwacked all over his knoll, and the elf came up and said "Won't anything ever make up for that damn weight?!" It took a bit of negotiation, but finally Kidhus agreed to supply them with the desired ladder, and he set it up for them.

The farmer and his wife took their buckets of porridge and climbed up the ladder, higher and higher. They got dizzier the higher they climbed, until finally they fell off the ladder and cracked their heads on the rocks. Where bits of their brains hit the rocks, they turned into white lichen; and where lumps of porridge hit the rocks, they turned into yellow lichen. And that is why Iceland is covered in white and yellow lichen, even today.

We are in Iceland and having fun! We finally found an internet cafe. How the heck many days has powerblogs.com been gebroken?! (we fixed it, i.e. renewed the domain which shouldn´t have expired so soon, at least according to Registerfly´s list of domains expiring in 30 days :þ :_(______ -- I hope that not all of my customers have left. :_(_____)

Reykjavik, by contrast, has been great. We have been walking around Reykjavik (it´s a really beautiful city). We swam in a geothermally heated pool and ate some of the best fish ever (A very nice friend of Chris´s father took us out to dinner). We saw the sun set behind the ocean (and then it didn´t get dark afterwards). Today we head out to Snæfellsnes for horses and kajaks and puffins oh my!

Chris and I had a really great time at our wedding yesterday. (We may have been the least nervous people there!) We had a lot of fun, we were glad to spend time with our friends and family there, everybody was really great, etc.

We're in Baltimore now, waiting for our laundry to finish so we'll have clean clothes to wear in Iceland. So I thought I'd post a few pictures. (just the honeymoon, of course; I was too busy getting married to take any pictures at the church or reception! I'm really looking forward to seeing the pictures everybody took. If you'd like information about getting official pictures, let me know and I'll pass on whatever info I receive.)

Here is the view from our secure undiclosed location in Pittsburgh (I can disclose it now: it was the Renaissance Hotel).


Here is the view from our Park-Sleep-Fly in Baltimore:


We will be posting more pictures here as they become available.

When posts seem to get a little slow around here, you may want to check out my recent bookmarks list. I've started bookmarking new, interesting, and bizarre things here; I update the list periodically. For example, the list currently has some stuff about SQL databases, Tuvan singers, motel signs, an awesome pancake recipe, a two-wheel-drive bicycle, and Icelandic language grammar.

Speaking of Iceland, here are pictures of some of its volcanoes:
Snæfellsjökull
Ljósuffjöl
Lysuhóll

I've also been reading up on Icelandic folklore. Note to self: do NOT be mean to elves. (maybe if I have time, I'll post some elf stories.)

YAPC continues. I've gone to a number of interesting talks, including "The Tester's Toolkit", "Perl Black Magic: Obfuscation and Golfing", and "Lexical::Attributes". The latter implements perl6 objects with full lexical scoping and everything via a source filter. I'm really looking forward to perl6, especially the objects.

Of course, Lexical::Attributes conflicted with the beginning of the pugs talk, so I missed out on that. But I already knew what pugs was, I guess. (it's an implementation of the perl6 spec in haskell. It's not an official perl project, but is meant more as a toy and tool for developers.)

Tonight was the cruise (they herded us onto a boat and floated us around the lake while attempting to extort money from us in exchange for books. I took the above picture as the sun started to go down.) I saw some interesting birds while we were still at the dock; as one flew by I saw the long head feathers and the gray-blue body and almost thought it was an inca tern. They stood on the dock, and looked for all the world like a cross between a great blue heron (the long-tailed, long-necked, long-legged tall bird most people have heard of) and a green heron (stumpier, uglier, but shows a family resemblance). Turns out they were black-crowned night herons, which forage at dusk.

I figure I'll try to post about YAPC as it happens. Last time I went to an event like this, it was the FSF associate member meeting, and I took a lot of notes but never posted them. I am fixing that now. The notes aren't totally done - I haven't gotten to the last two talks, which were really interesting - but everything else is there.

Now I forget what I came here to post about. Something about YAPC, I'm sure.

Here is an interview with the organizer of this year's YAPC.

Here is the page saying what a YAPC is.

Here is the wiki for this year's YAPC.

Oh well. More tomorrow.

I've been busy. A few weekends ago I had my second bridal shower, on Long Island, thrown by ctl's mother. It was really nice and I got to meet a lot of his family that I hadn't met before.

Now, I'm at YAPC. I just got here and had dinner with some people I know from IRC. The conference starts tomorrow. I'm pretty sure I saw Larry Wall standing around in the lobby earlier.

On the way up, I was driving up 96 (a country road that runs between Seneca and Cayuga lakes) when I thought I'd stop for some gas. I pulled up next to the pump, and just as I turned off my car, a cloud of thick white smoke blew at me from behind, enveloping my car. I couldn't see out the back or side windows. I didn't know what the hell was going on, where the smoke was coming from, whether it might possibly be coming from my car, whether it was even safe to get out of the car.

It turns out that gas stations have fire extinguishers built into the roof above the pump. The people in the gas station said they didn't know what set it off just now, but the gas pumps were shut off and there was white powder all over the place. They apologized, and gave me $6 from the register to go to the car wash down the street. It was a pretty surreal experience.

(But not as surreal as what happened the other day when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom: when I came back to my room, a deer was pressing its face against my window, looking inside my bedroom. Staring at me.)

Last time I drove through this part of New York, I saw farmers plowing their fields with teams of horses. Today, I saw horse-drawn buggies on the highway, and the gas station I stopped at (the one next to the car wash, the one that did not rain white powder on me) had parking spaces for horse-drawn carts. Note the hitching posts and the pooper-scoopers.

Anyhow, there wasn't much else of interest in my trip. I saw some vintage cars waiting in line for customs with me (that's a Sunliner and a Studebaker). Oh, and my directions took me to 89 Chestnut Crescent, a cute little house in a residential neighborhood, instead of 89 Chestnut Street, a hotel in a totally different part of town.

Thankfully, I called ctl (on 69-cents-a-minute Canadian roaming), and he saved the day.

(I'll be updating this post as I get more news) There's some bad snowstorm juju going on in western PA/NY. The highways I need to take to get home - 90 and 86 - are snowed in and have been closed. People are stuck in their cars on the highways, and the Red Cross is coming in to help out and find people places to stay.

Me, I just got stuck in traffic for a few hours. Eventually I found out what was going on (thanks, mom and dad!) and backtracked about 40 miles to get to the nearest open hotel room. I'm in Meadville, NY, at a hotel that fortunately has (pay) wifi.

UPDATES 11:00 pm: People have been stuck on 90 for over 8 hours now. The Red Cross is taking people out of their vehicles and to emergency centers they've set up in schools and fire stations. The good news is that the snow s finally letting up. There are problems though: first, the snow is too wet to be easily plowable. Second, all the empty cars left on the road are going to make it hard for the plows to get through. And third, the weather is warming up so much that all the snow (three feet in some places) may melt and flood the roads tomorrow.

37,000 people are without power in Erie. When I first got to the I-90 exit on 79, the first thing I noticed was that traffic on 90 was at a standstill and that traffic lights were out so somebody must have lost power. When I found out that Peach Street and Rt 20 were stop-and-go, I couldn't think of anything that could have caused all of those symptoms, especially since the weather was good. (Near me, there was no snow falling at all and the roads were only wet). When I hit traffic on 20 - which I had pegged as an alternate route along 90 - my dad tried calling the state police (couldn't get through), the Erie police (couldn't get through), and finally an Erie TV station, which had the dirt. My parents also found me a hotel that had a room open and allowed dogs, since Moxie is with me.

I had a dream that I went to Mars. I got onto a spaceship (it was roomier than an airplane, it was all orange inside, and there were a few rooms that you could walk around during the long voyage instead of sitting in your seat). I promised to call my mom as soon as I got there.

As we were landing on the runway, I took note of the scenery: the sky was blue, the terrain was all dirt and plants. The main difference between Earth and Mars, to the casual observer, was the presence of large red steaming volcanoes off in the distance everywhere you look. There were also other spaceships hanging around. They were the same rust red color, and they looked a lot like those tanks the jawas drove.

After we landed, something happened. All communication was cut off. The ship's radios didn't work, and neither did my cell phone. I couldn't call my mom. The spaceship couldn't talk to the base. We were alive, but stranded. My mom would never know I got in OK.

We lived in the spaceship for several days after that. Or maybe it was several months, or years. My companions got grouchier and grouchier. I didn't like them.

I think we made it back to Earth somehow.

I followed a link from Feministe to a Peaches mp3: "I can’t believe that Peaches, queen of the crotch, is featured on the Mean Girls soundtrack. Imagine all the parents of teenage girls freaking out when their daughters bring home a Peaches CD."

I ended up buying both of her CDs from eMusic. These and the Run Lola Run soundtrack are my new favorite discs.

In other news, we visited the Corning Museum of Glass today. The major advantage their Hot Glass Demo has over watching the glassblowing students at Alfred is that the guy at the demo finishes his piece in less time than it takes you to get bored of watching.

The building was large and curvy. There weren't any hallways; the walls and displays were not straight or regular. Anywhere you went, you felt like you were wandering. (Or lost. Or else you'd think you had seen everything when really if you turned a few more corners there was a whole nother half to the museum. I think this is a good thing though.) Toward the end I realized I hadn't captured any of that, so I took this picture of a random wall. These windows looked inside toward a courtyard. You can see some glassware on exhibit off to the side.

The exhibits were well done. There was a tower of casserole dishes with clear ones at the bottom, opaque ones at the top, and intermediate stages in between. It's the kind of thing that makes you go "wait - the white ones are made of glass?? They start out clear??" They do; the key is to add nuclei for crystals to form around. When the glass crystallizes, it becomes something more like ceramic.

Other exhibits tell the stories of (to name a few) Pyrex, fiberglass, mass-produced light bulbs and beer bottles, fresnel lenses, fiber optic endoscopes, and curved unbreakable windshields. The latter had a video looping on several screens: clips of people breaking, and trying to break, various types of experimental glass. The soundtrack, which you can hear before you see the video, was techno music interspersed with breaking-glass sound effects. They should sell CDs of that. It would be my fourth favorite album in 24 hours.

So, all of that was the "Innovation Center". And just when you're about to say "Is that all there is? Let's go home" somebody points you to the Gallery. There's a few little cases of art. Then a door. Then FIFTY BAJILLION little glass sculptures and vessels and plates and beads and instruments and giant chandeliers and naked women and then your head explodes.

There are more pictures here.