Yay, I Finally Have A Properly Formatted Head!

Yay, my earrings from Nicholas and Felice arrived today! Now I can finally walk around with a properly formatted head.

I bought them on Etsy a while back. I don't tend to buy jewelry for myself very often, but was unable to resist the HTML geeky humour of this handmade piece.

While corresponding with one of creators, I also discovered The Mechanical Philosopher, a personal blog with the intriguing tagline: "The musings of a dilettante on parenting, mechanics, philosophy and the background noise that is daily life, from beautiful Ruralburbian Philomath, Oregon." Nicholas and I exchanged several e-mails since. And this is one of the things I love about the Internet: how a chance interaction like buying a pair of nerdy earrings can put you in touch with such interesting and cool people.



I've been reading a great deal recently. The photo above includes some recent reads. I liked The Thief Queen's Daughter the best; it's the sequel to The Floating Island by Elizabeth Haydon.

I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I find I have to purposely MAKE time to read, else I get caught up in something else. One advantage of not having cable tv (for over two years now) is that I'm not tempted to turn on the television "just to see what's on."

Willpower still plays a factor, however, because it's still very easy to watch DVDs and recorded television shows. Last night I was torn between renting a movie and reading a book; I opted for the book instead. I ended up reading the entire volume in one sitting: The Last Apprentice: Night of the Soul Stealer by Joseph Delaney (third in the Last Apprentice series). I started the book in my office, then read it in the kitchen as I heated up my Sicilian Seafood Stew (leftovers from the previous night, see picture below), read it over dinner, finished it on the living room couch, curled up beneath a cozy quilt made by Beckett Gladney's family.

A satisfying read, and there's nothing like reading an entire book in one sitting. SURVEY: When's the last time you read in a book in one go? As soon as I finished Night Of The Soul Stealer, of course, I had to start another. My current read: The Astonishing Life Of Octavian Nothing: Traitor To The Nation by M.T. Anderson.



The bits of parsley in the stew above, by the way, were GROWN FROM SEED. I found parsley challenging to grow because of its glacial progress; most of my parsley plants died when we went to the cottage for two weeks (or were dug up by the Evil Neighbourhood Squirrels), but one brave seedling survived. It's finally thriving, just in time to be killed off by the frost soon, so I wanted to cook with it before then.



Speaking of food, I've posted a review of Queen Mother Cafe in blogTO. As I've mentioned in other Blatherings, it's a traditional lunch spot for Parki and me.

I've been very much enjoying listening to my recent CD purchases. Forgot to mention, by the way, that we (Walter, Jodi, Allison and me) listened to some filk CDs most of the way to and from Rochester. These CDs included Mich Sampson's Just Beyond, Courting My Muse, Seanan McGuire's Stars Fall Home (I will do a proper review when I get my actual CD), and Steve Savitsky's CD:



Coffee, Computers and Song!: Steve Savitzky's first album. Technonerdtypes will especially appreciate Steve's clever lyrics and sense of humour. Heck, even his tracks are numbered in hex! (Steve: "What did you expect? 12 hex is a hacker's dozen.") My favourite is The World Inside The Crystal, which won a Pegasus for Best Science Song in 1997.

"You can only see the shadows
Of electrons on a screen
From the world inside the crystal
That no human eye has seen."

The fabulous photos and layout in the CD packaging were done by my friend Beckett Gladney. You can find out more about Steve Savitzky at his homepage.

LINKS O' THE DAY

Pix Plz: I -lovedLOVED- this recent XKCD comic. (Thanks to Ray for the link)

Scenes from Lord of the Rings that might have been used as setups for bad commercials had the filmmakers not respected the material by Cody James, via McSweeney's. (Thanks to BSAG for the link)




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