Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Terrorists don't have missiles. Terrorists have VANS. A white-panel-truck defense shield, THAT would be worth our money." -- John Rogers, 2004-12-15 (thanks to cos for pointing out the essay it's in.)

I actually slept nearly eight hours this morning for a change. I didn't sleep especially well, but I did sleep a decent amount and even had a pleasant dream. I woke to see the expected large flakes drifting past my window, but just in case I thought I was still dreaming or something, and just in case anybody didn't believe the forecasts on last night's news which discussed the timing of today's snow relative to rush hour but gave a 100% chance that it would snow this morning, across the bottom of the television screen (which I had left on because the on/off button on my remote control doesn't work and I crashed rather suddenly last night, so I just muted the sound as I was nodding off) scrolled the message, "IT IS SNOWING IN BALTIMORE RIGHT NOW!" I'm, uh, so, er, like, ah, surprised at this, uh, startling news, dudes...

I don't recall how much we're supposed to get (yeah, yeah, "how is snow like sex," etc.) and am not looking forward to shovelling the sidewalk today if I need to (though I feel better prepared to deal with that now than when I was contemplating it yesterday when I felt terribly unwell), but I had been thinking a few days ago that winter is nearly over and that I would feel a little cheated if we didn't get one more snowfall. Not that I looked forward to clearing it or having it interfere with plans or sharing the road with people who undercompensate for conditions, overcompensate for conditions, or just plain get stupid in snow ... but once spring properly arrived, the winter would have felt incomplete in retrospect without just a little more snow.

Small pleasures: hearing a television weatherman last night use the word "sublimation" on the air. Correctly. And without covering his ass with a distracting paragraph of elementary-school remedial science to define it afterwards. (The word was in a parenthetical comment that viewers didn't really need to understand to get what he was saying, which is probably why he didn't throw in the grade-school science bit.)

And in even more trivial news, I recently watched High School Pygmalion ... uh, I mean She's All That, and despite some ooky characters, attitudes, and motives, and even though there were as many formulaic and predictable bits as I expected (including the "transform the ugly duckling by taking off her glasses" meme), I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I'd expected to. Not that I'm going to add it to my list of movies I tell other people they have to see, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Something I've been wondering about that an article that vvalkyri linked to reminded me I wanted to ask ...

When I'm driving around a curve, and it feels as though the car (the whole car, or just the back end) slides about a centimeter, what am I really feeling? Has that actually happened, or am I misinterpreting the combination of tactile clues I'm getting, and really it's just the suspension doing something funny? Is it really sliding more than it feels like? Less? It's not enough to notice a visible difference in position (at least not while moving at speed). Are any of y'all both familiar with the sensation I'm talking about and sufficiently knowledgable to answer this question, or are any of you willing to either drive the chase car or operate the video camera for a couple of hours while I try to reproduce the effect intentionally so I can find the answer experimentally?

The sensation feels different from what I know as the "smooshing over on the suspension" feeling. It's not usually accompanied by audible tire squeal. It lasts a very short time and does not seem to affect overall handling except to serve as a bit of a warning that I entered the curve faster than I really meant to. I'm very sensitive to the feel of the wheel, pedals, and seat when I drive, and have used these clues at a gut level for years, so I'm not worried about changing how I react to them, but I've never been quite certain whether what I think is really happening underneath the car -- the 'head" reaction as opposed to the "gut" reaction -- is accurate.

So far I've read up to late-Monday on my friends-page (and spot-checked a few individual journals for more recent entries, but yeah, I'm basically three days behind), completed one half of an annoying bureaucratic task (the other half requires going somewhere), sorted out some scheduling details for tomorrow, failed to nail down what time I'm supposed to be where tonight, and procrastinated shovelling the sidewalk with the excuse that it hasn't finished snowing yet. Feeling almost-virtuous and hoping I can convince myself it's enough to allow myself to slow down a notch and try to avoid tiring myself out before this evening. I still need to practice recorder parts and answer email. I now know the date of the wedding for which I'll be a bridesmaid, and it didn't land on top of anything already on my calendar (*whew*) though it might wind up keeping me from a gig that hasn't been scheduled yet (or rather, has probably been scheduled but the news hasn't gotten to the band yet).

I think I'll postpone tearing apart and reassembling machines for a couple of days.

Dinner with Mom got postponed because of the weather, so I went looking for dinner ideas in my kitchen. I decided that I was sortakinda in the mood for macaroni & cheese, but not quite ... but adding other things to it would make it right.

Macaroni and cheese and ... Cheese and broccoli works. And onions and cheese go together in quesadillas. Hot red peppers and cheese go together on pizza. So macaroni and broccoli and hot peppers and onions and cheese should work, right? Then I stopped and listened to myself think, and wondered, "Just how far can I take that?"

That particular combination does, of course, work, but I'm not sure it's because "goes with" is transitive. (Okay, the red peppers were a "gimme" because, like blue jeans and t-shirts, each goes with nearly everything else.) Of course, in this particular case we might really be talking about the distributive property of cheese instead of the transitive property of "goes with", so it might not be a good example to use anyhow.

The next "huh!" thought to cross my mind was how many things go with cheese, which led me to recall that on Tuesday, after I had answered a question by confirming that I am an ovo-lacto-vegetarian, not a vegan, someone (the Sheepie, I think) blurted out, "Gosh, can you imagine Glenn giving up cheese?"

The pepper in question, by the way, was one of the ones from the Huge Decorative Bundle O' Peppers that anniemal gave me. The thing that I'm not sure whether it's intended (by whomever tied 'em into bundles and shipped 'em to stores) as food or as decorations. I have no idea what kind of peppers they are, but they give off hungrysmell (that is, a scent that induces hunger, most noticeable when they've been enclosed in a container for a while and then the container is opened), they have some of that sun-dried tomato flavour, they're rather hot -- more so than they look like, especially given their size -- and they're a pain to cook with because they don't crumble worth a darn despite being rattly-dry, and when they get wet they're a little tough. So what I did was to soften one up under hot water (had to rinse the dust off anyhow), including filling it with water and pouring it out again a few times, then I sliced it into strips with a big knife and put it in the pot of boiling water a few minutes before the macaroni. The results were still chewy, but not annoyingly so, and the small strips made for pieces of manageable size despite the texture. What it added to the flavour of the dish was perfect -- worth the trouble.

And yes, I know that mac&cheese, especially if one starts with the stuff in a box, is supposed to be no-effort/no-fuss food, but y'all know the trouble I have letting plain food just be. Since I was nearly coordinated enough to handle a knife safely (no mishaps, just a couple of nervous moments) (I'm feeling a bit shaky, not as well as I felt at the time of my previous entry), I had to at least chop up some garlic, right? And once I had the knife and the cutting board out, anything that could be completed while waiting for the water to boil didn't count as "extra work", right? Isn't that the rule?

I guess I'd better go ahead and shovel the walk pretty soon.