Notes on a Sleepless Night

I've been up most of the night. OK, all night.

It's kinda sorta weather related, or more specifically, it was the wind. Early on, the big breeze happening around here emanated from RT's snoring self. Just as he stopped, the real deal started up outside, and that was that.

I like wind. In fact, I like wind a whole lot. I just can't sleep when it is whistling in my ears.

In any case, I spent hour after hour listening, not just to the wind itself, but to all those things the wind played with around our house. I heard the neighbour's wind chimes, of course, but I also heard our eight foot tall lilac bushes as they swayed back and forth, losing the icicles that had formed in the branches.

The gusts were strong enough to get our shed door moving in its creaky way. They were strong enough to trip our motion detector lights, too.

Like I said, I enjoy a good wind storm, so I spent a fair amount of last night semi-bundled up out on our patio. It was warmish, well, for Alberta in January, and it's not like I was going to get any sleep. On nights like this one, I'm glad I live in a small city on the prairie, where it's still safe to sit out all night.

Before I moved to Canada, I spent 30 or so years in St. Louis, in the struggling midtown area of the city. The wind never really called to me there, but I sure would have liked to escape from the summer heat., particularly on long summer nights. At some point, we splurged and got air conditioning, but it's not really air, is it, once its had the life sucked right out of it by the conditioning part.

I remember one August night in the late 70s when it was Blanche Dubois hot. Longing for a breath of air, I climbed out of a second story window, onto the roof of the back porch, dressed in my nightgown. There was a tall tree in the yard, and I was confident no one could see me there.

They say that back in the days before WWII, whole families would take the streetcar to Forest Park where the wide lawns and lack of concrete promised a bit of relief from the heat. Fast forward a few decades. St. Louis wasn't any cooler, but no one thought about sleeping in the park, well, except for homeless people who slept there all year long.

Anyway, on that particular night I wasn't the only one driven outdoors by the intense heat. At 2 AM, the street below me, while not exactly crowded, wasn't empty, either. It seemed as if all the young men of the neighbourhood had come out into the night. There was a fair amount of activity, of the big city urban kind.  I didn't hear anyone yell "Stella" and none of the men below my leafy perch looked anything like Marlon Brando.

I didn't stay on the roof for very long. Even though I was hidden from view, it just didn't feel safe. More than that, I felt like a voyeur, as if I were seeing something a young, almost middle class, mother had no right to see.

It was hot and it was night and the streets did not belong to me.

 

posted by taming at 04:50 | link | comments (3)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: alberta, homelife

Sunday Afternoon in Tamingville

One of them works too hard, and the other one doesn't. If you think that Beanie looks guilty, you've figured her out. If you think she looks cute, she's got you snowed.

 

posted by taming at 11:58 | link | comments (5)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: homelife

Out Out Damn Crap

I've spent the day decrapifying. Wonderful word, isn't it?

I discovered it on the Major Geek site, a great place for those little software programs you need for all sorts of things. It turns out, someone wrote a program called "The PC Decrapifier" that removes all the crappy games and useless software you get when you buy a home computer. You can get it directly from the author here.

Anyway, the word is so much better than declutter, which is what they use on those bizarre home improvement shows, or purge, which they also use on TV. That one makes me think of Nicole Richie. Blech.

I use the word decrapify all the time now. Today, I should have decrapified my laundry room, or mebbe my bedroom. Instead, I spent 15 hours, give or take, decrapifying the code underlying this weblog. Yes, my tech compulsion continues.

Chances are it looks the same to you. It's supposed to. Under the hood, though, it is much improved. 

I started blogging on Motime shortly after it came into existence. I used a standard template for about, urmmm, 20 minutes, and then I started playing around. I started with some code developed by Firda Beka using her Firdamatic generator. I went on to use various other snippets of code, some I developed myself, and some from other code writing sites. I also added, then subtracted, various code-dependent 3rd party toys. Over time, I had collected quite a hodge-podge of code.

This is a nice way of saying that my blog template was loaded with crap.

Now, there are some advantages to using crap-filled code. No one but me could figure out what the heck was going on, which meant that the same template was unlikely to show up on someone else's weblog. And it was in the grand tradition of home grown geeks, as well.

Still, for some reason, I got code-proud this week, and the crap/clutter had to go. It doesn't validate, but that has to do with the blogger code Motime uses. My own shtuff is now shiny and bright.

Isn't it special?

 

posted by taming at 22:40 | link | comments (1)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: tech

Too Much Coffee?

I've probably had a little bit too much coffee. I know that's hard to believe, but, alas, it can happen to even the best of us coffee hounds, from time to time.

I successfully avoided a basket full of double chocolate chip cookies (home made by me, whilst wearing not just a bra, but other items of clothing as well) that sat staring me in the face, with their little chipster eyes; and calling me, with their little chipster mouths. I didn't have one—not one.

Unfortunately, I rewarded myself for this amazing feat by having a bit of a coffee fest.

The roast of the day was Sweet Maria's Ethiopian Late Harvest Yirgacheffe that Tom says will "will beat you with a flower". Well, today I looked for the flower in the Krups Moka Brew, a Bialetti stove top espresso pot, a French Press, and the Aeropress. I was so sure I would find that elusive flower, that I looked in some of those places two or three times.

<sigh>, no flower. I did, however taste some lovely tangerine overtones in the lighter roast I had on hand, and some equally lovely chocolate in the more darkly roasted batch.

That is part of the joy of home roasting. You can take the same green bens, and just by manipulating the amount of heat you apply to them, and the length of time you apply that heat, you can get a wide range of delicious coffee flavours, flavours that are completely unknown to the vast majority of people who start their mornings with what passes for coffee in most households.

That being said, it is possible to, urmmm, overdo it.

Fortunately, all this means is that I might stay up a bit later tonight than usual. Had I succumbed to the basket of cookies, I might not be able to find a pair of pants that fit around my waist . Then what would I do when I roast some more of these wonderful beans tomorrow?

 

posted by taming at 21:49 | link | comments (1)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: coffee, roasting

To Every Thing There is a Season

The good thing about working at home is that you can stay in your ratty old bathrobe all day long if you want to.

The bad thing about working at home is that you can stay in your ratty old bathrobe all day long if you want to.

In actuality, it doesn't really get all that bad unless the doorbell rings and I come face-to-face with a hard working letter carrier. I know she must be seething as she carries yet another heavy package to my door at 11 AM and is confronted with my fuzzy pink self.

However, it's not like I fail to understand that there have to be limits.

For example, I am incapable of making a meal unless I am dressed. I can do breakfast in dishabille, but any other sorta formal meal, or real cooking, requires a bra. And lest you have some picture of me standing over the stove baking cookies in nothing but my Maidenform (I bet I am dating myself here), rest assured, that is not the complete wardrobe list.

It's interesting, to me at least, to understand, or at least think about, how we structure our everyday lives.

Some of this is no more than that strange collection of habits we develop over time, including things that made some sort of sense in the past, but are pretty nonsensical now. When RT was growing up, ice cream was a much loved family treat. For some reason, they always bought vanilla ice cream, and it was always served with chocolate sauce.

I understand that there might be an emotional component in all of this, but, sheesh, the man hasn't lived at home for 35+ years, and he really could try just a little dab of chocolate sauce on coffee ice cream. You'd think he could have a dish of vanilla ice cream without chocolate sauce, too.

Nope.

It isn't all silly things either. I've developed some pretty idiosyncratic ways of living in the world. Sometimes they serve me well. Sometimes, not so much.

My Uncle Max died about ten days ago. I was very close to him, and I am very glad I got to visit with him a few months ago, before there was just no Uncle Max left in him. I didn't think it would bother me all that much that I couldn't go into New York for his funeral, but it did.

I needed some support, beyond that which RT could give me, as I dealt with Uncle Max's death. Gawdess knows, I have plenty of people who care about me, all of whom were more than willing to listen to me with empathy and love. I just couldn't talk about it, or write about it, very much.

That was somehow outside of the boundaries I had  established for myself in terms of how I communicate with people, what I share, and how much of my vulnerability I let other people see. So instead of "using" my network of loving friends, I sat around in my pink bathrobe all day long. I did techie things, because doing tech work in my bathrobe has a long, long history, beginning when I used to maintain and develop content for a huge website that required two hours a day of work before I went to my day job.

Oddly, I didn't begin to come out of this grief-based funk until I spent two days watching way too much TV coverage of Gerald Ford's death. My Uncle Max was buried in the way we do that if you are from a traditional Jewish family. There wasn't really a service, instead, 14 people who loved him stood at the side of his open grave, the day after he died, and after a few prayers, covered the plain wooden box with dirt. Because he was a WW II veteran, he had an honour guard.

He would have liked that.

And even though Uncle Max was tech impaired, he would have vey much approved of my spending this time of mourning building a website and redoing this blog.

 

posted by taming at 18:00 | link | comments (1)|
motimers subscribe to taming
  Del.icio.us  Mo'Tags: tech, homelife

Home   Blog   Roasting/Brewing   Resources/Links   About   Site Map 

Copyright © 2007 4cats2much

Web Counter