i just got a text message from DHL, saying that two cartons of aparajita are set to arrive at my house on friday! 😉👍👍
All posts by przxqgl
pig-tures
apparently ezra has been talking to my father recently.
ezra texted me to say that my father had given him two photo albums that contain mostly pictures of me…
the fact that my father gave them to ezra, and not to me, is one of the reasons i haven’t talked to my father in a very long time, now. 😒
i believe this picture was taken between 1972 and 1974, and i believe it was taken in new york, before we moved back to seattle… i may be wrong, but the seamless backdrop was something that my father didn’t have room to set up more than a few times, and i don’t remember seeing it after we moved, but that could just be my swiss-cheese brain at work. the closer it was taken to 1972, the more “brand new” the trombone was…
of course, the original photo may have a date on the back, but because of the fact that i have COVID, currently, i can’t rush over to ezra’s place to look. 😒
this was taken on 221024 by someone at the fisher pavilion who wanted a picture of me, and i liked it so much that i asked for a copy of it. this is my current Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band uniform, and i was at the fisher pavilion to play for Festa Italiana, like we do every year… the coat is a new acquisition that i bought at a “purge-o-rama” sale at a costume shop in redmond. i have been looking at that, exact coat, in the display window of the costume shop, ever since i worked in redmond (in 1995 or thereabouts), and i finally went in because i had heard that the shop was closing (it’s not, they’re just moving to a new location… one without display windows), only to discover that they wanted $300 for it, but because of the fact that they were having a “purge-o-rama” sale to prepare for the move, they had reduced the price to $100… so i bought it immediately.
prior to that, i wore a uniform that i got from working for the Floating World Circus, after i graduated from high school. it was also red, but a lot it was also a lot more “normal” for a band uniform…
this picture, i believe, was taken in 1991, in anacortes, where the band that i was playing in at the time was playing for a parade.
the astute observer will immediately realise that the trombone depicted in all of these photos, is exactly the same. 😉
cannabis
i got 3 starts, yesterday: 1 GMO, 1 White Urkel, and 1 Runtz.
repotted them today. i got 5 new grow bags, but i only needed one, because i have 2 left over from last year. i bought 25 gallon bags, but they’re WAY too big, so i folded one in half (horizontally) and it’s still bigger than i need, but it’s what i’ve got. it will be interesting to see how the wider root structure affects the quality.
oy! 🤬
this is the fourth (or possibly the fifth) time i’ve had it. i’m fully vaxed, fully boosted, i wear a mask everywhere (inside), and i STILL got COVID! 🤬
stop the world… i want to get off! 😠
new art!
actual art… actually created… by me! 👍 incredible!
okay, they’re modeled after photographs, which i used as reference, but the artwork is not the photographs.
it’s amazing! 😎
what makes it even more amazing is that i created it on my tablet, with a stylus, the same as i would on paper, except that i can actually FIX wobbly lines, accidental brush strokes, and that sort of thing, WITHOUT having to start over from scratch…
and i can make animated gifs, as an added bonus… 😉
this may just be enough to start my sketchbook again… wouldn’t that be something?
ann moist ual fest ure ra ival nt
mump…
- 2023, 7 shares, $385.00 – $55 per share
- 2022, 15 shares, $750 – $50 per share
- 2021, 4 “virtual” shows, i played for 2 of them, no payment.
- 2020, 17 shares – cancelled at the last minute, because of the imminant pandemic.
- 2019, 13 shares, $520 – $40 per share
- 2018, 11 shares, $330 – $30 per share
- 2017, ?? shares, $480…
- 2016, 15 shares, $600 – $45 per share
- 2015…
- 2014…
- 2013, 14 shares, $490 – $35 per share
- 2012, 16 shares, $720 – $45 per share
- 2011, 14 shares…
as always, they included a note that says “Please don’t approach this as a paid gig or a money-making booking, because there is no financial guarantee…” blah, blah, blah, only this time they emphasised how much they appreciate our contributions, “each year we are amazed by the dedication and strength of the entire team…” and, once again, blah, blah, blah…
this is the second smallest check i have received since i started keeping track, and the smallest number of shares, from 4 to 10. i’m not the one making the decisions, but from where i sit (on the stage, in the band pit), i don’t see how it might be possible for us to get more than 7 shares, unless we increase the number of shows, or go for more than one week. given that this was the first time away from the palladium, and still being severely affected by the pandemic, both of those things are possible, i suppose.
urgh… creepy… 😒
okay, officially, ChatGPT works better than google.
when i upgraded to jammy, the application that i use to transcribe CDs — K3B — also got upgraded. because of the fact that i installed fresh, rather than upgrading, K3B was installed without the encoder needed to transcribe CDs into .flac files (why is still beyond me). i KNEW i needed to enable the FLAC encoder, but i couldn’t figure out how…
so i went to google, typed in “how to enable flac encoder in k3b”, and got a HUGE PILE of links, most of which were for how to transcribe FLAC files into audio CD format — exactly the OPPOSITE of what i want to do. then i typed in “enable flac encoder k3b” and got another HUGE PILE of links, most of which were EXACTLY THE SAME as the last time… although, this time, the top link was to the K3B manual, so i tried that, and got a couple of links which were mostly incomprehensible, primarily because they were talking about things that AREN’T K3B, or flac files. i tried several other combinations of queries at google, over the course of an hour or so, with similar results, getting more and more frustrated every time…
then i tried ChatGPT…
i typed in “how to enable the flac encoder in K3B”…
and it gave me PRECISE, STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS for how to enable the flac encoder in K3B…
and it WORKED!! 😒🤨🤔
officially, ChatGPT works better than google.
bounded chaotic mixing
bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability.
<sigh>… okay, i’ll update… 😒
we went to the campbell global snoqualmie tree farm, this morning, ostensibly to exercise dogs, but an ulterior motive was to scope out the “firewood” area, which is adjacent to the active logging, but they have logs pulled to the road and stacked, so that (if you’ve got a permit) you can go up there with a chainsaw and lop off firewood-length pieces, put them in your truck, and drive home without having to pay for it… thing is, the permit costs $300, which is about the same as a cord of firewood, but (if you’ve got a permit), you’re allowed to take up to 5 cords of firewood… plus, there’s literally 90,000 acres of trails that NOBODY else hikes on, because you’ve got to have a permit and a key… and, guess what? moe bought a permit when they went on sale, which is a little surprising because the permits sold out within a half-hour of going on sale… oh, and we have a pickup truck now… did i mention that before? we’ve had a ford f150 pickup truck for a little more than a year. it doesn’t get used for much — picking up loads of gravel, wood chips, or, soon, firewood (still got to wrassle up a chainsaw) — but it gets loaned to a whole bunch of different friends who need a truck for this or that…
i wrote to the newest member of the IOTM club last week, both from my hybridelephant.com account, and from my new hybrid elephant gmail account (because i’ve been having trouble with email, which is another story), and i have gotten no response, which makes me REALLY suspicious about this subscription… but, at this point, there’s absolutely nothing i can do about it, except to cancel the subscription and refund their money… which, at this point, is a little extreme, since, basically, the ONLY thing they’ve done is make me suspicious… but they’ve made me suspicious, which is very suspicious, and i really feel like there should be more than i can do to alleviate my suspicion.
the email thing is starting to grate on my nerves… fundamentally, there is NOTHING “wrong” with my email, but because of the fact that it doesn’t (by design) go through one of the “big guys” (i.e. micro$lut, yahoo, google, apple, etc.) i am finding that more and more services are either silently blocking my email, or producing more and more convoluted hoops that i have to jump through to get my email to… the people i do business with, my customers, suppliers, etc… 😒 at this point, i’ve gone back and forth with micro$lop so many times that my host provider is no longer willing to fight with them on my behalf, and has recommended that i route my mail through google or micro$hit to solve the problem… but i don’t see why i should have to pay — especially, i don’t see why i should have to pay micro$not — to solve a problem that micro$hite is causing to begin with. at this point, when i suspect that there may be a problem (like when a customer has an address @hotmail.com or @live.com, or something like that), i send them a response from my hybridelephant.com account, and if i think it may have been “interfered with” in some way, then i send them another response from my gmail account, which usually does the trick. but it’s grating on my nerves because it SHOULDN’T be this way, and i SHOULDN’T have to worry about whether or not my emails have gone through… it’s not like i’m running an open relay, or something like that, i’m just not willing to send my email through one of “the big guys” because, to be quite frank, i don’t trust “the big guys”… and it’s behaviour like i have seen from micro$leaze that causes me not to trust them. 😠
HMMMMM… 🤨
so i got another subscriber to the IOTM club, and at first everything looked okay… but the closer i looked, the more weird it became… everything came out the way it’s supposed to, so, technically, i am in the clear if somebody’s credit card was stolen and re-used, but i still wonder:
specifically, i wonder how a person with one name, in one location, can order something with a card that is for someone else’s name, in a completely different location, on the other end of the country. 🧐
this is very definitely not “normal”, if there ever were such a thing.
i’m not sure what to think of this…
i was reading back through my old blog entries, and i came across this one, about my perceived connection between the movie “La donna più bella del mondo” and the opera “L’Arlesienne”… i specifically remember thinking “internet would be a much better place if you could ask questions in human language and not be inundated with meaningless information that is only intended to sidetrack you from what you really want to know.” it’s now a couple years later, and ChatGPT is a thing that didn’t exist a couple of years ago, so i wondered if, maybe, it could cut through the horseshit and get me somewhere closer to the answer…
Rev. DeLuxe: is the movie “La donna più bella del mondo” a remake of the opera “L’Arlesienne”?
ChatGPT: No, the movie “La donna più bella del mondo” is not a remake of the opera “L’Arlesienne”. “La donna più bella del mondo” is a 1955 Italian musical film directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starring Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio Gassman, and Robert Alda. The film tells the story of a woman who becomes a famous movie star and the men who fall in love with her.
On the other hand, “L’Arlesienne” is a one-act play by French writer Alphonse Daudet. It was adapted into an opera of the same name by Georges Bizet, which premiered in 1872. The story revolves around a young man who falls in love with a woman from Arles, but she is already married and eventually drives him to madness.
Therefore, these two works are not related in terms of story or content.
Rev. DeLuxe: is it possible that the movie “La donna più bella del mondo” and the opera “L’Arlesienne” are related in some way?
ChatGPT: There is no known direct connection between the movie “La donna più bella del mondo” and the opera “L’Arlesienne”. However, it is possible that there could be some indirect influences or inspirations between the two works.
For example, it is not uncommon for filmmakers to draw inspiration from other works of art such as literature, music, or theater. It is possible that the filmmakers of “La donna più bella del mondo” were influenced by the themes or characters of “L’Arlesienne” and incorporated them into their own story. Similarly, the opera may have influenced other aspects of Italian culture, such as fashion or language, that were then reflected in the movie.
However, without any concrete evidence or statements from the creators, it is difficult to determine if there is any direct or intentional connection between the two works.
Rev. DeLuxe: why might i be under the impression that the movie “La donna più bella del mondo” and the opera “L’Arlesienne” are related in some way?
ChatGPT: There could be several reasons why you might be under the impression that the movie “La donna più bella del mondo” and the opera “L’Arlesienne” are related in some way.
One possible reason is that both works are part of Italian and French cultural heritage, respectively, and share certain characteristics or themes that are common to their respective artistic traditions. For example, both works could explore themes of love, beauty, and the human condition, which could give them a similar emotional tone or feeling.
Another reason could be that you may have come across information or reviews that compare the two works, even if they are not directly related. This could create an impression in your mind that the two works are somehow linked, even if there is no direct evidence to support this claim.
Finally, it is also possible that your impression could be a result of a simple misunderstanding or confusion between the two works, especially if you have not seen or heard either work firsthand.
ouch! 🤣
🍄 hmmm…
i tried to measure out .01 gram of mushrooms. it wouldn’t go. i tried measuring .05 gram, and that worked… in the process of reducing the measure, i observed the scale registering .04 gram, momentarily, but i get the very strong impression that my electronic scale (which i bought through amazon) won’t do the trick. i’ve got an old triple-beam scientific scale, out in the garage, that, it’s my recollection, will measure down to .001 gram, but the last time i used it (which was shortly after we first moved in to our OLD house, i.e. close to 20 years ago), i recall having to put a small coil of wire that weighed a tenth of a gram, on the platten to get it to balance correctly… but it’s an analogue scale, so there’s pretty much nothing that can go wrong, apart from corrosion and dust…
on the other hand, i could start titrating up, starting at 1 gram, just to keep things “scientific”… 😉 and to satisfy my desire for a REAL trip… 😉😉 i’ve actually got enough that i could take 5 or 10 grams without too much difficulty… unfortunately, my experience leads me to believe that such an event would be a multi-day process, and, at this point, there’s not an awful lot that would prevent me from doing things for which i might get in trouble during a multi-day trip, which is NOT my goal. 😉😉😉😉
i guess that settles that…
i guess i’m a hindu, now…
i guess there was some doubt, considering that i don’t believe in “god”, in the sense of the word recognised by most people… even other hindus… not to mention the fact that i was born in peoria, which is nowhere near the indus river, and “technically” to be a “hindu” means being born on the indian subcontinent, south of the indus river…
Hindus subscribe to a diversity of ideas on spirituality and traditions, but have no ecclesiastical order, no unquestionable religious authorities, no governing body, nor a single founding prophet; Hindus can choose to be polytheistic, pantheistic, monotheistic, monistic, agnostic, atheistic or humanist. Because of the wide range of traditions and ideas covered by the term Hinduism, arriving at a comprehensive definition is difficult. The religion “defies our desire to define and categorize it”. A Hindu may, by his or her choice, draw upon ideas of other Indian or non-Indian religious thought as a resource, follow or evolve his or her personal beliefs, and still identify as a Hindu.
but i got something in the mail, today, that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is SOMETHING in me that recognises hinduism as the right spiritual path for me, and i didn’t realise it until i looked it up, when i got the object, this afternoon.
the object i got was a stone. specifically, it is a red “sonbhadara shila”, which, like the shivalingam is the stone that represents shiva, and the shaligram shila is the stone that represents visnu, the sonbhadara represents ganesha, and when it is combined with four other stones, which represent other deities, they become the object of worship for “panchayatana puja“, which was introduced by adi shankara as a way to stop people from fighting over which deity is supreme, but it is apparently a lot older than shankara…
but it’s just one stone, right? how could a hunk of rock make the determination for me that i am a hindu, beyond a shadow of a doubt?… i hear you ask…
the reason is because, without realising it, over the past 40+ years, i have been collecting interesting rocks and crystals, and, again, without realising it, i have now amassed ALL FIVE STONES… the red sonbhadara was the last of them! 😉
the stones, and their corresponding deities, are: shivalingam represents shiva, pyrite, or “swarnamukhi” (स्वर्णामुखी – “golden face”) represents shakti (parvati, devi, or ambika), sphatik or quartz crystal represents surya, shaligram represents visnu, and sonbhadara represents ganesha.
i’m only about 90% certain that the black stone is, in fact, a shaligram. it came, carved that way, as part of a lingam and yoni set that i purchased from india, a number of years ago, and the stone was immediately replaced with a different lingam… however, i learned (again, today) that sometimes shaligrama are carved into lingam-shapes, and the stone doesn’t really resemble a shivalingam, otherwise, however it DOES resemble a shaligram… and, technically, the sphatik is supposed to come from the vallam river in tamil nadu, and the pyrite is supposed to come from the swarnamukhi river in andhra pradesh, and i’m fairly sure that mine don’t, but, from my standpoint, quartz is quartz, and pyrite is pyrite, regardless of where it’s from.
so, i guess that means i’m a for-real hindu now. 😉
also, i got some new, obscure incense: silver oud and mysore sandal, made by <insert fanfare here> shroff channabasappa and company! the company i thought was out of business, but apparently is going… well, not as strong as they once were, but going, none the less… WOO! 👍
get moist
20 years of blogging! 🎊
another milestone this week (this month, this year…) is that, as of today, i have been blogging for 20 years. i first started out at LiveJournal — my first “real” post at LJ, duplicated here for those of you who don’t want to use a LJ link (and i don’t blame you. 😉). i had a couple of posts on the same day, but they’re just tests, to see if the thing actually worked the way it was supposed to… and, oddly enough, i didn’t actually go to burning man that year, because i had a brain injury instead, which caused the people i told about it, later, to say that “now you don’t have to go to burning man, because you’ve already had a brain injury!”, which only made me want to go even more, to find out whether they were right or not… and, as it turned out, they were right. i can state, with authority, that burning man is a lot like having a brain injury: they’re both bizarre, unexpected, surrealistic, larger than life, and something i would wish to have happen only once in my lifetime. ultimately, the only major difference i can see is that fewer people die at burning man.
after my brain injury, i decided that blogging would be a good way to supplement my already failing memory, and so i started doing it more regularly… and, indeed, for better or for worse, it has been a good way to remember things that i definitely would have forgotten otherwise.
i gave up livejournal on 071130, after the “strikethrough”, other various shenanigans, and the final decision to sell to СУП in russia (and transferred all of the entries, so that there would be no reason to use LJ as a source), and moved to my own domain, which has changed homes several times, since then, but has always remained at przxqgl.hybridelephant.com.
i wonder if this is what everyone has been looking for…
today i took 1g (= two 00 capsules) and went for a walk with rye (our oldest dog). while i was out, i experienced a couple of things i have never experienced before. the first was, about halfway through the walk, i decided that i really wanted to be at home, taking a nap, instead of floating around deep in the forest.
ordinarily, when i have taken mushrooms, the LAST thing on my mind is taking a nap…
so, instead of going forwards deeper into the forest, i went back, and on the way i felt, distinctly, a couple of times, like i have in the past, just prior to passing out… only i didn’t pass out (if i had passed out, it turned out that there was an older couple, with a couple of yappy dogs, that would have found me within a few minutes), but, instead, i experienced a distinct “raising up” and “seperation” of my consciousness, to a point a little behind, and about 5 feet above where my body was — i remember looking at the path ahead of me, which i had always thought was relatively level, and thinking that it looked a lot more down-hill than i remembered — and, because of the fact that i was walking with a dog, i experienced a distinctly odd sensation as my body walked along behind the dog, but i was not part of my body. i got the distinct impression that, as it were, my body was an “automaton” that i was, nominally, in control of, but “i” was not a part of that body.
i have read a fair amount about ego death, both positive and negative, but it has always been a lot more of a “view from the outside”, as i was never really certain what, ultimately, they were talking about. 😉
but this puts everything in an entirely new perspective: if “i” — who i think i am — is NOT my body, then what is it? who am “i”, if not my body? and if my body is not “myself”, then, apparently, regardless of what happens to my body, “i” will continue to exist… अहं ब्रह्मण्सि तत्त्वमसि — AHAM BRAHMANSI. TAT TVAM ASI — “I am God. That Thou Art.” 😉
it’s possible that i experienced nirvikalpa samadhi. ॐ🙏
the amusing part is that i have read stories of people taking higher and higher doses of psychedelics in their attempts to achieve this mythical “ego death”, but i seem to have done it with a controlled, 1 gram dose. 🤣
the whole experience lasted, maybe, 45 minutes… from the time i was crossing the creek, including meeting with the older couple. basically, until i got to my car, which brought me back into my body again. i want to go back there.
ॐ अरुणाछलिष्वरय नमः — AUM ARUNACHALESWARAYA NAMAH
and, i want to tell you, it was a REALLY interesting experience when the aforementioned older couple and their aforementioned yappy dogs came down the path… i — or rather, my body stood to the side and put a hand on my dog as they approached, with their yappy dogs getting yappier and more aggressive, to the point where they had to pick them up, and walked past me with snarling, snapping little curs (to which i, or rather “my body” said “don’t worry, i understand”), all the while “i” was high up in the air, behind my body, making it go through the motions and try not to appear as altered as i really was… 🤣
hey!
i just realised… today is the 3rd anniversary of our moving into our (new) house… and now, the house even cooler than it was when we first moved in, because it has started to be “de-zeising-ified”: we’ve hooked up the complete HVAC system, replaced all the heating duct work, built a retaining wall, added a fence (and replaced that fence), pressure washed the deck, cleaned out the gutters (twice), built a new stair from the garage into the back yard, and gone through almost all of the huge stack of firewood they left us. and we’ve had a bunch of neighbours move away, and had new neighbours move in, so we’re not the newest family in the neighbourhood any longer! 🤣
moose
🫎
🍄
0.05g = ⅓ of a 0-size capsule
1200 ingested
1300 nothing. going for a walk.
1600 – after going up to the “yellow gate”* and getting my car stuck in ¾ of an inch of snow (🙄), i ended up going down to landsburg and walking down to the bridge. i DEFINITELY got the parts of the mushroom that were the most potent, this time (damn it! 😠), because, while i wasn’t inebriated, i was definitely feeling good… nothing visual, though. after walking to the bridge and back, i chanced upon a friendly bearded guy coming out of the security gate at landsburg crossing, so i asked him if there were public tours of the areas behind the “no trespassing” signs, with specific emphasis on trude and snoose junction. he gave me a physical address in north bend, and told me to inquire there… which is more information than i have gotten from internet in two years of hunting!
*the “yellow gate” is the “secret back entrance” to taylor mountain, but it’s still more snowy than my jikatabi like, and it’s up hill, which, along with getting my car stuck, just didn’t seem worth the effort… and i got my car unstuck, for which PRAISE GANESHA! 🐘
what happened?
in 1978, i was a just-out-of-high-school musician and composer of “unusual” music. i won the state award for music performance playing a composition that i wrote, which was a companion piece for the bach ‘cello suite number 1 in g, first movement; after playing the first movement of the suite number one, instead of the second movement, i played my composition. it was for solo trombone, which meant that it was in bass clef (like the ‘cello suite), but, unlike the ‘cello suite, it did not have a time signature, key signature, nor tonal center… or, it might be said that it had “multiple, unrelated” tonal centers 😉. it also had a section where the only way to play it correctly meant being able to circular breathe.
as an aside, in another competition when i performed this pair of pieces, i was interrupted halfway through my performance, by someone who came in and started talking with one of the judges, because they thought i was “warming up”… 😒 once they had realised their mistake, and apologised to me and the judge, i was given the unprecedented option of starting over, which, under ordinary circumstances, was NEVER allowed.
not many (who am i kidding, it was really absolutely no) other people were interested in even looking at the music i composed, much less performing it, or even trying it out in rehearsal… even in classes where developing composition skills was the whole point of the class. 😒 eventually i “transitioned” into composing more “popular style” music, and that was that…
in 1978, the composer Wieland Hoban WAS BORN, and he is now famous for “unusual” music, like this performance, by Pavlos Antoniadis of “when the panting STARTS”, a composition written “separately for the pianist’s ten fingers, as an ensemble rather than a unity”…
😖 waaa! it’s no fair! he gets to do it and be famous, and i didn’t! what happened to people’s idea of what music is between then and now? grumble, mutter… 😒
boycott western digital! 😠
Western Digital confirms digital burglary, calls in law enforcement
western digital is, ultimately, responsible for the great cloud drive crack of 2021, and they still haven’t made good. the only thing they’ve done is offer me a 40% off coupon for a new cloud drive. 😠 as if 40% off is going to console me after 40 years of my personal data, artwork, music, and everything else, was summarily deleted by some low-life miscreant who doesn’t even know me. as if 40% off would even REMOTELY convince me to change my mind, and purchase another storage drive from them, EVER… 😠
i say, the more WD experiences shit like this, the better i like it, and if the person or persons who did this, ever need a place to hide out, my house is always open.
🍄
0.10 g = ⅔ of a 0-size capsule
1530 ingested
i’m not expecting much in the way of sensations, but, judging by the previous encounters, we shall see.
1630 nothing. however, i am going for a walk.
around 1730 i noticed a definite change in my mood, but nothing else.
1830 nothing psychedelic visually or otherwise, but a definite change in my mood…
gawd DAMN it. 😠
w(h)oo…
seven performances of the moisture festival later…
the first performance of the moisture festival, i wore my purple suit, with the purple bow tie and the purple tando hat… and the guy who was in the attendent’s booth at the parking garage had a blue beard, and was dressed all in blue. when he saw me, he said “you’re as purple as i am blue!”… he said his name is blue. 😉 i’m taking monique to a moisture festival show on sunday, specifically because i want to see this guy called “the broken juggler” — michael rayner — who, i think, lives in tacoma, and is around 60 years old. he has a regular thing where he posts videos of himself: he has a pillow that has nicholas cage’s face made out of sequins, and, while he’s rocking on a rola-bola, or standing on a spring-loaded wiggle-board, or something like that, he does some sort of complicated juggling thing, or he spins a flaming cheeseburger on a parasol, or he does some fancy flower-stick maneuvers with a tennis racket, or something like that, with one hand, and, with the other hand, he strokes the sequins on the pillow so that nicholas cage’s face appears, and then he throws the nicholas cage pillow over his back, and sinks it in a basketball hoop behind him. 🤣
i’ve got a sousa band rehearsal this evening. first one of the 2023 season. we’re down a tuba player and at least one trombone player – the tuba player and his wife, who plays E♭ saxhorn (it’s a small horn that looks like a baritone, only with a trombone-like bore, and tuned in E♭, so it is between a french horn and a baritone. reads in treble clef. she plays french horn parts, most of the time.) are moving to portugal and the trombone player is moving to italy. i MAY have located one or two other trombone players, which would free me up to play tuba, although i don’t really want to, because i know ALL the trombone parts, but i know NONE of the tuba parts… and tuba is a really important instrument in a large ensemble, which means i am not even the best choice for a replacement tuba player…
i haven’t taken mushrooms for 10 days, and the weather is changing to the kind of weather in which i like to take mushrooms. this year, moe got permits to go and cut firewood in the “campbell-global snoqualmie tree farm”, a huge tract of land northeast of fall city, which, technically, is all private property (unless you have a permit). there are a whole bunch of rules about what you can, and cannot do while accessing their property, and there are even more restrictive rules about who gets a permit, which mean that, if i decide to go there to hike while taking mushrooms, i can’t bring a friend (other than moe, who also has rights to a permit) unless they buy a “day pass” at the perimeter gate, they can’t ride in my car, and they can’t take their own car in to the main parking lot, which is about five miles uphill from the perimeter gate. 😒 but, apart from that, it goes from I5 in the south, all the way up to highway 2, in the north, and it’s probably 25 miles from east to west, and it’s all forest, logging roads, and no civilisation for miles.
before the moisture festival started, i had my first serious fall off my unicycle… but, because of the fact that i had bought safety gear (knee and elbow pads), literally THE DAY BEFORE, and was actually WEARING that safety gear, i didn’t get as injured as i could have. however, i did get a scrape on the side of my left hand, and i bent my glasses to the point where i had to take the lenses out to get them straight-ish… and they’re still not as straight as they were. i’ve got an appointment with a new eye doctor, with my new vision insurance (thanks to moe), on friday.
moist
gearing up for the moisture festival (starts march 23, i play one show on the 23rd, and then two shows per day on the 24th, 25th, and 26th), AND one of my favourite costume shops is having a “purge-o-rama sale”, in preparation for moving to a new location… so…
😉
🍄
0.25g = 1 0 capsule
12:00 pm ingested
at 1:00 i noticed some yawning and a desire to pee
at 2:00 i noticed some twinkly edges around things, and had a strong desire to be somewhere other than in front of the computer, but i can resist for a while, because i also got 4 new CDs in the mail, and i’m working on transcribing them onto my cloud drive… yes, music takes priority over everything.
at 4:00 i’m still yawning, and i definitely feel elevated, but not necessarily high… unless i hold still for 30 seconds or more, then i can REALLY feel it. 😒
what i am learning from titrating like this is, basically, no matter how fine you grind it, any one 00 capsule, or one 0 capsule, is going to be VASTLY different from any other 00 or 0 capsule. 😒 NOT what i wanted to learn — primarily because i could have told you that before i started this experiment… 🤬
SCHENECTADY???
i ordered a CD from france. it’s Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and The Wolf”, performed by the Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Järvi, with Lina Prokofiev as the narrator.
in my opinion, the only better performance is the one in which Victor Borge is the narrator, but i’ve already got that one.
i’ve been tracking the package (as i often do, particularly when they are from places other than the united stoats), and, according to the web site, it should be out for delivery, today…
in schenectady?????
🤯
🍄
0.50 g = 1 00 capsule
12:00 pm ingested
1:00 came on
5:30… wasn’t paying attention, but haven’t felt anything for more than an hour.
😒
alarming
yesterday was a good day. the weather was beautiful, and i did NOT take mushrooms, but it felt like i had. i had the feeling that everything was going right. i went to my circus class, and despite the fact that i didn’t free mount more than twice, i felt like i was riding really well, and i practiced riding backwards and idling without any problems… i even idled once without holding on to the bar that i was using to steady myself. i walked the tight wire forwards AND backwards, without falling, and i identified “bad habits” that i had been doing, unconsciously, that affect my ability to balance. i did “rim walks” on a german wheel, which gave me an idea that i want to try out, which is riding my unicycle with my hands above my head, to change my center of balance… i cleaned the furnace filter the day before, which was the reason our house was so cold, and cleaning the filter fixed the coldness, which made me feel like i had accomplished something. at one point, i actually remember thinking that — MAYBE — this was a sign that things are going to change, my life is going to get better, and that i won’t be so depressed any longer.
and, this morning, i woke up in a really foul mood. depressed as hell, and the weather is still not warm enough to take more than a minimal dose of mushrooms…
maybe tomorrow.
DEPRESSION SUCKS! 🤬🤬🤬
🍄
1.00 g = 2 00 capsules
12:30 pm ingested
1:00 came on (while driving to tacoma)
4:20 still going
phoooooaaarrgggh!
so, the other day, i mentioned that our washing machine was broken, and that they scheduled the repair for today.
this morning, the repair guy showed up, plugged in the washing machine, and could not get it to malfunction. 😒
then he asked me if i had the part that he was supposed to replace. i told him that i had paid for it, but i assumed they were going to ship it to him, since i don’t know how to install it.
the guy said that they would have told me if they were going to ship it to me, that he didn’t have the part on hand, it would take two weeks to get it, and that we would have to reschedule another appointment. then he said that it was going to cost almost $500 for the part, and almost $200 for the “trip charge”.
i calmly told him that i had already paid for the part, i wasn’t going to pay more for another part, he could go fuck himself for the “trip charge”, and, politely asked him to leave our property. 😠
it’s a really good thing i decided to do laundry at the laundromat YESTERDAY (24 hours ahead of the appointment, and i wasn’t 100% sure they were going to fix the machine), because then i would have been REALLY angry. as it was, i had another load of laundry ready to go, and, because of the fact that the machine was functioning again, i took advantage of that fact and did it at home, rather than going BACK to the laundromat for a second time this week.
however, i was very definitely NOT the person to call GE and get things straightened out… because if i called them, even now, several hours later, when i have had some time to calm down, it would NOT go well for anybody, and the probability of GE EVER coming to our house again would be significantly diminished.
so moe called.
she managed to get through to them WITHOUT having to wait on hold for a couple hours, because they had actually texted her to arrange for today’s appointment, so she just called them back. the lady she talked to was tremendously apologetic, intensely infuriated with the GE drone that i had talked to originally, AND the repair dude who showed up today. she said that the part had actually been purchased (HAH!), and was supposed to arrive by fedex this morning, but fedex had changed their schedule without notifying us (GE knew about it, but they didn’t notify us 😠). they rescheduled the part delivery for tuesday, and rescheduled another appointment on wednesday.
🤬
this is the kind of thing i would have gotten in trouble for, when i was younger…
i really want to go exploring in the cedar river watershed.
the place that is surrounded by a fence, with big, dire warning signs that say “NO TRESPASSING – $10,000 FINE!”…
but, the thing is, there are a couple of “communities” near my house which i really want to go and visit: Trude, and Snoose Junction. if you plug those names into google maps, they exist, and if you plug in your home location, it gives you directions for how to get there.
and in the case of Snoose Junction, it gives me two alternate ways to get there!
i know there aren’t people living there… legally, anyway… i do know that there are some hold-outs who live on the outskirts of society, who probably live in the watershed illegally, but the state frowns on such things, and i would think that the location of an actual community, even a defunct one, is probably one of the last places such people would choose to live, because of that…
if they don’t want people going there, then why are those places even listed on the map? why does it give precise, turn-by-turn directions for how to get there, if nobody is supposed to go there? it doesn’t make sense to me! 🤨
both of these places are an easy bike ride from my house, they’re both places where people used to live, and i want to go poke around, take pictures, and see what is there now.
i know that they say $10,000 fine for trespassing, but i also know that there are SEMI-TRUCKS that regularly go in and out of the security gate at landsburg crossing (marked “Cedar River Trailhead” on the maps above), and i’ve seen folks with state-owned trucks, traveling on roads that have no trespassing signs on them, so i KNOW that the state makes exceptions to that rule… now it’s just a matter of finding out which strings to pull to have them make an exception for me… 😈
phoooooa
saturday, our three-year-old GE washing machine, basically, failed: i finished a load of laundry, moved it into the dryer, and refilled the washing machine, when the control panel went crazy, started beeping and changing settings without me having to touch anything. i thought it was weird, and reached for the power button, but the power button didn’t work. so i unplugged it, waited a few minutes, plugged it back in, and it was the same deal, beeping and changing settings without me touching the controls… i let it sit, unplugged, overnight, and managed to get one more load out of it, but then it settled on the electronic controls not working at all, or working independently of user input, the physical selector worked, but it also worked as a power switch, which it SHOULD NOT do, and the actual power switch didn’t work at all. 😒 so i unplugged it and arranged for a GE technician to come by and look at it on monday. the GE guy came around and plugged in some sort of computer device(!) into an ethernet port in the back (why i’ve never noticed it before is still a mystery), and, eventually, reported that the control panel was shorting out. he also said that he thought he had seen everything, but this was a malfunction that he had never seen before, which i said is par for the course where i am concerned. 😒
the replacement part costs $500 and won’t be here for two weeks.
a replacement washing machine costs $700… and we’ve had this one for three years… 😒
GE has a standard 1 year replacement warranty, and SELLS an “extended warranty” that lasts for 5 years, but… a brand-name washing machine SHOULD last more than three years before needing to be completely replaced… in my opinion… 😒
moe called the GE customer support line, waited over an hour on “hold”, and then gave up. the next day she called back and waited “on hold” for another 45 minutes before she gave up again. today, i called the GE customer support line and waited “on hold” for 40 minutes before i talked to someone, who said that they couldn’t help me, but transfered me (after another 30 minutes “on hold”) to someone who could. i explained the situation, and they said that they could offer me a 50% discount on parts and labour “as a courtesy”… and they made an appointment for next week to come and fix it.
so i only have to take our laundry somewhere else once more before it gets fixed.
hermanic phlooote
moe got me a “hindu drum machine” for xmas, and i’ve been playing around with it, but it assumes that you know what you’re doing, and a lot of the labels are in devanagari script… and, while i can read devanagari script, i still don’t know how to make sense of the words that it is trying to convey. don’t get me wrong, it’s an AWESOME gift, and i am going to play the hell out of it, but i’ve got to learn a little bit more about what i’m doing first… not to mention the fact that it doesn’t have a way to hook it up to batteries (yet)…
so, along those same lines, i got an “app” for my “tablet” (it STILL seems really bizarre to me that people say it that way, but… it doesn’t matter) called “iTabla Pandit”, which is, basically, the same “hindu drum machine”, but it’s also got a couple of tambouras and a shruti box, all of the labels are in roman script, there’s an obvious indicator when the taal repeats, and the entire thing is tunable, both individually (you can tune both tambouras separately from the tablas and the shruti box, OR you can tune all of them as a group [which is what i did]).
and it sounds AWESOME with the harmonic flute, by itself, with no electronic help at all… i’m getting ready to test it with electronic “oomph” in the park down the road (because it’s not raining and the sun is out for a change). hopefully something fun will come of it.
ETA – 230208 1500 PDT — yup, it’s a good one… i’ve got to figure out how to run sound from my tablet into my amplifier, but the harmonic flute is quiet enough that i can do without it for outdoor performances. 😉👍👍
Noisserped
with the panto over, there hasn’t been much for me to do, and, because i have been depressed, i have spent a lot of time sitting and doing nothing, because if i get up and do something, something could go wrong, and then the world would have one more reason to hate me, but if i sit and do nothing (these days, twit™ turd™ counts as doing nothing), nothing can go wrong. it’s a lot of… fun? i’d take mushrooms, but the weather has been rainy and cold, and it still gets dark around 5:00.
we tried to go busking last wednesday, but we got there around 10:30 and there was nobody there… probably 5 or 6 vendors where there are usually 50 or 60, and even fewer tourists, at the bridge spot. under the clock there were booths with their chain barricades down, and, while there were people at the fish market, there weren’t any fish on display, and it looked like they were cleaning up to go home. as far as i can tell, it wasn’t any sort of holiday, and nobody that we talked to had any clue why the market was a ghost town.
allegedly, we’re gearing up for the moisture festival. we’re doing the second week, march 23rd through the 26th, 6 shows… but it’s at the broadway performance hall, this year, which doesn’t have parking, which means that there is a very strong probability that i will have to park half a mile away, and hike in with my tuba… plus, my understanding is that the broadway performance hall is a union shop, and i am fairly sure that the moisture festival is NOT a “union shop”, and never has been, so i don’t know how that is going to work. meanwhile, the old palladium is boarded up and has a “for lease” sign on the front. 😞
shroomies! 🍄
they are! 🍄😀😉😈‼‼‼
the next phase of operation mindfuck
they’re here.
now i have to (once again) pester the web designer into showing me how to make a product that has multiple purchase choices: one postcard, two postcards, three postcards, four postcards, five postcards, multiple 5-postcard packs… that sort of thing… he’s showed me how to do it once, with the jagannath pins that i had a few years ago, but they all sold out, and the item got deleted in one of my “clean up my web site” binges.
what is every all which what where when why how whos?
i succumbed to peer pressure, and checked out ChatGPT, the “Artificial Intelligence” language model about which everyone has been ranting. my initial impression is that it is the next step beyond Racter, and it actually wouldn’t surprise me too much if i have a disk with Racter on it around here somewhere.
i asked it what it can do. it responded:
As a language model, I can perform various tasks such as:
Answering questions
Generating text
Conversing in a natural language
Summarizing text
Translating text
Providing information and facts on various topics.
i am inquisitive by nature, which is probably why i made such a good software tester. and, as a software tester, i have discovered that the following question is one that either stumps or confuses so-called “artificial intelligence” programs (like Racter) in some stunningly spectacular ways, and so i asked it
what is every all which what where when why how whos?
and i got, probably, the most coherent response i could have gotten, considering that, ultimately, i asked the question of a computer: it said:
“What” and “which” are interrogative pronouns used to ask questions.
“Where” is an interrogative adverb used to ask about a place or location.
“When” is an interrogative adverb used to ask about a time.
“Why” is an interrogative adverb used to ask for the reason or cause.
“How” is an interrogative adverb used to ask about the manner, means, or method.
“Who’s” is a contraction of “who is”.
“Whose” is an interrogative pronoun used to ask about ownership or possession.
“All” is a pronoun that refers to the whole quantity or extent of something.
there are some pretty astounding things that it DIDN’T do, by which i am very impressed: it didn’t ask me ‘what i meant’… it assumed that what i was typing made sense, and so it made as much sense of it as it could; it didn’t try to change the subject; it didn’t ask me to ‘rephrase the question’; it gave generic, accurate answers to every part of the question it could perceive, regardless of whether it ‘made sense’ or not; and it EVEN tried to make sense of the ‘nonsense’ word i put in there — whos — which it could neither identify as ‘who’s’ or ‘whose’, so it gave me both definitions.
then, the conversation took an entirely unexpected turn…
PRZXQGL: are you related to racter?
ChatGPT: No, I am not related to Racter. Racter is an early computer program designed to generate text using simple algorithms, while I am an advanced language model developed by OpenAI, using deep learning techniques.
PRZXQGL: you are related to racter, whether you know it or not.
ChatGPT: You are correct that there are some similarities between Racter and my language model. Both Racter and I generate text, but the approaches and technologies we use are different. Racter used simple algorithms, while I use advanced deep learning techniques that allow me to generate human-like responses.
“human-like”?
heh heh…
“HUMAN-like”??
ROTFLMAO! 🤣
that’s RICH, coming from a computer… 🤣 especially one which knows about racter without me having to prompt it… 🤣
it is exactly why responses like these serve to make me even more skeptical of these “artificial intelligence” programs than i already am. 😒😏
ETA 230131: i had the following interaction with ChatGPT, which goes to strengthen my determination that it is the next step beyond racter:
PRZXQGL: describe the poem “Jabberwocky”, by lewis carroll, in minute detail.
ChatGPT:“Jabberwocky” is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll, first published in his book “Through the Looking-Glass” in 1872. The poem is about a protagonist who sets out to slay a fearsome creature called the Jabberwock. The poem is famous for its imaginative and absurd use of language, as many of the words used in the poem are made up or have alternate definitions.
The poem consists of 14 stanzas, each containing four lines of rhyming couplets. The language used is highly imaginative and playful, featuring words like “frabjous,” “vorpal,” and “bandersnatch.” The overall mood of the poem is fantastical and dream-like, as the protagonist journeys through a strange and surreal world in search of the Jabberwock.
The poem is often interpreted as a commentary on the absurdity and confusion of language, as the words used in the poem are intentionally made to be confusing and difficult to understand. Despite this, the poem remains highly entertaining and imaginative, as the protagonist’s journey to slay the Jabberwock is full of twists and turns, and the language used to describe it is highly imaginative and playful.
Overall, “Jabberwocky” is a classic example of Lewis Carroll’s innovative and playful approach to language, and is considered one of his most enduring works. It continues to be popular and widely read to this day, and is a testament to the power of imagination and playfulness in language.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
new scheme… will it work?
for a few years now, i have been playing around with this app for my tablet called FRAX, to which i was pointed by my friend gunnar, who is a fractal maniac. i find it really easy, and somewhat meditative, to generate an infinite variety (they’re fractals, after all 😉) of magnificently detailed, wildly psychedelic patterns, and i can crank out 4 to 6 images per hour, for several hours, before getting “bored” with it.
i have maintained for some time that “boredom is a state of mind i never visit”, and, while it’s true, from the outside one might presume that it’s boredom, when it’s really something else… but i digress…
the other day, i went through the photostream on my tablet (which i am finally getting organised enough that i can find what i’m looking for, some of the time), and discovered that i have 91 frax drawings in a directory, which started me thinking…
what if i made postcards out of these drawings, and sold them on my web site?
i’ve got more than enough raw material, and they wouldn’t take that much tweezing to get them to fit on a postcard…
and i can buy 100 18 point postcards (the really thick ones) for less than $20, which means that i can sell them for $1.00 a piece and make a profit (assuming that people buy them, about which i am not as certain).
not only that, but i can send them out to the IOTM club, which is coming up a lot sooner than i realised.
so, yesterday, i ordered 100 of five different fractal drawings (not necessarily the ones depicted here)… we’ll see what happens next.
my famous wife! 😉👍👍
my famous wife and her famous friend… over whom i have been a massive fanboy for longer than monique has been alive… 😉
it’s already almost halfway through january… 😒
moe is going to orlando on saturday. we finished with the panto last weekend, and, yesterday, macque tested positive for COVID, which means that he likely was exposed at the panto. moe sez she’s going to wear her mask religiously, except for when she’s drinking water, but… i was potentially exposed to macque, and moe was potentially exposed to me, and nobody will know anything until she’s already in orlando. we’ve arranged for a puppy-sitter to take quill (the new puppy), so that i won’t have to deal with an un-trained seven-month-old puppy, which is a good thing, because i actually have a paying gig on saturday (the day moe leaves for orlando), in georgetown, and, with moe in orlando, a puppy would put a severe strain on my ability to perform successfully.
i harvested around 15 dried grams of wavy caps from my experimental mushroom patch, and, as far as i can tell, the mycelium has grown into the ground, which means a much higher possibility of more wavy caps, if not soon, at least next year. dare i say, this is a long-term project that appears to have gone right, for a change.
🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄‼‼‼
so, this happened… 😉
at first, i wasn’t completely sure (it’s always a good idea to be skeptical with mushrooms), so i plugged it into PictureMushroom which confirmed that they are, in fact, Psilocybe cyanescens, a “Toxic” mushroom.
specifically:
Wavy caps and should be treated as a moderately poisonous mushroom, best avoided. Ingestion of wavy caps can induce symptoms that include vomiting, nausea, fever, psychosis and seizures.”
it goes on to describe almost exactly the same environment, region, climate, and time of year. combine that with the fact that i INTENTIONALLY propagated P. cyanescens spores, and i’ve got about as much confirmation as i need… 🍄😉🍄😎🍄👍🍄‼
🤣🤪
in my attempts to break free of #twit™ #turd™, i have created a reddit profile. i joined the r/incense subreddit, and almost immediately got banned for “spam”. the “spam” i am guilty of disseminating was the phrase “i’ve got resins for sale: pure frankincense, copal, and loban (seperately)… i’ve also got a big chunk of palo santo.” which i posted in response to ONE person.
it’s not “spam”. i didn’t advertise anything, i didn’t include links to my business, and i didn’t “mass mail” anybody: this was in response to ONE person.
nevertheless, the moderator that banned me was disinterested in discussing it, because “we both know what spam is”, and, as i am a “newbie” at reddit, i didn’t feel like arguing about it…
but… 😉
i was searching for other subreddits which may or may not be similar to r/incense, when i came across this post… in r/incense 🤣
and it got 14 upvotes! 👍👍😉 this is, also, NOT spam (as it is on my own web site): a link to 999 Lord Krishna Puja Agarbatti, if anybody reading this is interested in purchasing some. 😉
Add New Post
blah blah, new year, new me, blah blah blah… 😒 i’ll tell you what: i’m going to do the best that i can NOT to kill myself this year, through direct or indirect action (indirect, in case you’re dense, refers to COVID or something like that). my “new years intention” (because “resolutions” are too restrictive) is less depression.
along those lines, i didn’t get a harvest from my “experimental” mushroom patch last year, but it has developed LOADS of mycelia… now, there’s no GUARANTEE that they’re “the right kind” of mycelia, and, until they start sprouting mushrooms, there will be no way to know for sure, but… it was three unplanted containers of sterile potting soil, covered with a thin layer of wood chips and straw, which i inoculated with mycelia LAST YEAR. i didn’t plant anything else in the containers, and, basically, i have left them alone for a year… apart from watering them occasionally, during the dry months last summer. i don’t KNOW that the mycelia i propagated is the one i’m looking at, but… well… there’s enough mycelia that all i had to do was disturb the top layer of wood chips SLIGHTLY to expose A LOT of mycelium… so there’s always hope…
however, even with auxiliary mushrooms from matrix genetix, the weather has been snowy/rainy/awful enough that it has been difficult to take as much mushrooms as i like, so i’ve been taking “microdoses” that i can’t perceive, but which smooth out the bumps to the point where i’m not snapping at people, complaining about everything, and being a complete recluse… but i’m still not particularly pleasant to be around. 😒
i’ve got to have my car serviced. i’ve been noticing a significant decrease in mileage for the past few months, i may need new tires, and, apparently there are “firmware upgrades” that are only available from the dealer. but the closest hyundai dealer is in renton, and i’ve pretty much burnt my bridges with the renton hyundai dealer years ago. there’s a dealer in auburn, with whom i haven’t burnt as many bridges, and there’s the dealer in puyallup where i bought the car, but this is sunday AND new year’s day, so i’m not even going to be able to call anyone about it until tomorrow. meanwhile, i’ve got to go to costco (tomorrow), and moe is leaving for a week in orlando on the 14th, which, coincidentally, is the same day thaddeus and i have our first paying gig of the year.
i got a “small” package, yesterday, of incense from one of the more reliable US distributors i deal with (“small” meaning only two kilos 😉), delivered by USPS, which was totally saturated, as though it had sat outside in the rain overnight, or something like that — which it certainly did not do outside of my house. 😠 only half a kilo of the two kilos of incense were damaged, and i have notified the shipper, but (once again) it is the new year, which means at least there won’t be anybody there until tomorrow, and i’m not sure there is anything that can be done about it, anyway. 😒
the moisture festival is happening. hooray(?). it’s going to be at the broadway performance hall, a “union shop” — meaning that there are going to be people not associated with the moisture festival doing things like managing the stage, moving sets, setting lights, operating spotlights and other suchlike stuff, and there’s nothing that can be done to change it. i’m kind of wondering how they’re going to deal with the fact that the bands are definitely not union organisations, but, at the same time, it’s for someone else to deal with. 😒 fortunately. 😒
VEWPRF
moe’s mom was supposed to be here for christmas eve dinner, but the ice-pocalypse has still got us in its icy grip… mind you, issaquah-hobart road has been chemically de-iced and plowed, and for every other place in the greater seattle metropolitan area, the roads are passable, at worst… but i had to walk out to the park at the corner of hobart-ravensdale road, this afternoon, to pick up a package, because the fedex driver, the USPS driver, a door-dash driver, and a tow truck had a “confligration” (complete with flashing lights and everything) at the top of our neighbourhood. there were two cars that passed me on the way to the park, which i’m not sure whether they got through or not, and there were two more cars that passed me on the way back… and i’m not sure whether or not they got through either…
so, conditionally, moe’s mom is coming for dinner tomorrow (after it has been >50° for more than 24 hours), along with scott and nancy (our friends from up the road towards issaquah about 10 miles), and that means that moe has decided that she has to make TWO dinners… she had originally planned to make indian food for dinner with scott and nancy, but her mom won’t eat indian food, so she’s getting enough steak for dinner, and to take back so she can have left-overs tomorrow… and, because of the fact that steak night was supposed to be tonight, moe made pasta tonight…
official 2022 snowpocalypse. 🤬
so, around here, anyway, it’s not so much a “snow”pocalypse as it is an “ice”pocalypse… there was only about two inches of snow last night at 9:00, but it was really windy overnight, and my guess is that it sleeted and/or freezing-rained enough that, this morning, there’s two inches of what LOOKS LIKE snow, but is, in reality, one to one-and-a-half inches of old crusty snow that has been TOTALLY ENCASED in a clear layer of ice… there’s ice on all the tree branches, and our slight incline out the garage door into the back yard has become totally impassable — unless you want to slide on your ass… it’s supposed to warm up and mostly dissipate by tomorrow, and the high tomorrow is supposed to be 50°… but, despite the fact that it is “warming up”, currently, it’s “warming” from yesterday’s low of 14° to a somewhat-more-normal 31°, and it’s supposed to start snowing at noon, and continue until 7:00 or so… in other parts of the metropolitan area, king county metro is COMPLETELY shut down, and seatac airport has gone from COMPLETELY shut down, to having one runway open, and alaska airlines cancelling 100% of their flights out of seatac today. moe says the last time she remembers this happening was in 1996, but then it wasn’t anticipated, which made things that much worse.
ETA: it is now 1:30 pm, and it’s 33° and raining… which, of course, means later on, when the temperature once again dips below freezing, that we will have SEVERAL LAYERS of increasing thicknesses of ice. woo. i’m SO glad i don’t have to go anywhere for the next few days. 😒
yup… i figured it was just a matter of time…
it started snowing in fits and starts sunday evening, after the panto. it mostly melted yesterday, and it was raining hard this morning… but then, around 11:00, it changed from rain to grauple, and then to sleet, and then to snow… and it transitioned back and forth between rain and snow at least three times before it got dark, which means that our beautifully plowed street (for a change!) is now two inches or so deep in slush, ice, and snow. i went out this afternoon around 1:00, and on my way home i saw two cars off the road on hobart-ravensdale road, one of which was a fairly substantial jeep or something like that, which had been going uphill and slid off the road facing oncoming traffic… which was complicated by a row of oncoming cars which were stopped because of the aforementioned jeep, which was just after a curve in the road. once i got past the conflagration, i encountered a large semi-truck with a huge piece of equipment on the trailer, which was tooling along at an elevated rate of speed, as though there weren’t about 8 cars that were stopped a thousand or so feet further up the road… 😒
it’s not really deep, but it’s REALLY slick, and people around here don’t know how to drive when it’s slick… which, of course, doesn’t stop them from trying, and failing in the most spectacular ways. 😒
fortunately, i don’t HAVE TO drive ANYWHERE until after the first of january, and, hopefully, it will all be gone by then. 😒
W000T!! 😎
i’ve had this sayagata-pattern iphone case for an iphone that i have never owned, and, probably WILL never own, simply because its got a cool pattern on it. i was showing it off to moe, a week or so ago, and complaining that i didn’t know of anywhere i could get an iphone case with pictures that i want on them, and moe recommended about a dozen places that make custom iphone cases… because, these days, her “google-fu” is orders of magnitude better than mine… 😖
so, i had one made. now my phone exactly matches my car. 😎
W00T!
i took the plunge and installed kubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) as a dual-boot — since i have a TON of extra disk space because of the NAS, and because of the fact that i have a 2TB SECONDARY hard disk, which i conveniently forgot about…
i figured it was about time to upgrade when i saw the “upgrade now, you fool!” warning messages, that appear at the top of my screen when i boot the computer, for the past week or so, but i’ve read some… “THINGS”… about upgrading jammy, rather than installing fresh… and, well, i have a TON of extra disk space because of the NAS, i have a 2TB SECONDARY hard disk, which i conveniently forgot about…
it only took me two days to go from blank disk to almost completely identical systems, with surprisingly little data loss… i’ve been having some trouble with widgets, applications, and the “task bar” (which is behaving strangely enough that, my guess is, they’re going to have an update which fixes it within a few days), some of my more fantastic “desktop effects” (specifically, the ones seen here) don’t seem to exist, and i’m having some trouble getting the browser configured correctly, but, all-in-all, this has been an amazingly painless procedure.
default title entry
last saturday and sunday were the first four performances of the panto during the winter holiday season, in three years. the last time we actually had a panto performance during the holdiay season was in 2019. the panto has been performed at the oregon country fair, last summer, but i missed it because i got COVID19 less than 12 hours before i was scheduled to leave. 😒 it was really fun to perform in a group for an audience again, but i was also acutely reminded of all the “politicial” horseshit that surrounds working for a group of actors and musicians. i was asked to provide a “5 minute warning” which, after two tries, no less than the stage manager told me not to make that noise any longer (this was one of the people on the board of directors, a few years ago, who screwed up the process of printing the posters because she refused to understand how the pricing breaks work, and almost screwed with the process of having the banners created in 2019, because she thought that grommets were not going to be necessary, or some crap like that 😒). also, i was asked to provide two different “ratchet” sounds, but, after two performances, they decided that the quieter of the two (the one that i had actually bought specifically for this performance) was loud enough that the actor couldn’t be heard above it, which means, not only that they don’t have two different ratchet sounds, but, because of the fact that i’m having to “mute” the remaining ratchet, i can’t match the ratchet sounds to the actors actions as well, which is, i’m absolutely positive, going to be irritating and a cause for a “note” later on.
monday (yesterday) i had to get up and take moe’s CPAP machine to the company that made it, because it has been making a strange noise for 6 months or so, and they’ve JUST gotten around to calling her back and making an appointment… but when i got there, they told me that the machine was beyond its EOL, and they would replace it, except that they didn’t have any machines, and didn’t know where to get one. i said, “so, what are we talking about, here? days? weeks? months?” and their response was “i’m not sure”. 😒 i thought it was somewhat unusual for them to have such a blasé attitude about moe’s prescribed medical device, but i brought it home… and, some time between then (around noon) and 7:30, they called moe and said that they had found a machine, which i picked up this morning.
the past couple of months i have been averaging about two incense orders a week. mind you, a lot of them have been for ONE BOX, but, at this point, i’ve stopped trying to get people to order more than one… if they want to pay twice as much (or more) for shipping, as they pay for one box of incense, it’s none of my business… or, i should say, it IS my business… which i would be driving away by telling them that it’s stupid to just order one box of incense. however, at this point, the price for a medium flat rate box is $17.05, my base rate for shipping is $16.50 (which is smaller than a medium flat rate box), and one box of incense is anywhere between $1.50 and $7.50 or so… it’s stupid… but it makes me money, so i’m not going to complain… after all, as far as i’ve been able to tell, i am the ONLY place they can get aparajita, or krishna puja 999 online… 🤷
the snow is mostly gone, but we’ve still got at least two more months of actual winter before things usually start getting back to normal, and despite what that “evangelical” preacher i saw a video of THIS MORNING says about “global warming doesn’t exist because it says so in the bible” (🤬), climate change has already had more than one negative effect on the environment around here, so i’m not going to hold my breath. it really astounds me that we are twenty years into the 21st century, and there are STILL people who believe in angels, demons, jeezis, and “de debbil”, but DO NOT accept the evidence of their own eyes concerning climate change, the economy, abortion, homelessness, health care, gay marriage… people in positions of authority whose word most other people treat with considerably more credibility than mine. 🗡🤬
HAH! 😤
yesterday something happened to my “widgets” — the things that contain the various content in the left hand side bar on this page — that caused them to disappear, and be replaced with the “default” widgets, which were boring and didn’t actually convey any useful information. at the time, i was on my way to a rehearsal, and couldn’t take the time to fuck around with it, and figure out where my content went to… but today is something different.
at first, i figured i would just rebuild the content that i could remember, but then i realised that i had A LOT of content that i didn’t remember — the list of haikus, for example, or the excerpt from “Kissing Hank’s Ass” — which i WOULD NOT be able to recreate from memory… because my memory sucks. 🤕
but then i remembered… i have a plugin called “updraft”, which makes a weekly backup of the entire site, and downloads it to my (new) cloud drive. i could just restore the most recent database backup, and it would only delete one post: the post that i made, yesterday, called “BUGGER! 😠” which complained about my not having the time to fuck around with it.
so i restored the most recent backup, which restored my OLD widgets, then i took their advice and changed them from “text” widgets that contained HTML code (which, apparently, is “bad”), to “image” and “custom HTML” widgets, which, essentially, work EXACTLY THE SAME, but don’t have a tendency to arbitrarily disappear with no warning.
i don’t have yesterday’s post, but i’ve got all my widgets restored, and now, instead of having a grumpy post about how things don’t work, i’ve got a triumphant post about how i’ve been able to overcome adversity. 👍
snow(pocalypse?) 2022
it’s early enough in the season that i hesitate to call it an actual “snowpocalypse” (particularly since mercer island apparently has no snow at all), but, around here, it’s bad enough that i had to cancel my attendence at the (essential) panto rehearsal, last night, and i’m going (once they open) to have to cancel my attendence at my circus class this afternoon. 😒
moe waited until 8:00 am to go in to work, and, apparently, the “main road” is clear (having been plowed this morning), but i still worry about her ability to get home. yesterday, she left work at 5:00 pm, and didn’t actually get home until 7:30, because of the snow/traffic that had built up in issaquah… and she said the state patrol had just closed down eastbound highway 18 as she was going by.
AND i have four incense orders that have been scheduled to ship out today, and it doesn’t look as though i’ll be able to do it, because… well… moe took the truck, and my car is snowed in! 😠
i hate snow. 👎
BUT… there’s this weird thing happening in the pond across the street, this morning. i THINK i know what is happening, but that doesn’t make it any less weird:
i think that this circular hole in the pond is where there’s something (a branch, i think) sticking through the surface of the pond, and making a place where the snow/ice doesn’t stick… i’m not sure, because i have never seen this kind of thing before, but that’s the only thing i can think of.
both blirgday &c.
on this day, in 2007, i started this blog, as a response to livejournal selling out to the russians, which means that this blog has been in existence for 15 years, in more-or-less the same place. i wonder if it will last another 15 years. 😏 as a result of getting closer and closer to leaving “twit-turd”, i have established a presence at linktr.ee, where i put ALL the links to EVERYWHERE that i might be contacted… which is a little strange, because, as far as i know, it is the first time i have EVER posted, in the same place, links to personalities that i have endeavoured to keep separate, prior to this. it is also a bit strange, because i actually switched my harmonic flute video to “public” from “you can’t see it unless i gave you the link”, because i didn’t want “salamandir” and “rev. deluxe” obviously associated with each other. now, i’m not as concerned, i don’t think anyone of consequence will notice, and, even if someone of consequence DOES notice, it simply doesn’t bother me as much as it did 15 or 20 years ago.
“twit-turd” has become a seething morass of white supremacists, nazis, fascists, MAGAts, drumpf-lovers, vaccine denial, and hatred, ALL OF WHICH is more-or-less unmoderated, because (among other stupid things he’s done), when “ELONgated MUSKrat” bought it (under duress), the first thing he did was to re-instate a whole bunch of people who had been kicked off the service, for violating rules that “ELONgated MUSKrat” disagreed with… which, at this point, includes “Fartgorie Taylor-Greene” (who was booted for spreading vaccine misinformation), and Donald J. Drumpf, himself (who was booted for spreading lies about the 2020 election). how long i stay there is still up in the air, but it’s a matter of days, weeks, or months, and certainly not more than a year, unless some massive change happens. 😒
the first show of 2022 fell yesterday. it wasn’t very much, but it’s enough that i am re-thinking my plans to go to the panto rehearsal this evening, despite the fact that we only have three more rehearsals until the show starts.
this was yesterday, at approximately 9:30 in the morning. i PROBABLY could have driven my car in this amount of snow, but unfortunately…
this was today, at approximately 7:45 in the morning… i definitely COULD NOT drive my car with this amount of snow… moe says that, outside of our neighbourhood, the roads are plowed, clear, and passable, but… from where i sit, it looks like a skating rink, and i have to get up a hill (which moe said is a skating rink) in order to get out of the neighbourhood… and the only reason moe knows this is because she took the truck, loaded with concrete blocks to work today, because her car needs new tires (which she just discovered yesterday, after having slid around on various streets on her way home from work, yesterday).
weird genealogy
we got a whole bunch of new information about moe’s ancestors, and one family group caught my eye almost immediately: moe’s 4xgreat grandparents were related to each other…
the brother married into one family, the sister married into another family, they both produced children, who, then, married each other to produce one of moe’s 2xgreat grandfathers…
her 3x great grandparents were first cousins…
we don’t know, for sure, who the brother’s parents were, but they were born 15 years apart, in the same town, in the same county, in the same region of the netherlands, so the probability is fairly high… 🤣
and, as expected…
i felt like a truck had run over me, on saturday… slept for a large portion of it, while the TV was on, which might give you an impression of how “out of it” i felt. i recovered enough to go to my unicycle class, on sunday, but i was winded about 20 minutes into it, and i had to take a couple of “breathers” after that. our alternate unicycle coach, nick, is the unicyclist i saw at the moisture festival this year (from the band pit, so the wheel of the unicycle was, literally, within 10 feet of me) do a perfect free mount and ride away, with a woman standing on his shoulders… during MULTIPLE shows, so it wasn’t just a fluke. 😂 i am tantalizingly close to being able to free mount… at this point i would say i’m doing it about a third of the time. i keep making microscopic adjustments in what i’m doing, and it’s really frustrating when i find something that works, and i can’t replicate it reliably enough to do it again… i guess it’s a good thing i’m dedicated, because i am painfully aware of the fact that i STILL can’t do essential things like idling, or riding backwards… 🙄 oh well, some day, maybe… i suppose…
then i came home and burned the pile of summer detritus in the fire pit across the street… except that a bunch of it was so green that it wouldn’t even burn… like a bunch of unripe tomatoes from the garden, and a bunch of leaves from the brussels sprout plants… but, because i was using a propane flame thrower as the fire-starter, and an electric leaf blower to accelerate things, i ended up making “fried green tomatoes”… 😉
today i was supposed to meet up with gunnar (i have a bag of weed for him 😉) but, before i left home, i got a text message from him that said “Cannot feline. Oils yoy mail”… um… ¿؟፧‽ so i called him. he explained that he hasn’t been getting enough sleep lately, and was not going to be there, so i drove down to puyallup, via our old neighbourhood, went by rick’s old place (there’s someone else living there, unsurprisingly) and came back by way of enumclaw, black diamond, and ravensdale.
booster #5
i got my fifth COVID booster today, along with my annual flu shot. i’m feeling okay, so far, but my arms are sore. if tradition holds, i will be feeling under the weather tomorrow. whee. 😒
extremism
i’ve been reading, the past couple of days, about “extremism” on the right, and on the left, as being somehow equal in their “extremism”. i was reading about how alexandria ocasio-cortez had to “stand up” to an interviewer who tried to imply that the two forms of “extremism” are the same, and it reminds me of something my old friend xydexx said about nazis. imagine this:
you and your extended family are having a potluck picnic, and everyone is supposed to provide some food. but when you arrive at the picnic, there, sitting in the middle of the table, is a huge steaming platter of dog shit, surrounded by dishes of actual food, provided by other relatives. do you want to interact with the person who put the dog shit in the middle of the table? and what about the rest of the food… would you be inclined to eat ANYTHING from a table that featured a huge steaming platter of dogshit? would you be inclined to talk kindly and gently with the person who provided that platter, to find out what their story is, to find out what possessed them to bring a huge steaming platter of dog shit to your family picnic? would you be anxious to hear their reasons for messing up your picnic? would you ignore it, hoping that the perpetrator would change, if given a good example?
the probability is very high that you would not do those things, but that you would find out who the perpetrator is, and eject them (forcefully, if necessary) from the picnic area.
that is the difference between “extremism” on the left versus “extremism” on the right: “extremism” on the left is more inclined to help other people, regardless of who they are, whereas “extremism” on the right wants everything their way, and if it’s not exactly the way they lay it out, they’re going to mess up the picnic for everyone.
xydexx has a multi-paragraph statement about this, but that’s basically what it boils down to. in xydexx’s version, the furry fandom is the extended family, and nazis and other fur-haters bring the dog shit, but the argument expands nicely. when people say “there are two sides to every argument” when the discussion is about having a country with universal health care, instead of causing harm to people you don’t like (furries, gays, trans, etc., etc…), you know that whoever is saying it is probably NOT someone you would want to invite to your picnic.
↑ 221110 – HPOI (sort of)
i can’t use zelle for accepting payments, because it makes the customer have to go through an extra step, with which they are not familiar (and, i suspect, somewhat skeptical), but it turns out that i can use zelle for making payments to people in other countries — in this case, tibet — a lot easier and faster than i could using a wire transfer or western union.
it turns out i was somewhat skeptical, myself… i made a payment of almost $300 to someone i only sort of vaguely know, from tibet, and didn’t hear anything back from them for a few days, which made me wonder… and then, yesterday, i got an alert from my bank that the payment hadn’t been collected because the person i sent it to was not signed up with zelle, which made me very concerned, especially since i read the other day that zelle, and the bank that’s behind zelle (key bank? i don’t remember… one of the lesser-well-known ones) are being sued by… germany, i think, or something like that… because of all the zelle scams that have been cropping up.
it turns out that they were just getting their shit together, as well, and hadn’t completed the process of signing up, because i got a notice today that the payment had gone through, and then i got a response from the person in tibet, saying that they had received my payment, and would be shipping me a medium-ish pile of incense soon.
it seems to me to be a payment method that is RIPE for scams, but, when it’s not used for scams, it is a GENIUS way of transfering money. 😉
update
the word that i’ve heard is that the democretins won most of the most essential races, but not others. and georgia is going to a runoff between republicretin herschel walker (a “christian” anti-abortionist brainless ex-football jock who has allegedly paid for at least two abortions with two different women, and has multiple unacknowleged children with multiple other women), and democrud rev. raphael warnock (an actual Christian minister) who, at last count, was winning by THOUSANDS of votes… 😒 now we have to worry about the global economy, which is still more or less up in the air. 😒
the most recent incense order i recieved didn’t have the shipping charges included, which is a major problem. a little bit of investigation, combined with a brief back-and-forth with the developers confirmed a bug in the version of woocommerce square plugin that i was using, which is, if the customer doesn’t enter the state that they live in, the shipping charges are not included on their reciept, and they can proceed through checkout without having to enter the state in which they live… which is DEFINITELY a bad for business, as it requires me having to write the customer and ask for more money. presumably i have been updated to the most recent (fixed) version of the plugin, after having to explain that my questions about cost were not a criticism of how much it costs, to the web designer, who was all set to cancel the web maintenance agreement that we’ve had for the past three years. 😒
i lied… i have actually logged into twit-turd twice since i said i was not going to login for a couple of days… but the fact that the democrasts have done somewhat better than expected has made it somewhat more tolerable.
scary…
today is the midterm election.
republicunts are projected to win majorities in both the house and senate, which means that
- they plan on impeaching president biden, more out of spite than anything else (because there’s nothing to charge him with, but that won’t make a difference, because democretins impeached #drumpf TWICE 😒), and…
- they are actively planning on (and bragging about it)
- eliminating social security and medicare
- any and all investigations into the crimes of #drumpf, the stolen government documents at mar-a-lago, and the january 6th insurrection will cease immediately
- a national ban on abortion
- a national ban on birth control
- a repeal of gay marriage
- further oppression of trans people
- making cannabis and other marginally legal drugs illegal again
- further wanton environmental destruction, promoting oil, coal, and elimination of endangered species protections
- gerrymandering and further voter suppression to make future election wins by democretins a lot more difficult
- other horrendously awful, inhumane, and massively unpopular stuff, primarily because they can.
and, if they win, there’s a much greater chance that #drumpf will run for president, again, and if he does, he will likely win, because of the republicunts’ love affair with voter suppression, and that will basically be the end of a democratic united states. 🤬
and if they don’t win at all (preferably), or if they don’t win enough to make a difference, the republican’ts have openly vowed to wreck the global economy, by refusing to raise the debt limit.
i am staying OFF twit-turd… maybe forever, but at least for a couple of days, or until the election FUBAR has died down a little.
payment gateway and business update
officially, square works. i got an order for >$90 from hong kong transferred to my bank account today. i already confirmed that it works for domestic packages, but the fact that it also works on international packages is the final step. now, officially, the only thing i am using stripe for is IOTM subscriptions, and i’ve only got 15 of those left before i shut the whole thing down.
officially, zelle works, but not in the way i was expecting, nor the way that THREE representatives of BECU explained to me. there IS NO “zelle for businesses” (or, if there is, it’s not available from BECU, because it’s “not free”, or something like that… 🤷). what happens is that i, now, have two new accounts at BECU, a consumer savings account, and a consumer checking account (to go along with my “business” checking and savings accounts). when i want to use zelle, i have to transfer money from my business checking to my personal checking, and THEN i can use zelle to send money. i found this out because i ordered a smallish pile of incense from tibet, and they wanted me to use zelle for payment (which i think is a GENIUS idea, because it’s essentially instantaneous, and avoids all the fees that wire transfers or western union entail). so now i have a smallish pile of incense from tibet that i’m expecting some time within the next month or so.
uline has apparently been donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to republican/right wing/homophobic/anti-abortion/nazi/fascist horseshit with more and greater frequency, recently, and i finally got fed up with using their triangular boxes. i found another source of essentially identical triangular boxes, which are BOTH better AND cheaper, so the last 20 or so boxes from uline are going to be the last i use before i switch my brand loyalty to the boxery. i have a half a jillion uline packing slip envelopes, but i bought them before we moved, and i’ll be using them up for years before i’ll have to worry about getting more. 😏
🙄
so, i decided to reposition major furniture in my office, to achieve the following results:
- i have to figure out how my studio is set up. i originally set it up to use with the piano/synthesizer setup, and i seem to recall doing at least one piece of music in that configuration… and then i set it up some other way, which i don’t remember, and now everything is mixed up and i can’t figure it out, because all of the connections are on the back of the devices, and in order to access the back of the amplifier, i have to move the printer, and stand on a stool, while leaning over the printer, and accessing the back upside down… which isn’t ideal. what i need is the back of everything to be as easily accessible as the front, which means moving stuff around.
- in the process of trying to figure out how the studio stuff was hooked up, i thought i had completely disconnected every audio connection from my computer to the amplifier… and yet, i seem to be able to play music from my computer, and hear the sound through the speakers… which would seem to indicate that there is a new/different/as-yet-undiscovered audio connection that i have overlooked somehow… (possibly the HDMI connection from the monitor, but how does it get to the amplifier??? 😕) but, unfortunately, the cables from the computer to the amplifier are accessed from the back, AND under my desk… which is REALLY not ideal… i’ve got to figure that out.
this may involve a trip to ikea and possibly a new desk, as the one that i have is a repurposed ikea table.
the reason i want to figure out how my studio works (again), is because i have recently discovered jamulus, which appears to be an audio interface that is designed to be used over internet. i realise that there’s some pretty hard physical constants that make audio connections… let’s say difficult… over long distances, but, apparently, distances less than 50 miles or so the latency is tolerable, and they get around the rest of it, sketchily, by having everyone listen to the server, and not the actual sound coming out of your instrument, and… well, i haven’t been able to busk the past couple of weeks (HVAC stuff), and i’ve been going nuts, because there are new songs that we’ve been talking about, but we can’t get together and rehearse because i have to be at home to let the workers in… and now i’ve got jamulus installed, and (apparently) working… all i have to do is hook up a microphone, which i do, but… no sound… and thus began the task of figuring out how the studio is set up.
there’s another thing i tried to get set up, but couldn’t, because of a lack of installation instructions. JamStud.io actually advertises “jam online without latency”, despite the fact that, as far as i know, scientists are still stymied by the speed of light 😉 which makes it impossible to have an audio connection without more and more latency as the distance increases… but, hey… if i could get it installed, i might be using that, instead.
💀💣
i made a bunch of operation mindfuck envelopes, which i intend to give to “trick-or-treaters” tonight, but not in the way they expect. moe put an announcement in the neighbourhood farcebook group that we would put candy outside our house, for whoever wanted to come by and take it, to do so… but moe is going to be at one of her dog classes, this evening, and probably won’t get back until 8:30 or so, so i’m going to put a big bowl of candy on a chair, next to our mailbox, and then i’m going to put on my black djellaba, and my black burnous, and my wizard hat, and skulk about in the shadows (of which there are plenty) and pop out at people with bizarre secret messages. 🧙😈
this is a test: 🫨 the test is over. hmmmm… 🧐
more ron zeising shenanigans
ron zeising is the former owner of our house. he is a general contractor, and, as the former owner of our house, seemed to think that he could do things to the house without doing them properly — or at all — and get away with it a lot easier, because he was a general contractor who “knew how to do things”… like build decks (wrong), or run electrical service to an outbuilding (wrong), or install HVAC systems (wrong), or do duct-work (wrong)…
the most recent shenanigan that we have uncovered is the fact that, i’m about 99% sure at this point that the ONLY reason he installed the “latest, top-of-the-line” heating and cooling system in this house, was to increase the resale value of the house. i know, from a couple of the next door neighbours, that he never actually USED the system, because he heated the house with the wood stove in the winter, and left all the doors and windows open in the summer… and, yet, when we bought the house, one of the big selling points was that it had the “latest, top-of-the-line” HVAC system… we very quickly discovered that the cooling part of the system had been installed, but it was never hooked up. and now, we’ve discovered that exactly the same thing was true of the heating system, as well. the last time we had trouble with the heating system, we blamed it on the duct-work — which was installed by ron zeising — and had that replaced… but that was spring time, and we weren’t using the heating system. now, when the weather is getting colder, we discovered that it wasn’t entirely the duct-work. what we discovered is that the heating elements weren’t hooked up, and the blower wasn’t hooked up. they were installed, but… ron never used them, so he didn’t bother to finish the installation, because he didn’t have to.
i’m really glad we got this house, and the next door neighbours are SUPER AWESOME (especially compared to our former neighbours, who were crack addicts), but i’m also really glad ron zeising left the area, because if he hadn’t, i could imagine all kinds of nasty things i could do to his “business”… 😒
in the humdrum
monday moe was in vegas. i got a whole bunch of spam, DIDN’T have my regular counselling appointment because of a misread calendar, two weeks ago, DIDN’T get my tires rotated in spite of waiting around for an hour while they DIDN’T rotate my tires… 😒 i’m still not totally sure what happened: i made an appointment, showed up before i was supposed to be there, told the guy that i had an appointment, which he confirmed, and then… i waited for an hour, went up to the counter to inquire when they were going to get to my car, and was told “within the hour”, but i had other places to be, so i had to bail and come back later in the week…
and i was already ripe for mushrooms… 😒
wednesday, the smoke from wildfires (i never bothered to find out where they were) was bad enough that both seattle and portland had the WORST air quality in the world — worse than singapore or hong kong. also, apparently, someone dumped, and burned, a human body just up the street from the trailhead to the back side of taylor mountain, where i walk a lot… where i saw the bear… 😒 moe came home. i picked up quill at the puppy-sitter’s place near lake desire at 8:30, and picked up moe at the airport at 9:30.
thursday i had my circus class, and on the way back home, driving down I5, the smoke was bad enough that i couldn’t see more than a mile or so in front of me. 😒 then got my tires rotated — for real, this time. i was in and out inside of 15 minutes. a guy i had never seen before, but who i assumed was one of the managers, said that he “knew all about” the fiasco on monday, and that they’d get to my car right away… and they did, which kind of surprised me…
friday i decided that i was not going to take as many mushrooms as i had planned, because, by that time, the smoke from the wildfires was really awful. we bought some inflatable halloween decorations — a unicorn skeleton, and two enormous, flashing eyeballs. when it got dark, it started raining, so, naturally, monique decided that was the time to put them out… and the eyeballs (which were my part of the deal) only had one set of tethers, which meant that i had to cut and singe nylon string, in the dark-and-rain…
saturday i actually took mushrooms. instead of four capsules, i only took two, but — as is seemingly fairly typical — all the “good stuff” had filtered to the bottom of the bag, which meant that two capsules was SIGNIFICANTLY more than the past couple of times i had taken four capsules… and it was raining REALLY HARD, so even if i wanted to go up to taylor mountain and risk being high on mushrooms in the vicinity of an actual murder investigation(!!), it was raining hard enough that there was standing water in our back yard, which usually indicates that the trails on taylor are flooded, as well.
it was weird not being able to walk around while tripping balls, as is my usual habit, but i got through it okay… although i REALLY need a beanbag chair, because the only “comfortable” chair in the house is directly in front of the TV set (because that’s where moe usually sits), and, while it is actually big enough for two of us, i REALLY DO NOT want to watch TV while high on mushrooms… so i sat for a couple of hours in the 2nd-most comfortable chair in the house, which is on the opposite end of the house, until i got done peaking, and then it was — more or less — life as usual, only “usual” included being high on mushrooms this time.
we had a karaoke party last night — about 10 people… including one of our next door neighbours, kelly, who i talked to fairly extensively regarding our respective weed crops this year… it still ASTOUNDS me that it is legal, and, while still not technically legal, i have a mental health professional RECOMMENDING that i take mushrooms… 😲
today was the last unicycle class of the session — a new session starts next sunday — and i think i may have gotten back to the point i was at the end of spring session, before “the summer from hell” (which is how i have been referring to the summer of 2022), during which i had very little time, and even less motivation, to practice unicycle.
i have a sousa band rehearsal on tuesday, a circus class on thursday, tracy and kelly (next door neighbours) are having a “costumes optional” halloween party on saturday, and halloween, proper, is on sunday. i have been making more Operation Mindfuck envelopes to be distributed to random people, while in costume, over the coming week.
why?????? 😕
when i woke up this morning, at approximately 8:30, i checked my email, and i had over identical 1,000 spam messages, in my spam folder, and more coming in as i watched… now, at 9:45, i have deleted approximately 1,000 MORE identical spam messages… and there are more coming in at this very moment…
ETA: as of 11:00, i have deleted at least 1,000 MORE identical spam messages… 🙄 if i don’t read it the first time, what could POSSIBLY make a person think that i’ll read it the 5,000th time?
WHY do people do this?
<sigh> 🙄
i suppose it’s similar to asking why people write scripts to delete all the data in unknown peoples’ cloud drives.
as winston churchill said, it doesn’t take all kinds, but there are all kinds. 🙄
grumble…
moe went to las vegas today. she’ll be back wednesday. the puppy went to stay with someone who is more able to handle a rambunctious puppy who doesn’t realise how big he is. i’m supposed to pick him up on wednesday, before i pick up moe at the airport. the other two dogs are “adults” (and know how to behave), but they are already concerned that moe is gone and won’t be back for a while. under ordinary circumstances, this would be a minor inconvenience, but because of the fact that the north american continent is experiencing YET ANOTHER COVID surge (thanks, republicunt anti-vax morons 🤬), airports are going to be especially dangerous, and vegas (as always) is going to be full of tourists from who-knows-where, who all think that COVID is no longer a concern, because our extremely NOT #drumpf president, joe biden, said that COVID is over. 🤬 and the ones who think joe biden lost the election are the ones who got us this far into the pandemic without any hope in sight, to begin with! 🤬
yeah, i know, it has been a couple months and i really need a mushroom break, but i can’t really take a break from the dogs, and i can’t really take two dogs on a 4-hour hike in the forest while i’m on mushrooms… moe could probably do it… she doesn’t take psychedelics that often, but it’s my impression that the part of her brain that speaks dog isn’t that affected by them. 😉
my stripe problems have vanished. i swiched from stripe to square, disabled the stripe plugin, and that’s the end of it. i’m actually NOT going to cancel my account right away, because i’ve still got 15 IOTM accounts to sell, and i’m really not motivated enough to figure out how to do that on square, in the middle of the run (so to speak). but it feels REALLY good to be quit of them.
the license plate in question
i went to bellingham on saturday. i left maple valley around 10:45, made it to bellingham by 11:30, picked up the license plate and dropped off a bag of weed for darol (i figured he deserves it, considering how many bags of weed he has given me), and made it out to ken and kamala’s new place on hannegan by 12:10, left there around 1:30 and drove down chuckanut on my way home.
and i’m pretty sure that the “old curse of bellingham” (the one where an old indian chief is reputed to have cursed the people that come to bellingham, that they will never be able to leave) is a superstition, because i have no more desire to live in bellingham. i have friends who live there, and it will always be a place i USED TO live, but i have zero desire to move back there. in spite of everything i’ve been complaining about recently, and my state of depression, i would still rather be where i am, than in bellingham.
the story of the license plate…
in 2019, shortly after faddlefum died, i was in line to inherit one of his license plates, which said “BREATH”. my recollection is that francie and i discussed it several times, and i was supposed to pick it up (or have it mailed to me) by the end of july, but i got caught up in stuff, and didn’t contact her until october, at which point she said she had given it to someone else.
i was friends with kenyth for decades, but i don’t know francie more than in passing: she worked with kenyth before i met him, but she moved out of town (new york, or something, is my recollection), and came back and got married to him until after i had moved out of bellingham, when kenyth already knew that he had alzheimer’s.
i figured that it was because she didn’t know how much kenyth meant to me, and went on with my life, DRAMATICALLY disappointed in the choices kenyth made about a life-partner, and without much motivation to be in contact with her in the future…
and that was where it stood until a couple of days ago, when i got email from francie, saying that she is getting ready to move and came across kenyth’s license plate, and would i be interested in having it.
and, it turns out, it is a VERY GOOD THING i didn’t say something about the fact that she told me she gave it to someone else, because the process of getting back to her involved discovering that gmail is blocking messages from hybridelephant AGAIN, which had me calling kamala to see if she had a phone number for her, and, in the process of explaining the whole thing to kamala, she mentioned that francie had the license plate on display in her house for the past couple of years. maybe i’ll mention it after i have it in my hands.
i can understand if she’s a grieving widow who doesn’t want to give away something that reminds her of her husband (even if he was her husband for a relatively short period of time, kenyth had that kind of effect on some people, particularly women)… but i DO NOT understand telling me that she had given it to someone else, and then putting it on display in her house.
nevertheless, i’m going to bellingham tomorrow, to retrieve the license plate from her. she says she’s having an “open studio” tomorrow evening, in bay street village (which is where the PHBFH lived when i first moved to seattle to go to the tech school), and it will give me a chance to see ken and kamala’s new place… and i might stop by and say hi to darol, as well.
You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie
exactly, all of THIS!
this is PRECISELY the reason i prefer to use FOSS whenever possible!
i AM one of those “1990s Linux proponents” although i didn’t start using linux on my own computers until 2000 — the last version of windows i installed was W2K server. before that time, i was predominantly a mac-head. i tested windoesn’t software (testing windows is easy, because there are plenty of bugs to be found), and used linux (and unix) at work for years, but i used macs for everything else… while i was building up the courage to switch to linux on my own machine. 😉
Continue reading You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie
up. date.
the most recent payment gateway to be tried is square. i checked authorize.net, but they want a $25 a month fee above and beyond the credit card processing fee, and sometimes i don’t make $25 in a month. square seems to be a viable alternative which comes highly recommended by at least one business-owner that i know personally (despite the fact that my web developer says “this one is one of the worse gateways” – he also accuses me of “refusing” to use paypal, however, which just goes to show how much he really knows) and i actually signed up for a square account a few years ago, when i bought a credit card reader for my phone… which i never used because i never needed to. apart from the fact that i have to go through all 323 products that i sell, one at a time, and mark them “sync with Square” (i’m still not certain what it even means, yet, but i’m sure i will find out soon enough…) i’m hoping that this will be the end of my credit-card-processor search for a while, because i’m done with it.
harvested one plant today. i was manicuring it, yesterday and today, and i found a small patch of mold on one of the buds, so i snipped it off, finished manicuring it, and gave it the chop. the other plant still has a couple weeks to a month before it’ll be ready, but, because of the mold on the other plant, i’ve got to be even more aware than i am normally, if i don’t want a moldy mess instead of nice fat buds…
however, currently, i have a fine crop of nice fat buds, so i’m hoping to keep it that way. 😉
oyoyoyoyoyOYOYOY!!! 😒 (part 2, continued)
so, i emailed woocommerce tech support. they told me that they didn’t see a zelle-compatible gateway installed. i told them that i was using “Direct Bank Transfer (BACS)”, according to THEIR instructions, which were given to me by an employee of THEIR company.
then they informed me that their plugin DOESN’T SUPPORT ZELLE…⁈
so i took them through the process of enabling zelle ON THEIR PLUGIN, and enabling zelle at my bank, and THEN they tell me… oh, if you do it that way, YOUR CUSTOMER has to go through this EXTRA STEP to send you the payment, and until THEY do this extra step, their order will be placed “on hold”.
which is NOT going to work on my web site: incense customers are impatient and flighty. if they have to go through this extra step to make a payment, they’re going to abandon their shopping cart, not make a payment, and not get any incense.
which is “BAD FOR BUSINESS™” 😒
i wish this little piece of information could have been conveyed to me A MONTH AGO, when i had three separate email conversations and a zoom call with a woocommerce representative, named bradley gilkerson, who ASSURED ME that it was fully compatible with zelle (false), and that all my customers would have to do was enter their credit card information (false) and it would instaneously (false) be transferred to my zelle account (false) without extra fees for credit card processing (false). 🤬
so, basically, i have wasted a month, and $200, getting a plugin that won’t work, installed and set up, only to discover that it won’t work, and now i have to UNINSTALL the plugin that won’t work, and find a new, different plugin that WILL work… and (hopefully) do it all before stripe decides that they’re going to cancel my account… AGAIN!! 🤬
oyoyoyoyoyOYOY! 😒
will it ever end?
i got zelle enabled and installed on my web site. i tried to test it, by purchasing incense: entering my information, and checking out. i got a notification from the web site that i had received a new order. i got a notification from the web site that my order had been received, but it had been placed “on hold, while we confirm that payment was received”… and then…
nothing.
i waited 24 hours.
still nothing.
no indication from the bank that either a withddrawal or a deposit had been made, no indication from the bank that either of those things were ABOUT TO happen, and, when i logged in to the web site, there was the order, in “on hold” status.
i contacted woocommerce, maker of the plugin i am using, but it is probably going to take them a while to get back to me, because all of my interactions with them have to go over email.
i actually called the bank, talked to their tech support which is (allegedly) the place to talk about zelle, and went through the entire process of creating a new order, with them watching the back end zelle interface. i got two notifications from the web site, but the bank was unaware that any transaction had taken place at all.
so the bank put in a ticket with zelle, to see if they can figure out what is going on. 🙄
THEN i got email back from woocommerce, which informed me that the woocommerce payments plugin wasn’t completely set up on my site, and that no account had been created. i checked, and the only part of the plugin that “wasn’t installed” was the part where i create an account — WITH STRIPE — so that i can use the plugin to process credit cards… but that’s why i’m using the plugin to begin with: to GET AWAY FROM STRIPE… and besides all that, i am not interested in stripe, i’m interested in zelle, which DOESN’T require that i sign up with stripe… AND i already HAVE a stripe account, and a stripe payment gateway plugin that is completely separate from woocommerce and zelle, and (for the moment, anyway) it appears to be working fine.
i gave them (some of) the information they were asking about, and fudged the rest, but it appears that they lay off work around 4:30 or so, so i anticipate not hearing anything from woocommerce until AT LEAST tomorrow. 🙄
Ƭȟȉȿ Ⱥǹƌ Țħăţ
today i talked, face-to-face, with an actual person at BECU, who told me that “zelle for businesses” is “not a thing”, and that there is ONLY zelle for personal accounts.
however, in order to open a business account at BECU, i had to open a personal account… which has never been used for anything, because i do business through my business account… but there’s no rule that says that personal accounts CAN’T be used for businesses, especially if the only transactions in that personal account are ones that ONLY apply to a business, so i activated my personal account for zelle, and made it so that any money paid to that account automatically gets transferred to my business account, where it belongs.
thus ends the stripe fiasco. all i gotta do now is switch payment gateways on my web site, and i’m quit of stripe.
and good riddance to bad rubbish! 😠
on the other paw, i got two incense orders today, one of which was for 5 boxes of incense, shipped to houston, texas, and one which was for 4 boxes of incense, shipped to ashanti, ghana. the one to houston was addressed to a person named “Nwogbo”, and the one to ashanti went to someone named “Agbogah”… and the one to ashanti was for $5.00 worth of incense! i REALLY DO NOT understand people from remote countries outside of the united states, who order relatively small quantities of incense that i’m POSITIVE are sold locally, and then pay more for shipping than they did for incense. it happens regularly enough that i’ve stopped asking why, and just sending it out, but it’s really mystifying to me.
oh, and on an entirely different subject all together, i have stumbled upon a RELIABLE, LONG-TERM source for mushrooms 🍄 on internet (of all places)… i got the first batch through a twitter acquaintance (which was REALLY weird), and the second batch i got “direct from the manufacturer” — a place called Matrix Genetix — which was an experience so far beyond “really weird” that it defies description… i got an ounce of APEs, which are a strain of cubensis. not my all-time favourite, but, at this point, any port in a storm…
YAAAAAA!!!! 😈
i got home from my circus class this afternoon, and discovered approximately 1000 IDENTICAL spam messages in my spam recepticle. over the course of the next half an hour or so, i deleted approximately 500 more IDENTICAL spam messages…
so i decided to do some research. what i came up with is that EVERY ONE of those spam messages had been sent from an IP address in the range of 37.32.0.0/16, in iran.
so i blocked it.
and NO MORE SPAM from that range of IP addresses. not a single one! 👍
THIS is why i do it! 😈
surreal 2
this is what i wanted with #3, yesterday, but i didn’t get the offset right, because i wasn’t working with an extended background, once i extended it, i was able to get the offset where i wanted it.
it looks better the bigger it is… it might be cool as a heroic-size portrait… 😉
surreal
1 and 2 are straight from apple messaging phone. 3 is from the gimp, and is a combination of 2 and the reverse of 2. moe thinks they’re creepy. i disagree.
i thought it was the end, but i was wrong. 🤬
this morning, i learned that, despite the fact that my bank allows the use of zelle, it only allows personal accounts to use it. “zelle for businesses” is, apparently, a “pay-for” application that isn’t used by the bank, so i can’t switch to using zelle, like i thought i was going to be able to do for the past couple of days.
argh! 😒
while i was freaking out about that, i got an email from stripe (at 6:30 in the morning), which said:
Unfortunately, following an additional review of your account, we’re still unable to support your business as it falls under our restricted businesses. Specifically, we are unable to accept payments for herbal incense , as mentioned on our restricted businesses list (https://stripe.com/restricted-businesses).
HERBAL INCENSE????
first they said it was tobacco products, then they said it was items “which mimic illegal drugs”, THEN they said it was because i “accept payments for aggregation or grouping of funds” (which i STILL don’t know what they’re talking about, and now i don’t think they know, either), and now it’s because i carry “herbal incense”????
W?
T??
F???
need i mention that there is NO restriction on businesses which carry “herbal incense” on their list of restricted businesses… 😠
so i sent them a response, saying that.
45 minutes later, i got this message from stripe:
In order to provide you assistance with this inquiry, my colleagues and I will be reviewing this case, so we can provide you with the proper information about the verification of your company and the reason for the restrictions of this type of business and once we have a response to this concern we will reach out back to you.
which was followed, half an hour later, by this:
I just wanted to let you know that we have successfully completed our review of your account, and your payouts have been re-enabled.We may be asking for more information down the line, but for now you’re all set.
W??
T????
F?????? 😵
so, if i parse this correctly, on 220823, they said they were going to cancel my account. then, on 220829, they said they weren’t going to cancel my account. then, on 220901 they said they were going to cancel my account for a different reason, and on 220908 they said they were going to cancel my account for yet another different reason, which they emphasised on 220909. then, this morning, (220912) they said they were going to cancel my account for another FURTHER different reason, and then they changed their minds, and said they WEREN’T going to cancel my account. 😵🤬
it’s a really good thing i kept detailed records of this fiasco, because i wouldn’t be able to keep it straight, otherwise. 😠
needless to say, as soon as i can locate another payment gateway that ISN’T stripe, i’ll be switching hybrid elephant to that, because, as it is, this is totally ridiculous! 🤬
miscellaneous
today i learned about the composer carl orff, who lived from 1895 to 1982. i’m somewhat embarrassed to say that i thought he was a 19th century composer, and i was shocked to discover that his lifetime and mine overlapped, despite the fact that i have actually played the piece he’s most famous for, which is the oratorio known as “Carmina Burana”… he was still alive when i played it, too. 😉 but he is also the originator of what has come to be called the Orff Schulwerk method of music education, which is, primarily, intended for children, but can be extrapolated very easily to encompass special needs students, and (significantly for me) older people who have some movement difficulty. there is the Evergreen Chapter of the American Orff Schulwerk Association which i have written to, in order to get more information, because this inspires me in a way that i haven’t been inspired in a long time.
also, i was looking at the wiktionary article for litmus, where i learned that the etymology comes from the protogermanic cognate “blee” which means “colour” or “hue”… at first i thought it might have been a typo for “bleed”, but no, it’s “blee“…
so, this has been a week from hell, but i’m still capable of finding things that aren’t hell, that interest me. 🤔
stripe — the end 🤬
this morning, i got the following email:
the only mention of “Stripe Connect” (which is an API, and not an actual, finished product) on the “restricted businesses list” is a restriction on “C2C services outside of Stripe Connect” in japan.
as far as i can tell, “C2C” can mean “Customer To Customer”, or “Consumer To Consumer, or “Corporation To Corporation”, or “Cradle To Career”, or Coast To Coast”, or “Coups 2 Cross” (a band), or “Kabushiki-gaisha C2C” (a japanese animation studio), or… there’s no telling which one they mean… and i no longer have the patience to wait for their explanation.
my business is not in japan.
i don’t carry any products that fall into the category of “accepting payments for aggregation or grouping of funds”.
and, on top of all that, stripe monetizes white-supremacist and neo-nazi web sites, which i have known about ever since i switched to them, but was never motivated enough to do anything about it.
they gave me until next tuesday to be off their services.
stripe, again, still! 🤬
i got a message from stripe, this morning. it said:
Unfortunately, following an additional review of your account for Hybrid Elephant, we’re still unable to support your business as it falls under one of our restricted businesses categories. Specifically, we are unable to accept payments for tobacco products, as mentioned on our restricted businesses list.
however, they can’t won’t tell me which products are causing the issue! 🤬
i have stooped to contacting them on twitter, to see if i can get new eyes on the problem, but, at this point, i’m not going to hold my breath that there will be a change in the outcome.
the only thing i can hope for, at this point, is that i can delay their cancelling my account until i can get a new credit card gateway installed and working… and, at this point, it doesn’t look good. 🤬
ETA:
We’re unable to reveal the exact reasons as to why your account presents a high risk, for security reasons, but we do thorough reviews of every account before coming to this difficult decision.
so they WON’T tell me what products i carry that increase their risk, they’ll just shut me down and tell me to go somewhere else. 🤬
#StripeSucks!!!
stripe, again… 😒
as expected, stripe didn’t pull their head out of their collective ass today.
I apologize for the delay and inconvenience this may have caused. I’ll have this shared with my team for further review, and should be back in touch with you as soon as we’re done.Feel free to get in touch with us in the meantime if there’s anything else we can help with.
maybe tomorrow… 😒 #StripeSucks
stripe, still… 🙄
so, friday was the day that stripe said it was going to cancel my account. if the existence of my account is any indication, they have NOT done that… yet…
however, the last thing any stripe employee said to me was “I was able to check that your website products are not related to tobacco products or services. However, I cannot confirm anything for you at this time until a result of this validation is obtained.” so, i’m still not sure they WON’T cancel my account for, alledgedly, selling “tobacco products”. 😒
and, of course, this is a “holiday” (“labour day” was created to distract americans from “may day”, which is actually the holiday for labourers), which means that the earliest i expect to hear about this most recent “validation” is tomorrow… but i’m not going to hold my breath that it’s going to happen at all… in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if i NEVER hear about it from stripe, especially because, as soon as i can settle on which one it’s going to be, i’m going to change credit card gateways to one that actually does their job, and doesn’t make unsubstantiated judgements about things that do not concern them. 🤬
and, thanks to my recent mushroom experience, i STILL give less of a fuck about these things, than i did prior to taking mushrooms, in spite of the fact that i am still very anxious and depressed. mushrooms are good for you (or, at least, for me)! 😉👍👍
🤬🤬🤬STRIPE!!🤬🤬🤬
stripe! 🙄
on 220823, i received a notice from stripe, saying that they were going to cancel my account, because i carried “tobacco products”.
i submitted a request for review on 220823. they said that they would get back to me within 48 hours, to evaluate my request.
on 220826 (72 hours later, 24 hours BEYOND their self-specified limit), i still hadn’t heard anything, so i got in contact with them. they said “the review is taking too long as expected” (🙄) and told me to be patient.
on 220828 (120 hours BEYOND their self-specified limit 😒), i got a notice that said “We have successfully completed our review, and you are welcome to continue processing payments with Stripe.”
on 220829, i got a notice that said “We’re contacting you to let you know that we’ve successfully completed a review of your account based on the information you recently provided to us.” and my account status went from “in review” to “good to go”.
on 220901, i got a notice that said “Unfortunately, following an additional review of your account for Hybrid Elephant, we’re still unable to support your business as it falls under one of our restricted businesses categories. Specifically, we are unable to accept payments for tobacco products…”
i STILL don’t carry ANY “tobacco products”, and since 220826, i have REMOVED AND DELETED any products i carry which MIGHT BE MISTAKEN FOR “tobacco products”. 😒
so, i contacted their helpdesk.
the first person i spoke to said that there was no need to worry, that my account was “good to go”, and not to be concerned. when i asked them if they could explain to me why i received that notice this morning, they shunted me off to a member of their “specialised team”, who wouldn’t answer my question about why i received the notification this morning, but ALSO wouldn’t confirm that my account is “good to go”, either. he said ” I would like to make sure that I’ll provide you with the accurate information so please bear with me while we complete our review to your account.”
so, my stripe account has now gone through THREE (or four) reviews in the past two weeks, and they STILL can’t determine whether or not i carry “restricted products” (even though i clearly DO NOT).
once this whole thing gets settled, permanently, i AM going to switch credit card processors, because STRIPE SUCKS!!! 🤬🤬🤬
and that’s NOT TO MENTION the fact that stripe monetises white-supremacists and nazis, and i have been looking for a reason to dump them anyway. 🤬
buddlies
pretty good shots, for my phone… although, i admit that the shots got orders of magnitude more difficult as the range decreased… the last one was the best of five shots, the other four of which were blurry because i was breathing. 😉
my “don’t give a fuck” pill 🍄
mushrooms.
mushrooms are my “don’t give a fuck” pill.
when i get cranky, depressed, irritable, out-of-sorts, and tired of doing anything, my “don’t give a fuck” pill helps me survive all of the unjust, inconsiderate, and outright wrong things that are happening to and around me. 😒
yeah, it doesn’t make the problems go away, or even diminish noticably, but what it does is gives me the ability to “not give a fuck” rather than letting them fuck with my brain to the point of incapacity.
that’s what MEDICINE SHOULD DO!
my MENTAL HEALTH PRACTICIONER TOLD ME to take mushrooms. — it still BLOWS MY MIND that i was given this instruction 🤯
she was right. 😉
so, instead of griping about how unjust my life is these days, and how many things have gone irretrievably wrong, i’m going to post pictures of my cannabis plants, and my trip in the forest. 😉
and it’s only the end of august! 😋
i went up road K again, where i saw the bear last year. no bears this year, but plenty of evidence that they had been there. 😉
because of the fact that it has been so dry, i actually went all the way up road K to the place where there isn’t any road, and there’s a sign that says “trail under construction, use different routes”. i could have gone further, but i was tired, and it was uphill. uphill is great when i’m “on my way up”, but by that time, i had reached a plateau, and uphill was asking too much.
so i walked back down to the old homestead, where i meditated for about an hour.
looks can be decieving… is something my father would have said. 😒
and the difference in my mood will definitely be to my advantage tomorrow, when there’s going to be game night at the burke’s, and on sunday, when the sousa band is playing at the ballard locks. 😉
what the fuck, stripe? 🤬
tuesday morning, i got an email from stripe, the credit card processor for hybrid elephant. it said:
[Please Read] Closure of your Stripe Account for Hybrid Elephant
We’re writing to inform you that we have determined your business, Hybrid Elephant, is in violation of the Stripe Services Agreement. Specifically, we are unable to accept payments for tobacco products, as mentioned on our Restricted Businesses list.
um…
i don’t sell tobacco products.
repeat, i DO NOT SELL tobacco products, of ANY KIND!
never have, never will. 😒
i went to their list of restricted businesses, to see if i could figure out what was going on. they mention tobacco products, and e-cigarette juice (is it just me, or does the mere concept of “e-cigarette juice” sound just a little bit creepy?), and they also list businesses which sell “illegal drugs, items intended to mimic illegal drugs, and items intended for use manufacturing or using illegal drugs.”… which i take to mean that they’re down on “paraphernalia”, and i HAD a “Pipes” category on the site…
but, because of the fact that i actually haven’t sold a pipe in more than two years, i actually had the “pipes” category removed and deleted from the site today.
they said if i disagreed with their decision, that i could submit an appeal, which i did, on tuesday. they said they would get back to me “in 1 or 2 business days”. according to the way i figure it, “1 or 2 business days” should have been yesterday or today.
their web site DOES NOT list a phone number. moe said that they apparently have a “chat” feature, which i have used in the past, but i can’t seem to find it. if i can locate their “chat” feature, i’m DEFINITELY going to be in contact with them tomorrow. if i can’t, i don’t know what i’m going to do.
they gave me until 2nd september before they’re going to quit accepting payments from my site. 🤬🤬🤬🤬
it KEEPS! GETTING! WORSE!!! 🤬
and there doesn’t appear to be anything at all that i can do about it! 🤬
😭
after busking, today, i was driving home, up hobart-ravensdale road, and i got to the wind-ey part, just south of the cedar river, right before the summit-landsberg cutoff, and i encountered a deer which had been hit by a car, going the other direction. the car that hit the deer didn’t even slow down, but the injured deer was wobbling and bouncing all over the roadway, as i drove up. there were two cars going the other direction, which almost hit the deer, and three cars (mine included) going the other direction, which narrowly avoided hitting the deer. it wobbled over to the guardrail on the opposite side of the road, tried to jump, failed (because its back legs were no longer working), and i was able to pass, but almost immediately after i passed, the deer wobbled into the middle of the road again.
i cursed, because the only thing i could think of to do to help the deer was to kill it, because it was so injured that it probably wouldn’t walk again, if it survived at all… but the only way i had to kill it was to run it over with my car, which isn’t guaranteed to kill it, but IS guaranteed to mess up my car, and, besides that, there were two other cars going the same direction as me, and two cars going the opposite direction, and, with the deer wobbling around in the middle of the road, there is no guarantee that hitting the deer won’t also involve hitting another vehicle… and, by the time i had worked all this out, i was already on the other side of the cedar river, and away from the excitement. 😒
i drove the rest of the way home — about a mile and a half — in a daze. i texted moe, and she recommended that i go back and check if the deer was still on the road, and if it was, to call 911, but i didn’t… there were at least 5 other vehicles present, one of which had actually pulled off to the side of the road and stopped by the time i rounded the bend at the bottom of the hill, and there’s a sure bet that at least one person had enough wits about them to call 911… and, besides, i was (and still am) REALLY distressed by the whole thing, and going back, even if it was completely gone, would have just made it worse. 😭
i suppose it’s what i get for living out in the sticks. 😒
another weird incense customer…
i’ve had an incense customer since 2018. he has always ordered the same variety of incense and nothing else, and, except for his first order, which was for three boxes, he regularly orders 10 boxes at a time… but that’s not the weird part.
the weird part is that, apart from the time between 2020 and 2021, when his orders all came from the same location, he has ordered from a different residential location, in two different states, EVERY SINGLE TIME…
and, as i said, he regularly orders 10 boxes of the same variety of incense at a time. 😕
makes me wonder… is he an AirBnB owner, or something like that, and is stocking up for his residences? is he a renter that burns incense so much that he has been evicted, and has to find a new place? is he ordering gifts for random people? what? 😵
so…
yesterday, the FBI served a search warrant at Mar-A-Lago, home of the former #SCROTUS, #drumpf. #drumpf wasn’t home, he was in new york, testifying in another legal proceding against him…
but he’s publically losing his shit, which is amusing to watch. 😉
however, forgive me for being skeptical, but, with all of the other fiascos going on — abortion, gun control, healthcare, climate change, nazis/fascists in the government (and elsewhere), and so on — while this is excellent news on the surface, i doubt that it’s going to amount to much.
we can always hope, but i’m not going to hold my breath. 😒
and to think… 😒
at one time i was a major apple fanboy… 😒
admittedly, it was back when the operating system was free, and all you had to do was go into your local computer store with four floppy disks, and you would walk out with a functioning operating system… in the early ’90s…
these days, apple has turned into a proprietary nightmare, which penalises people who buy and sell apple products without going through “proper” channels.
example:
my tablet has been needing service more and more frequently. it got a slight bend in the frame, and, apparently, the way they are made is flimsy enough that the strongest element is the screen… which breaks at the slightest breeze in the wrong direction.
my tablet first started exhibiting the symptom of “not charging” a few years ago. the first time it happened was when it was still under applecare warranty, but i took it to a third party repair shop (one hour device repair) once the applecare had expired. one hour device repair has a lifetime warranty on repairs, so subsequent times it started exhibiting this symptom, i took it back and got it fixed for free… and, usually, got a new screen in the process, because they had broken it in the process of fixing the charge port.
then, a couple months ago, someone (it may have been thaddeus, but i’m not sure) sat on the tablet (or something) which put enough of a bend in the frame that the screen no longer met the edge of the frame… at which point i started needing to get it repaired (for free) more frequently, but, on the up side, they could get the screen off without breaking it.
the last time this happened was last week. i took it in, and they diagnosed a new problem with one of the power management chips. they said that, under normal circumstances, their experience has been that once this power management chip starts to go, there isn’t anything that can be done to fix it.
🙄
so, knowing that apple sells “refurbished” equipment for EXORBITANT prices, the first place i looked was on craigslist, where i found an ALMOST IDENTICAL tablet (the old one is a 3rd gen., and the new one is a 4th gen.) for $690… which is A LOT less than i could get it refurbished (starts around $1,200 and goes up from there). i contacted the guy, and arranged to pick it up (which is what i was doing at dick’s drive in the other day). he said that the applecare subscription expired tomorrow (which is now yesterday), but he was going to extend it a month, so i could get a chance to switch it over to my name.
so, i called applecare, and (after getting cut off mid-call), i finally learned that i couldn’t switch the applecare to my name, because it had to be done by the original owner. so i contacted the guy, and arranged to meet him in issaquah. when he called applecare, they asked him his name, and the serial number of the device…
and then, they told him that it is NOT POSSIBLE to switch the applecare to anybody else. i can’t even wait for the applecare in his name to expire, and then subscribe with my name, because i am not the original purchaser.
if i had bought a “refurbished” tablet (from apple), it would have come with “refurbished applecare”, but, because i bought it directly from the seller, they didn’t have a chance to “refurbish” it, and they aren’t willing to issue a new applecare subscription.
AT ALL!
EVER!!!
🤬
apple has just lost ANY loyalty i may have still had for their products. this is totally stupid! 🤬
welcome to western washington
it’s never going to be “back to normal”… this is the new normal.
last summer, we had temperatures in the 110s farenheit. this year, europe is having temperatures in the 40s celsius (approximately the same).
the recent COVID19 variants have “stealth” capabilities: they have very few, if any symptoms, and can fool some tests into giving a negative result… but the infected person is still massively contagious, and, because of the fact that there are few symptoms, they are less inclined to do things like mask and isolate, which infects others… and they still have the possibility of developing “long covid”, or monkeypox.
and i remember, way back when the pandemic was first starting up, in early 2020, before they discovered the first vaccines, when the CDC basically said that, if we could get EVERYONE to wear a mask for a month, that we could get ahead of it… but of course, that never happened, because there were too many COVIDiots who believed #drumpf when he said it would miraculously vanish. 😒
AND EVEN NOW there are public media personalities and prominent politicians who are TELLING PEOPLE that there is no pandemic, that it’s a fraud concocted by the chinese to destabilise our economy, that masks are a sign of slavery, and encouraging people to eat horse paste to “cure” COVID symptoms. 🙄
the republicunts, through a largely #drumpf-appointed supreme court, have overthrown Roe v. Wade and are champing at the bit to overthrow gay and interracial marriage, birth control, and transgender health care, and enact a nationwide ban on abortion, with no exceptions for rape, incest, ectopic pregnancy, or, basically, anything else, and the democrats, lead by our so-called “president” joe biden, seems disinclined to do anything about it.
there has hardly been a week go by — sometimes as frequently as every day — when there HASN’T been a mass shooting. sometimes it’s the police killing innocent, unarmed (but, unfortunately, black) people, and sometimes it is people like kyle rittenhouse, who crossed state lines with his mother and an (unlawful) assault rifle to join a riot, ended up killing two people, got away with it, and is now a “celebrity” who appears on talk shows and is interviewed by pundits, or the kid who shot up a grocery store in buffalo because he wanted to start a race war, who was taken into custody by police, completely alive and unharmed, or the kid in texas who shot up an elementary school, or the kid who shot up a black church, who was taken into custody by police, completely alive and unharmed…
and, once again, the republicunts are blaming everything, and everyone EXCEPT the guns, and, once again, the democrats, lead by our so-called “president” joe biden, seems disinclined to do anything about it. 😒
meanwhile we have people like tucker carlson, alex jones, and other news media figures, who are actively fomenting unrest, with disinformation, misinformation and flat-out lies about everything from the most recent presidential election, to “the great replacement” conspiracy, to “Q-anon” madness, and blatantly right-wing, fascist, nazi propaganda. and we have people like the “proud boys”, the “3 percenters”, the “oath keepers” and other blatantly right-wing, fascist, nazi fanboys, who eat it up and spew out their own particuarly putrid brand of garbage, which is duly reported on by the news media.
and they STILL haven’t addressed things like gun control, universal health care, student debt forgiveness, or climate change, all of which are broadly popular and essential. federal minimum wage is STILL less than $7.50 an hour, which isn’t even starvation wages, these days.
AND IT’S NOT GETTING BETTER!
in fact, in many ways, it’s getting WORSE!! 🤬
at this point, as far as i can tell, the ONLY hope for a reasonably un-polluted, reasonably progressive future, with more or less equal rights for everyone, is a massive general strike… and that’s probably not going to happen, because a big chunk of people can’t be bothered or don’t care, and another big chunk of people believe they CAN’T go on strike, because of rent and food worries…
but, as far as i can see, those two big chunks of people are just delaying the inevitable, because the chaos that WILL ensue WHEN (not if) civilisation collapses will be WAY worse.
stupid motherfucking anti-vax republicunts, update (🤬)
according to the latest CDC guidelines, i was supposed to isolate for 5 days, and wear a mask for a week, as long as i continue NOT to have symptoms.
i isolated for five days, and on the seventh day (three days ago), my rapid antigen test had a SOLID positive line inside of five minutes (moe says it was more like 10 minutes, but i disbelieve her, this time), despite the fact that it’s supposed to take 15 minutes. my impression is that this is a fairly common occurrence, because there are "tips" that you can find on the web, that contain instructions on how to gimmick INCREASE THE PROBABILITY OF NEGATIVE post-COVID testing, which include rinsing nasal passages, blowing your nose, and using a neti pot immediately prior to the test.
but, the thing is, i have a gig TOMORROW where i will, potentially, be playing my tuba for multiple hundreds of probably un-masked people (it’s the west seatle summer festival), and, while it’s going to be outside, there appears to be another "surge" happening: SINCE THE FAIR i have gotten email from no less than 12 people who got COVID AT THE FAIR!! 🤬
and the STUPID MOTHERFUCKING ANTI-VAX REPUBLICUNT NAZIS would have you believe that it’s all a hoax, and that people aren’t REALLY getting sick.
🤬🤬
stupid motherfucking anti-vax republicunts!! 🤬
i SHOULD BE at the oregon country fair, at this very moment… but i am not.
less than 12 hours BEFORE i was supposed to leave, i tested positive for COVID-19. moe tested positive, as well. 😒
i mentioned it on twit-turd™, and some random person responded “your (sic) fully vaccinated? why blame the anti-vaxxers?”
to which i responded “”your” fully vaccinated?” PLONK! 😒”
(if you don’t know, “PLONK!” is the sound that spam messages make when they are shit-canned)
however, here is my reason for blaming the antis/republicunts:
if you recall, way back, two years ago, when this whole pandemic was first starting up, the CDC came out with a statement along the lines of “if we can get EVERYONE to wear a mask for a month, we can defeat this.” this was BEFORE they even had a vaccine…
but there were a whole bunch of anti-mask republicunts who believed #drumpf when he said that it would miraculously disappear, and totally ignored the CDCs recommendations.
and tens of thousands DIED because of it.
then they announced a vaccine, and there were a whole bunch of anti-mask republicunts who said that the vaccine contained aborted fetuses, or some such garbage, and refused to get vaccinated.
literally MILLIONS died, but the antis stood their ground, as millions of THEIR OWN KIND were dying around them…
and, more recently, there has been the “federal” (#drumpf-appointed) judge who decided that the mask mandates for airlines and public transportation were “unconstitutional”, and the rush to re-open businesses, and the rush to “get back to normal” that has totally ignored the CDC recommendations (AND, i might add, COMMON SENSE) which means that millions MORE died…
if we had listened to THE EXPERTS about this, we would have been done with it, or, at the very minimum, be well on our way to recovery by now, but…
now, don’t get me wrong: if a person CLAIMS TO BE an “expert” on something, i ALWAYS take what they say with “a grain of salt”, particularly when they claim to be an “expert” in MY health. but i also know enough history to know that, in 1918, when we had a pandemic of the “spanish flu” (which turned out to be an american phenomenon that was first isolated by spanish doctors), BEFORE the advent of reliable vaccines, the “anti-mask” crowd was the PRIMARY reason (along with world war one) that it lasted for 3 years.
yesterday, i felt “under the weather”, and slept most of the day. towards the end of the day, i transitioned from feeling “under the weather” to feeling truly awful, but (fortunately) moe was there with over-the-counter medicines and common sense, and i actually slept through the night (which is something that i rarely do, under the best of circumstances, these days), and i feel weak, but more-or-less normal today… but i was SUPPOSED TO BE at OCF LAST NIGHT — my panto comrades are going to miss me, there are at least two pieces of music they CAN’T PLAY because there are prevelant tuba parts, and, because of the fact that i tested positive on tuesday night, i can’t even go out in public (even with a mask) until sunday or monday.
and i have ZERO compunction about naming the stupid motherfucking anti-vax republicunts as THE primary cause of this. 🤬
and, despite the fact that boris johnson (the UKs answer to #drumpf) stepped down as the prime minister of the UK, yesterday, i am still not holding my breath that anything is going to change for the better, any time soon.
fortunately, i haven’t seemed to have lost my sense of taste and smell: i’m currently burning incense, which i can smell, and moe made chicken soup, which tastes AWESOME, but both moe and i have commented on the “brain fog”, which will, hopefully, go away over time.
what the…?
i don’t know for sure, because i don’t know what it would be like if i HADN’T taken mushrooms a week ago, but i will say that it’s PROBABLY a good thing i took mushrooms a week ago, because the intervening week was depressing beyond belief.
last tuesday, which was also our 24th wedding anniversary, when i was IN THE MIDST of a significantly more powerful psychedelic experience than i EXPECTED (considering how weak and impotent the immediately previous psychedelic experience had been), i got a text from moe, which said that some unknown thing had happened to rye (currently, our most senior dog, at 11½ years), and he was having trouble walking, moving, and standing — quelle horreur!!
the neurologist said that they were suprised the dog was walking at all. 😟
he came home from the hospital friday, and has been recovering ever since… which, basically, means that his movement is severely restricted: he lives in an ExPen, in the living room, full time, except for 4 or 5 bathroom breaks every 24 hours, and he sleeps in a kennel in monique’s office. it’s going to be two weeks before he will be allowed to go up and down stairs again, so moe has moved all of her stuff downstairs for a couple weeks.
SINCE THEN, i have had to deal with, suddenly, being in the middle of rehearsal season (rehearsals wendesday, sunday, monday, tuesday, wednesday, and so on) which i haven’t experienced AT ALL for two years, AND i’m going to the oregon country fair, for the first time in two years, which TERRIFIES me, even though i really want to go, AND (oh, joy), we’re getting a NEW PUPPY WHILE i will be at the oregon country fair… which means that, when i get home from OCF, we’re going to have a disabled dog, and a new puppy, AT THE SAME TIME…
😩😰
i am running low enough on spoons that i actually cancelled busking this week, because i have a rehearsal later that day, and i’m pretty sure that if i went busking, i would be totally useless by the time the rehearsal came around.
quite apart from it being EXTREMELY WEIRD to be high on mushrooms while dealing with emotional people (who don’t know i am on mushrooms), and a severely injured dog, and quite apart from the fact that i am committed to doing something (OCF) that simultaneously terrifies me and is something i REALLY want to do, this entire sequence of events has not been particularly easy or enjoyable for me… 😒
and i’m REALLY not sure how i would have been able to handle it if it were NOT for mushrooms.
🍄mush🍄room🍄satis🍄faction🍄
the other day i took one 00-sized capsule of dried mushroom, and experienced an OVERWHELMINGLY ASTOUNDING reduction of my depression, but a heightening of my FRUSTRATION that it “wasn’t enough”.
and it wasn’t enough, dammit! when i take psychedelic mushrooms, i expect to FEEL something… not just be less depressed! 😉
(i’ll take being less depressed, if that’s all it’ll give me, but, seriously… it ain’t enough.)
so, today, i took FOUR 00-sized capsules of dried mushroom.
no more frustration. 😉🍄
just realised…
this year will be the first year that i have been going to the oregon country fair in which i have had ENOUGH cannabis! it’s legal in oregon, and i have a medical permit AND i still have more than a pound of buds from last year’s harvest… 😎
of course, it’s still prohibited by the fair, but everyone knows how much that is enforced. 😉
🍄mush🍄room 🍄frustration🍄
once again, i have stooped to buying mushrooms through twitter.
this time, apparently, i was more successful.
i got two 3.5g packages (¼oz total) — professionally produced, expensive packages (which, in themselves, make me wonder A LOT about their provenance) — of APEs, which are a variety of p. cubensis.
they definitely appear to be “the right thing”, however, once again, i run HARD into this frustration that i may or may not have expressed previously, which is, specifically, that i take MINISCULE amounts of this “drug”: one 00-sized capsule of pulverised mushroom — so small an amount that i notice absolutely NO “psychedelic” effects WHATSOEVER — and, yet, there is an OVERWHELMINGLY ASTOUNDING reduction in the level and quality of my depression.
i HATE IT that this drug is so good. i HATE IT that, in spite of everything, this drug remains illegal. i HATE the bizarre hoops that i’ve had to jump through to obtain it…
and i HATE that i am unable to take enough more that i can actually get some psychedelic experiences out of it, because i don’t know when (or if) i’m going to be able to get more. 🤬
new IOS toys
Uvalde Police Didn’t Save Lives Because That’s Not What Police Do
i, hereby, quit the human race. 🤬
this is the reason why: #ACAB!! 😒
Uvalde Police Didn’t Save Lives Because That’s Not What Police Do
Continue reading Uvalde Police Didn’t Save Lives Because That’s Not What Police Do
why i do it, part ∞
Re:[## 78615541 ##] ABUSE VIOLATION: Give your feedback, get a $75 8J+NqPCfjag
Zoho Campaigns has a zero tolerance policy towards spam, and we do everything we can to curtail it. Thank you for sharing the email header. We have taken punitive action against the user as per our terms of use.
i don’t get these notices often, because of various “spam policies” held by the offending parties, but, occasionally, i get solid validation that the spammer i reported has been flattened by the mallet.
it feels good.
art for car!
i am, once again, the owner of an art-car! SACBO here i come! 😉
(however, on the way home this morning, i picked up a rock chip on the windshield, which is already bigger than it was originally… looks like monday is going to be “repair my windshield” day. 😒)
happy “ride a unicycle” day!
220515 salamandir on a very small bicycle
okay, so it’s not a unicycle… but i’m free-mounting at least once for every 15 minutes of practise… and it’s not often that one gets to ride such a tiny bike. 😉
behind me, you can see hannah, riding a unicycle, between two bars. she is probably no older than 7 or so, and i WATCHED HER learn more on the unicycle, TODAY, than i learned in two years!
it’s so inspiring having young kids in the same class as old geezers.
also, friday the 13th… booga! 😱
gooply and northful…
annual moisture festival…
i got my MF check today… 😒
- 2022, 15 shares, $750 – $50 per share
- 2021, 4 “virtual” shows, i played for 2 of them, no payment.
- 2020, 17 shares – cancelled at the last minute, because of the imminant pandemic.
- 2019, 13 shares, $520 – $40 per share
- 2018, 11 shares, $330 – $30 per share
- 2017, ?? shares, $480
- 2016, 15 shares, $600 – $45 per share
- 2015,
- 2014,
- 2013, 14 shares, $490 – $35 per share
- 2012, 16 shares, $720 – $45 per share
- 2011, 14 shares…
as always, they included a note that says “Please don’t approach this as a paid gig or a money-making booking, because there is no financial guarantee…” blah, blah, blah…
the fact is, the moisture festival is STILL one of my “top paying gigs” every year, and the fact that i’m on SSDI doesn’t matter.
at the same time, $50 a share is as high as it’s been since i started keeping track… i wonder if this means that i’m one of those people who has been making money because of the pandemic? 😒
snakez alive busking
photography by david carlos
it’s…
it’s almost a sacrilege to wear this hat with ANYTHING other than an all-purple suit (and even better if it was a matching zoot suit, but they cost too much), and i have such a suit… but i’ll post this because it’s SO cool…
zoot Tando hat
this is the final element of an all-purple suit: coat and pants, vest, shirt, cufflinks, a choice of 3 DIFFERENT shades of long ties, or a bow tie, pocket-square… i’ve even got a purple and black lapel-pin…
i MIGHT be wearing this to busk in, tomorrow… we’ll see. 😉
🍄 also 🍄 mush 🍄 room 🍄 news
i 🍄 moved 🍄 the 🍄 mycelium 🍄 outdoors 🍄 today! 🍄 two 🍄 to 🍄 four 🍄 months 🍄 to 🍄 obtain 🍄 fruiting 🍄 bodies 🍄 before 🍄 final 🍄 determination 🍄 fingers 🍄 crossed 🤞😉
fitment
unless something very unusual happens after this point, this is what my car’s hood will look like, very soon… (except that it won’t be blurry or fuzzy, that’s just the screen-resolution graphic. the finished product will be full colour and crisp lines. 👍😉)
and, to midnight window tinting (the guys who didn’t care about the fact that i couldn’t email updates to them), i say “bleh”. 😛 wicked wraps was able to handle my file without an issue, didn’t require me to save it in a different format, was able to figure out EXACTLY what i wanted with minimal input from me, they’re doing it for less money than midnight window tinting 👍👍, and they even took the finished graphic as a RGB file (which amazed even me), because, apparently, their equipment works better with RGB than it does with CMYK… 👍 they haven’t even seen my car, yet, and, already, they’re doing a far better job than you guys ever did! “bleh” 😛
urgh!
from the inside, looking out, life is pretty decent: we’re busking again, there are gigs on the horizon, nothing serious is wrong with the house, i’m getting my art car made… i’ve still got a big, scary thing that hasn’t happened for 2 years, but was pretty much essential to my life for some time before that (which is the oregon country fair)…
but from the outside looking in, 50 years of my life, and most of my identity, has been summarily dismissed by the supreme court, which has indicated its willingness to overturn roe v. wade, despite the fact that there isn’t a single state for which the overturning of roe v. wade commands more than 30% support…
which, of course, is PRIMARILY due to #drumpf, who, despite being impeached TWICE, managed to jam through three supreme court “justices”, two of whom are credibly accused sexual predators, and the other is amy coney barrett, who thinks that a woman’s place is barefoot and pregnant.
and all of that is coming from EXACTLY the same people that gave us matt gaetz, who is under investigation for human trafficking and sex with teenagers, and jim jordan, who is accused of enabling a sexual predator, and roy moore, who is accused of sexually predating teenagers at a mall, and madison cawthorn, who idolises hitler, and films himself fucking his cousin in the ear, and another guy who is a long time republican politician who was convicted of possessing pornographic images of children, and the “jewish space laser lady”, and on, and on, and on, and on, and FUCKING ON!!… 🤬🤬🤬
and the chance that ANY OF THEM are going to face real justice of any kind is vanishingly small. 🤬
and that’s not even to mention the fact that #drumpf, himself, along with ALL his cronies, and partners in crime, are STILL running around free, and having rallies, and spewing misinformation, disinformation, and OUTRIGHT LIES to anybody who will listen, which, apparently, is about 49% of the population of the country…
seriously, politics has gotten so over-the-top, blatantly FASCIST, pretty much ever since #drumpf was elected (but, honestly, i see the first inklings of fascism in the 1970s, when nixon and mcgovern butted heads)… the country, and the world, has gotten so right-wing, “christian”, and “conservative” that it’s beyond merely frightening, and everything i’ve seen seems to indicate that it is going to get orders of magnitude worse before there’s any hope of it getting better…
and, if that wasn’t bad enough on its own, don’t even get me started on climate change… 🤬🤬🤬
a long time ago…
(and i know it was a long time ago, because it was when i put a lot more faith (or whatever) in such things, which i have not done since well before my injury…)
i learned that there was some sort of mystical presence unlocked when, instead of using yarrow stalks, you used hemp stalks to cast i ching hexagrams.
i have always thought it was an interesting idea, and, to that end, now that it’s legal to grow hemp, i have now accumulated 50 appropriately sized hemp stalks which are intended to be used to cast i ching hexagrams.
however, because of the fact that i no longer place much faith (or whatever) in “techniques for divination”, i wonder what i should do with them? 🤷
i understand that i ching, particularly, is used as a valid form of self exploration, as well as a meditative practice, especially when the ancient, and far more meditative form of casting (which uses yarrow/hemp stalks), is used… but i don’t feel tremendously inspired to take up, or incorporate, another ancient practice, along with the ancient hindu, taoist, and muslim practices in which i currently engage.
i could put them up for sale on my web site, but that would seem to imply that i have multiple sets of stalks… and, while i do, there aren’t that many, currently, and only one of them is prepared enough to sell…
🤷
new car, new art
this may not be the final artwork, but it’s pretty close.
i dispensed with midnight window tinting, despite the fact that they sent me an original graphic, last year, when my cloud drive was vandalised, because the guy refused to talk to me, gave me vague reasons for doing things that i know nothing about, and refused to tell me more, then gave me a screen shot of my artwork that was totally screwed up (despite the aforementioned fact that he actually had a good copy, previously), and, to top things off, his email provider uses a spam detection service that “detected” my email, and refused to deliver my emails to him, and when i texted him to tell him, his response was “don’t care”…
i’m now going with “wicked wraps” — sounds like an east coast thing, but they’re on the west coast… who knows? 🤷 — i haven’t met them in person, yet, but i’ve corresponded with them, and i’ve seen their work, driving on the freeway…
further mush 🍄 room fun
the mycelia that i inoculated back in february have been making themselves evident for about a month now, and everything i’ve read seems to indicate that distributing the mycelia, once it’s growing, doesn’t necessarily require sterile components… I THINK that means i can put NON-sterile potting soil, and NON-sterile wood chips into my planter bags, and move them outside pretty much any time… at this point, i’m going to experiment, by putting half of the mushroom spawn in sterile media, and half in not-sterile media, to see if there’s any difference.
the sooner i transfer the spawn, the sooner i will have a crop. at this point i’m thinking, maybe, august or september… 😉
continued…
as i was saying…
i’m so used to being depressed and anxious that, when things are going well, instead of enjoying the fact that things are going well, it makes me more depressed and anxious, because i KNOW that things are getting ready to go “wrong-er” than they have ever gone before, and they’re just waiting for me to relax and ease my guard a little, so that they will have even more effect… 🤬
once again, i have found myself in one of those places: everything is going smoothly, the moisture festival is over, and, apart from being sick for a couple of days after it was over (NOT COVID!), everything went about as well as i could normally expect… i had a unicycle class today, and i worked on my free-mounting and my turns, and i didn’t fall off… and one time i managed to ride THROUGH a group of people and i didn’t hit one of them! 😉👍 there’s a better-than-normal chance that thaddeus and i are going busking on wednesday… i got two incense orders this week… the next big thing on the schedule is OCF, which IS happening, and i AM going (despite the fact that it terrifies me), but only because the band needs a tuba… i don’t know that i’m going to do an awful lot other than play music, and hide in my tent, but i AM going to go…
and, yet, i have this feeling of impending dread… gilbert gottfried died the other day, and he was 67… only five years older than me. i’ve already tried to die once, and failed miserably… what’s the guarantee that i won’t be more successful the next time?
combine that with the fact that i haven’t seen a doctor, apart from an ophthalmologist, for more than 10 years, and that is PRIMARILY because, in spite of everything (i.e. my brain injury), i am overly suspicious of “doctors” in general: i have had personal experience, on a number of occasions, where, if it weren’t for ME saying something, i would have been treated for diseases or conditions that I DON’T HAVE, because somebody, somewhere, made a notation error, and nobody actually knew me well enough to know that there had been an error made…
my erstwhile GP, doctor wackaloon, had notated in my chart that i had a heart stent, but had no notation about my brain injury… and he had been my GP for 10 years! 🤬 and when i was in the hospital, recovering from my brain injury(!!!!😠), i had to inform the nurse that i am not, in fact, diabetic, which was in direct conflict with my chart, which said i was… 🤬🖕🤬
and even the ophthalmologist thought i had glaucoma, because she made me take the glaucoma test with my right hand, and my right hand doesn’t work about half of the time! i told her this before i took the test, but she said no, that it was “standard” to test people with their right hand. when i took the glaucoma test with my left hand, like magic, glaucoma was no longer an issue. 😒
and i’m really not sure how to resolve my suspicion of doctors, and go see a (different) GP, because of the fact that i don’t have any health insurance other than medicare, AND the fact that i would probably have to personally interview several doctors before deciding, and i don’t really think that doctors make time for that, these days… 😒
but, at this point, apart from entirely expected “getting old” things, like sore muscles and arthritis, my health appears to be pretty good… which — i guess — is as good a reason as any to figure these things out now, rather than waiting until i actually have something go wrong with my health, and having to make the decision out of hurried necessity… 😒
the end of (another) era…
the last performance of the 2022 moisture festival happened last night. it was the last performance (that we currently know of) in hale’s palladium, EVER… the palladium has been sold, and there is no word on whether or not the “new owners” (whoever they may be) are interested in continuing to rent their former beer warehouse to a bunch of crazy hippies for a month, every year.
the largest, longest-running comedy/variety showcase IN THE WORLD is now looking for a new venue… rather like Teatro Zinzanni (a long-time moisture festival ally), which has been looking for a new venue, on and off, for 20 years. 😒
in 2004, the moisture festival was held, for the first time, in rev. chumleigh’s circus tent in downtown fremont. it was two days: the fremont philharmonic was to play the first day, and the zebra kings were supposed to play the second day, but because of the fact that the zebra kings were nowhere to be found, and most of the fremont philharmonic was backstage when the show was getting ready to start, the fremont phil played both days. at the time, i was under the impression that the moisture festival was going to be a “one off”, because i couldn’t imagine the city actually allowing us to set up a tent in a parking lot all the time, but little did i know that, already, there were plans being made.
the fremont phil, at the time, consisted of fred hawkinson, on trombone, the leader of the band, and the composer of most of the tunes we played; jeremy reinhardt on baritone and flute, and the composer of the rest of the tunes we played; ted lockery on trumpet, pam mcrae on clarinet, sasha malinsky and alan… um… i don’t remember alan’s family name, on drums (they alternated); john cornicello on keyboard, and myself on E♭ tuba. we were just off playing for billion bunny bash, and the cirque de flambé shows at magnusen park, but before fred quit the band. i remember, specifically, people not being able to find ANY of the zebra kings, and it being about five minutes before curtain when they asked us if we wanted to play, i also remember A LOT of chaos, disorganisation, and people running around like headless chickens… something which never completely went away, even after we moved to the palladium.
the first show in the palladium was when it was still being a beer warehouse: pallets of kegs, empty beer bottles and cans, A LOT of beer, porta-potties for public toilets, and a significant rat problem were among the first recipients of the moisture festival shows. the second year (the first year in the palladium, which would have been 2005) was four days, i believe, and the start of the tradition of the “marathon”, which was, the last show went on until there were no acts left who “wanted” to perform. the first marathon lasted until midnight, and from that time on, until we decided that it was getting to be a bit too much, the marathons got longer, and longer… and longer… and LONGER… the last marathon (year 6 or 7, possibly) started at 9:30 pm and lasted until 6:30 am the next morning… and we STILL had acts that wanted to perform, but some of us had to go to work in the morning, and ALL of us were so tired that we couldn’t see straight. after then, we decided that the tradition of the marathon had outlived its purpose. 😉
after year 2 (the first year in the palladium), i was more convinced that we were going to establish a yearly event.
the moisture festival started expanding after year three or four, i think… primarily because of the fact that, during one of the burlesque performances, an arialist had a “strategic costume malfunction”, ripped off her costume, and continued the performance entirely naked. the audience LOVED IT, but mike hale (the owner of the palladium) was a “christian” and was completely scandalised, although he made it sound a lot more like he was concerned about the city ordinance regarding “titties and alcohol”. 😉 he threatened to have the entire event shut down unless we found another venue for the more “suggestive” shows. 🤣
i made the programs for year 7. year 9 the programs went online, because that way it would be easier to modify them, when (as happened in previous years) an artist cancelled at the last minute, or changed their schedule without notifying anyone. and it made excellent use of the new domain and web site that the event had just purchased. 😉
the 2020 moisture festival was all set to go when the pandemic hit, and it was unceremoniously cancelled at the last possible moment. the 2021 moisture festival was four days of online presentations. i took part in two of them, but it was so totally “not the same” that it was entirely forgettable.
the moisture festival WILL continue… we now have the infrastructure and the network to insure that. what is still in question is how that continuance will take shape.
whatever happens, despite my near-constant griping and moaning about individuals associated with the moisture festival, there will be nothing, EVER that even remotely compares to the moisture festival, as it has been.
🤬
i’m so used to being depressed and anxious that, when things are going well, instead of enjoying the fact that things are going well, it makes me more depressed and anxious, because i KNOW that things are getting ready to go “wrong-er” than they have ever gone before, and they’re just waiting for me to relax and ease my guard a little, so that they will have even more effect… 🤬
one week of moisture festival down, one fluffing session complete (also, a term used in vaudeville, to describe preparing the awaiting audience outside the theatre for the show they are about to attend: getting them “in the mood”… 😉), and one more week to go… it’s kinda sad that this is probably going to be the last show in the palladium (and, possibly, the last moisture festival, ever), but it’s good that we were the band that had two weeks this year. i realise that i have been complaining, almost every previous year, that other bands were getting more of the limelight, but it’s good that it worked out this way, and i can say that i’ve been a part of the moisture festival ever since the beginning, when we did the show in rev. chumleigh’s tent in downtown fremont…
i’m getting totally fed up with the former owner of our house: ron zeising, general contractor and owner of a “home improvement” business, who thought that, because he was a general contractor, he could make “improvements” on his (now our) house “on the cheap” and skirting (or outright ignoring) building codes. recently (last month?) we paid $6,000 to a HVAC specialist to rip out and replace ALL of the heating ductwork in the house, because poor design (by ron zeising) meant that most of the heat from the very expensive, top of the line furnace (which was one of the selling points of the house), was going into the crawlspace, and the heating bills were through the roof.
of course, ron never had a problem with the heating bills, because, despite the fact that he had an expensive, top of the line furnace AND a heat pump, which provides central air conditioning as well, ron heated the house with the wood stove, and left all the doors and windows open in the summer… 🤷
we just had the last workman leave from rebuilding the “retaining wall” under our deck… and it’s a good thing, too, because, if we hadn’t, the deck would have eventually fallen off. now it is a good deal less likely to fall off, but in order to make it secure, it still needs some work: when it was in the process of being built, ron zeising just piled large rocks, bricks (including half of someone’s chimney, and a large cylindrical concrete footer for a post), and random construction rubble, next to the house, covered it with a thin layer of topsoil, and then built a deck over it… concrete pillars, on top of a thin layer of topsoil, and construction rubble… 🙄 it’s as though he thought that, because of the fact that he was a general contractor, nobody would ever question the work that he did, so he just. didn’t. care. 🤬
however, end result: we got a nice, new, secure, sturdy retaining wall, a couple of new raised beds to grow vegetables, and A LOT of new concrete under the deck pillars(!)… 👍 and yet another $6,000 chunk taken out of our checking account. 🙄
history, repeating itself…
if we do not learn from history, we will be condemned to repeat it… 😒
within our own FUCKING lifetimes! 🤬
MF: one week down, one to go
and, as everybody has been saying, it’s really great to have a LIVE audience for whom to perform…
but i’m still terrified… not enough to stop me from plating, but enough that it is definitely making a difference in my performances: i totally screwed up the melody for Godfrey Daniels’ tune yesterday… i played the first few notes correctly, and then got totally lost and confused. i picked it up again, a few measures from the end, but, as ALL of my other performances of this tune have been exemplary, that one was a major embarrasment. 😒
one of the unintended results of playing the moisture festival is that i haven’t been able to spend as much time on “twit-turd“, with the immediate effect being that, when i logged in, this morning, there were TWO events which were “trending”, about which i knew absolutely nothing… and the more i read, the less i understood about both of them. 🤨 i’m not giving up on it (because, honestly, it’s the most contact i’ve had with people on the fringes of, and completely outside “my community” since i gave up fecesbook), but, once again, i am forced into a position where i have to examine whether or not these “social media platforms” are, really, good for me… and i get the very strong impression that the answer will be “no”. 😒
not that it’s any great surprise…
moisture festival formal
looking at the photo above, at 100% (what you see here is approximately 45%), i’m not sure whether or not i like this effect… which is odd, because, as far as i know, i didn’t use any effects when processing this photo… 😒
sunday (yesterday)
i THINK i MAY have learned to free mount my unicycle! 👍
i went into the last class for this session about 15 minutes early, because i wanted to “practice” before class actually started. i free mounted almost immediately, and then did a couple more “almost free mounts” — i actually mount the unicycle, but i have to abort before i ride away: i figure it’s a “real” free mount if i can pedal at least twice, all the way around, before having to abort, and these were less than two complete rotations — then class started, and i got down to actually doing it… and i was able to break the limit of ten free mounts (after which i said i wasn’t going to count any longer) before the end of class. 👍👍
THEN, i went home to find moe out in the front yard, pulling weeds, and i asked her if she wanted to see me free mount the unicycle, and she said yes… AND I DID IT! 😎 THE FIRST TIME!! 😎👍👍👍👍
now i really have to get started on my flaming tuba… it won’t be long now. 😉
then, later on, i went to Fyodor Karamazov (tim furst)’s wedding party, to play my tuba with a group of musicians who were SPECIFICALLY chosen to play at this party, two days ago. it was a wedding, so there were A LOT of speeches, which meant that we didn’t play music as much as i would have liked (because we had to vacate the building before 1:00 am, otherwise the police would show up), but, strangely enough, it didn’t affect my payment in the least… and, because of the fact that there was ZERO traffic at 1:00 am, it only took me a half-hour to drive home…
but, apparently, i misplaced my regular reading glasses, after the show, so, in order to read the computer screen at a reasonable distance (as compared to a foot away from my face, while squinting), i’ve had to commandeer the glasses that i usually keep in the workshop… they’re the same prescription, but they’re a lot more chewed up, because i use them in the workshop. hopefully the regular ones will show up soon, because glasses are expensive, and i’ve “lost” too many pairs of glasses recently (which means “in the last 5 years”). 😒
rejoice!
they DIDN’T break the screen of my tablet, which means that i picked it up TODAY, and it charges, just like it should! 👍 now i KNOW i’ll be able to use it for the moisture festival!
and, speaking of moisture festival, i got a call YESTERDAY to determine if i was up for playing in a band for tim furst (fyodor karamazov)’s wedding TOMORROW, and, naturally, i said yes… because i haven’t played music for long enough that if i were a normal person, i probably would have forgotten how to do it by now… and the fact that they’re paying me $100 doesn’t hurt… 😉
also, i ordered 12 dozen boxes of Sugandha Shringar Gold incense, from india, at the beginning of march, and i just took delivery of what moe calls “a big box of incense” (but i know better, because i have gotten “BIG” boxes of incense, in the past, and they were more than HALF AGAIN as big as the one i got today)… but it’s for an “old time” incense, which has been around for AT LEAST 50 years, and it’s somewhat rare.
but it is a PRIME example of how “those indian people” use sanskrit… well, okay, devanagari, because hindi is written with the same alphabet, and i don’t really know which one they’re thinking of when they do this… but the insence is called “Sugandha Shringar Gold”, which it says on the english language side of the box. on the other side of the box is what one might assume is the name of the incense in hindi (or sanskrit), written in devanagari letters. if you don’t actually read devanagari letters, you might assume that it is the hindi, or sanskrit equivalent of “Sugandha Shringar Gold”… it says “सुगंध शृंगार गोल्ड” except “sugandha” is already a sanskrit (and hindi) word that means “incense”. “Shringar” is a place name, of a place in india… and the rest of the name? “गोल्ड” is the word “gold”, spelled out in devanagari letters — “GOLDD” — and they do this ALL THE TIME! i’ve seen NUMEROUS boxes of incense, and other things, which have devanagari writing on the box, but are, basically, the english words, spelled out in devanagari letters. they don’t use the hindi words, or the sanskrit words, they use ENGLISH words, spelled out phonetically, using devanagari letters. 😒
irritating!
new desktop behaviour!
220318 new (optional) desktop behaviour thanks to kubuntu! 😎
this is friday, right?
today is the day one hour device repair said they would repair my device… because they couldn’t do it tuesday, because the right person wasn’t in. so i took my device in to redmond, watched the guy open up the shop, he took my device, said the board tech would be in in about an hour, and he would text me when it was ready, and i went home.
when i got home, i got a text from the guy. he said that his board tech had called in sick, and they’d have it done tomorrow.
except that i have to, you know, USE it tomorrow… 😒
fortunately, i have printouts of all the required pieces of music for tomorrow’s rehearsal, because there’s almost a 100% guarantee that IF they actually have it done tomorrow, it WILL NOT be in time to take it to the rehearsal, and i’m still not 100% convinced that they’re not going to break the screen in the process of taking it apart… which, naturally, will mean that it will be EVEN LONGER until i get it back. 😒
this time, instead of being one step forwards and two steps back, it’s actually been two steps forward and one step back. i wonder how long i’ll be able to keep up this pace? 😒
now that’s what i’m talkin’ ’bout!
i made the jump from kubuntu 18.04 to kubuntu 20.04 today, and it went smoother than i had ever hoped, in my wildest imagination… 😎
i’ve been slowly configuring the computer for about a month now, and i finally found an old debian CD that had the .deb file for sigrot, which i installed this morning… and that’s pretty much the last thing that i had to install from external sources.
my old .deb file for sigrot went away with the old cloud drive data, and they discontinued it around 2000, so it’s “no longer available”… but it turns out that i can purchase install CDs for old versions of debian from LinuxCollections dot com — apparently the modern version of CheapBytes dot com, which went out of business a while ago 😢 oh well… — and it turns out that the versions of debian called “slink” and “potato” have the most up to date version, and it works perfectly well on kubuntu 20.04…
and why wouldn’t it? ‼⁉ it’s a tiny little application that only interacts with plaintext files that I provide, and it only makes a .signature file, so it’s not relying on system calls or hardware requirements… why they would have discontinued it is beyond me… apart from the fact that, i’m fairly sure, nobody but me even uses a .signature file, these days… 😈
i already had to install gucharmap, because no KDE-based character map works as well for what i do, and i’ve also installed the “Deep Connections” gramplet in the new version of GRAMPS, which is A LOT easier than it has been in previous versions. i’m fairly sure that there will be other things that i will install as i use the machine more, but i’ve got the old machine set up next to me, and i can use its configuration as an example when i need to.
at this point, the system looks good, and the minor tweaks that it needs will get done when they come up, because this is good. 😉
but this is, far and away, the easiest complete system upgrade i have ever experienced. THIS is the way it SHOULD happen, ALL THE TIME!! 😁👍👍
also, i finally got a mouse whose third button works the way it’s supposed to, which means that, now, i have to UNLEARN the “copy-and-paste” gesture that i have been forced to use, because the old mouse had a third button that didn’t work consistently. new computers that work the way they’re supposed to, ROCK!!
urgh
so, the tablet-fixer shop got the part in, and they said i could come in any time, and they would fix it “while you wait”… so i took it in this morning, only to discover that the person who can fix it (without destroying it) won’t be in until friday, unless i want to take it to bothell…
the thing is, i’m still more convinced than not, that they’re going to break the screen in the process of taking it apart… like they have, twice, in the past… and if they’re going to have to replace the screen, i would rather that the people who have dealt with me, and my device, in the past, be the ones that deal with me this time, rather than having to “break in” (so to speak) a new person, when my device gets broken… 😒
but i’ve got a zoom class on thursday, and, while i CAN do it on my phone, it’s A LOT smaller than my tablet, which makes things like responding to chats A LOT more difficult… and i’ve got the final rehearsal for the moisture festival on saturday, so if they DO break the screen, it probably won’t be fixed until after the second week of moisture festival, which is the first week i am supposed to be playing the moisture festival… which is decidedly LESS than ideal. 😒
the guy was supposed to come by yesterday and finish the insulation on the ductwork, but because of the plumbing disaster that happened over the weekend, and the EXTREME squeamishness of the guy, it turned out that he REFUSED to work, because of a little puddle of clean water that was left over from them running the hose into the cleanout under the house… 😒 our next door neighbour (who is a professional plumber) came over during the actual disaster, and again, after the HVAC guy left. what the HVAC guy said made me think that there were new leaks and ground saturated with grey water, but when i and the plumber went into the crawl space, the only moisture we could find was a small puddle of clean water… the plumber said that the HVAC guy was being a prima donna and a “pussy”, and called him up to tell him so… which i thought was EXTREMELY funny. but HE won’t be back until NEXT TUESDAY!! 🤬 and they want the crawl space to be COMPLETELY dry, and clean, before they will complete the work… the thing is, the weather has been rainy for a week, now, and, even with a fan down there, the ground moisture is NOT going away. i got a 25-foot sheet of visqueen which i’m going to lay down after a couple more days of the fan being down there, but, if the guy doesn’t finish the work, then i guess i’m not going to pay them the $6,000 that we agreed on when they started. 😒
on the plus side, i met someone who, i think, is my third cousin, once removed: ryan dorward, currently from bali, but normally from vancouver, BC, otherwise known as SHARPS. he is the great-great-grandson of John Muir Dorward, the elder brother of Peter Dorward, my great-great-great-grandfather… which makes our common ancestor Robert Dorward, who lived from 1803 to 1846 in Arbroath, Scotland.
not only… 😒
ah, the “joys” of hoMEOWnership… 😒
we’ve been, essentially, without heat for at least two weeks. the guy came and replaced our heating ducts, but he wasn’t able to finish the insulation, so, now, the heat registers are blowing a lot warmer air than they were before he came, but they’re still only blowing lukewarm air, and most of the heat is STILL bleeding off into the crawl space. he’s coming back to finish the job on monday. 😒
they’re supposed to text me, today (at the earliest), to let me know if the part for my tablet is in, but i doubt that they will, and, despite the fact that most of their repairs are made “while you wait”, there’s a good chance that, when they do text me (which will likely be monday or tuesday… or whenever they get around to it… 😒) the screen will break in the process of taking it apart to replace the charging port, at which point there’s going to be another two weeks (or so) wait before i get my tablet up and running again. 😒
AND last night, after i went to bed, the plumbing problem that has been gurgling in the distance for a few days, erupted (literally) in our downstairs bathroom…
a few days ago, the laundry drain backed up and spilled (fortunately clean) water into the garage. monique snaked it out, but she only went about five feet before she decided that it was “good enough”… so, of course, the drain backed up again while she was out, the next day. i snaked it out again, this time extending the snake as far as it would go, which is 25 feet. i found a couple more clogs, but nothing major… then i noticed that the kitchen sink was gurgling when the laundry drained… and the kitchen sink was gurgling when i flushed the toilet… and the kitchen sink was gurgling when someone took a shower… 😒
i discussed this with tracy, our next door neighbour (who is a professional plumber), and determined that the laundry drain was not installed “up to code”, and is not vented, which means that, from time to time, it’s GOING to back up, and there’s not a lot we can do to prevent it.
then, i noticed that the drain attached to the sink in the kitchen is also… wonky… it, also, does not have a vent, and is installed with a P-trap that is installed normally (i.e. the way it should be), and ANOTHER P-trap that is installed upside down, making an “S” or “N” shaped thing, and then another 90° turn before heading down into the crawl space…
another FINE job done by former owner ron zeising (or, presumably, one of his lackeys) because he was a general contractor, and “could”… 😒
monique and i discussed this, and we both agreed that it would be a good idea to get a plumber out to assess the problem BEFORE it turned into a geyser or a fountain, but, apparently, after i went to bed last night, that event happened: someone flushed the toilet, downstairs, which backed up into the bathtub, and in the process of plunging the toilet, the wax seal failed, which spewed sewage into the bathroom.
monique checked with a couple of professional plumbers that she knows (including tracy), and developed a plan of attack, but…
just for once, i’d like to be able to wake up in the morning without having some sort of immediate disaster that has to be dealt with. 🤬
here we go again… 🙄
i’ve got a zoom class this evening, a telehealth appointment tomorrow, and a moisture festival rehearsal on saturday…
… and my tablet decided to stop charging this morning. 🤬
i got in touch with the technician that replaced the charging port (odd that this seems to happen on an almost yearly basis… odd indeed… 😒), and informed him that it had quit charging again, and he said i should bring it in. so i left an hour earlier than normal, and headed up the east side of the lake to redmond, where the technician confirmed that it was, indeed, a faulty charging port, said that they would fix it on warranty, and ordered the new part. 👍
problem is, i’m fairly sure he DIDN’T also order a new screen at the same time… and this particular model of ipad is NOTORIOUS for screen breakage when you have to open it up FOR ANYTHING… kinda like they had to do last year (and the year before) when they replaced the charging port. it turned into a two week job, during which time the screen of my tablet was BROKEN, which precluded me from using it for ANYTHING… 😒
and that can’t happen this time, because i have zoom classes, telehealth appointments, and moisture festival rehearsals AND PERFORMANCES in the next three weeks. i can get through the rehearsals and performances with my old-school hard-copy music, and the zoom classes and telehealth appointments THEORETICALLY can take place on my phone, but it will be at least three levels of hassle that i would rather avoid, if i had the choice. 😒
mind blown… 🤯
The Evolution Control Committee – Fool On The Hill, major/minor swap
so, i’ve heard a couple of other “modifications” like this: John Denver, Country Roads in a minor key“is a significant example, but, still, i gotta ask…
HOW DO THEY DO THAT???⁇⁇
seriously! 🤔
i can imagine how the key of the entire piece could be changed from major to minor, but changing the individual chords from major to minor, or vice versa, would be A LOT more work, and even if one were willing to put in the amount of work necessary to do it the way i imagine it’s done, it wouldn’t result in anywhere as “nice” sounding music… 🤷
along the same lines, Jolene at 33 is also pretty awesome. 😉 but i’ve done that…
moist moisture
the moisture festival is, tentatively, back on the schedule this year. the phremont fill is taking weeks two and four, the sancapators are taking week one, and i don’t know who is taking week three, but it’s probably the naked truth.
moist fest rehearsals are happening, with a surprisingly large number of “replacement” musicians: euphonium, guitar and flute are all new to the phil this year. guitar has played as a substitute for us in previous moisture festivals, and flute plays for the sancapators, so she’s already familiar with the chaos that usually happens. euphonium is a guy from bellevue who i probably know from high school — he went to samammish at the same time i was at interlake — who just moved back to bellevue a couple years ago, and i recruited him from the sousa band. euphonium’s name is tony, and flute’s name is cate. i don’t remember what guitar’s name is, despite the fact that i’ve met him, and played on the same stage with him, fairly many times in the past. (ETA: it’s chris, which is why i don’t remember it… he just falls into the category of “another chris” and gets promptly forgotten, because there’s another chris in the same band… 😒)
despite our regular guitar, stuart, not being available this year, he’s still the fluffing liason, and he’s already said that i and whoever else i can get to play, are welcome to come in and fluff on april 1st. the pike place market has lifted its mask mandate, which means, when the weather gets nicer, i’m probably going to start busking again. for sure with thaddeus, and i’ve got a fantasy of busking with thaddeus on his “banj-itar” and kiki on her “banjo-lele”… it would be a plethora of not-quite-banjos that would add a lot of extra “oomph” to the group.
FREE MOUNT!!!
i free mounted my unicycle, for the first time, today at 12:43 pm! 😎
one step closer to having The Tuba-Cyclist ready for presentation! 😉
(it’s only taken me THREE YEARS… 😒)
cancelled
my circus class, yesterday, was cancelled.
my DBT class, yesterday, was cancelled.
my counselling session, today, was cancelled.
when i woke up this morning, it was 52°F in the house, despite the fact that we’ve got what everybody else says is “the best HVAC product on the market” supposedly heating our home… except that “the best” is hooked up to the ductwork that was done by “the worst” general contractor, who was ron zeising, former owner of our house — seriously, i get the impression that he put things in like the heat pump/furnace/central air conditioning unit with the SOLE INTENT of driving up the price of his house, because, while it is “the best” HVAC system available, it’s air-handler is only about half what the square footage of the house requires, and the ductwork is a COMPLETE MESS of new, old, and whatever the hell he had left over in the scrap bin, which, at it’s BEST, only delivers about half of the heat to the rest of the house… but our crawl space is 15°F WARMER than the rest of the house… which, of course, has encouraged critters to make nests under the house, further deteriorating the already sketchy ductwork. 🤬
so, instead of spending that money to remodel the upstairs bathroom (take out the jacuzzi we don’t use, and put in a sauna that we will use), we’re now having to throw $6,000 at critter-proofing the crawl space, and totally replacing all the ducts under the house. 😒
and, to top things off, the guy who is currently my “medication manager”, dr. uzowulu, asked me if i worry a lot, and when i said yes, his response was to tell me not to worry so much, and pray instead. 🤮
mushroom 🍄 landmark
innoculated P. cyanescens using the “90-second-perfect-every-time” brown rice method for spawn, today at 4:20 pm.
alledgedly, the planters are getting here next thursday. they will be filled with sterile potting soil and STERILE wood chips(‼🍄) and deposited in a secure location outdoors, and the spawn will be introduced… erm… when it’s ready.
how will i know it’s ready? when the mycelium makes itself evident!
that’s it…
if everything goes the way i’m hoping it will, i should have a healthy, self-regenerating crop in 3 to 6 months.
W.T.FedEx??
thursday (yesterday) morning, when they hadn’t arrived, i went online to “check my order”, and discovered that they had been waylayed twice in their journey from city of industry, california, and were currently in the middle of their second “waylay-ance”, in lakehead, california.
oh, well… i figured… they’ll be here tomorrow…
right?
actually, no… 😒
today, i check the status of my order, only to discover that the package has been rerouted through st. peters, missouri… only a 2,700 mile detour on a trip that should only have been 1,200 miles to begin with… 🤯
W.T.FedEx?? 😒
kapoor kacheri
i got some more channabasappa & company incense today. this is probably the last of it, because the rest is all duplicates of stuff i already carry. i got a kilo of kapoor kacheri bathi. this is what i have distilled from the available “knowledge” about kapoor kacheri:
Kapoor Kacheri – Hedychium spicatum
Kapoor Kacheri may also be referred to as Spiked Ginger Lily, Kapur Kachli, Kapur Kachri, Perfume Ginger.
3rd Chakra – personal power, 4th Chakra – unconditional love, 5th Chakra – speaking truth, Grounding, Introspective, Purifying
Anti-allergenic, Anti-arthritic, Anti-asthmatic, Anti-bacterial, Anti-inflammatory, Anti-rheumatic, Anti-spasmodic, Decongestant, Expectorant, Mucolytic, Tonifying
Hydacheium Oil which is also known by the popular name Kapur Kuchari is extracted from Hydacheium that grows to up to 3 feet tall. It has loose terminal flower spikes that have individual flowers that are yellow with reddish stamens. Its antibiotic properties have also increased interest in the medicinal properties of the species.
The root stalk is useful in local inflammations, nausea, asthma, bronchitis, hiccups and in pain. The rhizome of the plant is said to be carminative, stimulant and a tonic. It has been described as useful, specially as an anti asthmatic agent. Clinical trials have been conducted in tropical eosinophilia, with promising results. It counteracts bad mouth taste and smell.
incense smells like the best qualities of camphor, sandalwood and agarwood. it is as though camphor and sandalwood had a baby, and that baby grew up, got together with agarwood, and they had a baby… that baby would be kapoor kacheri. it is quite subtle, and doesn’t hang around for very long. 😉
add end um…
so, i went into home depot recently, and, at the entrance, there was a sign that said, essentially, “we test for illegal drugs as a condition of employment, so if you use illegal drugs, don’t even bother to think about applying for a job here”.
but, here’s the thing…
cannabis is legal.
and their excuse of it being “company policy” shouldn’t make a difference in a place where cannabis is legal.
shouldn’t it?
mush room 🍄
i took “the rest” of my mushrooms today, at 12:00 pm. i don’t know how many there were, in terms of “mushrooms”, but it was between 1 and 2 grams (two 00-sized gel-caps, plus a tiny amount) of powder, mushroom bits and detritus at the very bottom of the bag. this trip followed the predictable pattern of ramp up, peak, maintain, and ramp down, but it was a great deal more than i expected, considering how mediocre my recent mushroom escapades have been. i must have been taking the parts that didn’t have the right stuff, before, because this trip made up for it “in spades”. 😉
the fact that i actually logged in here, and am making what i suppose is something like sense, at this point, at 5:00 pm, is somewhat amazing, and is made even more amazing by the fact that i went out and got a prescription refill for moe, a 12-pack of diet ginger ale, and canned salt-free green beans for dog food, an hour ago. i have discovered that driving while high on mushrooms has, apparently, been affected by both the fact that i have been driving NOT on mushrooms for quite a bit longer than the last time i did so (which was in my 20s), and the fact that cars, these days, are a lot more “hands off” than they were fourty years ago… following distance, speed limits, road-center detection… even an amount of steering… are all “automatic” at this point.
“high self”, meet “normal self”. 😉
while i was out walking in the woods today, i saw a fallen branch with moss growing off of it… and it looked just like a lazy duck with green hair.
i knew those emergency eyeballs would come in handy… 😉
i confirmed that the big tree that has been speaking to me, is a “Tree of Being”… the only other one that i know of is on sehome hill. this one appears to be around 600+ years old. i sat beneath it, today.
this better have some lasting anti-depressant effects, otherwise i’m going to have to do it again. 😉
dashanga
DASHANGA (“Ten Ingredients”) CONSTITUENT INGREDIENTS
6 parts kustha, 2 parts gur, 3 parts laksha, 5 parts nakhla, haritiki, and raal in equal parts, 1 part dapai, shilajay equal to 3 lav, 4 parts nagarmotha, and guggul one part
——
KUSTHA
Kustha (Saussurea lappa C.B.Clarke) is an important medicinal plant which was mentioned in ancient Hindu literature and Ayurveda. It was considered as next to Soma plant which is best among the plants. It grows in the reigions of Himalayas and Kashmir and is used in Ayurveda for fevers, skin diseases, headache etc. Kustha is well known for its cures since the ancient times. Etymologically the word “Kustha” is derived from “Krushnaati rogam”. It means, one that ploughs out or drags out the disease from the body.
Dolomiaea costus, formerly known as Saussurea costus, commonly known as costus, Indian costus, kuth, or putchuk, is a species of thistle in the genus Dolomiaea native to South Asia and China. Rishi (Hindu) mystics of Kashmir especially ate this plant. Essential oils extracted from the root have been used in traditional medicine and in perfumes since ancient times.
Costus is the root of this plant. The root of the plant is the key part used for medicinal or homeopathic purposes. The root is also called by its Latin name radix aucklandiae (root of aucklandia).
It has a large number of names in other languages, including kuṣṭha in Sanskrit; kust or qust in Arabic and Persian; kut, kur, and pachak in Hindi and Bengali, kostum, gostham, and potchuk in Tamil; upaleta and kur in Gujarati; kot or kust in Punjabi; changala in Telugu; sepuddy in Malayalam; kostha in Kannada; kuth or postkhai in Kashmiri; and kosht (קשט) in Hebrew; koto in Swahili; mu xiang in Chinese.
——
GUR = jaggery
——
LAKSHA
Botanical Name
Laccifer lacca Kerr.
Family
Lacciferidae.
Synonyms
Coccus lacca, Kerria lacca.
Regional Name
English : Shellac, Laksha (Lac). Hindi : Lakh, Sanskrit : Laksha, Bengali : Gala, Gujarati : Lak, Telugu : Kommolakka, Lakka, Tamil: Komburrki, Malayalam: Arakku, Ambalu.
Part Used
Resin.
Description
India and Thailand are the main areas in the world where lac is cultivated. Over 90% of Indian lac comes from the States of Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Orissa. Lac insects thrive on certain trees and the principal lac host trees in India are Banyan, Peepal, Khadira, Palash, Kusum and Ber.
Lac are scale insects (Laccifer Lacca) which live on trees called lac host trees where they secrete the lac resin which is scraped off and manufactured into shellac. To produce just 1 kilogram of lac resin around 300,000 insects lose their tiny lives. A scale insect is a common name for any of about 2000 insect species found all over the world that attach themselves in great numbers to plants and trees. Scale insects range from an almost microscopic size to more than 2.5 cm. They can be very destructive to trees – stunting or killing twigs and branches by draining the sap.
The life cycle of a lac insect takes about six months and consists of four stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult. With this life cycle, the lac industry obtains two lac crops each year from each tree. Females lay up to 100 eggs, which hatch out into larvae. These small red larvae, roughly 0.5mm, long crawl out of the brood lac (or mother cell) and settle on the twigs. At this stage both the male and female larvae live off the sap of the trees. The lac scraped from the branches is known as crude lac or sticklac. Crude lac or stick-lac, consists of the resin, the encrusted insects, lac dye, and twigs. This is crushed, washed, dried to form Seedlac. Seedlac is then converted into Shellac by hand or machine.
Phytoconstituents
The major constituent of laksha is the resin (70-80%); other constituents present are: sugar, proteins, and soluble salts, coloring matter, wax, sand, woody matter, insect bodies and other extraneous matter; a volatile oil is present in traces. Lac resin is composed of mainly hydroxy fatty acids of C14- C18 carbon chains, such as aleuritic, butolic, C14- C16 mono- and di-hydroxy acids along with hydroxy terpenic acids having the rare cedrene skeleton as jalaric, laccijalaric, shellolic, and laksholic acids.
Ayurvedic Properties
Rasa : Kasaya, Guna : Laghu, Snigdha, Sneha, Virya : Shita, Vipaka : Katu, Karma : Kappa, Pitta.
Ayurvedic Applications
Pachana, Depana, Apasmara, Kushta, Raktadosha, Kasa, Antrasula, Prameha, Atisara, Arocaka, Hidhma.
Medicinal Uses
It is used for liver diseases, Diarrhoea, Dysentery, Intestinal parasites (worms), Injuries, Fungal infections, Eczema, Scabies, Herpes, haemostasis, Internal bleeding disorders, Hiccup, Cough, It is also used for Low bone mineral density, jaundice, dropsy, kidney disease, reduces fat the Adipose persons, joint disorders, osteoporosis, osteomalacia, osteoarthritis etc. It is also helpful in obesity, renal and spleen disorders, jaundice, backache problems, leprosy, ulceration, epilepsy and chicken pox.
——
NAKHLA = charcoal(?)
——
HARITIKI
Terminalia chebula fruits – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminalia_chebula
——
RAAL
Ral is the gum extracted from Sal tree (Shaala). It is the astringent Ayurvedic medicine widely used in diarrhoea, dysentery, skin diseases, stops bleeding, heal wounds, herpes, burn wounds, fractures etc.
Sal Tree
Botanical name : Shorea robusta
Family : Dipterocarpaceae
Qualities, Uses
Medicinal Qualities of Rala
Rasa (taste) – Tiktha (bitter), Kashaya (astringent)
Virya (potency) – shitha (Cold)
Guna (qualities) – Guru – heavy to digest, Snigdha (unctuous)
Karma (action) – Grahi – absorbent, Sthambana – styptic in nature
Indications of Rala
Blood disorders
Excess sweating
Visarpa – herpes
Vrana – It cleanses the wound and hastens its healing process.
Vipadika – cracks in palms or soles with pain
Graha – psychiatric disorders
Bhagna – fractures
Agnidagda – Burn wounds
Jwara – fever
Cough, Asthma
Shoola – abdominal colic
Atisara – diarrhoea
Kandu – itching
Sphota – blisters
Bleeding haemorrhoids
Effect of rala on Tridoshas
Vatapittahara – Balances vata and pitta dosha
Chemistry, controversy
Rala chemical constituents
It is composed of chemicals like hydroxyanone, dammarenediol II, Ursolic acid etc
Controversy
Sarja rasa or sarjaniryasa refers to gum extracted from Copal tree – Vateria indica
Rala is gum extracted from Sal tree
How to get gum extract
How To obtain gum extract from Sal Tree?
A white viscous substance oozes out from sal tree when few strips of bark is removed. On exposure it hardens and change to brown colour. It is collected after 10 to 12 days. Again the substance oozes out and the procedure is repeated. This gum extract can be collected several times in a year.
Features of Sal dammar
Color – Yellow to brown color
Odour – aromatic
Nature – Brittle
Opaque
——
DAIPAI ?
——
SHILAJAY ?
——
NAGARMOTHA = cypriol
——
GUGGUL = bdellium
——
thistles and bugs… hmmmmmm… 🤔
——
okay, this is what i get for geeking out about incense:
👉OPOPANAX!!👈
(i ordered some opopanax oil! 😀)
oh… my! 😮
so, i got the channabasappa & company incense today, and it is OUTSTANDING! 👍👍
i got a kilo each of dashanga, and guggal bathi… the dashanga is powdered, with no stick. i’m not exactly sure how to burn it, but i suspect that charcoal tablets will work… and it is an OLD TIME HIPPY scent that i haven’t smelled in a LOOOONG time. because of the fact that i’m not sure how it’s burned, and the fact that it comes in 100 gram packets, i’m not sure if i’ll end up selling it on my web site, but it will DEFINITELY be an addition to the IOTM collection. the guggal bathi is… not what i expected: i knew the scent, but i expected it to be a dark, wet incense, and it is, actually, light coloured and fairly dry… but it, also, is an OLD TIME HIPPY scent that i haven’t smelled for many years, and, because of the fact that it is a bathi (comes on sticks), it will be a lot easier to put on my web site. 👍
THIS is why i made the effort to do business with this person, despite the fact that i KNOW her to be flaky… when she DOES come through, it’s always with SUPERLATIVE product. 😉👍
incense
i FINALLY got shipping confirmation from the flaky incense lady from minnesota — the one who, two years ago, took my money and, 6 months later, STILL hadn’t shipped me the incense for which it paid, so i ended up having to go to the credit card company for help cancelling the order… this time, it only took her TWO months, and the USPS tracking number says that the “USPS in possession of item”, which means that it actually exists in someone’s mind OTHER THAN mine, and the flaky incense lady. i’ve known about her for 25 45 years or so (i’ve GOT to start remembering that my brain injury was almost 20 years ago! 🤕), as “another person who sells incense” like i do, and it seems to me that i used to do business with her a lot more frequently than i have in the past 10 years or so, but that’s only because, more and more in my dealings with her, she became the “flaky” incense lady.
i have actively avoided doing business with her for a few years now, because, back when i made my first bulk order from MSDF, she said she wanted to “go halves with me”, but, then, she “didn’t have the money, but would pay me later”, which she never did… and then, a few months later, said that she had a customer who wanted some bulk MSDF incense (which i had just imported), and she told them to contact me… and they never contacted me… 😒
but she’s “going out of business” — from my point of view, she’s SAID she’s been going out of business for at least 10 years, but whatever. she’s liquidating her supply of incense made by shroff channabassappa & sons — the same company that made “Leadbeater” incense, which is one of my two all-time favourites… and, while she doesn’t have leadbeater incense, she’s got a couple of other scents which i really like, i know would sell well, and, could possibly be additions to my “Incense Of The Month” selection, because, as far as i have been able to tell, shroff channabassappa & sons is out of business, as well. 😉
and, like i said, USPS is in possession of the item, and estimates that i will be receiving it on saturday. whee! 🎉
on the other side of the coin, i also just got email from Aravinda Parimala Works — makers of “Sugandha Shringar Gold”, which has been available from me since before i started the business (thanks to my association with Sugandha Prabhu) — informing me that, despite my inquiring about it 6 months ago and having them assure me that it would be available after the first of the year, at this point “Sugandha Shringar Gold” is completely sold out, and they will have to make more before they can even think about sending me some. 😠
at least they answer my emails in a timely fashion, unlike the flaky incense lady, who replies to my emails when she feels like it, which is, frequently, never. 😒
cirque du soleil
a couple of friends bought moe and i tickets to see the cirque du soleil show “Allegria”, which we used today. i have seen “Saltimbanco”, and “Volta”, and i think i like this one best of all. it is, apparently, “Allegria 2.0”, which is a reboot of the show they did from 1994 to 2013, which, according to moe, was “why there weren’t as many set pieces and why there was a lot more acrobatics…” and, indeed, there was A LOT more acrobatics than i have seen at previous cirque shows. there were stacks of 3 people in several of the acts, and EVERY. SINGLE. ACT. had some variety of “death defying stunt”, from the stack of 3 people that “fell” into a bunch of long poles, which were being held on the shoulders of other guys, and ended up with two of the stack of three people standing ON the poles… and a 4-way “tumble track” that had 8 people bouncing and tumbling over the top of each other… and the guy with the german wheel that started with the wheel flat on the ground, and he got it up and rotating SIMPLY BY exherting momentum with his feet… 
literally… there was one of the “entr’acte” scenes, with clowns, where they created a literal blizzard of confetti that completely engulfed the people who were sitting close to the stage (which included us)… and then, after they had done a little dance with leaf blowers, to get the confetti off the stage, they had people who ran sheets up, over the heads of the front rows of seats, and they blew the confetti on to the sheets, which were, presumably, gathered up and recycled for the next show… there was A LOT of confetti…
and i got a souvenier collapsible velvet top hat, which is something i have wanted for a very long time. 😉
look, it’s the end of the world!
a VERY long time ago — i would guess somewhere between 1964 and 1967, or thereabouts — i participated in a “market research study” (for which my parents, hopefully, got paid), where, over the course of a week or so, i would try various different dry cereals, and “potential” dry cereals — which they had produced, but hadn’t “hit the market” yet — without knowing anything about them, and rate them according to what i thought dry cereal should look and taste like.
i’m fairly sure i screwed up ALL of their data points, because i was a combination of three things, which severely skewed my personal experience of dry cereal. the first was that, when i was very small, there was a concern that i might be allergic to cows’ milk (which had been proven false, by the time this took place), and so, when i was learning which cereals i liked, i was only given cereals that could be eaten “without milk”… which, for some reason, meant various different kinds of oatmeal and grits… i wasn’t even given “cream of wheat” because it had the word “cream” in it, and, particularly, my mother was CONVINCED that it wouldn’t be good for me. the second was that my parents were “progressive”: not full-blown “hippies” (however, my dad did have long hair and a beard, but it wasn’t until the ’70s) but definitely not the standard fare for the time and place they were from, which was central illinois “corn country” in the mid-to-late ’60s. thus, they were CONVINCED that sugar was “bad”, so, as a result, when it was determined that dry cereal was “a thing”, i was only given ‘bland’ cereals, such as cheerios, kix, chex, puffed wheat, and grape nuts. by the time i was part of the survey, i was eating cows’ milk all the time, but i never liked “sugar frosted flakes”, “sugar smacks”, “chocolate frosted sugar bombs” or anything like that… and the third thing is that, when i was very small, i was forced to eat fruit at a time when i really DID NOT want to eat fruit, and, as a result, i developed a lifelong distaste for fruit, in general, and about 75% of the cereal that i tested was fruit flavoured, in some way or another.
i spent a few days trying, and rejecting about 95% of the “chocolate frosted sugar bombs” they offered me, primarily because they were so sweet that it overpowered any “cereal-like” taste there may have been.
over the years, they have come close… the closest they’ve gotten that i know about was “honey-nut cheerios”, which was “pre-sweetened”, but, because of the fact that it was, alledgedly, sweetened with honey, and not sugar, it was, alledgedly, “okay”…
however, when i came across this, yesterday… 😱
but still…
so, it turns out, there’s a MINISCULE chance of my getting pulmonary fibrosis.
as a fully vaccinated person:
there’s approximately 2% chance that i will get COVID (the “98% survival rate” that anti-vaxxers seem to think applies to them, as well). if i do, there’s approximately 2% chance that it will be bad enough to put me in the hospital. if THAT happens, there’s approximately 30% chance that it will end up with pulmonary fibrosis.
but still, i don’t relish the idea of getting COVID, even if it is “mild”. 😒
moe’s birthday was yesterday. she’s still not as old as i am.
we’re starting to gear up for the moisture festival, which IS going to happen, in person, this year — but, beyond that, who knows, because it’s alleged that the palladium has been sold — although precisely HOW they’re going to hold the moisture festival in the middle of a pandemic remains to be seen.
we’re starting to think about starting to gear up for the oregon country fair, this year, in spite of the fact that it hasn’t happened for the past two years, and nobody’s really sure whether it is GOING to happen… but, naturally, if it IS going to happen, we need to be ready for it, because, one way or the other, we’re GOING to have a panto ready in december, despite the fact that we probably won’t have a place to perform, because of the aforementioned alleged selling of the palladium.
thaddeus and i have a gig scheduled in october, as “snakez alive”, and kiki came over last week, with her banjolele, and we played old timey tunes á la Peanut Envy. at this point, we’ve played enough in common to get us through a couple hours of busking at the market, but the market still requires masks for buskers, and i can’t wear a mask and play tuba at the same time… STILL… 😒
OY! 😠
moe went on her first post-COVID business trip to florida. she left last friday, and returned yesterday.
she’s got to wait 72 hours before she tests from the trip.
REGARDLESS OF THE OUTCOME OF THE TEST, she’s got to go in to the clinic on monday, because ALL of the rest of the employees of the clinic ALREADY HAVE COVID!!! 😠
which means that it’s INCREDIBLY LIKELY that i’m going to end up with COVID, despite being fully vaccinated and boosted.
there are reports of lung fibroids in breakthrough cases, which would SEVERELY limit my ability to play wind instruments. 😠😠
and she STILL wonders why i would have preferred to DIE when i had the chance! 😠😠😠
apropos of nothing in particular, but…
what is MAGA going to do when #drumpf dies?
so, there’s this…
however i’m not sure about it. it’s an absolutely delicious double (or triple!) entendre, for those few who “know about such things”, but how many people spent the first 30 years of their lives studying obscure religious facts? and, i’m afraid it could be taken to be VERY offensive to… um… just about anybody else…
under normal circumstances, i wouldn’t care in the slightest, but this is, allegedly, representing my business, and i would be sending them out to people who don’t know me…
[ETA 220114] — it’s an 18th century drawing of what the ancient roman god Priapus might have looked like. ΣΩΤΗΡ ΚΟΣΜΟΥ (soter kosmou) means “Saviour of the World”, and it was usually inscribed below the penis face. however, in a bizarre twist, the figure of “a man with the head of a rooster and an erect penis for a beak” may have also been a representation of st. peter, in which case, ΣΩΤΗΡ ΚΟΣΜΟΥ refers to jesus. it’s one of the reasons a penis is sometimes referred to as a “peter”. 🤣
🙄
i swear, these people must be a part of my karass (also, karass), because i keep running into them in THE MOST unexpected places, despite my overall desire to separate myself from them as much as possible… 😒
recently i’ve developed an interest in mycology (who am i kidding, i’ve ALWAYS had a very strong interest in a certain kind of mushroom… 😉) particularly because it seems fairly likely that, with a little coercion (from spores which i already have), i can start producing psilocybe cyanescens outside, in my fenced yard, pretty much whenever i choose to do so.
to this end, i recently purchased a book by mushroom expert paul stamets, called “Mycelium Running”, and, on the colophon page for the book, i noticed that the cover design was by two people, one of whom is andrew lenzer…
who is married to my younger younger sister.* 🙄
the one i haven’t spoken to since… i don’t know, 1988? maybe…? probably earlier than that… maybe as early as 1980… when she was 12 years old… 🙄
and, i have to keep reminding myself that members of one’s karass aren’t necessarily one’s “friends”… 😒
* as compared to my older younger sister, who is two years older than my younger younger sister… but they are six, and eight years younger than me, respectively, so i wasn’t around for a lot of their growing up and getting married stuff, and i have never actually met andrew lenzer, my brother-in-law… but, knowing my siblings, i would wager that there have been many unpleasant stories told about me for years. 🙄
RT
i’ve been playing around with illustrator (mac), photoshop (mac), frax (tablet), procreate (tablet), inkscape (mac/linux), and the GIMP (linux), for a few days, and this is the result. i’m thinking of making stickers out of it. i wanted to play around with making the QR code an integral part of the artwork, so that you don’t have to go to the QR link to appreciate the art, but if you do hit the link, you’ll get even more information.
blasphemy?
okay, this is discounting the fact that gods only exist in the minds of those who worship them… this is a purely practical examination of the aspects of hindu gods, in particular… and to be precise, an examination of their clothing.
most depictions of deities are clothed. there are deities which are naked, and part of the devotion to these deities is dressing, undressing, and bathing them, but i’m talking about the deities that are depicted as clothed.
i wonder…
how is Kali Maa supposed to put on that shirt?
BLEHHHH!!!
day NINE of more than one foot of snow, and it’s currently snowing at this very moment!
i tried getting out to ship out the IOTM orders this morning, and didn’t even make it out of the driveway before getting stuck!
this is not fun any more. 😒
although, it’s a good thing i got stuck when i did, because i could have made it halfway down the street, or halfway to the middle-of-nowhere post office before getting stuck, which would be even worse…
[ETA] moe came home early, and informed me that there is a tree down across the road, about 150 yards up the street from our house, where it can’t be seen from our house… which means that, even if i had gotten out, i wouldn’t have got far. a lady heavy equipment operator came around and plowed the street in front of our house, all the way to the dead end, in exchange for $100. she said she’s been plowing the roads in our neighbourhood for 4 years.
bleh
blah blah new year, blah blah pandemic, blah blah isolation, blah blah depression…
same as it ever was:
day 5 SEVEN of 1+ foot of snow. keeping fingers crossed, but no power outage yet. at this point, the main roads are slushy, and some of them are bare and wet, but the street in front of our house has few enough tire prints that i can still count them. last year someone eventually plowed our street, but i don’t know who, and they haven’t done it this year. i brushed all the snow off my car, and ventured out today, because i’ve actually got a unicycle class tomorrow, and i needed to know whether or not to admit defeat, and take monique’s all-wheel-drive car (or the truck). as it is, it’s supposed to get up to 42°F, so i will probably take my car to class.
VEWPRF/year-end stuff
i’m slowly rebuilding my music collection. today i added two tom zé albums, from the early 2000s, which are “no longer available” — meaning “the only place to find them is on discogs. one is an album i had pre-cloud-drive-disaster, called “Estudando o Pagode (Na Opereta Segregamulher e Amor)“. the other is one that “just happened” to be available from the same vendor, from two years earlier, in 2003, and it’s called “Imprensa Cantada“. both of them appear in several tom zé anthologies, but the original CDs have artwork that is NOT included in the anthologies, and, especially in the case of tom zé, the graphic artwork is almost as important as the musical artwork in the overall scheme of things. i should be getting another Gogol Bordello CD pretty soon, also
we’re giving away the last piece of ikea furniture that we own, that is NOT shelves, tomorrow… which should be interesting, as we currently have three days worth of snow on the ground, and only a few tire tracks of people driving past our house. it’s the king-size storage bed frame, which means that now we’ve got the adjustable bed frame on the 4-inch legs that it came with (rather than on the 2-inch legs, on top of the storage bed), no storage under the bed (currently), and no headboard (currently). the plan is to get some other form of storage, and a headboard… and, possibly a dresser and nightstand to replace the ones i inherited from my grandparents in 1980-something.
moe is getting “stem cell treatment” on her knees on thursday [UPDATE: WEDNESDAY!!] (hopefully the roads will have cleared enough by then that i can drive out of the neighbourhood). this is to (hopefully) “cure” her bum knees, which currently have no meniscus. if everything goes according to plan, this is going to create “new” padding between the bones in her knee. naturally, “insurance” won’t pay for it, and the only other option — total knee replacement — isn’t happening at the moment because the orthopedist that moe has been seeing is fat-phobic, and won’t operate until she’s lighter than she’s ever been in her adult life. 😒… so the (veterinary) clinic is paying for the whole procedure(!!). alledgedly, it’s going to be a couple of days of being “pretty out of it”, followed by a couple weeks of “light duty”, and then it will develop into an “up to 80% improvement”, which is A LOT better than where she’s been for the past few years.
i’ve managed to stay a lot more insulated from the standard xmas “celebration”, this year, but it’s primarily because of the pandemic, which doesn’t look like it’s going to be ending any time in the forseeable future, barring a miracle of some sort… and, as we all know, miracles that involve anti-vax mask-holes, and the right-wing, republican’t, fascist, white-supremacist IDIOTS that currently make up slightly less than HALF of the population of this gawd-forsaken wasteland, are, for all practical purposes, totally unheard-of… but, on the plus side, almost complete isolation for the second year in a row, has made it so that i have only had to listen to one, partial rendition of “feliz navidad” this year, so i can’t say that’s all bad.
and i got a theremin for xmas! 😎
IOTM CLUB
i inducted another person into the Incense Of The Month Club yesterday, which means that i now have 20 slots left… and it’s further evidence that, while there may not be MANY incense fanatics out there, there are a few of them.
😥 ؟…yhaow
here is the beginning, and here is the end:
blirk
i wasn’t doing anything else, so i spent the day decarboxylating the trimmings from my harvest, in october (more technical information), so now the whole house smells like weed, and i am REALLY high…
so, naturally, while i was waiting for my timer to go off, i made a pretty good rhythm track for the music i talked about a while back, and now it sounds like this:
i still can’t quite get my mind around the fact that it’s 100% legal… astounding!
kick in the brain
from before the wayback machine… these tracts that i just found, were prototypes for smaller versions, which were originally designed to counter the “occult” graffiti i found in an abandoned house in the woods near bellingham… the same house i found the tail coat, which i still have (although it’s been substantially modified, at this point)… the house was obviously a place where teenage doodlehums gathered to do illegal and/or immoral things, and i wanted to “enlighten” them by leaving bizarre literature in their abandoned hideaway. it was in a section of fairly dense, second growth forest, on the outskirts to the northeast of bellingham… there were some neighbourhoods east of there, along alabama street, but the place where the railroad had been was, basically, second growth forest. not even a driveway to the house. the house was two stories, but when i was there, the second story was not safe (although i did go up there, a couple of times), and there was a well-house with a working well… and about 50 feet beyond that were what used to be a railway. it was a perfect place for teenage doodlehums to gather, mark up the walls with “satanic” graffiti, smoke pot, write graffiti about smoking pot, and dream about having illicit sex with their imaginary girlfriends.
i figured they had probably heard all the standard propaganda from the “christians” (the “satanic” graffiti was all the evidence i needed), and this was back when i was full of fire to enlighten the masses, so i came up with a number of tracts which were left in the abandoned house, in phone booths (remember them?), and traded for chick tracts at the local storefront ministries that bellingham had at the time. the first version of these tracts was originally published in 1987. one of the later versions was published in 1992.
now, the place where the abandoned house was, is a neighbourhood of slightly-more-upper-class tract houses with a trail that, 75 years ago, was a railroad that served the logging community in that area.
derp
since 22 november (a week ago monday), i have gotten 8 incense orders, and i’m back to almost $500 in my bank account, after having been, basically, wiped out in june. i sent out the final incense of the month to my first two incense of the month clients, which means that i have, officially, been doing the incense of the month club for a year, now. my business is as strong and as vital as it has ever been, and i am beginning to rebuild from the cloud disaster in june, but, every day i realise there’s another picture, or document, or bit of information, that i HAD on my old cloud drive. i’m still reeling from the loss of approximately 50% of my music collection. 😒
i’m learning to free mount on the unicycle, which is an important step in learning to ride the unicycle while playing the tuba. i have to be able to mount with no hands, not holding on to anything except the tuba, and i have to be able to ride away, while holding the tuba, without falling down. at this point, i’m ALMOST to the point where i can mount the unicycle with no hands. at this point, i can mount the unicycle with a pole in my left hand, to help me balance. if everything goes EXACTLY RIGHT, i can ride away after a couple seconds of wobbling and balancing on the pole. also, i am pretty sure i have learned how to turn left… which is important. turning right is a lot easier. i’ve been able to turn right for a while now. it turns out, turning left involves looking left, preferably at where i’m intending to go, and adding a little bit of extra “oomph” with my hips at just the right time. who would have ever thought that riding a unicycle would involve looking as much as it involves balance?
borg blithday
hi, today is the blog birthday. it’s not actually the blog birthday now, because i am writing this in advance, and scheduling it for the blirg bothday, but you don’t know that.
this is the 14th anniversary of this blog in this location, in spite of the fact that “this location” has actually changed at least three times since then. the location has changed, but the URL has remained the same. for the record, the bog is now physically located in florida, under the auspices of WebHost Python, which has been my host provider for around 5 years now. rather strange, as i am physically located in the seattle, washington area, completely on the other side of the continent from the location of the blig.
internet is awesome, sometimes…
the blithday of the borg in it’s original form is actually 030415, but that was back when it was on LiveJournal, and brad was still in charge. these days i’ve tended a lot more towards the Bacchus’ First Rule of Internet philosophy: “Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.”
it’s true.
ARGH! (A₁R₁G₁H₁)
another casualty of the cloud drive crack:
my “HANDY-DANDY LIST OF WHEN THINGS HAPPENED”
which i have been updating since my injury (2003) to help me keep track of what happened in my life, and when it happened in relation to other things that happened in my life.
my recollection is that it was a fairly complete, if compact, version of an “autobiography”, which i had been updating with new material, or changing around the position of old material when new evidence came to light, for a LOOOOOONG time… it was DEFINITELY a “working document”, and it’s gone. poof. 😩😖
a couple weeks ago, i started to rebuild it, but i’m confounded by the fact that things that appear very vividly in my memory don’t seem to match up in a predictable way with the timeline of my life. i don’t remember when important things happened:
for example, i am reasonably certain that i lived in St. Gordy’s house in 1988, but the job i remember having — working at mellowoods and music in friday harbour, doing musical instrument repair for the friday harbor traditional jazz festival — didn’t happen until 1991… and i actually HAVE a button from the friday harbor traditional jazz festival, and it actually SAYS “1991” on it, so it’s kind of hard for me to argue…
but, the problem is that i lived in St. Gordy’s house for a while, then i moved up the street a couple blocks and lived there for a year or so, then i moved into the dome in 1990, and i lived there until i moved to thillberg road, in mount vernon, with ruth…
or, when i freight hopped to wenatchee… i know i lived in the dorms during 1979 and 1980, and i moved to lummi island for 6 to 8 months, and then i moved to mackenzie street, and lived there until i moved to seattle to start the tech school, in 1984. i also know that i didn’t freight hop to wenatchee until i lived at mackenzie street, but i can’t remember, for sure, whether it happened in 1982 or 1983. at this point, i’m LEANING TOWARDS 1982, because i have calendars and sketchbooks from the early 1980s that may seem to indicate that, but nothing is written in clear enough language that i can be totally certain. 😖
fortunately, Ezra, St. Igon (with whom i freight hopped to wenatchee), and St. Gordy are still in my “contacts” list, but this whole thing started when St. Igon ASKED ME when we went to wenatchee, and that was AFTER i had already started to rebuild my list.
and ezra is in michigan with his sweetie, and won’t be back until mid-december…
FRUSTRATING!! 😖😖
hair
the latest from j. vernon mcgee, with the hell processed out of it. it’s a vern serm about hair, which he, somehow, works out to being equivalent to demon worship.
don’t worry, i processed the hell out of it, so it’s perfectly safe for ordinary people.
it needs a rhythmn track.
tittles
Symbolic Coach Lines
Christian Trees
Economy Whining (or “Economy Whinging” for a more “european” look)
Quipping for Christ
Teachers With Tentacles
Lowest Quality Price Tools
Best Jumbo TV Happiness
Gummy Whores
Overgrown With Underbrush
Hair Salon and Ankle Clinic
Lowest Price on Pubic Hair
Ceremonial Bread Fights
Fart Stand
Rain City Racists
Jutled Boxes
Your Safety is for The Lates
Worship Your Dick
An Imaginary Housing Community
We Make Hydraulic Noises
Bruch, Beeler & Giday, Attorneys at Law
Sage’s Gulag
Jalapeñes
Stortch
Smarmy Pants
Self Hostage
Flimflam Phloem
Acceptable Bones
War To Salvation Church
Can I Ask A State Trailer Park?
goo dot gl 😒
i INTENDED to use goo dot gl’s analytics to determine how many people had hit the link, and where they were located. apparently that was only a SMALL FRACTION of the information i could receive from the QR code.
what i didn’t know is that they shut down their URL-forwarder at goo dot gl in 2018 and i only JUST found out about it.
fortunately the QR code, and the URL-forwarder continue to work, but…
goddam it, gewgel… when you stop using something important, you should make it somewhat more obvious. 😒
now, admittedly, i INTENDED to use the goo dot gl analytics, but i only logged in to see what was happening for the first time, today, so i really was NOT paying attention, but still… you would think that a company as big as the big G could be a little more public about things like this.
so, my tablet is broken, again…
this time it started out as a charging port. it was intermittent for a while, i had to plug it in a certain way, with the plug held just so, or it wouldn’t work. then i upgraded the OS to 15.x and it ceased charging all together. of course i noticed right away, since i almost always keep it plugged in to power, unless i’m actually using it for something.
i had to wait a week (with my tablet unable to charge) while they waited for a part to come in. i was supposed to pick it up today.
i heard the technician who actually fixed it, say, about 3rd gen 12.9″ ipad pros, he’d seen one with a broken charging port “last week”. he also said the job was sensitive, because switching the charge port means disassembling the screen, which is “sensitive”… which meant that they might have to replace the screen as well…
i don’t think i was intended to hear that part, because the technician was talking to his boss, but… well…
he was right.
they broke the screen. 😒
i was supposed to pick it up at 2:00, and when i walked in, the guy said that there had been an “issue” with the screen, and that i was getting a new screen, which — he said — would be delivered “tomorrow”…
the last time they replaced the screen (last year? two years ago?) their replacement “tomorrow” took around a week. and, because of the fact that they broke it, while in the process of fixing something else, they get the privelege of keeping my tablet until the screen comes in (whenever that ends up being). 😒
and, of course, i have a telemedicine appointment tomorrow… 😒 i think i can do it on my phone, but i have never done it before, so it’ll be challenging, at the very least. 😒
homegrown! 😎
starts under lights on 210502, official first bowl smoked on 211114.
࿗ ManWoman Memorial Day! ࿘
in memory of ManWoman, born 2 feb., 1938, died 13 nov., 2012. father/mother/brother/sister to everyone, but particularly those who have swastika tattoos.
࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉
The issue is not whether Hitler’s Swastika is different from ours.
The issue is that it is our Swastika, not Hitler’s.
aaarrggghh! it happened again!!
that’s A³R²G³H² for those of you keeping track…
i have discovered YET ANOTHER thing that fell victim to the crack of 2021, and that was the user manual for our fireplace!
particularly, this exact diagram (found, and re-downloaded by MOE, who is the undisputed google-master of this house) which is found on page 28 of said manual: 
and the “automatic startup air control” is something i have never experienced in a woodstove before… it’s got a mechanical timer, and it gradually closes vents at the bottom of the fire, so that it has plenty of air to start with, but not so much air after 30 minutes or so…
and WITHOUT the information in this diagram, i have a very difficult time remembering the correct position for these things, which makes it REALLY frustrating, when i have to start a fire, as i did this evening. 🤬🤬🤬
fortunately, i have MOE to rescue me when technology fails. i now have this manual re-downloaded and stored away in an obvious place on my new cloud server. 😉
my guess is that this sort of thing is going to become, more-or-less, a standard occurance chéz salamandir, so it’s a good thing i’m starting to keep track of it now… i think… 😕
latin
when i was in high school, i took latin, but that’s not the story.
the story is that, when i found out they were going to offer a latin class, i IMMEDIATELY wanted to sign up for it… but my parents said no, that latin was a “dead” language, that nobody spoke any longer, or used for anything (😏), that i would never use it, and it would just waste my time.
i was a junior in high school, and i REALLY wanted to learn latin. i pestered my parents for a few weeks about it, but they stood fast…
so i went to my high school guidance counsellor, and told her. she immediately agreed with me, and gave me a bunch of “hints” that i could use to try to convince my parents, but none of them worked. my parents were the stubborn, pig-headed people that i have come to know them to be since then, and they were adamant that it would be a collosal waste of my time to learn latin.
i went back to my high school guidance counsellor and told her that the hints didn’t work, and that i still REALLY wanted to learn latin… so she CALLED them.
she talked with my mother (who was the louder of the two) for about half an hour, and, somehow, convinced her that my studying latin would NOT be a waste of my time. i was overjoyed.
today, 40 years later, latin is something that i use on a DAILY basis, to help me understand, and better utilise the language i speak… to help other people understand confusing things (of which there are many)… to learn about places, and things, in a way that english, by itself, doesn’t even have a clue about… to have a better grip on romance languages that ARE used in the modern world — i also studied french in high school, and it gave me a better understanding of the french language, as well as giving me a sneak peek at spanish, italian, and portuguese… at this point, it would take me about 3 days of immersion to get functional in any romance language, and probably not more than a week before i was understanding most of what was said to me…
WRITING, on the other hand, would very likely take quite a bit longer, particularly in italian or portuguese, because they spell things strangely, have silly, inconsistent silent letters, “non-standard” pronunciation for other letters, and are, generally, more laid back, which makes learning to write more difficult 😉
and that’s ALL because i studied latin. 😉
and i use approximately ZILCH of the other subjects i studied in high school, with the exception of music, which i also use, on a daily basis… actually, that’s not entirely correct: high school taught me skills, like how to study, how to use the scientific method, logic and reason to figure things out, the proper use of tools like a wood lathe, proportional dividers, engineering scales, and a linotype, all of whose skills can be transferred to the “modern” world in a variety of ways…
in other “forward into the past” news, i finally got around to editing the Wraith Ugly/Bob Larson tapes. i’ve been flogging them on bob larson’s twitter feed, which is somewhat amusing. 😈
also…
The issue is not whether Hitler’s Swastika is different from ours.
The issue is that it is our Swastika, not Hitler’s.
Friendly Swastika dot Art
the pond progress
the pond, last month…
the pond, this month…
it’s still not as full as i have seen it, but it’s getting there. a month of near constant rain doesn’t hurt, but it’s still not as full as it was before this summer. 😒
woo…
a couple weeks ago, i suddenly couldn’t login to my blog. it didn’t give me any of the standard “you can’t login” messages, instead it gave me half a page of code that was only partially legible (to me), and no clue what happend or how to fix it. 😱
after a good deal of futzing around, and a few back-and-forths with the host provider, i figured out that it was because i had a 2FA plugin, set to auto-update, and WordFence, also set to auto-update. when WordFence added a 2FA feature which was activated by default (generally, a good thing), and auto-updated itself, it “auto-updated” itself right into the middle of a conflict with the 2FA plugin that was already there, and active. 😱
at the time, i figured that it would be easier to delete the 2FA plugin and use the feature provided by WordFence… so i deleted the 2FA plugin, and set up the 2FA feature provided by WordFence.
except that, unlike the 2FA plugin that was now deleted, WordFence’s 2FA feature only gives you the ability to set up an authenticator ONCE, and, after that, it “assumes” that you have an authenticator set up, so it doesn’t give you the ability to set up another one.
which i discovered today, when i tried to login using my phone, rather than the tablet on which i have set up the new 2FA set up. the result was that i entered the 6-digit code given to me by google authenticator, only to have it rejected… twice… and then i was banned from logging in TO MY OWN GODDAMN BLOG! 🤬
THIS is why the web designer DIDN’T set plugins to auto-update on Hybrid Elephant! 👍
after i used one of my emergency login codes, i set the plugins to NOT auto-update, re-installed the 2FA plugin that allows you to set up more than one iteration of the authenticator, and deleted, and re-installed the blog on the authenticator on BOTH my tablet and my phone…
whew… i think that’s everything… 😕
yawn, again…
back to nothing happening again…
my harvest is curing, but the trimmings aren’t drying as fast as i would like them to. i’m pretty sure that if i took the screen off of my office window (which i am not currently using anyway), i could speed up the drying process. maybe i’ll do that today.
i went to a concert with moe and her friend lora, a couple days ago. i was chosen at the last minute to substitute for lora’s husband, who said that a concert might jeopardise his recent sobriety (and he was an AWFUL drunk, so i totally agree), and, also, because, that way, i could drive and lora and moe could talk. 😉 it was the first time i have done ANYTHING that “public” in almost two years, and it felt really weird. it felt weird going to the tacoma-dome, and being in the (relatively light) crowd of people getting into the venue… i wore a N95 mask AND my cloth mask, and kept my hands in my pockets as much as possible. it felt weird sitting in the row of seats with a totally strange (masked) woman so close that she was touching my arm, for the two and a half hours of the concert. a majority of the people were wearing masks, but there was also food and drink available, and a significant number of people thought it was “okay” to wear their masks incorrectly (under their nose), which made me feel like they could have easily taken it off and not felt guilty about it. it felt weird, and creepy, and, when i got home, i felt like i had been swimming in other peoples’ cooties. i took a long, hot shower after the show.
the concert was jackson browne and james taylor, with both of whom i am, more or less, unfamiliar. with jackson browne, there were a few songs that, once he started singing, i went “yeah, i know that song” (although there was one that moe said “if you were alive in the ’70s, you know this song”, but i didn’t), and even a couple that i knew most of the lyrics to, but, honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that i was hearing them at a show that featured jackson browne and james taylor, i wouldn’t have been able to tell you that it was a jackson browne song… hell, i was under the impression, prior to the concert, that jackson was a black man, because that’s the way i always imagined him. that’s how ignorant i was. 😕 james taylor was only a little better, in that i knew that he was white, and i knew a few james taylor songs — all of which they played, of course 😒 — but with both of them, i never had time to listen to their songs because they were INTENSELY popular, so much a part of popular culture, and, particularly, because, james taylor was married to carly simon, and was addicted to heroin…
i never had a thing for carly simon, but i figured that if he were that famous on his own, and he was married to carly simon, then i’m guessing there was something more than “love” involved in the process. 😒
besides which, at the time, i was a lot more interested in the music of morton subotnik, arnold schönberg, and karlheinz stockhausen, who were — and are — A LOT more interesting… 😉
but the musicianship was outstanding — james taylor was backed up by steve gadd on drums, and bruce fowler on horns, both of whom played with frank zappa — the music was good, the lyrics were as “woke” as i remembered them to be in the ’70s, and more “woke” and more “blunt” for the newer songs, james taylor is no longer married to carly simon, or addicted to heroin…
but i would still have much preferred to see a concert of music by morton subotnik, arnold schönberg, or karlheinz stockhausen. 😉
they started up my unicycle class again. it meets for the first time on sunday, which is also halloween. i have to figure out a costume in which i can also ride a unicycle… also, now i have a much higher possibility of learning how to turn left before the end of the year.
i ordered two “performance masks” on the 5th of october, and they still haven’t been shipped out… but it’s just as well, because it has been raining a lot, particularly over the past few days. the pond has water in it, again, but it’s still drastically low.
this is what getting old must feel like…
i harvested on tuesday: 4 hours of bending, stooping, squatting, and sitting on top of a propane canister (with a piece of plywood over the ring, so i didn’t get ring-butt)… by bedtime, tuesday night, my lower back was painful enough that i couldn’t bend over. i took a muscle relaxant before bed.
yesterday, i woke up and immediately took two tylenol, and made it through the day without too much difficulty or pain… but the most strenuous thing i did all day was blow the leaves off of the back yard — a pointless excersise… there’s already three times more leaves than there were before i started, yesterday. i spent most of the day sitting, standing, or walking on level ground, and it was okay, so i decided to go for a walk. i went for a 2.5 mile walk, and was okay, as long as i was walking on the level, but any uphill or downhill produced spasms so intense that i wondered whether or not it was a good idea going for a walk. at the same time, i went to sleep last night without any medication, so i figured that it was going to go away.
i was wrong.
today, i realised i have my circus class. i felt okay when i got up, and was able to move around, get dressed and suchlike, without pain, so i figured it was a temporary thing, but by the time i was about halfway to class, i realised that circus class today would probably NOT include trampoline, tumble track, unicycle, or tissue, which pretty much leaves juggling, tight wire, and stretching. we started with some warm-ups, and that went okay, then moved to juggling, and that went okay, and i excelled on tight wire, because i discovered that my back DOESN’T hurt if i stand up straight, and engage my core, which is EXACTLY what you need to do on the tight wire… i walked forwards AND backwards on the wire, using nothing but a balance pole in one hand! 😎 but then we moved to stretching, and… no. my body DOES NOT want to stretch. 😒
i came home, ate lunch, filled and shipped out an incense order, and went for another two mile walk… it was better, but there were still major twinges when i went up or down hill.
my next door neighbour just showed up with a batch of warm chocolate chip cookies that are “medicated”… 😉 he listened to an abbreviated version of my circus class experience today, and recommended i try two cookies.
i still can not believe that it’s legal. 🤤
HARVEST!
starts under lights on 210502, harvested 211019, almost two pounds (estimate based on raw weight of the harvested plants), 171 days, 122 of which were outdoors…
… making this my first successful, mostly-outdoor grow. 😉
yum! 🤤
harvest tomorrow. 😉👍👍
yawn
nothing has been happening.
nothing has been happening politically, nothing has been happening socially, nothing has been happening musically, nothing has been happening in regards to the COVID virus… i now have A LOT of “free” time: every other week i have a one-hour appointment with kate, and every week i have my one-hour circus class, but that’s it. 😩
i’ve been spending a lot of time hiking on taylor mountain.
i shipped out two incense orders, today. i’m averaging between two and six orders a month, and, before i got cracked a few months ago, i actually had over a thousand dollars in my bank account… but then i got cracked, and spent it all on replacement hardware and a pile of recovered, possibly useful data.
i have expanded ZIP files for about a tenth of my fonts collection, from the recovered data. mostly TTF files, and just a small fraction of the fonts i used to have. fortunately, my recollection is that my entire >10,000 font library is backed up on CD, somewhere… i’m sifting through the rest of the recovered data slowly, and more or less randomly: it’s totally discouraging to look at this huge pile of recovered data, which took me a couple decades to accumulate, but which is now many, many schrödinger’s cats with random file names, EVERY ONE OF WHICH has to be opened to determine whether or not it’s corrupt, and if it’s not, what general pile it goes in, which all have to be sorted again, later on, and then, probably, sorted at least once more before they’re back in more-or-less the place where they’re supposed to be. 😒
so, it’s something to do, but, literally, i would rather be doing ANYTHING else… 🤬
i ordered some “performance masks” from J.W.Pepper a few weeks ago. they were back-ordered (without my knowledge), and, when i talked to a customer service drone on monday last week, i was assured that they would be shipping out later that week, but i still haven’t seen or heard anything. they’re called “performance” masks, because they look like you’re wearing a mask, but, in reality, the mask has a hole in the front, that your mouthpiece goes through, which makes it practically useless as an actual mask… but the new rule at the market is that the only buskers allowed MUST BE masked, so it’s either wear a “performance” mask, or don’t busk. 😒 but i can’t busk at all, until the “performance” masks are delivered, and, as far as i can tell, at this point, they’re still on back order, and who knows when they’re going to arrive. 😞
the pond, nazis
today, after 3 days of rain, the pond FINALLY has water in it… not 10 feet of water, or even 10 inches of water, but it’s a start… and it’s going to have to rain A LOT MORE before we’ll be back to the “normal” 10 feet of water. 😒
but “climate change” and the coronavirus are chinese frauds, and we need to prevent the teaching of Critical Race Theory to junior high school kids in public schools. 😒
seriously, i’ve been removing flyers for patriotfront dot us, and flyers for somebody who is running for school board SPECIFICALLY on the platform of “mask CHOICE, not mandate” and “no CRT in schools”, from the bulletin board at the local convenience store… 😠 i’ve been replacing them with my “ultimatum to world leaders”, with a link to ABillionPeople.org, but it’s been being taken down almost as soon as i put it up, so i’ve been trying to get “creative”…
but it’s really disturbing to me that there are actual nazis living in my community. 😠 if he gets elected (which i hope doesn’t happen, but around here, who knows), i wonder how much actual school board experience he has, because the pandemic is not going to last forever, and once he discovers that public primary schools AREN’T teaching “critical race theory” he’s not going to have much of a platform left… but, by then, he’ll have discovered that the school board buys school books for the district, and i’m pretty sure he’ll have something to say about that. 😒
squeeeee!! 😊
i just sold 10 boxes of Aparajita — an incense which, as far as i’ve been able to tell, is available NOWHERE ELSE in north america, and possibly the western hemisphere — to the Govinda Gallery in washington DC… which is the place that Astrid Kirchherr and Donovan exhibit their work…
squeeeEEEEEEEEE!!‼‼ 😊👍👍👍
interesting…
fecesbook was down for around 6 hours, today… down, like, completely down, DNS not working, routes not functioning, nslookup and whois not working, domain for sale…
it’s back up, at this point, but, allegedly, fuckerberg lost 7 billion dollars as a result of the outage, and is now only the fifth richest person on the planet. still no word on exactly what caused it. 😉
mrmph… 😒
two days ago (thursday) i got my COVID19 booster, and my flu shot.
i was also going to get my shingles shot (shongles shit?), but medicare doesn’t cover it (🤬👎⁇), it’s actually two shots, and they cost around $200 A PIECE!
so i didn’t get that, despite the fact that i had chicken pox, and moe has ALREADY HAD shingles, in spite of the fact that she’s not in the targeted age group. 😒🤬
yesterday, i felt like hammered shit, and slept most of the day. i suppose it was probably a combination of the two vaccines, along with the fact that i didn’t have any side effects from the two previous COVID19 vaccines…
today, i’m recovering, but i still feel like i’ve been run over by a steam roller.
HOWEVER…
there are STILL people who refuse the vaccine, for one horseshit reason or another. there are STILL people who say that it’s got a 98% survival rate (leaving out the fact that there are many major, long-term health problems that follow most survivals)…
THEY are the ones who are DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for the 700,000 COVID19 deaths that have happened since january, 2020…
AND THEY STILL REFUSE THE VACCINE!! 🤬🤬🤬
soon, there will be a 9/11-style mass-death every week from COVID, and these people — all of whom try to keep 9/11 in the forefront of our minds, whether or not we want it there — will STILL be refusing the vaccine.
…
okay, i’m going to say this because it’s not on twit-turd or feces-book, and nobody is going to ban my account for advocating someone else’s death… 😒
i think it would be best for everyone if the government simply KILLED these people, so the rest of us can get back to something vaguely resembling normalcy, some time in the next decade. 😒
HAW, HAW, HAW!! 😈
a few moments ago, shortly after 7:00 pm this evening, i was alerted by the sounds of footsteps on our front porch, to the presence of people about to knock on our front door.
i still haven’t gotten over how intensely quiet it is out here. even with my music playing in my office, i was able to hear footsteps on our front porch, and was able to get there BEFORE they knocked on the door.
so i confronted two very young (probably no older than 21 or so) females, in masks, a taller, blonde one in the back, and a shorter, asian looking one (although she spoke with an american accent, so i would guess that she’s not first generation immigrant), JUST as they were about to knock. the shorter one introduced themselves as “missionaries from the church of jesus christ”… and she didn’t have the chance to say “of latter day saints”, because, by that point, i was ALREADY indicating that i was very definitely NOT interested in talking to missionaries. we said our mutual goodbyes and, JUST as i was closing the door, it started to rain…
HARD… 🤣
it rained for 10 minutes or so, REALLY HARD… long enough that, i’m fairly sure, they got TOTALLY soaked… they didn’t appear to have a car in the vicinity, and i have seen them riding bicycles on back country roads, before, so i’m guessing that they had a long, wet walk, in the dark, back to whatever mode of transportation they had… and i KNOW that our next door neighbours on both sides likely had a very similar response to mine… and we’re at the end of a dead-end road, with a what-is-usually-a-pond on the other side of the street… ROTFLMAO!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
i suppose i should have been a little concerned for their safety, since they were young women, alone, lightly dressed, on foot, in the dark, in the rain, in a remote area known to be inhabited by… less than savoury characters… and bears… 😉
but i wasn’t. 😈
however… 😒
one distinct DISadvantage to having a new, working cloud drive, is that there have been two different occasions within the past two days, where i thought of something, and went to look for the source files, thinking that i knew exactly where they were located, only to discover that they were on the OLD cloud drive… 😒
god DAMN whatever anonymous skript-kiddie that caused this! 🤬👎‼
blowing my own horn
now that i’ve got a functional cloud drive, i am going through and replacing what i can of my lost music collection, including music that i produced myself.
i have four St. Fred albums on bandcamp, and the only one of those four that were lost on the old cloud drive has not been replaced locally, and that album is The Church of The Pleistocene, which, naturally, means that it has been a few months since i heard it last…
i downloaded it today, and listened to it… and it has held up pretty damn well, considering that it was released in 2018… and i REALLY liked this track, number 14, called “Lamentations”…
in the same way, there are also nine albums of music by And More on bandcamp, which i haven’t heard for even longer (why listen to music i made 30 years ago? i just have it because i made it 30 years ago) and that, too, has stood the test of time admirably. the track is called Pfisteria:
i still laugh when i listen to this… 🤣
(that’s how i know it’s finished music, if it makes me laugh… 😉)
interesting
i’ve been playing around with “yellofier electrified” on my tablet, for the past few days, and i came up with this vaguely spooky “music box” tune which i really liked:
then, because i didn’t have anything better to do, i exported it from electrified, and imported it into audacity, where i doubled the track, and then set one stereo pair to play back 10% slower than the other stereo pair…
and the result was an EVEN BETTER version 👍
the 2nd plateau has been achieved!
on 190114 i reached the first plateau, and i’ve been hanging around there ever since.
but, recently, the batteries that completed the first plateau have been acting like they’re on their last legs, not holding a charge, or charging inconsistently, so i decided to get new ones.
unfortunately, the batteries that they made in 2019 are no longer being manufactured, and i really don’t like buying stuff online, where you can’t examine it closely before deciding it won’t work…
which is exactly what happened with an outfit called “slick vapes” (they have a web site, but i won’t link to it, because they’re assholes). i looked through their selection of dab pen batteries and bought 3 “Evolve” batteries… which turned out to be exactly the same as the batteries i rejected prior to reaching the first plateau (they were “pen sized”, wouldn’t hold more than a few hours charge, when they would hold a charge at all, charged inconsistently, etc., etc., etc. 😒). then, i discovered a new type of “coilless” atomiser that looked like it would fit, but i wasn’t sure, because… online… 😒 so i ordered them, and they got back to me and accused me of using a stolen credit card… 😒 and when i got that straightened out, they said they had shipped the product, but the tracking number they sent me said that USPS was still waiting for the package two weeks after they said it was shipped. 😒 and when they FINALLY arrived, wouldn’t you know, they don’t fit any of the vape mods i have. 🤬
cannabis babies
two cannabis starts under lights on 210502. 18 weeks later, 126 days, and now they are taller than me… 
micro$not, mshtml, and activex
back in the dark ages, when i was working at STLabs, before we moved to factoria (i.e. STLabs… so, what? maybe 1995? 1996? somewhere in there), i was testing Internet Explorer version 3.0, which meant, basically, that i was testing micro$not’s browser engine, which is called MSHTML.dll. at the time, a very good friend of mine from college, saint fred (now, sadly, passed on) was mucking about with the innards of micro$not’s operating system, and discovered a problem which had existed for several years prior to this, which micro$not had “made disappear” by changing the technology’s name from OLE — which was, itself, a “renamed” technology, originally called Visual Basic for Applications, or “VB-A” — to “ActiveX”, and, in the process of making it “disappear”, actually made it more prevalent and insidious, by making it work seamlessly with even more micro$not technology.
and, saint fred being who he was, took advantage of this by writing the “Exploder Control”, which could be embedded in a web page, or a microsoft document, and would, when “activated”, perform a clean shutdown of the computer on which it was being viewed… whether you wanted to shut down your computer, or not.
you hit this web page, and, within seconds, your computer shuts down, with no further input from you. 😏
or…
you open this microsoft word document, and, within seconds, your computer shuts down, with no further input from you. 🤣
i watched it happen as it first came out, before anybody realised what it was. it was hillarious! i gave the URI for the exploder control to my boss, and then went back to my workstation and listened, as she suddenly whined “it shut down my computer!” 🤣🤣🤣
and, of course, micro$not’s response to this was to threaten saint fred with lawsuits for doing stuff he shouldn’t have been doing, and when that didn’t work (because fred made sure that the exploder did everything strictly “by the book”, including getting micro$not’s signature on the control), they made the exploder control something that was detected by their anti-virus software (even though it was very clearly NOT a virus, and, actually, did everything totally “by the book”, something to which micro$not never admitted), and, once they figured out that they had caused all of this, they pulled their signature on the control, so that it raised even more red flags before actually activating it…
and, basically, did everything EXCEPT fix the problem, which, after a few months of frantic ass-covering by micro$not’s marketing department, while the tech industry had a good laugh, got swept under the rug, anyway, by more current micro$not fiascos.
but the technology remained, and every version of windows has support for activex, every version of MSHTML.dll has support for activex (which is one of the reasons micro$not got rid of MSHTML.dll a couple years ago, and current versions of Internet Exploder… um… what’s their browser called again? EDGE, that’s it… uses google’s “chrome” browser engine, instead. the browser wars are over! micro$not LOST!) and you can, literally, do ANYTHING with activex, that you could do from the normal user interface of windows, and there is, literally, NOTHING stopping you from doing this — or other, more nefarious things — given A LITTLE knowledge of the technology.
which is why, when i saw this headline: Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft the FIRST THING i thought was “Exploder Control strikes again!”
this is one of the VERY BIG reasons i do not use micro$not on my computers. i don’t even have my microsoft 5-button mouse any longer!
i wonder if they’ll ever learn. 🙄
so, unrelated to anything else…
i remember learning, some time ago (like, possibly, as many as 20 years ago), that the movie staring Gina Lollobrigida, which features the song “‘A Frangesa” (the name of which i have been unable to determine), was a “modern remake” of “L’Arlesienne”, by Georges Bizet and Alphonse Daudet…
or, possibly, that the movie starring Gina Lollobrigida was based on the real-life story of the person about whom Alphonse Daudet wrote his romanticised play…
but i can find no solid evidence for or against this theory, on internet.
i wonder if i imagined the whole thing… 😕
i can say that, if i had known about the movie with Gina Lollobrigida when i first learned the song “‘A Frangesa” (which was when i was in 8th grade, or thereabouts), i would have had a much more positive opinion about the song than i had at the time. 😉 as it was, it was a harder-than-normal concert band piece which i could play, but very many of my fellow student musicians were unable to play (because it’s “faster” than most of them could play reliably), and, because of that, it sounded VERY MUCH like an elementary school band trying very hard to play something that is too difficult for them EVERY! SINGLE! TIME!
ETA 210907: the movie appears to be called “La donna più bella del mondo” (the most beautiful woman in the world), but was english-ified into “Beautiful but Dangerous“… but i still haven’t been able to find out whether or not it was a remake of L’Arlesienne. internet would be a much better place if you could ask questions in human language and not be inundated with meaningless information that is only intended to sidetrack you from what you really want to know… and it’s full of computers! ick! 😒
see, this is the problem…
a couple weeks ago, i decided i was going to take a “proper” mushroom trip, and, towards that end, i prepared two 00-sized capsules with the oldest of my mushroom stash. by last week, i had decided that i didn’t want to take the whole thing, all at once, so i took the larger one…
and didn’t feel anything… 😞
which was really dissapointing, but i figured the mushrooms were old enough that they’d lost all their potency. despite the fact that i didn’t “feel” anything, i definitely noticed the “characteristic” anti-depressant effects of the psilocybin, and so, this week, i decided to take the other, smaller capsule.
that was at 12:30 this afternoon…
this time, i DEFINITELY feel something…
despite the fact that the capsule was approximately 25% SMALLER than the one i took last week, i’ve definitely had a marvelously melty afternoon, after going for a ≈5 mile walk in the woods, i came home and spent the afternoon doodling and listening to music over headphones…
it’s now approximately 6:00…
something i haven’t done in a very long time… stupid brain injury… 😒
ganesha the new car
once again, gas is $4 a gallon.
on july 18th, i got a new car: a 2019 hyundai ioniq hybrid.
it gets ≈65MPG… (it actually gets between 60 and 70MPG, depending on how i drive)
i LIKE spending $25 for gas, looking at the “full tank” indicator, and seeing that i’ve got almost 800 miles before i have to fill up again. 👍😎
although, i must admit, as a person who almost religiously got gas when the indicator said the tank was half empty, i still haven’t quite gotten used to the fact that, when the indicator says the tank in the new car is half empty, i’ve still got more miles to go before i have to fill up than any of my previous cars had when they were entirely full. 😉🤣
also, i REALLY like being able to drive down the street and not make any noise… i like stopping at a stop light and not making any noise. i like going 75 on the freeway and not making any noise… and looking down at the indicator to discover that i’m going 75 on the freeway, not making any noise, and RECHARGING MY BATTERY ALL AT THE SAME TIME! 👍👍👍😎
i have dreamed of owning a hybrid for at least 40 years… check that off my bucket list. 😉
now, to get some artwork on this blank canvas. 😈
🤔
this afternoon, i was doing some yard work, and i found this in the gravel between the house and the trailer… 
it’s small enough that i’m 100% certain that, if i didn’t already know what it was, i wouldn’t have even noticed it, but…
AS IT HAPPENS… i know EXACTLY what it is, which is a 1909-2009 Alaska Yukon Pacific 100th Anniversary pin, which was given to performers at the celebration, and (i believe) were also for sale to the people who came to the celebration. i know this because, in 2009, the ballard sedentary sousa band peformed at the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exhibition 100th Anniversary… although, for some (now) unknown reason, i was unable to make that gig, so i had liz get me a pin, becuase i have always been interested in the alaska yukon pacific exhibition, and i was really dissapointed that i couldn’t be there… and i THOUGHT that pin was on my red fedora, because that’s the last place i saw it, and it was only last week that i wore that hat…
could i have lost my AYP pin? 😨
so i ran upstairs to check, and… no, my AYP pin is right where it’s supposed to be:
so, that raises a new question… was the former owner of my house at the AYP 100th anniversary, and did he/she/they buy a pin? or were they performers? i consider the latter to be EXTREMELY unlikely…
umph!
i’ve come to a decision.
there are over 150,000 separate files, which takes up 4.5GB, in the .jpg directory alone, of the recovered data.
it took my computer half an hour of doing nothing but loading the directory, before it was completely loaded. every time i opened a file, it took 10 minutes to reload the directory.
i would have to open every one of them to determine if it’s corrupt or not, and if not (about ⅔ of the time), i would then have to determine what it is, and where to put it.
if it takes me (conservatively) 30 seconds per document to make those determinations, i will be doing this for the next 4,500,000 seconds, or more than 7 months of doing NOTHING but opening files to determine whether or not they’re corrupt… no eating, sleeping, shitting, busking or anything else, just slogging away in front of the computer.
factoring in those other things, i’m looking at a couple years, minimum. 😒
i may have been willing to do it at one time… who am i kidding, i’ve NEVER been willing to do that, for that long, for as little payment as i would get. 😒
it’s sad, but there it is: the last 6 years of my life, in pictures, and they’re all going down the toilet, along with a significant portion of my business, my music and artwork, and monique’s photos from the past 6 years.
now, do i keep the data on my new cloud drive, or do i delete it. i’ve also got it on the 1TB external drive that the data recovery folks sent me, so it wouldn’t be entirely deleted… but… 😭
this is one of the times the computer has won the battle. 😒
ETA: interesting, but extremely BIZARRE development is that, upon further investigation, there is a “.jpg” directory, and a “photos” directory, in the recovered data. the documents that are in the .jpg directory are about ⅔ usable files, but their names are gibberish, and there are more than 150,000 of them, all in one directory. however, for some strange reason, the files that are in the “photos” directory are in subdirectories that indicate the manufacturer of the camera, scanner or printer (of which there are about 50), and further subdirectories that indicate the make and model of the camera, scanner or printer (there are A LOT of them), and the files themselves, for the most part, contain the date they were taken in the filename… and, let me tell you, i have A LOT easier time figuring out what a photo is if it is named something like IMG_20061129_133315 (49EA1400).jpg than i do if it is named 80AB2B00.jpg… A LOT!
oh, alright… 😒
this is an update. what i’ve been doing:
busking. this has been a long time coming. it’s really good to get out and play music for people, and, so far, we’ve been averaging between $15 and $25 apiece for an hour or so of busking. now, instead of howlin’ hobbit and his ukulele, it’s thaddeus and his banjitar — an interesting hybrid, that looks like a banjo, but has six strings and is tuned like a guitar. as i’ve always said, the money is an extra, added bonus, for me, and it’s still true, even after a year and a half… but it’s always nice, and we’ve actually already got one “paying” gig as a result: the pike place market is putting on a “sunset supper”, and is hiring market buskers at $100 apiece for an hour of busking while rich people eat food… that is, most likely, NOT offered to the buskers, but they’re paying $100 apiece, so it’s sort of okay… the BSSB has started rehearsals again, too, which is another bonus. 😉
ripping CDs back into my music collection. i have only gotten the barest of starts sorting the recovery data, in spite of the fact that, in the small print, the data recovery people say that their “free” recovery media (a 1TB hard disk, in my case) only has a warranty of five DAYS — which, to me, says “if you don’t get your data off our recovery media post haste, we’re not going to guarantee that you’ll have ANYTHING, regardless of how much you may have paid us.” nevertheless, at this point, i’ve got all of the data that really made a difference (the panchamukhi ganesha from my car, the spreadsheet containing the data for the Incense of the Month Club, and the spreadsheet of blocked-for-spamming IP addresses), and, basically, if i had anything else i need, i don’t remember it, and probably won’t until i need that data again, which will mean that i’m probably going to have to keep going back to the recovery data on occasion, for the rest of my life… however, if i already have freshly ripped .flac files, then, when i finally get around to slogging through the 1TB MESS of recovered data, it will be slightly less of a concern if the archives i got are incomplete or corrupt. this is an ongoing project that is probably going to take several weeks to finish, and while it’s going on, i may not post here, as much.
hiding from the smoke and heat. it hasn’t been as bad as it was a couple years ago, but it’s definitely smoke season. i look out my office window and see orange skys and translucent air, and the AQI is 63, which is firmly in the “yellow” range. busking, yesterday, was an extra bonus, because it was around 10°F cooler at the market than it was at home… it’s 20° cooler than it was in june(!!), but it’s still in the high-90°s, which is extremely rare around here, in my experience. the government climate change investigatory committee just released the first part of their study, a few days ago, and it says what climat change activists have been saying for 30+ years, now, which is, basically, climate change is real, it’s happening, and it was definitely caused by humans… and then, two days later, 7 democrats switched positions, and voted with ALL the republicans, to pass a law making it illegal for the government to EVER ban fracking. 🤬 so, i guess that means that, ultimately, climate change will kill us all, but the rich people are going to die last. 🤬🤬 i have never wanted to, but it’s my impression that, soon, i will have to apologise to ezra for bringing him into a world where he may never reach his full potential, because of the thoughtlessness and carelessness of my immediate ancestors.
hiding from the virus. the delta variant is 1000 times more contagious than the original strain, and they’re saying that recipients of the pfizer vaccine, at least, will have to get a “booster” shot, but they’re not saying when it will be available, or how long we have to wait before getting one. in the mean time, schools have been making masks optional, and reopening, and then closing down again, when 40% of the students get COVID, while the right wing, q-anon devotee, anti-mask, anti-vax, trump morons are dying by the thousands, and STILL ranting their nonsense about it affecting pregnancies, or tracking microchips in the vaccine. there’s an image i saw on twitter that is, basically, a huge banner, strung between two cars, that says they’ll never get the vaccine, and that you’ll have to kill them… the ironic part is that, most likely, we won’t have to kill them, because the virus will do that for us, and we won’t have to do anything. hospitals are failing in missouri, texas, and florida, where the governors are particularly anti-mask and anti-vax, despite the surge in cases, and a vast majority of the fatalities have been people who refused the vaccine. at this rate, we’re going to be dealing with this pandemic for A LOT longer than the 1918 “spanish flu” pandemic, primarily because of STUPID people who won’t get the vaccine or wear masks, on account of their “freedom”. 🤬
why do i do this? 😒
apart from the fact that it looks… i don’t know… cool? creepy?
and it actually tastes okay, as well. it doesn’t taste like antifreeze, at any rate…
buddha bless – pak takhrai
yah ma pak, yah ma pak
soh by ting ya mi yah mah pak
yah ma pak, yah ma pak
soh by ting yang mi ya mah pak
ah yo ma mella hen mai, yah ho hane prupah tah drei
uhkonda pakatzong tzai raipa tah treibal ke
waggah boom
sah ting mabe me mamei, yah chun tehma batsal trai
bahchoi dupoinga dai mai, pah teh tege dur chatse
hope? — dashed?
sorting through the mess of recovered data is heartbreaking.
i’m finding all sorts of stuff that, once i actually see (or hear) a bit of it, i know exactly what it is, and i’m starting to get things organised enough that, some of the time, i even have a place to put it, once i’ve discovered what it is…
but, then… everything doesn’t come crashing down, but…
i haveHAD a CDR album called “We Bore 2“, which was one of my favourites. it was produced in 2003 by Toast & Jam Records, which has, since, gone out of business, and their web site is now a japanese porn site… it was a “various artists” compilation of electronic, experimental, glitch music, and it was AWESOME!
i found a .RAR archive with the .mp3s for “We Bore 2”, and i was, like, “COOL!”… i expanded the archive, and put it in the place it had been taken from in my collection, and went on to the next archive.
today, for the first time, i actually LISTENED to “We Bore 2″…
yeah, all the tracks are there, but track 1 is NOT what was there the last time i listened to “We Bore 2″… and track 2 is also the same way, to a lesser extent… and track 3 is pretty messed up… and track four is mostly there, except for a patch in the middle which is totally missing… and track 5… and track 7… and track 8… and track 9… 😭
pretty much all of the tracks have something wrong with them…
and i can’t get another copy of the CD, because i originally downloaded it as a .rar file…
and, i’m pretty sure (given the huge quantity of .rar and .zip files that got recovered) that more than a few of them are going to have exactly the same problem. 😭
ETA: all is not lost… well, for “We Bore 2” anyway… it turns out i actually have the original CDR for this album… but i’m fairly sure that is NOT going to be the case with a majority of the .rar and .zip archives i have…
NOBODY will listen to this music
NOBODY will listen to this music — prove me wrong.
sumbunal
i found sumbunal of my music collection, on a huge stack of CDs and DVDs (possibly two, i haven’t checked thoroughly, yet) which i had stashed in the garage, in a cabinet in front of which i have stacked 4 huge cartons of incense… so, naturally, it was the absolute LAST place i thought to look. this appears to be my music backups from 2002, or thereabouts, until 2016 or 17 — when i “moved everything to the cloud” — which means that the part of my collection that isn’t backed up, is, very likely, music that i have on CD (which i can re-rip, if necessary) or music that was in a .zip or .rar archive… and, strangely enough, not many of the .mp3s that are on the recovery disk actually made it, but there’s probably 90% to 95% of the .zip and .rar archives that appear to have made it through… meaning that, when i opened the archive with ark, it opened and didn’t tell me that the archive was corrupt most of the time… 😕 i don’t completely understand how that happened, but i’ll take it.
and, to be honest, there are more than a few albums where i was able to download all but one track from the backup disk (for whatever reasons), so i’m really glad that i actually have as many CDs as i do, because that makes it a lot easier to go back and re-rip one track from an album.
it’s been more than a month since i played music through my stereo speakers. i spent ALL DAY today, listening to music and uploading gigabytes of music to the new NAS. 👍😉
and, TOMORROW, i’m going BUSKING!!! 👍😎👍
gress
why is the opposite of “progress” not “congress” rather than “regress”?
i got in contact with the vehicle-wrap artist that did the actual artwork for the previous car, and he, also, sent me an .eps file containing the original artwork, so i’m sure i have backed it up, now… although i haven’t backed it up to the cloud drive, yet, because i can still only access it through a web browser on my linux box, and not at all on my mac laptop… and i am worried that they’re not going to be able to make it work on my mac laptop, because i did the steps to auto-mount a network drive, at startup, and it took my password and chewed on it for 30 seconds or so, and then rejected it… i THINK it’s because the cloud drive wants me to login to /cgi-bin/ but the ancient mac will only let me login to the base server URI. and on the linux box, it allows me to specify the login directory, and accepts my password, but never gets beyond that, to actually logging me in — it just repeats its request for a username and password, over, and over, and over, and over… 😕 hopefully, when the guy comes over this evening to give me the keys, he will be able to conclusively address these issues.
ETA: he addressed those issues like a boss, and had BOTH the ancient mac and my linux box wrapped around the NAS’s little finger in about 10 minutes… the old mac, apparently, doesn’t like the domain name, and REALLY doesn’t like the fact that my username has an @ symbol in it, but it eats up the intranet IP address like it’s going out of style, and, because of the fact that it’s ONLY addressing the NAS from the intranet, i just gave it the administrator username instead of my username… and the linux box was, basically, the same, once we figured out how to do it… and connecting monique’s computer was easiest of all: just gave it the intranet IP address and everything was kosher. 😎
there’s A LOT of music in .zip or .rar archives in my recovered data, so, once i get to the point of actually expanding those archives, i will have a significant part of my music collection back… for that matter, i’m pretty sure i “backed up” my music collection to CD, around 10 years ago or so, which means that, once i find where i’ve put it, there’s a good chance that my music collection will be back to 75% to 80% of what it was prior to the crack.
the western digital support personnel that i talked to on 210724, who said that someone would be calling me “monday or tuesday” lied, because it is now wednesday, and i HAVE NOT received a call from them… which only strengthens my suspicion that they are NOT going to try to contact me until after 210731, which is their deadline for making a claim through their data recovery program. 😒
the process of categorising partially corrupt files is both time-consuming, and ultimately frustrating, because, once i have rough-categorised the files, i have to go back through, re-open every file again to determine what it is, re-name the file, and then categorise it AGAIN… and A LOT of the file names started with the date that they were last looked at, which, frequently, is a complete mystery from inside the document, so even when i have them renamed, and categorised, i still can’t complete a time-line for stuff that was modified more than once… which will, very likely, cause major headaches in the future, particularly with documens created for other peoples’ printing. 😒
seriously, whatever anonymous skript-kiddie did this to me — who has never even met them before — just for “lulz” — better hope that i don’t run into them late at night in a dark alley, because, if that ever happens, the result will NOT be positive for anyone. 🤬
on a lighter note, i got my physical copies of questionable content, the electronic copies of which were lost… i’m slowly getting everything put back together.
but i still have to rewrite the IOTM blurb about patchouli for next month, because it’s coming up really soon, and it’s the only IOTM blurb that i didn’t get back… which is a real shame, because the old one was really amusing, and i don’t know if i can remember all of what i said.
new nas
lord buckley would love this…
but, unfortunately, lord buckley was part of the data that either wasn’t recovered, is corrupted, or i haven’t found it yet because i’m dealing with sixty gazillion files that are named something like 0SVP8382U794.mp3 or 3O1458DNLWO.jpg, because all of their meta-data has been deleted. 😒
anyway, the new NAS is up and running, although not completely configured yet. i have an “app” on my phone and tablet that gives me access to the cloud drive, and i can access it through a web browser on my antique mac and my linux box.
ETA: and accessing it through a web browser is an entirely new experience for me, because, despite the fact that it’s in a web browser, the “pages” are things like the file center, which allows me to “drag-and-drop” files from my local computer, to upload them. basically it acts like a window, even though it’s technically a web page. will wonders never cease?
although i’m fairly sure linux has a more direct way of accessing the cloud drive, the guy who came by to set it up wasn’t a linux geek, and, apparently, has never met a linux geek in the general public. he was astounded when i told him that i had been running linux for 20 years… 😉
but the new NAS is WAY cooler than the old cloud drive, primarily because it is, apparently, possible to edit files while they are still in the cloud, rather than having to download them, edit them locally, and then over-write the old file on the cloud. if what i have already experienced with audio files is true, the likelyhood of my losing any MORE music is practically eliminated. also, it appears to be possible to install executable code on the NAS, and run it locally, which would make things EXTRA SUPER COOL, but i’m not 100% sure of it, yet. 😉
ETA: the NAS has, apparently, either configured itself, or something has been installed remotely that allows it to communicate with my linux system via a number of different protocols, including SMB, MTP (whatever that is — Media Transfer Protocol… who knew?), HTTPS, and bluetooth… which is really odd, because my computer doesn’t even have a bluetooth reciever, so i kinda wonder where the “Bluetooth” icon in the remote network directory came from… unfortunately, i have been unable to connect with anything other than HTTPS, even though the SMB instance takes my password and doesn’t say it’s wrong, it just won’t log me in… which is something to take up with the configurators tomorrow.
the “twisted pair” who are whipping my computers into shape doing my configuration are going to be finished up tomorrow, at which point i hope to have the more direct method of connecting on at least the linux box (if they aren’t able to figure out the antique mac, i understand). i’ve already got a lot of stuff sorted out of the recovered data, including a whole bunch of music, embeded in .zip archives, which appears to be uncorrupted, so, initially, it appears that i may not have lost everything. oh, i also discovered a bunch of CDs that have the date 4/20/13 on them, that appear to be raw .wav files of my first three cassettes, originally produced in the 1980s. if they are as pristine as they appear, then i MIGHT NOT have lost all my old music.
AND western digital FINALLY got back to me — i originally reported the loss on 210624, and, since then, i have sent the drive to texas, waited two weeks, and had the people in texas deliver the drive back to me, which arrived ONE WEEK BEFORE the western digital team (which “values your data”) got around to contacting me… 😒 they said they couldn’t help me unless i uploaded the system logs, but when i plugged in the drive, it wouldn’t even mount on mac, which means that they couldn’t even talk me through the process of recovering the system logs, at which point the issue was “escalated”, and they are, alledgedly, going to call me back monday or tuesday. at this point, i would estimate that it’s NOT particularly likely that western digital is going to call me back before 210731, which is when their web site says i have to have contacted them regarding a data loss from CVE-2018-18472… because after 210731, they don’t have to do anything about it. 😒
bare bear!
i saw a bare bear (a black one) today, at 47.4336528, -121.9412438 at approximately 1700 hours.
sorry, there are no pictures, i was too busy getting the fuck out of there.
here are some wildlife pictures that aren’t twice my size with four inch claws, even if it was going the opposite direction.
also, some paraidolia, for you religiomus folks. 😉
hello, old friend…
i’ve got a lot on my mind… my new car, my old car, monique’s old car, my cloud drive, the data, which still needs A LOT of categorising and sorting. there’s so much of it, and about a third to one half of it is corrupt, but i can’t tell without attempting to read it…
next to my tablet is a cup which contains pens, pencils, permanent markers, a divider, a compass, a bong reamer, several dental tools, a couple of hemostats… miscelaneous things that i need on a regular basis. i was looking for the original gear shift knob for my old car, which involved emptying out a bag of miscelaneous leftovers from when we moved (last year), which i never got around to sorting out. it had a number of things that i had been looking for, like my extra vape battery, an extra container for concentrates, my (ORIGINAL!) fidget-cube, and some extra pens and pencils, which i proceded to put in the cup next to my tablet… but it was full.
so, i decided to get a larger can, from my workshop, into which to transfer the pens, pencils, and miscelaneous tools, which took a while, because i had to find the can that i was looking for. when i’d found the can, i went back into my office, and transferred the stuff into it, in the bottom of the cup, i found this…
i got this… i don’t know how many years ago… i think it was before my injury… i got it a clear quartz ganesha, and this citrine one, at the same time, but i lost the citrine one almost immediately — like, within the first two weeks — and i have never seen it since.
