Nothing funny about feldspar

I keep trying to use Automator, but it continually thwarts my efforts to do anything with it. I can build a workflow that gives me little green check marks and then toots like a little train when it’s finished… but nothing actually happens. If I tell it to open Preview, it doesn’t. If I tell it to set the desktop picture, it won’t. If I tell it to split PDFs into individual pages, nope, not that either. I thought AppleScript was arcane — this is practically ritualistic! Next time I’ll try tapping my heels together three times before I push the run button. At least then I’ll know I’ve accomplished something.

Alcohol really doesn’t work as a pain-killer.

I suppose I knew that already, but I just thought I’d test it again last night, and lo-and-behold, I only got sleepy. And then woke up four hours later when it wore off. And then I still hurt.

I wonder if there is something to the old saw about Grampa knowing it’s gonna rain by the ache in his bones. If so, I’d just as soon Grampa did all the weather prognosticatin’. And since my grandparents are all dead, then it won’t bother them a bit, will it? Unless they’re ghosts, in which case I suppose I don’t want to give them my pain, ’cause then they’ll be haunting me and such.

Jeez. I shouldn’t take narcotics and blog, either, should I?

Sally Greene is culling her cookbooks by trying recipes. She’s just getting started (three reports so far), but it’s looking pretty good if her intention is to create bookshelf space — one in three so far is a “keeper.” (The Lamb Curry (the sole keeper) sounds good, even at 9 in the morning…)

I miss my cookbooks, as they were all packed away in preparation for Plagioclase’s mother’s move-in. Plus we were going to sell the house, but the one we were going to buy didn’t work out. Anyway, it’s been a couple of years since I could sit down and leaf through my cookbooks to try new stuff. This has sorely limited the food we eat, because I don’t get inspired to cook anymore.¹

Maybe if I find my box of cookbooks I’ll try Sally’s method. Of course, I’m not sure I could manage to get rid of any of them — sometimes the book holds the memory of the meal (”Oh yeah! I remember this — we made this but didn’t have the _____ so we substituted ____ and boy was it weird!”).

I’ll at least plan on cooking something from every cookbook. When I get them, that is. In the meantime, I’ll be peeling potatoes…

1. That and the fact that I know I can please Plagioclase’s mother by cooking anything that has bacon, potatoes and onions in it, as long as it is bland and brown. She’s one of those people when confronted with vegetarian bean soup will ask where the ham is, and waxes poetic about her grandmother’s cooking, which always seems to start “She browned the onions in butter…” and ends with “and then everything got real brown.”↩

I hurried back into the air-conditioned house after taking Albite out into the stifling heat, and then read this story at Odd Ends.

The Professor of Physics, with his assistants, could only look through a crevice in the covering of his vault and see the fiery radiance which was coming from the East. When the covering grew so hot that he felt refuge must soon be taken in the lowest vaults, the sun was suddenly cut off by a rising cloud of blackness coming in from the Atlantic. The whole ocean was boiling like a pot, and the rising steam was carried over the land by a gale produced by the expansion of the air over the ocean. Moving with inconceivable velocity, the gale passed over the continent, sweeping before it every vestige of human work that stood in its path. Even the stones of the buildings, cracked and pulverized by the heat, were now blown through the air like dust, and, churned with the rain, buried the land under a torrent of mud. The lightning played incessantly everywhere, and, if it did not destroy every being exposed to it, it was only because no living beings survived where it struck. Constantly thickening and darkening clouds poured down their storm of rain upon the ruins. But no relief was thus afforded to the mass of cringing humanity which remained protected in vaults and cellars. The falling flood was boiling hot, scalding to death every one upon whom it fell. It poured through cracks and crevices, flooding cellars, saturating the ruins of buildings, and if a living being remained it scalded him to death.

Somehow I don’t feel any cooler for being in the airco.

Find a character in Greek Mythology, whose name is formed by two pronouns.

This one took me a while, because I was having to dig deep into my grammar school English memories… and then I had to look for Greek-seeming words, but I eventually got it.

RSSer: Look away!

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