das loft

Hooray. I'm now up to a triple-20 for pushups.

On Saturday, Meta and I are leaving for Cape Canaveral, Florida to join our dad on his cruise ship for a week. This should be interesting. A week of lavish relaxation. I feel guilty just thinking about it.

We'll be taking public transit to Pearson Airport - an Oakville bus and two Mississauga buses. One way, two hours, for $2. I'd say that's reasonable. However, our flight back arrives at Pearson at 11pm - after transit to the airport has ended for the day. So we'll have no choice but to take a taxi, the next cheapest method of transportation. That'll cost about $46. Why does there have to be such a huge difference? I guess because taxis don't get any funding from the government? I think it's just pathetic that there isn't a train!

Tomorrow we'll be saying goodbye to Jon, who's leaving for Australia for a week--er.. make that half a year. (If only it were a week.) Oh man. We're going to miss him. I miss him already. Mee-Ming - a friend and neighbour who could have been, but was not, a former high school teacher of mine (but was of Jon's) - thinks I should visit him over there. So I might just do that. Might. It will, of course, depend mostly on my employment and savings account situation at the time.

I've told him to take drum lessons while he's there. I'm very serious about that. If he learns to play the drums (maybe it will take more than 6 months, but whatever), then he can be in a band with Meta and me (and whomever else), and I think that would be one of the most fun things imaginable.

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This morning I woke up from another weird dream. I forgot most of it, and I knew that right after I awoke (it always sucks when that happens), but it ended so:

My aunt Anna from Parksville, BC was driving me, Jon, and some famous dude, like Alec Baldwin or someone equally impressive, in her lovely old stationwagon westwards across Vancouver Island. I suppose we were starting in Parksville. But it was different, because Parksville was surrounded by this enormous metal or concrete wall with turrets. As we were driving towards the gate, Jon asked Mr. Baldwin some question which I thought was rather inappropriate (I forgot what it was), and clearly Mr. Baldwin was feeling similarly by hesitating to answer. So to break the awkward silence I told Jon not to ask Mr. Baldwin such a stupid question.

When we passed through the gate, we found ourselves driving through sunny, green rolling hills with scattered clumps of deciduous trees, almost Mediterranean in shape. It was probably as I imagine Tuscany to look (I've never been there). There was the occasional cottage. Looking out my window on the right I saw brightly sunlit, open forests with thick groundcovers of white flowers. Then I began to see many stout, crooked, leafless trees sprouting clumps of huge white and violet flowers. I identified these as "flowering oaks". I remember feeling so moved by the view, as it was so spectacularly beautiful - almost cryworthy. And then I woke up.

Dreams are so mysterious.

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I don't know whether I ever linked this on my blog, but if I didn't, you should check out Fensler Films. Unfortunately, the Fensler dude had to remove the films from his site because he got this nasty letter from Hasbro ordering him to remove them. I guess it got popular enough that it found its way to one of Hasbro's bureaucrats. So if you want to watch them, you'll have go to another site that's still hosting them.

My favourites are Porkchop Sandwiches and I'm a Computer.

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Hmm... The cruise ship my dad's working on is in the news.

I'm just glad it's not SARS... or something worse...

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It's a big snowy snowstorm today. Very nice. Very nice indeed. It's really windy and fluffy ice falls thickly.

I'm thinking of making my own raisins. It's so expensive to buy organic raisins, so I've just been making do without them. I'll probably buy some organic grapes and dry them, and see if it's any cheaper. Organic nuts are also too expensive. It's a shame, because lacking these ingredients really limits the different things I can bake - but that might be a good thing, because then it forces me to just skip dessert. But really, I've been eating very well anyway. The only sweetener I have these days is honey, and then hardly any of it. I'm finding that I usually don't even need it. Bananas, apples and dairy are sweet enough.

Jon lent/gave me a copy of Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions cookbook (mine is still in BC), and I've been learning so much about how to prepare foods properly so that your body benefits the most from them. I'm trying to avoid consuming any grains that haven't been left to ferment or sprout first. So I only make sourdough bread (I never use baker's yeast anymore), and overnight I ferment my rye or oat flakes in diluted whey or yoghurt for making porridge and muesli. Unfortunately, it means I am no longer supposed to have pasta. That's okay, it shouldn't be too difficult to get out of the habit. I can always have brown rice pasta in an emergency, since it's the most digestable kind. And as always, I never use refined flours in any of my baking, or bran. I bet many people would be surprised to learn that eating the bran separate from the starchy portion of grain presents as many problems as eating the starchy portion of grain separated from the bran and the germ. But then, most people these days don't even know that eating just the starchy portion of the grain (i.e., white flour) presents any problems at all. Sad...

There's so much to be learned from Sally's book. It's packed full of eye-opening quotes from dozens of sources. Each one I find debunks yet another myth I was taught by the Diet Dictocrats.

The yoghurt I make now is surprisingly good. I've just been making each batch using a quart of milk and about half a cup of the last batch. Maybe it's just my imagination, but it actually seems as if it's tasting better each time I make it. And of course I'm still making cheese. I made my current batch using leftover whey and buttermilk from my first batch. Cheesalicious.

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A couple days ago the server that all my sites are hosted on, open-eyes.org, was down all day, apparently because some evil hacker did something terrible to the server. They had to take it down completely and restore everything from a backup. Luckily it was a pretty recent backup, and I haven't noticed anything to be out of date. Good old Manlius.com. I think they work pretty hard. I wish hackers wouldn't just try to kill the server for fun, though. It's not as if Manlius is a big, bad company, like Microsoft or AOL. It's akin to someone vandalizing a convenience store just for fun.

Today Meta and I finally have to take down the Christmas tree. It's pretty much dead anyway.

Yesterday I was tinkering with Meta's 16-track and her song, "How Can You Sleep?" - trying to come up with piano parts to it, trying to make it a bit more interesting. Bah. It does take a lot of time. It's definitely fun, but it can be frustrating. I'm sure this is normal, and my experience composing music is very limited. My experience listening to (today's) music is also very limited. That doesn't help when you're trying to write music for today. It's quite pathetic, now that I think about it.

I got an external USB MIDI adapter and a USB sound card for my laptop on eBay a few days ago. This way I'm able to play on my dad's Yamaha DX7 keyboard, let my computer generate the sounds for the MIDI events, and output it to the external sound card, which is connected to Meta's 16-track. (The built-in sound cards of laptops are generally of too low quality to be used for professional audio.) I'm running FluidSynth, a software wavetable synthesizer that uses samples in the SoundFont2 format. I found some quite good freely-available piano SoundFonts online. This is all under Linux, also. It's great. Almost like having a real piano in the house.

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I spent the last couple days visiting my aunt and cousins near Grafton, Ontario. They're living at the former home of my grandparents on my dad's side of the family, and my family used to take trips there all the time. I have many a fond memory of spending time in that beautiful country area. A couple years ago my grandma moved into an old age home, and my aunt and cousins took over her house. Meta, my uncle and I visited them (it's been a long time for some of us) and we had a really nice time.

My aunt and cousins are very cool people. You should have seen their kitchen, how full it was of organic and healthful food. They manage that even with the absurd prices they have to pay for organic food in their area during the wintertime (no farmers markets at this time of year). The three of them do so many interesting things - writing novels and poetry, sewing, knitting and spinning, playing the harp, violin, and flute - all in a very serene, forested paradise that gets lots of snow in the wintertime. They seem to be very happy, and I don't blame them. I took some walks around the expansive property: first up the hill to the Old Cabin (which has some mildew/mould issues at the moment), past the 400-year-old oak tree, down the Slope That One Slides Down, then past the Pond That Is No Longer Deep. I didn't go up to the Hill, but that's a gorgeous place to go in the fall, as it is home to many wild grapes and magical milkweeds.

Then we all visited my grandma in Cobourg yesterday. It was really good to see her, since I hardly ever get to visit her anymore. She too seems very happy. She's one of the liveliest residents there. She still walks on her own and gets exercise, whereas many (most?) other residents are in wheelchairs or beds all the time. I'm so glad she likes it there. She was very happy to see all of us.

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Weird weird. I had a dream I was replying to e-mails from Evan Munday. Each time I replied, I called him something else, always making fun of his name for some reason. I think I called him Evan Sunday, Evan Mundjhe, Evan Seven... then my brain got confused with him and Evan Quigley, so I started calling him Evan Wiggly and so on. I think he had been trying to organize a SIGFOOD, and all I could do was joke around. How annoying of me. I think it must have a deeper meaning...

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The long-awaited apartment photos!

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The Sitter and the Butter and the Better Batter Fritter - by Dennis Lee

My little sister's sitter
Got a cutter from the baker,
And she baked a little fritter
From a pat of bitter butter.
First she bought a butter beater
Just to beat the butter better,
And she beat the bit of butter
With the beater that she bought.

Then she cut the bit of butter
With the little butter cutter,
And she baked the beaten butter
In a beaten butter baker.
But the butter was too bitter
And she couldn't eat the fritter
So she set it by the cutter
And the beater that she bought.

And I guess it must have taught her
Not to use such bitter butter,
For she bought a bit of batter
That was sweeter than the butter.
And she cut the sweeter batter
With the cutter, and she beat her
Sweeter batter with a sweeter batter
Beater that she bought.

Then she baked a batter fritter
That was better than the butter
And she ate the better batter fritter
Just like that.

But while the better batter
Fritter sat inside the sitter -
Why, the little bitter fritter
Made of bitter butter bit her,
Bit my little sister's sitter
Till she simply disappeared.

Then my sister came to meet her
But she couldn't see the sitter -
She just saw the bitter butter
Fritter that had gone and et her;
So she ate the butter fritter
With a teaspoonful of jam.

Now my sister has a bitter
Butter fritter sitting in her,
And a sitter in the bitter
Butter fritter, since it ate her,
And a better batter fritter
Sitting in the silly sitter
In the bitter butter fritter
Sitting in my sister's tum.

---

Oh, the good old days...

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The good old days... (Fall, 2001)

By the way, we're having a bit of a discussion about that "letter from the future" on Open Eyes, in case anybody's interested!

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I finally made my own cheese and buttermilk. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but I couldn't find any organic buttermilk to start off with. I don't think organic buttermilk is sold in Canada. So I reluctantly bought a package of freeze-dried cheese/buttermilk culture. It took me a couple days to make the cheese. Right now I'm having some on slices of sourdough whole wheat bread that I made a few days ago. It's very good, but I wonder how to make it a bit more interesting. It's got a consistency between cream cheese and ricotta, but it tastes more like cream cheese. Maybe a bit of salt would help. Next I'd like to make ricotta.

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All righty. So nobody cares about that story? Is this old news for everyone? Because if it is, then how come everyone's acting as if nothing's going to happen in our lifetimes? Pretty much everything I've read says some major crisis is almost certainly going to happen in well under fifty years. Probably 2019 or something like that. Now seems as good a time as any to start learning how to survive the crisis, or at least start thinking about it. Isn't anyone else interested?

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Please read this: A Letter From the Future. It's an easy read, and I think it's very good. It explains very well why I feel the need to become self-sufficient.

I wonder what people who don't heed the warnings are thinking. Most people don't even realize the seriousness of the growing energy crisis. The media doesn't really talk about it and most people are ignorant and apathetic; they're uninterested in issues that seem to have nothing directly to do with them. But I can understand that. How can I expect them all to concern themselves about the problems of the future (their own futures even) in addition to all the problems they have to deal with every day to get by? It's actually quite a lot to expect. Humans are animals, after all, just a bit more complicated. Like animals, they have to satisfy their basic, immediate needs first before anything else. Unlike animals, they also have the ability to think about and plan for the future. My family, friends and I can do this because our immediate needs are relatively well met, and we have time to think and plan for the long term. It's unfortunate that most of the population, however, is just struggling to survive.

Anyway.

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Hey people, my dad just discovered a cool piece of software that I think some of you will be interested in. It's called Skype, and it gives you the ability to speak, by voice, to other Skype users over the Internet for free. It also has all the capabilities of a regular instant messaging program, including chatting and file transfer. I know this technology has been around for quite a while, but I think Skype just makes it really easy.

One of the sweet things about Skype is that it runs on Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows, so I can use it. You can also use Skype to call any long-distance number in North America, much of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and some other countries for only 2.8 cents/minute. That's pretty cheap, no? Because isn't it something like 10 cents/minute with Bell's First Rate plan? And that's just to Canada and the US.

So if anyone's interested, my Skype username is vtowel. Kara, I think you should use this instead of calling us, since it costs nothing. You'll need to connect a microphone or headset to your computer if you haven't already.

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Why not start the new year off with a good old 18-18-16. As you may have guessed, I took a rather long break from pushups, so I'm hoping to start again. I do three sets, and between each set I do as many arm circles as I can, roughly following the advice of my uncle. My muscles are dead exhausted now. I'm going to be feeling this for a few days, I think.

I spend new year's eve at my friend Carley's parents' condo in Clarkson. We baked cookies and decorated them. I actually had a pretty good time, considering that the original plan was for Jon to join us but he decided not to and instead slept like a rock all evening and night. Carley and I still had lots of interesting things to discuss, and the cookies turned out great. But I hope that will be the last of the white death I'll be eating for a very long time.

I've been trying to figure out my sister's Yamaha 16-track "professional digital audio workstation." It's quite complicated, but I'm getting a hang of it. One thing that I'm a bit disappointed about is the fact that it can only process two effects simultaneously in real time. For some reason I'd thought that you'd be able to apply a different effect to each channel if you felt like it. So I wonder how effects are handled in other audio workstation environments. Maybe it's just still too processor-intensive, even now, to run three or more real-time effects at once. Or maybe I'll find that I never need to use more than two effects at once.

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