AS220 Weblogs

Iowa Pictures

Rust on the top of my brother's minivan

A senior picture style photo of Jacob with above-mentioned van

Croquet, the official Pleasants Family Sport

A tiny overgrown house

The ugliest apartment building ever (yes, people live there)

Across the street from my parents' house

On the flight to Chicago

Olive visited the office today

On Hiatus

I am in Iowa until Monday, and as soon as I find some new camera batteries I will take some pictures of the corn state.

Making up for missed days, again.

Playing with the photo editor

Twinkie Sushi

More fun with balance settings

Somewhere in Brooklyn

The Special Collections Library at Yale

For Thursday and Friday

My summer project with the Met School

I grew these!

(this one may have been taken by Andrew)

Another weekend duo

Lilies

Making up for missed days

Two for the weekend

From Quebec City and La Chute-Montmorency

Installation at the DeCordova Museum

A Picture A Day

I was recently scolded about not maintaining my blog. Michael suggested, thought, that at the very least I put up some photographs. That I think I can handle. So I am going to try to put up a picture every day. And I am making the rule for myself that if I put up a cat picture I have to put up a non-cat picture as well.

So here's picture #1. If I start slacking, feel free to chastise me.

Freakin' Awesome

Last Tuesday I went to Boston to see Belle and Sebastian with The New Pornographers. I'm pretty sure it was the first time I've been as excited about the opening band as the headliners; it's definitely the first time I've wondered if you can make the opening band to an encore.

Some of the highlights:

Belle and Sebastian passed around a fruit bowl. I've never had blueberries at a concert before. And they were some pretty tasty blueberries!

Avalon has a bar in the ladies' bathroom. Maybe this is common at night clubs, but it was the first time I'd ever ordered beer in a bathroom.

Hearing Judy and the Dream of Horses live.

The drummer from The New Pornographers makes the best facial expressions. Plus he kind of looks like a hobbit.
Also, Chris from Belle and Sebastian looks kind of like the weird brother that someone let play with the band but turned out to be really good. He had a little bit of a Napoleon Dynamite's brother thing going on.

It may have been ridiculously hot inside, and the drinks may have been overpriced and weak, but we got three hours of amazingly good music. I am totally satisfied.

This scares me.

Yum!

I made this on Friday. It's easy and tasty -- what more do you want?

Ingredients

1 cup quinoa
2 cups vegetable broth
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup toasted pine nuts
fresh thyme

Directions

Throw everything except the pine nuts in a saucepan. Put those in the oven and toast them at 300 degrees. Bring the broth to a boil, cover, and let simmer for 15-20 minutes.

When the quinoa is fully cooked, throw in the toasted pine nuts.

I think I may just go eat this for lunch today.

A lack of photographic evidence

I have been camera-less for over a month now. Why? It's a long story, but you can read about it here. It's been painful, really. So many picture-worthy moments. Like the hassidic man gazing out the window of the Verizon store. Or the view from East Rock in New Haven. I think today may be the day that I take the plunge and commit to a new camera. Hmm, I feel like I could almost do an extended metaphor here comparing camera-hunting to dating. Those disposable cameras? They're the one-date wonders. Right now I'm leaning towards the Canon PowerShot A620. It's not a digital SLR -- those sure are tempting -- but it's like the high-maintenance boyfriend. I'm hoping that the Canon will be the low-key go-anywhere kind of camera that still performs up to my standards.

This is why copy editing is a good thing.

Ok, are they advertising for a gardener or a missionary? I can't decide.

Just in time for the holiday season . . .

Fall = Soup Time

This one was inspired by a very tasty soup made by my friend Ryan (who, incidentally, I am going to see this weekend) and adapted to fit what was in my fridge.

Buttery Butternut Squash Soup with Thyme

Ingredients, in order of appearance

2 red onions
1 bunch scallions
1/2 stick butter
1/2 butternut squash, diced
~5 cups vegetable broth
5 cloves garlic, peeled
1/4 cup/small handfull dried porcini mushrooms
6-8 stalks/branches fresh thyme
1/4 cup white wine
1 Tbsp honey
Salt & Pepper to taste
3/4 cup wheatberries (or barley)

Instructions

Saute the onions & scallions until they start to caramelize
Add the squash and saute for another 5 minutes, then add the broth, thyme, mushrooms, and garlic
When the squash starts to get soft, add the remaining ingredients
Simmer until the wheatberries are fully cooked
Add more salt/pepper/wine/honey/thyme/butter to taste

I'm guessing this would be a good soup for dunking bread as well, but I didn't have any at the time so I couldn't test that theory.

A bad protocol decision

Yesterday I lost my phone. Mostly likely it was grabbed by a 7th grader who missed the lesson on why stealing other people's stuff is not cool. So today I thought I would go online and find out just how much it's going to cost me to get a new one. Cell phone companies aren't big on telling you the real price of phones. They like to let you know just how cheap it will be once you sign a brand-new two-year contract, but if you want to know how much the phone costs all by itself you have to log into your account. Which would have been fine, except they recently enacted a policy by which you need not only your account number and pin number, but also a user name and password. The user name you can pick yourself, but the password they have to send you. And they can only do this as a text message.

To sum up: To get a phone, I need a password. To get a password, I need a phone.

I suspect this is all a nefarious plot to get me to go to the mall.

In the interest of circular linkage

I will send you here. This is Jeff's blog. It is entertaining. Now that I'm sending people to his site, though, he need to add more content to it.

Your tax dollars at work

Yesterday I went to the DMV to get myself a Rhode Island Driver's License. I assumed that a valid out-of-state license and proof of address would be enough to do the transfer. Apparently, though, you need your social security card as well. Not just your number, but the actually flimsy little piece of paper.

Now, I know that I had my card at one point, but somewhere in the moving process I misplaced it. So today I went to get a replacement. Guess what's the only item you need to get a replacement card? Your driver's license. Hmm.

I love bureaucracy.

Where I'll be this Halloween

Come see . . .
Dabasement Bombers!

Pushy Galore!

Paris Killton!

Cyndi Plopper!

Veruca Assault!

Iowans are really good at naming things.

Something looks oddly familiar about this font . . .

Rain, Rain, Go Away

As you fellow New Englanders may have noticed, it has been raining for the past 7 days, and apparently will continue to do so through Sunday. I am very unhappy with whoever decided that this would be a good idea. I don't mind a rainy day every now and then. It tends to serve as a good excuse to stay in bed or watch a movie. However, I would prefer my rainy days evenly spaced out, with plenty of sunny and/or partly-sunny days in between. Therefore, I have created this short petition. Please fill this out and send it along to whoever you are blaming for this nasty weather.

Dear god/local meteorologist/aliens/yakuzi/al-Qaeda/Donald Rumsfeld/other ________,

This weather sucks. Please make it stops. I promise that I will donate money to your party/kill the heathens/not talk about the abduction/support my local TV station/start going to church/buy more Japanese products if we can just have a little bit of sunshine.

Sincerely,

your name here

Thank you.

Living it up in 16 bits

Today I bought Dr. Mario/Tetris for my Super Nintendo. This is me beating my brother:

Note the lovely "X" denoting "You lose, player two!"

Said brother was also kind enough to give me Donkey Kong Country:

Now I'm all set for another cold Providence winter.

Today sucked.

No, really, it sucked. It started off with a certified letter stating that I was going to be sued by Miriam Hospital for a bill from November of 2003 that my VISTA insurance had never paid, despite numerous phone calls on my part to all involved parties. Today I had to argue with the representative from VISTA that labwork is indeed a part of an annual exam, and that a yearly physical and an annual are, well, pretty much the same thing.

Then things got a bit better; the two people I wasn't looking forward to interviewing didn't show up, and the pre-recorded training session I was supposed to watch turned out to be shorter than I though. I left work at 4 and went to my very first yoga class, where I stretched and relaxed and worked some muscles I didn't know existed.

But then they got worse. I left yoga feeling all loose and energized only to find that my car had been broken into. And not just broken into, but seriously brutalized. The passenger window was smashed, and the entire middle console, including my ghetto cd player set-up, vents, and heating controls had been completely torn out. With all sorts of gouge marks around the sides. Even better, the genious who did this managed to cut himself in the process, and now there are blood streaks all over the inside of my car. My AC adapter is gone, and so are most of my CDs, with the exception of David Bowie and Beck. And the turn signals don't work.

The good news? It's covered by insurance. The bad news? When I switched to Rhode Island insurance I raised my deductibles so I wouldn't be paying quite so astronomical an amount for car insurance. Instead, I get to pay the first $1000 towards fixing this mess. Which, coincidentally, is about what Miriam Hospital wants me to pay them. Although, at this point, being sued feels like nothing.

The scrabble set wasn't touched, though, nor was the box full of glazes; that has to count for something. And Erin was kind enough to come over with a bottle of wine, which has done wonders to mellow out the stressfulness of the day.

I'm just hoping that from here, the weekend can only get better.

A much-needed tune-up

I cleaned the chain, adjusted the handlebars, tightened all the nuts on the fenders, and fixed whatever was wrong with the gears (although I'm still not sure what was wrong, or how I fixed it).

Now my bike is in (almost) tip-top shape, which is excellent, given that it is my preferred form of transportation in this age of $3.00/gallon gasoline.

And it's keeping me in pretty good shape, too. There's a lot of hills in this city. Riding up them on a 3-speed is no joke.

Hopefully I won't wimp out come wintertime.

My new fun toy

Making homemade soymilk rocks.

Back from the wilderness

I'm feeling too lazy to put up a photo gallery with captions, so I'm just going to post a few pitures from my adventures at the North Carolina Outward Bound School.

There once was a dog and a carriage The love-stricken dog proposed marriage When the carriage was silent The dog became violent At that act of utter disparage -R.P.	Young Florence had very fine knees And she always said thank-you and please Her smile was delightful But her tresses were frightful For her beehive, it really had bees. -R.P.
As Madeline sat on her bed An idea came into her head "If one day I go wild And string up a young child I will bury it under the shed -S.H.	There once was a lady quite fair, And whenever she ate a ripe pear, The meb would start flocking For her manner was shocking But she fought them all off with her hair -R.P. & S.H.

AS220 Weblogs

Iowa Pictures

On Hiatus

Making up for missed days, again.

For Thursday and Friday

Another weekend duo

Lilies

Making up for missed days

Two for the weekend

Installation at the DeCordova Museum

A Picture A Day

Freakin' Awesome

This scares me.

Yum!

A lack of photographic evidence

This is why copy editing is a good thing.

Fall = Soup Time

A bad protocol decision

In the interest of circular linkage

Your tax dollars at work

Where I'll be this Halloween

Iowans are really good at naming things.

Something looks oddly familiar about this font . . .

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Living it up in 16 bits

Today sucked.

A much-needed tune-up

My new fun toy

Back from the wilderness

Things I will not miss about 75 Raymond Street

3 New Photo Galleries

Right. The bird story.

The end of Team Raymond

Woolly Fair at the Steelyard

New Image Galleries

You know you're a Scrabble nut

Catster

Waiting for the snow to start

Meet Batman

Don't let the cat out of the bag . . .

Warning: this post contains language unsuitable for children

The System Is Down

Mary Jane Pleasants

It's a four-job life

An Update

The Unstrung Harpsichord

Garlic Broccolini

Birthday Boy O'Keefe

Drive AS220: A New Way to Give

AS220 Membership Survey

Fools Ball Image Galleries

Tile Mosaic, Ames Jewish Congregation

Ceramics Class, CityArts!

Coconut Curry Vegetables

Pasta Fantastico

Mojolicious Tempeh

Musings from the grammar-obsessed

Silly kitty

Halloween 2003

Tom's radio piece

The distribution of wealth

Good Morning!

Very pink

Life After Fools Ball

Peanut-Coconut Noodles

Andre the Giant has a posse -- 7'4", 520 lbs.

No comment.

Mayday! or, How I Won the Kentucky Derby

Blast from the past!

Two new ones for the collection

The stress begins . . .

Notes from the Creative Economy Symposium

Lying in bed with Olympia in my arms and looking forward to tomorrow.

I miss New Pioneer

Meet Olympia

She came from the locksmith

Boggle? Boggle? B-b-b-boggle?

I dream of Spring

Burlington

Creamy dill-vegetable soup