Miscellany including zucchinis, pagans and a meme

[metawidget]

I'm writing from the couch with Pixel the Relatively New Cat lying on my legs. She's kind of the Ernie to Noisette's Bert: sociable, talkative, stripey and drives Noisette a little crazy. They're getting along a bit better than they did at first, though.

I'm in my second week of a two-week vacation: Elizabeth's music school shuts down for two weeks in the summer, and my projects are all long-term enough that two weeks in the summer without me won't kill them, so we co-ordinated. Happily, Kaleioscope Gathering was also on, and so we hopped on our (fully-loaded with panniers and a trailer full of gear) bikes and went out to Planatagenet or thereabouts to camp under soft pines, participate in a communal camp kitchen, learn about partner yoga, thai massage, herbs, relationships, vocal techniques and esoteric stuff, hang out with fun pagans and pagan-friendly people, acquire a thumb piano, and attract most of the security on duty to our campsite — with rumours of chocolate fondue. Like teinm_laida was reporting, people there for the most part have their guard down and are their genuine, enjoyably weird selves.

The garden is doing really, really well. The exciting bits lately are red Russian kale coming up where the spinach was, and a zucchini patch that wants to take over the world. Also of note are the beginnings of a blackberry patch behind the compost!

I commented with "words" over at stateofwonder's journal, and she gave me five words to riff on:

Biking

I've enjoyed bicycling, and gotten around in varying proportions by bike, since I was quite young. Back in late elementary school, I'd bike 12.5 km to school once in a while. In high school, I extended my range to friends a town or two away, out to about 40km. I've been through several bikes (due to growing a bit since elementary, and due to bike thieves — may they all get seat posts lodged in their colons), biked on trails, country roads, secondary highways and the downtowns of two cities. I biked to Kaleidoscope with gear this year and last, and the longest bike trip I've done is about 180km in a long day between Montreal and Ottawa. I bike for health, for cheapness, for the environment and sometimes out of sheer obstinacy.

Quebec

Aside from four months in Ottawa, I've lived all my life in Quebec: my education was here, many of my jobs were here (albeit not the current one — I cross the bridge into Ontario to work at StatCan), all my papers were issued here. Quebec is different, for sure, sometimes in a good social-democratic, social liberal, eco-conscious, joie-de-vivre kind of way, and sometimes in a maddeningly bureaucratic, mildly xenophobic or trashy kind of way. Just when you think Quebec is eco-friendly in general, someone is watering their giant, redundant, conspicuously expensive pickup truck and driveway in front of their ramshackle, unloved, low-R-value home with the pesticide warning sign on the lawn, but if you breathe and move on you'll see something like Dépanneur Sylvestre or a Maison de naissance.

Scrabble

I really got on a Scrabble roll around when I met Elizabeth, around when vierge_en_trop and feygele were also starting up monthly-ish Scrabble happenings around Montreal. The existence of a Scrabble club in StatCan methodology branch has kept me getting my fix. I'm pretty competitive and enjoy the game a lot. It's up there in my regular game diet with Carcassonne and D&D.

Mathematics/Statistics

My best pithy definition of math (particularly academic math) is the practice of wandering across things which are true looking for things which are also interesting. Conjectures aside (which are basically compasses toward interesting when they work), every step in doing math is dealing with absolute truth. Statistics, although full of math results, is a very different but very fun creature: there it's all about confidence, which is almost always less than 100%. Also, wandering across truth looking for interesting without making a hypotheis in statistics is data mining, which may cause the downfall of civilization or something close if we pretend it's statistics.

Home cooking

I like doing it, I like eating it. In our household these days, I take care of much of the supper food and wet cooking, and Elizabeth does the bready stuff and granola, as well as wrangling the yogurt and sourdough micro-beasties (I do the compost worms). We are gardening and subscribed to a CSA this year, which means our fridge is always overflowing with fresh veggies (we got a small share and we're still doing just fine with weekly deliveries plus the garden). This makes eating out or buying pre-processed stuff a little harder to justify, because that cabbage or those peas will moulder in the fridge if they aren't cooked into something tasty. I tend to cook without recipes and with lots of steaming and currying techniques, and because Elizabeth is a vegetarian, I'm a bit out of practice with the meaty dishes.

If you comment with the word "words" somewhere in your comment, I'll pick five words for you to ruminate on.

Well, it seems that this time last year is still on the first page of my Livejournal — I guess I'm a little uncommunicative on here. I hope a few more meaty updates will be in the near future, as well as the traditional good/blah table for all your point-form needs…

Comments

[teinm_laida.livejournal.com]

words

also, is there D&D this Sunday?

[metawidget]

cults, security, food, shiny, feathers

And yep, we're on this Sunday!

[raccoonbonapart.livejournal.com]

Eliot has a Sesame Street tape with a song of Ernie and Bert singing together. One of them lists things that they like, and then the other sings, "Well I don't really like any of those things, but I like you!" It's really sweet. I hope your cats end up having a relationship like that.

[metawidget]

They've come a long way since we got them, and when they're near each other and being civil, we give them cat treats, so I hope they drift towards the happy E&B roommate relationship.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Quebec is good on macro-ecological things like carbon plans, and bad on an individual and lower-government level. BC is the other way around.

I'm so jealous of Vancouver's zero-carbon downtown-core public transit (electric buses and electric skytrain) and all its greenery. I'm jealous of their foot-and-bike-over-cars cutlure. But BC's premier Campbell has to be dragged and screaming toward anything ecological, while Charest (for all his flaws) is more on the ball.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Also, I wanted to say I really like the icon :)

[metawidget]

I ganked it from reyl, who ganked it from somewhere else...

I have a little golden apple hanging in my office too. Some of the LAN admins seem to like the number 23, maybe I'm not the only Discordian in the area.

[reyl.livejournal.com]

WOOT!

[reyl.livejournal.com]

The CSA sounds awesome! I'm going to have to look into something like that. It will make me eat more veggies. I love depanneurs and miss Québec for that. Luckily it isn't too far away. Plus *words* are hot. Cool post!

PS I hate scrabble ;)

[metawidget]

The CSA is definitely awesome. The seasonal-ness means you get to try all sorts of things, but you get a lot of leafy greens at the beginning (does the Pumpkin eat salad?). Gord who runs the CSA is really nice, and apparently also sells organic beef. He'll also give some suggestions as to how to cook the stuff he gives you (steamed garlic scapes, beet green salad, arugula pesto...).

As for words, how about:

unseelie, dork, sarong, pacifism, real

[reyl.livejournal.com]

The Unseelie court of myth is the faery court that is more likely to harm humans, or at least not be concerned with them. I love myths about dark creatures who don't waste their time pandering to humanity. They are also the court that reigns in winter. Most of my interest in fae started with Changeling, which I find to be very beautiful and also have the greatest potential for personal horror.

Dorks are sweet! I'm not skilled enough at most things to consider myself a geek, but I am definately a dork. It includes an aspect of social awkwardness, and having once been terminally shy I find it an appropriate word. Wikipedia also says it's slang for a certain male part, though I'm not so sure I've heard it used as such.

Sarongs are the best! Who needs clothing when you can just tie a nice bit of cloth around yourself and run through the woods and along the beach?! Pants are evil, and sarongs are the solution.

Pacifism is a difficult concept. I was just talking about it the other day. I hope for peace often, but I'm aware of the nature of humanity. Unless that nature is drastically changed, peace is impossible. What struck me in the conversation was that a display of peace signs on a lawn was taken as a political statement. But it really isn't, it's the opposite of that. Let's just not kill each other seems so simple and obvious, yet it is the most difficult thing in the world. People can't seem to agree to disagree. My biggest hope is that one day I will be out of a job because of peace. But participating in it as I do, technically I am part of the problem. Of course I also need to eat, and war is good money. It's a difficult thing, peace.

Real. I am very grounded in reality these days. I was far less real in my youth. Reality is true and false and meaningless. There may be parallel realities. There may be only one, yet we aren't able to see all its dimensions. My nickname is reyl because reality is interesting but sometimes painful and we need to escape once in a while.

[odetothepillow.livejournal.com]

Have a happy birthday!

[metawidget]

Thanks! Have a happy National Leave a Giant Zucchini on Your Neighbour's Doorstep Day (and watch your doorstep just in case)!