Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Grateful for dial-up – the pleasure of not being connected (gratitude #41)

    So, this past weekend we went up north with some friends. It was a brief trip, much too short for the length of the drive, but it was nice to get away, get up north and relax.

    Breathe in. Breathe out. Appreciate the scenery. Repeat.

    In the summertime, we share DSL and a wireless router with the neighbors. But they locked their place up for the winter, shut down the DSL/wireless, and they won’t be back until the spring. We go year-round. I really love it when it is quiet and the winter woods especially are quiet.

    I did have a bit of work to do, so I had to reinstate our old dial-up service, through Bruce Municipal Telecom. I discovered a few fun facts:

    • My space-age Macbook doesn’t even have a place to plug in a phone line, but
    • My husband’s Dell laptop did.
    • Neither of us had a thumb drive to transfer the file I’d painstakingly prepared to send to a co-worker for the Monday I’d be out.

    I borrowed Dave’s laptop, recreated the spreadsheet on his computer, and dialed in to get stuff into Basecamp for my colleagues. Hooray for connectivity.

    Yet, dial-up definitely put a damper on my online activities. Because I didn’t have connectivity, I let a few things go. I put off work email, Twitter, uploading photos to my flickr account, personal email, blogging, working with my MiUPA colleagues to set up the chapter meeting we had the Monday evening I returned, etc. I could answer some of the email on Tuesday morning during working hours, the MiUPA team is all-powerful and organized without constant input from me. I could upload the few photos I took late Monday. My twitter friends didn’t need instant reporting of my hikes and naps and the weather at Gillies Lake.

    It all worked out just fine. So, even though I’ve loved having the wireless broadband up there, it is nice to disconnect for a while. A real vacation after all. A chance for downtime, not uploading.

  • Fall chores

    Today was a day of fall chores: sweeping out the garage, tidying it and getting it ready to store the table and chairs for the winter, raking leaves from the back yard, and pulling in all of the “tender” bulbs (voodoo lily and calla lily) that I had planted in pots on the deck and porch. They’ll slumber in peat in a bin in my basement – cool and dark – until it is time for them to grow again in the spring.

    Nice to feel I’m ready for the change of season.

  • My desert island item – a stack of freshly laundered kitchen towels (gratitude #40)

    You might think I’m reaching the dregs in the gratitude barrel, but no, this is actually one of the things for which I’m actually, sincerely, really-really grateful.

    I’m not someone who stockpiles; I’m an under-buyer. Normally, I tend to run out and go run an errand to refill my supply of (important item here). But, along with piles of books, I stockpile kitchen towels. There are few things better or more satisfying to me than a stack of freshly laundered kitchen towels.
    dishtowels

    I haven’t actually bought many of them – several were gifts from my mom, others from friends with various wedding (yes, 8 years ago) presents, my husband’s grandmother wove some of what I use, my mother-in-law likes giving tea towels as gifts – so I can use the excuse that I didn’t intentionally acquire the set I have now. I blundered into my stockpile of dish towels. And they give me a disproportionate happiness. Yes, dishtowels.

    There’s just something abundant in the waiting stack. I like having a stack because in a weekend of a lot of cooking, say my canning fun, I can keep on tossing dirty and sodden dishtowels down into the basement (our staircase is our laundry chute) and reload the oven handle with another clean, dry towel. So, after my weekend of canning, I’d exhausted my stack of towels and needed to launder the set. There was something abundant about that too. Felt like an accomplishment.

    I use one to line underneath the bins that hold the potatoes, onions, and garlic. One is always looped over the handle of the oven, for drying washed hands or wiping up the counter. When we’re cooking, one of us has a dishtowel jauntily tossed over one shoulder, at the ready for drying a hand-washed dish or grabbing a pot handle. I suppose they’re some kind of tangible reminder of the joy we take in our kitchen, in cooking with and for friends.

    So, want to make my day? Give me a dish towel.

  • Going to Podcamp Michigan!

    So, just the other day, with some of my Michigan Usability Professionals Folks, I was wondering about local social media folks that I hadn’t yet met. You know, wondering about who might be good speakers to invite to talk to us, that kind of thing.

    Podcamp Michigan 11/8/2008
    Podcamp Michigan 11/8/2008

    I didn’t even tweet it, though I should have. But, I did find, in my inbox this morning, a twitter notification from, of all things, Podcamp Michigan. Ask and ye shall receive. Or, in this case, “receive even though the ask was inchoate and unarticulated.”

    A podcamp is an unConference focused on blogging, podcasting, and social media. Should be fun. I’m planning to attend. You?

    Coordinates:

  • Not having to blow dry my hair – the power of a well-placed complaint (gratitude #39)

    Hair Drier...!, originally uploaded by murrus

    I really dislike blowing my hair dry. My hair is wavy, and drying it makes it flyaway, but its really about the boredom of drying it more than the end product.

    When I was a kid, I remember going out in the winter with wet hair. Now, my hair was inches below my shoulders, and so the Michigan winter would freeze it into little icicles and then it would unfreeze when I got to school. Little popsicle-dreadlocks. Probably not a good look for me, and I dimly realized that was probably socially unacceptable so I’ve been trying to fit in ever since by using a hairdryer.

    To this day, I can think of little more boring than waiting for my hair to dry under a loud hot blowing thing. Well, I always assumed I had to deal with it, and I suppose in the winter time I do. This summer, I finally thought to mention this to the one person who could do something about it – the woman who determines my hairstyle – my “beauty operator”. Maureen let me off the hook. She assured me that the simple application of some styling goo could free me from the obligation to blow my hair dry. I could style it wet and not look like a resentful 9-year-old.

    It’s funny. I’ve noticed in work that sometimes things that are really basic might feel too basic to be expressed. Yet, expressing them can unlock a thing or two. It’s the little things, I suppose.

  • Canning – a direct experience of the abundance of summer (gratitude #38)

    It’s that time of year, the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market is a study in abundance, and my summer reading, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, has inspired me to can. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

    So, I took a perfectly good Saturday and Sunday and made two trips to the Farmer’s Market, a trip to the hardware store, two trips to a grocery store, burned many BTUs of gas on our gas stove, and taught myself to can following the Ball Blue Book of Preserving and an article on canning in the October 2008 Bon Appetit.

    This was my discovery:

    • $15 of organic roma tomatoes plus
    • a few dollars of organic shallots plus
    • a few dollars in organic lemon juice plus
    • $30 in canning supplies (jar lifter, magnetic lid lifter, pint jars, canning funnel)
    • labor peeling, seeding, stirring, ladling, and then boiling the jars of sauce

    makes about six pint jars of fresh tomato sauce, something which when purchased would have cost many dollars less than what I spent. Yet, I didn’t burn myself, had some fun cooking and learning, have some lovely jars of pinky-red tomatoes lighting up the shelves of my basement, and I have stored a bit of this lovely summer sunshine for later.

    I realized that canning is kind of like knitting a sweater. It’s not that I saved any money, it’s that I got to enjoy the process and engaging with something concrete – beautiful yarn in the case of a sweater, beautiful produce in the case of canning. That level of absorbtion and attention is almost intoxicating, while my hands were slicing the 50th tomato, my mind was wondering at the variety of shape and color and detail in the box of romas. Plus, I experienced a distinct sense of abundance when processing a big pile of tomatoes- their weight, their texture, their color, bounty. So, after I finished the tomatoes on Saturday, I was up for another round on Sunday. With dinner guests arriving at 6PM, I carefully planned my day of cornbread-baking, coleslaw-making, peach cobbler-baking, and my husband’s slow cooking of the spare ribs with more canning. I discovered that

    • $20 in fresh figs plus
    • zest of two lemons plus
    • sugar and brandy

    makes six 1/2-pint jars of drunken fig jam. It’s tasty, though I’ll have to arrange to get myself invited to sophisticated dinner or wine tasting parties where I can bring this as an addition to a cheese plate…Dear reader, let me know if you’re hosting such an event. I have the housewarming gift ready to go!

    I loved it, I’d do it again, and I realized just how much I love my dishwasher, which I think ran about 6 times this weekend, no fooling, and that’s even after I hand-washed all of the pots.