Got this link from one of my bird lists. This guy takes tourists parasailing in Nepal, using Egyptian vultures he has rescued to help find the thermals. Way cool!

Current Mood: awake

I had to euthanise Bailey, my blue-headed pionus parrot, on Saturday.

A while ago I noticed that he had a growth, like a cyst or abscess, in his right ear, so I took him to the vet, who recommended laser surgery to remove it, and a biopsy to determine what the underlying cause was. So two weeks ago I took him in, and the surgery went fine. I thought the worst I had to worry about was cancer, and I would have months or a year to make the decision, but the lab finally came back with a diagnosis of Mycobacterium avium complex infection. There's no practical treatment for this in birds - there's a spottily effective three-antibiotic-cocktail, months-long treatment that might be useful for breeding stock of endangered species, but nothing I'd put a pet through. The bacteria will infect pretty much anything, and infected animals shed the bacteria in their droppings, and so there really was no choice, I have to think of the rest of us in the house.

I still feel lousy, though. And I miss him.

Current Mood: depressed

So, I'm sitting here in the living room when Deb comes in from her pin-money job - delivering pizzas for Dominos. The college students have returned, and business is up...

"Wow, we were really busy tonight - I guess the new students have figured out their OCMP cards," Deb said as she flopped onto the couch.

Acronyms sometimes baffle me. "OCMP? Obsessive Compulsive Mounted Police?"

Deb avoided spitting Dr. Pepper across the room, but only just. Turns out that "OCMP" stands for "Off-Campus Meal Plan", wherein starving students may order their meals from area restaurants and avoid the dreaded dining hall chow. What a concept! Oh, where were OCMPs when I was in school?

Current Mood: amused

Saturday, because I whanged my knee rather badly on a door jamb, I sat out a trip to the Arden Fair with Deb. The lure of a bag of books for $5 from the library sale table, especially when I've been trying to cull the current pile of books and zines, was not enough to counterbalance the pain. So instead, I loaded up disc 2 of the Honey West DVDs that Deb got me for Solstice, and had a seven-episode marathon.

Honey West was a series spun off from Burke's Law in 1965, starring Anne Francis as the daughter of a PI who takes over the business when he is killed, and solves crimes with the help of friend (lover? oh, the sexual banter!) Sam Bolt (John Ericson), Aunt Meg (Irene Hervey), Honey's pet ocelot Bruce, and many high-tech gadgets.

I remember the show fondly, but really, I was five at the time, and mostly interested in the ocelot and the fact that the star of the show was a GIRL (who owned an OCELOT!) Having had fond childhood memories dashed before, I really wasn't expecting too much of the series, but I'm pleased to say it holds up pretty darned well. The plots aren't complex - you can see through them pretty easily - but the dialog is witty, and they use a scene-changing technique where the last word of a line in one scene is the first word in the next scene, which works brilliantly. Honey is spunky, sexy, capable, and very liberated for the times, and blithely uses her male antagonists' expectations against them. The slang is sometimes a little tough to translate, and very occasionally seems forced, the fight scenes aren't quite up to modern snuff (although the blocking isn't too bad), and it's really weird after so many years of non-smoking television to see practically everyone lighting up everywhere, but there is clever dialog, including sexual innuendo that I can't remember in another American TV show until probably a decade later, and a pair of really likable, amusing characters.

Then there's the fun of trying to spot actors in early roles - I've ID'd Michael J. Pollard, Bobby Sherman, Maureen McCormick, Kevin McCarthy, Wayne Rogers, and Joe Don Baker in the first 16 episodes, and who knows who'll show up in the remaining 14? I can barely wait!

(On the down side, it's really obvious to me now that Bruce the Ocelot was not even a little tame, and had been declawed and had his canines pulled (which was probably pretty common practice at the time) and that he really would rather have been somewhere else. This rather destroys one of the things I loved about the show as a kid. I'm glad that Bruce isn't in too many scenes, and that animals on TV shows aren't treated that way now.)

Current Mood: nostalgic

On Friday, Deb played hooky and we went to the Franklin Institute to see the Star Trek exhibit. Pretty cool, with lots of costumes, props, models of ships, clips and stills, and rubber alien heads from five series and the movies. (Astute readers might note that just a few posts ago, my complaint about the SF Museum in Seattle was that there were too many props and costumes, and not enough interactive displays, but I think this exhibit succeeds where that one failed because it's organized around a single subject.) Being it was at the Franklin, there were also plaques about the science behind the science fiction, and the history of the space race.

And there were also several opportunities to mug for the cameras at green screens (one for the "transporter effect" shot, and one of a command chair), or on a replica bridge. The photographer at the bridge told us that for an action shot, we should fling ourselves to the left, and he'd tilt the camera... the results were pretty hilarious:




After touring the exhibit, we went to the Tuttleman IMAX Theatre to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The IMAX experience was interesting - heck, getting to our seats was a vertigo-inducing experience - but I found the wrap-around picture, the immersion effect, very, um, distracting. I kept turning my head to watch things that were moving on the edges of the picture, and for the first ten minutes or so of the film I couldn't stop focusing on the grid of the screen itself. Maybe with practice... they're going to be running the Star Trek movie there from September 3 through the end of the Trek exhibit on the 20th.

Current Mood: sleepy

Last weekend, the Cole Brothers Circus was in town for their annual visit, and I once again did the neighborly thing and took them vast quantities of donuts (for the people) and melons (for the elephants!). My goal was some decent shots of the elephants. I chatted for a few moments with Caroline, the horse and camel trainer, but the elephant trainer was off trying to get a truck fixed (apparently, the circus was having a bad season), so I couldn't get too close, or get any pics of the ladies interacting with him, but I did get a few shots of pachyderm faces.




I love elephant faces :-)

Current Mood: calm

This afternoon at work I got a panicked call from Deb. From the tone of her voice, I thought that the house had been burgled, or burnt down, or she'd had a car accident... But she went on to say that our Maine Coon Cat, George, had managed to get himself entangled in a sticky flypaper strip. She'd managed, by dint of much chasing about the house, to get the actual flypaper off of him, but he was still covered in glue and had taken refuge under a dresser.

So when I got home this evening, we had to locate him, catch him, and cut and comb the gluey bits out of his fur. It was not, thank the gods, as bad as I'd feared - mostly along his left shoulder and upper back, and the left side of his chest - and a good ten minutes with the cat rake and a pair of scissors got nearly all the sticky out. He immediately ran for the food dish when we turned him loose, so there's probably no harm done. The glue is non-toxic - we'll catlube him tomorrow, in case he swallowed any.

He does now have one of those awful haircuts that your Mom gave you when you fell asleep while chewing gum and got gum all through your hair. George is acting as though the other cats are laughing at him.

I think they probably are.

Scientists ponder outcome of zombie attack!

I was startled to read at the BBC News site of a study rating our odds of surviving and effectively dealing with a zombie plague... Apparently the scientists have pooh-poohed the "fast zombie" concept that has appeared in more recent films about the scourge, and gone with using the classic slow zombies in their models. Personally, I think it's highly irresponsible to leave the possibility of being overrun with the zombie equivalents of Usain Bolt out of your contingency plans, as it would call for an entirely different level of response. Worst-case scenarios, and all...

The research team, comprised of scientists from Ottawa, published their findings in Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress.

Oh, those Canadians!

Current Mood: amused

Well, I’m back and mostly recovered from my vacation! With photos to share!

On July 16, I flew out to Seattle to visit with Bhil and do Fun Things. After I arrived at the hotel at about 16:00 and caffeinated myself for the first time that day, Bhil returned from work and we walked out to a restaurant (Buckley’s in Queen Anne) for dinner with two of his friends. Yum, a proper pub meal of fish and chips, made with salmon instead of anonymous “whitefish”, and washed down with Arrogant Bastard Porter! Then a brief walk down to the Olympic Sculpture Park (where we met a lady walking a sweet French Bulldog named “Nanette”) before heading back to the hotel to collapse for the evening.

Friday was a leisurely day which started with walking out for breakfast, visiting the
market for fruit and salmon jerky, and picking up a car for our Further Adventures. After
dropping the car at the hotel garage, we ambled over to Seattle Center, where Bite of
Seattle was going on, and made a lunch of samplers from seven different restaurants.

Then we headed through the crowd to the EMP/Science Fiction Museum. It was kind of cool to see things like Anne Francis’ (very brief) costume from Forbidden Planet, and the motion-capture model of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park - Paul Allen owns a lot of really keen (for sf geeks) stuff - but the displays are not really interactive, which I can see would bore the socks off most folks. Heck, even I have a limit as to how many typewritten (or handwritten!) manuscripts with author notes handwritten in the margins, first edition books, and static movie props I can look at before my mind begins to wander. They really need to add some FUN to the museum… maybe a motion-capture model that can be manipulated by the visitor and have the results appear on a monitor, or something… There was a muppet display that offered the kiddies some interaction, but they do need something more.

The EMP was not my cup of tea. I really liked the visual impact of the tower of musical
instruments in the entry hall, and they had a nice collection of posters, but otherwise,
for me it was kind of meh. On the way back through Seattle Center, I bought some “gator
on a stick” – a skewer of big chunks of breaded and deep-fried alligator – to tide me over until dinner, which ended up being a salad at McMenamins in Queen Anne, a brewpub-style place with a nice selection of beers.

Saturday it was up and out early for a jaunt to Mt. Rainier! We drove to the Paradise visitor's centre on the south side, and headed up to Panorama Point, an approximately 5.5 mile loop with an elevation gain of 1,700 feet to 7,100 feet (maybe a bit higher...). Now, I'm a sea-level kind of girl, and my body was rebelling the minute I asked it to do anything like *work* in air that thin. The hike is rated as moderately strenuous, and supposed to take 3.5 - 4 hours... Me, it took 5.5 hours, gasping like a landed fish for a lot of it. Seriously - grandmothers and 5-year-olds were passing me on the trail. Despite all that, I made it to Panorama Point, and it was well worth it, and I really want to do it again, soon!

Sunday we drove to Anacortes for a whalewatching trip, which was a blast! We ran across J-pod about 15 minutes out of the harbor, and stayed with them for the next two hours. Saw Ruffles, the big 58-year-old male, Granny, his 98-year-old (!) mother, Blackberry, Slick and her calf, and some others. No spyhops or tail slaps or breaches, but still fun!

Monday we dropped the car off, then headed to Pioneer Square for the Underground Seattle Tour. This is a 90 minute tour of three relatively small areas of the "underground", with accompanying historical talk (complete with AWFUL puns). There are a few relict items in the tour areas, including an old toilet as originally installed, and some remnants from an elevator manufacturer, but most of the old stuff has been cleared out for safety's sake. Not at all the wild tangled mess of my imagination, but still interesting. Then we walked back to Pier 57 for a late lunch at the Crab Pot - Dungeness! Yum! - and back up through the Market fruit stalls for dinner supplies. Spent the evening in, and set the alarm for a 05:00 shuttle pick-up.

All in all, a great trip - fun was had, in a low-pressure way. Many pictures were taken during the trip, some of which can be seen here.

Coming soon: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part 2: Exponential Music Festival

Current Mood: busy

Just got back from dropping Captain Bhil off at the airport - he's off to Seattle, where I'll be joining him for a brief visit on Thursday - we're hoping to hike around on either Rainier or St. Helen's, and get in a whale watching trip on Saturday, where I *hope* to see some orcas. The last whale watching trip I went on, I felt a bit like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park ("Now eventually you might have dinosaurs whales on your dinosaur whale tour, right?") Ooh, and I definitely want to take one of the Underground Seattle tours - I've been intrigued by the city-beneath-a-city idea since I heard about it in the second Kolchak movie in 1973, and I just didn't have enough time when I was out there last summer. My inner claustrophobe hopes it's not too too cramped down there!

The past few weeks have been wicked busy! Working in Princeton hasn't been bad, although with all the training modules and SOPs I have to master, I leave every day feeling that my brain is completely full and couldn't possibly absorb another concept (no, not even a wafer-thin idea!) The commute turns out to take approximately the same amount of time that the 23-mile shorter commute to North Wales took - about an hour and a half. I attribute this to better roads, and the fact that everyone in New Jersey seems to feel that speed limits are more like guidelines, and that it is their god-given right to drive at 80 m.p.h pretty much regardless of the posted limits. I was congratulating myself on driving pretty safely - I try to keep my speed to below 10 m.p.h. over the limit - when this guy pranged me as I was trying to get back on Rte. 1 north at Rte. 526 on June 30th. A dent to the passenger-side door, but the door closes and locks, and the window works, so I'm probably going to just leave it. It's a 10-year-old car, and I dropped my comprehensive because I was tired of paying as though I was driving a new car and getting bupkis when filing a claim.

**************************

The guy who cuts my lawn also does tree removals, and I asked him a few weeks ago for an estimate on removing the oak in the front yard (it had started to die from the top down). He circled the trunk, gazing up at the 60-foot-plus tree, and said, "$400?".

I stared at him, eyebrows raised.

"Is that OK?" he asked. "I'll grind down those two other stumps, too..."

I nodded vigorously. "Oh, yes, that's fine... can I get that in writing?"

So he gave me a written estimate, and this past week, down came the oak, and the stumps. The tree might have stood for another few years without crushing my house, but damn! I had to hit that before the guy came to his senses! The last tree I paid to have taken down, in 1990, was a largish ash tree that filled my miniscule backyard, and they charged me $400 back then! The ballpark estimates I'd received in the last year for removing one of the oaks was for well over a grand. So, on the one hand pangs over removing ANY tree, but OTOH, yay me for getting what friend Pete likes to call a "deal deal".

******************************

OTOOH, scheduling siding and windows (just on the awful north side of the house) has not been smooth sailing. They stood me up on Friday - no call or anything - and now the job is tentatively scheduled for the 17th (asbestos removal) and 18th. Deb will at least be home to let them in for the window replacement, but they'll damn well have to wait until I get home from Seattle to be paid.

Ah well, at this rate, it'll be years before we get the house buttoned up right, but at least we're moving in the right direction...

Current Mood: calm

...so little money!

Last week my bead pusher (the excellent Connie, who owns Sparkles! Bead Shop in Newark - we're related through our cats) invited me to go with to the bead and gem show in Timonium. Never one to pass up an opportunity to spend money on craft supplies, I accepted. The show was at the fairgrounds, and took up both the 4-H building and the Exhibition Hall. I'd only ever been to the Newark-local version of the Intergalactic Bead shows, and boy howdy, this one was of a whole different magnitude, a veritable cornucopia of beading/jewelry delights.

Since Connie is a retailer, I got to go into the wholesale section of the show and go ever-so-slightly insane there, though after seeing people spending thousands and thousands on materials, I feel guiltier that I couldn't spend more money than that I spent the couple of hundred I did. Got some nice aquamarine, some gorgeous chunky prasiolite, a few strands of nice lapis and Chinese turquoise, assorted other beads, and sterling beads and findings. Picked up a few finished items for myself from a sterling jewelry wholesaler. Spent some time drooling over the Indian and Thai gem merchants' items that were so far out of my price range it wasn't even slightly funny, though I did (very briefly) consider a petite 18kt gold ring set with tiny diamonds and rubies that was only $300 - something about the color of higher purity gold just goes straight to my hindbrain:-) - before I came to my senses.

Connie picked up a lot of inventory for the store, and told me that I ought to get a business license so that I can deduct my crafts-related expenses and get materials wholesale. I'm thinking it would pay for itself pretty damn fast :-) Guess I'll check it out in the coming week.

Current Mood: mellow

I started the new job in Princeton on Wednesday, and the commute up isn't as bad as I feared... only about an hour and a half each way (barring accident or stupidity on the road). Woof! On the up side, the office is just under ten miles from fileg and notarysojac's place, so I'll be able to see them WAY more frequently - I'm posting from there right now.

Visiting up here is awfully good for my LJ updating - where once upon a time I would have visited a friend to go to our separate corners and chat and read, now we sit in the living room and browse and chat and email each other :-) The more things change...

Current Mood: still

I went to the blood bank a few weeks ago to donate what turned out to be the 40th unit of whole blood I've donated. This time, when they asked the standard question, "Are you feeling well and healthy today?", I replied, "My boyfriend gave me Ebola last weekend." And showed them this:



Yes, it's Giant Microbes! The lab staph staff were much amused. :-)

Current Mood: cheerful

Not a D-SLR, but a big step up from the old 3.2MP Olympus!

Bhil called me from Seattle on Wednesday, asking, "Is it there yet?", but wouldn't tell me what "it" was. I said I hadn't gotten a package, though I had gotten a notice that there was something at the PO for me. That turned out to be some beads from China. When the package hadn't arrived at my house by Friday, he told me he had sent me a new camera, and the PO said it had been delivered on Wednesday. We panicked a bit until I remembered that there had been a package at HIS house on Wednesday. Turns out Amazon had posted it to there instead of here.

So now I have a brand-new 10.1MP Panasonic Lumix! I'm still trying to work my way through the menus, learning all the options... it's a bit more complex than the old camera! A big plus is that it doesn't have the annoying lag between depressing the button and capturing the image. Took a walk through the White Clay today to try it out a bit, and got a great shot of a black ratsnake, which you can see here ('cause it's a biggish file). Need to study the manual more, though...

And on top of the camera, Saturday's mail brought with it another package from Bhil - the Pretty Ponies of the Apocalypse teeshirt from my previous post!

A big "Thank you!" to Bhil for being made of awesome!

Current Mood: excited

This brightened my day immensely - I may need to have one :-)




Find it here.

14 June 2009: Saturday's post included a package from Bhil with the teeshirt in it! Yay! Pony Apocalypse FTW!

Current Mood: amused

For years, my habit has been to keep an empty soup tin on my stove for drippings, discarding it for a fresh one every few weeks. It's generally about half- to two-thirds-full of pork and/or chicken fat by the time we throw it out. On reflection, not the neatest of habits, but we've never had a problem with it.

Until last Friday.

Friday morning, I was pottering around in the carport and the yard, cleaning up and moving plants around. CJ, our big red tabby Maine Coon cat, who is very concerned about his monkeys being assaulted by ninjas, was monitoring me closely through the kitchen window and the screen door, but I didn't think anything of it...until I came inside to find CJ perched on the back of the stove, the last four inches of his tail dunked in the grease can.

And it wasn't the first time. He'd apparently dipped and jumped down from the stove and up onto the stool in front of the kitchen window at least once before. The entire range, the stool, and a good 12 square feet of floor were smeared and spattered with a mixture of bacon and chicken fat.

It took an hour to degrease the kitchen and the cat (he now smells ever-so-slightly of schmaltz), and I will never again leave a grease can on the stove. See, cats make us better people!

In a frenzy of excitement over the impending release of The Decemberists' latest effort, I went ahead and pre-ordered The Hazards of Love from their sales site. The disc arrived last week, and I guess I got in under the cut-off, as there was an autographed lyrics-insert thingy included in the package. Oh, the fan-girling thrill!

I've only managed to listen to it once through so far - it's one of their quirky folk-rock-operetta things, and really should be listened to in one sitting for full effect - so I haven't formulated a strong opinion on it yet. It's obviously not going to spawn a lot of singles... I think "The Rake's Song" may be the ONLY candidate for radio play on the whole thing.

On a related note, does anyone have any notion why they even BOTHER putting the lyrics into those itty-bitty booklets with the CDs? I mean, the text is so small as to be illegible. I really appreciate that the band had a PDF of the booklet posted so people could resize and actually read the damn thing.

...and in the Distant Early Warning division, the 2009 XPoNential Music Festival on the Camden waterfront is scheduled for July 24 through 26. No word on artists scheduled, yet... will post as info becomes available.

Current Mood: relaxed

Well, it's certainly not the Holmes *I* grew up with, but here's a poster for the new Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. It looks like they were trying for a Cabaret-type style - dark with harsh contrasts (check!), claustrophobic (check!), hat at rakish angle (check!), pall of cigarette pipe smoke (check!). Very stylish - I never thought of Sherlock Holmes as a male model before - but now I have a mental image of RDJ's Holmes meeting Joel Grey's Emcee amid the decadence of the Weimar Republic. Perhaps while disguised as Sally Bowles. *boggles* Not sure I needed that image...




(Photo of poster by George 'El Guapo' Roush, originally posted on LatinoReview.com)

Current Mood: amused

To deejay and evcelt! Hope it's a great one!

Current Mood: tired

Glommed from mirnell...

You're on my friends list! I wanna know you. I want to know 33 things about you. I don't care if we never talk, talk every day or already know everything about each other. Short and sweet is fine. I just want to know you. Copy this and post it with your answers in the comments.

1. Can you cook?
2. What was your dream growing up?
3. What talent do you wish you had?
4. Favorite place?
5. Favorite vegetable?
6. What was the last book you read?
7. What zodiac sign are you ?
8. Any Tattoos and/or Piercings?
9. Worst Habit?
10. Do we know each other outside of lj?
11. What is your favorite sport?
12. Negative or Optimistic attitude?
13. What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
14. Worst thing to ever happen to you?
15. Tell me one weird fact about you:
16. Do you have any pets?
17. Do you know how to do the macarena?
18. What time is it where you are now?
19. Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
20. If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
21. Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
22. What color eyes do you have?
23. Ever been arrested?
24. Bottle or Draft?
25. If you won $10,000 dollars today, what would you do with it?
26. What kind of bubble gum do you prefer to chew?
27. What's your favorite bar/restaurant to hang at?
28. Do you believe in ghosts?
29. Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
30. Do you swear a lot?
31. Biggest pet peeve?
32. In one word, how would you describe yourself?
33. Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?

Current Mood: cold