Moar updates

[infryq]

Yeah I do a lot of stuff.

• I started bellydance classes again, two weeks ago. I'm taking the beginner series with Bernie Vargo in squirrel hill. The only other regular student in the class has about the same amount of experience as me (~18months), but more recent. I completely adore taking beginner classes from a new-to-me instructor, you get all the gooey foundational technique details that are unique to that person's style of dance. Already having some semblance of coordination helps too, since you're not using all your cycles on "OH GOD WHAT IS MY BODY DOING" and can actually think critically about the smaller stuff.
  
• Stayman apples make gorgeous sauce and butter.
  
• I remembered how to make casserole.
  
• Moths are running rampant in our pantry. :( About once a month I find some container of otherwise dry goods that's disgustingly full of maggots. Aforementioned casserole was going to be based on brown rice; I switched to pasta at the last minute when I saw their little bodies floating to the surface of the boiling water. Ew.
  
• I've not been spending a lot of time reading. I've been spending less time playing iPod games. I've been spending more time standing a bus stops and looking and listening. It's nice. Sometimes I write; that's nice too.
  
• Alton Brown's banana bread recipe doesn't hold any candles at all to mom's. I'm never doing that again.
  
• I got some new 3/4 length boatneck shirts from LLBean, which are nice but a little too blousy. Probably going to take them in. They're pretty fetching with a wide belt, but that's not what I bought them for.
  
• It's starting to get cold enough nights that I'm starting to want the feather duvet. Which means I should really sew on the damn buttons. Oh man, and I just thought of this -- what if I sewed every other button to the featherbed itself? And replaced the corresponding buttons on the cover with button holes? Then half the buttons would be holding the cover closed, and the other half would be holding the featherbed inside. That could be mad clever.
  
• Birthday $ possibly going towards pantry containers, a new spice grinder, or a wicked awesome infrared thermometer and thermocouple.
  
• ...and the nest is finally probably clean enough that I could actually paint it. Like I meant to, last year. What color of smoky lavender goes best with a sunset? All the windows face west.
  
• I'm playing more IF these days, and learning Inform 7 as a foil to swearing at authors of bad games. It is a seriously weird language to program in, and there are no reference manuals, only tutorial manuals, which is a shame. The language is flexible enough that it's kindof like Perl in that TMTOWTDI, except sadistic in that most of the ways suck, or only allow you to get 80% of the way there before dead-ending in a slightly damp cave with no visible exits. There is a slowly growing textfile on my home computer entitled "WTF Inform" which might someday become the reference I would've liked to have. We'll see. In my usual way I keep looking for the edges of what's expressible, but finding that I haven't played enough recent games to know that people have been there already. There are so many small-, medium-, and large- sized holes that have been filled already; how do people like zarf keep finding enormous gaping ones? I am mystified.
  
• Someone in my hallway is playing an audio recording of the seashore?