I went to see a bunch of friends (and some relatives) a week or two ago. It was a good time. I took a bus for about two days, played several board games that were new to me, went to see an incredible house/theme-park, and all kinds of other things before getting a ride home with some friends. I was only gone for about a week, unfortunately. I would have enjoyed spending a lot more time there, but I had to get back here in time to move out.
A few days ago I met some friends of a friend who are in the process of building their own house. They were kind enough to let me come out to hang around for a few days while they worked. The land they’re building on is out in the country, a little more than an hour where I’m living. The property was entirely wooded when they bought it, with a small spring and creek and plenty of hills.
I am mostly finished with work for the summer. The plan for the summer season is to work about two days a week. That’s more time than I was counting on for the summer, so I’m pleased about that.
One roommate and I took advantage of a cool afternoon last week to walk around the local college campus wearing a tall box. We alternated wearing the box and taking pictures of it.
We made tempeh last weekend. It’s been in the freezer since then, and I finally got around to trying it last night. It was pretty good as moldy soybeans go, but I think that I didn’t boil the beans long enough before adding the starter. We incubated it in my closet with a space heater.
One of my tires had a slow leak today so when I got out of work the tire was flat.
The potato-in-a-box experiment is over. The plants looked unhealthy most of the time. The stalks seemed to be rotting at the base, but the leaves were wilted. We put it outdoors when the weather started to get nicer. It looked like it was improving, but in the meantime several volunteer potato plants came up around our compost pile. I guess I decided that we didn’t really need the box potato anymore.
I’ve been working daily this week. Between work, sleep, commuting, and fixing lunches and dinners, I end up with about three or four hours of free time at home each day. That seems unbelievably low to me.
Work has been good though. It’s pretty interesting right now, and we end up with a lot of down time while we’re waiting for more work to be printed for us. It may get less interesting as we start longer and more repetitive projects.
Yesterday I helped in an office move. We went around disconnecting computers from their peripherals and, after the movers had moved things to their new location, we went back through reconnecting everything the way it was before. It was a one-time job, and pleasant enough.
To get there, we took a bike path that I’d never really used. It was a leisurely hour-long ride, and probably forty minutes of that was spent on the bike path, the rest was roads.
I finished a project that I was working on yesterday. I had no luck finding a list of names sorted by gender-neutrality, but I did find enough information to make my own. Here are the results.
Today also happens to be my last day of work at the book store. I already have a few plans for new employment. Hopefully some of them will work out. Unfortunately the magician’s stagehand gig probably won’t be one of them.
In a fit of inspiration, we decided to grow a potato in our house. We’ve got a large cardboard box that we lined with plastic and filled with dirt from dead plants. We don’t have it quite full yet, so we may have to buy some soil or wait until the ground thaws and we can collect some of the dirt that was thrown out from earlier dead plants.
Yesterday afternoon we got some more sledding in.
In the morning there were a few inches of snow on the ground. I biked to work while it was still falling. It was the first time I’d ridden in the snow. It was slow going, and there was something of a learning curve involved, but in the end there was no particular excitement. By the time I rode home in the afternoon, the snow had stopped falling and the roads were more or less cleared.