Intense dream: I was reheating a recalcitrant hypercompact bluetooth keyboard over the open flame of one of our gas burners (no, I don’t know what good that was supposed to do). Amazingly, the plastic caught fire and began to burn and melt! Who could have foreseen such an outcome!

The burning plastic somehow got into the oven and into one of our dish cabinets and ignited several small fires that I was able to calmly. if angrily, extinguish. I was most mad about the oven fire because I was not certain how to knock it down.

This reminds me: although we do have a couple of extinguishers, I don’t know where they are.

Took the dog to the dog park and then to a self-wash place. He hated it, of course, but he was a good boy. Now he’s fluffy!

Mowed the lawn first thing Saturday morning, first time this year, probably since November.

sudden onset of a Stones jones. hm.

I feel like I am hitting the same learning curve issues in Rise of Flight that I had last time I took a run at it. My gunnery appears to be improving a bit, which is nice. I still have a hard time with the plane-specific engine management stuff and there do appear to be some transient bugs in the game that can affect key inputs, making the larger multi-crew aircraft problematic.

Many years ago I used to run a playlist of pre-1920 pop recordings in the background while playing Dawn of Aces, in like, what, 1997? Something like that. Pre-iTunes. Eighteen years later it should come as no surprise that a couple hard drive failures lost much of that early stuff. Seems like a lot of it came from an early online enthusiast’s page of their personal connection.

Naturally today the correct place to trawl for cylinder and victrola recordings to listen to is YouTube. Here’s a playlist of the hundred or so tunes I have glommed in a couple of short late-night sessions for use as background music whilst flying and crashing.

Woke as Viv was panicked about leaving on time this morning, around 4:30 am. Normally her alarms start at around 3 and she likes to be on the road just before 5. She’s had this exercising schedule in a couple of different incarnations for a few years now. She swears it’s OK now and doesn’t hate it.

It’s not unusual for me to waken as she leaves as it generally falls into the four hour trough of preindustrial sleep. Usually I am just awake for about an hour and go back to sleep until around 8 or 9. Today I stayed awake.

You’d think the extra time would mean I did extra stuff, but not really. I ran my slated two miles and was surprised to see that I should have gone two and a half. I finished up my photo processing gig and reintegrated the accountant copies of my various company and personal accounting software files. Tomorrow I have to review the accountant changes and then I can get going on all the tax bullshit, personal and corporate.

I never really understand the purpose or intent of accountant changes or of tax accountants. They just appear to be a mandated, meaningless annual expense which is intended to be justified by the theoretical reduction of mandated meaningful expenses in the form of taxes, a goal I neither understand nor support. So my attention wanders and I have a bad attitude toward my accountants, for which I apologize.

What else? I watched parts of the first Mariners spring training game, a game lost on stupid, careless errors in both the ninth and tenth innings. Which was comforting in a way. I rejiggered a nest of computer cables such that I can now share the LCD graphics tablet, a USB hub, and analog audio in/out between the tower Mac and the Wintel box via KVM.

I really should post some gear on eBay, I have some amazing and obscure stuff that someone somewhere could use.

No flying tonight, the early rise has me headed to bed early tonight, I think.

Beginning in early February I started running on our treadmill again, the fourth year (I think) I’ve taken a crack at it. I picked up the treadmill cheap on craigslist about four or five years ago. It’s pretty heavy duty, at the upper end of home-market machines and ran about $3000 new. I paid less than 300 bucks for it excluding delivery.

The first time I tried to use it I nearly immediately gave myself tendinitis and had to wait a long time to heal. After that I used it effectively for several months, eventually getting up to a bit over 20 miles a week. The year after that I used it for a week and either just stopped or developed a baker’s cyst that meant I was done for a year. This year no early-onset injuries cropped up and it seems to be going smoothly. This should be a seven mile week and after next week, the weekly distance additions are more than a mile a week at a 10% ramp.

Just as ever, the people who talk about excercise being fun and something they enjoy and look forward to apparently do not inhabit my body. I hate every second of it. Still, it has to be done.

Hours more spent today on gummy food version 2. I did not come up with a reasonable fish mousse recipe, but a version of that cod-potato casserole did get made, something closer to this than the prior posted receipt. Despite a fair amount of waveoffery I ran both taters and cod thru a blending. Basically, it looked like extremely fine-grain mashed potatoes going into the oven.

I did give thought to steaming and then pureeing cauliflower as a side, but my cruelty has a short reach. Instead I went back to the carrots and greens of yesterday, this time going with kale and going a bit long on the carrots by adding fresh ginger and turmeric, heading in a soupish direction.

I’m actually kinda beat! Each one of these dishes requires the food be fully cooked, then pureed, so compared to what I might do on a normal night – one or two one-pot stovetop dishes, a salad, and a microwaved frozen vegetable – my cook time was at about three hours instead of the usual thirty minutes.

As a result, the dog got shortchanged his usual two long dog-park visits of a weekend and had to make do with the regular cemetery ball-toss, truncated as expected on weekends in order to minimize impingement on mourners. We did not see the coyotes today but in the spirit of scientific inquiry Logan took it on himself to lick a stray turd presumably produced by a peer. Eeyurgh.

Provençal Salt Cod & Potato Purée (Brandade with Potatoes)

Something like this tonight, I think. With a mustard sauce maybe.

Watched the Mike Leigh “Mr. Turner” tonight. It was lovely, with a central and startling CGI depiction of the anecdotal encounter that inspired “The Fighting Temeraire”.

As always, movies about painters remind me how much time I have already wasted, how many pictures I will never make. Not that it ever affects me to the point I actually exert a daily practice, even now when paint and canvas and setup and cleanup are no procrastination excuse ever again.