sudden onset of a Stones jones. hm.
Bumbling
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.
Day
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.
Prey
A wonderful, enthusiastic review of Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk in this week’s New Yorker.
feet
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.
well, of course. it's the same thing.
The warmly self-congratulatory NPR show the “TED Radio Hour” is apparently presenting a groveling feature to none other than Tony Robbins this evening. At four in the afternoon on a Sunday in one of America’s cities of the future, KUOW is devoting an hour to positive self-delusion. As a fundraising tool, I suppose it works out, and suspect it might.
I am highly amused that Robbins sounds somewhat like Penn Jillette, fast patter, hoarse baritone, and all.
Steams and so forth
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.
Fish paste
Provençal Salt Cod & Potato Purée (Brandade with Potatoes)
Something like this tonight, I think. With a mustard sauce maybe.
Up in the air
Viv had a tooth out today, which was trying for both of us but in the end not that big a deal. The dentist is located on the shore of Lake Washington in the extremely well-to-do neighborhood known as Madrona, and with the gloriously sunny weather it was a lovely drive over this morning.
She’s to be on a mush food diet for a couple of days so I knit my brow to come up with a decent dinner. In the end I served poached eggs on polenta with pureed cooked carrots and finely chopped spinach. I did something spectacularly right with the polenta because it was like eating some sort of soft, spicy cheese.
While we were out at the pharmacist I idly checked my email to find a note from my London-based internet friend Sumit wondering about my absence from Twitter. I wrote back explaining. I was very glad to have heard from him as although our exchanges have been brief and reflect the compression of the medium I recognize my relationship with him as important to me and he had been one of the folks on Twitter I knew I would most miss.
After Viv went to sleep I spent some more time wrestling with my setup for Rise of Flight. For years I have been frustrated by unaccountable difficulty with TrackIR, an infrared-based head-motion tracking system which, when it works, becomes an essential aspect for POV style games such as RoF. Last week I thought I had solved this issue by applying it directly to my forehead. Earlier this week it became apparent that I had not.
Eventually it became clear that the issue was that I had sufficiently moved the infrared camera as well as the three-point tracking reflector widget from their design-intended relative locations that it was not gonna work the way I had hoped. So I went back to the drawing board.
In the end, I found a short strap made of stiff black nylon webbing originally made for use on a small piece of luggage. A bit of fussing, and it became a headband, to which the widget is no affixed in reasonable emulation of the designed position on the brim of a baseball cap. I was able to successfully fly a couple of scenarios with this in place, so, huzzah.
Like, what else? There was a white dress that was a blue dress, and Leonard Nimoy died. Still ploughing thru Imperial to no accountable purpose. My ex-bandmate announced he has cancer and needs cash to help with treatment. Waiting on my accountant to return our books so I can get to the next stage in our taxes for last year. Started on the post processing for a shoot, imagine that will be done Monday. Looked for gigs on Craigslist, no plethora of product photography to be found. I imagine I’ll start tossing some retail items up next week.
Turner
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.