elainegrey

I made a grits and greens casserole tonight. So. Many. Pots. Hmph. It's like the food is twice cooked: fix the greens, fix up the textured vegetable protein, fix up the grits. Then bake it all. The kitchen got quite warm, which was fine, all things considered. I fixed the vegetable protein with apple cider vinegar and sorghum molasses, ingredients in NC eastern BBQ sauce. I think that turned out pretty well, although maybe it was just a bit much vinegar and not enough red pepper.

We've been running the logs for a while, then turn them off when the thermostat reaches 70°F. When it gets to 65°F we turn them back on. I'm running the ceiling fan in when the logs are on. Note to self: clean the blades BEFORE reversing the rotation direction. Or, maybe, note that a real quick way to clean the blades is to reverse the rotation. But the rest of the room has mats of cat fluff spread everywhere.

I do feel thrifty in that i figured out that the HVAC system has a "circulate" function. By turning that on we could circulate the heated air throughout more of the home. I'm not sure what to do tonight. We let the temps drop down to 60°F at night, but the heater is going to need to run frequently to make up the 50°F to 60°F difference with outside.

I haven't had a heat pump as a heater since becoming an adult. The heat in Philly was unstoppable steam heat. It ran, and you managed the temperature by opening windows. In San Francisco we had gas heat. In Mountain View there were several electric base boards. I grew to distrust all of them, and we just used a space heater.

A mild argh: the time at the computer was spent in some mild frustration Sunday afternoon. I don't think any data is lost, but i waited a small forever as my iDisk synced up again. The work machine will be getting the same treatment. The unreliable drive i was going verify had nothing unique on it briefly showed me the data, and now will no longer mount. I'm pretty sure all the data on the drives is entertainment data, but Christine isn't. Looks like it's $60 to have both bad drives crushed.

I didn't get through much of another issue's troubleshooting with the delay.

Oh, fiddle. The mind map i use for "to do"s is definitely out of date, part of the iDisk sync failure. Well, gaps in my digital memory will still be smaller than that of my embodied memory!

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One of the things in Worship that i identified is i listen to the song of Need not the song of Joy. One of the queries this month has to do with, "What barriers keep me from responding openly and lovingly to each person?" I wrote here (less clearly than i intended) some time ago about my old wounds around letting someone down and how that makes me far more reserved now. I worry about what you might need from me and don't want to create an expectation that i can't meet at some point. That's one of many places where i listen to the song of Need.

In therapy this past week i shocked myself with the *feeling* when i said, "That went well," referring to the earlier work day. I know i was carrying at the time a worry that the firehose of information i pointed at my boss' boss was, at its root, an aggressive action to make him back off his neat framing of all his teams as tidy little models of agile development. Frame this! But for a moment i was able to let myself feel something else. I labeled it success on Thursday evening, but now i think it is also *joy*.

Worries, anger, guilt, and fear are all voices in the song of Need. I don't need to make time to listen to that song. What might be parts of a song of joy? Praise for all co-creators (which means me, too). And what about free floating comfort? If one doesn't have to anchor one's worries, why not accept the completely ungrounded, "It will be OK," voice of a comforter, even though the comforter has no idea how it will turn out ok. There is abundance, always (?) abundance of something. Perhaps the challenge of the duet of Joy and Need is to find the underlying abundance that can meet and transform the need?

I don't believe that the Song of Joy is always the louder song, but in my life, there's no reason why it shouldn't be. I don't know that simply transforming from need to joy would solve my work strains, where the work i do (well) is work that saps my energy (more interactive problem solving, less reflective creativity).

I do suspect though that listening to the song of Need as the main voice overwhelms my capacity.

(I reflect for a moment that joys and needs are fractal, with the pattern repeated over and over at different scales of time and energy. There's a clue there, especially when i take into account the illusory nature of time and energy.)

--==∞==--

My grey cat blogs have a post on troubleshooting and on the gardening purchases.

Small joys from yesterday: as i sat down to figure out how to create a fender for my bike when it's up on the trainer, i discovered the cause of the horrible black "soot" that i'd deposit when i rode. The tire was rubbing on a piece of the trainer, and it was the trainer shredding, not the tire. That was easily fixed. I rode for twenty minutes last night.

I found some clear enough, thick enough plastic reserved from the packaging of an Ikea purchase and was able to make a barrier above the cat door in the screen. It's adequate enough for the cats to come and go when we aren't heating the place, but want to keep it warm (which is most of the winter). Christine will add a new flap: the flap the system comes with, of heavy black rubber, didn't seem like a door at all to the cats. We'll see how they manage with a cover over the gap next.

The roomba is running itself this morning. The kitchen is fairly tidy. The household work on the hall is waiting some resolution on the CDs. Christine is under pressure through mid November: i don't know that she'll be able to make much progress on the boxes of CDs.

We do have some stashes of books and a few VHS to get rid of: i can plan to take those to book buyers on Friday. I could run to Green Citizen n San Mateo county over lunch one day this week, taking the drives to shred and the CDs (free); a run to the smart station to take batteries and other misc stuff.

Tonight i have to myself, and i hope to make some catalogs for the meeting library.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_Tos/Creating_Mail_Merge_Documents_From_Text/CSV_or_Spreadsheets

Way way too much time on his hands: driver crosses the US in a GPS-tracked route that then spells out "READ AYN RAND." http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2010/08/ayn_rand_big_bo.html
(Christine asks if the driver did any sort of networking or anything while wasting all that gas.)

I think Apexart is very cool, They now have publications http://www.apexart.org/publications.htm (What we would like is a bound book of the exhibition brochures, but that's not offered.)

The temperature is supposed to leap up by 35 degrees today, a high 13 degrees warmer than yesterday. Entertainingly, the temperature was still falling as of 7 am -- but started back up at 8 am, so should shut up the house at some point.

I am supposed to blog about "home" today. The house is a bit of a wreck. We have the new bookshelves mostly done, but the anchoring needs to happen. So nothing much is on the shelves yet. There are a few more shelves to add; the incorrect doors need to be returned. The CD review project, which involves unpacking the CDs from shipping boxes and moving them to the nice storage boxes (culling disks Christine no longer wants), is mid progress: the assembly line for new CD boxes and review disks overwhelms the dining area.

The Roomba seems to have very little battery life. I resent that, although the fix is obvious. [Runs off to Amazon to buy new batteries and new brushes and ponder the TCO.] We bought a new wall on eBay, i'll be testing that and finally setting up the scheduled run some time soon. I've not used the scheduled run because of the need to manually block spaces; if it runs on a schedule it will that really will help with the track-in from the deck.