Rather than post more tattoo pics here again, you can find them either in our gallery, my facebook or myspace pages, or CheckoutMyInk. Since the last post I’ve had done a Jack Skellington arm and a small ladybug on my foot.

On Friday I sat for the first of two sessions on another tattoo, this time with Jana at The Iron Quill in Palmyra:
This part wasn’t too terrible…
This part hurt way less than I thought it would…
She said this would be the worst but it was a breeze (possibly because slightly higher up than achilles)
OW OW MAKE IT STOP…made a lot of faces and tried really hard not to whimper like a girl.

I go back for color in about a month. In the meantime I have another thing scheduled with TeeJay at White Tiger. Fortunately NOT on a foot this time.

Back to work tomorrow. Wahhh! But at least we’re all set to start a new year:

• Tree and inside holiday decorations are down (outside lights…well, eventually)
• Stale Christmas cookies flung into a ravine
• Taxes and bills all paid
• Fridge and freezer are full of food so I don’t have to think too much about dinner choices for the next few weeks
• Ellie’s home with Kendra

Today was one last big cooking day; made a batch of Good Eats beef stew (ate leftover stew) and Confit Byaldi, the Ratatouille dish from the Pixar movie with the rat chef. Wow, was that good…you’d think bland because of the vegetables involved, but the piperade really contributes a lot and the little bit of vinagrette drizzle really brings it together.

Surprise to nobody: the producers of Expelled purposely conflated social and biological Darwinism in order to create controversy. You know, like the artificial ‘controversy’ they’re supposed to be teaching in science classes, despite the fact that there *is* no scientific controversy, only a philosophical one (at best).

Happy new year folks.

Squeeeee…an Ameraucana pullet hit puberty

I was delighted to find that our new Kodak digicam (Z1015 IS) has a stitching mode. This was something I remember playing with back when I worked at Kodak. It lets you take 3 pictures (with an assist overlay to let you know how far to pan) and then stitches them together into one panoramic picture. Here are a few:

Sorry it’s a mess :)

OK, could be worse…

Out the back door

Front yard

towards the barn

towards Palmyra

How far can one genre of children’s movie go?

So the other day I’m using my work phone to test something (ip phone with communicator–don’t ask, our company LURVES the microsoft)…I was using my directory to find Paul’s number so I could call his phone and not bug someone in the office. With this, you type in the letters of their name using the number pad (one press per letter; you don’t have to multi-press to get to the actual letter; it figures out possible combinations for you). So I type in E R K K and look at the number echo on the display. 3755, which is our house number on our street. How could we have lived here for 10 years and never noticed that?

Our new plasma showed up early! The Stereo Shop said it would take a week, but the guy left me an email on Wednesday afternoon so of course we had to go get it. We settled on the Panasonic TH-50PZ850U…decided against the Pioneers since they’re selling off their plasma business to Panasonic, and decided that the tv having ethernet is pretty cool (for firmware updates and such), even if we don’t use the youtube and picasa features. We were a little bit torn about the Pioneers since they support DLNA, but oh well, maybe it’ll be more established next time we upgrade. Since we are switching up to blu-ray and needed everything to be 1080p, that meant a new receiver as well (so that we can switch HDMI)…this time we went up a level to the Denon 4308ci (our last was a 3803). We were going to wait for Black Friday on the blu-ray, but the Stereo Shop offered us their black friday price on the Sony BDP-S350, which we were going to get anyway, for $199 (I think we could’ve gotten it for $179 from Sears or K-Mart on Friday, but figured why not). He tried to sell us Monster HDMI cables too but we came to our senses, there. The TV had to be unboxed to fit in the Subaru and it was like Tetris trying to fit the receiver and blu ray boxes in there too.

OK, I ALMOST came to my senses about HDMI. We had ordered HDMI cables online for like $5 each but they are being shipped ground from California. This was fine when we thought the TV wouldn’t be here until next week. But the sight of a blu-ray player sitting there on the shelf was bugging the hell out of me. In the interests of marital harmony, Paul suggested we go buy 2 cables from Wal-Mart…the minimum we’d need to hook it into the receiver and hook the receiver to the TV. $60 for impatient geekdom. But man, Wall*E and Nightmare Before Christmas looked and sounded great…when we finally figured out how to get the blu ray player to pass through the audio as bitstream (had something to do with the bd live or additional content audio setting; we had it on ‘Mix’ and we needed ‘Direct’).

The other thing was, the TV came with a stand but not bolts for other mounts (we have a low A/V shelf with pole mount)…had to go to Lowe’s to get them.

So now we’re just waiting for HDMI cables so I can eliminate component/optical for the cable box and one DVD jukebox, which frees up enough component connectors on the Denon that I can finally eliminate the manual switchboxes…yay. Next up, new motherboard and/or video card for Mooby so we can hook that up HDMI as well.

This is the first time we bought A/V equipment where everything had an ethernet jack. First thing we did with all three was get firmware updates. Can’t wait to see how the Sony blu-ray jukebox will turn out–will we finally get a complete disc title listing without having to type them all in?

MG, it’s a CC.

heeeee

Those Invisible Pink Unicorns. They’re so hard to spot in the wild. That is, unless you happen to have a black light.

Under normal light. With any luck when the scarring heals, the part inside the ring will be nearly invisible, leaving a (slightly broken) pink circle visible.

Partially black-lit

Just black light

My friend Josh got me in with his artist, TeeJay, the owner of White Tiger Tattoo in Rochester. It was her first time with UV inks (Chameleon), but I’m thrilled with how it turned out (glad to be a guinea pig in this case). Thanks Josh and Michelle (and pee, too) for coming along, and to Teejay for working me into her busy schedule. :)

I did a fair amount of looking around at the UV ink before jumping in. I was nervous enough about a first tattoo, but I really wanted the UV ink due to the subject matter. This type of ink has been in use for over 10 years with very few problems–it’s fluorescent, not phosphorescent (EverGlo ink caused problems for many people in the 90’s), and it’s encased in little PMMA microcapsules (a plastic they use for medical uses and has a very low rejection rate). The ink part never actually comes into contact with your skin due to those. The ink itself is FDA approved for use in marking animals that are for human consumption, although not for tattoo use (no tattoo ink is). I feel pretty comfortable with it after having read articles by artists and people who have used this ink for years. And it really, really looks neat. :)

Why IPU? I’d been thinking of tattoos for a long time and although a life-long agnostic, in the past few months, after having listened to The Atheist Experience and The Non Prophets podcast and starting to read more Atheist blogs, I’ve realized I’m really an agnostic atheist. Of the various free thought symbols I’ve seen, the IPU seemed both the most humorous (I wanted something fun) and also aesthetically pleasing. By making the circle part the only visible part in normal light, I actually get two symbols with the same meaning in one (yeah, I know it’s supposed to be unbroken, but close enough :)

-epe

We lost our last silkie rooster, Sumo, on Wednesday. Just like the previous one, we’re not sure what finally did him in but he’d been a bit wobbly for awhile so maybe he was just old. This leaves two silkie hens in with Sr. Modelo…who’s happy not to have to sit on the perch to avoid Sumo anymore, but I hope he doesn’t start bothering those little hens.

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

I usually avoid memes, but I couldn’t resist. -epe

(explicit lyrics)

State of the pantry:

• 9 pints sweet and sour pickles
• 4 quarts hot dill pickles
• 20 quarts tomato sauce
• 3 quarts + 15 pints corn and tomato soup
• 16 half-pints+ 1 pint salsa
• 2 4-oz of hot peppers (mostly jalapenos, some hot cherry, some habanero)
• 2 pints + 2 quarts tomato vegetable soup
• 12 half-pints + 3 cups cinnamon/nutmeg applesauce
• 10 quarts grape juice (refrigerated but not canned–we’ll drink it all pretty quickly :)

This represents about half the total food we canned–my mom took about the same amounts of the tomato sauce, soups, salsa, peppers, and applesauce as are listed above. We also gave a few cans away. We would have had more pickles, but the crock pickles went bad–probably too many cukes for too little brine.

Now I just have to figure out where to store it (small house, no basement, everywhere else freezes in winter). :) Yay, maybe I can get more computer stuff done; we’ve been canning almost every weekend from the beginning of August until now.

We’ve been working our way through the archives of the Austin, TX cable access show The Atheist Experience lately. Great stuff and often hilarious. It must be maddening to hear the same questions every week for years: 1) do you believe in any higher power (god/ghosts/angels/jesus), 2) what do you think happens to you after you die, 3) where did we come from, if we weren’t created, 4) how can you be moral without god telling you how to act, 5) do you believe in evolution. My favorite so far was the lady whose belief in god was triggered when her alarm clock beeped differently one day (it never did that before!).

It falls quickly for guinea keets. (meanwhile Blanco/a gets cuter).

The incredible bearded women:

Guess what?

Another canning weekend. My mom and I did 14 quarts of spaghetti sauce. With any luck we’ll get that much more from her garden, then maybe we’ll buy tomatoes locally to do salsa.

The little birds made it into the new coop first. See that triangle at the top? They managed to fly up there and escape to the main coop two nights in a row (8 feet up). Today I put some mesh up there, for their own protection.

We had to transfer them one at a time from the old coop to the new one. We’re keeping them in for a few days, until hopefully they won’t go to the empty coop anymore.

Or not so empty, because later this week we’ll be picking up another rooster (and possibly a couple of hens) from jkk. Which will bring the total to 26-28 birds (depending on hens).

NASA wants your pee. Seriously? Urine, for Orion? And it’s part of the constellation program? (This works on a number of levels…the old NASA pee joke as heard in ‘Apollo 13′, and the fact that ‘Orion’ comes from the greek word for ‘urine’).