Joy Unbounded

5:43pm: Weather
Rain, snow and sleet but, kock wood, no hail.

5:19pm: Writer's Block: Like mobile for chocolate
No sacrifice required: I haven't got a mobil phone.

4:32pm: 18 November 2009
18 November 2009

I spent all morning yesterday buying four yards of black raw silk, but I did get a significantly neater sewing room as a side effect.
( details )

11:21am: Sewing
The linen-jersey project has been backburnered in favor of stuff I need Right Now.

12:57am: The Dime Drops
I was referred to a frightfully clever ad, the referrer said, but repeated visits to http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20091027 turned up nothing but a blank page. Tonight -- or, the dateline says, early this morning -- I poked around in Adblock, discovered that it had a button marked "whitelist", and read the strip.

Nothing could live up to the fuss, but it was definitely worth whitelisting. And now I've learned how to do it.

1:26pm: Sewing
I'm updating the Linen Jersey page of Rough Sewing. A rough draft of the additional material is behind the cut.

( She wore her New Jersey )

12:47pm: Knock down, Drag out
.

11:02am: Posting
I worked on this post for a Girl Genius mailing list so long that the moderator cut the thread before I got a chance to post it. But I worked on it so long that I'm bound and determined to post it *somewhere*.

( Posting Etiquette )

12:41pm: From the Banner
23 July 2009

I threw the renewal notice for Science News into the recycling yesterday. The format change removed everything I had subscribed for in the first place; I still read it, but I really have to push myself, and the issues are piling up -- enough to supply me with waiting-room reading for years to come, I suspect.

4:26pm: Battery-Powered Chalk Line
27 May 2009

So now I have used my "laser level" to mark bias lines on absurdly-wide white linen.
( read more )

9:48am: The night of Easter Sunday
A tip for people who live with cats: when you are too tired to hang up your clothes, draping your newest pair of white jeans over the spare pillow on the cedar chest isn't a bright idea.

11:47am: Really Boring if you don't share my DNA
Comcast decreed the January edition of my family newsletter too long to e-mail.

And also decreed the one-screen notice that it wasn't coming too long to e-mail.

I am sufficiently annoyed that I'm posting the banned text *everywhere*

==============================
( cut for boredom )

3:57pm: Emergency items: was: scraps and storage
I keep an old all-wool army blanket in the car, because it can shield against fire as well as cold. Luckily, its only use so far has been to wrap around groceries DH sometimes picks up on his way back from someplace.

In the winter, I also carry a wool poncho: I have, several times, put it on over what I *thought* was suited to the weather. (A few wool scarves have also come in handy.)

Which brings us back to sewing: I posted instructions for making a poncho on my Web site at http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/~roughsewing/RUFFTEXT/ROUGH037.TXT .

--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/

This post is a duplicate of one posted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/creativemachine/

12:11pm: &%#*@!
I'm fighting Thunderbird for the right to edit the September Banner. It's doing its thing again: I click an arrow key to move one line, and it jumps to some random spot in the file. All Windows programs know what you want to do better than you do.

And Thunderbird always puts hard returns at the end of every line when I save as a draft. Did it never enter the pointy little heads of the programmers that someone who saves a draft might conceivably mean to edit it before sending?

9:39am: Fall has officially fell
The leaf-sucker made a trial run this morning.

7:52pm: New Fic up
Actually, an old one that I recently dug out of my files:
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/~joybeeson/LINKS/TEXT/WIDOW.HTM

11:33am: argh
Twice in two days, I've clicked on a link without checking to see whether it was PDF. But I managed to abort the download the second time it happened.

( Cut for cussing. )

1:17pm: Writer's Block: Your Username


When I joined, the LJ website was messed up, with everything scrambled together, and whatever it was important for me to read was sure to be only one corner peeking out from behind something else. I managed to fumble through, but got the impression that it was forbidden to use your real name as a username; having no nickname, I translated "Joy" into latin, but "laetitia" was taken and none of my other bilingual dictionaries had a reasonable suggestion, so I tacked on "_apis". It would have been cool to spell out my full name to the bewilderment of all, but I didn't have access to a latin speaker to assure me that laetitia_apisfil_sinamor wasn't utter nonsense -- not to mention that now and again I have to type it; I find it hard enough to peck out "laetitia".

As for the spider -- I couldn't find a bee, and I *am* an arachnerd. http://www.arachne.com/list_instructions.html

12:44pm: Patterns for Broadfall Closings
A reply I wrote to a discussion on Creative Machine got too long to post there, so I posted it here:

( Adjustable Waistbands )

To read the original discussion, go to:
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/creativemachine/>

11:13pm: Testing one two three
text text
( Read more )
more text

1:03am: LOC
I sent the following letter to the Times-Union this evening:

(There was a typo in the fifth paragraph, blush blush; I have corrected it on this copy)

Bike Lanes

The AP story "Two Indiana Deaths Worry Biking Advocates", which ran in the Time-Union on Monday, June 2, 2008, ends with a suggestion that bike lanes be painted on streets to make motorists more aware of bike riders. In my experience, bike lanes do the opposite.

I used to live near a place where a busy, narrow road with drop-offs on each edge intersected a road that quickly became a city street with a bike lane painted on it. When I rode down the narrow road, drivers would give me a wide berth -- sometimes too wide. But once I got onto the street with the bike lane, the drivers would refuse to shift a single inch, and the last time I rode on that street, a car rapped my knuckles with a door handle. Thereafter, if I couldn't get there without using the bike lane, I didn't go.

Note that these were the same people who were too considerate on the other road -- the drivers were *not* coming too close on purpose.

Drivers perceive bikes in a bike lane as being on a separate facility, and, therefore, not their responsibility.

For this perception to be accurate, the cyclist would have to ride so far from the white line that he is safe from a driver who keeps his passenger-side tires on the line, even when the vehicle has extended mirrors or protruding cargo.

The cyclist must also allow for the fact that neither cars nor bikes follow a dead-straight line accurate to the nearest millimeter.

And he must keep well clear of the curb: if the front wheel of a bike strikes a ridge that is almost parallel to its path of travel, the ridge will steer the bike out from under the rider and cause a dramatic crash.

"Well clear of the curb" is a greater distance in a bike lane than in a shared lane, because the white line keeps cars out of the bike space when no bikes are using it. When cars never enter the bike space, the dirt that's swept out of the street into the bike lane stays there.

Then the cyclist himself takes up about a yard of space. Add all these distances together, and you come pretty close to the width of a motor-vehicle lane. Bike lanes *that* wide are not going to happen.

7:41pm: Meme
"Meme: Find a piece of artwork that represents where you'd like to be right now and post it in your LJ." (Text copied from Land of Confusion Gazette)

11:12am: Tangent to a discussion on alt.sewing
I'm posting my recipe for buckwheat pancakes here because it's too long to post on usenet, so I ought to put it behind a cut, but it doesn't seem worth the trouble of learning how just for this single occasion (particularly since I've no idea where that information is stashed), so I'll put it in a comment.

6:12pm: DNA my foot
There's a cheaper, quicker, and more-accurate test which would have been employed on the very day of the kidnapping, had the kidnappers had the brains of a goose or the human compassion of a hungry shark:

Gather together all the women who claim to be mothers, have them line up at one side of the room, and let a child into the room. The person he runs to screaming "Mommy! Mommy!" is the mother.

Chromosomes are at best incidental to motherhood.

The only conclusion the news reports allow is that the people holding the children want to make quite sure that the shrinks who examine the children later find that they have been traumatized and abused.

11:30pm: Once cold, the bread was rather dense. In cold weather, it takes dough *much* longer to rise. When I'm baking inside, I set it into the pilot-lit oven, but the kettle won't fit.

We got started on cleaning up the winter debris today. More rotten leaves than most years, but they are way up on the lawn where they are easier to get at. I filled a wheelbarrow with small pieces of driftwood and dumped it beside the fireplace -- more bread! Or maybe bean soup.