Not Dead Yet

I have a nifty new iPad to play with. Here's an example of some handwriting to text I've been toying with. The translation is sort of hilariously weird with some of my scrawling but still pretty cool.

I've gone quiet fiwoggingnfhen Mets, busy. But, a New Year is upon us. I have. a shiny new iPad Mini. I'm hoping t will streamline some of my writing. I seem to do better writing by hand than typing. I've been filling stew pads, but am hgsnng to use my iPad and wind up with min text from my scrawling.

Bread!

I've always wanted to try making bread from scratch. No knead bread has been trendy lately, so I finally went ahead and used a recipe from Budget Bytes.

It turned out really well for a first time bread. Nice crispy crust like I like. Still kind of fluffy in the middle. I made rolls instead of a full loaf today. Still have half the dough waiting in the fridge to be used in the next week or so.

There are all kinds of fun variations to try - raisin bread, whole wheat...mmmm

Dough right after mixing

Loose fitting lid for dough to rise

Rolls cooling

Omnomnom bread!

Chicago Botanic Gardens

We went to the Chicago Botanic Gardens at the end of May, but I only just now got around to downloading the photos from my camera.

It's really beautfiul. I was really interested in their Enabling Garden. It's designed to be accessible for a variety of people. There are lots of suggestions and examples of ways to make gardening easier (or possible) for people with a variety of conditions.

Probably of most use were the examples of vertical garden planters and the raised planting beds.

Very cool!

Planner Planning

I have recently started trying to downsize the stuff I carry around regularly.  I bought a new sling-bag that I love.


And a folding cane in the hopes that I might be able to fold it up and stick it in my bag now and then on good days.

Unfortunately, my current day planner is a smidge too big for my new bag.  I seriously need this planner.  I have a week across 2 pages section and a month across pages section that are absolutely vital for recording appointments, work schedule, migraines, and notes.  The daily pages get notes about meds I take as needed so I can keep track of when I can take the next dose plus have an idea of my med usage over time.
I especially like having a year or 6 months worth of stuff in the planner, it makes it much easier to show patterns of symptoms or note when medication dose changes or whatever happened.

It also has all my primary doctor contact info (business cards), plain note pages, and a pocket for stowing loose paperwork.

It measures 7" x 8.5" x 1.5" - kinda big and heavy, as it's faux leather, zips shut, and is the six-ring binder style.  The interior pages themselves are about 4" x 7"  Finding a new smaller, lighter cover seems like an obvious choice, but I'm having trouble finding one that isn't over $20-40 (I'm cheap).  I'm not sure if the binder rings from the one I have or another old one could be scavenged to make an new binder myself.  If anyone has any handy links about that, do please let me know.

So, I've been exploring other options.  DIY sounds fun, but I would prefer relatively little effort or lots of tracking down of supplies.  Something that I can get soon would be really nice too.

I've considered a hipster PDA, but the lack of easy flipping back and forth and longer-term organization would be a big problem for me.  It needs to be fairly sturdy too.  And I'm not confident plain paper will work or that my printer can handle index cards.

I've also looked at the PocketMod - nifty planner folded from a single sheet of paper.  I suppose I could print lots of them and bind them somehow.

I'd really like a super easy way to just print, fold in half, and staple a bunch of regular 8.5 x 11 paper, but haven't had much luck finding that sort of thing.

I have found some fill-in date (so I can start it when I want) planners that are adorable, but I'm not sure I want to make the leap.  But they are seriously adorable, so I wanted to share.

Vintage Typewriter Style

Stick a Bird on It!

Write Every Day

Flowers!

Before the Pyramids Sneak Peek (3)

Before the Pyramids Sneak Peek (3)

Some wonderful photos and peeks behind the scenes of the OI's latest temporary exhibit "Egypt Before the Pyramids." Beautiful, beautiful Predynastic pots. Very nifty.

These are on the Oriental Institute's Facebook page, but you should be able to view them even if you are not a member of Facebook.

My Official Response Is As Follows: "Daaaaaaaaaaaamn"

Image via WikipediaUnreported Heritage News: Ancient Egyptians made the arduous trek to Chad ne...: "View From Egypt to Chad in a larger map The Bodele Depression. New research suggests that the Egyptians travelled to this area. Today it..."

Go read the article and look at the pictures.

I wonder what this will do to the ongoing debate over which ancient Egyptian place-names apply to what areas in greater Nubia and Africa

Also: ZOMG A country in Africa had contact with other parts of Africa!

Four Years Ago Today

I was in Khartoum for the very first time.  Specifically at the museum, drooling over cool things.

Mmm, pottery

Was-sceptres and ankhs with arms so they can hold up flags

C-Group pottery

Probably a beer strainer.  Ancient beer was some funky, chunky junk.

Beautiful Kerma beaker.  We still aren't sure how they managed to achieve that silvery "ash band"

Weights for quantities of gold.  The semi-circle with the tails at either end is the hieroglyph nbw for "gold"

Bronze mirrors, probably imported from Egypt during the New Kingdom

Two colossal statues of Kushite kings

Antique graffiti

Tom's ass in a temple

Enemies of Egypt personified as bound prisoners (heads missing)

And the lesson of the day:  I should really have gone through these back in the day and captioned them more fully because I honestly can't remember for sure what some of them are or why I thought it important to take those particular shots.  Or even if I had the camera for some of them or if Tom had it. 

Anyway, the museum is awesome.  They've reconstructed several Egyptian temples that would have been flooded by the formation of Lake Nasser had they not been chopped up into manageable blocks and then moved.  Mmmm, temples.  Temples without other tourists.  Mmmmmm.

Xmas Morning

Heeeee!

Most hilarious moment - ripping wrapping paper to see this:

I screamed "WHYYYYYY!!?!?!?" for quite some time after I stopped laughing.  It's a SodaStream, by the way, and should be super awesome.

I also got a scarf and more sock monkey jammies!  Eeee, sock monkeys!!!!

Oreo got a goose toy.  And some other stuff, but he's mostly interested in killing the goose.

And Tom got a new money clip and I got him a starter pack from the Art of Shaving.

The 12 Days of Ice Age Christmas

Snowmass tally: 10 mastodons, 4 mammoths, one "once-in-a-lifetime" find - The Denver Post

Pretty nifty find. The list of animals has me thinking someone should get cracking on some song lyrics.

Some earlier articles about the initial find by the guys digging the reservoir indicate that at least one of the mammoths was buried in peat which would account for the preservation (rather than fossilization) of bone and hopefully some soft tissue.

Widespread Panic fans will be interested to learn that Snowmass Village at least considered making "Big Wooly Mammoth" the official village song.

Space photos of the day: Vintage NASA art - The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

Space photos of the day: Vintage NASA art - The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

The slide show is awesome. I have to confess to having a little internal giggle every time I see the Dyna-Soar project mentioned.

I really want an inflatable space station.

And whoever drew the Apollo space suit (final slide) was clearly just phoning it in that day. "So, we'll get some toilet paper and duct tape..."

NAMIWalks Chicago 2010

On the lakefront

Today was the big walk. We had beautiful weather and a great turn-out. We got some fun photos too.

Oreo can't quite make a full 3 mile walk (the block is sometimes a challenge) so he had to sit this one out. Instead, our friends brought their dog, Yuki. She's sweet and fluffy and beautiful and had lots of admirers.  So I had good people and doggie friends to keep me company and help me out on the walk.

Our team raised $500 (thanks to all our donors!!!!)

I am stiff and sore and very tired, but I think it was well worth it!

Yuki!!!!

No idea why Tom took this

Start of the walk

I don't think we managed to get a full team photo without at least one of us looking weird

Tom in front of the Ram in Chinatown

NAMIWalks Chicago - Team T-Shirts

As I've mentioned before my husband, some friends and I are walking for the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Chicago this coming Sunday. (There is a link on the right side-bar of my blog for those who'd like to donate/sponsor us.)

NAMI has encouraged teams to get t-shirts. Tom and I decided we'd screenprint our own.

So, Tom found this tutorial on Instructables and I found a related one on Cut Out and Keep.

I wanted an Old West sort of font for the team name, since we're the James Gang and crossed canes.

Tom was nice enough to turn a photo of an ergonomic cane like the one I prefer to use into a silhouette in Illustrator. I did the rest in Inkscape (there was a lot of swearing while I was figuring out how to get text to arch).

I spent most of yesterday painting out the negative space in my screen - a quilting hoop holding some old sheer curtains. I mixed a bit of white acrylic paint with Mod Podge to paint out the negative space (the paint was so it was easier to see where I'd painted).

Tonight we pulled prints using fabric paint rather than proper screenprinting ink because netiher of us felt like going across the city to get proper screenprinting ink.

Pretty cool, huh?