tigertoy

EFRC report: RIP Ryggs, Smudge

2026-01-07T06:00:04Z

Haleigh wasn't there today and Rebecca was busy with the vet and with office stuff for most of the day, so I was pretty busy. I did, lessee.. Jodi, Sumira, Hershey, Mira and Bhutan, Chip, Lilly, Witchita, Socks and Zera, Casey, the pack, Shenzi and Chinook, Frosty, Lilly and Jilly, Rodney, the Guardians, the Spice Girls, Junior, Pandora, Belle Fille, Sassy, Max and Mercury, and Tilly. 21 cages (not counting Chip, since I was feeding him while Isaiah was taking care of the rest of the hybrids. But nothing much noteworthy. Chip was trying to change his name to Karen, he had a decent looking freezer meat steak but he was very unimpressed with it, he seemed to be trying to send it back to the kitchen. Shenzi was only interested in being petted a little. Chinook was being very shy; I got her to take a couple of bites of food from my outstretched hand but she wouldn't come closer. Getting her treats didn't keep Frosty from being very rude when I let her into her small part for her food. Between how mad she gets and how wobbly the chain link fence of her ancient cage is, it's a good thing she doesn't have claws.

At the end of the day, Pandora was a very good girl and followed the script perfectly, which I hadn't expected since she'd just gotten a deer head not that long ago. Tempt her with a little treat, she takes it suspiciously, give her another treat, she's more eager, give her the meds, she thinks they're a little sus but swallows them, and gets another little treat as a chaser. Hershey was acting happy but with slightly ambiguous behavior, so I backed off to look at the Squinters, and when I came back she was happy to see me some more. The hybrids were very excited to see me, and directed their excitement into fighting each other. First it was gang-up-on-Mousse again, and then when I managed to separate Cookie and Chunk (the main Mousse-bullies) from the rest, Cookie decided to start beating up on Chunk. So I lifted the slide gate again, and everyone else wanted to beat Chunk up too. After a bit, they were back to picking on Mousse again, and I got her alone in the small part, and Calypso and Cookie got into beating Chunk up again. I know it's mostly a lot of noise when they're fighting -- nobody was getting hurt -- but they were getting worked up enough that I didn't want to try to go in with them until they calmed down, and they seemed to be calming down many times, only to get going again. Calypso was being very bold through the fence; she was sticking her nose through the fence to sniff, and actually let me touch her a couple of times. Unfortunately, she also tended to jump on whichever of her children I was trying to socialize with. When you're the smallest of your pack by a good margin, you have to make up for it by grabbing any opportunities to dominate the rest.

We still do not have final results for Eurydice's necropsy.

We lost Smudge; her necropsy said that she'd been in severe renal failure for a long time, but we didn't realize it. Ryggs seemed fine and then dropped dead on us, and her necropsy came back as hemorrhagic pericardial intrusion -- a big buildup of blood in the membrane around her heart that degraded her heart function. They'd seen labored breathing one day, and she was gone the next day. The vet says that it's a rare condition and you'd have to catch it right away when you could see symptoms. Which I doubt we would, we haven't seen it before and if an animal seemed to be having trouble breathing one day we'd be watching them closely but wouldn't expect to need to intervene immediately. Unfortunately, you can often see the symptoms in hindsight, but you also often see an animal looking down one day and back to normal the next day.

Somehow, our problem employee last week was out of jail and back at work today. I guess they have a huge problem with overcrowding in the Vigo County jail and have to let a lot of people out. I guess we just have to hope he doesn't get drunk and do worse.

Jerri's cat went to her vet last night. She was diagnosed with esophagitis, and they have a regimen of treatment that involves giving her medication half an hour before she gets food and keeping her vertical so that her esophagus points straight down for the duration. And it's unfortunately a bad prognosis, but we wish her the best. (The treatment could work. But it's likely it won't.)

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Moving Over

2026-01-03T21:01:15Z

I've finally taken the plunge and imported my LiveJournal to this site. The only thing I've posted there for years is my weekly EFRC reports. They are friends-only. If you should be able to see them and you can't, message me. I will be posting new reports here and cross-posting if it works easily.

I suppose it's vaguely possible I'll actually post other things here too.

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Ginger Apple Cauliflower Sausage Couscous

2023-04-29T19:39:45Z

Here's today's look into the bachelor cooking brain.

The question of what to cook always starts with "what's in the fridge I ought to use up?" This week I actually considered it while I was at the store on Thursday. The principal answers were smoked sausage and cauliflower. A little odd together, but I could make it work. Once I get a couple of ingredients, the next question is, "What goes with that?" Here's where I sometimes feel the urge to get creative, because after 30+ years of my bachelor paneroles there's a certain sameness. (The core tenet of bachelor cuisine is to use as few pans as possible. It all goes in the one big pan, unless pasta is called for. These concoctions might well be called casseroles if they were baked, but a secondary tenet of bachelor cuisine is that the oven is a scary mystery where we don't go. I use my oven as a liquor cabinet. I've tried to figure out what to call this kind of dish for almost as long as I've been cooking without being satisfied with an answer. Today I'm going with "panerole". Who knows what tomorrow will bring?) This week's thoughts were apple; (apple goes well with cauliflower); a bit of carrot (adds a little color, and I have some carrots too); and it's been a while since I've done anything with couscous (a couple of years ago, it occurred to me that always using rice or macaroni as the bulk starch is a little repetitive, so I'd challenge myself to try some other things); and to complete the unusual combination I'd season with ginger (ginger goes with apple, right?)

( recipe inside )

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Creativity Pan

2022-11-02T20:35:42Z

I blew off cooking last night so I really needed to use the ~4 oz of chicken breast I'd thawed, but I didn't know what to make but I knew I didn't want the same old thing. So, I thought, I use rice the great majority of the time, and I just finished something with macaroni. Something different is needed. Quinoa! And corn and quinoa complement each other amino-acid wise, making them an excellent source of protein together, or so I've heard. My fridge is bare of veggies, so, hmm, how about a can of bamboo shoots? And how about an apple? I have those and that would be different. And I was thinking of cheddar cheese.

I got out my trusty round-bottom wok that I use for almost everything and started the onions frying so they'd be a little caramelized, diced the chicken finely, and tossed it in to brown. I knew I'd need some salt, and I asked myself, what spices should I use today? Ginger! Let's try ginger. I diced the apple while the chicken cooked. (Pink Lady, for the record. In addition to being the best eating apple (fight me) they are pretty good for cooking, although I buy Granny Smith if I have a plan to cook with apple when I'm at the store.) I let the apple cook a bit while I opened the cans of corn and bamboo shoots and then dumped those into the pan. I measured 3/4 of a cup of quinoa, totally spaced out on rinsing it, and added that to the pan. A quick taste and it seemed like it was mostly just sweet from the corn, so I added more salt and more ginger and a little water and let the quinoa start to cook. I went through several cycles of is the quinoa done yet? Nope, add some more water and give it a few more minutes. Finally, it seemed pretty much done, but still lacking in flavor, so yet more salt and ginger went in. Somewhere along the line, I'd realized that I was game to try cheddar cheese with the apple, but I didn't think it would work with the ginger so I left it out.

Once the quinoa was finally done, I put lunch in a bowl and the rest in single meal sized tupperware. I began to eat and pronounced it good. It was tasty enough that I might well try to duplicate it. I think it took an hour from start to finish and I don't understand how, but that's how cooking goes no matter what I'm making.

Ingredients (spice amounts are best guesses after the fact, I just throw stuff in the pan)
large skillet with enough oil to coat the bottom well
4 oz boneless chicken breast, diced finely
1 oz chopped onion
1 tsp ground ginger (half at the start, half later)
1 tsp salt (half at start, half later)
1 oz can bamboo shoots (including liquid)
1 14.5 oz can sweet corn (including liquid)
1 medium firm textured tart apple, cored, cut into 1/4-1/2" bits, not peeled
3/4 c quinoa (plain, dry grain, not any sort of mix)

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A Little Bit Thai

2020-09-28T01:48:51Z

My cooking adventure for tonight:

Saute 1/4 lb or so of round steak diced very fine with onion, a little garlic, a little salt
Start 1 cup minute rice+1 cup water in another pan
In the first pan again:
1 can petite diced tomatoes, drained as well as possible
1 tsp or so Thai red curry paste
Stir it up and let it cook a bit
Remember the cream of onion
Add 1/2 can condensed cream of onion soup, stir until everything is mixed and hot
Add the now-cooked minute rice to the pan, stir until the rice is mixed in
(I guess normal people would serve the stuff over the rice instead of mixing it together)

4 servings, tasty enough to remember the recipe

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Cream of Refrigerator

2020-09-07T05:31:22Z

In my fridge, I had one large zucchini that I forgot I had when I should have used it a couple of days ago, 2/3 of a chicken breast I kept out when I froze the rest of the package, and half a can of Cream of Jalapeño soup. (I bought the soup on a "let's see what we can do with this" whim. The soup is a disappointment, it has almost no heat but plenty of the flavor of jalapeños, which I don't much like.) Add to this the fact that I'm trying to experiment with quinoa in my culinary travels, and I came up with this:

Caramelize 1/4 cup of chopped onion
Add 4 oz finely diced chicken breast
Add some salt, 1 tsp or so
Add 1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, chopped as finely as possible
When the chicken is cooked, add the zucchini, sliced
Simmer until the zucchini is mostly cooked
Add 1/2 cup of quinoa, rinsed in the strainer I just bought
Add 1/2 cup water, bring to boil, simmer 10 minutes
Add some more water until it looks right
Simmer another 10 minutes, quinoa should be done
Add 2 oz. shredded sharp cheddar cheese
Add 1/2 can condensed cream of something soup (will try cream of onion next time I think)
Stir until thoroughly mixed together

Serves me 3 times.

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Charitable Contribution Aggregation Service

2019-11-08T21:45:41Z

Whenever you make an old fashioned snail mail contribution to almost any charity, you get put on a list where you will receive several more requests for more money from that charity. Thank you gifts, membership renewal requests, emergency donation requests, and reminders that you haven't contributed in a while years later. Worse, many legitimate-seeming charities will sell your name on to other charities and you can get dozens. The larger the contribution the more further appeals you receive. It's just the way the fundraising business works.

This is a terrible waste of the charity's resources, the donor's time and attention, and the environment that has to be burdened with all that trash. The last one is particularly ironic in the case of environmental causes.

I believe I have a solution to this problem. Imagine there was a service you could send your donations to. You would specify what charity the donation was for, and they would collect all the donations to that charity that had come in every couple of months and send it on anonymously. The charity would pay a very small surcharge, which would be far less than what it costs them to send out all that follow-up spam.

The donor could easily set up a recurring donation, and in any case could opt in to a single annual statement listing the charities they had donated to.

The main question I have about this would be whether the tax laws would allow it. I have heard that a 501(c)3 can make donations to other 501(c)3 organizations. This would allow the donor to retain the tax benefits and make it easy to account for them with the IRS. Even if the aggregator were a 501(c)4, the current tax law means there is no benefit for most taxpayers to donate to a 501(c)3, but I suspect that if the aggregator had to operate as a regular company it wouldn't work financially.

I would be interested to have someone with more knowledge than I comment on how far this could fly legally. Ideally such a person would be a lawyer, but I'm in no position to pay a lawyer for official legal advice.

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National SAD Day

2019-11-03T03:00:38Z

Tonight we switch to standard time, or as I like to call it, Daylight Wasting Time. As someone with a touch of seasonal affective disorder, it really hurts to lose that hour of useful daylight when I could be out hiking. This is the true start of the dark time, my season of misery.

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The census

2019-09-14T23:51:44Z

I was just listening to the news and there's an item that says the Census Bureau is behind schedule hiring workers to perform the 2020 census.

Given the Trump administration's intentions, already demonstrated with the citizenship question, to distort the census for political advantage, I am troubled that they are "behind schedule" because they don't actually want to have the workers in place to do the job right. When they are criticized in 2021 for not really counting everyone, they can plead that they did the best they could with the workforce they had.

What can citizens do to see that the census really counts everyone despite an administration that doesn't want to?

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Dealing with Big Problems

2019-08-19T19:47:00Z

I have some big problems in my life. What they are isn't the point of this post; I'm looking at how I deal with problems. The least functional way I have of dealing with a problem is to metaphorically hide under the bed. The problem is too big to have any solution I can see. Thinking about it is distressing. So I just ignore it and pay attention to other things.

In a slightly more functional mode, I see that the whole problem is too big, but there is one part of it that I can address, and then I focus on that part. That part is something I can work on. The problem is that I focus on that part, however trivial it is, and continue to ignore the rest of the problem. If the thought of the larger problem comes up, I tell myself I'm doing the small thing so I'm taking care of it.

This is only slightly more functional than completely ignoring the problem if the part I've chosen is trivial. To take an example from my own past, my house is perpetually horribly cluttered. When I was actively playing Magic: the Gathering, my magic cards were a significant part of the clutter. I would direct the energy for dealing with the clutter into obsessively sorting cards while the rest of the clutter continued to build up.

The reason I bring this up, the real point of this post, is that I had an insight that as a society we are caught up in the same trap. For an example, consider the cold war. The problem that the world could be blown up in a nuclear war was too big to deal with, so there was a lot of hiding under the bed. However, there was also a lot of energy put into trivial gestures. School children were taught duck and cover drills and shelters were designated and stocked with emergency food rations. Doing these things helped people to feel that they were doing something, but if one considers an actual nuclear war, one realizes that these things wouldn't really make any difference.

More relevant to our situation today is the problem of how we're destroying our environment. We realize, when we bring ourselves to think of it, the extent of damage we're constantly doing to our planet, but we don't see how we can really fix it. But we've hit on recycling. "I'm recycling my plastic bottles," we say, "so I'm helping. I'm doing my bit." I can't argue that recycling in itself has no value at all, but it has much less value than we give it credit for. Many of those plastic bottles we virtuously put in the recycling bin end up in the landfill anyway, very few of them become more plastic bottles, and even when they do the process uses a lot of resources along the way. It would be better to not buy a one use bottle at all. It would be better than that to get our municipal water systems to the point where nobody felt they needed single use water bottles.

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Writing

2019-08-19T19:12:12Z

For a long time I have been thinking about writing. I ought to write, but whenever the thought comes to mind that I should sit down and write something I come up with mental excuses not to.

I spend a lot of time with my own thoughts, especially on walks. I walk every day, usually for 40 minutes or so. I go through lots of ideas that I want to share, but I never actually get around to writing anything.

Today I'm resolving to spend a little of the time I spend vegetating in front of my computer actually trying to turn some of those thoughts into words on the screen. As of right now, if I do work on fiction I don't plan to post it, but I will plan to post other stuff. Topics may include politics, society, game design, math, science, or whatever else coalesces in the chaos of my mind long enough to pin down.

Encouragement will probably help me keep at it. If anyone is reading this, and I write something interesting, please leave a brief comment.

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Last Election argh

2017-11-27T19:43:40Z

Why am I still hearing people talking in the media about how Trump won because of how he appealed to the white working class or the Democrats lost because they didn't have a coherent economic message? Trump has a core constituency who love him, and it's bigger than I want to admit, but it's still a minority. The Democrats in general do need a more coherent message. But the reason Clinton lost the election is because everyone hates her. I'm convinced that Democrats and moderate leaning independents stayed home in droves because they couldn't make themselves pull the lever for Clinton.

The lesson the Democrats need to take from this election is not to appeal more to their base. It's not to have a more convincing message. It's to not put up a candidate that half the country despises beyond coherent thought and the other half merely doesn't like. Don't let the party hacks put up a candidate because she's "paid her dues" and somehow earned it. Put up a candidate that people actually like and they'll win in a landslide.

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National SAD Day

2017-11-05T05:53:35Z

It's National SAD Day, the day we switch to Daylight Wasting Time. Because nothing says "we love you" to people with Seasonal Affective Disorder like throwing away an hour of daylight just when the axial tilt is making it so precious.

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OVFF!

2017-10-19T18:10:15Z

It's OVFF time! If any of the three people who read this care, I will have EFRC calendars available as usual; if you tell me now you want one, I'll make a point of finding you at the con.

Other than that, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone, hearing lots of music, as many hugs as possible, and painful choices for the Pegasus awards!

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Disaster Porn

2017-10-19T18:05:53Z

It sickens me how much airtime the media spends on "this is so and so who just lost their home and/or their loved ones in the latest disaster, can you please tell us how you feel while can barely keep yourself from crying uncontrollably" garbage. This isn't journalism it's sleazy tabloid garbage exploiting the victims for the sake of emotionally titillating the audience. Disasters are a worthy subject, but what should be covered is explaining what really happened, and more importantly how likely it is to happen again, what we should do to mitigate the risk, and what the economic and political barriers are to doing it.

I knew days ahead of time that Harvey was going to be an epic disaster not because of hurricane winds but because of flooding, based on things that I caught because I know stuff and I was paying attention when they quickly glossed over it. Then after the storm hit, they're incessantly harping on how this was totally unexpected, why didn't we know this was going to happen. We did know it was going to happen, but the media didn't think it was important enough to stress and the country didn't notice.

I knew months ago that we were going to have terrible fires in California, the whole state is tinder dry. I want to hear details on what the local terrain is like to support such an intense fire, and what could be done to make the towns less vulnerable when the countryside goes up in smoke. I don't want to hear how much it sucks to have your house burn down and how terrible it is to come back from the evacuation and see it over and over and over again.

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Eclipse Trip

2017-08-22T19:56:29Z

I've just returned from my eclipse trip. There were enough clouds in the area that we were nervous, but it was clear where the sun was at the big moment. The eclipse itself was incredibly beautiful, but not quite the spiritual experience it was for some people. The light of the partial eclipse though the trees was cool but it doesn't like up to my memory of the partial eclipse in Champaign some years ago, I don't know if it's just the effect of memory or if I just couldn't find a really good spot to see it.

Touch of Nature where we were staying is a very nice place and I'd love to visit again when it's not so hot and humid, I spent a fair bit of time hiking/walking around but I would have spent even more if it had been less uncomfortable. Astronomy people are incredibly nice and happy to share their cool toys; I got a good look at Saturn on Saturday night. The meals they provided were not exciting but edible, and I still managed to eat more than I should have.

My real camera decided to crap out on me, so I was limited to taking pictures with my cell phone. I did not have my phone out during the eclipse but I took pictures of nature-y things while I was there. I didn't bring my guitar and I guess I should have, there were campfire sings on Saturday and Sunday. Although I would still have been really shy about playing in front of a group of strangers who didn't know my kind of music -- I don't really know campfire songs. The camera that didn't work is almost as heavy, though more compact, than the guitar.

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Silly thought for the day

2017-07-31T19:22:03Z

In Canada, the equivalent of having a green card in the US is called being a landed immigrant. So why do they give priority to people who come by ship or plane over people who walk or drive over the border?

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If I Were King

2017-07-29T18:03:54Z

I spend a lot of time thinking about what's wrong with our economy and what might be done to fix it. Of course, the rich and powerful would never allow things to upset their happy apple cart, so pretty much the only way they could happen would be if they put me in charge.

I dashed off some of my thoughts in a chat group I'm in and I thought I'd record them here, for my own interest if nothing more.

( stuff in here )

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I'm an Old Geek

2017-07-11T19:26:15Z

I watched Gremlins at movie night at a friend's last night. (I imagine I'm the only person anywhere who hasn't seen it yet, but this is hardly a spoiler.) I laughed my ass off at the Robbie the Robot cameo. Nobody else got it.

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Math and Physics (from XKCD)

2017-07-10T19:17:51Z

Today's XKCD:

My comment: If you can't do the math you don't know the subject. If you don't understand it intuitively without resorting to the math, you don't really understand the subject. So basically nobody understands modern physics.

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Cycle

2017-07-10T18:46:12Z

I was taking my walk this morning, and I started humming a couple of bars. They seemed familiar, I was sure they were from something I knew, but I couldn't place it. So I tried to see where they would go to see if it helped me remember what it was. Soon I had a tune. It was simple and repetitive but it was catchy. I repeated it a bunch of times as I walked along in the hope I wouldn't forget it. It may be from something else but I still can't place it.

I started to improvise some silly lyrics. And they seemed to come together into a song. I got home and wrote down the lyrics and started to file down some rough edges, and here they are.

Oh it's a butter
A happy butter
Do do do doot do do do
He's looking for
A happy flower
Doot doot do do do do
And if he finds
A girl butter
Do do do doot do do do
Then they will make
Next year's butters
Do do do doot do do do

And their eggs
Survive the cold, etc.
That's how it's been
Since days of old, etc.
The cycle turns
Goes on and on, etc.
For that is how
Life's will is done, etc.

And there's a bird
A happy bird
And he sings
His happy song
And he feeds
His wee fledlings
Til they can learn
To fly down south

And they return
After the cold
That's how it's been
Since days of old.
The cycle turns
Goes on and on
For that is how
Life's will is done.

Life evolves
Along comes man
Who makes the world
Fit to his plan
He tames the fire
He tames the wolves
He plows the fields
He tromps the roads

He build canals
He burns the coal
Not how it's been
Since days of old
The cycle breaks
It can't go on
And who will know
This song's been sung?

(hum first half of verse)
(fading out)
The cycle turned
Went on and on
It was the way
Life willed it done

I don't know what's happening to me. I don't write songs. I hope I don't forget the tune, since I don't have any meaningful way to record it.

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Childhood Safety

2017-07-05T18:46:20Z

I'm going to post something here that may get me yelled it, but it's something I believe.

This was inspired by a story I just heard on the radio about how some kids in Hannibal, MO got lost in a cave and were never found. It described how they went off on their own and no one was concerned until they didn't come home for dinner, and how that would never happen today. It would be considered child neglect.

( long and somewhat incendiary comment inside )

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Question About the Obligation of Society

2017-06-28T17:29:13Z

I have a philosophical question that I'd like to pose as a hypothetical. This is strictly a thought experiment and it's not intended to refer to any real person and certainly not to any identifiable group of real Americans.

Suppose there is an able bodied person. They have no physical limitations and no diagnosable mental health issues. They have no kids. They don't do unpaid work (such as assisting family or volunteering). They are simply unwilling to work in any way.

What obligation does society have to that person? Is it ethically appropriate to leave them to starve in the gutter? If not, what level of support must society provide? If the answer is "it depends", how would you define what it depends on how the obligation varies with that?

In particular, what is the obligation in a prosperous modern Western democracy?

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A Verse

2017-06-28T16:16:36Z

I took a nice long walk this morning, and as I walked I wrote a little song.

(ttto "Babylon Is Fallen")

I wish I had an orange tiger. I would beep him on the nose.
I would give him lots of scritches; I would pet his fuzzy toes.
I would give him toys to play with; I would give him lots of love,
But I would not walk beneath him where he could pounce from above.
For I know he's very pointy; he could bite my spine in two,
And I know that his instinct even though he loves me too.

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Outliers

2017-05-15T00:47:47Z

I was listening to the radio this morning and there was some discussion about the connection between facts and truth. The person on the radio contended that while facts can be checked and verified and reasonably be shown to be correct, but truth is more subjective and hard to pin down. This inspired a train of thought.

I believe in science as a way of understanding the world. Science approaches a problem by forming a hypothesis and collecting facts to see how well it fits. If most of the facts align, the hypothesis is strenthened. If there are facts that don't fit and there's a pattern to those facts, it points to a way to refine the hypothsis, or possibly even throw it out and start over. But in most sets of data, there are a few outliers -- measurements that are way outside the range of most of the data. If the data can be graphed on a scatter plot, there's a very heavy concentration of points along the expected line, but there are just a few apparently randomly around the graph. If there are few enough outliers, we consider the hypothesis valid despite these outliers.

In politics, on the other hand, we focus much more on the outliers rather than going with the general trend. If a debater can present a single fact that disagrees with an opponent's point of view, and that fact is verified, it's considered a valid argument (at least to one side of the question). There is little attempt to see the general pattern and ignore the outliers.

This problem is very much driven by the way the media work. Ordinary events -- those in the main blob of data points on the scatter plot -- aren't newsworthy because they're common. Outliers, because they are novel, receive far more attention than they generally deserve; and this tends to reinforce extreme viewpoints by reinforcing them with outlier examples. For example, consider how many people worry about how dangerous air travel is but never pay attention to how dangerous car travel is. This happens because plane crashes are so rare that every one is going to get media attention, while car crashes are so common that they're hardly ever mentioned.

Truth is somewhat subjective and squishy, but a reasonable view of the truth should be formed by considering the ordinary majority of the facts rather than concentrating on the outliers.

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