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We met Dan’s folks in Asheville today - they’ve driven across the country with a truck of furniture from Utah! To celebrate, we stopped into the Chocolate Fetish and picked us up some of these:
They really are the world’s best truffles…or at least the best I’ve tasted. We got some of their dragon (pepper and wasabi) ones, a wine and roses truffle, a hazelnut, oh my goodness. And some sea salt caramels. Worth the trip!
We have 4 cats at our house - Nochi, Floyd, Jackie and Shadow. Generally speaking, Jackie loves everyone, Shadow loves Jackie, Nochi is indifferent, and Floyd hates everyone. Your run-of-the-mill kitty soap opera. We’ve been trying to get them to get along better, and the secret appears to be bribery. Look what Pounce treats can do:
If only we could throw a case or two of Pounce treats into Jerusalem and see what happens…
I got a hedgehog for my birthday back in September. Since our friends refused to name their pets “Bacon,” I took it on myself to name him Sir Francis Bacon. Also known as Frankie Bacon, just plain Bacon, or Senor Grumpybutt.
He’s pretty much full-grown now, and is about the size of a small guinea pig. If you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting a hedgehog, they’re really something. They have terrible eyesight, so they’re kind of nervous. They puff up their quills (which aren’t barbed like a porcupine’s so they don’t stick in your skin, but they’re sharp enough to deter most predators) and roll into a ball at any sign of threat. They’re mostly nocturnal, so I usually take Bacon out to play around 9 or 10 at night. They’re not exactly affectionate critters, though he does know my smell (and equates it with treats - meal worms, nomnomnom) so he’s pretty easy to handle.
Hedgehogs also have the odd behavior of “anointing,” or coating their quills with foamy saliva whenever they smell something new and interesting. You can see a video of Bacon anointing over a piece of greenery (I thought it was spinach but I think now it’s a celery leaf) on youtube. Watch for the bright green saliva. 
This is the traditional European hedgehog 
, which has finer spines and darker coloration. Those have not been domesticated. Bacon is an African Pygmy Hedgehog, which are smaller and have been domesticated for about 30-40 years as pets. Keep an eye out for more exploits of Bacon.
A couple of years ago I made a great family genealogy book for my mom as a gift. It had all these old family photos along with printouts of census records and a fairly detailed family tree back to the 1200s in England. A few years later I did the same thing for Dan’s parents, complete with maps of where the ancestors came from (Wales, Poland, England, etc. - turns out his family and my family both came from Essex county way back when). I decided to do the same for my Dad for his birthday this year.
On my Grandma’s side, we don’t know much. She’s adopted, and her adoptive family’s last name is “Jones,” so that’s pretty much a dead end.
However, on my Grandpa’s side, I knew just enough to get by on and trace things back a few generations. From there, I filled things out a bit more from census records on ancestry.com and familysearch.org (the Mormon site….they’re friggin baptising everyone retroactively! Annoying and presumptive, but useful!). Anyhow, after you trace things back a few generations, to a woman named Louisa Douglas, born sometime in the 1830s, someone had done all this work to trace our family all the way back to about (get this) 6 AD in England. How, you ask, would they be able to trace things so far back? Well, you see, they keep very detailed records of royalty. Yes, ROYALTY. William the Conqueror is my 32nd Great Grandfather, or something like that. We’re the descendants of one of his bastard children.
Great Great Great etc. Grandpa Bill
Go back from there and you have all these kings of France and Italy and Germany and, of course, Charlemagne. Another branch of the tree goes back to Alfred the Great and on back to Kings of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, another back to Wales in the 300s AD.
Who knew?
Granted, this is all highly questionable. I know they kept some good records and stuff, but seriously, with names like “William Herbert” there has to be some confusion somewhere in there. Granted, if 80% of Asia can trace themselves back to Genghis Khan I’m sure a disproportionate piece of the modern population can trace itself back to some royal family or other, but really, what are the odds?!
So this
is the grain of salt I’m taking it all with, but it’s still fun to imagine that somewhere back in my bloodline are Viking kings. (My brother-in-law, the Vikings fan, will be pleased. Heh.) I’d rather be pictish, but I’ll still expect you to bow and kiss my ring next time you see me.
Here’s my catchup post.
Here in Greensboro, like in much of the southeast, we’re in the middle of a fairly severe water shortage. Some towns have already run out of water, and it doesn’t look like the situation is going to improve much after an abnormally dry winter. I’m looking at ways to reduce our water usage, and one of them is replacing all our grass with moss.
Isn’t this lovely?
Moss doesn’t really have “roots” per se, so it derives nutrients from the air. We have a humid, shady back yard that makes growing grass difficult anyhow, so moss seems like the perfect alternative.
We’re also looking at using rain collection barrels and taking shorter showers. Sigh. Does it ever feel like you’re drifting slowly into a science fiction story? You always expect environmental disaster to be a quick, catastrophic thing, but really it’s very slow, like the story about the frog in the pan of water. Perhaps I”m overreacting, but when you see a city the size of Atlanta looking at persistent if not permanent water shortages over the next few years (and who knows how far beyond), it’s easy to get a bit pessimistic.
Oops…isn’t that just how resolutions go? I’ve already missed a day. Well, to make it up, I’ll post twice today. Here’s one. First, check out the new theme, Vistered Little! Heavily customizeable, apparently. I rather like it. I’ve added a steampunky wallpaper for my own view of it. Enjoy!
That is all!
Okay, in honor of it having been 1 year + since my last blog posting, I am turning over a new leaf. My resolution for this year is to post once each day. There, I have spoken it. So here we go.
OK, last year’s New Year’s Eve party brought us a small housefire (quickly extinguished), butt-rubs, fireworks in the street, and The Rant. And this lovely image:
This year was even more epic, with more shotglass checkers, free-for-all ass-grabbling, Playstation karaoke, hat-vomiting, and the Cah-Razy!!!
More pictures, in all their incriminating detail, can be seen at http://flickr.com/photos/danray/sets/72157594452328803/
Part of my job at Reading Connetions, the adult literacy nonprofit where I work, is increasing public awareness of our agency and of the literacy problem in our community (and, really, nationwide): about 20% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate.
As a way of getting the word out about our existence, we entered a float in Greensboro’s annual holiday parade - it was tons of fun! We threw a wooden sleigh that one of my co-workers happens to own on a trailer, rented a Grinch costume and made a bunch of banners, and my buddies all pitched in to populate the float. It was tons of fun! I had no idea the parade was such a big deal - there must have been 10,000 people there! They had giant floating balloons, just like the Macy’s parade, and just ahead of us was a live nativity with real camels, donkeys, cows, goats, and sheep. (And people with pooper scoopers.) Anyhow, it was a fun time.
Back in August I started listening to the Dresden Dolls (I’m always a little late to the party, musically speaking), and fell hard in love. I love Amanda Palmer’s sexually ambiguous voice, her deliciously ambiguous lyrics, the mixture of punk sensibility and cabaret rhythms, the fact that Brian Vigliano looks better in lingerie than Amanda does…everything about the band’s music and aesthetic is perfect and challenging. They sit firmly at the crossroads of every categorization you can think of.
In October, I piled a bunch of friends, most of us in costume, into several cars and we drove 90 minutes to Raleigh to see the Dolls in concert. We got there super early so I was thiiiiiis close to the stage. Literally touching it. I could have touched the Dolls themselves when they came to the edge to sing a few, but I didn’t think they’d really appreciate strangers pawing at them. It was enough to be RIGHT there. Photos follow, courtesy of my lovely buddy Jess (she’s the stacked hottie in the corset ).
Amanda - note the mod to the keyboard.
Brian plays guitar as well as drums
Hottie freaks Jess & Deb
I love my friends.
The concert itself was a - maz - ing. They are every bit as talented in person as on their albums, and the way they play with each other and communicate on stage is fun to watch. The opening act, the Red Paintings, was fantastic. They’re a punk band from Australia. The lead singer (”Trash”) wore a grinch robe the entire time, with the rest of the band in kabuki outfits. Trash joined the Dresden Dolls for an amazing encore of “Mad World” that made me cry. (Long story, has to do with Josh.)
Such an amazing evening. Please check out their music etc. at dresdendolls.com
