beetiger

I have for the first time done what is colloquially known as "throwing my back out". bard_bloom is taking the boy to preschool while I wait for the ibuprofen to kick in. Mopey and wishing I had some other muscle relaxants here, and ow.

I guess maybe the warranty ran out at 40. I feel too young for this.

Ow.

I did some stuff. Now I will tell you about it.

Saturday bard_bloom, projectmothra, and I went to the Acrobats and Animals show at van Cortlandt Manor. Unlike last time I went, two years ago, when it was hot and sticky and I had a sort of confused, whiny toddler in tow, this time I had a cool, lovely day and a much more interested four year old in tow. Saw random old mommyfriends whom I've been out of touch with. Saw some songbirds completely harass a ground hawk brought in by a birds of prey show by buzzing its head from behind and yelling a lot. Saw a sleight-of-hand magician/slackrope walker who looked like he had been doing the same act for 50 years, and who was somehow utterly charming.

Saturday night bard_bloom and I actually went on an actual dinner date for the first time in forever or so, having finally taken a friend up on a favor she owed us and was paying back in babysitting. A branch of the Melting Pot fondue restaurant opened locally recently, and unlike when we went out with ladyperegrine there in Florida earlier in the spring, this time I did not suddenly realize i had a stomach bug halfway through, and also the kitchen in White Plains seems to have had a lighter hand with the spices than the kitchen in Orlando did. So that was nice.

bard_bloom's parents showed up Sunday, and we took them along to projectmothra's first trip to MoMA, which went quite well. There was a long corridor lit in a very narrow range of yellow light that seemed to turn everyone the shades of a sepia toned photograph. And there was gelato from il laboratorio del gelato there, so I had grapefruit campari sorbet in the sclupture garden, which I can't argue with.

I made the smoked chocolate cupcakes with sweet corn frosting that were featured on Cupcake Project this week. They are bizarre but good. I should not eat extra sweet corn cream cheese frosting with a spoon.

Also, I have been playing Wii Fit. Virtual hula hooping is way more fun than it has any right to be. And it says "That's obese!" in such a cute voice after it measures my weight every day, it kind of makes me giggle.

Today we went to a little Audobon sanctuary that I'd never noticed before. It was a wide well-marked trail, a loop of just over a mile that went around a pond and through some woods and meadows and past a lot of little stone walls. Nice, and quiet, since it's a bit off the beaten track. It would probably be a good place to go meditate if all the areas just off the trails were not completely loaded with poison ivy.

I just realized that I did not put any of the fun and useful links you might expect into this entry. But I am tired, and all of you know how to use Google.

Love to you all.

Or at least, one of the major components of frankincense affects areas in the brains of mice which are associated with anti-anxiety and anti-depressive effects.

It's unclear from the abstract whether they actually administered the chemical by inhalation -- they seem to be implying that, but I find it unlikely. I'm going to have to pony up the $7 to flex my rusty neuro chops on the actual article to find out.

I know burning frankincense makes *me* happy.

The USPS has started a pilot program to let people recycle small electronics by putting them in a free envelope available at post offices. I hope this is successful and goes national.

Clouds over Chicago I took a disposable camera to Midwest Furfest in the fall, as part of the Thousand Little Pictures project by Art House. I got a disk with the pictures on it in the mail today. Almost none of the pictures I took on the camera they gave me came out at all. But I'm very charmed by this snapshot out of the plane window on the way back home.

For the furries hanging around here: I'm afraid I've failed to resist posting this. Free mating call ringtones.

Just a reminder that I'm using Twitter (same user id as here) for the really small stuff, and not mirroring it here. So if you want to hear my random thoughts in 140 characters or less, a few times a day, come find me there.

Y'know, I'd like to see a real Open Source Boob Project.

"You have lovely breasts, may I touch them?"

"You like them? I redid them myself. Only about 20% of the cost of getting them done by fancy doctors, and I was able to add all kinds of features that aren't available commercially anywhere. Hey, you know what? Here, have the code for them. Make your own set, tweak 'em however you like, drop me an email and show me what you come up with."

Out late last night, and bard_bloom and projectmothra indulged me in a few hours extra rest. But I woke up wanting to Do Stuff. We ended up going to brunch at Kathleen's Tea House in Peekskill, a lovely crowded little place with that mismatched china English sort of vibe. We sat in the window, no one broke anything, and I ate little crustless sandwiches of cream cheese and who-knows-what.

Then we wandered over to the Hudson Valley Center of Contemporary Art, a modern little museum in a old warehouse on the road between Yorktown and Peekskill which apparently has been there a few years, but I only just noticed it a few weeks ago. It's only open on weekends, and right now has an exhibit of very large paintings, several of which I really enjoyed. It also has a really complicated semi-permanent exhibit which looks like a laundromat, but really has a dense array of disturbing images about world atrocities and capitalist excess. (The curator warned us, so we didn't take Rhys in there. I poked my head in briefly, but need to return there alone sometime to explore it more.) We also chatted with an artist currently building an installation there, a sculpture of a broken horse and carriage, full-sized, made of cardboard, wood, and magazine clippings. Ah, modern art. In any case, I was thrilled to find this little museum in my backyard, and the curator convinced us to purchase a membership there, noting that we could ring the doorbell during the week and if someone was there we could come in.

After that, we decided to take a drive out to the International Food Warehouse in Lodi, NY. It's gone downhill quite a bit from what I remember, smaller and not quite as random-exotic as I remembered, But we still got some of the old favorites from last time (fig-anise jam), some things I like but have a hard time finding (rose petal jam), and some things that were just too odd to pass up (the most complicated canned Indian relish I've ever seen, with a dozen kinds of fruits and vegetables in it). We also went to the little Indian restaurant that's been installed in it since the last time we went (pre-kid), and it was astonishingly good. They were frying dosai fresh, and making bread in a little electric tandoor. So fun.

After that, we ended up taking a quick trip to the Paramus Park Mall, which was obviously the same place I'd escaped to regularly as a teen, but 25 years of mall inflation and consumer jadedness really made it look very small.

beetiger at twitter. come tell me if you are there.