#3

I was trying to find the entrance to the other section across the road but nobody apparently has hiked the connecting trail and I really didn't feel like leaping dirty snow piles into four lanes of traffic. So I just followed these old xski tracks until I came across this sign then turned around (I didn't feel like walking alongside the highway) and followed a bit more of a different path until I headed back to my car. I walked over to the map (I'd had directions how to get across the road from where I'd parked) and the map didn't show the trail I'd wanted. Not a big surprise - the land across the road is run by a different organization or something. I'd had a quite a workout walking in the snow - had to unzip partway through the hike and then take off my coat when I got to the car.

Two bits of annoying news I don't want to get into but feel that they should be mentioned:

1. I got a parking ticket yesterday for parking in my parking lot. The one I buy two separate passes so I don't get tickets - an overnight and a commuter for the day. It's for the train stop and it's the only parking available to those who live in my building. I went to the police station and ended up talking to the policeman who had issued my ticket and he explained that half of the lot was overnight and 2-hour-free-during-the-day ONLY, another quarter of the lot was for E (employee) parking only, leaving only a quarter of the lot where I should never have to get a ticket. I was unaware that the C permit wasn't good for 75% of the lot. I went ahead and paid the ticket but I told him I suggested that there be clearer signs, especially saying something like "C and E permits are not valid in this half of the lot." I refuse to rant; I let off steam yesterday with the dishes. It's just one more reason I won't be sad to move when the lease is up.

2. Applying for health insurance sucks. I got the letter for why I was refused one plan and even though I was annoyed, Colin made it make sense why they refused me. It makes sense from their POV but in the bigger scheme, I just want to say, it really doesn't seem cool. Hopefully plan B will produce better results.

Colin's parents and his youngest sister are in town so a bit more apartment spiffing up is in order before going to hang out with them. Thai restaurant for dinner!

1st real Lent post, 2nd real photo-hike post

I was wondering what I might find that would show up in a picture (since everything is so white) but I think I need to learn to stop worrying about making sure I find a subject and just let it happen. I had a couple of pictures but they wouldn't have worked (hard to see what's in them) and then I came across this very noisy energetic dog who kept running the length of the fence facing the trail. I love dogs and I'm not afraid of them (been bitten a fair amount but rarely by vicious strange dogs) but I was glad this one was fenced in because it definitely was telling me to go away. Never noticed it before even though I've hiked on this rail trail a handful of times. It's not hard to believe it greets everyone on the trail just as I was.

Update on roast chicken: The stuffing and the veggies were all set to go - but the darn chicken just wouldn't thaw, despite being pulled out of the freezer and into the fridge since before lunch and put in the microwave to defrost a bunch. Finally I just put in a small pizza I'd gotten as back up and put all the chicken stuff in the fridge. It should be thawed and ready tonight, right? I know meat takes forever to thaw but I've never dealt with whole chickens before so it's a learning process. However, I apparently need a roast pan. When I was preparing the recipe yesterday I took this to just mean a regular pan but now that I've read the directions more thoroughly I see it means "a fancy pan with a rack inside of it." So, back to the store to get yet another thing (yesterday I got a meat thermometer and then had to ask Colin to stop and get a baster on his way home). Whitney - I don't remember you using all these things ... perhaps I could steal the recipe with oven temp and cooking time from you?

Big News of the Day: The Peek has arrived! For those of you unfamiliar with what the device is, it's simply an email device that uses cell phone towers. There's a lot of options, but we got this one used for about 200 bucks AND it's set for life. No more fees ever - can get and send emails and text messages. The person we bought it from also sent another one that doesn't work (it seems to have signal and works until you try to set it up to get email) so that we have an extra battery ... but I'm definitely itching to see if I can get it working. Probably would have to pay for the service (either monthly, quarterly, annually, or for life). If you want to see more about Peeks the website is http://www.getpeek.com/. For clarification, it's actually the Peek Pronto not just the Classic.

I ran into this last week while looking for internet services for deaf people and we thought it'd be good for Colin to have since I have texting on my phone but he doesn't. Plus, we love playing with new tech toys. I get to play with it today and show Colin all about it this weekend. Sure, it's limited and we'll probably just get some kind of smartphones in the future that would make this a redundant device for us, but it's a good basic alternative especially since both of us are still locked into our family cell phone plans for at least another few months. It would also be especially valuable for me if I can get a Google Voice account - text messages, emails, and transcribed voicemails would then end up on the peek and I could call people back using WebCapTel. I'd still need a voice plan of some sort but am calculating and trying to judge how actively I actually use voice and when so that I can figure out exactly what I'll need in the future. I don't mind carrying around two devices and I might just leave my cell at home except for bigger trips.

All right, got lots to do today and I should get to it instead of just gushing about silly toys.

Prelude to Lent

So I've decided on a simple Lent activity: go for a walk, take a picture, and post it in blog. I decided to go ahead and start it today even though Lent doesn't officially start until tomorrow. I did go on a walk Sunday but didn't take a picture and was feeling really under the weather yesterday so the real start is today. For now, I'll ignore the Sundays off idea. This will mean 45 walks, 45 pictures posted.

Reasons: I was spurred into thinking up something when Tom mentioned he was going to attempt veganism for Lent. I've been a big fan of adding rather than subtracting for Lent - instead of depriving myself of something, I'd *do* something. Even religiously, I still think it's appropriate since it's a way to mark the occasion and remind myself what it is every day. I promise not to get really "preachy" but this passage says it all:

"Lent is a time of stripping down to essentials, as each Christian focuses on his or her individual relationship with God. It is a time when Christians remember our baptisms, when Jesus washed away our sins, giving us newness of life to celebrate in the triumph of Palm Sunday and the glory of Easter." (http://www.sundayschoollessons.com/lent.htm)

It doesn't matter if I say anything else and there are times when I'm not going to be able to post it on the very day (such as on the cruise) but this will hopefully prove to be fruitful and fun. At the very least, it will be a way to initiate a post everyday and push me to go on walks more.

Today's photo was taking of the turning around point, Lake Michigan:

It was a damp cold (just below freezing) but strangely very little wind that I noticed only on the way back. I only saw a woman with a dog on the way there and on the way back (different pair each time). Most of the sidewalk was covered in snow (left from last week's storm) with patches of ice and bare pavement and I had to walk in the road for the last block. Since the sun was setting somewhere behind me with clouds in most of the sky except to the north, the lighting was neat when I was taking the picture but I only had my cellphone. The ice is kind of ugly with the brown tint but it was still cool to watch the water and ice. Now I'm off to prepare for my very first chicken roast!

Hodgepodge Entry featuring Aardvark, Snowman, Earthquake, Captel, Manuscripple, and Faces of America

Becca was here last weekend - definitely had good times, even (including?) getting lost driving in downtown Chicago. Went to the Lincoln Park Zoo on Friday where the highlight was Aardvark in a Barrel. Aardvarks! Who has seen an aardvark before? Did you know they can be incredibly cute?! We watched while this aardvark played with his blue barrel before curling up in it. I just had to upload the video I took to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIk0sm07l1w so you can see for yourself.

Saturday was a second visit to Brookfield Zoo (first for Colin) which happily turned out to be free admission for the day. It was colder and we ended up with only a couple hours to see things but the monkeys and apes were definitely a highlight. Then we bummed at a Caribou reading and sipping hot drinks until we went to meet up with the awesome Lenya for dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant. Then, all too soon, Becca had to leave to go back to her crazy busyness.

Apparently an earthquake started about 30 miles from here at 4 in the morning Tuesday, but everyone was so tired dealing with the load of snow (something like a foot?) that got dumped Monday that nobody noticed it. And it wasn't wimpy - 3.8 magnitude. Personally, I welcome the snow - it means people actually pay attention to their driving and don't get quite as impatient when you don't gun it the split second before the light turns green. Still had some idiots on the roads and everyone seems to be back to their normal driving habits now.

I've discovered a technology I wasn't aware of that is turning out to be quite useful. It's called web captel. Similar to TTY (which I've never used) except I get to talk out loud to the person on the other end and both read and hear what they say. Captions for telephones! It's not perfect - if you've ever been to live event or watched live news with captions you would have probably notice they lag a bit behind the speaking and sometimes have weird word combinations that are phonetically related to the word that was actually said. But it's still useful. I've only used Hamilton Web Captel but I'm going to try Sprint's since I've read that people like it better.

It's free and very simple to use, as long as you have a phone and a computer (with a web browser and internet connection). Go to https://web.hamiltoncaptel.com/index.asp. You have to sign in (easy signing up) and then put in your telephone number and the telephone number of the person you want to call then click "Call." It will dial you first then the other number and then you can look at the captions on the screen while talking. So far, you need an additional device (laptop or you can buy an additional special device to carry around with you) with one exception: you can call and read the captions on an iPhone.

Speaking of hearing-related technologies I've just tried, watching Sherlocke Holmes in the theatre last month was the first time I'd ever been able to utilize a captioning device in the theatres. They don't do it for all movies; apparently only one at any time ("It's Complicated" is captioned right now) but definitely a step up from any other theatre I've been to. It was harder to watch in the theatre than on the TV with captions since the captions are not right on the screen. You have wrestle with the mirror device so you can see the captions and then whenever you want to shift your position you have to move the device again. I felt like I missed quite a bit more of the actual visual parts of the movie but being able to follow along greatly made up for it.

And speaking of movies and TV, we watched "Faces of America" last night - PBS show following the genealogy of a handful of famous Americans including Yo-yo Ma, Meryl Streep, and Stephen Colbert. It was quite interesting; although there was nothing on how the information was actually found, it was a great way to hear stories connected to historical events such as the Holocaust and the Japanese Internment. Can't wait to see the next episode!

Still doing my personal genealogy research. Started looking at a branch that was in Michigan as early as 1850 but that we know little about. Definitely not as easy as looking for the Scandinavian roots when I found and connected with a cousin of my dad's who has done tons of research and there's a very active tree on geni.com (kind of like facebook for families).

A couple of silly things:

I'm still making my way through Julia Child's "My Life in France" and I run into words like "manuscripple" that I've never seen before but their meanings are clear. I searched for "manuscripple" using google and only found one hit - for an online copy of her book. She made this word up and it didn't catch on?? Imagine what would have happened if Shakespeare had used it. So now, here's to hoping google picks this entry up and displays it as the second result for "manuscripple."

There was an attempt to build a snowman today. Shaheli, Mike, and Fazal (some of Colin's coworkers) were corralled into this activity. However, the snow was too fluffy to actually pack into snowballs let alone roll into bigger balls. So we threw snow in a pile and patted it down, trying to make a mountain resemble a snowman. Then I snapped a picture (Fazal and Shaheli are on the left) with my phone before we went to get coffee and hot chocolate. Probably will get knocked down but oh well.

Look! I made a fail!

I noticed it in the local monthly newsletter last night and was excited to finally have something I could submit to fail (and it wasn't something stupid I'd done!).

link: http://cheezburger.com/View.aspx?aid=3169583616

Drawing hollow circles on pictures using GIMP

I rarely use the image editing tool automatically available in most flavors of Linux but I wanted to draw a circle on a photograph. Trying to figure out how to do this was tricky; GIMP is very powerful but it takes some real know-how and not just fiddling around to achieve specific results. It is a fun way to waste time and to see what crazy things you can do with a photo. Yet I figured, "How hard can it be to just draw a circle?"

Very hard, it turns out. I don't have a steady enough hand to draw a perfect circle using a mouse. So I tried the ellipse selection tool but was completely stumped on how to make the shimmering ellipse into a real circle with color. So it's off to Google to find instructions.
I tried all kinds of search terms - "circle" just told me how to make filled in circles; "bubble" told me how to make speech bubbles but were still filled in circles; "hollow" anything didn't help. I finally got help with "circle outline" from http://hubpages.com/hub/Creating-a-Rectangle-or-Rounded-Rectangle-Using-The-Gimp. And after I successfully created my circle thingy on my fail blog submission, I decided these instructions needed to be easier to find for anyone else who uses GIMP infrequently. Here is a quick guide for making a simple hollow circle.

*Note: Many mistakes can be undone by pressing ctrl + x. Deleting the layer will erase all the editing. If you're really stuck, try exiting Gimp without saving.*

1. Create a layer (Layer -> New Layer). For this task there's no need to adjust the layer settings but it would help to name the layer to something easy to recognize, such as "Circle." Having a layer will make it easy to delete any bad circles by just deleting the layer. Think of it like putting a sheet of glass over your image.
2. Click on the ellipse select tool in the toolbox (second from left in the top row).
3. Inside the image, drag the mouse to have the shimmering ellipse tool covering the desired area on the image - you can adjust the boundaries by hovering over any corner until the cursor becomes L-shaped and then dragging to resize.
4. Before you actually draw a line, click on the foreground color box in the toolbox to change it to whatever color you want the circle line to be.
5. Go to (Edit -> Stroke selection).
6. Here's where my instructions really differ from the link's. Leave it selected to "Stroke Line"; this allows you to decide how thick the line is (I find 15 to 20 pixels to be a good width).
7. Your hollow circle/ring/bubble should be visible on the photo!
8. If you try to leave it at that and save, you'll get error messages and it will ask to export. To avoid this, go to (Image -> Flatten Image). Carrying the glass sheet overlay metaphor further, flattening will seal or put anything that's on the layer right onto the image. You will now be able to save the image without the error messages or having to export anything.

I hope these instructions helped. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments.

This is pretty much how my mornings go

Got an email from Dad, saying that the site I found that had a picture of my grandpa with his dad and brothers was "neat." Also got an email from a relative I just found last night who invited me to be part of the family tree on geni.com. Yay! Then I got an email from Dad with some documents I have to print off and sign and got side-tracked from genealogy ...

Looked up suggestions on where the best place to use printing services would be and noticed that none of the stores list prices for individual prints. Found some other people complaining about this but no real suggestions except it usually starts at 10 cents a page for black and white. Then I decided I would just go to the library this afternoon and print what I needed for 10 cents a page. This is my default for printing from now on as long as it proves a good experience. I'll figure out what to do with color and other types of printing when it comes to that. Meanwhile, any of you have suggestions?

Following the "keeping cents of things" (just made that up for "saving money"), I checked to see what deals I could get on non-instant oatmeal which we need more of. Colin made an awesome multi-grain bread in the goodwill bread machine which uses oats this weekend and we definitely plan on making more. I found a coupon for 1 dollar off each 42 oz quaker oats I buy - and it's currently 1.39 each when I get five a jewel osco. So .39 cents each is really cool. Yippee!

coupon's here for one dollar off quaker, 42 oz oats or instant: http://www.quakeroats.com/DollarOffCouponBanner/default.aspx

I am not consistent in my coupon clipping, bargain hunting. I have noticed a strong correlation with how much else is going on in my life. But I only recently figured out some neat online "tricks." One is registering your Jewel Osco preferred card for ecoupons which are tailored to what you've bought in the past and if you buy that certain item you automatically get the savings at checkout. Didn't seem to work completely when I tried it last week - one item was deducted but another was not.

While doing a bit more searching for deals online, I found a neat list for deciding how to prioritize organic foods: http://www.foodnews.org/fulllist.php. This is determined by how much toxic stuff they can suck up while growing, from what I understand. For someone who is often torn between bargains and being nice to the earth, this is great.

Major annoyance: "Coupon printing is not supported on Linux ..." at coupons.com and so many other sites. This is NOT COOL. But since I don't have a printer at home, I'll just save the links and open them at the library to print them. This will also help me only print ones I think are really worth the hassle anyway.

Then I started browsing my neglected rss feeds and in the process found some fun things that I wanted to share (the things one learns from comics can be useful in such strange ways):

http://www.johnnywander.com/comics/140 spider plants are weird but cool

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123018405 - about the discovery of dino feathers and their colors! This is a link I found from another Johnny Wander comic.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon (If any of you don't already read The Oatmeal, now's a good time to start!)

Nasa on twitter: "Feb 1st is 7th anniversary of the Columbia accident."

Favorite postsecret: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwl7tUjQdDVwDttciNJ8RX9yq4bKrhw35qo6ACs1C1ssHKnIewb1itAQAPrFHaKKUl0GWVier9laI4ea4jyroG4FZwjhIGJytIYLHR6ltqSYe7PuBreMHLbb4qX1OqqLSwS-wxrCoxovf4/s400/spock2.jpg
In case you can't see it, the text reads: "After I shower and wrap a towel around my hair, and my eyebrows get pulled back, I like to pretend I'm a Vulcan." I honestly wonder if this is anyone I know ...

Bill Watterson on the 15th anniversary of the last Calvin and Hobbes strip:

Q: How soon after the U.S. Postal Service issues the Calvin stamp will you send a letter with one on the envelope?
A: Immediately. I'm going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription.
http://www.cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2010/02/bill_watterson_creator_of_belo.html

Even though we ate a big breakfast and I'm not feeling hungry, we need to go get lunch now that it's already 1:30 pm ... need to finish making sure I've got all the docs I need to print on the usb drive and go get Colin.