the bouncey zone

It happens twice every year, spring and fall. First I have a little trouble hearing. Then my inner ears feel like they’re on fire, my sinuses hurt, and stuff starts draining down my throat. The throat irritation often causes me to lose my voice. My joints start to ache. After a day or two the flood gates open into my nose, and a forest of innocent trees must perish to keep the mucus contained.

After “the snots” comes the chest infection. Sometimes I go visit my doctor at that point. If it really turns out to be an infection, he’ll write a prescription or two. In any case, though, he always gives me the same well-rehearsed advice: Drink plenty of fluids. Get some rest. Maybe take some sudafed.

Today I’m at the snot stage. It doesn’t seem anywhere near as bad as last time. Taking the doctor’s advice in advance, I’ve been doing some experiments with oral rehydration mixtures. My current best is from a recipe that I found somewhere on the internet:

– 1 liter of water
– 3 tablespoons sugar
– 1/4 teaspoon salt

This tastes good! It’s also very soothing for the throat. I’ve gulped down several liters of this combination (or something similar) in the past couple days. Note that adding a sugar-free lemonade flavoring packet actually makes it much more irritating.

A while ago I watched “The Plague”, a show about the Black Death recorded from the History Channel last night. Imagine two hours of coughing and sniffling both on TV and in the audience… Now I’m watching TV shows about Halloween.

At the rate things are going, I should be feeling much better by this evening.

Here’s a breakfast recipe that I’ve been working on. It tastes like a sweet Christmas or Thanksgiving dessert.

Bring these ingredients bring to a boil together over high heat:

– 1 cup steel cut oats
– 1 cup cracked wheat
– 7 cups water
– 1 cup raisins
– 1 cup cranberry “raisins”
– 1/2 tsp salt
– 1 tsp ground ginger
– 2 tsp cinnamon powder

Reduce heat to medium and continue to simmer. After 15 minutes, turn heat off and stir in the sweeteners:

– 1 cup brown sugar
– 10 packets of Splenda (sucralose)

Let stand until cool enough to eat. Feeds four if they’re very hungry. It also reheats nicely the next day.

I added several more pics of Scott to the photo gallery this morning.

The 2 pound test batch of canola/coconut soap had too much lye. Here’s what I did to salvage the batch last saturday…

First I grated the soap into powder. At first I used a small metal cheese grater, but that took too long. Switching to the hand blender sped up the grating a lot.

Next, I melted the powder with these in a double boiler:

– 2.5 oz canola oil
– 1.5 oz coconut oil
– about 4 oz water

When it had the consistency of canned pudding, I stirred in 1 oz of lavender essential oil. Then I poured it all into a box lined with paper. The box was from a Sam’s container of Splenda packets, by the way. This time all measurements were done with a digital postal scale.

About 36 hours later, which was monday morning, I cut it into 12 bars. Each bar was about 3.5 oz at cutting time. The consistency, appearance, and stickiness reminded me of white fudge. I got some on my hands; when washing off it lathered quite nicely.

For my next batch I might make a cylindrical mold from cheap 3″ PVC pipe. By my calculations, I’ll need a pair of two-foot sections to make molds for 7-8 pounds of soap. I saw some round soaps at the local health food store that should be about the same size after curing. (Soap shrinks a bit while it cures.) They looked nice.

I’m also looking into options for bulk essential oils and fragrances. Scented oils are horribly expensive at the health food store. Adding that ounce of lavender almost quadrupled the cost of the test batch! Some online sources look more promising.

All this talk of ounces, pounds, inches, and feet feels very strange to me. I got used to the metric system in my science classes and never really looked back. Metric almost always simplifies the math, so maybe I’ll convert my soap recipes sometime. At least I’m not quoting tablespoons and drops.

(Because several people have asked: No, I haven’t watched Fight Club yet. Apparently it has some soapy content.)

This week I started re-importing my music CD collection into my PC. Previously I had been doing this on my iBook, using iTunes to manage track/artist/album information and LAME for the MP3 encoding. Now I’m using Sound Juicer on Ubuntu Linux, and the format is FLAC.

Why? Simple answer: Disk space. I finally figured out that I have enough of it.

FLAC is lossless. After compression and decompression with FLAC, a music track has exactly the same data as when it started. Other formats, such as MP3 and WMA, lose information along the way. Most of us don’t really hear this loss. Thus, a properly encoded MP3 file sounds almost as good as the original uncompressed version, but it uses a lot less disk space.

The problem is, what if I change my mind later? What if my music is encoded at 128 kbps and I decide to try 192 kbps instead? (That’s my situation.) What if you want to go from WMA to Ogg Vorbis? Every time music is encoded and decoded, it loses some of the original data — and each encoder loses something different. To have the best quality with a new sound format, we must re-import our original CDs. That’s a slow, tedious process.

Because FLAC is a perfect copy, it can be converted cleanly to other formats without going back to the CD. If I archive all of my tunes as FLAC files, re-encoding the entire music collection is just a matter of running one program and then going off to take a nap.

There are two problems with this. First, we have to know where to find the program that converts the whole music library. I don’t know offhand what to use for that. Worst case, I can write my own perl script to coordinate things between the usual command-line converters. I don’t think this will be too hard.

The second problem is disk space. FLAC files are compressed about 50% from the original. In practice, this means a little under 3 CDs per gigabyte. (Pimsleur language CDs compress to about half that size, due to the long pauses between phrases.) I don’t have enough room on my iBook to make a habit of this.

My PC, on the other hand… I allocated 20 gigs for Windows, 16 for Linux, and the rest (about 75-80 gigs) for bulk storage. That’s enough unallocated space for at least 200 music CDs, far more than I actually own. That leaves plenty of disk space and processing power to convert everything to whatever “lossy” format I want afterward.

So how do I import the CDs? The standard install of Ubuntu Linux has the right tools. As I said in the first paragraph, Sound Juicer will do the job quite nicely. Ubuntu doesn’t include MP3 support, but that part can be added easily enough. I figured out how to do it the other day.

The main difficulty with the current setup was getting write access on the big FAT32 storage partition. But that’s another story.

Last weekend was Protectorate, a Society for Creative Anachronism event managed by the Barony of Namron in the Kingdom of Ansteorra. For those who don’t know about such things, this involved dressing up in pre-1600 attire and spending the weekend at Camp Cimarron. Some people were riding horses, and others were wearing armor and beating each other with duct-taped sticks. At night there was drumming, dancing, singing, and story-telling.

Most of the time I was doing two things — showing off little Scott, who by the way is SO CUTE in light brown colors, and handing out samples of homemade mead. I didn’t bring much to give away, just two 750ml bottles, so I had to choose who would try it and then track them down. Thus I was able to get opinions from people whose judgment I trust without having to bring very much. It also meant running back and forth across the campground several times, so I got some exercise too.

One bottle was well-aged concord grape pyment made using Barat’s recipe. The other bottle was the same thing, but with black cherry concentrate instead of Welch’s grape. After reading labels and doing the math, I had discovered that the two juice concentrates have roughly the same amount of sugar. I think it might be an industry standard.

The consensus was that grape is good, black cherry is better, and I should make more of both. I’m looking for a bulk supplier of black cherry concentrate. It’s a little on the expensive side when bought in small bottles at the local health food store. Some bright marketer decided that black cherry is a miracle supplement and priced it accordingly.

Yesterday and today I’m doing laundry. Three blankets and two cloaks smelled like campfire smoke when we got home. The nights were chilly, though, so I’m glad we brought them.

I made soap!

This shouldn’t be very surprising. I already make my own mead, preserves, soups, and occasionally bread. Soap follows a similar theme. I’ve been planning this for a long time.

I started a thread about this first batch on the Latherings forum. My message there assumed that the reader already knows how to make soap. For everyone else, I’ll include more about the soap-making process as we go.

My recipe started with the Favorite Castile/No Palm Oil recipe on Kathy Miller’s web site. I scaled the ingredients down to 25% and replaced the relatively expensive olive oil with canola. Here’s a list:

… 18.5 oz canola oil
… 3.5 oz coconut oil
… 3 oz Red Devil lye crystals
… 6.5 oz ice-cold water

Soapmaking involves the use of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye. I know how to make lye the old-fashioned way from rain water and wood ashes, but I’d rather not. It sounds too much like work.

Finding a local source for pure lye crystals was quite an adventure. I went to Home Depot, two Wal-Marts, Dollar Tree, Super Target, and Sam’s with no luck. Apparently pure lye has fallen into disrepute among the big retailers, due to a combination of its use in meth production and the drain-cleaner industry’s general trend towards gels and liquids. The brand most often mentioned in recipes, Red Devil, has been reported recently to be out of production.

Finally I found some Red Devil crystals at Albertsons. Later I found it at the IGA around the corner too. If the rumors about Red Devil are true, I might have to look into other options. Anyone know of a wholesale NaOH supplier in central Oklahoma…?

The coconut oil came from Wal-Mart. Fascinating stuff. Its melting point is somewhere between our programmable thermostat’s day and night settings. One day it was a solid, and the next it was a liquid! It tastes like Crisco.

I bought the canola oil at Sam’s. Nothing special about it, really, other than its low price. I like cooking with it.

Mixing the ingredients reminded me of chemistry class. First I sprinkled the lye crystals into the cold water in a Pyrex measuring cup. Immediately the water’s temperature shot up from a hair above freezing to 170 deg F. I set it aside to cool off.

Next, I poured the two oils together in a stainless steel saucepan. (It was the bottom half of my double boiler, one of the few pots actually labeled “stainless steel”. I’ve been told that lye does Bad Things to aluminum.) Turning on the stove, I heated the oil mixture until it stopped looking like a swirl of two different oils. At that point it was about 150 deg.

I ran off and did something else for a while. When I came back, both containers had cooled off enough. The oil was about 100 deg and the lye was down to about 115. I slowly poured the lye into the oil and stirred it with a plastic spoon.

And stirred, and stirred… The mixture started to turn into a golden milky slime. It got thicker and cloudier as the stirring continued. The plan was to stir until “trace”. I’m not sure how to explain what exactly that means. The test involved drizzling a spoonful of the mixture across the rest. If the drizzled substance stayed visible for several seconds, it was trace.

After 45 minutes of stirring I was bored silly. I took a 10 minute break and came back. The mixture had settled into a soapy layer with a layer of oil on top. I started to stir it again, and some of the oil splashed out of the pan. I scooped it up with my finger.

Looked like oil.
Felt like oil.
Smelled like oil.
Tasted like the terminals on a fresh 9V battery…

After swishing cold water for a few minutes and drinking something slightly acidic, I decided that I shouldn’t worry about having too little lye. I resumed stirring.

An hour and a half had passed since mixing oil and lye. No sign of the “trace” condition. I was bored again.

Out came the electric wand blender. With that, the mixture went from milky to “trace” within a minute. The lesson: Modern technology is good.

I poured the soapy slime into a plastic velveeta box lined with wax paper. (The box really says “velveeta” in big letters.) The lid snapped on, and for extra insulation it went into the wand blender’s original cardboard box.

The next morning it was white, almost solid, and smelling pleasantly soapy. 24 hours after that I pulled it from the mold and cut it into inch-thick slices. The plan is to “cure” the bars for 2 to 6 weeks before testing.

There could be one small problem. Remember how the recipe called for 3 oz of lye? Well, my kitchen scale is analog, not digital, and each ounce mark is about a millimeter apart. Maybe it was 3 ounces. Maybe it was 3.5 instead. I don’t really know.

That half ounce makes a big difference in pH for a batch this size. If all went to plan, the soap will be firm and mild. If not, it’ll be harsh and crumbly, and it’ll have to be melted and remolded with more oil. I’ll have to do some tests to be sure. Either way, I’m looking into getting a more precise digital scale. It won’t cost much.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy soapmaking is. It’s about as hard as making a pot of soup and freezing the leftovers. I’m already planning molds and cutters for a larger batch.

Any suggestions for color and fragrance?

My natural wake-up time is quite late, typically around 9:30 plus or minus an hour. I’ve always had trouble waking up early. The one exception was at OSSM, where I shared a bathroom with about 10-15 other teenage boys. I didn’t want to stand in line for a sink, so I woke up around 5:30 every morning to beat the crowd. In college I went back to oversleeping.

Last week I started an experiment. I’ve been trying to wake at 6:00 every morning, even on weekends. After getting out of bed I immediately brush my teeth (it helps me stay awake). Then I go to bed at night when I’m sleepy, not at any specific time.

The goal here is to have a few more hours every day to do things. Most days I have time to bathe, eat a decent breakfast, and do something useful (like washing dishes) before Scott wakes. Some days I just get my email out of the way first thing. I’m still working on the routine that follows waking up, trying to figure out what works best. But at least I’m awake.

For the article that inspired this, look at Steve Pavlina’s blog.

We saw Serenity on Saturday. I liked it. Without spoiling much for those who haven’t seen it yet, my main complaint was that it wasn’t long enough. It needed to be a TV mini-series. Given the 2 hour time limit, I thought they did a pretty good job.

I also had some technical and philosophical gripes with centralized camera monitoring and wave spamming on an extended solar system scale. But never mind, it’s just a movie. Go watch it for yourself.

You don’t have to have seen all of the Firefly episodes for the movie to make sense, but it really helps.

When we last visited my PC, it was in an unbootable state. Ubuntu Linux had died in the middle of installation, but not before lobotomizing the boot loader. Windows was inaccessible as a side effect.

I’ve had this problem with Linux before. The easiest solution is to install it again, but successfully. That’s what I did.

The Ubuntu Linux installer that I had used last time was version 5.04. This time I used the Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy Badger” Preview Release installer. It worked.

After installing, rebooting, automatically installing more things, and rebooting again, it was ready to use. Or rather, ready to download updates. The update process is similar to how it’s done on Mac OS X and Windows 2000. There were many updates, and another reboot afterwards because the kernel had been updated. It politely explained all of this with only the minimum necessary technical jargon.

Then it was ready to use. Overall, it was easier than installing Windows. In fact, even arranging the disk partition table myself (there’s an option to do that automatically), this was the easiest Linux installation I’ve ever done.

The included programs work pretty well. It has a good selection of programs for office, internet, and entertainment uses. At the same time, it doesn’t appear to have the triple-redundancy bloat common to other Linux distributions. Most distributions assume that any program you might want to try someday should be installed, along with all competing programs. Ubuntu seems a little more selective than that.

I haven’t tested it for security or MP3 encoding yet. Nor have I tried to install additional programs. These are important to me, so the jury’s still out on whether Ubuntu is worth keeping. So far I’m feeling optimistic.