Collie's Bestiary

Passing thoughts during the days which bubble up between readings: Crockpots Crockpots are incredibly cool! While I'm familiar with them, I'd never used them to any extent before. For fun and relaxation, and to improve my cooking, I've decided to make one crockpot meal and one casserole dish per week. Last week I made "Sunshine [...]

We have roofrats! OK, not really. The new landlords decided we need a new roof, so they informed us late Saturday night via email that the roofers were scheduled to arrive at 7:30AM Monday morning. I'm not wild about the fact that the roofers are scheduled to be here all week as well, especially since [...]

What causes a feeling of community? What creates a coherent sub-culture? Both my housemates play on the on-line multiple-player game City of Heroes, which is being startlingly abruptly shut down by NCSoft, the Korean company that bought the game some years ago. Watching my housemates, I find myself faintly surprised at the real distress I [...]

Okay, this posting is going to be a not-so-quick recap of stuff I want to keep track of for my yard work, and I'll keep adding to it as I learn more stuff to do. I'll work more on the compost idea later; for now, some very useful URLs: the National Wildlife Federation's Garden for [...]

More Arcosanti photos; click on the thumbnails for a larger, clearer version of each photo. Also, you can read my thoughts on Arcosanti here, for more background, and see more photos at the end of that article. Enjoy! :)

Photos are at the end of this article; all are clickable for larger versions. You will need to use the Back button on your browser to return to this page. Enjoy! :) Arcosanti was designed in the 70's by Paolo Soleri, who dreamed of ecologically friendly cities. His soaring design precludes cars, integrates multiple levels [...]

Now I'm safe home, I'm having occasional amusing muscle-memory lapses. Driving my housemates' cars, for example (both of which are significantly smaller than Dark Star), I find myself reaching to the wrong place for the gear shift — or I wonder with some alarm how someone can drive with their butt so close to the [...]

Once a week we usually have some friends over for dinner and gaming or video-watching. For the night falling on Hallowe'en week I decided to celebrate a bit with a special recipe: Rat on a Stick! Here it is in all its delightfully messy glory: Rat on a Stick Ingredients: 1 to 1-1/2 lbs. ground [...]

Spent most of yesterday in a state of carefully controlled panic. I've been desperately working on finishing my late papers for last quarter — thank goodness for being able to "pre-load" WP with my reviews and Bestiaries! So I have a desktop with Word 2007, the latest version, on it… and a nice but very [...]

Originally written December 2003: more of a grumble than usual… As you probably don't know, by profession I am a web site designer. I take pride in my work, as I assume most competent craftspeople do. However, recently I've had the most incredible frustration in my job — on this very web site! — due [...]