Darkoshi

It is such a gorgeous warm sunny day today. This whole so-called winter has been relatively warm. Other than a few cold nights and cool days, it hasn't even felt like winter.

The pink magnolia tree started blooming this week. The blooms don't usually last more than a week or two. Based on photos, in prior years it bloomed in early to late March. So this year is a full month earlier than usual, unless the years in which I didn't take photos had earlier blooms too.





The fragrant yellow jessamine on the fence is also already blooming.

There is a bush at Qiao's house, which I've been curious to know what kind of plant it is. It has thin stalks, some with reddish blossoms and some with white (unless the white ones are a different kind of bush). It started blooming right at the beginning of February, even before the pink magnolia. In the summer, it gets roundish green fruit that look like plum-sized small apples. They are surprising to see, because the thin stalks don't seem like they could support such relatively big fruit, yet they do. The fruit smells and tastes like bitter apples (too bitter to eat). So it's probably some apple variant. It doesn't look like what Google Images shows for crab-apples, though.

After doing some searches, my best guess is that it is a shrub quince, even though the fruit is green rather than yellow, and more apple-shaped than quince-shaped.



( More photos... )

There are these "Botija" black dried pitted olives which are very expensive (I got the first packet on sale). But they are so good that I subsequently bought a 2nd packet at full price. If I had to describe the flavor, it would be "bitter, salty, oily", which doesn't *sound* particularly appealing. But they do appeal. Especially together with the chewy texture, and the fact that I can eat them with my fingers, without my fingers getting wet.

Eating them late at night doesn't help with a case of acid reflux though.

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One of the things I like about Lantana is how the flowers go away but keep coming back all summer long, even up through now in November.

I'd been wanting to make these green tea cupcakes ever since Qiao gave me the fabulous vegan cupcake cookbook. I finally bought the essential ingredient - matcha green tea powder - last year, but didn't get around to actually trying out the recipe until last week. The cupcakes turned out soft, fluffy, and super-duper yummy, even without any marzipan flowers on top.

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It is blackberry season. I've seen people gathering berries along the roads. On the way home from work today, I stopped by a patch and picked some myself. I'm glad I stopped at the place I did, as 2 other people were already stopped by the larger patches further down the road which I passed by later. As it was, after stopping my car where I did, it took me a while to gather my courage to get out of the car. I had a silly fear that someone would come out of the commercial building whose driveway I was parked in, and accuse me of stealing their berries. From the car, I couldn't even tell if there were any ripe berries in this patch. But I finally got out, and got me some lovely berries.

Thin dress pants aren't suitable attire for blackberry picking. A branch snagged my pants and tore out a few threads before I managed to get free. Denim would have been better.

After getting home, I checked the bushes across the street and picked some more berries there too. But those were tiny compared to the others.

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I remedied the pinholes in the curtain black-out liners by using fusible web to iron on extra strips of black-out fabric over the seam lines.

The black-out fabric and/or the fusible web gives off fumes while ironing it at the necessary heat level. But at least those fumes were temporary.

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Knoppix! I created a live disk and used it to boot my laptop to Linux. Neat! The last time I created a similar live disk and tried it on my old computer, I never got the internet working as that would have required finding and installing the necessary wireless drivers. But this Knoppix live CD had everything I needed - my wi-fi and internet worked, as did my external mouse and keyboard.

I was using Linux in order to reformat a 256 GB flash drive as FAT32. Windows didn't let me do it. Linux did.

The reason for reformatting the flash drive is a story for another time.

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Partially inspired by this post by gfish, as well as articles such as this one, I've been trying to do more work standing up.

When we moved buildings, I was given a 2nd monitor. Rather than position it side-by-side with my other monitor, I put it on my cubicle's shelf, after moving the shelf down a few notches. That puts the top monitor at a fairly good height for me to use while standing. So now I have one monitor on my desk to use while sitting, and another on the shelf to use while standing. I can position my mouse higher by using a small stack of books. But I can't really get the keyboard high enough to be very comfortable while standing.

I was thinking that rather than moving the monitor and accessories up and down, it would be simpler to have everything up high, and to have a high chair. Then everything would be at the right height whether I was sitting or standing. Maybe someday.

For now, I can only manage to stand for a few minutes at a time before I start feeling tired/uncomfortable, or before I feel the need to sit down to do something that takes my full attention. Working while standing is sort of like trying to write with my left hand - I can do it, but at a slower pace and with more frustration.

Sometimes I stand in a spread-leg or horse-riding position, which brings my torso low enough to comfortably use the lower monitor and keyboard. But I don't do that for long either, as it makes my feet tired, and I feel self-conscious about looking weird to anyone who walks by.

Then again, I do full-body stretches in my cubicle a few times a day, which surely is a strange sight to see, too.

Fried pickles at Bean Vegan Cuisine, in Charlotte NC.



Peanut butter cheesecake, from same location. The coconut whip cream on top was a little smooshed from being in a to-go container.



The above was delicious, but the mocha chocolate chip cheesecake at Eden - A Vegan Cafe in Scranton, PA, was arguably even more scrumptious.

Bright cloud:



Cloudy sky in Hartford, CT:



Oranges in vending machine! (A bit hard to see, due to reflections.)

I made another cucumber soup; this one included apple and avocado (the recipe is after all the photos. I didn't include the salmon, and used less vegetable stock.). It was good.

At the grocery store, there was a sign labeled "mango blood orange" right by a bunch of what looked like clementines. There weren't any oranges or mangos in that section. Intrigued, I bought some of the clementine-looking fruit. They weren't expensive.

I just ate one. It looked like a fairly normal tangerine on the inside, with seeds. The flavor is somewhat different though, and I suppose one could call it slightly mango-ish. I wonder if any of the others have darker flesh, like a normal blood orange.

I did a web search on "mango blood orange", but didn't find any fruit by that name. That is curious.

Hmmm. It isn't April Fool's day yet, so it doesn't seem likely to have been a joke by a store employee.


The web-search did bring up a page which mentioned an avocado - mango - blood orange soup, which sounds good. Unfortunately, a recipe was not included.

However, I did find another tasty sounding dish with a recipe - Avocado, Mango, and Pineapple Salad with Pistachios and Pickled Shallots

I got quite sick to my stomach last night. The most likely culprit seems the prickly pears. I guess that ends my adventure with wild cactus fruit. It's a pity; the violet pink juicy juice was so pretty. I'd like to have a carpet that color for my bedroom. I will look up whether I can find any good-quality hot pink carpets for sale.

I seem to be a tad more impulsive than usual of late. I wonder if it is due to the Pristiq.

I'm staying home from work today due to still feeling achy and feverish when I woke up this morning. But I'm working from home, off and on. I'm never quite sure where the boundary lies between being too sick to work or not. I'm not in bed delirious with a high fever. I'm up and about; a bit slower than usual, but still up and about. So I guess I should be working. The only food that seems slightly appetizing at the moment is dry toasted white bread; that indicates I'm still sick. I feel like replacing the phone outlet*; that indicates that I'm healthy enough to work. If I'm up to replacing a phone outlet (as well as up to writing an LJ post), surely I'm up to working; therefore I should be working and not replacing a phone outlet. Sigh.

*When the telephone repair person came to replace the ancient phone box with a new one which has a test jack, apparently he also replaced one of the inside phone outlets. (He came while I was on my Germany trip, so I wasn't able to watch what he did.)(Maybe that was his excuse for charging the $100, when replacing the box was supposed to be done for free - I'm fairly sure that the phone line problem I had after that storm was due to the wiring in the ancient box, not due to any problem with the wiring in the outlets.) Yesterday while testing all the phone outlets in the house, troubleshooting where the static on my line comes from, I noticed that the phone jack in that new outlet was full of goopy glue. So much so that it is hard plugging the phone into the jack. After trying unsuccessfully to get the goopy glue out yesterday, I decided it would be easier to just replace the whole outlet. So not only was I charged $100 in what seems an unfair manner, but the person messed up one of my outlets, so I have to go thru the trouble of replacing it again myself! It doesn't seem worth the trouble to complain to the phone company and to try to get them to come and fix their mistake without charging me again. I also don't trust their competence much at this point. (Squirting so much goopy glue in the outlet that it filled up the jack! Jeesh! Why did they even need to put any glue in there??)

But the static in the line is there even when using the test jack, which indicates that problem is on their end of the wiring. So I'll have to call them out again to fix that, unless it's a simple problem with the ground wire which I might be able to figure out myself, when it stops raining and dries up enough outside for me to go and take a look.

Hoo-ray for e-Bay. I found climate control knobs for my car there, which I couldn't find anywhere else. I had bought a generic 3-piece assortment at an auto store, which had one knob that looked exactly right, but turned out to be about a millimeter too narrow on the stem. Since my knobs broke, I haven't been able to even turn on the fan to clear the windshield when it fogs up. Hopefully the new ones will fit and won't break.

I bought a nice-looking dragon fruit at a new Asian market in town, as well as a bunch of leek flowers.