:TESTO:Having written the following in a "what's up in your world" response-email to Erik, I thought I'd share it here, for general updation. i trust Erik will not feel slighted by the impersonality of sharing my email to him with y'all (of which he comprises roughly 20%, I think). If he does, I shall send him cookies from the surface of the curve in apology, which I might do anyways. But don't tell him, it shall be a secret. Remind me that he doesn't like walnuts, in case I forget.

How are things with me, indeed? You asked me that a while ago, and I never answered.
Besides the evermore mead-related blog news, life continues much as it always has in the Shire.

I'm teaching well, and my students continue to learn useful things and don't hate me... it's encouraging. I am doing what I can to avoid the bureaucracy to which I am incumbent, as the most senior teacher of my subject - budgets and orders and supervisors, oh my - but I must do it, to maintain and better the teaching. I really, really dislike bureaucracy.

Liz and Nat had their engagement party yesterday, which was full of people. I had spent the previous two hours wandering along a lakeside in the woods, so I was well steeled against that whelming context. In fact, it was mostly fun. Today I saw my housemate and her poetry gang perform poetry, music, and beatboxing in response to certain pieces from the new exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum, and I flirted with a lovely young lady, which I have not done in quite some time, and ought to do more of.

Jo and Nathan are nearby in outer DC, and it's nice to have additional people that I know within thwacking distance. We had a dinner party, like grownups do, only with less tables and better food. I successfully overturned a pear-upside-down cake for that event, during the implementation of which cake I proved to myself the continuity of the surface of edibility/deliciousness in the flour-egg-milk-sugar* phase space, containing my corn bread, my pancakes (with and without cornmeal, to varying degrees of egginess), my scandinavian crepelike things, my mutant scrambled-pancake-eggs, and the twice aforementioned marvelous fluffy dessert item. The notion remains qualitative, but I strongly suspect I could identify appropriate and delicious ratios for remaining ingredients, given any reasonably valued starting set.

I've also been making the Mandelbrot set play music, and have memorized the Fibonacci sequence through 10816. Sometimes the walk home can be boring...

Yes, that's about it.



*this is a convenient abstraction. The true space is more like (flour-cornmeal)-(milk-yogurt)-butter-(sugar-honey-syrup-molasses)-(bakingPowder-bakingSoda)-temperature-duration, but that ruined the flow of the sentence, and in fact does not line-wrap in this blogging-engine. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:
Rock.

The new mead's name is set, the label drafted.
Although I fear the cloves may be overmuch for a casual drink, Thunder! will certainly suit special-occasion drinking.

(I haven't yet directly compared this new one to the original Midnight Mead label, but I hope the impression is of emboldened evolution of a recognizable figure. Level 30, indeed.) :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I have a cell-phone. I'm a cyborg now, just like the rest of you. If you're reading this and don't have my number yet, mail me and I'll get it to you.

Observations:

• The word-prediction engine for text entry doesn't know troglodyte, but does know deliciousness
  
• My limping desktop speakers chatter when the phone is nearby and transmitting data.
• The central "Click Me" button connects to the wireless-intertron-service thing when on the primary screen, and unless one clicks Cancel very quickly, an accidental click can cost a penny.
• I have not been granted abnormal strength or concealed laser weapons. This is a disappointment.

---

Batch #3 out of Heorot Labs was started today, of the strong delicious robust buckwheat honey. It will not be Mad Doctor Hrothgar's Thyme Lord, nor will it be Mad Doctor Hrothgar Presents "Story Thyme". 1.5 oz of sage and 4 whole cloves season this mead, so I may call it Buckwheat Sage (with an antlered+bearded silhouette, and cloven hooves of course), or (seasonally) The Fall of Heorot, or (for its color is dark and its taste is bold) Thunder. Or something else. Names are a joy to me. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Against the darkness, lightning flashed green in the god's eyes. It looked upon a vial of rolling storm and shape, a dense speck hanging in the void. The emerald gaze of the god was fixed upon two figures deep within it, clinging to a shell within an endless succession of shells, each one but one of billions that crawled across the next greater surface. Each dot that scurried was a world to itself, barely aware of the shell it moved on, scarcely apprehending the universes that moved within. The god marveled at the growth, the endless complexity of this forgotten experiment, an idle twist of rules and patterns that had passed in eons and moments to... this.

It winced at a buzz in what we shall call its ears, a tiny Horton-hears-a-who sort of sound, and peered closely at the pair that stood upon that tiny husk. The god surmised that these two shells had broken that barrier of awareness, had attained a complete comprehension of their place and relation among the hulled specks, within and without and to the very reaches of their test-tube world. Beyond the furthest stars, within the most minute of the parts of particles, lay the void, and there winced the god. They had achieved a harmony with the whole of creation, and they hummed in tune with it.

With a blink, the tiniest burst of green fire, the figures were silenced, and the god was once again at peace.

---

Nothing great, just a spinoff of a dream last night. I think there was a little more dialogue between the god and the two who turn out to be Adam and Eve, and there may have been a local god who was the target of the outer god's wrath, and something involving RNA. This leads into the rest of the dream, which featured a charismatic religion (claiming god's true purpose for humanity was encoded in our RNA) which turned out to be a front for evil aliens that force-grew their converts and conscripts into giant mutant bug-soldiers, to fight a distant space war, and the corresponding movie-hero resistance fighter who hid in the wilderness and ultimately failed, but nobly.

---

Today I shall get some corks, and bottle Patent #990: Method for Enduring a Siege. I may even begin the next batch straightaway, for I'm quite excited by the honey I bought at the rennaissance festival, a strong and hearty buckwheat. I'm thinking thyme would go nicely, or sage, or maybe the rest of the heather. The name possibilities for a thyme-based mead are endless, Mad Doctor Hrothgar's Thyme Lord (and a picture of a Tardis) first among them. It would be foolish, of course, to choose ingredients purely for the names they'll allow, but it does tip the scales a bit.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I think my neighbors must have a distant T-rex stalking them, or they're playing video games.

In any case, the impact tremors (deep and periodic, about 3 seconds apart) are beginning to bug the I-want-to-sleep-now me.

-Me. :ENDTESTO: