I am with Mister Pants in so digging these pie charts.

Ethel the Blog, after careful thought and analysis, has identified the Big Mole in this don’t-miss post about Russian infiltration of the CIA.

There’s a karaoke & nacho party happening at my house right this moment. Come on over. The gin’s on me.

All week long, it’s been sunny and hitting the low seventies. Of course, I’ve been in my office, and it’s been dark by the time I get home. It’s now Friday afternoon, so of course it’s clouding up and the temperature’s dropping. The forecast calls for rain all weekend (with highs in the 40s!), then sunny and warm for next workweek. At this rate, it’ll be August before I get my garden in. What I ought to do is get me a weekend job that pays the same as what I make now, so I can quit my current job, enjoy the sunny weekdays, and work during the cold rainy weekends. Arglebargle.

Try to imagine the most sugary-sweet lyrics you can. It won’t come close to these:

You’re my Honeybunch, Sugarplum Pumpy-umpy-umpkin, You’re my Sweetie Pie You’re my Cuppycake, Gumdrop Snoogums-Boogums, You’re the Apple of my Eye And I love you so and I want you to know That I’ll always be right here And I love to sing sweet songs to you Because you are so dear!

Now try to imagine the most amazingly cute three year old girl voice singing, and you won’t come close to matching the sound clips found at Cuppycake.com. If you’d prefer a different path to cuteness, try cuppycake’s official MP3 site. There, you can hear the same song in its original format: a country arrangement complete with three part harmonies.

It rained most of the weekend, so I wasn’t able to do much garden work like I wanted. I’ve got peas in the ground, but there should already be lettuces and a few others there as well. The current forecast for the rest of the week, including next weekend, calls for rain too. I should be glad, since we really need it, but I hate sitting in an office while it’s nice out (sunny and in the 70’s yesterday and today) and have it rain during the only chance I have to be outside. But I digress. Instead of gardening, I finished the chicken coop. Thanks to my experience designing and building theater sets, I was able to take pictures from my head, translate them into pictures on paper, and translate that into a real physical object. And all with a minimum of fuss. I’ve decided that’s a very handy skill to have, and I’ll work on refining it further. I also made another half-gallon of yoghurt, replacing what I ate last week. Last week it was mixed with various berries. So far this week, I’ve been enjoying it with a bit of pure maple syrup mixed in. Mighty tasty. I also made a few pounds of cottage cheese, and it was by far my best ever. Let me explain how to make cottage cheese. It’s very easy, and if you like store-bought, you’ll go crazy for your own. I started with two gallons of milk, store-bought, one whole and the other two percent. I heated it up to 85 degrees F in a stainless steel pan submerged in a larger pan filled with water. This double-boiler prevents the milk from scorching on the stove. When it reached temp, I added a mesophillic bacteria culture. The bacteria, obtainable from a cheesemaking supply company, eats away at the lactose in the milk, turning it to lactic acid. This, along with a few other minor chemical processes, “ripens” the milk, changing its taste and thickens it a bit. I let it ripen for about an hour, which was longer than I had before. I kept the temperature constant by wrapping both pans with towels and turning the heat on when necessary. Then, I added rennet. Rennet was originally an enzyme found in the stomach of a young calf, but today vegetable rennet is readily available. You can certainly get it from the same place you get your bacteria, but I got mine at a local natural foods store. Let the rennet work for about an hour, again keeping the temperature steady. This will solidify the milk into a single curd. It will look like the milk has gelled. I like large curd cottage cheese, so I sliced the curd into half-inch cubes with a long knife. You could make smaller cubes if you want to. The cubes will be very soft, but they’ll hold their shape. As you cut, the curd will start to release whey, a greenish-yellow liquid. At this step, we could really be making just about any hard cheese – cheddar, swiss, colby, etc. – but to make cottage cheese we’ll slowly cook the curds in their own whey. Raise the temperature to 115 degrees very slowly, taking at least an hour to go from 85 to 115. Then, keep the temperature more or less steady until the curd gets to the texture you desire, about a half hour. These higher temperatures will draw the proteins in the curd closer together, expelling more whey and toughening the curd. They will shrink as they do this. When done, ladle out, drain (cheesecloth, naturally, is perfect for this), and refrigerate. And enjoy. I got into cheesemaking for the fresh mozzarella, but I’m staying for the cottage cheese. It is incredible.

Things at work are beyond busy right now. I finally released the new version of our software today (six weeks late, but that wasn’t my doing… and as it turns out, it is better for it). Released it to the first lucky customer. There will be another one tomorrow, and one major upgrade Friday. And more to follow, lickety split. It’s a complicated affair, a major upgrade that is much more than uploading new files. And, at a time when the competition was just showing signs of catching up to us, it puts us a generation ahead, again. It’s a good place to be.

What? What!? You’ve never seen someone buy a few cases of girl scout cookies before? Sheesh! (By the by, you can freeze the Thin Mints. Throw a few in a blender with milk and fine ice cream, and you’ve got a heck of a milkshake. They’re so good, in fact, that I buy enough for the whole year. I just ran out of last year’s, right on schedule.)

My life has been threatened, more than once lately, so I have decided it is necessary to log my daily activities. In the event of my untimely death, I want others to be aware of what I was doing in the hopes that they will continue to try to restore balance in my homeland.

Malachai Ironshaft is a seventy-five year old gnome from the Gnarley Forest. Evil has taken over the forest, and Malachai is doing what he can to set things right. Along the way, he’s keeping an on-line journal.

The New Yorker magazine has finally started posting online content. I was frustrated with them last year when I was looking for material to use in conjunction with my production of The Man Who Came to Dinner. I used a New Yorker theme to tie the poster and program to the show, using the same fonts and licensing a cartoon from their cartoon bank. Their (at the time) lack of online content made my work harder than it had to be. Anyway, besides the works from the current issues, they’re posting some of their older content too, such as this excellent short story about a schoolgirl’s crush on her English teacher, The Smoker.