Raven’s Range
Blather around a virtual range

Sunday, 29 June 2008 20:13

29 June 2008

Filed in Blog

Rice is cooking–brown rice. I’ve never made brown rice before, so it’ll be interesting to find out how that goes. I’d better stir it, actually, to make sure I don’t do my frequent trick of burning the rice (the internet is so fascinating, you know.)

:: stir :: Hm, that stuff actually has a flavor.

This has been one heck of a week! The magnificent storm last weekend sparked a record number of fires across Northern California. There were somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 lightning strikes that lit 842 fires, most in Northern California (but not, I gather, all). The fire season doesn’t usually get going until August, so it looks like we’re in for a fun summer. The first we knew of it was when we went outdoors and smelled burning pine, and then the smoke got worse and better and worse and better and news became the most important thing in the world, and the lack of it the most frustrating.

Mostly, we’ve been staying inside. Our smoky trip to Weaverville was certainly an experience, but there was actually one morning when I thought we’d have to get out because the air was so bad I was finding it hard to breathe. It’s been in the high nineties the last few days, and terribly humid.

All this enforced indoorness has had me doing an incredible amount of cleanup on Markeroni in particular, with a bunch of ideas coming up on how to make the site really work to the extent where at times I’ve been on the verge of project management panic attacks. This week’s project has been to write programs to consolidate the 80+ resources pages into one dynamic page that draws its information from a database, as well as to continue redesigning the page to highlight landmarks in the Catalog and to button up a whole bunch of pending, piddly jobs that have niggled at me for way too long. I even wrote code to allow the volunteers to help with the huge and growing backlog of direct-logged landmarks, and between times I input the data for Illinois, which is somewhat akin to basket weaving.

Also, to my intense surprise, I started writing a manual for the site, something I’ve been promising to do for at least three years. Other surprises included finding the national register of historic places in Germany, starting to set up New Zealand, realizing that the site will be ready to open to at least Europe next year, and the discovery of the ISO-3166 codes which makes finding states, provinces and the like an absolute doddle. Wikipedia, thou are both the bane and the love of my existence.

I’m quite sure nobody else cares about this other than me and perhaps Don, but let me sum it up in a nutshell: My world got bigger, Markeroni is suddenly seeming like it won’t be overwhelming for the rest of my life, and by golly, I even have a job. :: grin ::

Finally, in my continued almost sugarlessness, I have found my way to candy blogs galore, which took me on a wild goose chase and trip down memory lane to see if anyone sold the Slovene chocolates Ledene Kotske (ice cubes) in the USA, which appears to be a No. I also discovered Swiss Miss chocolate pudding and a British food shelf in the one and only Weaverville supermarket, and that actually, licking the foil cover is enough chocolate to satisfy.

I’ve lost another pound. :)

The rice is about done, so that’s it for another week. :)