100deg fever

There's a certain girlish giddiness that flavors the fear that my head might explode or the inside of my lugs slough off and come up during one of my deep coughs (I started on antibiotics so hopefully this is bacterial and not viral and will clear quickly.)

I'm going to make chicken rice soup with chiles (good thing I made chicken stock last week) and oatmeal cookies with dried cherries.

And torture Ernie with fever-based non-sequiters.

Night before last when this was coming on and I couldn't sleep and I took an ambien and was still typing when it hit, I found out the next morning that I had been looking up website names . I want a site to put photos in context, like a mini-show. The first one that I'm working on is has the working title "Acid, for your Face". Of all the things I've flailed with it feels like a context that includes a glee. I like glee. I think I do glee well.

So I had been looking up names, apparently, right before I went to sleep and after I had enough ambien in my system to make the memory too slippery to stick until morning.

The first one frissonrouge.com. I like it but is it just too too to do the foreign language thing? Then there was monorosado.com - is it less pretentious if it's spanish, not french?

Or is it just dumb to have anything other than my name? Unfortunately my full name is taken by a minor designer who designs stuff that looks like : but hasn't updated the name since 2004 but doesn't expire until Jan 2008. I could go for my name with .net but I always thought that less effective.

For some reason I've always liked my full name - 3 syllables in the first 3 in the second. Using just "greg" in the name makes it sound sort of _common_.

Or maybe I can use gregtography.com. That's available and not too twee. "gregography" is good too but sounds vaguely geological.

But I still like saying "frisson rouge".

I also like monorojo.com but it's taken too. As is schismism.com

Maybe I'll make new icons today.

Learning about oatmeal

A local store makes oatmeal raisin cookies that when they're cooked correctly are really amazingly good.

I'm a good cook, so why shouldn't I be able to make them myself?

Lesson 1 - what we think of as "oats" are in fact "rolled oats". "old fashioned oats" does not translate to "the oats that you need to cook for an hour or more" which are in fact like pieces of wheat. When you use these - steel cut oats is what I have - they don't magically puff up onto edible cookie-components in 12 minutes. They stay hard, and rocklike, continuing to require hours of cooking.

Lesson 2 - hard, dried, small-fist-sized pieces of dried dark brown sugar don't come apart when using a blender, they simply jam the blendor. Putting them in the microwave with some of the butter and then going at them with a fork will eventually cause them to dissolve but the physical property of cookie dough is not enhanced with melted butter.

I used dried cherries and pecans instead of raisins and walnuts. The flavor was good if you like buttery flour cookies with small rocks in them.

I wonder if they're going to swell up in my intestines?

It pays to do a little research

That Nikon lens that I didn't think was worth anything will probably sell on eBay between $200 and $500.

Yay!

Here's a photo I took with it on my D70. The problem with it is that it doesn't couple to the metering system so I have to guess at what aperture to use but with the ability to see instant feedback that doesn't matter so much.