gmonkey42

My cat Snape, that is. Check it out, her picture is on Cats Where They Do Not Belong
http://getoutoftherecat.tumblr.com/post/4750222541/get-out-of-there-cat-you-do-not-belong-in-that

She does not have a job to carry things to. She cannot drink out of that water bottle. Get out of there cat, you're being ridiculous.

XD

WHY DO YOU BETRAY ME, DECIMAL POINTS, WHY?

It's all correct now. I would have been able to track down the error a lot quicker if I'd just filled in the form by hand. THANKS, TURBO TAX.

One of my smoke alarms has started chirping. It's always hard to tell which one. I have to get the stepladder and stand right under it and wait a few minutes until it chirps again.

And I was about to go to sleep. I think I'll leave it until morning, unless the chirping wakes me up. ...I don't even know if I have a 9V battery, I think I'll have to buy one. Argh.

So florence_craye convinced me to star using my Dreamwidth account. I'll try this crossposting thing. I'm still going to read my LJ f-list and participate in LJ comms. But LJ keeps having problems and I don't like the way they do business. I had already let my paid account expire earlier this year (I really don't need all those icons). I'm importing my LJ posts here so they'll be saved but that operation is still pending.*

So the purpose of this post is mainly to make sure this x-posts to my LJ.

AND the secondary purpose is to say:
I saw the Penny Arcade strip and thought "what's MagiQuest?"

It's a LARP for kids and you can buy a bunch of merchandise. That's some genius marketing. I looked at their web site. ...I kind of want this potion rune pendant. It has a volumetric flask on it!

In other ridiculous-things-that-I-nonetheless-kind-of-want news, I also kind of want this unicorn shirt by the same company that made Three Wolf Moon.

* eta: WHOOOOPS I should have read the news post first. OK, looks like the posts from my LJ won't import for a while. No worries.

[Error: unknown template qotd]NO! God, that would be horrible! You couldn't switch it off? Like having the TV on 24-7 and that TV is following you around everywhere, preventing you from concentrating on anything, ever?

Here's an article (via Echidne of the Snakes about a teacher giving students the questions on assessment tests before the test:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-06-school-testing_N.htm

I was in an all-day meeting yesterday with four teachers about a program we're going to run at the lab this summer, where a group of K-3 teachers come for a week-long retreat to learn about marine science and work with these four leader teachers on how they can bring what they've learned back to their classrooms. I'm pretty excited about it. We're taking them to the Aquarium and out on a boat to count birds and whales the same way we do and to the tidepools to do an exercise about the scientific method.

ALL four teachers are frustrated by this teach-to-the-test mentality that's forced on them by the state. Especially in science, the Standards that have to be met (specific topics the curriculum has to cover because it's going to be on the test) are out of date; because of politics and bureaucracy it takes a long time to change them. Conventional K-12 science education already has problems: it fails to engage students or to dispel common misconceptions about science; standardized testing makes it much harder to fix that because the tests are geared towards a conventional curriculum.

Anyway, one teacher told me that in one country - I don't remember, I think it was in Southeast Asia - the teachers routinely give the kids the test questions ahead of time. They spend the year doing effective science education then about two weeks of drilling on the multiple choice test, so they can just get that over with then go back to real learning. It's cool. And it's exactly what this teacher did.

I realize that doing this totally defeats the purpose of evaluating schools with standardized testing and if we're going to do that, we might as well do away with the testing altogether. Yeah, that's the point. This teacher was doing civil disobedience and I approve.

I've been watching Archer on Netflix and I just saw the last episode (of season 1 - I think season 2 is airing? But I don't get FX).

It's one of those cartoons like on Adult Swim where there's a lot of swearing and sex jokes and it's really funny. Sterling Archer is a sort of James Bond-type spy except he's all irresponsible and kind of stupid. He's voiced by that guy who was on Family Guy and Bob's Burgers and when you hear him, you go "ohh, it's that guy!" And Aisha Tyler does the voice of another spy, and there's also Chris Parnell, René Auberjonois, and Jessica Walter and Jeffrey Tambour from Arrested Development!

Ahh, apparently its creator also did Sealab 2021. I'll have to watch that - is it on Netflix?? Aw, it is but not for instant play. OK, season 1 is in my queue.

Speaking of shows I want to get around to seeing: Venture Brothers. My old housemate recommended it highly. That is also not available for instant play.

I need to hurry up and watch The Sixth Sense so I can send it in and get my next disc (yeahh, I don't know, I've only seen it the once, I wanted to watch it again and see how it is knowing he's a ghost. Yeah, sorry for the spoiler, Hayley Joel Osment is a ghost.)

from mijan

Put this list in the order it occurred in your life (I just put them in alphabetical order for the original list):
Become gainfully employed
Buy a car
Buy a house
Get a cell phone
Get divorced
Get drunk for the first time
Get married
Get Pregnant
Graduate college
Graduate high school
Have baby #1
Have baby #2
Have baby #3
Have baby #4
Meet significant other
Meet who you hoped was your significant other but wasn’t
Move out of parent’s house for good
Start college

( here's my list in order )

I'm sleepy and I don't know what to have for dinner and it's already 9:00pm.

I made some nice black beans & rice with BBQ tofu for lunch. Here's the beans recipe, as usual modified from a recipe on AllRecipes.com

( recipe! )

Ground coriander seed is my new favorite seasoning, I've been putting it in a lot of things. It used to be oregano when I was first learning to cook, then for a while it was basil. My earliest experiments with cooking involved adding extra seasonings to Campbell's minestrone soup. I pretty much had to teach myself to cook. I was kind of bad at it in high school and university - broccoli in a slow cooker: BAD IDEA - but I was getting fairly good by the time I graduated.

I try not to do that, always adding the same seasoning; I want to choose seasonings that are really appropriate for the dish, not just put them in because I like them. But gosh, coriander seems to be appropriate for a lot of things lately. In fact, the original recipe called for cumin, not coriander, but I didn't have any cumin, plus I was kind of tired and hungry at this point (big coffee and a cookie = A+ breakfast!) so I seriously thought "ehh, it starts with a C." Yeahh.

Just looked it up - cumin tastes like caraway? I don't like caraway. Good thing I didn't have any!

I'm also liking a McCormick lemon herb blend I just got. That's handy to throw on things. Like the other day I did roasted root vegetables, I just tossed them in olive oil with this lemon herb mix and some salt & pepper and that was really good*. I put some of the lemon herb mix in with the rice today. I buy the boxes of Near East pilaf in Spanish Rice flavor. It comes with a handy spice packet but the full dose is too strong for me so I put in about half the packet then add a bit of salt and today I also added some of that lemon herb mix. It was good.

The tofu was just tofu strips in BBQ sauce and a bit of oil in a frying pan. I like the super firm tofu from Wildwood. It's easy to deal with, it doesn't fall apart like most extra firm tofus.

* More on the root vegetables - they're easy and very tasty: ( Read more... )

I hadn't yet seen the new LJ header that everyone's complaining about so I logged out to see it.

Bleah! Bring back the chickadee! That was so much better!