I should probably mention that I got a new job a few months back, working at the camera store on Transit Ave. There are two locations, and the Delaware store is the bigger one, but the Transit one has the online sales office in the back, so we actually have more stock. But if you go to one or the other we send stuff back and forth all the time. Black and white film gets developed at Delaware. Color 120 film comes over to Transit. Any prints larger than 8x12 go to Delaware. Slide film actually gets sent all the way to Philadelphia.
Oh yes-- the chain is no longer locally owned. Used to be one family that owned allll the stores. Well, a number of factors contributed, but largely, as I found out today, there was a tragedy in the family-- I believe the daughter that was to inherit died young or something awful-- and they sold the chain instead.
They sold it to another independent family-owned chain down in Philly, and so now we *sort of* have corporate overlords. But not really. The district manager, who has been in place for about fifteen years, runs the place in the way that seems best to him, and our two little stores make a reasonable living. His philosophy is openly that his employees are his most important asset, which is kind of nice. The pay is negligible, but there are no stupid rules, there's no stupid dress code, and what's most awesome is that if a customer is being unreasonable, the management will totally back you up. You just have to be reasonable yourself.
So I like working there. I feel like it's useful work. I'm helping people, I'm doing something meaningful, I get to be a little artistic (unlike Rite Aid or Walgreens, we actually manually color-correct every print, so they come out as nicely as they can; there's no automatic setting. The downside, if you're a weirdo, is that we do have to look at every one, so when we're printing someone's fetish pics or whatever, I admit, we do snicker a little. I haven't seen nearly as much sausage as I anticipated when I started, though). Mostly, there's a refreshing lack of bullshit to the place.

And our prices on cameras and lenses are extremely competitive. We don't get the profit margins Best Buy does, since our distributors don't get to do nearly as much volume and so don't give us those margins, but Best Buy, believe me, doesn't pass their savings onto you. They charge the same amount we do, and get a bigger profit. But it's OK, because we're not spending a thousand dollars a day on advertising either. We're not a real high-profit company, but we're an institution. And it's nice being involved in that.
I just wish *I* made a little more money.

Oh, hey, for you photo and arty types-- DCV's running a promo contest thing with the Music Is Art festival. Send them your photos from that festival and you can win a nice camera. Also, friend the store on Facebook, or become a fan-- it would warm the cockles of my manager's surprisingly un-evil little heart. For some reason he likes that kind of thing.

Asked the boss when I got in & he said, huh. If we got robbed nobody called me. So he called the Delaware Ave store & they said everything was normal. Shrug! Store closes @ 8 so they were long gone by then. Must've been some kids fighting inthe lot or something... Boss says he's been robbed 8, 9 times in his 15 years, & it totally sucks. So we're glad whatever the cops were doing, it wasn't us. (I work @ the Transit Ave location.)

Finally I have achieved my ambition of blogging from the bathroom at work.




Edited to add: What, I get no love?! That's a moblogging milestone, that is!!

This is my maiden attempt at (e:strip)ping via iPhone. I am hoping to figure out how to add photos too because I am sewing a really cool case for the new phone and I want to post progress pics!

I posted a bunch-ola of photos up on my Flickr account, lest you think (e:zobar) stretches the truth about Pennsic a tad. I didn't take any of topless women, or of anything that might be nudity, or whatever. But that doesn't mean I didn't take any that were fun.



One of (e:zobar) in garb

And one of me, in garb!

It was a good time, if the pictures don't make that clear. Along with (e:zobar)'s description. Which is approximately correct.

I am exhausted today. I spent all day yesterday racing the impending rain-- it's supposed to rain/drizzle/be cloudy all week, and I know that I have trouble starting seeds outdoors because I never can water them adequately.
So I busted sod, thrashed roots out of dirt, made German mounds (where you make a mini-compost-stravaganza underneath where you're going to plant a plant), and went to town out there. From 8 am until 1 pm yesterday, I was a gardening machine.
I am being daring-- the guaranteed frost-free date isn't until May 17th. But we've had such warm weather for so long that I am gambling, recklessly, that we won't have another killing frost. (A light frost, I think my seedlings can weather-- I have plastic milk jugs with the bottoms cut out that I plan on using as hotcaps should the worst occur.) One year I gambled and then there was a frost, but I threw blankets over the tomato cages and all was fine. I'm being pretty reckless, but I don't think it's unjustified.
So I planted out a few cherry tomato seedlings, and two jalapeno pepper plants. And a basil seedling. I also repotted more tomatoes from little seed-starting cells into bigger pots.
The rest is seeds:
spinach, lettuce, marigold, radish, turnip, beet, snap pea, pole bean, muskmelon, cucumber, acorn squash, zucchini. I wanted to plant basil but couldn't find my seed packet! So annoying.
I heard that basil and tomatoes are mutually beneficial companion plants, so I want to try that.

Anyway. The upshot is, I have planted out three cherry tomato plants, which is as many cherry tomatoes as I can reasonably expect to go through with three people in the house, one of whom doesn't eat tomatoes and one of whom is moving out in August during peak tomato season.
And I have like six nice healthy cherry tomato seedlings left. Maybe more.
There's a big plant swap somewhere local, I saw it on the GardenWeb forums, but I just thought I'd ask if anyone wanted a cherry tomato plant or two-- I don't think I'll have time to go and attempt a swap. Months ago on here I theorized that we ought to have an (e:strip) plant swap, but again, I don't really have time. But anyway-- they're Burpee's Super Sweet 100 cherry tomato hybrid. Indeterminate, so they'll get pretty big and need staking or a cage.


And one other random announcement: Last roller derby bout of the season is May 9th. I'm playing. It'll be fun.
If you can't make that, May 15th is my team's fundraiser, and it's at a pool hall with great drink specials. They're running a pool tournament for us, which is cool. More info here:


So either come watch me skate, or come play pool with me! I can't shoot pool at all so I don't know how that's going to work. But whatever. It'll be fun anyway.

So I've been gardening like a crazy thing lately.
Did you know that coffee grounds make fabulous compost?
They're basically potting soil as-is! They are very high in nitrogen, which plants need for lush foliage and good fruit production. (Phosphorus is better for flowering plants to set flowery blooms.)
So even if you're not the sort of person to have a compost heap, you can just dump your coffee grounds into a container and when it gets full, sprinkle the grounds in your garden or on your lawn or around your shrubs. Keep 'em out of the trash! Throw less stuff away. (Just use a thin layer; grounds may clump together and prevent soil respiration unless you spread them out and mix them into the soil. And too thick a layer at once might shock or burn the plant, so keep it light. Try raking them into your lawn! Better than commercial fertilizer. Try it.)

And if you've ever thought about composting, it is so easy. It can easily go wrong, just like any gardening thing. But by "go wrong", I mean, not work, or smell kinda funny.

Those black plastic composters make it basically foolproof. That way, even if it doesn't work, the odor doesn't spread much, and the mess is self-contained. But you can also just set up a circle of chicken wire held up with garden stakes with a big stick in the middle that you wiggle to aerate the pile.

Basically, compost is made up of "brown" matter, and "green" matter. You want approximately four parts of brown matter to one part of green matter. Too much green, and everything will go slimy and smelly. Too much brown, and it will dry out and nothing will change.
"Brown" material is anything rich in carbon. Chopped leaves, dry sticks and stalks, wood chips, sawdust, straw, and even cardboard and paper are good brown materials. Coffee filters count too.
"Green" material is anything rich in nitrogen. Grass clippings are a fantastic source of nitrogen. Weeds you've pulled (though be careful if the weed has gone to seed-- a small compost pile won't get hot enough to kill the seeds). Food scraps-- carrot peelings, squash guts, wilted lettuce, celery ends. And coffee grounds!

When you make your compost pile, just remember to add more brown than green. You can either layer it, in the "lasagna" method-- a big layer of brown with a layer of green on it, then another brown, like a sandwich only repeated until you're out of material. Or you can just mix it all evenly.
Either way, whatever kind of enclosure you've got-- a wooden box, a cardboard box that eventually composts itself, a black plastic one that keeps it tidy so your neighbors don't complain-- all you've got to do is make sure it doesn't dry out (water with a hose until it's as damp as a wrung-out sponge), make sure everything you put into it is in small pieces (run leaves over with a lawnmower, chop sticks up small with a shovel, slice your vegetable castoffs smallish, crush eggshells with your hands), and turn it with a pitchfork or shovel once in a while. The turning is optional if it's well-mixed or properly layered; it just goes faster and is more complete if you turn it.
If it's stinky and slimy, add more brown and mix it in. If it's too dry, water it, but maybe it needs some more green too. When you turn it, try to make what's on the edges go into the middle, since that's where it's hottest and things break down most quickly.

In the summer it'll only take maybe 3 months until what you pull out of the pile basically looks like potting soil. Compost is the perfect planting medium or soil enrichment. It's cheaper than buying topsoil and fertilizer at the garden center. And it means you didn't throw away a whole lot of stuff that would wind up wasted in a landfill-- landfills don't have proper composting conditions so things are basically fossilized there, plus it's all contaminated with chemicals.

If you don't want to compost, give me your leaves and grass clippings. I don't get enough from my tiny yard with no trees-- I had to steal a big garbage bag full of leaves from my parents' house 300 miles away while I was home for Thanksgiving. My soil needs the help!

This year I'm trying something new: I'm setting up a horizontal compost "heap" and gardening straight onto the top of it. Look up "lasagna gardening" in Google and see what you find. That's what I'm doing! Much less back-breaking than cutting sod and chopping out the established weeds in some of my garden beds!!

That may be something you could try if you don't think a compost heap will fly with the neighbors-- they'll never know you're composting! Just get some kind of edging for the bed so they can't see the layers at the edges, and they'll never know you didn't have tons of expensive soil trucked in.

So I haven't been around here much. And thought I'd stop in and say hi. I showed up yesterday in a fury because ok it's a long story, but to make it short, my LJ, which maybe I link to from here, is completely anonymous. It's been at the same name for 8 years and I have probably mentioned my name and various identifying things at various points over those years-- I have been unwary at varying points of my life-- but the fact is, in and of itself, there are no identifiers on that blog. And yet it keeps persistently getting used as "evidence" in roller derby dramas.
I mean, I know for local stuff it's inevitable-- people on my LJ f-list are skaters too, so they're going to take what I write and go with it.

But yesterday someone from ANOTHER LEAGUE, who doesn't know me, doesn't know my name, doesn't know anything about me, protested about an observation (not even an opinion!) I'd made in a 4,000-word entry about a road trip to see another league skate. And they're threatening to withhold support from my whole league over it. And Jesus Christ-- it's an anonymous blog.
I used to do search engine optimization so I know how to be relatively invisible to search engines.
The only way to find that blog if you're looking for derby stuff in there is:
Type in the abbreviation for the league's name
Scroll through FOURTEEN PAGES of more relevant results
Find an old entry of mine talking about something banal
scroll through several years of posts
There's the 'controversial' entry where I talk about my road trip.

So...
Someone who reads that blog fairly regularly has to have sent the URL directly to the person who got offended. There's really no other way they'd have found it. Because I have 0 contacts in this league, and have nothing to do with them at all. None of them have any way to have known where my journal was.

Someone is using me to stir up shit. And this isn't the first time it has happened.

I've had that fucking journal for 8 years and it has my whole life in it. I have done all I can to anonymize it. I completely resent the shit out of having to constantly watch what I write, but I have been for over two years-- I *know* people read it.
I just am sick of the bullshit. I DON'T write anything offensive, and people still find ways to be offended. And I have no recourse, since they're using it as a lever against my whole league.

Which is why I need someone out of town to help me out and mail a whole huge box of undies with "big girl panties" stenciled on the ass to Washington D.C.
No no no. But it would be hilarious.

I need a blog no one knows about so I can rant and rave about how I AM GOING TO BUY A BIG MULTI-PACK OF BIG GIRL PANTIES AND MAIL THEM TO A CERTAIN PERSON.

But I really can't, since someone might know who I am and tell this person and then OH NOES there would be MORE FUCKING DRAMA.

Which I need like I need an extra hole right in my forehead so I can POKE MYSELF IN THE BRAIN.

Neat party trick that'd be. Until someone tried to use the hole as a bottle opener and I DIED.

• Pre-entry commercial break: TICKETS FOR THE FIRST ROLLER DERBY BOUT OF THE SEASON HAVE GONE ON SALE ONLINE

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, ALONG WITH SEASON TICKETS FOR ALL OF THE BOUTS, AND YOU SHOULD BUY THEM BECAUSE I AM AWESOME AND SO ARE MY BITCHES. Thank you, and we now return to your regularly scheduled entry.***

I'm pissed at the thundersnow because the clap of thunder this morning (well, more a roll of thunder-- in my half-waking state I thought it was a basso profundo chord on a pipe organ) scared away Chita, who had been snuggling my face and purring and purring.
So sad.

I am going to be making Christmas cookies today, of at least two kinds. The cookies you roll and cut out have to have their dough refrigerated from anywhere between an hour to overnight. I have two kinds of roll-out cookie dough in the fridge now. One is the kind my mother always made, from Fanny Farmer's Butterscotch Cookies recipe. That dough is tastiest raw, and many happy childhood memories were made eating the scraps left over after cutting cookies out.
The other is Piparkukas, a traditional Latvian cookie that must be rolled out very, very thin so that it is crispy. The dough is very sticky-- there isn't much flour in it, or really much of anything except for spices. The ideal finished piparkuka (Is that the singular? I don't know Latvian) will be a whisper of crispy spiciness that melts into a sweet/savory suggestion in your mouth, and leaves a lingering spicy scent of Christmas about you.
Often when I make them they're too thick, though, because the dough is extremely hard to roll out. It's largely molasses and honey, and if it's warm enough to work, it is sticky and incorrigible. If it's cold enough not to stick, it is also the consistency of brick. I tried to cheat this year-- I spread the still-warm dough (the honey and molasses are boiled to start off with) out between two sheets of wax paper and have put it in the fridge to cool that way. Hopefully I'll be able to roll it out thinner if I start with a sheet instead of a brick.

I'm not too optimistic, however. I've been working out daily all month, because of the roller derby bout on the 3rd. I've missed probably three or four days all month. That's fine, that's good, that's OK-- I am dealing with sore muscles as I get them, and am enjoying the feeling of how strong my body is getting.
But shoveling snow makes for sore muscles. So my triceps are killing me on both sides, and yesterday while I was scrubbing the bathtub I noticed how much weaker I was than normal because I was so sore. It's not much better today.
(e:zobar) took a turn shoveling, so his arms are like noodles now.
And even (e:fi) shoveled a bit, and did something to one of her shoulders.

So of the three people in this house, none of us is really in much of a state to wrestle large quantities of obstreporous Latvian cookie dough into thin, meltingly-crispy submission.

Oh well. We're pretty much snowed in, so I haven't much else to do. Except oh yeah, maybe finish my Xmas cards.