Ravings of a Textual Deviant

I’m going to take advantage of the fact that my dad does not, to the best of my knowledge, read my blog.

First, a little background. My dad’s a clinical chemist. His specialty is dry-reagent chemistry. If you’ve every used one of those little plastic dipsticks to check the chlorine in a pool, you may well have used something he worked on. He’s always had these ideas for new products kicking around, and starting when I was eleven and first learning to do computer graphics, I’ve been helping him out.

A couple of years ago, I got dragged into helping him with his main project. I was technically working at an hourly rate, but because it was a start-up, there wasn’t any actual cash being paid out. Pretty soon, I ended up working for shares, because it was easier (for him) for me to accumulate stock options than not paid in cash. Originally, I was strictly doing the occasional bit of graphics or tech writing. But as time went by, I saw a lot of other things not getting done. And as I’m the sort of person who does things that need doing, I ended up trying to do a lot of things that needed doing…never mind that I wasn’t trained, experienced, qualified, or even interested.

Now, the product is finally on the market. (Getting it there is a whole other story, and I’m not going there because I simply cannot start drinking at 8:00 AM.) Back in November, I told my dad that as soon as we got to this point, and all the loose ends were wrapped up, I was done. And I was absolutely, positively not taking on anything new. Well, we’ve almost got the loose ends wrapped up. And I am burned out. I am beyond burned out. I expressed this to my dad, and he simply said “Me, too.” Lately, the only way to get him to listen to me is to tell him something he doesn’t want to hear, so I retorted “Yeah, but it’s your business. I’m just here because I have trouble saying no to you.”

Would you believe that he still doesn’t get it?

The worst part of it is that along the way, I seem to have lost my dad and ended up with a boss who’s known me for way too long and happens to share some DNA. I can’t remember the last time I got a phone call or email from him that didn’t start with “I need you to…” He needs a graphic emailed to someone. He needs me to find a file. He needs me to write a procedure. He needs me to troubleshoot a corrupted database that turns out to be just fine if he’d open the damned thing in Access, not Word. He needs me to go to a plant sale for him (I am not making this up) on the first Saturday morning in months that I don’t have to go into the lab and work. He even invited an out-of-town investor to stay at my house–and forget not asking me about it, he damned near didn’t tell me about it. (”I thought I told you,” he said. “No, because if you had, I would have told you that I had another houseguest staying those days.”) And then, my mother had to explain to him why I was so upset.

Now, I don’t mean to portray my dad as a complete asshole, because he’s not. He’s not intentionally malicious; he just doesn’t think about what he’s doing. I really, truly try to remember this when I can’t sleep and I’m frantically calling my brother in Oregon at 2:00 AM so that he can convince me that it really is a bad idea for our dad to end up in a garbage bag in the woods. (Or that if he does, he had it coming.)

Doug’s once-a-month game on Saturday was a great opportunity for character development…and my character, twelve-year-old Celia, is developing into quite the little sociopath. She’s made a very smooth adjustment from life to unlife, and even said “I like other people better now that I know what they’re for” [food].

One of the side effects of having everyone a little (or more than a little) afraid of her is that she can get simple requests fulfilled with amazing ease. She hasn’t quite figured this out on a conscious level yet, but I doubt it’ll take long for her to start taking advantage. This is how we ended up at the zoo in the middle of the night. After a brief “discussion” about the relative merits of the plan (”Why do you want to see a polar bear?” “Because I’ve never seen a real f$#@ing polar bear and I want to!”) we ended up in front of the enclosure. When we got there, the bear was asleep. One of the other characters couldn’t let sleeping bears lie, and decided to try out her vampiric mind-control powers on it. Next thing we know, several hundred pounds of polar bear is doing its best to escape the enclosure. Everyone else hastily backed up. Celia watched for a few minutes and said “Cool. Can we get ice cream?”

Dorothea is quite the evangelist for usability in All Things Tech, particularly e-text. It’s a dirty job, and I don’t envy her. It was on her recommendation that I started reading Donald Norman. As a result, I have got a real hate on for the more everyday bad designs one runs across…especially in plumbing.

I’ve complained about automated plumbing before. My new place of employment has managed to combine bad design with automated plumbing in the redesign of the nearest set of restrooms. The automated toilets are what I’ve come to expect, although the manual flush button is easily identifiable, and the flush timers seem to work much better than those in the Indiana Government Center.

The faucets are another story.

I suppose I ought to congratulate the perpetrators on the universality of their design. These things confuse everyone. The building that I work in includes an international conference center, and I’ve seen visitors from several different countries trying to figure these things out. Picture if you will a spout emerging from a chrome disk about the size of a small plate, which is set directly into the mirrored wall behind the sinks. On the four o’clock position of the chrome plate is a small cylindrical handle. At the nine o-clock position are two sensors, a graphic of a hand and the following:

On
—-
Off

Now, a question: How would you turn on the faucet?

Most people ignore the text and graphic entirely and attempt to turn the cylindrical handle, to no effect. The next step involves pressing the sensors. Sometimes this works; more often, it doesn’t.

What to do?

It turns out that the correct answer is to wave your hand in front of both sensors to turn on the water. A second wave turns the water off. I’m fairly certain that turning the cylindrical knob adjusts the flow of water. I have yet to discover a way to control the water temperature; I doubt that there is one. It took us all a few tries to figure this out, and I suspect that there were a couple of very unhygenic days at first.

A few days after the restrooms were officially open for business, small printed signs appeared stuck to the mirror above the spouts. “To Turn Water On, Pass Hand. To Turn Water Off, Pass Hand Again.”

I shudder to think what the urinals are like.

My new fridge arrived as scheduled on Sunday morning. The entire process of moving the old one out and the new one in was so unremarkable as to be remarkable. As more than one person has observed, I am someone to whom interesting things happen. The fact that nothing interesting happened makes me exceedingly nervous. I can’t help but think that Something Interesting is lurking right around the corner, waiting to happen to me. So long as it doesn’t happen to the fridge…

I followed through on my threat promise last night and baked a pair of purple potatoes to go with dinner. They came out of the oven a dull purplish-brown, but when cut open, were a gorgeous, vivid violet. I think that they tasted like Idaho russets. Ed thinks that they tasted like Idaho russets, “only purpler.” He declined to describe exactly what purple tastes like, though.

In preparation for the arrival of the new fridge tomorrow morning, I had to empty the old one. I got out my cooler and made as much room as possible in the mini-fridge that’s finally out of the garage and in the breakfast room. My fridge has a not-undeserved reputation for being, shall we say, overpopulated. I knew this going in, in a back-of-my-mind, theoretical sort of way.

The reality of was something else entirely. I haven’t completely emptied the fridge since we moved into the house in October of 2000. Yeah, I know–in a back-of-my-mind, theoretical sort of way–that you’re supposed to empty out a fridge and clean it every couple of months or whatever. But there’s always somehting else more interesting to do, like a play, or laundry, or waxing the cat. I had to check my blog for earlier entries to figure out when the last time I cleaned the fridge actually was.

I decided to tackle the freezer first, because that compartment was smaller. Also because the less-savory things would be safely encased in ice. There was half of the bag of whole coffee beans I bought for Ed when we started dating (I also bought a coffee maker for him; never touch the stuff myself) in 1996. That was before I realized that he’s happier with instant because it’s easier. There were two(!) partly used bags of frozen squid. Nine frozen egg yolks and four frozen egg whites (separated) from various baking adventures. I think there was even a very small mammoth in there, although I admit that I was afraid to unwrap the foil to confirm. I realized that the vast majority of the stuff I’ve actually used in the past year was in the door, not the compartment itself. As I got further and further into the freezer, I noticed a sort of geological layer effect. I’d originally been very organized when I put stuff into the fridge. However, as time went by, I got more and more haphazard, so that the back half of the freezer was stacks and rows of neatly wrapped and labeled plastic containers and foil packets, while the front half was a tightly-packed random arrangement of bags, boxes, and resealed packages. After throwing out everything that was expired, dessicated, or unidentifiable, I managed to cram almost everything into the large freezer in the garage.

On to the refrigerator compartment…

Unlike the back half of the freezer, there was no organization whatsoever. I started on the top shelf and worked my way back. The first shelf was fairly easy–large tall containers of juice, milk, the can-dispenser full of lemonade cans, a brand-new container of Ed’s leftover Chinese food, and a fairly recent slice of pepperoni pizza, wrapped in foil. I don’t like pepperoni, and Ed almost never eats leftovers, but squirrel-like, I was compelled to save it anyway. The cheese drawer yielded up a few very tiny pieces of parmesan cheese rind, but nothing green. One vegetable bin was empty–I’ve been avoiding buying refrigerated stuff since Tuesday–and the other had some bagged salad and carrots. I got rid of the cheese rinds, pizza, flat soda and flat champagne, and had a nice false sense of security going.

On the second shelf, things started to go bad. Literally. There was a box containing about 20% of a cheeseball I’d bought last Christmas and defrosted for use somewhere in the vicinity of April. Ziploc bags full of green and white fuzz. Plastic containers I’d forgotten I’d owned full of same. A bird’s-nest of dried-out cooked spaghetti. Leaky yogurt containers. A piece of cardboard that had adhered to the shelf. The third shelf yielded half a jar of antique roasted red peppers, a jar of pickles with the lid half-unscrewed, something that was tomato sauce in a former life, and no fewer than three separate small containers of homemade chocolate sauce of various vintages. The thick, slippery contents of half a can of coconut milk. I don’t remember the last time I used coconut milk, although I’m fairly certain it was within the last six months.

The fourth shelf was blessedly unremarkable–mostly recent bread products that were still perfectly edible–providing much-needed relief. I was actually sweating by the time I got to the fourth shelf, although I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t an allergic reaction to some variety of green or white fuzz.

Finally, the only thing left to tackle was the door, which was mostly condiments in bottles. Oyster sauce, lime juice, peach salsa, Thai-style peanut sauce, plum sauce, ketchup, mustard, two bottles of kalamata olives (one open, one not), two maraschino cherries floating in their bright-red liquid, lemon curd, barbeque sauce, grape, raspberry, and blue rose hip jelly (no idea where that came from), freakishly artificial maple-flavored syrup (Ed’s; I won’t touch the stuff), spicy shrimp-cocktail sauce, cilantro-walnut pesto from Trader Joe’s (not very good), rice vinegar, and 1/8″ of bottled Lite Ranch salad dressing. That’s the big mystery item; I don’t buy premade salad dressings very often, and I certainly wouldn’t have bought either Lite or Ranch. I know I haven’t used the salad dressing, and yet, the bottle’s nearly empty.

Last, the outside of the fridge–magnets and the things they were holding up. The letter we got a couple ofyears ago that let us know Ed was no longer being sued. Coupons for pizza. An expired gift certificate for a massage (Ed’s, from me). The phone number list. A safety sticker for beer. A small assortment of cartoons, paycheck stubs, and business cards.

Now, I can go to bed with the satisfaction of a job well done. The only thing left is a box of baking soda that predates our move-in.

So, being me, I had to try out the strange fruit I found yesterday. My mom, from whom I have inherited my intrepid spirit (among other things best left unmentioned), was also game.

But first, I had to do some googling for recipes. Not much luck, I’m afraid. So I decided to just cut the thing open and dig in. If you’re going to try this at home, be careful. It’s tricky to get the darn things to hold still while you cut them open. There was almost an Incident Involving a Sharp Object. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but a sitcomesque scene in the emergency room did. Fortunately, my reflexes are still fairly good.

Anyway, I get the KiwanoTM (the name “Kiwano” is a registered trademark of the company that imports them from New Zealand) open and it looks more or less like the picture I found on the web. Being forewarned, I was prepared to scoop out the seeds and nibble the fruity bits off the kernel.

Easier said than done.

The fruity bits have the consistency of warm jelly, and yet somehow manage to cling to the tiny seeds with a stubbornness not often encountered in food that’s already dead. I tried nibbling the fruit off the seed, which was maddeningly slow. Then I tried sieving the fruit off the seed, which is kind of like vacuuming up Jell-O. I did manage to get a bit of juice out of it, and I think that if I wanted that KiwanoTM experience again, I’d probably just go for bottled juice. It’s just too messy any other way.

As for the taste…it’s sharp in a sort of citrusy way, and tropical-fruity, but not sweet. Mom suggested a “tart banana,” which is reasonably close. Maybe with a bit of kiwi fruit thrown in the mix. I can understand why most of the recipes I saw involved adding it to a fruit salad; it would probably go very well with starfruit. My final experiment was to take the small amount of extracted juice and try it with some vodka.

Neither Mom nor I could even decide if we liked the taste. On the other hand, neither one of us dislikes it either. These things taste as strange as they look.

Last night at the grocery store I saw this wacky-looking thing in the produce department. Appropriately enough, it’s called a horned melon. I’ve got no idea what do with one, although a few minutes of googling turned up the fact that it has a “cucumber-lime” flavor, shouldn’t be refrigerated, and that one eats the flesh around the seeds, like a pomegranate.

Next to it, positively sedate by comparison, were pepino melons (which I’d never heard of) and purple potatoes (which I had heard of, but never expected to see in Indiana). Now, I know what to do with potatoes, and I think I can safely say that some fun is going to be had. Possibly at Ed’s expense, but that’s what he gets for not reading my blog.

Italisized: Not quite as big as France

It looks likely that our regular Thursday night GM will be moving to Pittsburgh at the end of the summer. Therefore, somebody else is going to have to run something, because not having a game would be wrong.

Doug and I got to talking about the situation at lunch today, and it looks like we’ve got a solution. We’re going to jointly run a game–the American Ellipse–for our Thursday night crowd. Unlike the Grand Ellipse or the Lunar Ellipse, all the players will be on one team, as it’s FTF. We’re looking at an 1880s Weird West type setting, although we’ll probably use different mechanics. (Whatever Doug wants is fine with me; he’s the screen monkey.)

We spent about half an hour laying the foundation, and my head is already overflowing with ideas. All we have to do now is sell it to our Thursday night group.