Roadrunner Twice

How to get lemon balm (or peppermint)

Man, that stuff goes WILD in this climate. Our old front yard was infested with it, but the new one isn't so we just get some from the neighbors.

Cut stalks that are back from the sidewalk a ways so it's less likely that a dog peed on it.

You can tie the stalks into bundles and hang them upside down to dry.

How to brew yerba maté

You could just buy the bottled Guayaki stuff, but that gets expensive, and besides, their package copy is super colonialist and also just insulting in general. Plus it's really easy to brew it at home.

You just get a one quart-ish teapot, put five teaspoons of the powdered herb in, add a bunch of lemon balm leaves (dried or fresh, doesn't matter), and fill it with boiling water. Wait five minutes, pour it out through a sieve, boom. Also, you can use peppermint or spearmint instead of lemon balm if you'd prefer. Just brew it with SOMETHING else so it tastes like more than just hay.

There'll be some mud in the bottom of the jar you poured it into; if you want, you can wait a few minutes and slowly pour it off into another jar, and that'll leave most of it behind.

If you stir in a heaping teaspoon of honey, it'll cut the astringency without being too cloyingly sweet! Sometimes I do that and sometimes I don't bother.

I usually drink a cup or two while it's hot, then fridge the rest and drink it iced later.

You can brew the same pot a second time, and when I do that I like to throw in an extra 2-ish teaspoons of fresh maté on top. If the weather is hot, sniff the pot before trying because it might get funky if you leave it all day.

How to quit coffee and caffeine

I used to do this every summer sort of by accident, back when I was still in school. Now I do it on purpose, about, uh, every other year? It's a reset, and also just a way to check in on myself. And also... I kind of like how it feels, being off caffeine in the summer. It's nice. I know you probably don't believe that, which is fine, but once I'm fully weaned it makes getting up in the morning weirdly easy and light. Anyway, I always go back on coffee anyway after a month or two of abstaining; I like not drinking coffee, but I also really really like drinking coffee.

Here's how I quit:

1. Quit coffee entirely and just switch over to yerba maté. You can drink literally as much as you want, and at the start that might be like two quarts a day.
2. Wean yourself off the maté and eventually quit that. I kind of just get tired of it over the course of a week and gradually drink less without really paying too much attention.

OK: so I have no idea why this works, but using yerba maté as a quitting aid SOMEHOW lets me totally skip the caffeine withdrawal headaches. Tea doesn't work that way; if I try to wean off tea, the headache shows up somewhere between two cups and a half a cup a day. But if I do it this way, I'm fine. Just kind of drowsy for a week.

Your mileage might vary, but I know at least one other person who's run into this, where maté just has a different effect and is way easier to go on and off of. It's wild.

How to feel serene and at peace with the world

Fuckin... who knows.

But I'll call you when I get there.

Also, the toilet flooded over this morning while Ruth was trying to get ready for an interview, so I got to scoop up poop water and bleach the floor before I'd had coffee.

My telephone got stolen tonight, and then I got it back. This might be the dumbest thing to happen to me all year.

For reasons involving a working vacation, a wedding, and a bunch of plane trips, I picked up a friend’s stored car at another friend’s house, took it back to my house, and unloaded a bunch of stuff into my living room. And left my iphone on the passenger seat, like some kind of jackass. It was out of my sight for maybe 50 seconds, tops.

Anyway, I get back into the car after unloading, and it’s gone. I bail out, ask the group of random women walking by if they saw someone grab a phone out of the car, and — AMAZINGLY — one of them says “Oh yeah, he walked that way! I think it might be that guy!” And she points at a dude who’s just, like, standing there, a block down the way.

I dash after him. He sees me, and stays standing there, slouching a bit. He’s a tall, weedy-looking white guy, with sort of bulging eyes and that slightly-too-skinny face where you’re like, okay, probably a tweaker.

I have no idea what I’m doing or what’s going to happen here, but I’m imagining some humiliating scenarios. I figure, 60% chance he’s got my phone (wasn’t enough time for someone else to grab it and disappear unseen; has to be SOMEONE within a block and a half of me; could’ve been those gals from earlier, but the timing didn’t seem right), but if he decides to stonewall, like, what the fuck can I do? Sit there and argue with him? There’s pretty much nothing else on the table! I’m not gonna, like, try to kick his ass and search him, because I’m not a vigilante psychopath. (Also, everything else wrong with that idea.) Getting the cops involved would be, like… I just can’t even fathom how that would go, and plus I would really rather not increase police presence in this neighborhood. Also, the fuck am I gonna use to call anybody, because I don’t have a telephone anymore. If he denied everything, he’d probably just get to keep my shit.

But that all turns out to be irrelevant, because he fucking volunteers my phone back to me. He says, “Are you the guy whose phone just got taken?” He pulls it out of his pocket. “I saw that guy that did it. I stopped him. Like, I saw him, it was a guy in a green shirt. He went that way.”

I take the phone back. “Awesome, thanks,” I say. “You’re a helper. I gotta go now.” And then I went back to my friend’s car and went to pick her and her fiancée up at the airport.

---

Like, that situation is end-to-end bizarre, right? I’m not just tripping?

Anyway, tonight I am thankful for dirtbags who embrace the concept of “easy come, easy go.”

So. Early in that recent series about my ill-advised renovation project, I mentioned that, until I'd recovered from my brain amoebas or whatever, I had wanted to paint the room orange. And when Emm (emmling/kamonohashi) and Laura (roler) read that, they were both immediately like "Oh Jesus, it's fishhead.jpg all over again." And it recently occurred to me that there should definitely be more people sharing their horror.

Okay. Google has blessedly forgotten about all this, and I am DEFINITELY not saying how to find it over at the Archive, but listen: I used to have a... PERSONAL WEBSITE. On my ISP's five megs of web space, because I'm sure Geocities and Angelfire were nice, but I wanted a URL with a tilde in it. No I do not remember why that mattered.

For reasons I do not want to get into, it was VERY important to me that this website's background be a childishly-drawn skeletonized fish against a baby aspirin orange backdrop. This was the very soul incarnate of my internet presence. THE FISH SYMBOLIZED AUTHENTICITY, PEOPLE. The fish abides. Abided. Serenely. Until I eventually decamped for LiveJournal.



And so now you know what that was about.

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In other news, we had a thunderstorm in Portland tonight, and it was pretty badass. Reminded me of Minneapolis, and made me half think I should scurry down to the Acadia for a pint and some warmth and a good view down Franklin of the retreating clouds and lightning.

'Course, the Acadia moved down to Hiawatha or something, after I left. Who even knows what's the place in Stevens Square these days. But still.

Part two of three, continued from here.

Sidenote: Musical Beds

Obviously I wasn't sleeping in the room for the rest of this. Since I got the short end of the house, the other two shuffled things around to accomodate me; sometimes I was sleeping on the futon, and other times Schwern would give up his bed. This is mostly irrelevant until the fire alarm starts going off.

King in my World of Sawdust

You guys. Don't ever sand anything. ( It is a trap. )

This WEEK, man. You GUYS. You all know I ain't no workaholic, but this weekend looks like a bender. A workahol bender. Yeah.

Crunch time and word quota aside, I did manage to get to the TMBG/Coulton show, which was totally awesome. I haven't seen TMBG since... must have been like 2004 or so. (They were on tour for The Spine at the time.) Not feeling up to a proper concert review, but man, they put on a good show. Some tracks from The Else, some tracks from the new record, some older stuff, and yeah. (CONTROVERSIAL OPINION TIME: Best TMBG album is John Henry, and second best is The Else, with Flood a distant third.)

Things:

• I am so glad I switched to Dvorak back in 2008. You've probably heard this from me before, but in summary: the speed boost ended up being basically nonexistant, but the endurance boost has been incredible. I'm not confident that I'd be able to do both dayjob-banzai typing and NaNo banzai typing without it. And the timing of the switch was definitely a good call, since I was doing manual labor and could totally get away with typing like a sloth with a nerve disorder for three weeks.

• Oh right, that chair. It's this one:

  

  This chair was in my room when I moved in, which means it's probably Curtis Poe's fault. It's fugly as hell and weirdly short and stubby and also I guess it comes with its own corner?? I originally didn't know what to do with it and it was piled high with laundry more often than not, but then I warmed up to it. It's cushy and lets me put my feet on the ground without any shenanigans, but more than that, it's just a squishy chair of my very own, which is something that'd been missing from my life for a long time before now. (Protip: If you're in your early 20s and moving into your own place for the first time, tell that futon to go to hell and get yourself an actual couch and/or easychair.)

  I've got what I'd call a pretty thorough computer setup over at my desk, but for some reason I don't write very well there. Everything is much easier when I'm in my little chair over by the east window. Desks are for editing, apparently, and when I'm writing I'd much rather be close to the ground and tucked into a corner with a wall at my back.

• God I love this Bugseed track.
• Protip: The correct time to turn on Freedom is BEFORE you sit down. Like, if you get home and have to pee? Turn on Freedom and set it for 3 hours, then pee.

EDIT: Of course, I totally did not heed that last one tonight. *headdesk* Still made quota, though. (Sort of—I ended up doing like 1400 words of out-loud thinking, plot-detangling, motivation-decoding, outlining for two additional chapters I apparently need to shoehorn in there, and for good measure some details about the contents of a document that Zoe's going to get network-cockblocked before having a chance to read. Won't count toward the eventual total, but it kept my momentum up.)

Whoa hey, looks like Apple just released a new EVERYTHING. I'm kind of just waiting on all of it, though, which mostly comes down to making sure I don't miss a crypto window on upgrading my hacked iPhone -- that shit gets silly fast, by the way, remind me to tell you about it someday -- and trying to decide on a spreadsheet to replace the direly agèd copy of Excel that came with my old iBook.

Spreadsheet dorks: Numbers or the new Excel? I actually quite liked Excel '07 for Windows, and thought Numbers '09 felt kind of flimsy by comparison, but I'm still on the fence a bit, because it's $150 vs. a combined $30 for both Mac and iOS. Plus, I don't reeeeeally need that awesome bolt-on regex substitution function anymore, since it was mostly a workaround for being stranded on computers without proper text editors or language runtimes.

All right! One week after I started ratcheting it down, I'm off caffeine entirely. Something I'm already noticing is that it's easier to get up in the morning. So that's interesting. Also, my (always present) appetite for fruit has increased dramatically. Of course, both of those could just as easily be from the sun finally coming out yesterday. Shrug! I guess I don't really  have any idea what's up, but it's fun watching it anyway. One thing I'm missing already is the bike fuel aspect: going over the Broadway Bridge, you can definitely tell the difference between a day where you had coffee and a day you didn't. 

Ugg, has that last post seriously been sitting there for half a month?

Okay, so stuff's been happening. Other stuff's been not happening. Whatever.

• Went to Oly and visited with roler! Surprise bonus visit with Elizabeth! Her beau seems like a good dude. She looks happy. (Actually, she's probably reading this. Hey, Z!)
• Speaking of old friends, my childhood pal Gregory went and married a girl under the St. John's Bridge. They walked down the aisle to Beirut's "Scenic World," and it was adorable. He, too, looks great these days.
• I still need to re-attach my bike rack, get that netting tied on, and probably start early shopping for some rims and hubs, since these wheels don't have a whole lot of seasons left on them, and I'd rather have some buffer time to build their replacements than have to do it emergency style.
• Dep't of burying the lede: I'm also in the market for an affordable ticket to Turkey for January. Planning a rendezvous with katealaurel.
• Captured By Porches brewery has a stall at the Hollywood Farmers Market, and they'll fill a quart mason jar for $5. That's pretty awesome.
• Don't use an extra-wide mouth mason jar for that. The lids don't have enough stiffness at that size to maintain the seal when subjected to internal pressure. Use the type with the smaller mouth or suffer a backpack full of undrinkable beer slops.
• I've been using the trunk builds of Firefox, because it is that time of the year again, and they did something recently to the redirect API that broke Adblock Plus, so I've been browsing like the other half recently. And oh my fucking god, people. These interstitial ads on LJ. I cannot even believe how trashy those things make the place feel. LJ used to be my living room, and now it's like a bunch of tweakers are crashing on the couch and selling off the stereo equipment.
• Dudes, the westbound MAX will ALWAYS be at 120% bike capacity by the time it hits Goose Hollow. Natural law. And yet there's always a big old crowd hoping against hope that they're gonna find space on the thing.

So over the course of the last couple months, I've been trying to track down the source of some annoying GI issues. (Spoiler for TMI: Mild discomfort, constipation, and, worst of the bunch, indescribably heinous farts.) And I've come to an unfortunate conclusion, which is that I might have to cut onions most of the way out of my diet. WTF! Onions are practically their own food group!

Anyway, does anyone else have any experience with this? It's not an allergy, per se; it's more like my gut flora just lost their ability to handle the things or something. Why would that randomly happen at age 28?

In conclusion, goddammit.

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Also, I've finally busted my two pairs of iPod earbuds! One now plays at 1/3 volume in the right ear, and the other is torn-up lookin' and rattles a bit when any low notes blow by. Now I need to figure out what to replace them with. Preferably something a bit better than iPod earbuds.

So yeah. I listen to music on my bicycle, so I need something compatible with a helmet, and I'll also be using them to run, so they need to be light and able to stay in pace when jounced. Schwern has these things, I think, and I'm not sure how I feel about them; I keep thinking I can find something I'll like better.

Any suggestions? I'm not allergic to buds, and I'm not averse to trying weirder stuff as well.