You love life and you're determined to live to the fullest. You use your bag of tricks to protect those you care about and to teach those who mess with you and yours a lesson, but you're not unreasonable. You're a tinkerer and an inventor, you love to build stuff. You enjoy hanging out with good friends or being out in nature. Like the Hawaiian Trickster Maui, your amiable nature fools those who think you're an easy target. You're not.
repost of earlier request on writing help Ok i am writing up a little book on making traveling ponds. (mostly for the SCA) i am not a great writer and even though i have read a thousand and one do it yourself manuals i want to know if my outline seems to work. Please Comment and tell em anything. Lack of knowledge on the subject is a bonus as the people buying it would have none or minimal knowledge anyway. thats why you pick up books to learn more! so none of that i can't give an opinion because i do not know how to judge something...
Also if there is anything you would be curious about with this that you may not think is covered then please ask (yes WhiteWer i got the solar powered pump comment and i have never used one but i shall have to check that out) Please Please Please for the Love of Biscuits! anything would help! PLEASE!
things that piss me off So MSN has this article on if america had no fat people and the billions that would be saved (and of course nothing on the money lost from those fat people buying diet dreams and paying high payed doctors and hospitals and paying extra for clothes and everything else)
Anyway in the article the crack whore bitch that wrote it decided to make like most people do a crack about McDonalds and the fact that they would be serving low cal chicken snaks to survive. Since the Big Mac is obviously only eaten by fat people (yeah right. i know plenty of skinny and overly skinny guys that pack those away!)
Premium Crispy Chicken Club Sandwich 9 oz (254 g) 660 calories.
Chicken Selects® Premium Breast Strips (5 pc) 7.7 oz (219 g) 670 calories
healthy Chicken snaks right... not all the chicken is that heavy in calories but they are far from light either. hell there are desserts with far less calories here
Also something else i am getting tired of is people assuming that because i do not wave it around or something that i have no fucking education. Oh i went to college al right got a degree too. not a huge one but that was because back then you had to be 24 to sign for your own loans and my mom did not think there was much difference between degrees. But indeed i have been studying certain subjects for a LONG time because of my passion for them. so do not tell me i do not know what i am talking about when it comes to certain things thanks. just because you have not seen my piece of paper does not make someone else's more powerful. thanks.
and for those of you who read through all this shit please take a look at my last entry and please help me with that project please
Travel Pond Book Ok for a few years i have been dragging an entire pond setup to pennsic and lots of people want to know how to do it and i have been told i need to write a book or pamphlet on it
you would think with all the frikken how to books i own i would be able to do this with ease. though i am a bit more of a rambler
in an effort to make something of this work i decided to go back to basic stuff and write an outline. so i give you that bare bones outline here to see if this "chapter" list sounds like it makes sense. and do not answer me with Well i do not know anything about ponds so i cannot give an opinion! cause i am fucking writing it for people who know nothing about them!!!!
i just want to know if this sounds good so far and what kinds of things would you be looking for in something like this if you wanted to know how to do it? What kinds of questions would you have that maybe are not in this listing that i may not be thinking of?
Please i would like this to be a good thing. i want it to help people and inform so anything no matter how stupid you think it may be to ask about something like this PLEASE ASK! PLEASE!
the outline is as follows with brief description
travel ponds Introduction to travel ponds.
this would be an overall explanation of the concept and some of the more interesting pond history (since this is for the SCA anyway)
Proper responsibility for plants and animals.
Explanations of proper care adn feeding and NOT TO RELEASE THINGS IN THE WILD!
Advatages
Some advantages of the traveling pond versus in ground ponds
Disadvantages
the bad things about it!
various containers.
What you can put a pond in! and their pros and cons
Plants - side plantings - floaters - oxygenators
different types of plants and their uses and benefits and a list of the easier to find ones that work for the smaller systems.
Substrates
An important part of the pond ecosystem. much of the filtering in a pond is done with the substrate which is what things grow in or lines the bottom of the pond.
Livestock - what to choose - how many to choose - what to feed
discussion of animals appropriate to the min travel pond. from fish to amphibians to crusteceans what works well and what is NO!
Transportation of Live things
how to get them there! and what you may have to do to keep them alive while the pond gets set up!
How to clean and care for your pond.
there are some specific do's and don'ts to this process. One may wish to clean everything in the pond but this would be a bad idea. so some ideas to clean out what one can and not destroy the balance
disguising the containers and other decor.
using plants and those decorative fence things as well as statuary and possible fountain pumps to make a rather plain looking container nicer!
if you have anything you think i have not covered that you may want to see covered please say so. and not i will be using illustrations as well so anything you think would be good in that regard would be good too!
Aethelmearc War practice. Heads up people it is close at hand! first some info from the website Very important: Troll will close at 3 pm on Saturday, May 17, NO-ONE will be admitted to the site without a receipt after this time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
so if you are going to only visit on Saturday get there early!
Cost 3 nights 2 nights 1 night Day Fee Adult $22.00 $18.00 $12.00 $9.00 child $ 9.00 $7.00 $5.00 $4.00
There will be a $3.00 non member surcharge. (this means add three dollars if you are not a member!
Which came first Sauces or the cooking implements this was my thought earlier today when i realized i hate yet not gotten bread. so i took a LONG WINDING TREK. to the main drag. mostly cause i was like OH i can get a sub at the pizza place and just make a bigger better sandwich and eat that all day. but alas they were still closed and my stomach said "Onward you bitch! GIVE ME FOOD FUCKNUGGET!" So i was all OK maybe the bakery is open. Nope. Ok maybe the other not so great pizza place is open and i can still snag a sub. Nope closed too. so i made it to downtown and decided that my hunger was great and well there was a little chinese place that i had not tired so i would try it. After getting my heart rate back to normal upon looking at the one guy that worked there (i know it is a sterotype and they are bad m'kay but i NEVER expected to see a package like that on any asian let alone one that hot! Holy shit he was smuggling third world villages in those tight ass jeans!) i sat to enjoy my Cheese Wontons (otherwise known as crab rangoon) which were indeed very good. Well they provided a bowl of sweet and sour sauce and i began to think. Sauces are VERY important part of almost all cooking and cultures. we call sauces by many things depending on thier uses but they are all sauces. Many i am sure you are familiar with such as tomato sauce or dipping sauces such as garlic butter stuff that comes with pizza and soy sauces and sweet and sour but did you realize most of out condiments are also sauces Like ketchup and mayo and salad dressings and mustard and relish (relishes are just chunky sauces really like chutney) so it got me thinking when did sauces evolve. was it after we had cooking utensils like bowls and pots and woks and such or was it before that. perhaps pastes of fruits and fats and such prepared on rocks next to the fire or on a big leaf. or perhaps they evolved from curing techniques. even more primitively perhaps like mead evolved from honey left in leather pouches perhaps that leather pouch was all they had to carry everything in Perhaps they also threw meat in there as well. and the honey or fruits marinated the meats making new tastes. and in an attempt to make it tastier they poured the mixed contents over the cooked meat that had already sat in that.
So there are two possible evolutionary paths there Marinades from storage during primitive times or leftover juices and such thickened or other things purposely boiled down or smushed or whatever to cover the meat and make the flavour more intense. Surely it is noted that many cultures spiced thier meats to cover the early stages of putrification those could also are known to have evolved into sauces. as well as just spice and preservation treatments.
Unfortunatly i am not a nutritional anthropologist and have no idea how one would even figure to research something this bizzare. other than to find out if extant stone age cultures have sauces . and that is not something oft discussed most places. and far to many of these extant tribal cultures have had to much modern contact through those locusts called missionaries. so i would imagine much of that is now tainted.
but it was just a thought. but this is how my mind works. always wondering and always trying to understand things more.
Of course all this has also been influenced by the observation yesterday by Kyr that all this all around us is due to a molecule that wants to self replicate. Isn't life fucking awesome!
sorry to keep making posts on stuff no one cares about or that are to long. sometimes i just want to say something. so i am sorry if it ruins your friends lists or anything.
Not that many people really care but. Global warming! WARNING WARNING WARNING TMI COMING at least that is one of the main problems i see with the Populace at large. in thier need for simple instant everything the current population wants simple yes no answers and simple convientient to them solutions. not going to happen the world does not exist in a billion billionb seperate vacuums. simply does not. thank you for playing but you are a fucking idiot and should prolly be eaten by lions or maybe angry gerbils
Last night i had played for me some guy ranting on global warming and it was a lot of the same shit i have herd from republitards before. OH just thirty years ago some magazine said we were going into an ice age but they recently apologsied for writing that article. and shit about where the carbon trail really falls in relation to the climatic changes and all sorts of things one expects from those to whom science is a word and not a process. those who if given a scientific paper on something would be lost as a blind lesbian in a fish factory*. he did have a few good insights such as that billionare guy who owns virgin airlines wanting to give much money to whoever invents a machine that removes CO2 from the air. Of course he wanted the money for the tree but i think Brahma gets that. he had a few good points such as using fear to motivate people will fail in the end. a constant state of fear has been shown to breed apathy in humans. they will no longer come when you keep calling wolf if the wolf is invisble and hard to grasp. i could go on about this but i realize my audience has the attention span of a mayfly so i go on
Anyway this got me thinking about the fact that people think and have this Throroughly fucked up concept that a+b=c but that only happenes in theories and vacuums. real life has many many factors that create things. and well this is about the truth behind global warming so i will give a few things to think on
the earth has a erratic orbit. nothing OMG like going to fling off into the nether reaches of space to be gnawed on by Azathoth or anything but we have a bit of a cyclic wobble. this coincides nicely for good reason with ice ages and global warming NORMALLY. i say normally because things can change this such as huge volcanic activity. asteriod hits. sun spot activity and other things can create minature versions of these phenom. anyway we are in our wobble for an Ice Age. thats right kiddies we should all be bundled up hunting wolly cows or something now. However while we were falling into this Ice Age (which the begining of is now refered to as the mini ice age and happened not all that long ago in the mid to late middle ages til the industrial revolution. Napoleans army were able to cut meat from thier horses and the horses never knew it because it was so cold. those trees in medival manuscripts and later period stuff that seem, to be stuck to a wall WERE stuck to the wall in an effort (quite successful too) to keep the plant active and bearing fruit in the shorter and shorter growing seasons (i learned about this as i was researching solar tech in the ancient past and middle ages) anyway right around the whole industrial revolution we had a few interesting things happen. One we began to burn a LOT of dirty coal and peat moss. as well as cutting down a lot of trees as we searched for materials and resources. made new farm land to feed the bigger cities where the sewers ran through them (this is important too) and all sorts of human things going on. Also we had A lot of volcanic activity (which cooled the earth for a year but more on that later.) and lots of other interesting stuff
All of this contirbuted to a huge amount of green house gasses. Yes Gasses cause CO2 is hardly the only one. it just happenes to get the press today. water vapour also traps heat and Methane does a better job than any of the rest. So where does stuff like CO2 and methane and water vapour come from. lets do CO2 first CO2 comes from living animals - we breath it out Plants at night - many plants breath it out at night as other chemical processes happen Bruning of Carbon based fuels - these include but are not limited to. oil, coal, natural gas, peat moss, wood, and animal bones Forest fires and wild fires- both man made and natural Rotting organic matter - this also produces methane and water vapour as well. and is all around us in dead plants and fallow fields and sewage and landfills and all manner of things one does not think of most days acidic erosion of carbonate rocks - such as limestone and calcite and that calcium carbonate you toss on your sidewalk during the winter. Acid erosion is caused by many sources including but not limited to acid rain (still around thanks) and chemcical reactions with things like sulphur in the soil as water passes through and organic decomposition in water. (which also produces methane and other substances.
these are just a few of the things that CO2 comes from Water vapour comes from evaporation of water of course which can come from all sorts of things other than just the sun. but it is aggrivated by watering in environments that do not have a lot of water like deserts. a lot of that food we grow in places that would not grow without irrigation wastes a lot of water that way. washing your car on a hot summer day. watering your lawn. steam plants and such. water falling on blacktop and such instead of soil when it rains. there are a lot of ways we contribute to the increasing mass of water vapour in the air
Methane. We once had a HUGE INCREASE of planet wide heat. see a large section of siberia once became one of those huge spread out volcanic areas. and it belched out metathane by the millions of tons. and in a few short years. way under a hundred. more like a few decades. the artic areas were now tropical and the rest of the planet was simply uninhabitable. dead and dry. an interior desert the likes of which no one wants to see again.
and the methane level threaten to do so again where does methane come from you ask. Rotting organic matter mostly. all that dead stuff on the bottom of a pond. sewers. dead stuff on dry land. the crap you ate last night that did not pass through your bowls fast enough.
the good news is it freezes. like under ponds in the artic and under the ocean. and it can be used for fuel. but that just makes CO2. unfortunalty the earth is only just cool enough to do so. and the frozen stuff that is melting now is ten times as much as that siberian volcanic fuck fest. and of course bottling it to dump elsewhere like was done with CO2 once would be reprehensible. using it as fuel yes makes CO2 but CO2 is only a tenth of the bad as methane. but CO2 could be pumped into sealed green houses to make really happy plants!
there are a lot of partial solutions to all of this but they must all be heeded to work. there is no one bandaid. there is no one cause there is no one solution. but maybe you will understand what is going on with the climate a little more. we have created a global heating while the natural cycle is that of an Ice age. things are bound to be fucked up. we should be in an ice age. we should be all fleeing for the tropics. but because of Natural and Man made processes we have a heating going on. Also we are in for a increased sun spot activity and a lot of other natural cycles that are going to be happening all very close to each other so the near future is going to be very interesting. so when someone is feeding you one cause one cure crap. smack them with a brick
* this is not meant as a slight against anyone just one of my colourful turns of phrase get used to it
so yesterday i had an idea filled to the brim with Win! around here the solar garden lights are very popular. nice little lights around that do not require outside plugs and such. great idea. except we do not have that much sun around here most of the time. we do however have a LOT of wind. Also things like this tend to be pretty popular around here they are a type of wind spinner. a kinetic sculpture so my thought was why not use them as Mini wind mills for generating enough electrical power to power a LED garden light. Concept is simple. magnet in the spinning shaft. coil around the outside simple generator linked to a rechargeable battery. the light itself has a little light sensor so it does not come on til dark and the wind charges it all day long. I need to find a way to sell this idea. (along with a shit load of other ones.)
Also thinking on this line Kyr and i were discussing a wind powered outdoor fountain. wind power is fun and can be rather pretty
OMFG i are tired. did much shopping today started getting stuffs for the Pennsic Practice (expect a big post and possible e-mails sent out on that o campers that shall be with me!) got some serious plant deals. tulips that were losing thier blooms were a whole 25 cents But they were marked higher so i did not get many. Trees for earth day were also a quarter so i got a forest a nice azalea bush was down to 3 bucks from 16 four lilac bushes for 12 finally found watercress Found some other pond plants. got three types of tomatoes including a gold one found seeds on serious sale. 29 cents a pack for a lot of differnt things Figured out how to use the 35 dollar inflata pool for a pond liner it will be a lot of digging but the pool itself is thicker than a pond liner. and i do not mind some blue colour to the sides of the pond. besides it will be mostly lined with plants and rocks so Meh
the bad parts of today was the fact that in the 2 weeks since i went out to do any shopping everything and i do mean EVERYTHING foodwise has gone up a Minimum of 20 cents. does not sound like a lot til you are buying a lot of things and then it adds up a lot. bologna went from 99 to 1.19 the tube of hamburger that i normally pay 8 for was 11 today. and it was like that on nearly everything but clearance stuff. i am thinking of re learning canning and pickling and other preservation techniques to get stuff when it is on cheap get rid of it sale and stock it up. this price hiking stuff is ugly anymore. especially for someone that makes as little as i do.
Panties in a bunch! I blink now I woke up very early for me today. was checking LJ and heard noise in the living room of my area so i looked out. Billy was gathering games up. i asked what was going on and he gave me this look like i put his ferrets on a spit and roasted them. Thoroughly pissed and smoldering. So i was like "ok then" and went back to reading. when i got out of bed to get stuff i got distracted by the sudden lack of Xbox and such so i figured he was going to take it and game somewhere else. and Figured he was pissed at me for leaving a note on his note that said not to put garbage in a certain place that his own bag of garbage was saying "but you left it here" and also asking nicely that he get his tables out of the kitchen so that i can finally unpack all the boxes of food and such that have been sitting waiting since last august. (non perishables thanks) and finally set up the kitchen. and i did ask nicely too. Please and thank you involved. not sarcastic either. i just really really really want to use the kitchen. this little space i have down here is hard to maneuver in sometimes what with the sink being used for everything.
so i go upstairs to get something out of the fridge (which i failed to do now.. distractions they are so easy!) because not only are the tables still there. but stuff on them has been moved around. the small couch in his room has been pulled in front of the door to the room and his xbox and games for everything are loaded on it. WTF!?!?!?!
he has blocked the room. Not that it is important or anything but it is really fucking odd! especially if this is in response to kitchen stuff
memories FUCK! i think i have tried to write an opening to this post like 10 times now. i really do not know what to say. as a man i guess i really do not get to have feelings on this stuff that will not be minimalized or just told WAAA! at.
there have been several posts by people this weekend that have due to me responding to them made me relive things i would rather really fucking forget. the kind of stuff that makes you fear touch and want to shower til your skin comes off. right now i am just sitting here with hot lead in my stomach and phantom touches and experiences. one of the experiances i am living out right now i never realized hurt me so damn much. i buried it as it happened. well technically i buried a lot of what happened when it happened. the earliest is what made me get roomates in the headmeats. or at least must have been a large part of it.
and because i am male this should not bother me at all i guess
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akirashima's journal
