Introducing Stickley

I'd like to introduce Stickley. Stickley showed up on our front porch one day last September and stayed with us for a couple of days. He's a walking stick, with a body about 3" long; overall he seemed to be about 6" long.




In other words, a huge walking stick showed up on our porch last September, and we named him Stickley. He rocks.

Superb Steamer Steel-cut Oatmeal (v1.0)

This is my recipe for making steel-cut oatmeal on our HS800 Black & Decker™ steamer.

1. Place the following ingredients in the steamer bowl:
• 1 cup steel-cut oats
• 1¾ cup water
• ½ dried fruit, rinsed (raisins, cranberries, ginger, etc)
• 1 tsp spice mix (posted separately)
• ¼ tsp vanilla extract
2. Cook for 60 minutes (at the "Hi" water mark).
3. Let cool, and mix in:
• 1 cup milk
• ½ tsp molasses
• dash salt
4. Refrigerate overnight (optional)
5. Serve w/additional milk for breakfast

Makes 4 servings. Optional mix-ins: ½ cup toasted walnuts; ½ cup peanut butter and ½ cup chocolate chips.

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If you're changing proportions, here are the two variables:

• The water to add to the recipe is the volume of the oats and dried fruit, plus an additional ¼ cup. (in the base recipe: 1 + ½ + ¼ = 1¾)
• The cooking time is the brown rice cook time, rounded up to the next 5 minute mark, plus 5 minutes. (½ cup steel-cut oats cooks for 50 minutes.) This formula might also be written as the (volume of the oats * 20) + 40 minutes.

I love using 3 parts Welch's™ Berry Medley and 1 part crystallized ginger as my dried fruit.

Oatmeal Spice mix (v1.0)

This is the mix of spices that I usually add to my oatmeal during cooking:

• 8 parts cinnamon
• 3 parts ginger
• 1 part allspice
• ½ part nutmeg
• ½ part clove (optional)
• ½ part cocoa (optional)
• ½ part red pepper (optional)

Mix together and store in an empty spice container.

Go raibh maith agat, Minnewaska

Thank you, Minnewaska. I went on a beautiful hike yesterday, up a carriageway from Lake Minnewaska to Castle Point, and back down via the Blueberry Run.

To your right is a picture of Hamilton Point, taken from Castle Point. You can get an idea of how steep the cliffs are in the 'Gunks.

Below is a picture of Lake Awosting, also taken from Castle Point. It's only accessible by foot or horse (or bike), and has a carriageway running around it. On the side of the lake closest to the cliffs, there are several side trails and carriageways, offering amazing, secluded, views for very little additional effort. Beyond Lake Awosting is Mud Pond, which isn't visible from Castle Point (at least I've never seen it).

Unfortunately, no picture I've ever taken could really capture the beauty that is the view from Castle Point. You're standing at the edge of a cliff, and the view is incredible; something like a 270° view.



Anyway, the thank you in the title and the top of the post is a big thank you to Minnewaska, for once again kicking my butt and reminding me that if I want to enjoy hiking, I have to stay in shape. That was something between 7 and 8 miles, and it was pretty much at the limit of my current ability.

Hobbes: Humans are filthy

Ack, ack, ack!

Hobbes the cat here. I found the following picture on the cell phone of the male human, and quite frankly, I am appalled. Disgusted. Male human said he was at "Tulip Fest" today. Female human says that "Tulips" are the beautiful flowers that grow in the front yard. I do not understand how festival humans turned the beautiful flowers into this pile of... I do not even know what. It looks like a dumpster came to life, drank itself into oblivion, and vomited all over the sidewalk. Disgusting.


That dumpster obviously came to life as a direct result of humans being filthy. If humans would just clean themselves more often, like cats do, this would not be a problem. Instead, humans rely on soap and shampoo and conditioner and a myriad of other products to substitute for their tongue. I try to keep the male and female human who live here clean, especially the female, but they keep getting dirty. Disgusting.

I am launching a full investigation into this so-called dumpster vomit; my full report will be presented for peer review in the August issue of Verontwaardigde Katten. I will also be presenting a paper on "The Filthiness of Humans and the Vomit Monsters That They Generate" at this years Convention du Chat, in Austria.

Oh well. I'm off to stare at the tulips in the front yard and try to figure out how they become vomit monsters. After that, I think I will scour the back yard for more of those hopping monsters from the night before last. I had them in my sights, but female human wouldn't unleash me from this unholy prison, that I might smite the despicable hopping monsters and reclaim my former glory. Perhaps then I could reclaim my position in the court of Queen Sheba III and not have to deal with stupid vomit monsters. Then I could enforce my will upon this land; filthiness amongst these humans would no longer be tolerated.

-hobbes out

PFY unveiled

Oh my god, the PFY has a name: Steven.

Epsiode 16, BOFH 2007

[Editors Note: Okay, apparently his name has been mentioned in at least 3 other BOFH episodes, the first one being in 2001. I guess I'm just a little slow.]

Along came a...

My wife and I live at the edge of a small forest in upstate New York (it's that region on your map labelled "Here There Be Dragons", just north of Manhattan). Our backyard is essentially "kitty TV", with chipmunks, grey and red squirrels, a mole, birds of all kinds, and toads that like to hide in the dirt until you're almost on top of them.

Anyway, after a rather spectacular thunderstorm this evening, we were treated to a few visitors of the amphibian kind. I heard the cats making a commotion, looked up, and noticed a silhouette on the window. I walked closer, thinking it was the biggest moth I'd ever seen. Once I got close enough, though, I realized it was a frog, climbing his way into the liiiiight.



Robyn decided that his name should be Kermit; it was later changed to Glen when his buddies, Randy and Dean, showed up. Glen climbed his way from the base of the sliding door alllll the way up to the top lip. After that he started making his way back down, opting to employ gravity instead of skill for the last few feet. (He survived, and hopped away into the night).

Hobbes (one of our kitties) pointed out Randy by way of her "ack"-ing and tail wagging :). Robyn saw Dean off in the distance, being a frog as hard as he could.



Our kitten, Maggie, doesn't look very interested. Don't let her fool you, though, she's fierce. Rawr.

As far as we could tell, they were either Common Grey Treefrogs (Hyla versicolor) or Cope's Grey Treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis). The markings looked correct: parallel stripes on the legs, bright yellow (orange?) patches underneath the legs and lower abdomen.

Fun with UUIDs

Okay, so I was bored; I used the following command to generate 8 (or less) hex character strings (to use as the first part of a UUID).

cat /usr/share/dict/american-english | tr 'a-z' 'A-Z' | cut -c1-8 | grep -E "^[A-FGILOSTYZ]+$" | tr 'GILOSTYZ' '61105712' | sort | uniq | less

Some of my favorites:

DA7ABA5E
D1ABE71C
ACCE55ED