More stuff

Which to discuss first: the finished socks, the tuna salad recipe, the band rehearsal, or the medical update? Well, that's as good an order as any, I suppose.

Finished socks: the brown pair. If you recall, this was the pair where I did the rest of the cuffs after doing the foot. The pictures behind the cut illustrate that process. This is one of the self-striping yarns, in a sport weight rather than a sock weight, so it's already too warm outside to wear these; into a mothproof plastic bag they go till next fall.
( bigger pictures )

The tuna salad recipe:
2 cans tuna - depending on where you live, cans of tuna may be 6 oz., 6.5 oz, even 7 oz; doesn't matter too much for this. I use white chunk tuna packed in water.
2 stalks of celery, sliced and diced into small bits
1/2 white onion, sliced and diced
4 ounces of fresh white "button" mushrooms, sliced and diced
1/2 to 3/4 cup chopped pecan pieces

Dressing:
about 2/3 of a small jar of mayonnaise (reduced-fat or whatever kind you like)
1 tsp yellow mustard
2 Tbsp lemon-pepper seasoning (e.g., Mrs. Dash in the lemon-pepper flavor; you can use the kind with salt if you prefer)

Mix everything together. Taste. If it tastes bland, add more mustard and lemon-pepper seasoning. If you want crunchier, add more celery and pecans.

That's it.

Band rehearsal:
Sooner or later, someone is going to injure themselves in that overcrowded band hall... this was our last rehearsal before we go to Williamsport on Friday; we sounded pretty good! Not perfect, but the bassoons have it a LOT more together than they have heretofore. Some people did not show up for tonight's rehearsal, and did not call or email ahead of time; if I were the ruler of the universe, such people would be told not to bother to come to the concert either, but then, I'm mean.

Medical stuff:
Got some very expensive supplies covered by insurance and thence shipped to me, arrived today. Bandages that do not itch. That being the main problem now - the wound is healing fast, but it was reaching the point where all the skin around it was breaking into a rash or blisters if I so much as LOOKED at most bandages. So now I have some fake skin stuff called Primacol, and then foam sticky bandages called Mepilex (made in Sweden), and the foam bandages stick to the fake skin, which sticks to my real skin but in a much smoother manner, somehow, than bandages. What I'm calling "fake skin" is a "hydrocolloid dressing" and it's not really intended to be fake skin, but it is intended to rest on skin long-term, so that one does not have to peel off a bandage and then apply another one, and then peel off another one... Anyway, that's probably TMI, but if there are any medical trivia freaks out there besides me, I thought you'd want to know.

Squirrels

From the magazine New Scientist, 22 April 2006:

Evolution gets busy in the urban lab
-Bob Holmes
"It's the wild west of evolution and ecology," says Joel Brown, an ecologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Evolution is operating with a vengeance in the urban environment as animals struggle to adapt to novel conditions and cope with "evolutionary illusions."
An animal is said to be in an evolutionary illusion or trap when it does something it has evolved to do, but at the wrong time or in the wrong place. The concept may help explain why so many squirrels get squashed on city streets, says Brown. For millions of years, squirrels have evolved to cross open spaces as quickly as possible without wasting time watching for predators that they would not be able to escape anyway. "Ordinarily, that was a very sensible thing to do," he says. "But as an urban squirrel crossing four lanes of traffic, that's a bad idea."

The article goes on to describe how the urban environment is more stable, with more predictable sources of food and water, and thus insects may be active year round, as are other animals. Birds may breed too early, fooled by lots of food that mimics a productive spring. Sea turtles get confused and head toward the bright lights from beachfront development, rather than toward the water, and night-migrating birds fly into brightly lit buildings. (For example, the "Light Pollution Building" as landley calls it, in Austin - the Frost Tower is so garish at night, it even occasionally causes car crashes on the highway as distracted drivers look over and go "What is that thing that looks like a giant lighted nose-hair clipper?") So anyway, biologists can watch adaptation happen before their eyes. For example, in the Netherlands, urban great tits (a bird, people, a bird!) sing at a higher pitch than their country cousins so that their songs stand out better against the city noise, which tends to be at a lower frequency.

There, that's enough science for the moment.

I just got my hair cut, finally, and it was about time! My head is several ounces lighter.

No, wait, there's more from New Scientist:

Attack of the giant rodent
Imagine pitting yourself against a giant man-eating hamster. That is the theme of "Mice Arena," an augmented-reality computer game in which your opponent is a real, live animal.
The live - though normal-sized - hamster is housed in a tank fitted with infrared sensors that track its motion as it chases a tasty piece of bait. Its movements are mimicked by the monster hamster on your computer screen, which is chasing an avatar representing you, the player. When you evade the monster hamster on screen, actuators move the bait around the tank to evade the animal. The game ends when your avatar is caught.
The game is the work of researchers at the Emerging Art and Architecture Research Group in Serbia and the Mixed Reality Lab at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

You'll note it doesn't address what happens if the hamster suddenly decides to take a nap, which often happens with hamsters! Still, I think this is evidence that things must be getting back to normal in Serbia, if they've got time for hamster games...

today's funny

Somewhere along the line, I forgot to ever post the link to the "Hugos". Well, now I have.