katie

This post is a long, long overdue continuation of my travelogue from last fall's trip to Japan.

So, Friday was our trip to Ōhara 大原, a rural village north of the city of Kyoto that had been one of the high points of my previous trip to Japan. As we did last time, our group loaded into a few taxis to get there. Our first destination was Sanzen-in 三千院 Temple with its beautiful gardens and Jizō (地蔵) statues. It wasn't very crowded, so we wandered the temple grounds at a leisurely pace, enjoying the tranquility and stopping for a cup of shiso tea at a little rest area.

Our group dispersed as we left the temple. I had a cone of chestnut soft-serve ice cream as I drifted along the pedestrian walkway. Heading down the hill, I was happy to see this cat, whom I recognized from my previous visit even though he wasn't sitting on a scooter this time. He's such a personable kitty; apparently he's a fixture at his caretaker's jewelry stand. Pickled vegetables are a specialty of Ōhara, so I stopped at a pickle stand for some vacuum-sealed pickles to bring home as well as an aisu kyuuri, a cucumber pickled in seaweed flavored ice water and served on a stick. Crunchy and refreshing! I picked up some more food souvenirs—candied yuzu peel and a kinako-based confection—and hot-off-the-grill senbei as I walked down the hill to join the group for lunch at Sawada. Lunch, including tofu dengaku and red shiso-topped rice and more that I forget, was tasty.

After reading that last paragraph, you know why I go to Japan, right? :)

Before I go on to our afternoon, I'll interject that I recently discovered a show on NHK World TV—which I'm lucky enough to be able to pick up over the air if I point my antenna out the right side of my townhouse—called At Home with Venetia in Kyoto. It appears to be an English-language adaptation of 猫のしっぽ カエルの手　京都 大原　ベニシアの手づくり暮らし. I'm now addicted to this show about Venetia's idyllic Ōhara lifestyle, living in a renovated farmhouse, cultivating a productive garden, visiting her local artisan friends with jars of homemade jam in hand. Apparently my tour group's organizer tried to include her garden in our tour at some point.

Anyway, on to the afternoon, when we walked over to the natural dyeing workshop at Ōhara Kōbō (大原工房). This workshop features in an episode of At Home with Venetia in Kyoto. Here's the episode in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3. I dyed a linen shirt for my mom in pink and orange.

Here are my photos from Ōhara.

Somehow it wasn't especially late when we got back to the city, so Barbara and I headed to Ippodo's KABOKU Tearoom. We each had a bowl of Sayaka-no-mukashi usucha and a delectable sweet (hers, mine). We stopped in a paper shop and then a used bookstore, which was my downfall. I think I managed to double the weight of my luggage by picking up old books on gift-wrapping, chadō, shodō, and, serendipitously enough, Sanzen-in.

Wandering over to Teramachi Street, we stopped in Koizumi Gakki, a music store selling recordings as well as instruments ranging from erhu to djembe to Jew's harp to didgeridoo... a fascinating assortment. I asked the store clerk, in my halting Japanese, if they had any CDs of traditional instrumental music, particularly Ryukyuan music, and he opened up some half dozen cases to let me listen to different albums. I'm not sure how Barbara managed the patience to wait for me through all that sampling. Eventually I decided on NISUMURA: Traditional Songs from Nishihara, Miyako Island 宮古西原 古謡集 and MYAHK: Traditional Songs from Miyako & Tarama Island 宮古 多良間 古謡集. Props to that super-friendly and -helpful store clerk. If you're in Kyoto and you like music, I recommend this place.

For dinner we sat down in the nearby Lipton Tea Room. I had mushroom and sea bream pasta followed by this matcha parfait to top off a day of amazing eating and exploring.

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/9011.html.

Mood: angry

I'm a longtime reader and fan of PostSecret, a site that every Sunday publishes anonymous secrets mailed in on homemade postcards. I just got around to reading the batch posted this past Sunday, and I was surprised to see that someone had made a postcard using a photograph I or my then-partner—I don't remember which—had taken of Tornado Kitty staring down a General Patton action figure around eight years ago. The fact that someone used this photo I'd posted online isn't what bothers me. What bothers me is the abhorrent secret they superimposed over the photo of my beloved cat, who died four months ago of natural causes.

I'm not especially interested in those kinds of revelations being censored. But I do wonder about the motivation of that contributor in revealing his or her wrongdoing, and about how I can honor Tornado Kitty's memory in the face of that offense.

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/8269.html.

I went to The Next HOPE this past weekend with some friends and had a good time. We took the train up to NYC and slept in a clean, comfortable hotel in the garment district, several blocks away from the fleabag con hotel.

photo by johngineer

My favorite talk, perhaps predictably given my career, was Stephen Cass' T+40: The Three Greatest Hacks of Apollo. Cass talked about the resolutions of three Apollo-era mishaps. Less than a minute after Apollo 12's launch, lightning discharged through the vehicle, triggering false detections of fuel cell overload that knocked out the fuel cells, much of the Command and Service Module instrumentation, and the attitude indicator. Read more about this incident and its resolution here. Apollo 13's mishap is fairly famous; with regard to this mission, Cass focused on flight controller John Aaron's development of a protocol to power-up the completely shut-down Command Module from scratch, something never intended to be done in-flight. This article Cass wrote explains what was so difficult about this power-up and how it was done. As for Apollo 14, its Lunar Module Antares was plagued during descent by an apparent floating solder ball intermittently closing a circuit that would have led to a needless scrub of the moon landing. The crew had to reprogram the flight software on the fly to ensure the descent sequence wasn't aborted. More here.

Outside of attending talks, I made my first amateur radio contact (and got an N2H QSL card for it), hung out with a bunch of geek women, fixed a broken solder connection on my RFID-circuit badge, rode a Segway, obtained a bottle of Club Mate, admired a couple of Bradley Litwin's kinetic sculptures named The Sway of Public Opinion and Tracker-Rocker, enjoyed the hammock lounge, and contemplated buying a kit to convert a typewriter into a USB keyboard. Being a faithful viewer of adafruit's Ask an Engineer show, I had hoped to catch a live session at the con on Saturday night, but in the end the con wireless network wasn't strong enough to let them hold it there.

On Sunday I skipped the talks to head across the Hudson River to Mitsuwa, the largest Japanese grocery store on the east coast. The shopping center includes not just a supermarket but Japanese bookstore, home goods store, and cosmetics store, among others. Between those specialty stores and the supermarket, I came away with a Japanese book on knots for an impressive array of purposes, a trio of cute yunomi, seasonal wagashi for my chado teacher, Hello Kitty pasta, yuzu juice, flour and sauce for okonomiyaki, loose-leaf sencha and hojicha, bottled milk tea, amanattō, and other items too numerous to list without boring the pants off my readers. I'm not sure where the store's permanent food court ended and the weekend-long food festival began, but when it came time for a bite to eat, I had a hard time deciding, not to mention making my way through the crowd of like-minded patrons. Ultimately I went with a matcha zaru-udon / chirashi set, with soft-serve matcha ice cream to conclude. Yum++.

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/8161.html.

Possibly against my better judgment, I recently saved an Apple IIc computer (with monitor, printer, and a bunch of 5.25-inch diskettes) from the dump.

photo by juandesant

I've fired up a couple of the games that came on the diskettes, but I don't have a particular use in mind for this Apple IIc. It lacks the expansion slots that other Apple II models had, so I wonder whether some TCP/IP silliness like a web server or IRC client would be out of the question. Any ideas? If I don't think of something, I'll probably try to find another home for it.

When I was a kid, my family had a Commodore 64 for games and a succession of x86-based PCs for more serious computing. So I only used Apple II machines in (middle) school. Not that I've ever been responsible for a school computer lab, but they must've been so much easier to administer when the computers lacked network connections and persistent storage!

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/7617.html.

Weird things, given that I'm an American of German and Polish ancestry who grew up in the mid-Atlantic U.S.:

The first time I ate matzah ball soup was in Las Vegas. (2002, Backstage Deli at Luxor)

The first time I ate a pierogi was in Japan. (2005, Poland pavilion at the World's Fair in Aichi Prefecture)

Both were quite good.

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/6914.html.

photo by Anthony Armijo

I must admit to being a chronic misuser of the snooze button. I've been known to repeatedly press it for well over an hour when I can get away with it. This morning I had planned to attend a friend's NOVALUG presentation on Tor, but in that half-asleep haze facilitated by the snooze button, I considered that I hadn't exactly committed to attending, and my bed was so comfy and warm, and... zzzzz.

It's not that skipping one presentation is so bad, but rather my pattern of snooze button overuse that's prompting me to declare next week, April 11-17, my personal No-Snooze Week, when I challenge myself not to touch a snooze button. Who's with me?

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/6554.html.

As suggested by one of my tweets, I did a bunch of stuff last weekend, and I'm feeling an urge to document it.

On Friday night I attended a photo lecture by National Geographic photographer George Grall on "Life on a Wharf Piling in the Chesapeake Bay". The photos were amazing. I had no idea there were corals and seahorses in the Chesapeake Bay. To be sure, a random look underwater wouldn't make it obvious that there's strange and beautiful life down there, since the bay's waters are often murky and the life can be on the small side for naked-eye viewing. Clearly Grall spent a huge amount of time waiting and strategizing for good shots. On the downside, the lack of spontaneity in his read-verbatim-from-notes presentation was disappointing, but the photos themselves made up for it.

On Saturday morning I participated in a Chesapeake Paddlers Association workshop wherein I continued carving the Greenland-style kayak paddle that I started at the same workshop about three years earlier. Last time I'd managed to plane the sides of the blank and mark it up with a pencil to guide my carving. This time, armed with a borrowed spokeshave, I made progress on the actual carving and quite enjoyed it. Alas, I don't have a spokeshave of my own—does anyone local have a spokeshave I could borrow?

I might have finished carving my paddle had I not had to duck out early for tea ceremony class. At that class I learned my first konarai-level ceremony. (Konarai is a level above the nyumon beginner level; each level at least theoretically requires a license granted by the grand master to study. I received my license to study konarai-level procedures last year.) This particular ceremony that I learned Saturday, called chasen kazari, was one to highlight any of the more utilitarian utensils, like the fresh water container. It wasn't especially tricky.

After class I joined the Mad Science Coffee crowd to play with handcuffs. :) No, nothing naughty, just banal experimentation with locks. I have a decent understanding of how normal handcuffs work now, as well as a realization that I wouldn't be able to pick a properly double-locked pair of handcuffs. Not that that'd probably be my plan if I somehow found my wrists enclosed by a pair of them.

On Sunday I attended the local Urasenke branch's Rikyuki, an annual ceremony that commemorates Sen no Rikyu, the father of Japanese tea ceremony. I had never been to this sort of ceremony before. For this event I tried wearing kimono entirely without in-person dressing assistance for the first time. I did follow along with a kitsuke DVD, and I used a pre-tied tsuke obi, the latter of which could be considered cheating.

Before entering the tearoom my first impression is always the welcoming aroma of the incense. When I entered this time, several things were new to me. For one, several ceramic vases were lined up in a row on the room's low sideboard. For another, a hanging kettle hovered over the burning charcoal in the sunken hearth. And lastly, the alcove contained a footed tray with a burning candle and incense, a vase of nanohana, and a sweet, along with a scroll depicting Rikyu and what I understood to be someone's writing in praise of him.

When our host (also our teacher) entered with a tray of flowers, we learned that each of us guests would dedicate a flower to Rikyu by placing it in one of the empty vases. Arranging flowers in chabana style with a roomful of people watching is a bit tense; I did my best with a pair of small white calla lilies. Next we watched the charcoal arrangement and got a chance to examine the han-neri (marbled ceramic, lit. "half-kneaded") incense container.

For the "snack" of a meal we were each served a tray with an ordinary-sounding but heavenly-tasting chirashi dish (rice with shrimp, grated tamago, lotus root, konnyaku, koyadofu, shiitake, and other stuff), nuta (spring onions dressed with a sweetened miso sauce), and a cup of savory broth with spring greens. After an intermission, we were served the omogashi, a fat teardrop of green yomogi-flavored mochi topped with a dollop of sweetened mashed azuki beans.

Then we were each served a bowl of thin tea. The most interesting utensil was the matcha caddy, a repurposed French glass vessel painted with a silhouetted scene of plants and birds. Sensei used a koukoudana style of utensil stand (one of Rikyu's favorite styles, naturally), a fresh water container made by Willi Singleton, and a tripod lid stand to evoke the tripod kettle trivet that is missing when we use a hanging kettle.

After the ceremony, I had a meeting to plan for this upcoming Saturday's Spring Chakai at the Sackler Gallery. With the cherry blossom tourist season in full swing and a planned hanami outing on Sunday, I expect I'll be having another adventurous weekend.

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/6103.html.

Mood: sad

Tornado Kitty died this past Sunday, and I wanted to write a little about what made her so special.

I adopted her as an adult cat in November 2001, and her name derives from her having been found outside after the September 2001 tornado in central Maryland. At that time she weighed 22 pounds, which made her disinclined to jump and play, but she was a sweetie. Over the years I put her on various diets, and although she was always overweight, she managed to lose a good bit of her starting weight. It was hard to deny food to her—for one thing, she loved eating and expressed it by purring when she really got into it, and she would lick her dish clean. If she found people eating at my low dining room table and she wanted a share, she'd actually sit up on her hind legs and beg. That was frickin' adorable.

She had a strong purr. Here's an mp3 of it. At her yearly checkups at the veterinarian's office, she'd always give the vet trouble by purring loudly when the vet tried to listen to her heartbeat with a stethoscope. What kind of a cat purrs at the vet's office?

She was a licker, too. She groomed me as though I was her little kitten. That didn't work so well when she got to my long hair, but she kept at it. She licked whatever she could get to, be it arm, cheek, or toe. She also groomed other cats when she got a chance, usually against their will. And I could never figure out why, but she licked plastic bags, too.

Tornado Kitty loved to sunbathe, preferring a nice civilized wooden deck to crude dirt or grass. I have to admit that I sometimes joined her on the floor in a pool of sunlight for some rollin'-around-belly-up bonding time. I don't think I've ever experienced such pure, simple happiness as I did during those times.

I miss her.

Thanks to Simon Law for taking the photo that accompanies this post.

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/5829.html.

In case you missed my few seconds of broadcast-television fame on Nova's The Pluto Files earlier this month, you can watch it online. I think I have less airtime than the chihuahua whose purpose is to illustrate the concept of smallness. But I'm pleased that my hair happened to be sporting a freshly-dyed streak of Special Effects Blue Velvet on the day PBS visited to tape our New Horizons part of the show. Counterculture in the control room. :)

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/5546.html.

This summer will mark the 15th anniversary of my getting my amateur radio technician-class license. But I haven't done much with it over the years. As a high school senior I used it for contingency communication with my parents when I drove to the university ~2 hours away to visit my boyfriend, especially when the roads were snowy. I completed ARRL's online introductory Amateur Radio Emergency Communications course a few years ago. I got a handheld VHF/UHF yagi antenna for working amateur radio satellites and even wrote a simple python web application to tell me when those satellites would be making promising passes over my part of the sky. I managed to listen in on the voice traffic for a few AO-51 passes, but I never made any contacts myself, satellite-mediated or not, and the web app broke in upgraded versions of python.¹ So my gear has been sitting on a shelf, collecting dust. A few months ago I looked around for transmitter hunting (a.k.a. fox hunting) activities in my area but found none.

But recently a couple of things are renewing my interest in amateur radio. The first is the great how-to videos by Diana Eng, fashion nerd, hacker, maker, and ham radio ambassador. Just from an attracting-women-to-amateur-radio public relations standpoint, she's a breath of fresh air next to the stale and patronizing efforts like this audio (mp3) public service announcement by ARRL. She is awesome.

Also, I'm joining HacDC in an entry into Hackerspaces in Space², a high-altitude ballooning contest that will take place this summer. Points will be awarded for minimizing cost, mass, and recovery time. The amateur radio connection is that we may use APRS for telemetering the position of our balloon. Incidentally, HacDC's club station callsign is KB3TEA, which is awesome.

For what it's worth, I've got a copy of Kristen Haring's book Ham Radio's Technical Culture sitting on my to-read bookshelf. I'm not familiar with the author, but I'm interested to read her perspective on the topic. Meanwhile, I'm joining my local ham radio club, so I'm sure I'll be forming my own perspective soon.

¹ I just discovered HamSatDroid for my Android phone, which looks quite nice. I wish it included, e.g., AO-51's operating modes, but maybe I can add that myself if I can convince the operations group to publish the schedule of operating modes in a parser-friendly format.

² No, not really in space. But near space.

This entry was originally posted at http://bokunenjin.dreamwidth.org/5311.html.