The Windkey and the Lamplighter

30 years old and a little worse for the wear, even if some of its
design was a compromise where everyone lost, even if it can’t fly
itself home from California, t is still my favorite ugly duckling.

Thanks to How I am Becoming an Astronaut for the picture

They have this in the specialty pasta section at Star Market. I think
it’s tomato and spinach flavored.

My friend Amy took this while visiting Boston. It wasn’t a great
picture of my face, but I liked the crazy hair, so I "fixed" it.
Think I have a career in magazine photoediting? I don’t think so
either.

Someone at church had a garden that must have been solid rhubarb. I’d
never tried it before, but Brian said it was good, so we took a bag
with maybe nine stalks. I tried some, and it is good–if somewhat
bitter.

So I am making a rhubarb pie. For this, I started with the
Pie and Pastry Bible (a really awesome wedding present, thanks Courtney!),
which has so far given me awesome pie crusts. Their rhubarb pie calls
for 2/3 c sugar. Since I tend to like less sweet pies than most
Americans (my apple pie just has cinnamon and nutmeg and apples,
thank-you-very-much), I cross checked the sugar with a recipe from
The Joy of Cooking.

1 1/2 c of sugar, in one 9" pie? Are they mad? I mean, I reliably use
the Joy of Cooking as a basis for experimenting—I almost never
follow their recipes as written—and I knew that many of their
recipes are over-sweet—but that just seems ridiculous.

I’ll let you all know how the pie turns out. If this ends up like the
unsweetened apple-cranberry pie (each slice ended up served with
between a teaspoon and a tablespoon of honey), I will feel very
embarassed.

edit: Here is a picture of the pie. It is by far the prettiest pie
I’ve ever made.

(or, Why I Love Being a Soprano)

Tonight I was rehearsing a setting of the Lord’s Prayer with my
church’s organist. The piece is one I know reasonably well, and is
written to lead up to a beautiful high-Bb climax and then come down
gracefully to end the prayer(1). As I drove home, I felt a phenomenal
endorphin rush combined with immense peace and relaxation. I have
other memories of this feeling: sometimes it comes after exercise,
when my body is exhausted but my mind is clear. Sometimes I feel it
when I pray, especially outdoors and away from all the fast-moving
distractions that dominate much of my everyday life. Mostly, however,
I get this feeling when I sing.

Music is very tied up in my connection to God, and in how I express
myself. I went to church all through middle and high school so that I
could sing with the choir, even when I was the only member of my
family to attend and I had to be driven 30 minutes away to get there,
because the music was important to me. The hymns of my childhood
formed most of my early thoughts about religion and what God is.

Conversely, I’ve never been confident composing spoken prayers—they
end up being awkward, and if I’m alone I’ll get distracted before I
really finish saying everything I meant to say, especially when I’m
tired.

When I’m singing, I don’t have to worry about what I’ll say or
in what order the words come. When I sing, I can open up the
floodgates of my soul and let the music hidden there come pouring out.
This is particularly true for loud high notes.
Tonight the organist told me, "It must be so fun to be able to sing a
Bb", and I agreed that it was, but there’s more to it than that. It
takes everything you have to give, physically and spiritually, to push
the air out and fill the room with sound. But, just as you push out
the last bit of air, and think you’re empty, you realize that your
soul is full of that excitement and peace I mentioned before. (Sadly,
it does not come with more air. More air would sometimes be nice,
since the music does keep going and there’s only me to sing it.)

I am so grateful that God has given me a way to reach out to Him that
I can share with others.

(1) I hate when composers abandon the soprano on a high note
(especially a soft one) at the end of a piece. It can be done
well, but usually isn’t, and then you squeak, and nobody likes to
squeak.

Komodo Dragons aren’t usually what comes to mind when I consider a smoothly decafinated blend.

I’m a great fan of Knuth’s TeX system. I use it for papers, markup on
literate programs, and slides for talks. I even use it for letters
and address labels. For several years now I’ve had a split setup: my
Macs use teTeX from MacPorts while my Debian GNU/Linux machines use
TeXLive. TeXLive is a much nicer system—it has dozens of packages
that Thomas "te" Esser never could ship with teTeX. But the
convenience of using MacPorts kept me with its teTeX package.

I’m now delighted to have discovered MacTeX. It’s a Mac-friendly
TeXLive package, including DVI previewers, TeX-aware spelling
checkers, and everything you’d ordinarily find in a TeX system. It
even includes a working XeTeX. XeTeX is a recent innovation to
support Unicode and fancy TrueType fonts in TeX. You can just write

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Times New Roman:LetterCase=SmallCaps}

and away you go. It makes it easy to use system fonts in TeX. Now
documents produced in ordinary applications (e.g., OmniGraffle) can
mesh easily with TeX documents.