kayray.org

Karate (Tiny Tigers)
fabric shopping
handwriting
mythology class
musical theater class
A Way with Words: Etymology, Threes
Morris Dancing

Dan: I read an interview with that scientist, what’s-his-name.

Kara: The guy who was on the thing?

Dan: Yeah, that guy.

(ten minutes later)

Kara: Richard Dawkins.

Dan: Yeah.

048 – The Battle of Poitiers

Science club — classifiying minerals, mass/volume
polygons and polyhedrons
pentominoes
A Way with Words – etymology
karate
Greenwitch

I started making my own salsa recently.  It’s so good — I’ll never buy ready-made salsa again.  We don’t like spicy things, so if this salsa seems bland to you, add some hot peppers or something :)
You need:

• Fresh cilantro
• fresh ripe tomatoes
• an onion (you only need a little bit)
• a lime or a lemon
• dash of salt

Mince up a bit of onion, very fine.  Separate the leaves and tender upper stems of cilantro from the tough bottom stems (throw the bottom stems out).  Chop coarsely. Chop a bunch of tomatoes.  Mix all this together in a bowl or an empty cottage cheese container or something.  Add a good squeeze of lime or lemon, and salt to taste.  If it needs more of something, add more of something :)  So good, so good.   I keep a container of this salsa in the fridge at all times.

We have a few volunteers who are artistically/graphically inclined. They’ve been making CD cover art to go with some of our audio books. Wonderful designs! Tonight I finally collected all the artwork pdfs, made 150x150px thumbnail jpgs and 300×300 Album Art jpgs (I’m obsessed with adding Album Art to iTunes lately), and uploaded everything to one nice project on Archive.org, with links back to the recordings and everything. Take a look:

http://www.archive.org/details/librivox_cd_covers

Don’t those nice graphics just make you want to download a book and burn it to a cd and make a spiffy jewel-case insert for it? Why, that’d make a fine Christmas present for someone, don’t you think? :) At the bottom of the wiki page that Seth made, http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/CompactDiscCovers, you’ll find sources for library-style cd cases, so you don’t have to put a ten-cd book in ten individual cases, you know?A big thank-you to Seth and Ted, who made all this art for us AND released it into the public domain for everyone to enjoy!

By popular demand – my lasagna recipe!

Warning: this is a Kara-style, why-bother-to-measure, improvisational recipe. Find some other recipe that gives explicit instructions if you’re a new or nervous cook, and then come back and try this one when you’re ready :) You’ll use raw noodles and spinach in this recipe but don’t worry — it’ll all turn out ok!

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Kara’s Lasagna

Ingredients:

• Dry lasagna noodles in a box. Not fresh, not pre-cooked — just regular.
• A 15-oz tub of ricotta cheese. This will make a generous family-size dish. Use two tubs if you want a mega-lasagna with leftovers for days.
• a bag of fresh, clean, salad-style spinach (you won’t need the whole bag, so you can make a nice spinach salad to go with your lasagna)
• a bag of grated mozarella cheese, or grate your own.
• a tub of nice fresh grated parmesan cheese, or grate your own. Please don’t use the sawdust in the green can!
• about 2 jars of good pasta sauce. You might not need it all, but better too much than not enough. You’ll probably need a third jar if you’re making a mega-lasagna. When I use a can of Roma tomatoes for some other recipe, I save the thick juice to make the sauce go further when I make a lasagna.
• an egg or two
• salt
• Italian herbs — basil, oregano, whatever you’ve got handy
• an onion, chopped
• several cloves of garlic, chopped
• Assorted fresh vegetables: red and/or green bell pepper, fresh mushrooms, zucchini, sliced carrots, whatever you like. I use a box of fresh mushrooms and a red bell pepper as a start, and add other things if I feel like it. The more you use, the bigger your lasagna will be, obviously. Chop everything into appropriately-sized chunks.
• ENTIRELY OPTIONAL: some kind of meat. I used uncooked sweet Italian sausage once, cut into chunks and cooked with the veggies. It was great! You could use ground beef or turkey, or chunks of chicken, or whatever. Just make sure your meat is thoroughly cooked before you assemble the lasagna.

Ok! Heat up some olive oil in a nice big pan. Cook your onion and garlic for a little while, until it starts to get slightly soft. Add the rest of the veggies (hard/solid things like carrots should be added before soft/quick-cooking things like zucchini). Add meat, if you’ve got meat. Add herbs, generously. Cook until it’s all done and smells most sentimental. It’s better if the veggies don’t turn to mush, of course. But make sure that meat is done. It’ll cook more in the oven but why take a chance?

Dump your ricotta into a big huge bowl. Add several handfuls of raw spinach and mix it around with a wooden spoon. Remember that the spinach will shrink a lot, so why not add some more? Add a few spoonfuls of parmesan. Dump in the cooked veggie mixture and mix it all around. Taste, and see if needs salt. I usually add several good shakes. Add an egg or two.

Ok now get your pan. I use a deep 9″x9″ casserole dish with a lid for family-size lasagna, and a 10″x14″ pan for mega-lasagna. Put a layer of RAW lasagna noodles in the bottom. Dump in about half (or a third, depending on how much you made) of your cheese/vegetable mixture. You want a nice even layer. Sprinkle on a generous layer of mozarella and a few spoonfuls of parmesan, and then a good thick layer of sauce. This is no time to be stingy! Repeat these layers until you run out of stuff. End with sauce. You want a LOT of sauce.

Cover and bake (preheat the oven!) at 350 degrees fahrenheit for an hour. Let it rest for 10 minutes or so before you serve. YUM!

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I love this recipe. The noodles turn out perfectly al dente and absorb all the extra liquid, so you don’t get that yucky runny juice in the bottom of the pan. And you don’t have to fiddle around with slimy half-boiled lasagna noodles and big gobs of cooked spinach oozing all over the cutting board. Freeze the leftovers. They reheat deliciously. Let me know if you come up with an awesome new ingredient or variation!

Handwriting
bass practice
guitar practice
A Way with Words – Latin
Greenwitch
Homer Price

I did a lot of stuff today. Hmm, let’s see… Well, after the normal morning stuff, (feeding people, morning chores, email, etc) Henry and I went out to buy turtle food. We had a list of other errands to do, but then I remembered that I had a make-up lesson to teach at 10, so we went home. After the lesson I did more housework and Henry played his guitar and bass for a long time. He worked more on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” (on guitar), and “The End” from Abbey Road (on the bass). And then when he was ready we went to the hobby store for Dan, then back to Trader Joe’s for ricotta, ice cream, eggs, vitamin water, etc. Then to Stater Brothers for straws and prescription stuff.
Then home. We put everything away and grabbed a bite to eat and then played World of Warcraft together for a couple of hours. He played his level-14 night elf warrior, Naronda, and I played my level-14 dwarf Priest, Kayrayovac, and we did Darkkshire quests. You know, the Red Crystal, the Cliffspring Sample, killing the rabid bears, talking to that dude up north across the bridge, etc. It was lots of fun to do those lowbie quests that we already know by heart :) We both leveled, too.

Then I did 4 recordings — a chapter of The Middle Temple Murder, a chapter of How To Speak and Write Correctly, and two sections of poetry, and then I did moree housework and made a lasagna for dinner. Maybe I’ll post my recipe tomorrow. It’s really easy — you don’t bother to cook the noodles or the spinach and it turns out just fine.

047 – The Siege of Calais

Subtraction practice
worked on Multiplication chart
practiced guitar
Meeting with Karen
Greenwitch

Last night Dan showed Henry how to use his amp setup and everything, which sounds much than Henry’s setup, and Henry got all inspired and started to learn “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.  This morning he practiced for about half an hour, and then at 10 we left for our meeting with Karen.  Handed in our “work samples” and discussed all the fun stuff we’ve been doing together.  Very pleasant.  Henry brought his guitar along and played for her :)

Then we went straight down to Chloe’s house to listen to the band rehearsal. Traffic was hellish — two separate accidents on the freeway and everything clogged up for miles.  We got there an hour and a half after they started playing, heh.  But what we heard sounded good!  Henry played Gameboy with Chloe and I ripped cds and knitted and stuff.  When rehearsal was over we stayed and had more fun.  Henry played music with Bob and Chloe and I listened and talked, and then we just goofed around some more.  Nice.  I had planned to try to leave before rush hour but I missed the window of opportunity (if there was one yesterday) so we stayed until nearly 6.  Listened to My Man Jeeves all the way there and back, too, which made the drive as pleasant as a rush-hour freeway drive can be.

So tired.

Henry and I went to the zoo today! We left at about 10:40 and zipped down there — almost no traffic, amazingly — and got there are 11:20 or so. First we walked through the reptile house and visited the komodo dragon (Henry’s favorite today!) and then through the lovely new monkey exhibit, which was built last year to replace the ancient monkey house. It’s one of those beautiful modern exhibits, with two levels of walkways between large airy mesh enclosures, so you can see what’s going on at the top of the forest as well as the bottom. It feels lush and spacious, and the monkeys have huge natural-looking homes filled with live trees, branches, climbing ropes, hiding places, rock pools, etc. We spent a long time watching a family of Wolf’s Guenons. The little one was performing amazing feats of acrobatics while the mother worked and worked to try to crack open a walnut. After about 20 minutes it slipped out of her hands (or maybe she dropped it in disgust) and the father sprinted for it and grabbed it. He took it away to the top of a tree and eventually got it open. They were wonderful to watch.

We wandered through the new exhibit and reached the Gorillas, and spent a lot of time there. Saw two gorilla moms with little infants riding on their backs :) Then down to the bonobos, and then Chloe called (we’d invited them to come and meet us) and we headed back to the beginning of the monkey trail to meet them. Meanwhile they headed down a different trail to the gorillas to meet us :) But we finally met up, and walked all the way back through the monkeys, taking the lower trail this time and encountering lots of interesting wild pigs on the forest floor. Then we popped back to visit the kkomodo dragon again, then took the Sky Buckets over to the polar bears. We watched them for ages. One was rolling around, and the other was chewing on carrots. Arctic carrots, I guess.

Then we went down the hill and past the raptors to the pandas, and watched the 15-month-old cub cavorting with his mom. Because the pandas are so rare and secial, they have a zookeeper sitting near them all the time. She fills the crowd in on their personalities, histories, behaviour and other interesting facts. Neat.

And then we headed home at about 3 to try to beat the rush-hour traffic. It was slow for a while but wasn’t all THAT bad.

So tired now, so tired. But it was worth it! We had a perfect day :) And I have a tub of Trader Joe’s Pfeffernuesse here that needs my attention.

Whoa, I just noticed that our Zoo has little guided-tour podcasts for some of their exhibits! Each episode tells about one of the animals or plants. Check out this link to the podcast for Monkey Trails! http://www.sandiegozoo.org/podcast/monkey_trails/monkey_trails.xml

You can paste that link into your podcatcher and learn about our Flamingo Lagoon, Mandrills, Wolf’s Guenons, Wild Pigs, Bog Garden, and more! So cool. We’ll load some guided tours into our ipods for our next visit! Here’s their main podcast page: http://www.sandiegozoo.org/podcast/

Went to the zoo!
Jeeves and Wooster

046 – The Battle of Crecy

worked on subtraction with borrowing
started writing out big multiplication chart on the white-board
Greenwitch

It’s hot, 89 degrees Fahrenheit in Oceanside right now.  And dry, too. Bah.  Where’s winter?

Got up, fixed oatmeal with raisins for everyone, took Dan to his eye appointment, came home and got our voting stuff, went to the polls.  I made them give me an actual fill-in-the-bubble paper ballot, but Dan says the Diebold electronic thingy was better than last year (well I mean the way he described it sounded better than the machine I used last year, which was wretched). It printed out a paper slip showing his votes. The machine kept the slip, but at least he got to see that it was recording his vote correctly.
Came home, fetched Henry (he’s recovering from a sore throat so we stayed home from Karate this morning) and went grocery shopping.  I wish I could say I “did the marketing”  or that I “went to the market”  but I was raised saying “grocery shopping” and it’d be weird to change.  One of the guests on Loveline the other night was talking about “going to the market” and it just sounds so nice and old-fashioned.

Anyway, did the shopping, got the mail (new Macworld, yay, and the car insurance bill, boo), came home.  Henry hauled the groceries in and I put them away, and then we did  little bit of subtraction together and started writing out a big multiplication chart.  Then I made lunches for people, then I read for a little bit, then I drove out to pick up a package for Dan that had been delivered to his work.  It was nice to get out by myself for a bit.

Then home, more house chores, email etc.  Then piano student, who seemed actually to have practiced last week! Yay!

It’s hot.  I really need to vacuum the whole house but it’s too hot, so I’ll do it later when the sun goes down.

Chloe invited me to go to a band rehearsal on Thursday so I’m all excited about that!  I hope I don’t get Henry’s sore throat before then.

Three chapters of Story of the World — Byzantium, medieval India, beginning of Islam.
Looked at Hagia Sophia and Ajanta caves online.
Greenwitch

045 – The Battle of Sluys

Last night as I was getting ready for bed Dan said he had found the most awesome website ever. I hurried to see, thinking he’d found some hilarious video or something. What he showed me was http://kiva.org. Although it is not hilarious, it is truly amazing.

From their “about” page:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

But this is a very dry description and doesn’t convey the happy feeling of working with Kiva. When you go to their site and click the “Lend” button, you’ll be taken to a list of entrepreneurs in developing countries who need a small (and I mean small) loan to help improve their businesses. For instance, a fellow in Mexico might need $500 to improve his grocery store. You can sort through the businesses to select a certain kind of business, or a certain country, or whatever. You’ll see a photo of the business-person, and a description of his or her plans for the loan. You’ll see how much money has been donated toward the goal, and how much is still lacking. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see the names and locations of people who’ve helped with that loan.

Click the “Lend” button and you can pick an amount to lend (as small as $25) through PayPal. PayPal does NOT take a cut! This is the first non-profit to get this special treatment from PayPal.

You’ll create an account with Kiva, and you’ll have a portfolio showing what you’ve lent, when it will be paid back, etc. You’ll also have a Lender Page, like ours, that can be viewed by other Kiva participants. If you click Carolyne‘s name at the bottom of our page there, you can see that we were the first to lend to her business last night. By morning, the entire amount of her loan had been raised! As we were browsing around on the site last night, we kept an eye on her page and it was so exciting to see other lenders joining us to help her!

I think one of the most important aspects of Kiva is that it’s so much fun. Dan and I stayed up WAY too late last night poking around on the site, choosing businesses to lend to, clicking the profiles of other lenders. That’s how we found our second lendee (is that a word?). We clicked on the profile of “Jim“, the second lender to Carolyne. We saw that he’d lent to Peter, and that that loan was not yet fully funded, so we lent to Peter too. There’s a nice sense of community. Also instant gratification — the amount you lend is reflected immediately. Also the pleasure of being able to see a photo of the person you’re helping — a real live person, not some impersonal faceless charity — and to feel that your small donation can really make a huge difference!

The site is a little bit slow right now. Frontline did a story on Kiva a few days ago, and the resulting rush of lenders took their servers down :) They’re still working on improvements to handle the increased load. Here’s a link to the Frontline page, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/uganda601/video_index.html

And an easy guide to getting started with Kiva: http://kiva.org/app.php?page=about&action=how

(Or just look in my sidebar for the Kiva banner and click the photo!)

More info: Wikipedia: Kiva