I'm not an obsessive list-keeper, but I do like to have a safe place to put down the things I need-to-remember-to-remember. When I need brain space for the things I'm actually working on, I tend to open a fresh text file, dump my active memory into it, give it a hopefully descriptive name, and pretend I'll come back to look at it later. This is arguably a terrible idea, but I persist.

Here is the entire contents of read-when-awake.txt, which was created at 12:19 PM on 29 Oct 2007 (probably just before I took a nap?), modified the next day, and is now, inexplicably, living on my thumb drive.

I'm fairly sure I did eventually do at least three of those things.

My photos from Zack and Marina's wedding are up over at the Flickr.

( But really, this is all you need to know. )

While pulling cookie ingredients out of the cupboard to make good on my recent promises, I had to shuffle aside some currying supplies on my way to grab the molasses. My hand lit on another dark-colored, viscous substance. I raised an eyebrow and got out two more bowls.

My proof-of-concept batch was promising but unbalanced. kalmialatifolia sampled them, prescribed a spicing that worked, and made batch two. The results were delightful: chewy and satisfying, with a lot of flavor but a light citrus character that keeps them from landing too heavily. For your summer baking pleasure, we give you...

Tamarind Cookies

Cream together:

1 C sugar

1/2 stick unsalted butter

1 egg

2 generous tablespoons tamarind concentrate

Juice and zest from 1 key lime (or half a regular lime)

1 tsp finely-grated fresh ginger

Mix in a separate bowl:

1 C flour

3 pinches ground black pepper

3/4 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

Stir the dry and wet ingredients together to make a wet, sticky dough. Drop tablespoonfuls about 2" apart onto an ungreased cookie sheet and bake until they're set but not crispy (8-10 minutes at 375° F). Cool them on a rack or towel and put them in an airtight container as soon as they get to room temperature; if they're left out too long on a humid June evening, they will absorb moisture and turn from chewy to floppy.

Makes about 3 dozen very thin 3" cookies.

A note about the tamarind: I used Tamicon brand concentrate, which is an extremely thick, dark, smooth-textured, very sour goop that looks a lot like molasses (hence my inspiration for this whole project). It comes in an 8-oz plastic jar with a red lid and it costs less than $2 at every Asian or Indian grocery I've checked, so don't rush to order it off the Internet unless that's how you roll anyway. I've also purchased tamarind by the whole pod and by the brick of pressed, unprocessed pulp. It's possible you'd get a slightly fresher tamarind flavor from these, but you're on your own for concentrate⇌pulp conversion factors.

Find an existing (no fair adding it yourself!) Wikipedia page that mentions Fred Rogers and Kurt Cobain in the same sentence. I know there to be at least one. Winners get cookies.

Laurel's not eligible, but she can have some cookies anyway.

I'm chronically slow at most things I do, but especially at editing and posting photos. Yesterday I finally put up the worthiest of my photos from the second, third, and fourth quarters of last year. No promises when I'll start on this year's images.

As always, there are more on Flickr and these all link there. You, uh, may notice a theme to the second half of the year. I'm not sorry.

( Nine more. A megabyte or so. )

I'm heading east. Tomorrow morning I will drive out of Southeast Portland, past the old houses and the coffeeshops and the plethora of Asian markets. I will take my old route to work, but instead of taking the Fairview exit I will continue up the Columbia gorge, past the fine hiking near Multnomah Falls and the rock-climbing at Horsethief Butte, and onward into the territory I only see when I'm passing through. I know the drive between Portland and Wisconsin well enough that I don't need the map anymore; I have to follow the signs carefully for that one dodgy stretch around Pasco and Kennewick, and if I hit traffic in Minneapolis I might try to look up an alternate route, but the rest of the trip is burned into my mind. I've lost track of how many times I've done this drive. At least six times across, plus at least another six on Greyhound following the same route.

This trip is different, though, because this time I won't be returning to Portland, at least for a while. My car is loaded to the gills with all of the junk I didn't sell, give away, trash, or abandon. I shipped ahead 140 pounds of books and another 80 of clothing and kitchen gear. I own too much stuff.

From next week onward, I'll be living in Champaign-Urbana, IL. I will be studying plant biology, finally living in the same house as kalmialatifolia (well, in four months, anyway), learning to live in a place without hills, gardening and cooking a lot, and spending a lot of late nights in the lab. In five years or so, I'll finish up a badass PhD thesis and go looking for new horizons, but right now a small city in central Illinois is the place for me.

Portland has been good to me. I have six years worth of memories set here: Most of one love now over, the start of another still ongoing, hundreds of hours in coffeeshops, photo walks in St. Johns, late-night frisbee in Irving Park or on Mount Tabor, two years of being a grunt and four years of being an egghead. Portland is where I wrecked my first car, ate my first sushi, and knifed my first hobo (...or maybe that was a dream). I'm going to miss the neighborhoods full of negligently but happily tended gardens, the hot bicyclists, the hipsters and and hippies and punks and outdoors lovers, the skyline seen from the Hawthorne bridge, the walks in the rain-that's really-just-mist-trending-downward.

Portland residents, don't be strangers. I can still be reached by phone, email, AIM, Gchat, IRC, Facebook, Livejournal, that form on my website, and probably some other ways as well. Get in touch with me by whatever method you know and I'll tell you my info for the others.

I don't know my new address yet, and I will be moving at least once more in August. If you have anything to send me (or want to visit!), check with me by one of the methods listed above.

As you may know, I own the domain name bodger.org. I use it for both that there website and for my main email account.

As you may also know, one great thing about controlling the domain name for your email is that you make up your usernames at will. I've told many friends that they can send email to "anything you like at bodger dot org," and I will see it. Sure enough, I routinely get messages for "chris," "chrisb," "bodger," "bluesbodger", "telapathicmonkeys," "TheExpectedValue," and, yes, "anythingyoulike."

The trouble with this system is that anybody else can also make up usernames for you, which makes it very, very easy for someone to guess a valid email address, which means ( I get a mind-boggling amount of spam ).

To fight the torrent, I'm adopting a more aggressive mail filtering rule, and ( it's no longer strictly true that I'll see absolutely anything you send to bodger.org. )

I want to read messages from you, but not from spambots. Both you and the spambots know that email addresses look like user@domain, and both you and the spambots know that my domain is bodger.org. You can get a leg up on them by also knowing that my name is Chris.

The punchline is "Good morning, Mr. Pleathident!"

You tell me what the joke is. Extra points for illustrations.

Nearly all of my contact info is changing before the end of the month. I'm moving across town, I got a cell phone, and my Reed email will stop working soon. I plan a mass email containing all the new info, but you should email chris at bodger dot org to make sure I remember to include you.

If you are a former resident, guest, passer-through, or fellow traveler of Winch-On-Green, consider this your last chance to ask for the return of that thing you left in our kitchen or basement that one time.

In more important news, my main distraction these past several months has been not school or moving or even Lackadaisy, but a certain cute Reedie nerd who has blinded me with her science. My housemates will attest that I haven't shut up about her since March. Yeah, she's just that awesome.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I believe I have some homework to... uh, wait. Whoa.

A few of you have met my father, Bryce, who's kind of like me except better at building stuff. When he's not climbing windmill towers or hauling granaries around on hay wagons, he writes songs, at which he is much better than me.

I'm pleased to announce that Bryce and his longtime collaborator Yata have just released their first album, and it's really freakin' impressive. I know, everybody says that about their favorite musical relatives, but let's put it this way: I've been listening to some of these songs for ten years now, and they just keep getting better. This ain't no shitty garage-studio work, either; producer Bruce Hecksel is a knob-tweaking genius.

The music is catchy lyric-driven folk; some of it is very serious and some of it, including some of his very best songs, is hilarious. He sings about cannibal cows, caffeine dependence, honest courtship, paleontological controversy, and makeshift tie-down devices. You can hear one-minute clips of every song (That's damn near a third of the album!) on bryceblack.com, and you can buy the album directly from him or from CD Baby, and I hear tell he'll be in the iTunes Store soon. Seriously, go check it out.

FAQ:

• No, track 1 is not a true story. But it was inspired by my actual toddler self (my love of altitude was revealed early) and it's true that Bryce was forbidden to sing it in my presence for several years; Mom was convinced it would give me ideas.
• Yes, that's the same “Sheer Caffeine” that you may or may not have heard me sing once in a while. My version doesn't hold a candle to the real thing.
• Yes, CD Baby recommends this album for anyone who likes Tom Lehrer, John Prine, or They Might Be Giants. John Prine is Bryce's all-time songwriting hero, but last I checked he still hated TMBG despite all my best efforts to train him otherwise. You should all tell him you bought his album because it sounded like TMBG.
• Bryce's website is my doing. Send your suggestions and complaints directly to me, or send your thoughts about the music straight to him.

Update, April 7th: Bryce points out that he doesn't actually hate TMBG, and in fact he's the one who picked the "recommended if you like..." artists. I retract the allegation, and I hereby apologize for subjecting my family to so many listenings of "We Want A Rock" back when I first got a copy of Flood.

Spot the overeager comma placement. Seems to be happening for everything in my iTunes library; I don't think I have any other files handy which would have "year" in the metadata. I think this is new in Leopard, but I can't prove it.

Many of you seemed unconvinced by my representation of bouldering in yesterday's post. I guess I was wrong about bouldering walls being easy to draw.

Fine, then. Here's what I was really doing during the time indicated in yesterday's panel 4:

To clarify, this was at an event where many other people were doing something a little more like:

...And today I was sore but not miserable. Maybe I'm not as far out of shape as I feared.

(In the style of Unphotographable.)

This is a photo I did not take of a family eating dinner in the Reed College dining hall, the parents two old hippies—alums from the 60s?—slouching comfortably in their worn-out sweatshirts, their frizzy grey hair flying in all directions, while their two preteen daughters sat carefully upright with straight brown hair flowing neatly down their backs and their matching hip-hugger jeans hugging the hips they didn't yet have. In this picture I did not take, the father is leaning forward, muttering genially to his wife without looking up as he applies knife and fork to the food on his plate, and they look for all the world like a gentle, non-abrasive replica of Miracle Max and his wife from the Princess Bride, improbably grouped with two earnest-faced and stylish daughters in red leather Mary Janes who seem to enjoy their company.

Speaking of procrastination, I edited and sorted these photos way back in December, and they've been sitting around ever since waiting for me to tag them and upload them (which is the easy part). Might as well finish what I start.

I've been posting a few pictures every time I upload a fresh batch to Flickr, but I'm wondering how much overlap there is in my audience—perhaps you've all subscribed to the RSS feed and I'm just spamming y'all with duplicate notifications. Given that you can always go directly to Flickr if you want to see more (every picture links back to my photostream), and that I try to pick my favorites from each batch so you're getting only the high-grade product, how much of my Flickr output would youse guys like to see me posting here: All? 23%? Never more than 1 photo per batch uploaded? None ever?

I have supposedly been writing a thesis introduction for the last month. Its current form consists of a couple incomplete outline versions, a stack of rumpled papers with notes I can no longer decipher, and dozens of text files filled with notes that I can decipher but that don't make any sense (that's the magic of typesetting, folks). I've written perhaps two out seven sections; the whole intro has to be done ten days from now.

While I was home for xmas, I had a long conversation with my mother about the fine distinction between triage, yak-shaving, and procrastination. We were particularly discussing the idea of using physical work (say, cleaning the bathroom) as a stalling tactic for mental work such as writing a paper.

Mom asserts that the concept of procrastination is basically a white-collar disease, born of a mindset where you have one thing to do and it keeps being Clearly Most Important for many consecutive attention spans, ensuring you'll get sick of working on it well before it's done. My mother is definitively not white-collar (she proudly reports her occupation to the IRS as "peasant") and maintains that in the real world you expect to be choosing between several important tasks, meaning it's usually okay to decide that it's time to go give some attention to thing B now.

I wasn't entirely convinced, and I pointed out that my academic work (a white-collar activity if ever there was one) usually involves a healthy dose of triage and priority-juggling just like her gardening does. Well... this month it was just me and the thesis staring each other down, and the urge to go clean the bathroom has been getting stronger by the day. I guess Mom was right again.

Right. So I'm supposed to be doing all these things for school (pronounced "writing a thesis"), and I'm behind schedule and getting just a wee bit stressed out. My usual system for dealing with stress is to procrastinate a lot like always, but to do it while using what I like to think of as my "I'm not actually here right now" userpic:

Mad props to jazkharma for providing the image way back in the day (2004); it has served me well until now. Trouble is, see, it went and got to actually be 2008, so "try back in 2008" doesn't imply quite the same frantically sequestered condition anymore.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why vruba has manfully accepted the challenge to make me a new userpic to go with my new state of desperation:

Right. Well, back to work. I'm, uh, studying. Try back in May.