I brought the birds to work with me today. One of Daedalus' favorite pastimes is running around on top of the cabinets prying the doors open.

Today she has been prying open the cabinet doors just a bit, sitting on the doors and leeeeeeeaning down to peer into the cabinet's interior. She then makes her "I'm getting into trouble!" croak, over and over. (They both love to hear their own croak echo in enclosed spaces.)

Next thing I knew, she'd hopped off the door into the cabinet, which was mostly shut behind her. She then proceeded to march back and forth, croaking and whistling.

I found this highly amusing, so I popped Icarus in as well. He joined her in marching and croaking and whistling.

Evidently being inside an empty cabinet provides many minutes of amusement! I'll have to file that tidbit away for later...

On Monday night I returned from visiting holdenrevisited in Chicago. It was a fabulous, relaxing vacation, mostly comprised of knitting, cooking, chatting, listening to NPR, and going to yarn stores.

While there, I clicker-trained holdenrevisited's cats a little. One was really into it, and I taught her to sit on cue (palm flat facing down) and to sit pretty. It was funny to be around un-trained cats; I kept expecting them to act like my own dog-like cats, but instead they did normal cat things. :)

I admit it: I'm an addict. I guess it's telling that clicker training is what I do when I'm on vacation. (And the books I brought with me? Jean Donaldson's Dogs Are From Neptune and Karen Pryor's On Behavior.)

Yeah, I'm a little obsessed. But I promise to use it only for good.

Subject: Icarus
Behavior: Spin

Big breakthrough today! I did a bunch of lured spin practice, then decided we'd done enough of that, and that it was time to try to get Icarus to give me the behavior on his own. I planned to do this by shaping, starting with small head turns and working up to the full spin. I was hoping he'd put together our practice with lured spins with the new shaping regimen and eventually (probably after several training sessions) offer spins on his own.

To my complete surprise, after a few clicks for head-turns, he offered a complete spin on his own! Even more surprising, it was in the opposite direction of the spins we'd been practicing (which were left, or counter-clockwise, turns). Color me flabbergasted! I jackpotted that, of course. After that, he offered at least 30 spins in both directions on his own, although he did offer more left turns than right. I clicked and treated them all. What a session! :D

Lured spins: 16
No spin: 1
Shaped spins (including initial shaping clicks): 51
Session length: approx 8 minutes

Subject: Daedalus
Behavior: Tic tac toe

Still working on accuracy of placement of pieces on the board. Daedalus started off with a fairly low rate of correct behaviors (leans or fully in-square placements, aka "ins"), perhaps 40%, but quickly increased until she was offering many more leans and ins than "betweens."

Final totals:
In square: 26 (29.89%)
Leans: 37 (42.53%)
Outs: 24 (27.59%)

Total correct: 72.42%

Subject: Icarus and Daedalus
Behavior: Cued right and left waves

I decided to switch the cue for right and left waves to something more subtle. New cues are: Right wave: curling motion with my right pinky finger; Left wave: curling motion with my right index finger. This was an easy transition, since I've been doing one-finger waves as their cue already (since I'm often holding a treat hidden in the other fingers) and because I initially taught them the right wave as a modification of the "shake hands" behavior, so the cue was originally a curled pinky finger (they shake a person's pinky finger).

Both birds picked up the new cues very quickly, and quickly started to distinguish between the two. I helped them along by utilizing some of the old cue (my hand/finger waving on their right or left sides), but quickly faded that.

Didn't calculate rates of correct/incorrect behaviors (hard with 2 birds!), but I am guessing it was at least 60%.

transversely and I don't have ASL class next week because of Veterans' Day. We also have no class the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Being nerds, we are horribly disappointed by this. Fortunately, we've found a sign club at the local college where we can go to practice.

Because class starts at 6:15, we don't have time to go home after work, so we grab a burrito downtown each week. We use it as a time to practice our ASL and get our heads into 'ASL mode' before class. Yesterday we literally spent all of the walk to dinner, then dinner itself, then the walk back up to the car without speaking aloud, and had a great conversation in ASL! It is really cool to realize how much we've progressed. Sometimes when I'm learning new languages I get frustrated by how little I can say; it's nice to remember how much I can say.

Our big final project for the semester is to watch two stories on our course DVD "textbook," pick one, practice it, and then videotape ourselves telling the story and turn it in. I am very excited about this! I've been watching ASL poems and interpretations of songs online to get psyched up for it and get ideas on good and bad storytelling.

Stay tuned for my video in a few weeks. ;)

Oh, and the sign for nerd is: put your index and middle fingers together and run the tips of them from the point of your nose up to the bridge, like you're pushing your glasses up. :)

Daedalus: worked on tic tac toe a bit. Same behavior as yesterday. She's definitely improving at getting the shape into the hole. Icarus was distracting her today, so our session was pretty short, approximately 5 minutes.

Icarus: Worked on "spin." This was our first session, and he did marvelously. I am luring the behavior with a target stick (actually, a pen, because I couldn't find my real target stick... Icarus didn't care). I am verrrrrrrry slowly fading the lure; by the end of the session he really understood the desired behavior, so I could make the cue fairly fast (not waiting for him to follow it around, just getting him started) and raise it up a smidge. Training time: about 3 minutes.

Milton: Worked on his "under/through" behavior using a kitchen chair. We used to practice this with a wicker tunnel, but the rabbit chewed it to pieces. Ah well, it was her toy, after all. The chair requires more focus because there's more than one way to go under it, so I did a bit of leading him around to the correct starting place. By the end of the session he had clearly grasped the desired behavior and I was able to fade the lure (target... pen) quite a bit. I still occasionally had to target him around to the correct place and then target him under, but thus is the nature of cats: they are easily distractible. All in all, good session. Training time: about 3 minutes.

Worked with Daedalus on tic tac toe this afternoon. This session I increased my criterion to "put the piece all the way (or very close to all the way) into any one of the squares on the board. (The board has a raised grid around the squares so that it's easy to get the pieces into the correct places.)

We did about 10 minutes of work, and her rate of getting the piece solidly into the square increased dramatically. (Again, no record keeping. Bad trainer! I have to make up some record-keeping sheets.) At first she would place it on the board at random, sometimes mostly in a square and sometimes right on the raised border between the squares. By the end she was putting it into a square more often than not.

Again, as soon as I started clicking, Milton (cat) came running over, sat nicely at my feet, and purred very, very loudly during the entire training session. It took me months to teach that cat patience, but it's a lesson he's clearly learned well!

It's been far too long since my last photo post, my friends. Today, I will remedy that.

Sign language class is marvelous and wonderful. Learning new languages always makes me imagine I can actually feel the new neural connections forming.

We've been learning at a breakneck pace - this past week we did the entirety of Unit 2 for homework. It took approximately a gazillion hours. Now that the pace has picked up, the Hermiones are being sorted out from the Rons. (Three guesses which group transversely and I are in, and the first two don't count.)

In last week's class we were practicing appearance descriptors - clothing, colors, etc - and we got to play Go Fish! It was amazingly fun. The in-class exercises that go along with our book have been really good so far.

This week we practiced hobbies and activities. We got to say what our favorite activities were, and then what we disliked. One guy said he disliked women because they drive him crazy. Nice. Toto, we're not at a women's college anymore.

During the round where we talk about what we dislike, one guy tried to say he disliked work, but instead of tapping his wrists together twice (work), he put them together and held them. Our teacher started laughing, and explained that he'd signed that he didn't like being arrested.

The next hilarious moment came when we were practicing the sign for soda. You curl the fingers of your left hand into a tube (like a can), then put the middle finger of your other hand into the tube and pull it out, like you're popping the tab on the can. To complete the sign, you then tap the open palm of your right hand on top of your left hand (still in its tube shape).

One of the middle-aged women in the class didn't quite get the first part of the sign right, and she stuck her index finger up inside the bottom of the "tube" hand. The teacher turned purple and vehemently told her not to sign it that way. It became clear that what she'd signed meant something extremely dirty; when she realized it, she too turned purple, and we all dissolved into hysterical laughter for a couple of minutes (including the teacher and the student who had mis-signed). Oh, the hilarity of learning a new language.

transversely and I are kind of obsessed with signing, and we practice at every opportunity now. NERDS, that's what we are.

Woohoo, broke 50 before the end of September!

48. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
A novel about a girl Victorian England who sees a male impersonator in a variety show and falls in love with her. It chronicles her life from there on out. The writing is lush and evocative, which makes the book captivating. It's divided into four sections; I found the first two to be marvelous, but the third and fourth less interesting. Still, a very good read.

49-52. Academ's Fury, Cursor's Fury, Captain's Fury, Princeps' Fury, by Jim Butcher
transversely and I tore through this series like our lives depended on it. Butcher masterfully crafts his plots and weaves together the various storylines. This series was reminiscent of A Song of Ice and Fire. I'd recommend these books highly to anyone who enjoyed that series, or anyone who likes classic swords-and-intrigue fantasy novels.

A couple of weeks ago I helped dr_fritz and azar slaughter their chickens. Perhaps this was a strange choice of endeavors for a mostly-vegetarian (and non-chicken-eater), but I wanted to do this for several reasons:

1. I wanted to learn the skills involved in the process of killing and preparing an animal to be eaten.

2. I like to experience things I haven't before, and this seemed like a pretty interesting experience.

3. I'm interested in the politics of food, and am horrified by the things that routinely happen in factory farming and commercial slaughtering operations. I wanted to see - not just read about - the other side of the coin: the humane slaughtering process that happens on small farms.

4. Many hands make light work, and I like helping out friends when they need it.


( What was it like? I'll tell you what it was like for me... Don't read this if you don't want to hear about dead chickens. )

Overall, the process affected me strongly, but was less traumatizing than I had anticipated. I went to the farm unsure if I'd have the fortitude of stomach be able to help, or if I'd just watch; I ended up halfway to my elbows in chicken guts. The process was far cleaner and more humane than I had thought it could possibly be. In fact, I told dr_fritz that if I was going to eat a chicken it would certainly be one of his. I watched those roosters grow up eating grass and bugs and seeing the sunshine, and I watched them die gently.

It wasn't easy, though. I watched twenty-four living creatures die. Even if it was as kind a death as I could ask for myself, it was still death. The reality of the process was that it was slimy and smelly and hard physical work (especially holding the freshly-killed chickens over the plucker!) and challenging emotional work, and I spent a long time afterwards with the smell of hot, wet chicken feathers and feces in my nostrils. As someone who's never really had to deal with the death of my food (except the occasional fish or lobster), it wasn't an easy thing to see. But I think it was an important thing for me to see. I want to be connected to the process of growing and raising food, and this was a part of that.

It's an experience I'm glad I had.

I took very few pictures at the wedding, since there were several photographers on duty who are much more capable than I. I did take a few "hanging out before the wedding" pictures:

#42-44. The Midnighters Series, by Scott Westerfeld (YAF, fantasy)
Not Westerfeld's best work. Pretty fluffy and brainless, but entertaining. They're about a group of teenagers in a certain town who experience an extra hour at midnight each night. The only problem is, a whole bunch of creepy monsters wake up in the extra hour.

#45. Down to the Bone, by Mayra Lazara Dole (YAF)
This is the story of a teenage Cuban girl in Miami who is outed to her Catholic school classmates, her close-minded mother, and the entire city by an evil Catholic school nun. She gets kicked out of her house and ditched by her brainwashed girlfriend, and spends the rest of the book trying to figure out what to do. It's a cute book, but it's told in a very sassy, flippant, "this is how I think real teenagers talk" style that kept me from really getting into any of the characters. They all seemed like caricatures created for a purpose, not real people. I'm glad this book exists (it's sort of the lesbian counterpart to Alex Sanchez's Rainbow Boys), but I didn't love it.

#46. Furies of Calderon (Book 1 of the Codex Alera), by Jim Butcher (fantasy)
This fantasy novel is set in a country where everyone controls furies, which are sort of spirits associated with various elements and natural things (air, fire, water, plants, earth, etc). These give people special powers, but also weaknesses. On this premise Butcher builds a novel full of political intrigues, battles, and compelling characters. Recommended. (I think pawpower4me and makaer would like this series.)

#47. Bread Alone, by Judith R. Hendricks (fiction)
This novel tells the story of a selfish, entitled, annoying woman going through a divorce. There's enough whining and navel-gazing to make you think you're reading Twilight, and then she magically figures things out at the end and we're supposed to believe she becomes a better human being. I spent most of the book wanting to slap some sense (and self respect) into this character. Not at all recommended, unless you like whiny divorce books.

Currently reading: Academ's Fury, the second book in the Codex Alera. I'm almost done, and I think this one is even better than the first one.

lizsybarite is building her portfolio as a makeup-y person, and this weekend she did a fabulous makeup job on me. Here are the pictures to prove it:

Quickety-quack post just to say:

1. Classes started on Tuesday and work is eating my life. I'm busting my butt so I can take Friday off to go to the wedding of two very good friends.

1a. However, work is so much less bad than it usually is the first week of classes! We've had no major crises so far, which hopefully means we've finally gotten the whole system stable. (Touch wood.) As per usual, some faculty make me really love my job, and some make me want to become a hermit. Overall, though, it's been a really good couple of weeks and I've had a lot of laughs and very little tearing out of hair.

2. My poison ivy is almost gone. It's faded into scabs and scaly pink patches. (Charming, I know.) A coworker and I realized that although we aren't allergic to anything else, poison ivy is debilitating. It is our kryptonite.

2a. This poison ivy attack wasn't as horrible as usual, thanks to the outbreak-control method transversely thought up: Take a Claritin each morning and a Benadryl each evening, and wash with Tecnu soap whenever it itches. This kept the swelling down, reduced the spreading of the rash, and prevented the itching from driving me bonkers.

3. Tonight was my first ASL class! transversely and I are both in love with it already. We came home and looked up a bunch of signs, and have been talking to each other in sign-and-mime.

4. I played model for lizsybarite, who's building her portfolio as a makeup artist. It was even more fun than I expected, and the pictures turned out fabulously. I'll post them when I've got time to breathe.

5. WEDDING! So excited! It'll be like a mini vacation in celebration of surviving the first week of classes.

6. ASL!!

How good, you might ask?

Well, here's a typical picture of my kitchen recently:

My homemade, lacto-fermented "sour" pickles are so delicious that I don't think I'm going to get a chance to try canning them. We've already dispatched half of the gallon jar. I managed to shove them in the fridge just at the right moment, and they're not overfermented or soggy. They are perfect, if a bit salty. ("Sour" pickles have a strong brine, about 5.6% salt, I think, so they keep longer but taste saltier. All that salt sure tastes good after biking home in the 93* weather with 97% humidity, though. I think I've drunk about six pints of water since I got home!)



The other reason I probably won't test out canning the lacto pickles is that I haven't bought a new pressure gauge for my canner yet, so I couldn't can them even if I wanted to. I'm sure it would make them dreadfully mushy, though; it did with my dilly beans, and they never get mushy.

On our way home today we stopped at a yard sale. We bought a small steam cleaner and got two battery-powered string trimmers and a paper towel holder for free. The old couple who was selling the stuff was skeptical about us bringing it all home on our bikes, but once we let out the Xtracycle panniers and strapped it in, they couldn't stop remarking about how neat our bikes were. :)

This is what my house looks like when it's this hot out:



Thank goodness for ceiling fans! We're super-paranoid about ceiling fans + birds, but a combination of vigilance about turning them off when the birds are out plus the fact that the birds have no interest whatsoever in going up to the top of the cathedral ceiling mean things have been safe so far.

Went camping with transversely for the first time, with nuclearvenus and midnights_sun12. We ate, cooked our food over a fire, swam in a lake, ate some more, did a zillion Sudoku puzzles, ate, hiked in the woods, drank a large quantity of chocolate almond milk, saw a glacier-balanced rock and a 40' waterfall, and successfully banked our fire overnight and restarted it from coals in the morning. T and I are already planning when we can do it again!

Dropped off Daisy, our cruiser tandem bike, to get tuned up. We're having the gears tweaked, the pedals put into alignment, the front handlebars raised up to take the pressure off of transversely's wrists, and a sweet rack put on the back. We're also buying better headlights for night riding.

Painted the rest of our kitchen red. It looks fabulous, and I am completely in love with it.

Picked out wallpaper for our guest bathroom. Next on Homemaking Adventures, we'll learn how to hang wallpaper, courtesy of my mom.

Helped callyboy move away. Was sad, but he's since slept over at our house twice, which makes up for it a little.

Mopped the entire house, with the help of my robot slave, the Scooba.

Were introduced to a new swimming hole with a rope swing on the Connecticut River. Next time I will be brave enough to rope swing out from the tree and fall in the river!

Sat in the gloriously icy flow of another little river. When you sit just so with the waterfall flowing forward over your shoulders like a cape, your voice echoes in your own ears as if you are the god of the river.

Made a huge batch of lactofermented pickles which turned out to be absolutely delicious.

Made a batch of homemade root beer which turned out to be disgusting. I'll try this again with different yeast and a different sweetener.

Ate cabbage in a variety of different, delicious ways (recipes to come). I told Maureen, the woman who runs our farm share, that we love all the vegetables everyone else doesn't like, like kale and cabbage, and she's been giving me extras, along with whatever she's picked for market that didn't sell.

Ate the first plums and peaches off of our trees. They are intensely sweet and juicy and delicious. I can't wait for more. I must learn how to care for the trees so they'll stay healthy and produce more fruit.

Bought two raspberry canes and one blackberry cane. Now I just have to decide where in my spacious yard to plant them.

Life is good, even if vacation is over.