Category: Life

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Some interesting search phrases that have brought readers to this site recently:

southpoint hoyel haunyed – It’s not the typos that I find funny here (the keys are right next to each other), but the thought that the hotel’s air pressure problems causing whistling doorjambs may have given rise to a reputation for it being haunted.

brand names for sex – This post on gender-specific brand names (ex. “Men’s X” or “Y for Women” or simply things like dropping “Liz” from “Liz Claiborne” when selling to men), has picked up a lot of search hits, but I don’t think this one was phrased quite right. Unless they were looking for something else.

alice in wonderland tl dr – “A young girl finds herself in a magical world full of nonsense.” There, that was easy. Anyway, check out the TL;DR photos of Katie’s Alice cosplay, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland–style, from this year’s Comic-Con.

why does no one go to the gardenwalk in anaheim – Probably because there isn’t much there to go to.

zucchini spam – Wow, there’s a flashback. An oddly specific one, too. (All right, they were probably looking for a recipe.)

why are there no stars in the sky anymore – Variations on “why can’t I see stars anymore” have been landing on my thoughts about light pollution, jumping off of a photo of the Los Angeles area at night from orbit. The question isn’t funny, but this particular phrasing is just depressing.

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Seen from near LAX through an office window. The Santa Ana winds have cleared away the smog, making the view unusually clear (until the dust takes its place).

The sundog near the top of the frame was definitely in the sky and not on the window, and was visible no matter where I moved — I actually had to adjust the angle to avoid a reflection on the window that would have drowned it out! Timing is everything, though: I went to grab a cup of coffee from the break room right after this, and it was already gone when I got back.

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Camo Cookies

The kiddo wanted to know how Baskin Robbins made their Veteran’s Day themed camouflage ice cream, so we made cookies to demonstrate. Each color is a different flavor, too: The brown is chocolate, the tan is maple, and the green is vanilla.

Make the three kinds of dough, then pack globs of them together into a cylinder. Straight plastic tumblers are helpful for this step.

Camo Cookie Dough

Cut into slices, set the slices on the cookie sheet, and bake!

Camo cookies - slicing.jpg

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Late Halloween night, the first rainstorm of the season blew through town. By morning, it had mostly passed over us, but there were enough clouds around to make things look interesting after I dropped off my car for maintenance. With a couple of hours to kill, I walked to downtown Manhattan Beach for breakfast. I kept going all the way to the pier first, and was glad I did — otherwise I would have missed this:

Rainbow over El Segundo

One straggling cloud continued to drop rain on the coast a few miles to the north. A rainbow fragment neatly arced from the cloud down to the El Segundo power plant. (I thought that was kind of ironic.) Continue reading →

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Teal Pumpkin

The idea behind the Teal Pumpkin Project is to offer alternate Halloween treats that aren’t candy, so that kids with severe food allergies can still go Trick-or-Treating. It started last year in Tennessee, and FARE picked it up and promoted it nationwide this year.

When I was a child, I always had to either decline or discard some of my Halloween candy because of my peanut allergy. Fortunately it wasn’t life-threatening for me at the time (that came later), so I could separate them out at the end of the night. A lot of kids develop severe allergies younger than I did, and a lot of them are sensitive enough that the risk of cross-contact — whether in the candy bowl or at the factory — is a major issue.

So in addition to candy, we picked up an assortment of pencils, plastic dinosaurs, hair ribbons and more, and kept them in a separate tray. We painted a fake pumpkin so we could keep it around (though we’ll have to go over it again with better paint or maybe a coat of primer next year), and set it out front where it could be seen from the street. (Update 2021: You can buy plastic pumpkins in teal from a lot of stores these days!)

I’m not sure how many of the kids who chose the toys over the candy did so because of allergies, but we had enough of both to go around.

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