My friend Nate has restored his old blog entries, including one about a date he had that's quite memorable. Recommended reading, but not while you're eating.

A good night's sleep
Acupuncture
Baths with Dead Sea Salts
Baths with Elemis's Aching Muscle Super Soak
Baths with Elemis's Musclease Herbal Bath Synergy
Baths with Elemis's Cellutox Herbal Bath Synergy
Baths with Epsom Salts
Baths with Village Naturals Therapy Aches & Pains
Chondroitin
Codeine or Vicodin (prescription)
Detox foot pads (I'm not sure how they work, but they don't work the way they claim, I'm pretty sure of that)
Elemis's Cellutox Active Body Concentrate
Elemis's Instant Refreshing Gel (yes, really, it's that much better than Aspercreme)
Elemis's Musclease Active Body Concentrate
Gabapentin (prescription)
Glucosamine
Gluten-free diet
Human love
Ibuprofen (or aspirin)
Kitty love
Mediclear (again, many many thanks to kate_schaefer)
Multivitamin to provide things I don't absorb well
Self-stick ace bandages for when my legs are swollen
Sulfate-free shampoos (gluten-free is nice but not as important for me)
Very mild exercise (like strolling through a mall for 15-20 minutes)
Yoga

As seen on another blog:

"If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky."

Apparently, there is a reason women hurt more.

Now where's that testosterone shot?

Rick and I were at a party tonight and a chair slipped out from under me and I fell backwards and splity head open. We went to the ER and now I'm all stapled up courtesy of the Tyco Autosuture.

They asked if I had a religious preference, and I just laughed, then said Wiccan. The real answer would only confuse them.

I'd been meaning to dye my hair red again, but I guess I was insufficiently specific. Those darn tricksters!

But a corn flake shaped like the state of Illinois.

Currently 82 bids with the highest bid over $200,000.

Fixing typos for the good of all.

What's not to love?

"This March through May, we, sworn members of TEAL, will be taking a road trip around the country to stamp out as many typos as we can find, in public signage and other venues where innocent eyes may be befouled by vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language. We do not blame, nor chastise, the authors of these typos. It is natural for mistakes to occur; everybody will slip now and again. But slowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed. We believe that only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society."

Endicia's an online postal service, and I've been using it for the last four days to make postage for shipping packages of yarn and pens.

In short: it rocks.

I've largely been happy with the shipping that comes within PayPal, except:

1) You can only ship a package that's paid for with PayPal.
2) For international shipments, it'll only handle priority mail or higher.

Endicia handles international parcel post and first class, complete with all the customs forms I used to loathe. Given that I've shipped packages to Slovenia, Slovakia, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, Germany, Italy, and a few places I can't recall offhand -- having easy access to customs forms is a Good Thing.

My only complaint with Endicia, really, is that it ONLY works with the USPS. I'd really love it if it also worked with UPS and/or FedEx. I don't do a lot of packages, and their horrible online interfaces pretty much ensure that I won't.

Okay, I have another small complaint. It only takes money in certain intervals. Given that the least expensive priority mail package goes for $4.60, buying $10 in postage will get you two of them -- but you'll have change left over.

For an online guide of Maui and Molokai.

Here it is.

Got up, paid bills, drove down to Santa Cruz. I hadn't mentioned this before, but I was out of commission on Saturday and Sunday in part because my car was overheating. Eventually (Sunday afternoon), I figured out this was due to having not filled the reservoir tank -- because I didn't know where they'd hidden it on my car.

Met up with therinth in Santa Cruz, but due to a miscommunication, she'd already had lunch, but she did sit and talk with me while I had mine. We then went off to Serpent's Kiss for some shopping. I picked up a couple of candles and a few small things.

It was really a lovely day in Santa Cruz; at 77 degrees, it was also unexpectedly warm.

After dropping Erin off elsewhere in town so she could meet up with one of her nursing school friends, I drove south to Carmel, home of Bittner, the premier pen store in the greater bay area. They have stuff no one else has. The guy I spoke with, Robert, is one of the great pen lovers in the world, and was happy to have a pen person to talk to for an hour and a half.

He showed me some David Oscarson pens, the Visconti Divina Desert Springs ("Go look at it in the sunlight" -- how many places encourage you to take an expensive item out of the store with you?), and more pens that I wasn't even going to ask the price of.

It was a good day, all told.

Most of you who know me know that I'm celiac: I can't eat wheat, rye, or barley, or most oats. I'm not the best adherant to a gluten-free diet. However, I've discovered that trying to be as gluten-free as possible has helped to reduce my pain levels.

Cooking is a hard slog, though, because basically I can't have prepared food. It's amazing what has wheat in it. I knew about soy sauce, but recently I was told that my intolerance to wasabi may be (at least partly) related to the fact that wheat is commonly used in packaged wasabi paste. Who knew? Then there's pizza, and pasta, and sandwiches, and sausage casings, and hamburger with filler, and meatloaf with bread crumbs, and croissants, and cookies, and cakes, and and and and. As an exercise, go to P.F. Chang's and ask for the gluten-free menu. Yes, they have one. Note how its size is smaller than their dessert menu, and smaller than the average kid's menu. Exercise part 2: go to any other restaurant and ask for their gluten-free menu.

With that in mind, I've been particularly enamored with the offerings from The Brazilian Cheese Bread Company, a local producer of gluten-free rolls. They are good enough that even people who don't eat gluten free have wanted more of them, which is saying a lot -- many gluten-free breads emulate a cross between cardboard and hockey pucks with densities approaching those of neutron stars.


Quite aside from that, most gluten-free recipes use flours that are significantly more caloric than normal flour recipes. As an example, I once bought a box of gluten-free brownie mix. When made, it had 50% more (!) calories than the usual gluten kind. Fortunately, the mixes have improved since then.

Portion size: 40 grams of each (1.375 rolls of Brazilian cheese bread, 1 roll Pillsbury dinner rollls)

	Brazilian	Pillsbury
Calories	114	110
Fat	5.5 grams	2 grams
Carbohydrates	13.75 grams	18 grams
Sugars	0 grams	3.0 grams
Protein	2.75 grams	4 grams

And now the Brazilian Cheese Bread company have pizza crusts, which my mother spied in the store and bought for me. I made one, and while they are crispier on the edges than a standard pizza (I'm going to try putting oil on the edges next time), it made a creditable pizza. Yay! Pizza at will!

Anyhow, tasty pizza is always welcome, especially with less sugar and without a ton of calories.

May I just say that the soundtrack is brilliant? Especially for a relatively low-budget film. Then again, Darjeeling Limited was one of my favorite films last year. I just loved the quirkiness. I mean, seriously, what's not to like about a train getting lost?

The soundtrack is an odd mix of off-the-beaten path old Indian film music (much of it cleaned up as well as they could, which isn't very), classical, Kinks, and the theme song from Joe Dassin.

Wednesday I spent playing with rails, updating some older apps of mine, playing with new features I hadn't tried yet, upgrading mysql, and generally having a fun old time.

Due to a headache that's been pretty brutal (meds related), I haven't gotten as much done as I'd like, but I did get to play around a lot, which was great fun.

Oh, and I listed even more yarn on eBay.

Now I need to sleep and get ready for Thursday.

Rather than doing a day-by-day as I did last year, I thought I'd point out some of the highlights of Pantheacon for me:

1. Finally meeting some local druids! Not only that, managed to hang out with jschonbr and try some of the Oak Ash and Thorn Brewing Company's Apple Piety Cordial, along with some of their other yummies (Lingonberry cordial, Blackberry cordial). I hope they get all the licensing straightened out so that we can buy some. :)

2. Went to many rituals, probably too many.

My favorite (no shocker) was the sort of mini-ritual for Olokun, because I really like the traditional Yoruba music a lot.

My second favorite was probably the Kali Puja, a ritual for the Hindu goddess Kali. The group is kind of a mix of traditional Tantric Hindu with western Wiccan elements, though chants are done in Sanskrit, and I understood bits here and there, which only made it weirder. It was different, odd, and cool, and if you have the last Sunday of the month free, you can go to their open rituals in San Francisco. You can read more about them at the link if you want to. One of the great moments was having the altar flowers passed around for everyone to smell and enjoy.

Other rituals:

Introduction to Graeco-Egyptian Magick: Always worth going if only for the history lesson. I wrote this one up last year; this year, we'd actually been to Alexandria. I bought the book and the CD.

Oracular Seidh: we saw this after the Kali Puja, and in the same room, so it was quite a pantheon whiplash. It's a traditional style of Norse oracle, and the Seers (three of them) were pretty great at answering questions. The length was amazing: four hours. I felt like I'd been through a Norwegian winter, but it was an awesome thing to see.

Ancestors Celebration: this is a traditional Orisha event, and it was held by the Ile I've been attending, but had a number of people from different faiths. Prayers to ancestors in a number of languages, and fun dancing around the room with my friend Amy.

ADF (Ár nDraíocht Féin) Ritual: Ahh, druids. I'd missed two druid rituals, so I'm glad I got to this one. It was a bit louder and more dramatic than necessary in places, but interesting, with wee smatterings of Gaelic.

Pompeia: balancing the forces of earth and air, held by Thiasos Olympikos, a Greek reconstruction group. There wasn't a lot of energy, and we could definitely hear the Norse heathens in the next room despite there being a hard wall in between the two rooms. If nothing else, I realized I couldn't be a Norse heathen because it'd just give me a migraine. I'd like to see a real event from the Greek group, held outdoors, before making a judgment about the group. Not being able to use fire was a huge constraint for them.

3. Went to a few panels. In addition to two I went to about the Orisha, I really really enjoyed the one I went to with Thalassa. She is my absolute favorite speaker at Pantheacon.

A few quotes from her:

For people you don't like, you could send a Tower card that said "Merry Christmas." Or a Ten of Swords that said "Thinking of You."

"The I Ching, which is a 4,000-year-old divination system with a really bad attitude."

"Measure twice, ward once."

"I am even psychically dyslexic."

"I put on my Sunday best tie-dye."

"I belong to the ephiphany of the minute club."

"Divination is a profoundly subversive act."

About the Celestine prophecy and "transcending" the body: "Next time, don't incarnate into a body."

"It's sort of like strip poker with metaphysical consequences."

"That's why I created the Betty Ford Clinic of the Arcane."

"Yes, I am writing a book. The working title is The God-Damn Book.

Friday:
Filidecht: Poetic Madness and Healing
Orisha 101
Hung out with Druids

Saturday:
Introduction to Graeco-Egyptian Magick
Olokun - Finding Your Treasure Within the Deep
Norton's Guard Ritual Longsword Dance
Saving the World, One Murder at a Time
Tarot - The Soul's Health Club
Kali Puja: Worship of the Dark Goddess
Oracular Seidh

Sunday:
The Orisha Warriors: Esu, Ogun, and Osoosi
The Question of Cweorth-- Exploring the Old English Runes
Ancestors Celebration
ADF (Ár nDraíocht Féin) Ritual
Pompeia: balancing the forces of earth and air
More hanging out with Druids.

There's still yet more to go. Longer descriptions later. ;)