Taught myself how to use the sewing machine today. I threaded it, unthreaded it, oiled it, threaded it again, and hemmed up a pair of pants ( Read more... )

Rhubarb -- Home canning season proceeds. Last week I put up some rhubarb jam that I had to add some apples to because I didn't buy enough rhubarb. I shorted the sugar a little to compensate, so we'll see if it sets. Mostly I wanted to break in -- so to speak -- some new 12-ounce jars (the size between a full and a half pint) that I got a couple of ( Read more... )

Hey, everybody, the polls are open tomorrow for the statewide primary races: Sestak vs. Specter, a bunch of candidates for governor, etc., etc. Oh, and if you're in Ward 2, Division 16 (Queen Village, Philadelphia), vote for Anne C. Gemmell and David DiSabatino for Democratic Committee ( Read more... )

So, remember when my TV's power source blew up in September, 2007? And I tried to get rid of it in some kind of environmentally responsible manner, didn't manage to, spent another couple of years in law school, and decided that the least inconvenient way to deal with the problem was to shove the TV under the utility table in my laundry nook behind ( Read more... )

I'm looking into pressure canners so that I can put up tomatoes and some other things more safely this year. If you have had good experiences with a particular type, size, or brand, please comment. Thanks!

On Saturday I got a lift with a fellow filthy liberal hippie to beautiful Westville, New Jersey, to work on a Rebuilding Together Philadelphia project. I have a limited skillset when it comes to home improvements, so I ended up doing a lot of painting, tool-fetching, and child-wrangling. The homeowner, a Katrina evacuee who lost all of her worldly ( Read more... )

- I have obtained a rhubarb rhizome. See, when you want to grow rhubarb, you start by planting a root with a bulb on it. One year later, you get a rhubarb plant. Two years later, you can start harvesting. Keeping it in a container on the deck is fine because (1) it likes a good, deep freeze; and (2) in the ground it's susceptible to disease and ( Read more... )

. . . IJLS, "Representing performers and creators in all media."

At the most recent Tuesday nite gathering of the local filthy liberal hippies, I was kinda caught with my pants down by a guy who works for the military-industrial complex [1], when he asked me about types of free and open-source software licenses that I'd never heard of. I spluttered, "Uh, Apache and FreeBSD are types of licenses? I thought they ( Read more... )

News article on a Friday afternoon that's a three-day weekend for a lot of Americans debunks some of the more egregious historical inaccuracies that right-wingers have been trying to get across lately (McClatchy, via Yahoo! News ( Read more... )