The Wordsmith's Forge

Today we made this. It turned out quite well. :D

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Another dramatic example of climate change in action: ghost forests, killed by rising sea levels. 

Today is sunny, breezy, and quite warm.

I fed the birds.  I've seen house finches and doves today.

I put topsoil around the last 2 privets. 

EDIT 6/5/21 -- I watered the privets.

EDIT 6/5/21 -- I planted 2 paw paws in the streetside yard, put grow tubes on them, and watered them.

EDIT 6/5/21 -- I planted a Dolgo crabapple in the savanna and a dewberry in the berry patch west of the prairie garden.

White penstemon is blooming in the wildflower garden.

The hollyhock that was partly blown over yesterday has zigzagged upright again.  :D

Cherries are starting to turn red.  Some mulberries are beginning to darken, others are still pink or green.  Most blackberries have green fruit.

EDIT 6/5/21 -- I planted 1 White Feather hosta and 2 Regal Blue hostas in the purple-and-white garden.

As it is getting dark and I'm tired, I'm done for the day.

For my current set of tips, I'm using the list "101 Small Ways You Can Improve Your City.

75. Create community murals, and make preserving them a priority. Public art can illuminate a street, but protecting the work over time can truly define a neighborhood and foster creativity and talent. Philadelphia’s iconic Mural Arts Program, which started in 1984 and turned the city into a street art mecca, includes a restoration initiatives, to make sure creative expression is prized and protected. In Denver, Colorado, Crush Walls is an annual urban art festival that transforms the street walls of the city’s former industrial neighborhood.

Murals make a great addition to any neighborhood.  You don't need an expert or expensive supplies.  It's nice to have those, but you can do just fine with your best local graffitist and their box of spray paint.  Learn how to paint a mural.  You don't feel like a painter?  ("Then by all means, paint!  And that voice will be silenced.")  Make it abstract.  A favorite is tape painting.

Two notable examples from my writing:

1) Most towns in Terramagne-America have a municipal artist.  Muralists are popular among these.  Big cities have more than one, usually in different styles of art.

2) Over in my main science fiction setting, Picture This: The REAL Artists' Colony has two styles of building.  One is elaborately shaped.  The other is flat and plain, intended as a canvas for murals.

This article talks about the rise and fall of artificial intelligence funding.

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Today we made "Black-Eyed Beans with Mushrooms" from The Food of India (p. 182).  This is a similar recipe.  The results were amazing.  Yes, it took an hour and a half to make, and we had to tweak it a bit, but it was totally worth the effort.  :D  Things we particularly loved about this recipe:

* It cooks the black-eyed peas and the vegetables separately.  This is great because combining those in a dish is challenging, as legumes can be difficult to cook fully while vegetables are easy to overcook.  Separating them makes it easier to get both done to the right level.

* The flavors are downright symphonic.  There's a high bright note from the tomatoes, a floral note from the cilantro, a whole arpeggio of spices, mellow black-eyed peas in the middle, and then the bottom note of mushrooms adding a deep, earthy umami flavor.  It's a pretty typical curry sauce, but the mushrooms make it taste very different.

* If you add rice or naan, you get a complete protein.  It makes a great vegetarian main dish.  I put mine over brown rice.

If you are a fan of mushrooms, I highly recommend trying this.

This article talks about tab usage, including some different ways people use them or feel about them.
* short-term storage of information (me)
* keep tabs that they know they'll never get around to reading
* a sort of external memory bank (me)
* a manifestation of everything that's on my mind right now. Or the things that should be on my mind right now...
* feeling flustered by having so many tabs open — a situation called "tab overload" — * feeling ashamed that they appeared disorganized by having so many tabs up at once

Also, they sometimes crash a browser or a computer. This is annoying, but some people find the value of the tabs exceeds their risk.

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Today is sunny with a light breeze.  It is pleasantly mild in shade, considerably warmer in sun.

I fed the birds.  I've seen doves, house finches, Bob the Squirrel, and another squirrel.

I cleared 3 places to plant privets in the savanna.  Still need to clear another space; there are 4 privets left.  I was hoping to plant them all today.

However, in our enthusiasm over the Indian curry with mushrooms and black-eyed peas, we neglected to compare its cooking time against our workload this week.  So there goes an hour and a half of daylight, in the kitchen  :/  Also I didn't check the amount in the recipe against the amount in the bag, and presoaked all of the black-eyed peas, which is about twice what we need.  We'll need to cut them in half, then use the rest to make ham-n-beans tomorrow.  We have a bulk bag of prechopped raw bacon in the freezer, so we can use that, and smoky spices to vary the flavor.

EDIT 6/4/21 -- I cleared another space for a privet.

EDIT 6/4/21 -- I planted 3 privets in the savanna, only to discover that there are several extras in the bundle that was supposed to hold 10.  *headdesk*

EDIT 6/4/21 -- I managed to plant the rest of the privets.  They still need more attention, but at least they're in the ground.

EDIT 6/4/21 -- I put covers over the remaining privets and topsoil around some of them.

Here's an article about gengineering ethics. It raises some interesting points.

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I'm fascinated by this article about iconic sounds, which are comprehensible beyond language.  Scientists have identified about 30 of them. 

This is interesting because many species have a set of different calls, each of which has a meaning such as "come," "food," or "danger."  Some of these seem to be genetic (standard across all members of the species) while others are learned (thus varying by population groups).  The human set seems to be the genetic version, a fossil rootkit of communication left by our ancestors -- probably very far back in the hominid tree.  They are long gone, yet they live in us.