Avian Serenade

Every morning this week, I've been awoken by the sound of birds. Doesn't that sound like a nice, soothing, all-natural way to start the day? I would have guessed that, too. Unfortunately, the birds are angry pigeons.

The noise sounds like a cross between a growl and a lawn mower, and it's always accompanied by a lot of flapping of the wings. I've only seen two of them (both male), but I suspect there are more, given the amount of noise they make.

These birds are huge! They perch on my balcony railing right outside my bedroom window and make their ruckus. Naturally, this makes Ebony agitated, so she starts meowing and pacing on my window sill. Yesterday, I decided that I would try to scare the birds away by letting Ebony onto the balcony.

Ebony walked out onto the balcony like she owned the place. (She probably does own the place. She's so kind to let me live inside the apartment in exchange for food and toys.) She walked over to the pigeons and they didn't leave. They expanded their wings, flapped them, cooed threateningly, and chased my cat back into the apartment! I walked outside and chased them away. (I guess a human is scarier than a cat.)

This morning, they were back at it, waking me up at 6:30 AM. It wasn't so bad today, since I had to get up for work, but I'm going to be really annoyed if they wake me up early tomorrow. I wonder if a scarecrow will keep them away.

I suppose it could be worse, though. At least I'm not waking up to an apian serenade.

Changes

When I started this blog, I intended for it to be a lighthearted place where I could share my quirky and humorous observations of life. I promised that it would be about nothing serious at all. I keep a serious blog under a pseudonym, but lately both blogs have been experiencing mission creep. Everyday Narcissism has had a few serious posts of late, and my other blog has had a few lighthearted posts. Since both blogs have a different set of readers, I'm not going to close either one. Instead, I'm just going to embrace the evolution of my blogging life. While this blog will still be mostly lighthearted, I'm going to start posting more of my inner thoughts here.

You've already been subjected to my musings with such posts as:
Song Lyrics
Why I Hate the F-Word
Pondering Pronouns
What's in a Name?
A Public Service Announcement

I'm always interested in reader feedback. What do you want to read? Serious, lighthearted, or some combination of the two?

Homemade Yogurt!

It's true! It's possible to make homemade yogurt. It's ridiculously easy, too. The only ingredients are milk, and a little bit of yogurt to use as a starter. I made mine from nonfat milk and nonfat yogurt, but you can use any type. I've even seen vegan recipes from soy milk (with soy yogurt as the starter).

Super Easy Homemade Yogurt:
2 quarts milk
1/2 cup plain yogurt (Make sure it has live active cultures, otherwise it won't work. I used Trader Joe's nonfat organic Greek-style yogurt.)

1. Put the milk in a crock pot on low for 2 1/2 hours.
2. Turn off the crock pot, but leave the lid on, and let sit for 3 hours.
3. Add the yogurt to the milk and stir until it's all mixed in.
4. Put the lid back on and wrap the crock pot in a bath towel to insulate it. (Don't turn the crock pot on. If you do, you'll kill the Lactobacillus acidophilus, and it won't turn into yogurt.)
5. Let it sit for 8 hours.
6. Once it has turned into yogurt, refrigerate it and use within 7-10 days. You can use some of this batch as the starter for the next batch.

I haven't tasted it yet, since it wasn't ready until 6:00 this morning, and I didn't want to eat warm yogurt for breakfast. I stuck it in the fridge, and I'll try it when I get home tonight. It smelled right, though. I'm not sure if the batch can be doubled or cut in half, since I haven't tried it. I think next time I'll cut it in half and see what happens. 2 quarts is a lot of yogurt for one person. I'm also going to try mixing it with various fruits to see what tastes good.

I love how much money I saved. 2 quarts of plain yogurt would have cost $5.98 at the store. I spent $1.39 on a 5 oz container of plain yogurt. (It can be gotten more cheaply, but I wanted to use organic yogurt.) I used powdered milk that one of my old roommates gave me, so the milk was free. Total cost: $1.39. Savings: $4.59. (Even if I had to buy milk, it's only $1.49 for a half gallon, so I would still be saving $3.10.) The savings increase on the second batch because I don't have to buy the yogurt again. Since I still have some powdered milk left, my next batch of yogurt will be free! Plus, now I know exactly what's going into my breakfast.

Twisted Word Interpretations - Landlord Edition

When I started law school five years ago, I thought I knew what words meant. After all, I used to read the dictionary as a kid. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that perfectly normal words like "reasonable", "person", "willful", "knowing", "reckless", etc. also have legal meanings that are only tangentially related to their common meanings.

I've gotten used to words not meaning what they seem to mean. However, yesterday I ran across the most ridiculous interpretation of a phrase I've ever seen, courtesy of my landlord. My landlord likes to make silly little rules. One of them involves exercising tight control over the balconies. As I mentioned previously, my balcony had no privacy, so I put up a tiki fence to correct that problem. It was up for a week and a half with no complaints.

Bits of Randomness

Wow, it's been a while since I've blogged. I'll regale you with tales of randomness from the past few weeks.

Update on the move:
I'm all moved into my new apartment. I love my new place; it's so quiet and peaceful, and I can do my own thing. I haven't finished unpacking all of my boxes, but I'm getting there. I don't have a dishwasher, which is mildly annoying, but I do have heat, which is an improvement. Ebony is a bit scared of the furnace, but she's getting used to it. My balcony is huge! I could totally do a reenactment of the famous scene from Romeo and Juliet. (Assuming that Shakespeare contemplated tiki fencing...) Speaking of tiki fencing - my balcony had no privacy when I moved in. From ground level, people could see right onto my balcony and if the blinds were open, they could see into my apartment. I went to Home Depot and bought two rolls of tiki fencing and a canister of zip ties. Now I have a 6-foot high fence. I just need a few torches to complete the look!

Mistaken identity:
I'm no stranger to having my name written incorrectly. For some reason, people have trouble spelling Rushforth. I've seen Rushmore, Rushworth, Rushford, Rushfort, Rush-Forth, Bushforth, etc. Well, today, I received another incorrectly addressed package. My real, live, honest-to-goodness legal first name is Trudy. It isn't short for anything. (It seems to be something of a family tradition. My great grandmother is named Jennie, I have a cousin Larry, a cousin Jennie, an aunt Kim, a cousin Danny, and best of all, my dad's uncle, whose first name is simply the letter K. He goes by his middle name.) When I got the package today, it was addressed to Gertrude Rushforth. Erm...whatever. I don't know where they got that from, seeing as I filled out the information with my correct name. At least the package still got to me. I hope dear old Gertrude (whoever she may be) didn't order the same item I did and have it shipped to my work. If she did, she'll be wondering what happened to her stuff!

Is It Time to Replace My Car?

I love my car. Liandra has character. (Yes, I name inanimate objects. For example, the toaster is named José.) She also is 20 years old and has 275,000 miles. She needs a new suspension system, the driver's side window is permanently jammed in the up position, the headlights short out every six months, there's a massive oil leak, and the heater/air conditioner only works on the high setting. But, she has four wheels and an engine, and she gets me where I need to go.

I've had my eye on a Toyota Yaris for a long time. They're cute little cars, and Toyotas run forever. (See above about Liandra. She's a 1990 Camry.) I was listening to the radio this morning, and Toyota has some really great deals right now. For people with good credit, they're offering a 60 month interest-free car loan on the purchase of a new car, and they're throwing in 2 years of free oil changes and tire rotations for people who already own a Toyota. Now, I'm a used car person, but this is a tempting offer. I ran the numbers, and it actually makes sense in my budget. (Getting a new car on these terms is about as cheap as a nice used car and only a little more expensive than keeping Liandra.)

Obviously, this is the kind of decision that's worth thinking about carefully. I'm not one to make impulsive decisions, so I'm definitely not going to do anything until the weekend. (Part of me would like to just go carless, but since I commute for both work and school, and my work isn't in a place that's well served by public transit, I need a car.)

New Blog Layout

I've changed my blog layout a bit, and I'm wondering what my readers (if I even have any) think of the new look.

Header: I decided that I wanted a custom header, so I made one. (The flower is a narcissus. It seemed like an appropriate mascot.) How does it look on your browser? (If it looks funny, please let me know which browser you use.)

Blog Width: I widened the blog from 660 pixels to 780 pixels. I would actually like to make it a bit wider, but I wasn't sure what screen resolution most people use. How's the width? (Could I safely go wider, or should I leave it?)

Colors: What do you think of the color scheme?

Other: Any other comments? Your feedback is helpful!

Fun with HTML!

I've seen other blogs where lengthy posts start out with the first few paragraphs, followed by a link to read more. Since I'm long-winded, I wanted to do that here on my blog, but I didn't know how to do it. I found out this morning! For all of you who use Blogger, I'll let you in on a little secret. When you're composing a post, click on the "Edit Html" [sic] tab. Where you want to put the break, insert the code . It will put a break there!

Edit: Sorry about the funny look. I had to convert the tag to an image file because otherwise the software kept wanting to change it into HTML.

The Gender Genie

There's a website, called The Gender Genie, that claims to be able to tell whether the author of a piece of prose is male or female. I decided to run Everyday Narcissism through the genie to test its accuracy. I figured that the notion of determining an author's sex or gender based on a computer program was suspect, so my assumption was that it would be right about half the time. (Which is what it would get by random chance.)

Everyday Narcissism has 72 blog posts. I excluded my list and quiz posts when I ran the genie. That leaves me with 61 posts to analyze. 24 of them came up as female, and 37 of them came up as male. This means that the genie was only correct 39% of the time. The genie actually did worse than random chance.

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to which posts came up as female and which posts came up as male. Jen posited that the computer was just guessing based on stereotypes, but that didn't seem to fit because the two posts I wrote about laundry came up as male, and the post I wrote about how much I hate shopping came up as female.

The funniest error was in the analysis of An Open Letter to the California Highway Patrol. In that post, I specifically stated that I'm a woman. The gender genie's result: male. At least the one where I talked about being vaccinated for cervical cancer came up female!

My results, in case you were wondering:

Space Invaders

Not hostile extraterrestrials bent on conquest, but people who have no respect for personal space...

I dislike it when people invade my personal space. Unless the person in question is someone I know well and like, I prefer that people stay a handshake distance away. It's been my understanding that in western American culture, approximately 1 cubit (I love the Biblical reference there. A cubit is about 18 inches, or the distance from elbow to hand, i.e. handshake distance.) is the socially acceptable bubble of personal space for strangers and casual or professional acquaintances, BART during rush hour notwithstanding. I've heard that in Japan, it's even farther, more like bowing distance, but I've never been there, so I don't know for sure.

It's especially uncomfortable when professors become space invaders. Yesterday evening, I was sitting in the lounge studying. I was on a large couch-like piece of furniture. There were a few other people in the lounge on the other side of the room. Suddenly, I noticed that someone practically appeared right next to me. I looked up, and it was one of my professors. (We'll call him Professor Space-Invader.) He sat down on the couch right next to me (like, probably an inch away) and struck up a conversation. I made small talk, but I was really uncomfortable. Finally, he wrapped up the conversation and headed off. Then I relaxed.

Professor Space-Invader is from Alabama. I have another professor who is a bit of a space invader, too (though he doesn't really make me uncomfortable), and he's from New England. Both of them have lived in California for many years, though. Is there an eastern/western divide in how much personal space is socially acceptable? (I lived in North Carolina and Virginia for a year and a half, and I never noticed personal space being smaller out there.)

Installation Wizard

I probably should have been an engineer, like my father, and his father, and...well, you get the idea. For some reason, computers make sense to me. This can be both a blessing and a liability.

My roommate's computer has needed a fresh re-install of the operating system ever since she got the computer two years ago. (It used to belong to her aunt or someone, and it's an old computer, but hey, it was free.) She didn't want to do it because it's disruptive, so she decided to just make do.

This morning, she said that her antivirus software said she had a virus. I went to take a look at it. Her update license expired in 2007, so it hasn't been updating since then. The computer had 26 unique viruses. I figured I would just download and install AVG, since it's free and it would solve the immediate problem. For some reason, the antivirus software that was already installed wouldn't uninstall, so I couldn't install AVG.

I decided to look around a bit to see what was going on. The registry was completely corrupted, and whoever had originally installed the operating system formatted the disk incorrectly. I was honestly surprised that it had lasted this long. I retrieved the files and then asked if it was ok for me to reinstall the OS. (I explained that it was the only way to properly fix the computer.) She said ok.

So, I've spent my entire holiday reinstalling Windows. It's a good thing I actually enjoy this sort of stuff. I'm going to set everything to be automated so that the Windows components and the antivirus software update themselves. Hopefully there won't be any more problems.

Update: One of my friends sent me this link to a comic on the subject.

Legal Textbook Review

A friend asked me for advice on legal writing textbooks so I figured that I would write about a variety of law textbooks. I've had my fair share, so my thoughts are below.

Space

Not outer space, unfortunately, though that would make a great topic for a blog post. (Hmmm...Note to self.)

For the last six or so months, I've been sharing a room with my sister. She was ready to move out of our parents' house, and she wanted to save money, so she moved in with me. I was cool with the idea of cutting my rent in half, so I went along with it. We have a bunk bed, so there's still sufficient floor space in there, but it's cramped to have to share. Plus, I go to bed around 10 and get up around 6. Jen goes to bed around midnight and gets up whenever strikes her fancy, though she complains that 8 is early. (I would find sleeping until 8 to be a rare luxury.)

The apartment has been cramped because it was inhabited by 5 people, 2 dogs, and a cat. (3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 1050 sq. ft.) However, one of my roommates moved out on Saturday, along with her dog. Now there are only 4 people, 1 dog, and 1 cat in the apartment. I moved into the vacated room, and it's so nice!

It's a smaller room, and I don't have all of my stuff in there yet. (I have a big deadline on Tuesday night, so that takes precedence.) My bed frame isn't scheduled to arrive until tomorrow, so my mattress is on the floor in the mean time. Last night was a dream. I shut my door and everyone left me alone. (Well, except for the cat, but I don't mind her. She's pretty quiet.) I got to hit the snooze button without feeling guilty. I got up at 5:15 AM without anyone throwing stuff at me for disturbing slumber.

I'm so done with the sharing a room thing! I can share a bathroom with no problem, but the only time I'm ever going to share a bedroom again in my life is when I'm married. (Even then, I'll make sure I have an office or something so I have a place I can get away from people and have my own space.) Don't get me wrong, I'm not a misanthrope. I genuinely like people. I also like being able to get away from people sometimes so that I can recharge.

SCU Campus Food Review

Sometimes I think I spend more time at school than I do at home. Of course, I need to eat. There are plenty of places on campus to satisfy that need. Some do it better than others. More after the break.

Ironic Spam (Updated)

My blog has finally arrived - I've been comment spammed. There's some amusing irony, though. The post that got the spam was "My Love/Hate Relationship With Citation". The post was all about academic honesty, proper citation format, and my complete lack of toleration for plagiarism.

The comment (which I have since deleted) said:

Thanks a lot for a bunch of good tips. I look forward to reading more on the topic in the future. Keep up the good work! This blog is going to be great resource. Love reading it.

It linked to one of those term-paper farms where you can buy essays to turn in! I guess the spammers just look for keywords or something. It's obvious this guy* didn't read the post, or he would have realized that I was speaking out against his services.

The upshot for you is that I've turned on word verification for comments. I apologize; I know it's annoying to have to type the word to prove you're not a spam-bot. It won't deter human beings from spamming my blog, but it will cut down on computerized spam. It was either that, or turn on comment moderation. Moderation is extra work for everyone, and it impedes discussion, so I'm not going to do that unless I get a real spam problem.

Update (1/5/09): My spammer is back. This time he spammed my "Business Writing Help!" post with the same comment. I'm going to turn on comment moderation for posts older than 10 days. That should stop hit-and-run spam attacks without unduly impeding free and open discussion.

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*I'm pretty sure he's a guy, since the comment was signed "james" [sic.].