My delightful friend golux_org, among his other excellent qualities, is an astronomy buff and a photographer. He posts a daily photo at http://photo.bluebrook.com/potd.html, which I read through its LJ feed, bluebrook_potd. Usually he posts (gorgeous) nature scenes, but today’s photo is of the ISS, with the shuttle docked, passing overhead on Saturday. As it happens, I was there when he took that photo, and it was pretty impressive. To my eyes, it looked about as bright as Venus, and it crossed about three quarters of the sky before rapidly dimming and disappearing as it entered Earth’s shadow. It was visible to us (given that trees and buildings blocked our view as it rose) for a minute or so.

On a related subject golux_org reminded me that our mutual friend dalek (a/k/a Marek), who works with the Clay Center Observatory, was one of the people who took this impressively detailed ground-based photo of the ISS and Atlantis during the previous shuttle mission to the ISS. Atlantis is docked to the bottom-left of the main space station body, between the two large groups of solar panels, mostly in shadow and pointed away (with the main engines pointed towards earth), so we’re looking at the rear of the shuttle. The ISS is well-lit. It’s worth clicking through the picture on that page to the higher-resolution version; you can see considerably more detail.

(BTW, my userpic for this post is the Hubble Space Telescope; nothing to do with the ISS.)

Well, plumtreeblossom and I made it home, despite two delays and a quite serious sprint with our carry-on bags to a different terminal in Philadelphia to discover that our connecting flight had left and we had to go back to the original terminal to get on the next flight.

Our checked luggage has not made it home, and had not made it to Logan several hours after we landed. (plumtreeblossom needed to go to an event at theatreatfirst, so she grabbed a cab while I tried to find our luggage.) It may yet show up, but I am *ahem* displeased.

Suffice it to say that I will endeavour to avoid US Airways in future if possible.

In the past, I’ve mostly flown American, and they’ve had good coördination between ground and air about connections, and they’ve handled the case where a plane with a large number of people making a specific connection was delayed very well. Also, in the one case where I couldn’t find my luggage (which wasn’t their fault — another passenger with similar baggage had walked off with it), they gave me a meal voucher so I could get some food while I was waiting for them to try to track it down.

There are some good things I can say about how US Airways handled our troubles on the way home: A flight attendant whom we asked for connection information reseated us in aisle seats near the front of the aircraft so we could get off very quickly (which didn’t actually let us make our original connecting flight, but was probably instrumental in our managing to get on the flight we did make, so we were an hour and a half late rather than two or three hours late), and the person in baggage services we filed our tracking request with was very sympathetic and polite. Oh, and another person working in the baggage area gave us useful advice.

Anyway, our time in Vegas was great! It was excellent to see sionnagh and for her to meet plumtreeblossom, we had a couple really excellent and shockingly inexpensive meals among many very good and quite reasonably priced meals (reminder to self: eat at the Caravan Café at Sahara again next time), we had lots and lots of fun, and subtracting the money we spent on the casino floor from the money we won on the casino floor, plumtreeblossom and I both came out a bit ahead, which means the casino paid us $15 or so to sit and entertain ourselves for a couple hours and drink free strawberry daiquiris. (We spent most of that couple hours at video poker machines that advertised a better than 100% return; I think they’re loss-leader machines. But they brought us free drinks there all the same.)

We also got to see the Star Trek Experience at the Hilton and a really impressive aerial silks performer at Circus Circus as well as nifty aerial work as part of the Bite show at the Stratosphere. And we rode the monorail to the other end of the Strip and saw the impressive exterior of the MGM Grand and sat and had a very pleasant time on the patio of a bar in New York, New York and, um, I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff I’m forgetting. Like the toothbrush story; I’m definitely forgetting that.

Oh, and I won singing stuffed chickens for plumtreeblossom and sionnagh and myself at Skee-ball at Circus Circus. (That’s another reason I hope our luggage is found.) sionnagh’s is named Tandoori, plumtreeblossom’s is named Pot Pie, and mine is named Cordon Bleu.

Pictures may follow in a few days. (Fortunately, I pulled the memory card from the camera on the theory I might look at pictures on the plane. Unfortunately, the camera itself is in my checked luggage.)

All in all, it was a fabulous trip and we had a wonderful time!

[EDIT: We saw the smoke from this forest fire in New Jersey from the air. It was impressive.]

List from the Science Fiction Book Club; meme from hrafn.

( 50 important SF books per the Science Fiction Book Club, and the 22 I’ve read )

What a full and fine weekend! Saturday morning I had dim sum with plumtreeblossom and a bunch of her friends and mine (and in the process discovered that we have some friends in common I didn’t know about!). Dim sum was yummy as always, and I was ravenous when I got there, so I stuffed myself.

(I’d been running just a little bit late, so decided to take the car to the Quincy Center T station rather than walking. What I didn’t realize was that Quincy’s Veteran’s Day parade was about to start — I had no fewer than three intersections close just as I was about to go through them, had similar trouble getting back home (since some of the streets I’d come through were now blocked off), and ended up dropping my car off in a parking lot I could get to and walking. So I was sadly more than half an hour late, but fortunately that just meant there was lots of yummy stuff already on the table when I got there.)

Then the lovely (x3) minerva42, underwatercolor, plumtreeblossom, and I went to the Museum of Science, intending to see the Body Worlds 2 exhibit. Unfortunately when we got there we found out that the earliest entrance time that still had tickets available was 5:30 (6:00 by the time we’d finished talking about it), and minerva42 and underwatercolor had evening plans and hadn’t planned on spending that much time in the museum. So we all got exhibit hall tickets, and plumtreeblossom and I got tickets to a movie and to Body Worlds 2 as well.

The regular exhibits were fun, but not particularly new to any of us. (The electricity show, with the huge Van de Graaff generator, suffered from a presenter who could give Mumbles a run for his money.) Definitely fun, though, and we got to see tamarins! Yay monkeys!

Then we said goodbye to minerva42 and underwatercolor, and plumtreeblossom and I saw the ( 3D Mars movie ).

And finally, we got to go to the Body Worlds exhibit, which was amazing and somewhat awe-inspiring. ( Body Worlds 2 exhibit )

I could go on and on for ages about this exhibit (feel free to ask questions, or browse through the exhibit catalogue if you’re over at my house), but I’m running out of LJ-posting steam, so I’ll stop babbling now. (I definitely want to go back while it’s still in Boston, more than once if possible.)

plumtreeblossom and I then took the T to Quincy, where we both slept very well. I dropped her off at home, since she had a busy Sunday planned. [EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention introducing plumtreeblossom to Sarsfield’s, an Irish pub in Quincy. We had a couple of yummy pints, but I like going there on weeknights better — it was extremely crowded.]

I had a busy Sunday planned, too, but so far I don’t seem to have actually gotten to any of it. :-)

[Whoops; I meant to post this to what_a_crock; that’s why it’s so detailed and didn’t name the other people mentioned until I edited it. But hey, maybe some of you care, so I’ll leave it mostly as-is.]

Some time ago I stumbled across this recipe for crockpot Kalua Pig. Kalua Pig is a Hawai‘ian dish which was traditionally made by salting a pig (with sea salt made by evaporation), wrapping it in leaves, and burying it in an imu or fire pit and cooking it for a stunningly long time.

The crock-pot version of Kalua Pig is dead easy: Prick a pork roast all over, rub kosher salt and liquid smoke seasoning into it, and cook it in the crockpot on low for 20 hours, turning it once. (“Turning” the pork after ten hours in the crockpot ends up being more like “stirring” it. And since my crockpot has a timer that only goes up to ten hours, I restart the crockpot when I turn the meat.) You don’t add any additional liquid; the juices melt out so that after ten hours, or even fifteen, it’s clearly meat in liquid, but by the end of 18 or 20 hours, all the liquid has gotten reabsorbed and the meat is really, really soft, juicy, and tender — and of course smoky and salty, so it has the flavour of ham. (cathijosephine and I typically serve it over bread with some minced roasted garlic and/or a little butter on it; the salty juices soak into the bread and make it yummy.)

Well, I decided to try making “Kalua Cow”. (Maybe Kalua Kow?) Exact same procedure, but start with a beef roast rather than a pork roast. I used a shoulder roast.

It came out really well. It didn’t end up as soft (almost mushy) as the pork does, but it sure was yummy! The Kalua Pig you could easily eat without putting your dentures in; the Kalua Cow you actually have to chew a little bit, but it does get very tender. It doesn’t seem to need as much salt as the pork does, but then I usually put in more salt than the recipe linked above calls for. docorion put lots of pepper on his, and I think the next time I make it (if I’m making it for people who like pepper) I’ll add lots of pepper at the beginning, in with the salt, and see how that goes. Might also try adding a little bit of vinegar to make the beef even softer.

And both Kalua Pig and “Kalua Cow” are really good for making big batches and dividing into lots of lunch-sized portions.

I was recently introduced to Pandora by darxus; you can read his post about it, but basically, you tell it music you like, and it plays similar music. For free, over the net. And you can give it as many different seeds as you like, and keep them separate, so you can listen to fast bluesy jazz instrumental stuff today (what I’ve been listening to today) and Europop tomorrow. I think this site is going to seriously affect how (and how much) I listen to music.

Hi! So the current two leading contenders for Wabbit veterinarian are Alex Gonzalez and Janice MacGillivray, both at Fenway. Anybody besides the people who recommended them have opinions about them? (Also, Tom Barber is at Quincy Medical Center and has a strong recommendation; I’d love further opinions about him as well.)

I’ve screened comments by default so you can give me positive, negative, or neutral feedback about them with impunity, but I will unscreen anything that’s not actually about a doctor unless you ask me not to.

In unrelated medical news, I’ve definitely got what I presume is eisa’s bacterial infection. I’m home from work today and planning on doing lots of sleeping. I don’t have it nearly as bad as she did, but neither am I good for much besides sleeping today.

Reading: Finished The Light Fantastic yesterday on the train. Might start Equal Rites today if I feel like I have enough focus to read.

Aargh. I recently tried to get in touch with my doctor about getting a referral for a sleep study, to discover she is no longer practicing (or if she is, not through Fenway, and I don’t have a way of getting in touch with her).

cathijosephine had previously given me a glowing recommendation for her doctor, Kevin Kapila, who also works with Fenway. He sounded perfect for me in a number of ways. Tragically, I just discovered from his office that he’s no longer seeing new patients. (cathijosephine, if you want to ask about that next time you see him, in case his receptionist is more certain he’s not taking new patients than he is, I’d be delighted.)

So, looks like I’m in the market for a new doctor. Any recommendations? Here are my preference, in approximate order of importance. Note that only the top few are absolutely essential.

• Is taking new patients. :-(
• Takes Blue Cross (is there anybody who doesn’t?)
• In reasonable walking distance either from my house near Quincy Center or from Northeastern University (or T-accessible on a lunch hour from the latter).
• Can get me a sleep-study referral quickly.
• Will share information with me, take things I say seriously, and generally not talk down to me.
• Is comfortable with queer, poly, kinky patients.
• Will want to take his/her time with me when we have appointments.
• Is email-accessible, and willing to do quick simple followup things via email or the phone.
• Can make appointments for relatively urgent stuff in a timely fashion.
• Takes a relatively holistic approach to his/her patients’ health. (For instance, my previous PCP wanted to know about emotional stresses in my life in case they were affecting my health.)
• Is affiliated with Fenway Community Health. (I’m assuming this would make the transition go more smoothly.)
• Is willing to give me advice and not write me off if I don’t take it. (For instance, I’m not going to give up salt or red meat, or stop going out in the sun without sunscreen, even though I know those things might be better for me. I’m happy to hear that they would be better for me, but then I don’t want to fight about it.

I finally finished Humphry Clinker a couple weeks ago, and enjoyed it quite a lot, despite the preachiness. (I haven’t made much progress on my father’s book about it, though.)

I then read and really enjoyed The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer. Somebody on my Friends list, or perhaps on OKCupid, recommended it, so I tracked down a copy. (It was published in 1964 and is long out of print.) Quite funny, in an early-60s-satire sort of way.

I am now reading Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, a True History, published in 1688. So far, it’s more interesting as a document of its era than as literature, but it’s interesting and short. I haven’t gotten to the title character’s enslavement and sale to Europeans yet.

I’m also reading some short stories out of a collection called Oceans of Space, whose theme is the connection between seafaring and space travel (or other science-fiction themes). The couple I’ve read so far have been entertaining, but not particularly well written.

[EDIT: Oh, and I also read Witches Abroad recently.]

bearsir, a/k/a S. Bear Bergman, is a wonderful performance artist. I’ve only seen one of his shows, but it was really amazing. (Aside: Bear, I bet you and Kala would have stuff to talk about.)

Anyway, his latest show is called Monday Night in Westerbork. From his post about the show:

My new solo play, Monday Night in Westerbork, recounts the untold stories of Jews imprisoned at Camp Westerbork, Holland. These Jews - actors and performers - wrote, directed, and performed six different shows over the course of twenty months. The shows were performed each Monday night for SS officers and Nazi dignitaries as well as the rest of the camp’s prisoners on the same stage that the names of those to be sent to the death camps were read on Tuesday mornings.

He needs funding to go to the Netherlands and research the show (e.g. interview survivors). Having seen some of his work I have no doubt that he will do a spectacular job, and his show will be an important resource and a powerful piece of art.

I’ve contributed $50. If you would like to support this project, you can read his post, or if you want to cut to the chase, you can go directly to https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=2151 and make a contribution by credit card. Make sure you write “S. Bear Bergman” in the field where you can specify what the contribution is earmarked for if you do that.

(By the way, I took the picture my userpic is from in the Hague. It’s the flag flying in front of the International Court of Justice. bearsir, maybe you’ll get to see it while you’re in the Netherlands.)