Addendum / Errata / Et Cetera

My grandparents on my father's side were living in Beacon by 1976. I remember because that's when Hurricane Belle came through. Lucky Charms cereal had just gotten new blue diamond marshmallows the year before. Mount Beacon Incline Railway was still operating back then. We took at least one trip up the incline railway before it closed, though there wasn't much to see at the top besides the ruins of the burnt-out casino.

I Can Has Deployment?

According to my e-mail I may be deployed as early as tomorrow morning. W00t! Sitting at home cruising the internet all day is nice and all, but it doesn't pay the mortgage and I really really really need to start doing some productive work for a change.

In the meantime, I am now the proud owner of Adobe Creative Suite 4! And it works quite nice, though it takes up almost all the remaining room on my hard drive. I was thinking of getting a new external hard drive to kind of organize all my files, and was shocked to discover I can pick up a 500 GIG hard drive for like $150. WTF? Seriously? I knew memory was getting cheap, but 500 GIGS? How will I ever fill up all that space? I could fit both of my computers on that and it wouldn't even be half full! That's amazing!

I found a site a while back with links to 150,000 free fonts and dingbats. Because one can never have too many fonts. I've been collecting them since 1995 or so. I remember I used a font called BoinkOMatic on the Albany Anthrocon banner ads.

Talking about Swedish Butter Cookies the other day got me thinking about my grandparents on my father's side, so I ruminated about that for a while. I should probably write down what my childhood was like before I forget it all. It's like forever ago I did stuff like go to church and Sunday School and all that. Going to Mount Pleasant pool. Playing video games on the newfangled Atari 2600 we had. Building forts out in the woods. Sneaking out late at night in the summer to cause mischief and then helping Xakor deliver newspapers at 5 in the morning. Good times.

Swedish Butter Cookies

Lately with my considerable downtime I've been baking cookies. These turned out really yummy, and now I have about four dozen oatmeal-raisin cookies to eat, NOM NOM NOM.

All this cookie-baking got me to thinking about some cookies my grandparents on my father's side used to make back in the day. They were very thin butter cookies, with brown edges. These grandparents passed away in the late-1980s, so I haven't had these cookies, much less thought about them, in about 20 years.

So I did some hunting around on the intertubes to see if I could find out what they were. They are apparently called Swedish Butter Cookies or Brown Edge Wafers. Currently I've got more cookies than I can shake a stick at, but once they're finished I think this will be my next recipe to try.

Swedish Butter Cookies

1 cup sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs, beaten
2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, mix butter and sugar until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla. Add flour and salt; mix well. Drop from teaspoon (1/2) on greased cookie sheet. Bake 12-15 minutes. In theory, makes 60 cookies.

And then maybe after that I'll try my hand at making my grandmother's famous butterkuchen. Ye gods, so much butter.

In other news: Xydexx is on Twitter and Xydexx is fucking awesome.

Updated Flickr Photos

I've added some more photos to my Flickr account, mostly of Midwest FurFest and Further Confusion.

There's also a nifty mapping function on Flickr that allows you to add locations for where photos were taken, so I tried that out a bit on my biking and modern ruins pictures.

I've invented the Xydexx food group: Xydexx is part of this nutritious breakfast!

I've also invented a new drink: French Kiss Vanilla Schnapps + Pony Malta = FRENCH KISS PONY. Except the Pony totally overwhelms the French Kiss (so you can't tell you're French kissing a pony...)

Despite people's best intentions, I am not devoid of humor.

Xydexx's Time Wasters du Jour

We're halfway through October and it's 84 degrees outside. I'm gonna go biking if I can pull myself away from the internet long enough to do so.

In the meantime:

The Color IQ Test — Arrange the rows of colored chips by hue order. Tricky. Gosub eyeball.

The Eyeballing Game — Test your ability to eyeball geometric lines and angles and shapes and positions.

Super Bowl Of Eyeballs — Because everyone wants one. It's part of a nutritious breakfast.

Xydexx Squeakypony's Photostream — I've been adding new pictures from my biking trips around Northern Virginia to my Flickr account. Another 124 miles to go before I reach my goal for the year.

Future Plans

I'm going to go look for and possibly explore Pleasantville's Lost Cave with Renfield next time I visit New York. A visit to the Mount Pleasant Historical Society may be necessary to get background information.

I have my Anthrocon 2008 pictures up. Only about a dozen of them, mostly fursuiters. I didn't have a lot of time to take pictures this year.

Albany Post Road / Graymoor

Milestones on the Old Albany Post Road in Putnam County: Milestone 55 is about 100 yards north of where the Appalachian Trail crosses. Milestone 54 and 53 are south of there.

Abandoned stone structure near Graymoor, NY: On the hilltop west of Route 9, approximately parallel to the south entrance of Graymoor, there appears to be an old stone structure with a turret of some sort.