a current meme

[solarbird]

Leave a word, any word, in the comments below, and I will tell you a fact about myself relating to that word.

Comments

[redsixwing]

...stars?

[solarbird]

I wrote a song by that title once. It's on my Bandcamp. There's a verse I wrote in Japanese because I couldn't write it in English. No, I won't translate it for you. ^_^

[redsixwing]

Nice.

(For me in particular, you don't need to. ~_^)

[ironymaiden]

CSS

[solarbird]

Well, the obvious one - Coexistence Alpha and that whole project - came about because I was sick of Dreamwidth being useless on phones. No secrets, but a fact!

[dreamerinsilico]

Candle

[solarbird]

I made a candle out of cheese wax - the wax that comes on cranberry wensleydale, to be specific about it - to see if I could. (I've made... four, now? It worked!)

[dreamerinsilico]

That's pretty neat! Must have taken a lot of cheeses to get enough.

[solarbird]

They aren't very big candles. ^_^ They're, like, tea candle size. I have holders that are that size already so I just used them.

[kathmandu]

origin

[solarbird]

Ouch, goin' right in, are we? No clue. Adopted, by people who looked great from the outside but were incredibly fucked up. No idea who my birth parents were, haven't talked to the adoptives since the instance I no longer had to.

[binary_sunset]

Cats

[solarbird]

One time when I was in school we had a group house and one of the cats was named Sparkie and Sparkie loved me and loved Vicka and tolerated Anna and hated everyone else in the world. And one weekend Anna and I were eating pancakes with maple syrup in the living room and Anna had finished hers and put it on the floor beside the couch, and Sparkie came up and licked it clean before we really noticed what was going on, but we were amused that she liked maple syrup so did nothing.

A few minutes later, we saw her run by at top speed right to left in front of us. And then about 20 seconds later, again, same direction. And then, again, and then, again, and then, again! (It was possible to run around the main floor of the house that way.) And we were going "what the fuck, Sparkie?" when she came in still at top speed from the right side, did a hard (right-angle) left turn in front of Anna, leapt up into her lap, and immediately fell asleep.

And she would never touch maple syrup again.

[alatefeline]

That's a great story.

[alatefeline]

chocolate

[solarbird]

I enjoy making rock candy geodes. Chocolate is involved. One of them literally fooled a geologist once, albeit only visually. (Of course.)

Here's a youtube video on how to do it.

[alatefeline]

That is so cool.

[masu_trout]

Hmmm... how about nature?

[solarbird]

We used to go out to the natural hot springs in the Olympic Mountains almost every year and watch the meteor showers in autumn. Stay up all night (or 'til 4am or so), just out in the park.

Avoid the resorts, they're pointless.

One of my favourite other hot springs was up in the Cascades, but there's a property owner between the springs and the road and another private owner who owns the spring the land is on and they both changed hands and both were like NOPE GET TH' HELL OFF MY LAND and that was that.

[ossobuco]

Movie

[solarbird]

A guy I know was making a movie that had this kind of semi-post-apocalypse/alt-futurist setting and he asked me if I had a slide rule I could loan him as a prop and I asked if he preferred yellow or white and he borrowed both.

OK, try this

[ng_moonmoth]

strings.

I'm over here.

Re: OK, try this

[solarbird]

I don't entirely like any of the prepacked string sets made for Irish Bouzouki, so I assemble my own out of single string sellers.

[sistawendy]

caterpillar

[solarbird]

When I was in grad school I worked for a while in a genetics laboratory headed by Grace Jones and Davy Jones, and I am making up neither of those names. They wanted me to run their computers and I did, but that was too easy so I started doing more things which is how I ended up on three papers (lead author on one!) which is why I can say I kind of used to be a geneticist. I mean, I'm published, so.

Anyway, they did a lot of work on insects - it was specifically an entomology genetics lab - and aside from the inevitable fruit flies (of course) they did a lot of work with parasitic wasps, which incubated their eggs in (ta da!) little moth caterpillars.

Normally, of course, all of the caterpillars get stung, but once, somehow, a couple of them got missed! And we had two cocoons. So I built a little habitat next to my desk for the (very short-lived) adults and had two moth pets named Bert and Ernie for about two and a half weeks before they died.

[arethinn]

division

[solarbird]

First Cascadian Widowmaker corps, of course. Salut.