(no subject)

[ewt]

Saw an advert for a room in a house in Plumstead, front and back garden, sharing with other Trinity musicians, £220/month. It wouldn't be a bad commute in terms of getting to Trinity but it would be horrible in terms of getting to Hendon on a Sunday morning, although if I caught first trains it could be done (and more easily after the finish fixing the bloody Thameslink).

I have to move out of student halls of residence by 17th June.

I'm still toying with the idea of putting lots of stuff into storage and spending lots of the summer in Bath - of course if I were to find somewhere as cheap as the room mentioned above then it wouldn't necessarily be cheaper to do it that way. But, um, I'm not going to find anywhere that cheap that also has a tolerable commute for Sunday mornings.

Intarweb seems to have died. Joy. I do grow weary of the "it is windy, so your intarweb is going to go away until someone feels like fixing it" situation.

To waste time online while not having any online, I shall go through some of the browser tabs I have open and tell you about them.

This one is a post in musictheory regarding a list of books people should read if they want to do post-grad level music theory. I'm not sure if I'd want to do post-grad music theory but I certainly do enjoy music theory and hey, books. The vague plan is to get some of them out of the library and read them.

this icon made me laugh. I don't like moving icons most of the time or I'd probably nick it. pfy showed it to me.

Chenopodium quinoa from the PFAF database. The Plants For A Future database is quite neat, it uses a system to rate plants on a scale of 1 to 5 in their "usefulness" although I'm not entirely sure what criteria are used. Quinoa is pretty neat stuff, though. It's kosher for Pesach, which is why I was eating it and ended up discussing it, and looking up information about it. That page says at the test site in Cornwall they've managed to get half a kilo yield per square metre. That's not bad; 100g of dry quinoa gives 400kcal, something around 20g of fibre, just under 20g protein (particularly rich in lysine, methionine and cystine). If you assume each person needs 2000kcal a day (this is a bit under, to be fair) and that sort of yield, a square metre provides your calorie intake quite neatly. A plot 20m by 20m would provide enough to feed a person on 2000kcal a day for 400 days. Now, I don't want to get all of my calorie intake from this stuff, but that isn't bad yield by any means, particularly for something so high in protein. When I have a garden I will further investigate growing some.

I like quinoa in chili or in soup, or just in a simple sort of pilaf. It's useful in halls as well because it cooks reasonably fast without requiring much supervision. I bring two parts of salted water to a boil and add one part dry quinoa, then turn the heat off and give it a stir and put the lid on, and go back fifteen minutes or so later when I remember it should be finished. Rice takes much longer, or at least brown rice does, and pasta just isn't as healthy.

What else is hanging around in my browser?

my old guestbook is pretty self-explanatory. Someone actually signed it recently. I ought to re-do it (or just take it away and have people comment on livejournal entries instead, really) to match the new, simplified layout of my website, but then I should fix my LJ layout as well. Eventually, eventually, all things happen.

Gmail is hanging around in my browser, as is my Trinity College e-mail, but I'm not about to tell you all the contents. The Trinity one is mostly stuff that's been sent to all students that I'm not actually interested in, and the Gmail is mostly freecycle stuff. I also have my userinfo in there, and that is also mostly self-explanatory - it screams, "This woman has no life! RUN AWAY!" fairly loudly. I have a whole bunch of theferrett's entries open as well, most of them ones he links to from his userinfo page.

is in there, too. That would be because the National Rail Enquiries site is shite, and also b0rked for Firefox (didn't used to be, is now, not sure why, don't care). Now, if only JourneyPlanner would work as quickly.

I have pictures of erzibet's brand-new Felix - managed to open them before the intarweb b0rked. I am probably supposed to say he is adorable, or something, but to me he looks like... well, a baby. He seems happy, though, which is more than I can say for lots of babies.

I have Strength Through Joy. Might creep out this Saturday night, you never know, since it will be the first one in ages where I don't have to teach piano all day on Sunday. It's been a very long time since I went out dancing. It seems a bit un-glowstick for me, maybe, though. Comments, anyone?

Intarweb is back.

Horn lesson later, yay! I'm actually looking forward to it a bit, having practised since the last one. Go me.

Mental note to self: talk about thermal depolymerization.

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Been to Strength Through Joy, liked it a lot. Er, can't go this weekend because I'm at the Ki Federation Spring Seminar.

Quinoa... Additional uses, soaking the seeds to remove the saponin coating leaves you with soapy water. Er, that might be useful.

The downside of all that protein production is denitrification of the soil: unless it has nitrifying nodules in the roots (and there's no mention of that in the article) you're going to be dependent on artificial fertilisers or crop rotation with legumes. Probably a four-year rotation, too.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Yes, the saponins may well be of use.

Crop rotation with legumes is not necessarily a huge problem. I like beans. I'm kindof thinking some sort of four-year crop rotation is eventually going to be necessary anyway - it's also important for preventing disease in Solanaceae and Brassica foods. I'm not a huge fan of most brassicas (though raw broccoli is ace) but they are still useful for other people to eat and as feed for livestock.

Chicken poo turns really bright turquoise if you feed red/purple cabbage to the chickens. I guess the blue just goes right through them.