Improvisation in the key of C... food

A little nervous in the knowledge that the frozen squid I had been buying for the cats in Pagosa had been cleaned before packaging, I fired up the iPad and watched the first YouTube video on "how to clean a squid" that popped up.

It was a deliberately wordless presentation (probably a good thing, as the demonstrator was Asian, and there was Asian music playing as an accompaniment), but the procedure is so simple, the video images alone were enough. I took the squid specimen I bought at the H Mart and pretty much did what the fellow had done in the video. There were some details that weren't entirely clear near the end, but my specimen was small enough to where I wasn't too worried about them, and I'm sure the cats will enjoy the tentacles, which are free of such details.

My one major surprise during this cleaning exercise was finding a "stiffener" that sits against and runs along the "back" of the "cone" part of the body; said stiffener is transparent, shaped like a feather, and—if I didn't know better—I'd say it was made of plastic.

Anyway, once the squid was clean and sliced, out came the ghee, some corn meal, some hot paprika, and mung bean sprouts. I rolled the cut squid in a mixture of the meal and paprika and put the coated squid in a frying pan with the ghee. After a few moments, it became clear there wasn't enough oil in the pan, so I added a few tablespoons of canola.

After about 3-4 minutes, I put a generous handful of the bean sprouts on top, reduced the heat to medium, and covered the pan. The frying sounds continued and checks every minute or so verified that the squid and the sprouts were getting cooked.

When I judged the ingredients were done, I moved them to a bowl and spooned two teaspoons of Thai chili sauce on top.

Not bad (even if Galina won't have anything to do with it).

My next escapade will involve a propane torch and some crème brûlée. That, Galina will partake in (and anyone who bets otherwise is throwing money away).

Wish me luck, I'm off to find some matches.

Cheers...

Layout fix...

Some time ago, I had noted that my LJ layout (Flexible Squares) had suddenly begun to display text posts in such a way as not to "wrap" around my userpic.

Then I noticed that, despite this behavior, the text of comments did wrap, and that got me to thinking—go figure!—about another change that took place at the time that text stopped wrapping, and that had to do with photographs being "cut" to column width if they were wider than what the style allows for "normal" column width (not optimum behavior, but it is an annoyance I can live with).

Nothing I did with the CSS code for ".entry" had much of an effect, and then I noticed the code for ".entry_text" and ".entry_text .ljtags":

.entry_text { overflow: hidden; }
.entry_text .ljtags { clear: both; }

The first, I reasoned, is responsible for cutting photos off at the right-hand margin, and according to a Google search, the value of "both" for the "clear" property basically keeps floating elements from appearing on the left and right sides of an element (e.g., the content of an entry).

So, clicking on "Customize" and then "Customize your theme" under where my current theme was shown, and then selecting "Custom CSS", I scrolled down the page to the "Custom stylesheet" text box, entered:

.entry_text { overflow: visible; }
.entry_text .ljtags { clear: none; }

clicked on "Save Changes", reloaded my journal, and BAM!, text was shown wrapped the way it used to!

Between this, coming back up to speed in GNU emacs, and learning about org mode and BBDB, I'm feeling computationally accomplished!

In other news, invoices are caught up to date. As far as the rest of the year is concerned, it's difficult to predict what the next couple of weeks will bring. On the one hand, it's the holiday season, which might lead one to think work will be slim, but historically, that's not the case (at least not for me).

Looking at the overall numbers, I completed 6 assignments in the last 15 days of 2009, and 13 in the last 15 days of 2010. Part of the explanation for all the work lies with how people about to take time off want documents to be translated in time for when they get back. (That explains why I get so much weekend work. It's an occupational hazard for translators, but the money earned pays the bills just as well.)

Cheers...