Moving house
The notebook has a new address. Why I left the free blogging platform, what came across in the move, what did not, and where the feed lives now.
Tagged “notes”
14 posts. All tags
The four minutes I chose not to drive to
Three weeks after watching a 93% eclipse from outside the path of totality, I finally watched NASA's 2024 totality feed and understood what everyone had been telling me.
What's up in July, and what is up from here
NASA's three-minute July sky guide, with my notes on which parts work from a European back garden with a street lamp and which ones need a car.
Short nights
Mid-June, the sky never gets properly dark, the telescope stays in the cupboard, and two bright planets make the best of the twilight anyway.
Morris
The starter I had kept going for years finally gave up in the cold kitchen. A short note on what happened, what I should have done, and some bread without any starter at all.
Baking in a 15-degree kitchen
My kitchen is at 15 °C this month and every dough takes twice as long. Three small adjustments that have kept bread on the table anyway.
November, according to NASA and my cloud cover
A short monthly sky guide from NASA, a big aurora night that I spent under cloud, and a purple ribbon called STEVE that turns out not to be an aurora at all.
The long nights are back
Dark by half past seven, a new four-minute habit of counting stars in the Little Dipper, and one minute of someone else's much better sky.
Twenty minutes from rye field to loaf
A German museum film follows winter rye from horse-drawn sowing to a wood-fired oven, and makes my bag of supermarket flour look like the end of a very long story.
Morris goes in the fridge for the summer
At 28 °C in the kitchen my starter peaks in three hours and collapses by lunchtime, so he has been moved to the fridge and onto a weekly schedule.
The nights that never quite get dark
Around the solstice the sky over the back step stays a faint blue-grey all night, so I watched a few seconds of somebody else's Milky Way instead.
A year of the Sun, in three minutes
I do not own a solar filter and do not intend to point a telescope at the Sun without one, so around the equinox I watched NASA do it for me.
A brick, with notes
The same recipe I have baked two hundred times came out dense, pale and flat. The kitchen was 16 °C and I followed the clock instead of the dough.
Morris, and a rye starter filmed by someone else
My starter is older than some of my cutlery and I have never once watched it rise. Someone on Wikimedia Commons filmed theirs for ten hours.