Swift Fish Net

Back when I was still going to school, I took Organic Chemistry, and in one of the labs we had to do a project. I don’t remember the details of my project anymore (I probably still have the lab notebook somewhere), but it had to do with studying citronella essential oils. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get an actual citronella plant, but I did manage to get a Citrosa geranium which produces one of the fragrant essential oils that is so distinctive in citronella oil. I held onto one of the Citrosa plants I used after the project ended, and for the most part, it has been very easy to grow. It is really quite weed-like; it doesn’t bloom much but has plenty of rather pleasant foliage. I just cut it back once in a while, water it every now and then, and it grows just fine.

This summer, however, it started to fade out.

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After a December of spending my weekends either internet shopping for the holidays or visiting relatives, things are back to my usual pattern for the first weekend in the New Year. Usual for me (at least in the last six months or so) is working with my computers on various projects and getting in a run at some point in the day. The projects are not far enough along to bother mentioning in detail just yet, but at least I am making some progress on them for a change. The running is gradually improving after finally getting closer to 100% recovered from a cold I picked up from my travels last month.

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I hadn’t gone geocaching lately, but this past weekend was a perfect opportunity for adding a state or two to my map of states that I have found geocaches in: I drove up to Connecticut for a cousin’s wedding from Maryland. I already had Connecticut, but I was hoping to add New York and Pennsylvania. Alas, I didn’t have enough time for a Pennsylvania cache, but kiirekass and I successfully added a NY cache as well as a couple of extra CT finds. While I was updating my geocaching profile, I thought I would add a geocaching badge to my sidebar. It ended up being a bit more work than I anticipated, as I had to adjust some CSS to get it to fit without getting cutoff at the right side of the sidebar. Hopefully I didn’t mess up any other edges and borders in the process. I am no expert with CSS. One of these days I need to do something about that zero hidden stat!

It has been a while since I’ve posted, so here’s a brief update.

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I had not bothered to check the validity of my WordPress site’s XHTML before today, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that there were some errors present. I took some time to track down and fix the minor issues. Hopefully, I caught them all.

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We ended up with a couple of inches of sleet from this past week’s storm. It quickly froze to a rather solid sheet of ice. With that, and the failure of some prompt sidewalk clearing, I suspected that finding a running route where I wouldn’t get run over by cars this week might be challenging. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually ended up not being a problem for me.

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I went out this morning to take a look at the beaver dam a little ways below Lake Needwood, along the Rock Creek Trail. With the sub-freezing weather we’ve been having, it was looking quite artistic with the interesting shapes from ice accumulation.

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It finally got cold enough this week in Maryland for a bit of snow. I intentionally waited for the snow to accumulate a bit before going out running about a half hour before sunset.

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When I tried out Drupal blogging with TextMate, I discovered that the TextMate Blogging Bundle couldn’t deal with Drupal’s way of posting with categories as implemented by the BlogAPI module, so I decided to see if I could figure out how to add this support.

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It has been a while since I last posted, so it seems like a good time for a general update.

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