TDW

Three Day Weekend -- a phrase redolent with possibility. Even though I know that at the end of it I'll be a bit amazed -- is that all I did? -- it still sounds like an eternity. I believe I'll learn French, reshingle the house, arrange my CDs by type and name, hang those curtains I meant to hang, cook some breakfast, and read the book I bought last night. And then this afternoon, I'll.....

Okay, I started the book. And the sausage is cooking, and the coffee is brewing. I tend to be fairly precise about how we make coffee, but lately we've gotten uneven results -- sometimes too strong, sometimes too weak. Not sure why. The good news is, we have divergent tastes in coffee intensity, so one of us, at least, will likely be happy. And the waffles are baking, too.

In about an hour, I'll make the first pass at mowing the lawn. An article I found said that you ought not to mow until the grass is looking a bit parched (I'm not exactly sure what that means; I have a vision of little green faces mouthing 'water, water'), on the principle that this forces the grass to get deeper, and therefore stronger, roots. It also says to mow 'high', the principle there being that the weeds get sustenance from the top of the plant, whereas the grass gets it from the middle of the plant; hence (in their great phrase), when you mow, you are giving the grass a trim and you're lopping off the head of the weed. Also, this lets the grass grow higher, shading the weed, thus depriving it of sunlight and growth. Personally, I don't know about any of that, but the idea of mowing so that the grass is a bit shaggy sounds right to me. I can't explain why, it just does.

I did some web searching (is there any other way to search? have libraries and knowledgeable librarians gone out of existence? Surely not) on the topic of making text searchable, aka 'what do you do with a pdf document'. I was thinking specifically of the search style where you say 'give me this word if it appears within x positions of one of these other words', and that made me realize that I am mixing two concepts -- physical style and search style -- so I wondered if PDF documents, which are, after all, still a file, not something magical (hmmm...wonder what would happen if you tried to open one with a text editor?) can be searched used that technique? I know, this is trivial stuff for people who understand it, but for me, its kind of interesting.

Another thing I'm going to try to do is make some pizza dough. I mentioned that reference in 101 Cookbooks the other day; today, I will try it. Won't try to bake the pizza today, but simply assemble the ingredients and mix the dough, then let it sit for a couple of days. I was a little surprised, when I went to the site, to find that they were having server problems which prevented me from pulling up the recipe -- I always assume that of course the net is always available -- fortunately, the old standby, Google, had captured the page (the search phrase was 'reinhart' and 'pizza dough') so now I have it.