Floral inspiration for our shower mosaic

Cathy and I are considering lots of subject matter for the mosaic that we're going to do in our downstairs shower (we're remodeling the bathroom). Over the last few days it was trees, seasonal and not, and now we're on to flowers. Maybe that's what we'll do, maybe not. But here are a bunch of images that I clipped from the web:

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Shape Wars

So, I was home sick yesterday. Pretty good fever, horrible head and joint pain, etc. We were afraid it was the flu, but it turned out to be a 24-hour thing. (Hooray!) Anyway, I woke up at 2 AM and needed stuff to do. I watched the Criterion Collection copy of Sparticus, worked on my PC and wrote up this game.

Shape Wars is a quick cardstock/paper game that you can print and cut out and be playing in just a few minutes if you have, and can print to, cardstock. It's way simpler than my original idea which was a cyberpunk permutation of Discwars but retains some of the core features. Download the PDF here.

It's good that I did this because I let my thing-a-day obligation slip Monday night while I mostly just shivered in bed.

Rye

I've been making whole oat groats for breakfast lately. First we were making steel-cut oats for the increased nutritive and taste value. And I figured if less-processed = more nutrition, why not whole oats? So we mastered that and they're great! But what about other grains? We (everyone) make rice that way all the time, right? And it works for oats very nicely. So when I was buying a bag of oats out of the bulk section at my local natural foods coop, I noticed Rye right next "door." So I got some.

In the end it took over an hour and a half to simmer to the texture that I like and I used about 2 cups of rye...uh...groats(?) or kernels(?) or whatever and ten cups of water. But it's super good. More flavorful than oats or rice -- kind of nutty (and smells like bread), but the texture's not as nice. It was totally worth doing and I'll have it for breakfast in the morning, but I bet that I'll stick with oats in the end.

These three pictures show the rye before, during and after cooking. If you happen to be crazy-interested, click on any of them for blow-ups.