Sunday, August 17, 2008

The Omnivore's Hundred

Here is a meme from Very Good Taste, called the Omnivore's Hundred.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

Bold I've had, Italics I would not consider.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (I am smarter than this)
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear (there are actually some growing not too far from the house, I should go pick some today)
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (I do not like burgers)
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. (like I have that kind of money!)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Update on Maggie & Heed

I thought I'd post this right quick, since I was looking over the archives and realized that I hadn't said anything about Maggie since that last post about her growling at Heed. Since that post sounded dour, and things in fact are awesome, I thought a little update was in order.

Maggie is doing great. We still make her work for her rewards, and she is listening to us and learning words and signals very well (like walk, wait, and come). We are learning what her different moods mean, what different sounds in the house mean when we are not in the room with her (for example, the sound of paws on the kitchen table is now clearly identifiable), and we're getting the hang of how much exercise she needs to have to keep from going stir-crazy. She has lost weight, maybe as much as 3 lbs, which doesn't sound like much until you see the before and after photos. It's about half of what the vet recommended she lose, so that's pretty awesome.

She is much more affectionate towards us now, and shows a lot of personality. She's lost pretty much all her food aggression so far as I can tell - her and Heed drink water out of the same bowl, and once she figured out that Heed has no interest in her food aside from smelling it, she stopped growling at him about it. They not only tolerate each others' presence, they interact, curling up on the same couch cushion for a nap, touching noses, and when Heed has his fugnuts-o-clock race around the house, Maggie is right behind him, trying to initiate a game of will-you-freaking-chase-me-already. She still doesn't have a big interest in toys, but will occasionally romp around with her squeaky hedgehog or the mysterious lime green mittens that turned up in the living room and no one remembers where they came from. They are ugly and fit for dog chewings.

She still sleeps in her crate at night, so Hastur and the Library Overlord totally lost a bet there, though they were right that I do feed her more people-scraps than I probably should. She doesn't get them every day, or every week, and she has to lay on the floor and wait for me to bring the food down to her nose and THEN wait for me to say 'Okay', but she does get them. We've even given her treats around other dogs and had her do tricks and not show any aggression, so that's awesome. We need to get ahold of her foster-mom, though, because I lost my phone at a wedding like a month ago (seriously, so many weddings) and we still need to get the paperwork all done up in our names. I wonder if it's rude to just drop by?

Heed is still Heed. He sleeps on you, or near you, or if he picks a really uncomfortable spot instead of you, and he's gained back some of his weight again - I'm eyeballing him at around 18 lbs, so he's gained about what Maggie's lost. People always tell me that he must be a really fat cat to weight so much, and you know, he IS fat, but we compared him and the dog, and from shoulder to butt they're just about the same length. Heed is shorter by a small bit, and he's about half as wide, but he's still essentially a beagle-sized cat. Living with him, it's odd for me to see normal cats, because they always look so small. He still won't go to bed until I do, so I think I'll let him get on that.

Truly Reversible Entrelac Scarf!

So, I started spinning my Mediterranean batts from Loop! on Etsy, and fell in love hard. Like, really really hard. I sampled like 25 grams of 3-ply light fingering weight yarn from it (navajo plied, of course), and have since been alternating between spinning up more singles, and furiously swatching with my sampled yarn, trying to get a fabric that didn't look like ass.

First I tried lace. 3 ply, too round, poor pattern definition. Then I tried the start of the Clapotis - which worked, but I got bored like 20 rows in, so not so much. I pondered tiny cables, but then I've already got my Irish Miss scarf going on zeroes, and there's only so much patience I have for tiny cabled scarves. Plus, with the color pooling, it would look like ass. I pondered some more.

Today I tried some entrelac, on a whim. I like entrelac, it's surprisingly amusing to work and the front side looks very impressive. The back side, though, looks like ass. Not only like ass, but like crazy asymmetrical ass, which instantly withers the impressed stares of passers-by (and you know I loves me some impressed stares of passers-by).

So I got thinking. Entrelac. Reversible. Entrelac. Reversible. Ribbing? Would ribbing work? I did a quick search on Ravelry, and yes, someone has done an entrelac scarf in ribbing, and it is reversible... but it kinda looks like ass. Each of the squares draws in towards the middle (like ribbing does), but the ends flare because of the picked up stitches. In short, the squares are, well, NOT.

So, I got fiddling. In the end, I worked up a pretty simple solution for the whole pulling problem - don't pick up so many damned stitches. If you have a square of 16 stitches, pick up eight, then increase in each stitch as you knit them (you should also twist the picked up stitches, to prevent holes, but that's what I always do when picking up stitches so I don't know if that's like special instructions or not). If you do that, you're picking up about the same width of fabric as you'll get with your ribbing, which is pretty damn awesome in my opinion. So, yeah, I'll be finishing my little 25 gram reversible entrelac swatch, and hope to post pictures. I may even write this up as a PDF and post it as a free Ravelry download.