Yowee

Well, I did it again. Tendonitis. This time, my right hand is cold and tingly, especially around the fingertips. There's cramps up to the elbow, and occasionally beyond. Heat helps, as does medicine, but damn it's inconvenient. I suspect it's a combination of working on the computer 8 hours a day, then coming home and playing WoW for a few hours, before finishing with a night of spinning. Yeah. That's probably it.

Mostly I'm blaming World of Warcraft. I mean, if those folks at Blizzard hadn't put their danged Fire Festival at the same time as I got interested in spinning again, we wouldn't be having this sort of trouble, now would we?

I've been thinking of doing something different with the blog these past few days. I know this is a knitting blog, but to be honest when you're working on only one or two projects that are on tiny yarn and tiny needles (hello, Irish Miss scarf!) and your camera doesn't work for shit (still can't find that damn connecter cord), words are all you got. So I got thinking, around the time that I did the zombie post - writing fiction is fun! So maybe I should post some of my fiction here? All I've really got on me right now is my NaNo Novel from last year - would folks be interested in seeing that up here? I warn you, it's not edited AT ALL, and in my opinion it should get off to a much quicker start than it does, but I like it. It's 50,000 words, but that doesn't include all of the story. When I got to certain parts, I'd have to actually WORK on it, to make it go. It might be good practice, it might just be fun to do. Anyone interested?

As a teaser, here is the excerpt I posted last year:

Spookworld
an excerpt

TUESDAY

Dr. Phillip Jennings scratched a flea in his beard. The sweet smoky smell of beans cooking over an open fire comforted him, and he leaned back against the concrete and lumber contraption he called home. It was nice living here, under the Bryan River bridge, not a care in the world. Once or two hours a week he’d go into town and help the poor little engineering majors with their homework in exchange for canned food, soap, bottled water, and a few packs of cigarettes. He didn’t smoke, and he told them so, but still they gave him the cigarettes. Once he tried to explain the difference in being homeless and being in prison, but the boys eyes (it was only boys he helped to study, the girls were too cautious of his dirty, smelly self) would glaze over, so he stopped. He shared the cigarettes with the other street people, and built up good will. The shelter let him shower there so long as he brought his own soap and wasn’t drunk, which he never was. He enjoyed life too much to drink; his was an existence free from care, and idyllic eden where he could sleep, read or think as much as he wanted, every day of his life.

So when he saw the stranger shambling up from the other side of the river, he felt no fear. He waved, and gestured to his beans. “Howdy, brother. You look hungry, want to share some beans? Maybe a smoke?” The stranger said nothing, just continued his clumsy, slow advance. Dr. Jennings scratched idly at his beard flea (he was considering naming it Irving, but thought that might make it harder on himself when the flea drowned in tomorrow’s shower) and waited. Maybe the stranger was a crazy – god knew there were enough of them in the general homeless population, and he knew quite a few of them himself. Most were harmless, but a few were unstable enough to merit avoidance. Dr. Jennings wondering if this man was one of those. “Hey now, brother,” he spoke softly, like to an unfamiliar animal, “There’s no trouble here. I got food to spare and a nice warm fire. Won’t you share it with me?”

The stranger crawled hands and knees slowly up the side of the embankment, putting a cold and dirty hand on Dr. Jennings’ shoulder to steady himself. He started to raise his face.

The eyes were empty, not filled with madness, but cold and glassy as a taxidermied bear’s. The mouth was bloodied and raw, flesh falling in strips from he perfect, white teeth. Those teeth terrified the good doctor more than anything, shining white and clean in that dirty, dead man’s face, the metal gleam of braces undiminished by the meat and gristle of Dr. Jennings’ shoulder and neck as it bowled him slowly over onto the concrete floor, a wailing moan starting somewhere in his belly and escaping through his mouth like steam from a kettle, rising to match that rumbling howling screech from the stranger’s own filthy, dead lips.

Roux the Day

So, Mr Sweetie has a new student worker who's vegetarian, and I wanted to cook something all vegetarian-y and impress her (because, you know, I'm a praise-based organism). She *does* eat milk and eggs, which gives me a little more wiggle room, though this recipe I made today doesn't use any milk.

I have said before, publicly, that I don't know how to cook. See the green onion incident.

I've been wanting to make pasta from scratch for a while - ever since the Library Overlord mentioned that yeah, it's just flour and eggs and a little bit of salt. Like, seriously. That's it.

So I gave basic pasta a go last weekend, and then I felt I was Truly! Ready! to cook something ovo-vegetarian.

Here is the basic recipe I use for pasta:

2 cups flour (more if you think you need it)
4 eggs (room temperature)
Pinch of salt

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl. In a seperate bowl, whisk the eggs up good. Mix that shit together, until it sticks to itself enough that your hands are, you know, fairly clean. Like, you can move them independantly, bend them, see where the skin is, that kind of thing. Make it into a ball, then put that ball in the bowl, put some foil or damp cheesecloth or saran wrap on the top, then leave that shit alone for at least half an hour. It's done when it has a kind of glossy dampness all over. And is vaguely plump-looking, not that you really expect it to rise.

Flour the surface you're going to be rolling on really well, then roll it out (or, you know, buy a pasta machine). If you have limited space and/or are me, you can flour the top of the dough VERY well, the fold it, and the flour will keep it from becoming a big mass of dough again. You can make layers this way. Layers are nice. Roll it nice and thin, then cut it into strips, and cook them in boiling water with some salt. Use a LOT of water - and also? They cook FAST. Like, 2 minuntes fast. Don't leave thinking you have time to do other things. Drain the water out when they're done, and you have pasta. If you are me, you have ugly, uneven strips, but it's pasta and it's tasty.

The first time I made this, I forgot that I had thrown out the pesto I planned to have it with. They were good all by themselves. The second time, I had them with canned pasta sauce (spinach cheesy goodness). Even better.



So tonight, I Had A Plan, you see? I was going to make a meaty-tasting meat-free pasta sauce. It was going to rock. Here was The Plan:

1. Roux is thick. Make some roux. Medium to dark, but not too dark.
2. Walnuts are mellow. Toast some walnuts. Add them to the roux.
3. Portabella mushrooms are delicious and meaty. Sautee them bitches in butter.
4. Everyone loves green onions.
5. And salt.
6. And pepper.
7. Maybe you should add some water, so it actually forms some kind of sauce.

Somehow, I thought that roux was one of those things you could have a lot of, so I made a LOT of roux. I'm proud of myself that I didn't burn it, and I got it down to a nice dark peanut butter color (I have never made roux in my life), so I just dumped the entire goddamn cup of roux in with the walnuts, thinking thick = sauce.

So, at that point I had a giant pile of roux, and my precious walnuts. I tried adding water in a frantic attempt to less-roux-ify it. I actually ended up straining the walnuts out, so I had a pot of roux and a pot of walnuts. I added the mushrooms, onions, salt, and pepper to the walnuts pot, and it was good, but it sure was.... thin. Maybe I should add back a little of that roux.

So I didn't want to add too much, but I did want a creamy consistancy, so I busted out the coconut milk. As it turns out, coconut milk is actually pretty good in savory dishes! I was starting to have a passably okay mushroomy-walnutty-vaguely-creamy-sauce-thing. But it was still a little thin.

Instead of doing the sane thing and quitting while I was ahead, I added more roux. After pouring the thin stuff off the top, which was mostly water. So I was adding almost pure roux again. Then I went and cooked the pasta, and by the time the pasta was done, you know what I found out?

I had somehow invented the vegetarian recipe for brown gravy. And not the good stuff, either - the instant kind like you get a Luby's, three hours after the lunch rush. Oh yeah.

At that point I did what anyone would do in my situation. I fed the dog what she would eat and put the rest down the garbage disposal, then sat down with a bowl of ice cream for dinner.

Zombies!

So I get up this morning at 4 a.m., because the cat would like to be in the window now. The cat is not allowed in the window, neither at 4 a.m. nor at any other time, because he is 15 lbs of fat-ass, who wants to sqeeeeze his way through the blinds (and crush them, and break them, and ruin our deposits) to sit on the windowsill... for maybe ten minutes top, then squeeeeze back through to the bed.

Have I mentioned that the window is right above my head? As in, the cat must walk on my face with his 15 lb self to get to and from said window? So yeah, I'm against the whole process. Why he only wants to do this first thing in the morning is beyond me, but I suspect it's an elaborate plan to wake me up, so that maybe I'll feed him early. Not that I ever feed him early, but hope springs eternal.

So today, I am awake at 4 a.m., because the cat has tried to walk on my face, and there really is a limited amount of cat-flinging you can do while prone and groggy and cranky as all get-out, but somehow it sinks into my lizard-brain that Heed is crouching down next to my face, hair puffed out all crazy, growling at something in the backyard.

He is not a growly cat, so this scares the shit out of me.

I woke up Mr. Sweetie before I looked out the window, and I thought I saw a dude wandering around the yard behind ours (see, this shit is why we need a privacy fence, I don't need to know what is going on in your yard, neighbor people!), stumbling around like he was drunk or stoned or something. Well, scratch that, you see a lot of drunks in a college town, and he didn't seem drunk, so probably on something. The dog started barking, Mr. Sweetie got out the handgun case from the closet but didn't open it - you know, because you never know, but you want to be safe. I guess I don't really regret him getting the gun now, hey?

So the dude wandered around for a while, then turned like he heard something (which he didn't do for the dog - weird, right?) then wandered off towards the highway. We were pretty goddamn awake at that point, so we started getting ready to go to work.

We had some extra time (like two hours extra time), so I figured hey - I'll make breakfast. Haven't done that in a while (try ever, but I was still freaked out and needed something to do), and we had some pamcake mix and chocolate chips, how hard could it be?

So I'm mixing up the batter, and Mr. Sweetie's on the computer in the living room, and next thing I know he's spouting crazy-talk about zombies and uprisings and oh god oh god we're all gonna die.

Honestly, it's like we don't plan for these things.

So, of course, I finished the pamcakes (they were delicious), turned off the stove, and grabbed the bug-out bags a friend had prepared for us last year. Supplemented with the 50 lb bag of cat food we'd picked up from the store the other day, the rain barrel from the yard and our brita pitcher, and we were good to go. It wasn't easy getting the Maggie and Heed into the attic, and let me tell you, getting Maggie's crate through that creepy little door did not help my mood one bit, but once we pulled ourselves up and busted a small hole through the roof, it was cosy enough. Mr. Sweetie made an amicable truce with Falafel Jones, the previous resident, regarding which sides of the roof were off limits, and we were able to last out the uprising without too much trouble.

Building Worlds

Well, the wedding we attended last weekend went along well, as did the godson's birthday party, though the whale went unfinished. We got him an Indiana Jones Mr Potato Head instead, and next time his mom is in town we'll give her the theoretically-completed whale.

In other news, Mr Sweetie and I have started working on our roleplaying game again.

It's something that we started talking about around this time last year, or maybe last fall. We both like classless systems, and skill-based systems, and really the more flexibility the better. We started building some mythology together, which with his background in religious studies and classical literature, and my lifetime love of low fantasy and how-did-they-make-that, it's turning out really interesting. We've got the general feel down, which is a lot more ... folktale-y than your classic RPG, but we're pretty stoked about it. I don't want to say too much about it, since nothing's really set in stone, but we came up with a really cool thing today that creates roads (a lot more important than you might think), plows fields, and ferries the souls of the dead. It's awesome.

So in short, life is good.

Henna OK!

Remember my freakout last post? Totally unfounded. As someone on the hennapage forums pointed out to me, "henna grows in the desert, is harvested in the desert, and sits is a warehouse in the desert until it gets to you. A few days in your mailbox won't hurt it."And right she was.

So I mixed up 100g of CCJ's Rajasthani henna, and let me tell you, it is NICE. I used only a pinch of sugar (it said I didn't have to use any, but I am nothing if not paranoid), and it is very stringy, but I think I'm going to go ahead and add a little more in anyways, to make it retain moisture a bit more. The unsealed paste, left on for maybe an hour or so, left a good B4 stain on the back of my hand (I drew a Murloc). I doodled on my palm as well, then almost immediately wiped it off because I had gone in without planning and the result, as happens, was not so great, but I'm getting about the same level of stain so I guess I'll have to live with that for a while.

In dog news, I'm starting to get a little concerned about Maggie. A few times now she's growled at Heed, once tonight, always around food, but while I know Heed doesn't really want to get to her food at all, I also don't want her to become food-aggressive at all, and don't really know what to do. So far we've yelled at her when she does it and sent her outside, where she can't do fun things like be pet and sit on the couch... but it does worry me. I've had Heed since the day he was born, so if it comes down to it, I know who we're keeping, but I'd really like them to be able to get along well enough to continue having them both.

Anyways, next weekend is my godson's 3rd birthday party, so even though I know I should be working on the Cuddlefish, I'm going to get started on a gift for him instead. No, he's not getting the Cuddlefish. Boy's too young to have a proper appreciation of cephalopods.

But he can get this really bitchin' humpback whale.

SON OF A BITCH

So, last week I ordered some henna. $40 of henna to be exact, which is not a small amount of henna. It got mailed on the 21st, and priority mail, and I kept eagerly checking the mailbox to see if the little flag was up, signifying that we had mail. A few days pass, no flag, so today I remember that I have henna coming in the mail and take a peek outside. No flag. With a sinking feeling in my gut, I walk out to the box and open it - there's the package, along with a week's worth of mail. The goddamn mailman didn't raise the flag. This shit is TEMPERATURE SENSITIVE, it's been sitting in my mailbox for DAYS, when it's been fucking NINETY DEGREES OUTSIDE. Son of a BITCH!!!

So, I put it in the freezer, and only time will tell, but I'm guessing I have about a pound of high-quality henna, that's been completely ruined because of our fucking incompetent mailman.

Variations on a Theme

So I've been working on the Cuddlefish's eyes, and it's been tricky.

First, I thought I would just, you know, do buttons or something. That looked like ass (so much so, that I didn't even sew them on, the ass was apparent from just holding the buttons to the unshaped head).

Then I thought, hey, what if I add in some short rows? Eh? Eh? Everybody loves short rows. So I sketched for a bit, got a W-shaped pupil going, made a chart, and got going on it. There were minor mistakes (such as knitting from the wrong end of the chart, and making M-shaped pupils instead), and I ended up redoing the knitting a total of 5 times, and the chart a total of 7.

So I start the 6th round of knitting using the 7th chart, and I'm following it, and it's going well, and then BAM. It hits me.

This eye? Is too shallow. It is an almond, and not a bulge. It's too symmetrical, and the W will be pointing to the butt-end of the mantle and not up to the sky, as actual cuttlefish eyes are oriented. Ergo, the sort-row eye has got to go.

So I started thinking, and I started sketching again, and I think I may have come up with something that will work. I'm going to be bringing back some of the color patterns from the mantle, but not in ways that you'll expect. It's going to work. It's going to be interesting.

It's going to be asymmetrical.

If you know me, you know that I have a really hard time with asymmetry. I'm not good at creating it, my gut naturally roils when I try, but dammit, this time I am going to do it. It's going to be awkward and counterintuitive the whole time, but as Dog is my witness* I will make this eye by monday!



* Seriously, Maggie. Time to step up.

State of the Union

So, I looked back at myself and the blog today at lunch (which I am still on - yay one hour lunch!) and realized that I haven't been doing as much with the blog as I would have liked to - especially since the wedding, and since discovering Ravelry. I do wonder if the knitblog community has had a bit of a slowdown since Ravelry came out, and while I'm honestly not sure (I also discovered the magic of RSS feeds, so now I always seem flooded in entries, but have no way of knowing if that's more or less than I would have been reading before), I don't think it'd necessarily a bad thing. I mean, Ravelry? Is clearly awesome. Awesome as few things can be. It has completely revolutionized how I search for patterns, designers, errata, and of course it has forums aplenty for my chattier impulses.

So, no, I'm not dead. I've just been doing a good amount of my talking elsewhere.

I also realize that a lot of my entries for the past year have been either 'ZOMG WEDDING' or 'ZOMG MOVING', which is not terribly interesting to people who are not me.

So where are we now? Well, there's me. I still knit. I still design. I still buy patterns like it's going out of style. I know that I'm happier than I was when I started this blog, which is a big thing for me. I've had a lot of therapy, which I mentioned but not much or often. I have fewer depressive episodes, now that the wedding is over - I'm glad now that I'm not on medication, but I am perfectly aware it might have helped and not against it in general. I'm eternally grateful to the person who helped me work on my issues - you know who you are, though I don't think you read this - so that now I'm much more attuned to my own rhythms, when I need to be awake, when asleep, when around people, when alone, when I need to do what I don't want to do, because what I want to do will make me feel worse instead of better. I no longer use sleep as a way of avoiding my problems, or making time pass quickly so I can get to the other end of a depressive moment. I'm much more confident, both at work and in my personal life, and I take more pride in my abilities and accomplishments without constantly seeking external validation for them. All in all, I think I have improved as a person, as a knitter, and maybe started on the road to becoming An Adult. And all of that is good.

It's odd, though, that even with all that growth and change that I know I've done, I still just feel like me. Still a little flaky (though I like to think, less so), still a little goofy, still curious and stubborn as hell. I think the main difference between myself-now and myself-ten-years-ago is largely one of surety. I know who I am, I know what I will and will not put up with, and in general I'm a lot less confused. Feels good.

So all that said, I think I'm going to breathe some new life into this blog o' mine. I might gussy up the formatting a bit, I definitely plan to add more free pattern links (evidently this is one of the main reasons people come here, according to Hastur, and that's pretty cool - Yes it's external validation, but it's nice to be told people like your taste in clothes), and other cool things as I find them. There'll probably be a place on the sidebar for things to look/listen at during work. No videos, since those require entirely too much attention (in my experience) to be a good idea, but things like free audiobook reviews (and oh, I have many), more Things that Piss Me Off, and whatever else floats my boat.




Something else occurs to me now. It's been eight months since I started my own private protest against all forms of media that depict sexualized violence. No movies, no books, no TV shows (that's right, no more SVU!), nothing. I've been pairing it with a concentrated effort to find more women-created media, books and music mostly since I go to so few movies these days (two this year - Iron Man because it's awesome, Harold and Kumar because that's what Sweetie wanted to see for his birthday, and I plan of course to see Indiana Jones sometime soon as well), and it's been a lot of fun. I listen almost exclusively to women artists, not because of any grr mens bad sentiments, but because I've found so much now that I like. I have more positive role models for myself and any tiny knitters Mr Sweetie and I may ever have (though no time soon, I'm looking at an IUD), and I think it's really improved my quality of life. Yay me!

The To-Make List

So, I keep thinking of things I can make, and then either forget about them, or someone else has already made one so awesome, mine could only be a pale imitation. Ergo, I'm making a list of cool things to make, so I don't forget, and hoping I can make good ones.

Angler fish
Tapir
Chupacabra
Anteater
Platypus
Waterbear
Axolotl
Iguana
Jewelled scarab
Moose
Fruit bat/flying fox
"tentacorn"
Byakhee
Armadillo
Possum
Badger
Diplocaulus - "hammerhead salamander"
Megamouth shark
Bilby
Shovel-nosed lobster
Gulper eel
Oreo dory or sunfish
Giant isopod
Okapi
Capybara
kinkajou
buffalo
skunk
coatimundi
SLOTH!

Anya now a PDF

My Anya Scarf is now available as a PDF, courtesy of Ravelry. Enjoy!