Rrrrrrip!

The other night, I ripped out 23 rows of the Persian Star Shawl. Almost 1500 stitches.



That's a dime I used for scale. I didn't have a quarter handy.



It damn near broke my heart to do it, but the chart as I had written it in that section just plain sucked. There was too much empty space, too strong of vertical elements (and I don't care for strong vertical elements in circular shawls - makes 'em look like wagon wheels), and the whole thing was repetitive and boring. I don't want my shawls to put people to sleep, and I know that Galveston suffers from enough of that. It had to go.

So that section, like all that have gone before it, has been re-sketched and re-charted. It's a wholly different beast than it was before, and now I am enamored of it. I start to worry, though, whether I should change the name of this shawl? Because honestly, it bears absolutely no resemblance now to that original ceiling tile. I mean, I definitely like the pattern as it's written so far, it's just a very different beast than it started out trying to be.

And yet, it will be star-shaped in the end. Or star-shaped inside a round shape, actually, but you get the idea. Either way, it's time for me to pick up my needles again. I want to see how this next section looks when it's finished.

Making an Honest-to-God Actual Website

That's what I've been doing lately, setting up a real, paid-for, domain-registered website.

Not for me, of course - or rather, not just for me.

See, my friends and I, we're gamers. I know I must have mentioned this once or twice or a million times, we are huge nerds and this is what we do. We have a game that's been running for over two years now (I remember the excitement of showing off my engagement ring while we sat down and prepared for the superhero game), and a game that is very recently started. We meet two nights a week, as a rule, though of course school and work and life make their intrusions. We have a set of forums that we've used for a couple of years for things like arranging gatherings, sharing funny stories and interesting news items, and incidental interaction (incidental meaning nothing you need dice for) between characters. It's a good system, and one that we like, but in the years that we've had it, the hosting site has often crashed for weeks at a time, leaving us with little recourse.

So I bought a website. And a year of hosting. As a lump, it was a little painful on the wallet, but it came down to less than $10 per person per year, for registering the domain, getting things set up, and all the hosting, and that's a hard deal to beat. I'm wanting to say it was something like $5/month for hosting?

I used JustHost.com, which offers unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, and was very well reviewed. So far I haven't had it for terribly long, but I'm liking it. I set up new forums right off the bat, and Pitt Beau will be showing me how to move over all our previous posts in some kind of an easy manner, so that we don't lose our years and years of forum history. I set up subdomains and ftp accounts for everyone in the group, so that everyone has their own corner of the site to fuck with as they please, and nobody (danny) has to worry (danny) about anyone else (me) messing with their content (danny), even if only as a prank. Which, knowing our group, we would do in a heartbeat were it an option. I mean, hell, I would do it myself.

So now things are slowing down on that. I still need to make some html templates for me, and for folks who aren't terribly familiar with html, to use. I still need to set up some kind of a contact list that not-us people won't have access to, and perhaps a chat room, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

Perhaps at a later date I'll post a link to the site, but for now I think I'll leave it be. I want to see it grow into an awesome online encyclopedia of our games, because I am just arrogant enough to think that they're really something special, even in the wonderful world of gaming.

I mean, where else are you going to find an ex-government-experiment ward of the state superhero whose power is that she talks to rats, and can locate objects or people through her "cheese sense"? That level of awesome doesn't just grown on trees, you know.

100 Best Novels?

So, random house put out a list of the 100 best novels of the past whatever period of time. They had a list compiled from libraries, and a list compiled by patrons (L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand are all up in the top 10 of the reader's list, so clearly something fishy went on with the voting but whatever).

This got me thinking. I read a lot - I mean, I read a lot - but I don't really consider myself "well read", largely because I read mostly science fiction, fantasy and horror. If I wanted to live under a slightly smaller cultural rock, reading every book on this list would be a pretty good way to go about it, I figure. Reading every book on both lists might end with me clawing my eyes out, mostly because I've got no respect for Hubbard or Rand, but it might still be worth it only so that I could bitch more effectively.

So if you take out the duplicates and sort them alphabetically, this is the list you get:

1984 by George Orwell
A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving
A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
A TOWN LIKE ALICE by Nevil Shute
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner
ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara
ARROWSMITH by Sinclair Lewis
AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS by Flann O'Brien
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS by H.P. Lovecraft
ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
BELOVED by Toni Morrison
BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy
BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
CATCH-22
CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY by Robert Heinlein
DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
DOUBLE STAR by Robert Heinlein
DUNE by Frank Herbert
ENDER'S GAME by Orson Scott Card
FARENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury
FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard
FIFTH BUSINESS by Robertson Davies
FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell
GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon
GREENMANTLE by Charles de Lint
GUILTY PLEASURES by Laurell K. Hamilton
HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
ILLUSIONS by Richard Bach
INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
IRONWEED by William Kennedy
IT by Stephen King
KIM by Rudyard Kipling
LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
LOVING by Henry Green
MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
MEMORY AND DREAM by Charles de Lint
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
MOONHEART by Charles de Lint
MULENGRO by Charles de Lint
MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather
MYTHAGO WOOD by Robert Holdstock
NAKED LUNCH by William S. Burroughs
NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
ON THE BEACH by Nevil Shute
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST by Ken Kesey
ONE LONELY NIGHT by Mickey Spillane
PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford
POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
SHANE by Jack Schaefer
SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
SOMEPLACE TO BE FLYING by Charles de Lint
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by Ray Bradbury
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION by Ken Kesey
SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron
STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert Heinlein
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert Heinlein
SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy
TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
THE CUNNING MAN by Robertson Davies
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
THE DOOR INTO SUMMER by Robert Heinlein
THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN by John Fowles
THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy
THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by Shirley Jackson
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER by Tom Clancy
THE LITTLE COUNTRY by Charles de Lint
THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington
THE MAGUS by John Fowles
THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS by Robert Heinlein
THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
THE PUPPET MASTERS by Robert Heinlein
THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
THE RECOGNITIONS by William Gaddis
THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie
THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
THE STAND by Stephen King
THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
THE WOOD WIFE by Terri Windling
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving
THE WORM OUROBOROS by E.R. Eddison
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
TRADER by Charles de Lint
TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM by Nevil Shute
U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
ULYSSES by James Joyce
UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
V. by Thomas Pynchon
WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams
WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
WISE BLOOD by Flannery O'Connor
WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
YARROW by Charles de Lint
ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE by Robert Pirsig
ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm


It's a lot. But I think I can do it. I might even shoot for doing it all in one or two years.

Pasta Pasta Pasta!

So, a few days back I tried making some potato gnocchi - and let us politely say that it failed.

Like, hardcore fail.

So tonight, I'm going to try making ravioli instead. I have a shiny new pasta roller, and a kitchen full of ingredients. I'm going to try and make a spinach and feta set, a mushroom cheesy set, and depending on how much of the boiled crawfish I'm eating for lunch escape my belly, I might even try a delicious crawfish-based filling.

Persian Star Shawl 9% Done!

And to clarify, this is my diagram. It is not a random bulls eye of doom.

Kebab 2.0 (now with pics!)

The last time I made kebab, I followed my aunt's recipe and things were good. Not as good as hers, but certainly not bad, and we ate it and were content.

Tonight, I made kebab again, with a couple revisions to my aunt's recipe. I love it! It's a more Mediterranean version, again featuring mint, because we still can't get Sumac anywhere in town. Tomorrow I'm going to make a cucumber yogurt sauce to go with it, but that's another blog post.

I wanted to make a smaller batch as well as a leaner one, so I cut it down to 3 lbs of meat instead of 5, and one onion. Here's the recipe I used:

3lbs ground meat
1 large onion, pureed
2 tbs each turmeric, salt, spearmint
3 large bullion cubes (ran out of beef, used chicken instead, everything was fine)
3 eggs

For my meats, I used two pounds of 90/10 ground sirloin, and one pound of 73/27 ground beef. I wanted there to be SOME fat to stick it all together, which was good. 3 eggs and it was still much less stick-to-itself-y than the previous batch.



First I made a slurry with my spices and the eggs



Then I pureed my onion, and added it to my spices.



Then the meats! Mix your meats in good. The sirloin was much more tender than the ground beef, so it didn't need nearly as much mixing.



Then onto the foreman grill it went! I used big spoonfulls, about meatball sized.



Operation: Less Fat was a total success. Instead of having to empty the fat tray every go, I only had to empty it twice for the entire batch.



Kebab 2.0 was a total success!

PPN's Anal Adventures

Horrible name for a blog post, right? Nothing good can come from a name like that. Well, yes and no.

I haven't mentioned it much here (if at all), but I'd been having some trouble with rectal bleeding off and on for the past... two years or so, and recently I actually got the balls to go see a doctor about it. No big thing, I figured. I'm not dead, so I must be fine.

The doctor felt a "nodule" when he did the Dreaded Finger Test (and let me tell you, I can now definitively say that anal sex is not for me), so he took some blood and suggested I see a specialist, which I did.

The specialist said that he wasn't too concerned about the rectal bleeding, since it was off-and-on and I wasn't dead, but the blood tests had shown that I'm anemic (yes, this was right before I got Balthazar), so I should get an upper-GI endoscopy, and a colonoscopy.

Yikes! I was terrified of this. I have never had a major medical procedure done, and never been under serious sedation. I don't even drink to excess.

Well folks, I went and had my double-team endoscopy and colonoscopy yesterday, and it sure was something. I was super-terrified of the whole concept, but my nurse was really nice, and the IV wasn’t terrible, and she let me knit until the doctor came in and it was Go Time.

At 3:35 she put the drugs in my IV (dopamine and something else), which made my head go all tingly, and asked me to roll on my side, and the other nurse had me bite down on this thing they put in my mouth (to keep it open). I closed my eyes…

…and Mr. Sweetie was petting my hair and asking me to wake up. The rest of this is a mix of what I remember doing, and what I’m told I did. Evidently I was astounded by the fact that I was wearing pants now - did the nurse put on my pants? Did the doctor put on my pants? Did Mr. Sweetie put on my pants (yes, he did). Apparently I asked him this a lot, as well as what time it was.

Then we were driving home, and I was hungry, and suggested we call two of our friends (Saint Pit Bull and Pit Beau) to come eat with us. I called them, got asked to hold for just a second, and hung up on them. Then Mr. Sweetie had a great suggestion - we should call our friends to come eat with us! I thought that was fabulous. And hey, since we were going out to eat, we should call our friends to come meet us! This went on the entire car trip, through the bank, to the restaurant, and up until the moment our friends stepped in the door. Then, hey! Our friends are here! You guys should come eat with us!

I ordered something to eat (evidently I ordered Tilapia because, and I quote, ‘catfish can kiss my ass’), and got up to go to the bathroom like 5 or 6 times before the food got there, then fell asleep at the table. Sometimes I would wake up and ask what time it was, or be amazed again that I was wearing pants. Mr. Sweetie boxed up my meal, and took me home, where my new drum carder was waiting in front of our door.

He put me to bed, where I slept until 6 this morning. I remember waking him up at like 4 to ask if my drum carder had ever come in, and he said yes, it had, and please stop waking him up to ask that…. so I must have done that a couple times.

I asked him this morning what the doc had said about my tests, and evidently he had answered this question like a dozen times already: I had a 3mm polyp, which they removed, yes that is the same size as the needles I’m using as the persian star shawl, yes he knows they let me knit with the IV in, yes he was the one who put my pants on me. I also had some hemorrhoids, which appear to have gone away, and I should eat a lot of fiber to make sure they don’t come back. The biopsy results have not come in yet, but the doctors will call when those are ready. Because of the polyp, I should get this done in another 5 years.

So that’s my story, bitches! I went in terrified, and it wasn’t horrible at all. I even finished the next section of the Persian Star Shawl, and I'm swatching the pomegranates on the way home.

Oh, and By the Way:

Persian Star Shawl - Update

Guys, the Persian Star Shawl is turning out great. So far I've got it charted up to row 128, and knit up to row 32. I'm really quite excited, but the question now is do I release the pattern before I finish knitting it, or do I sit on it while I finish the actual shawl? I know I'd hate to buy something without a good photo of it, so probably I will sit on it until Persian Star Prime is done.

The section I was calling swirls, I've had to replace with rays, for the good of the design. It's not as true to the ceiling tiles as I would have liked, but it's turning into a better actual pattern for knitting so I don't mind that so much.

And in other news, I'm getting a DRUM CARDER! How awesome is that, right? I'm really excited about it, because I've wanted one for years and wasn't in a good enough financial setup to get one. I started getting me and Mr. Sweetie's finances in order after the wedding, though, and right now we are doing great. The carder started on its way to me last Monday, so it should be in by Saturday. I am going to be a carding fool!

The Story of Balthazar

A long, long time ago I set up my google reader to let me know whenever the search terms "spinning wheel" got a hit on the craigstlists for Houston, Austin, and here. I've seen a lot of $300 wheels posted, and a few $200, and those I just skip over. A new wheel is like dessert - you want it, but you don't really need it. So I set myself a $100-150 budget on the off-chance that a good-looking wheel would happen to pop up for sale.

So last weekend, after I get back from some doctor-stuff (turns out I'm anemic, not a huge deal, seems to run in the family) I checked my google reader and hey - spinning wheel, $50, Houston! I emailed the seller and got a couple pictures. She said that the treadle worked, the wheel turned, and all the pieces seemed to be there.





The seller had said that this was her grandparents' wheel, and probably an antique, but she didn't know how old it was or what manufacture. I posted the pictures she had given me on Ravelry, and soon found out that it is a Canadian Production Wheel, which were made from the late 1800s into the 1940s. I was very excited.

So I ran by the bank, drove to Houston, and got me a new wheel. She was right, all the parts do work, the only thing that was missing was a drive band. He is a beautiful, beautiful wheel - but what an UGLY finish!



Well, I knew what I had to do. If this had been the original finish, I would have cleaned him up and could then have sold him for about a grand. HOLY CRAP, right? But from what I could see, he had been painted over in some orange color, and then had varnish applied over THAT, and THEN gotten covered in grime. So of course my best option was to refinish him.

It took two days and three bottles of refinisher to get down to the wood on all the pieces. There were some gouges on the underside of the base and under the metal treadle that needed to be repaired with wood filler, and most of the metal parts had been painted over as well, including paint in the screw holes and paint in parts that were supposed to be movable. I had to damn near fully dismantle the wheel in order to remove it all, but by god, I cleaned that wheel up good.











It was all worth it in the end, though. Balthazar the Canadian Production Wheel is happily restored and sitting in my living room.









Balthazar is definitely more of a diva than the Babe - as a double drive band wheel that only came with one bobbin, he has a ration of 12.5:1 and more take-up than I was really expecting. He's also much heavier than the Babe (wood heavier than pvc, who'd have thought), AND single treadle, so I end up having to treadle faster than I'm used to just to keep him going. It's a bit of a challenge right now, but when it works, we make the nicest, smoothest, thinnest singles I could ask for. And he LOVES woolen spinning! Go figure!

So I've been carding up some black shetland from Copper Moose, and some hand-dyed silk that ended up more red-pink in person than it had appeared on my monitor, and spinning an awesome, funky yarn that I'm privately calling Bubblegum Goth. My carding skills are not so great, but with a wheel that does so well with rolags, it's time to buckle down and learn. And I couldn't be happier.