Extra post--the ranting edition

I am getting really mad at the radio right now. As I was drinking my coffee and trying to organize the day, John & Yoko's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" came on the radio. It didn't register for a moment, and then...what? Christmas music? It's not December! We haven't even gotten to Thanksgiving yet! Dammit, marketers, quit rushing Christmas!

And then I calmed down. This station is on a satellite feed until 6 am. Maybe once the DJs come on we'll get sensible music.

Nope. Ten minutes ago they played some schmaltzy pop-duet version of "Silver Bells." That's it. I'm going to iTunes, where I can control the play list.

Look, I get that the economy stinks, and that retailers are running in place waiting for Black Friday to get here to save them. I have to say, though, that the more they ram this "Christmas is coming! Buy! Buy! BUY!" crap down my throat, the more I want to give everyone homemade cookies, handmade soap and scarves I knit myself. Part of it is the mulishness that is me. I find that even if I'm half inclined to do something, if someone tries to push me into doing it I will balk just to prove I won't be pushed. This got me teased a lot in high school. I didn't dress "cool." I got teased for it. So I went out my way to not dress "cool." Screw them, I thought. Same with music. I liked classical music. In middle school someone found out about it, and passed the word around. I then refused to listen to anything but WFLN (which was Philly's classical station at the time) or WXPN (for The Thistle and Shamrock, or for their in-house folk program called The Unicorn).

But another part of it is that I'm really tired of all the tinsel and the sparkle and the plastic and the piped-in music. "Victorian" Christmas may be more picturesque, but I'm sick of that as well. That's just commercialism from 200 years ago. It looks more dignified because it's older, that's all.

I used to think of Halloween as the last firewall between Christmas and the rest of the calendar, but that's not true any more either. It's starting to bleed through. This year I saw a lot of Halloween and Christmas displays side by side.

Maybe I'm just grumpy because I'm tired. I don't know. I do know that I'm not ready for a month of Christmas carols, and now they're starting early! I want to smack someone.

I guess I'll go scrub the tub. I'm in a bad mood anyway.

Thanksgiving Eve

It's 5 am. I have a lot to do today. Sophie, for reasons known only to herself, is tearing around like a mad thing.

I'm going to spend 15 minutes with my nose in my coffee cup and then it's back to putting the finish touches on the house. My parents will call right before they leave home, at which point I will keep one eye on the parking lot, ready to chase off anyone who tries using my parking space. It's not likely to happen. The lot (the whole town, really) is pretty empty since the kids have a week's vacation around Thanksgiving. When I was a student (back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), they only gave us Thursday and Friday.

The cat's last dose of eye medicine is this morning, and a good thing too. I think she's getting pretty tired of this.

All right. Breakfast time. Enjoy your day, folks!

Busy

The plan today: get some coffee in me, medicate the cat, then finish this house. Not much to blog about at the moment.

Here's another picture I pulled off my hard drive from 'way back:

Background: I was at a crafting day thing in a friend's basement, which she had made over as her workshop (jealous!). A bunch of other people were over as well, some that I'd never met before. One of the women made miniatures--for dollhouses, I think.

Aren't they amazing? I took a close-up of the cutting board to emphasize how very small these things are. That olive jar was pretty neat, too. I cannot for the life of me remember their creator's name. Maybe the Chief Loon knows--she was there too, and I think she knows these folks better than I do.

All right, that's enough fun. Time to go squirt ointment at the cat. Whee.

Countdown begins

It's Thanksgiving week! That means I'm furiously cleaning and stressing about my house in preparation for the feast on Turkey Day. The parents arrive on Tuesday evening, Wednesday is for shopping for the stuff I need to get and any prep work that needs doing. Ditter arrives Wednesday evening. And then it's Thanksgiving Day.

I think I'm ready. Sort of. Maybe. Well, no. I forgot to ask my Mom what time to expect them tomorrow. Same with my sister. Also, I need to rent a carpet cleaner. Though I may wimp out and use Resolve or something. The downstairs is still a bit untidy, same with my bedroom and I just now remembered I need to do sheets and towels. I think next year I'm going to ask Mom & Dad to come on Wednesday.

Actually, between that last paragraph and this one, I did call my Mom and ask them to come Wednesday. I think I can handle the shopping and prep work by myself this year. There are only four of us this time around so I don't feel quite as liable to burst into tears or flames at the thought of pulling this off. Turns out Wednesday would suit them better anyway. They can get a good night's sleep and leave in the morning instead of leaving after work and driving in the dark when they're tired. Good idea, me!

Now I need to give myself a stern talking to about not relaxing because I just got a little more time before company shows up. Must keep going at this pace (or a little faster) if I am to get done what I intend to. I really wish I could work at this pace all the time, but apparently I need the panic of a looming deadline to get the lead outta my keister. Sigh.

Well! Back to work! Fridge to clean! Junk to stash! Laundry to do!

Snapshot Sunday #3

I went out really early this morning to get things at the grocery store. I wasn't thinking about the blog so I forgot to bring the camera. So instead I dug through the huge file of pictures I have on my hard drive to see if there's anything there worth showing.

Okay, here we go. I managed to grow tomatoes this year. I didn't get many of them, and that's partly my fault. I was weeding at one point this past spring, stepped back, lost my balance and fell splat! Right on the tomato. That set back growing time, though the plant did bounce back. Just in case I'd killed it I went out and bought another tomato plant, a Roma tomato (which is what I thought the first one had been, but it turned out it wasn't). A good thing too, since the first plant developed blossom end rot. Again. That's the same thing that happened the last time I tried to grow tomatoes.

The Roma was okay, though. I got some tomatoes off of that one, but there was some animal in the area that beat me to most of them. Here's the first one I managed to get to before whatever that critter was:



The same weekend Mom taught me how to make jelly, we picked elderberries from the bushes down the road. Then she taught me to make a pie. Now that I've made a pie from fruit I picked myself, I think I'm going to stick to making them from fruit I pick out myself. Note to self: elderberries are a pain in the tuckus to stem.



Here's another picture of Sophie. She likes sleeping on towels. She also really, really likes my furry red bathrobe. It's sort of become her blankie now. Yes. She is that spoiled.



And that's about it for now. Time to go check on the tomatoes. I froze a whole bunch of CSA tomatoes this past summer, and now I'm thawing them out to make soup of them. They're really easy to skin once they're frozen. Now I need to seed them.

Menu for Dad

My Dad just got all of his teeth removed in anticipation of getting dentures. The dentist removed them one-quarter at a time. He said if Dad wanted them all out at once he'd have to go to an oral surgeon. This probably has something to do with Dad being on blood-thinners. The last quarter just got pulled earlier this week, I think.

This presents an additional challenge for Thanksgiving this year. I'm trying to avoid serving chewy foods or anything with sharp pointy bits (the sweet potatoes have chopped pecans in them. I think instead of putting them on top of the casserole I'll put a little bowl of nuts on the table). And I think instead of the apple or cranberry thing I was going to do, I'm going to try this pie from Three Many Cooks (and I thank the Pioneer Woman that link. She's doing Pie Week this week, and she mentioned them). It's a cinnamon-flavored custard pie. No sharp or chewy things there.

I called Mom tonight to see what she's been feeding him, and to see if my ideas were right: I have oatmeal to serve for breakfasts, and I'm going to buy fruit and yogurt for smoothies for him. Dinner on Wednesday will probably be spaghetti. I definitely need to make that tomato soup. I think I'll do that tomorrow.

One for the wall

I found a photo hanging out on my hard drive that I really like. I took on campus a few years ago:



It's cropped from a larger picture. I like this one because it looks I got a lot closer to the rabbit than I really did. Pretty good, I think. Then I ran it through the watercolor filter on Adobe Elements:



Suddenly I want to take it to Kinko's and have them print it on watercolor paper, like I had them do for the picture of Pip that I then framed and gave to my Dad for his birthday. I know exactly where I want this to go, too. I'm pretty sure my bedroom wall color is in there among all those shades of green, and my walls are still bare. I think a big framed bunny will do quite nicely.

I don't have time for this

One of my part-timers took off on Tuesday because he was sick. He came in yesterday, and when I asked him if he was better he croaked, "Not much," as he grabbed his cart and headed for the stacks.

Well, apparently that brief contact was enough to make me come down with a sore throat and stuffy ears, dangnabbit. I cannot get sick. I don't have time. Argh!

Maybe if I stay home and take care of it instead of ignoring how I feel and going to work I can nip this right in the bud.

T minus one week and counting

By this time next week I should be in my kitchen, unloading perishables into the fridge and prepping for The Big Day. I am so not ready. Also? Even though I really have enough on the menu, I sorta kinda want to make this as well as a pumpkin pie. I must be nuts. But it looks really, really good. Doesn't it? It'd have to be an "as well as" pie because my dad's blood thinner reacts badly to cranberries, and if I just did this one he'd have no dessert choices. Or maybe I could do this one, and no one would be excluded. I can always do the cranberry one later. I should stop piddling around and get stuff done, is what I should do. Tonight's mission: find the kitchen table under all the junk. And clean the fridge. And maybe the freezer.

Brought down by a sleeve??

If you're not a knitter you might want to skip this post. It's full of jargon which I may or may not explain. Instead, why don't you go look at this for a while? His stuff is pretty cool.

The sleeve of this gansey is giving me more trouble than the whole rest of the sweater combined did. I have unknitted, recounted, reknitted, recounted, sworn, and unknitted again so many times I'm afraid my yarn's gonna break. I unknit rather than rip out (called "frogging" by those who use the lingo--for "rippit, rippit, rippit"--adorable, no?) because I can't guarantee finding all the stitches I need to put back on my needles when I get it down to the point where I want to start over.

It shows in the picture and the drawing that the pattern on the sleeve mimics the one on the body, and that it stops a few inches before the end. I'm supposed to go back to stockinette stitch for a while before I end with some ribbing at the wrist. She never says this in the instructions. If I follow the instructions the way they're written, I'd have pattern all the way to the ribbing. Since she doesn't say how many to make, I don't really trust the line drawing (it's written for all sizes), and the photo doesn't show the sleeve very well, I have arbitrarily come up with the number 10 for chevrons on the sleeve.

Also? When I finally decrease the stitches enough that I have as many as she wants me to before I change to smaller needles (she says to decrease 2 stitches every 5 rounds for the size I'm making), I have 1 3/4 more inches of sleeve than I should. I'm torn about how to fix this. I could either go back to the tenth chevron and decrease more often while doing the stockinette stitch or I could take it all the way back to the end of the underarm gusset and decrease 2 stitches every 4 rows, the way she instructs for the smallest size. I think I should probably do the latter. It would create a gentler line than the former, which might have this funky falling-off-too-quick look to it. But it means taking out an awful lot of what I've been doing for the past week and a half.

I realize that for a lot of you this all blahblahblah yarnspeke and I apologize for that. I'm thinking with my fingers, here, trying to set out in print what my options are for what to do next. Whatever I choose, sleeve number 2 should be a lot easier. I hope.

Oh, hey! For Marnilla, who wanted the pattern I'm using--I found out that for $5.50, Interweave press will let you download the Muted Musician Gansey pattern from their website. Click right here if you're interested. And good luck with the blasted sleeves!

Edited to add: I got tired of unknitting, so I'm only taking it back to the tenth chevron and then decreasing faster. I'll see how that looks before I decide to go aaaaaalllll the way back to the end of the gusset. That was a lot of work I don't really want to redo if I can avoid it.

What's the opposite of cyberstalking?

For reasons I should probably talk to a trained therapist about, I go online and look up old boyfriends from time to time. It isn't because I want to keep in touch with them, or that I care about their well-being; I have no warm fuzzy feelings of nostalgia about these men. I want to know where they are living because I want to stay well away from them. One of them is in North Carolina, and I don't think he'll be moving any time soon. The other one I haven't been able to find an online trace of at all.

Until today.

I wasn't sure at first that it was him. He has a very plain, common sort of name. There's no picture on the entry I found. There might be one that's suppressed until you join the site (reunion.com, I think), but I'm really not that keen to see him. I know his mother's name, though, and that was on this listing too. It also had the right age, the place where he grew up, and named a couple of the other places where I know he has lived.

I'm not going to describe the relationship except to say that I never want another one like it. He used to reside in New York City, moved there right after we graduated college. I have been abnormally paranoid about visiting that city for 20 years. I was convinced that even though the odds of it happening are incredibly long (how many people live there?), I'd run into him somewhere--that he'd walk right up to me and say hello. Sort of like When Harry Met Sally on crack, where instead of the story ending with a New Year's Eve declaration of undying love, I'd wind up arrested, with my face splashed across in the New York Times the next morning: "Tourist kicks ex-boyfriend to death at FAO Schwarz," the headline would read. Or something like that.

Are you remembering that BlogHer was in New York this summer? I was secretly afraid to leave the hotel. I was also secretly afraid that he worked for the hotel, and that they'd find his body stuffed in a laundry chute shortly after I checked out. But now, if I can believe this search I performed over my lunch break, visiting New York City is no longer a problem! I can go there every weekend if I want to. He's on the west coast now, living in a suburb of Seattle.

Damn. I wanted to see Seattle. I guess I'll have to wait until he moves again.

Snapshot Sunday #2

These aren't pictures taken with my camera, they're scanned. A long while back I took a drawing class through the arts center on campus. Our first project was to take some image out of the newspapers and sketch it. I chose an oxford shoe, and shocked myself when I found out I really can draw. I don't have a scanned image of that.

Not quite as far back, a blogger I used to be in contact with named Anna suggested we each do that same thing again and post our results. We shared our drawings with each other, but we didn't post the results on our blogs. I don't think she was happy with how hers turned out, and I didn't want to publish mine without her publishing hers.

Her blog has been inactive for years now. I think her life got very complicated and she didn't have the time or energy to both live it and then write about it.

So anyway, here's the picture I drew from. I can't remember what the ad was for, or what magazine I tore it out of:

And here's what I did with it:




















And now I want to dig out my sketch book and draw again. Like I have time for that right now.

Feeding frenzy (Warning! Contains grumbling)

Today I went to Wegman's and bought most of the things on my "Buy Ahead" list for Thanksgiving. I got an almost 14 pound turkey for about $4, because I had a shopper's club card and bought at least $25 dollars worth of other stuff.

The whole store was crazy. It appears everyone picked this weekend to do the same thing I was doing, and probably for the same reason: the football team has an away game today. You can't get a thing done in this town on a home-game Saturday. The store added to the crowd by scattering Pilgrim-hatted employees around the place to hand out samples, coupons, sweepstakes entries. There were also random stockers with their big rigs parked right smack in the middle of aisles. Because it's imperative to get more fish sticks into aisle 7 at one o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, I assume.

People amaze me sometimes. This woman and her daughter pulled their cart right in front of the frozen turkeys, looked at them all without choosing one, and then just parked there. There were three more of us trying to get in and out. These two just hung out, oblivious. It reminded me of Jelly Man from a couple years back. One woman tried to squeeze past the daughter to get at the turkeys behind her, and that girl didn't budge an inch. She just kept staring at the cupcakes in her cart (because purple frosting is so hypnotic), completely unaware of anything else. And no, there were no earbuds to blame, pouring loud music into her head and obliterating all else. I checked. She was clueless all on her own.

After a couple of minutes of politely waiting for this pair to get their shit together, I gave up. Muttering "Excuse me," I pushed past the mother and started looking for a good turkey. She got out of my way (barely), but then stood blocking my exit. I so dearly wish I'd had the nerve to say, "Really? You have a whole bloody store to zone out in, you have to pick the turkey case? In mid-November???"

While I was trying to get round her another woman was trying to get in, giving me dirty looks because it looked like I was causing the hold-up. I shrugged and gestured over my shoulder to the living statues behind me. She glanced where I pointed, assessed the situation, nodded an apology at me, and transferred her stink-eye to them.

If this is what shopping for Thanksgiving is like, can you just imagine how Christmas will be?

But! I saved about $11 on my turkey! Silver lining!

Today's brief musing brought to you by...

...conjunctivitis and the differences in personality between Delilah and Sophie.

If Delilah had ever had pink-eye and required antibiotic ointment be applied right in the eyes three times a day, by the end of Day Two she would have been watching my every move. She would've hidden from me, run by me on her way from one end of the room to another, and treated me with suspicion no matter what I had been doing. She would have slept with one (infected) eye open. I would've been treated to long, deep scratch marks on my neck, chest, and probably my arms.

Sophie? Well, she has no front claws, but her back ones are still there; and her teeth work. She hasn't used either yet. She fusses when I put the stuff in, makes noises to tell me this is not her idea of a good time. She tries to get away by backing out from under my arm. Afterward she eats the cat treats I provide as a sort of apology/reward, she sulks for a moment, and then it's as if she shrugs and says, "Ah, whatever." Next thing I know she's looking up at me with her poor little greased eyes and saying, "You're my best friend. Even when you do crap like that. Can I come sit up there with you?"

Yes, Sophie, of course you can. And I promise I won't do that again for another eight hours or so.

Which unfortunately for one of us is right about now.

Produce fatigue

The final pick-up for my CSA half share was last Friday. Thank heavens. I don't think I'm going to renew next year.

Don't get me wrong, this whole support-the-local-economy-while-eating-healthier thing is great. I cooked a lot of new things, like a spinach, onion, bacon, and chard quiche. I pickled beets. I did a lot of stir-frying. I made more pesto. I experimented with things that I thought might go together, with general success (a weird take on chili, for example -- chicken instead of beef, garlic, onion, greens instead of beans, a ton of spices, and egg noodles. Looked strange, tasted great). I have a ton of tomatoes in the freezer at the moment that I want to turn into tomato soup before my parents get here in two weeks. I'm seeing homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese as lunch for that Wednesday. If I can get around to it.

Problem is, I'm still not using everything I'm given before it goes bad. I didn't get a freezer this year like I thought I would--money was a little too tight--so I couldn't blanch and freeze things as much as I would have liked. Mom and I experimented with fava beans and failed. I'm up to my eyes in potatoes. Before I started freezing the tomatoes they were attracting fruit flies.

And the eggs! Dear Lord, the eggs. That was new this year. They started a co-op or a trade or something with some other farms, and now we get eggs every couple of weeks. I didn't realize how little use I have for them until I started to get so many. There was a three-carton pile-up in the fridge at one point this August. I mean, a girl can only eat so much egg salad before she starts to smell like a sulfur mine. I made that quiche, I baked a little bit, I scrambled a few, but the eggs just kept on coming faster than they were leaving. Eventually I just gave the new cartons away to my neighbor when I brought my share home. She tried to pay me for them. I had to assure her that she was doing me a favor by taking them off my hands.

I really don't have the money to shell out on something if I'm not going to be able to use all of it. And this year they didn't offer a discount for next year to renewing members. They haven't sent out an email about renewals at all, come to think of it.

I'll do this again in a few years, when finances are better and I have a little more cooking experience. And a chest freezer. Definitely need one of those.

I think what I'll do instead is go to the farmer's market every Friday next season and buy a smaller, more manageable amount of produce. Then I'll work with it over the weekends.

Cat's eyes, pilot programs

Sophie's had something funky going on with her eyes, some sort of infection. I took her to the vet today to see what it is and what they can do about it. The vet says she has conjunctivitis. He gave me some ointment with erythromycin in it that I have to apply to her eyes three times daily for two weeks.

It's gonna be a fun two weeks, but her eyes will thank me for it when we're done. I have no idea how she caught this. Maybe it's leftover from being out in the Big Bad World before we met? I don't know. Delilah never had it.

That presentation I mentioned yesterday went really well. A lot of people were interested, which was a nice surprise. I was expecting screams of rage. We did get some people who didn't like the idea we had, but about 90% of the room agreed that now that we've seen whether this thing we're attempting can be done, it's time to test it out. That way we can decide whether it should be done. The task force is now going to design and run a pilot program with a few interested campuses. Part of me is excited. Part of me is saying, "Oh great, more work."

Favorite part of the whole day: calling the taxi to take me to the vet's. The dispatch operator asked how many were going and I replied,

"Just me. And a cat in a carrier."

"Okay," he said. Then to himself, in that voice people use when they're writing things down (I pictured a clipboard): "One person, one boxed cat."

A little nervous

I got named to a task force earlier this year whose charge was to look into doing something very different with regard to our libraries' collections. We met all spring and summer, took the fall to write our report, and tomorrow we are making a presentation at a yearly two-day retreat for all the librarians from the satellite campuses.

When we're done we're going to be greeted with either be applause or pitchforks and torches. Or maybe stunned silence. In any event, I'm a wee bit nervous and preoccupied right now, so I can't think of anything to write. So here, look at some pretty pictures I took of the garden this summer:



My big purchase this year, garden-wise: a climbing rose called "Joseph's Coat."



The lone sunflower to make it to adulthood. Everyone else either died off or failed to thrive.



Bought a morning glory seedling at a craft fair. I had no idea what color I was going to get. Happy that it's deep purple.

Cat. Bag. Out of.

So my Mom saw the online pictures of the gansey in progress and got all excited. She can't wait to get here for Thanksgiving so she can touch it. Exactly what she said. Myself, I'm hoping that I'm done by Thanksgiving so that I can wear it. Though, knowing my propensity to wear my dinner on my chest, perhaps that's not such a good idea.

A few hours later Mom emailed me to say she'd been looking on Amazon for copies of "Knitting Ganseys," quoted me a price she saw advertised for a used one, and wanted to know if the one I got was at a similar price.

I said yes, and then went on to explain the whole used book/higher price/better condition thing. Then I wrote:

Uhm. Having said all that, can I just say please don't buy the book because...well...Christmas is coming...and...yeah. I've started my shopping early. :)

Hint received, rejoicing commenced. Oh well. She's getting more than just this, so I guess it's okay that she knows about it. I'm not saying what else I'm giving her, though, 'cause she swings by the blog from time to time (Hi Mom! [waves]).

Folks, please try to remember that Christmas is if not right around the corner at least in the same county by now. Don't buy stuff for yourselves. Point out what you like and then walk a discreet distance away so we can get it for you. Wouldja? Please?

In Thanksgiving prep news, I've taste-tested the wild rice dressing recipe (thumbs up), the sweet potato recipe (thumbs way up), and the apricot relish (thumbs sideways). I think I'm going to buy some mango chutney or something for this year and substitute that for the cranberries. The taste of the apricot stuff was good, but the texture was unappetizing. Mushy. I have an idea what's wrong--the recipe calls for canned apricots. I think fresh (or even dried but soaked in something like orange juice) would be better. I'm going to play around with this over the summer and see if I can't fine-tune it into something usable.

Snapshot Sunday: The Gansey

So here are some pictures of the sweater I'm working on:

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

I'm pretty pleased with it so far.

Success on the horizon

As soon as my battery charges up, I'm taking a picture of the sweater-in-progress and posting it here. I just joined the front to the back and tried it on. It fits! Huzzah! Next I work on the sleeves and the collar.

I'm so pleased with myself. I think this is something I would actually be happy to wear in public.

Of course, since I want to take a picture before I do anything else to it, that means I have to hold off on starting the sleeves. Well, maybe I'll work on another project for a while tonight.

#12, you are in my sights. I should have you crossed off before Thanksgiving!

In a bit of a rut at the moment

So here's the kind of day I've been having lately:

• I wake up on time but take about 45 minutes to talk myself out of bed.
• I turn on the coffee pot and then run back upstairs to take a shower.
• By the time I'm out of the shower I realize I have just enough time to do any three of these things: eat breakfast, drink coffee, get dressed, brush teeth, catch bus that gets me to work on time. The bus usually loses.
• I spend my work day feverishly trying to catch up with all the work I should have been doing over the past three months but didn't because I got press-ganged onto a project for another department. It started by doing something for them as a favor and rapidly turned into the Beast That Would Not Stay Fed. Now that it's over they at least have the decency to be grateful about it, but I still want to stab them all repeatedly with a dull pencil.
  
• While working, I hum softly to myself in an attempt to keep the running commentary in my head from leaking out of my mouth. No one would want to hear what's going on up there right now.
• Lunch is had hunched over my desk. I then either read my non-work email or do a few rows on the gansey I'm trying to knit (if I remembered to grab the bag it's in on my way out the door that morning). I shave about ten minutes off of my lunch to make up for not getting to work on time.
• At some point during the day I catch sight of myself in the ladies room mirror and wonder what the hell happened. When I left the house, I looked fine. By the time I see myself in the mirror, I look like someone dragged me through a hedge backwards. The hair in particular looks ridiculous.
  
• I come home to a cat who is absolutely thrilled to see me. While I change into pajamas, she rolls around on the bed and meows at me, no doubt telling me how many skeins of yarn she subdued that day.
• Dinner is usually something so unremarkable I can't remember what it is ten minutes after I put the plate in the dishwasher.
• After an hour of surfing, I admit there's nothing on TV. I go to bed obscenely early. Like, old-people early. I drift off to sleep only to wake with a jolt about half an hour later, realizing I haven't blogged yet and that I'd better get on that if I'm serious about NaBloPoMo.
• I get up and write.

I just realized, writing that, that while I can't get myself out of bed to go to work I practically leap out of it to write a blog post. What's up with that?

Here's hoping my behind drags a little less after we turn the clocks back. I do better in the morning when it's light out. And now I'm going to bed.

Turkey Day for 4

My sister just emailed me this morning to tell me the Lancaster contingent will be just her this year. Hubby has to work Thanksgiving Day (he works at a lab. They can't shut down for a day, they have delicate procedures going on that can't but put on hold. I think holiday time off rotates. I'm betting he's off next year, 'cause he was off last year), so his parents are staying there and the three of them will be having their own Thanksgiving. Ditter's coming to my place.

My parents are coming Tuesday evening so Mom can help me do some prep on Wednesday. Though you know what? Prepping for four doesn't sound nearly as difficult as prepping for seven. I'd better not get too relaxed, here, or I'll be a maniac on the day itself. Who am I kidding? Of course I'm going to be insane on that say. Ditter's coming Wednesday evening, after work, I think. I don't know how long everyone is staying. It'd be nice if they could stay until Saturday or something. There's a football game here on Saturday, though, and they might want to get outta Dodge before all that madness starts.

It'll be like old times. Except that instead of at Mom's (where it used to be while I was growing up) it's at my house. Which is still a horrible, horrible mess right now but hey! I have three weeks. Oh, crappydoodle. I only have three weeks. Exactly three weeks. If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go clean something now.

Oscillate Wildly

I have a new musical crush. Janice Whaley is working her way through the Smiths' catalog, hoping to record covers of the whole thing by December 31, 2010. She uses only her voice and some software. She calls this scheme (and her blog) The Smiths Project

Her latest offering made me want to make out with my headphones:



I need to go lie down.

P.S. To hear the music, just hit the little "play" button. You don't have to buy anything. I think I'm going to be buying some stuff to download to my iPod, but that's mainly to make sure she has funds to continue.

Election Day 2010

I voted. And all I really have to say is thank heavens that's over with for another year.

I am so sick of the sniping, the back-stabbing, the name-calling, the out-and-out lies candidates tell about each other.

"He's an out-of-town transplant!"

"She wants to raise your taxes!"

"He did raise your taxes!"

"He wants to make all guns illegal!"

"He wants to make your kids pray in school!"

Next campaign season I fully expect one candidate showing pictures of the other one in kicking puppies or passing out crack pipes to small children. And then the other guy will retaliate by showing a video of his opponent having a kitten for breakfast. On toast.

I think what bothered me most this season were all the computerized campaign phone calls I received. Didn't they used to do these in person? Are people not volunteering like they used to? It's a weird mixed message I'm getting: "Look, we want you to vote for our guy but we're tired of saying it. So here, listen to this recorded message from the candidate's wife/mother/imaginary staffer named Dave."

It is so unsatisfying to scream "F--- off and leave me alone!" at a computer. You know? But I guess it's an even trade. I wouldn't hear their message, they didn't hear mine.

Ow

I woke up a couple hours ago with a vicious headache that nothing has been able to tame. Aspirin? It caught the aspirin one-handed and tossed it aside. Caffeine? It swatted that away and kept coming. Allergy medicine (because maybe it's sinus pressure)? It blew a raspberry at my Allegra. Multivitamin (maybe it's lack of iron)? "Nice try," it said with a sneer, lunging at me with both hands.

I've called in sick to work and plan to sit here bundled up on the sofa with a cup of mint tea for a while. I have some sort of brand X excedrin that I'm going to try later. Can't use it until this aspirin I took wears off. There's aspirin in the brand X stuff. Don't want to thin my blood so much that my ears start to ring. (Yes, I did do that once. Not my idea of a good time). Meanwhile I'll just sit here and pinch the area between my thumb and index finger with my other thumb and index finger (old acupressure trick Mom taught me. Sometimes it works) and wish this beast with my head in its fist would just go away.

Deep breath before the plunge

Well, tomorrow is November first, which means the start of National Blog Posting Month. This will be my third time through. Expect it to be heavy on Thanksgiving angst, as I'm once again having six people and two dogs over for dinner and my house is once again a total mess. In fact, I should be cleaning it now. I'll try to keep the online fretting to a minimum.

Tasks I've assigned myself to get done before this Turkey Day include:

• sorting out the craft room
• rearranging the living room
• cleaning out the freezer
• shampooing my sofa as well as a perfectly good (but a little grubby) La-Z-Boy rocking recliner that I rescued from the trash this summer. It wasn't in the trash, mind you, just right next to it. I noticed it one day on my way to the bus stop. Bunch of boys who moved out of the end unit the night before trash day had set it by the dumpster with a "free to a good home" sign on it.
  
• shampooing the area rug in the living room. Or maybe I should just replace it with something that doesn't look so haphazardly installed. This thing is a remnant the last owners bought and hacked down to a size that almost covers all the living room floor. It was tacked down at the doorways with clear packing tape. Classy, no? Maybe when I'm out getting a strap clamp and some wood glue I'll start pricing area rugs.
• repairing a kitchen chair -- hence the need for a strap clamp and wood glue. I broke a kitchen chair last winter with my big toe. Don't know my own strength, apparently. I was sitting in it, feet tucked under, and when I got up I must have hit the piece that connects the front and back legs together in a weak spot with my toe, 'cause it went "crack!" And I said, "Are you kidding me?!?" Then I went online to look up how to fix it. According to the webpage I need: wax paper, cord, wood glue, and a strap clamp. Looks simple enough, I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.
• refurbishing two old kitchen chairs that now live in my craft room. They are part of a second-hand three-piece dinette set that I used to use in my apartment at as a kitchen table. Years of abuse from the various cats in my life had left them tattered and without stuffing in the seats. Now that I have a cat who can't shred things (but she tries! Boy does she ever.), I might as well put new cushions on them. This is one reason to sort out the craft room. The supplies to do this are buried in there somewhere.
• testing some Thanksgiving recipes. Dad can't eat cranberries because he's on coumadin for his heart, so I looked up some alternatives for cranberry sauce and emailed them to Mom for her opinion. We're trying one that made with apricots, an orange, ginger, cilantro, dry mustard and turmeric. I'm gonna test it first. If it tastes nasty, I'll look for something else. Actually, I'm testing it today, if I ever get my rear end in gear. I'm also testing a crockpot stuffing recipe with wild rice in it, some corn dish with fresh sage, and a sweet potato recipe. I'm going to use a rotisserie chicken from the local grocery store to eat with all this stuff instead of trying to cook another turkey. We'll save the turkey-roasting for Thanksgiving Day. I'm crazy, not stupid.
• trimming back the tree in my flowerbed. Again. I'm this close (imagine a finger and thumb held very close together) to asking a male family member to bring a chainsaw with them at Thanksgiving and take that tree down. I don't know whether it was planned to be in the flowerbed or if it's a volunteer that someone decided to keep, but either way it was a bad idea. It's too close to the house. It's always pushing on the windows. I cut away the bothersome bits, they grow right back. The only thing that's kept me from doing it sooner is that robins come nest there in May. It's not the only tree in the neighborhood. They'll find somewhere else.

So anyway, NaBloPoMo. Posting everyday for a whole month. The annual experiment to see how long it takes me to get sick of the sound of my own voice. Wish me luck. Just in case I get stuck, there's a Twitter feed I'm going to follow that supplies daily writing suggestions.

Anyone want to join me? Misery loves company, after all.

Better late than never

By the time I got around to uploading by pictures from 10/1o/1o, they'd closed the group on Flick'r to new entries. Ah well.

Here they are anyway:

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Number 12, and where I've been

I'm trying to tackle #12 on the life list -- knitting a sweater. I wasn't terribly specific on the list, but what I really want is to knit a sweater I am willing to wear in public. I've decided to knit gansey, because hey, why start easy?

Ganseys (also called guernseys) are sweaters that were traditionally knit by the wives/mothers/sisters/daughters of the fishermen of the Channel Islands (most notably Guernsey, hence the name) and worn by said fishermen. They were usually dark blue. I don't know why that color in particular, unless it's because it was the most practical one. These sweaters were all about practicality. They were knit in all in one piece from the bottom up, had a section at the bottom that could be torn out and reworked if it wore out, had gussets under the arms to save wear and tear on sleeve joints (thereby prolonging the life of the sweater), usually had the initials of the wearer knit into it somewhere (I'm thinking that was to ID sweaters and match them back up to owners on washing day--you have 4 men in the family all with similar blue sweaters, you're going to have a hard time telling them apart otherwise) and had some fancy knit/purl designs and simple cables in them. The plainer ones were work sweaters, the fancier ones were for dress. Wikipedia does a much better job of explaining this, if you want to know more.

I got interested in ganseys when my Mom mentioned she was looking for a good, free pattern for one. Being a library employee, I put my little research cap on and started digging around on Ravelry and coming up with some good book titles. I mentioned them to her and suggested she take some of them for a test-drive through interlibrary loan before she decided to buy some. And then I started to ILL them, myself. Borrowed one called "Knitting Ganseys" and after reading it decided that yes, I could probably do this.

Wish me luck. I've been thinking that knitting a sweater in the round might be easier than knitting it in pieces and then sewing it together. I've tried the piece-it-together way before and was disgusted with the results. Let's see if this works better.

Thing is, I can't knit and type at the same time. This is why things are quiet right now. Though I can't use that excuse next month--I'm going to do NaBloPoMo again.

And I just realized, I crossed off making a pie from my list but never wrote it up. So I need to do that. Maybe I can write the post in my head while I'm knitting.

Edited on 10/18/10 to add: Just found this in my drafts. So far the sweater is going well. I've gotten about 1/2 way up, and am now working solely on the back. It looks pretty good so far, if I do say so myself. (And I do...)

As soon as I get home (provided I remember) I'll post my 10/10/10 pictures and at some point this week I'll talk about making the pie. Maybe. Well, the pictures definitely, but I'd rather knit than write right now.

Oh! And the opera was really good. They used this interesting set design, called it "The Machine" -- a bunch of planks that could be raised, lowered, tilted -- with them they got the Rhinemaidens to swim by suspending them on cables, made the gods look like they were flying, made a staircase to Niebelheim, all sorts of things. It was almost like the set was another cast member. It reminded me a little of the way they used a rotating stage in Les Miserables. There are so many more things you can do with a stage like that than a traditional set of flies and curtains.

Now I'm all excited for Die Walküre in May.

Das Rheingold

When I was in sixth grade I somehow got lumped into the same class with the Gifted kids. They were called “AT” in our school system (for “academically talented”). The AT program had its own special teacher, one per school, who would teach us things that had nothing to do with the regular curriculum. The man attached to my middle school was Mr. Mason.

For reasons I’ve yet to figure out, Mr. Mason would regularly preempt our classes, take us all to his little class room, and talk opera at us. Specifically, he would lecture on Wagner’s Ring Cycle. He had a little stage and paper dolls to act out scenes of the various operas and everything. After he’d gone through the whole cycle he grouped us into pairs, assigned us another opera (ours was Aida), and made us do the same sort of thing for that opera that he had just done for the Ring Cycle.

My partner was a very serious girl , 1st generation American, the only child of very serious Polish parents. On top of being wicked smart she was a virtuoso on the piano. I never saw her after 8th grade. I don’t know if her family moved or if she got admitted to the Philly performing arts school or what. If she’s not a concert pianist now, she’s probably off trying to cure cancer or working for a Supreme Court judge.

Ours was not a happy marriage. She would get irritated with me on a regular basis. I can’t remember the reasons. Perhaps my artwork wasn’t up to par. She was a perfectionist, and I had not yet discovered that yes, I could indeed draw. (I didn’t figure that out until I was in my 30s). Perhaps I wasn’t serious enough--did I mention she was serious? Almost to the point of humorless. It was Very Important that she do well at whatever she attempted. If she hasn’t become a concert pianist, a lawyer, or a research scientist it’s probably because her head exploded sometime in college.

The upshot of all this opera hooey is that my mother demanded I get taken out of the AT class. The school fought her on it, but she told them to test me: if I didn’t meet the criteria for “AT” (I was skating right on the edge), she wanted me in a new class the next year. I didn’t know about this at the time. Maybe they asked her not to tell me about it so that they could get accurate results. Probably a good thing. If I’d known, I might have thrown the test. I was so unhappy with those AT people. I was not so much fish-out-of-water as goldfish trying to live in a tank full of clownfish.

I got called to the guidance office, sat down, and asked a bunch of questions. I think it was an IQ test. I guess my score was again right on the edge, but (thankfully) just low enough to put me with the normal kids.

Sixth grade has left some lasting marks:

1. Grammar mystifies me. Not usage--I know the rules instinctively (I hope) but I have never been able to articulate what those rules are. Past participle? Gerund? No idea. I use them, I suppose, but I wouldn’t know one if it bit me in the behind. I blame sixth grade and Mr. Mason for that, because it was the English classes he kept poaching for his little operatic tutorials. I have a very clear memory of sitting on the stairs at home, watching Mom cook dinner and grumble, “Going to be standing in the unemployment line, not knowing what a linking verb is. But she’ll know the plot to Aida!”
2. I do actually know the plot to Aida. I threw back my head and howled when I heard Elton John was making it into a musical. Two protests there: ever since he and his writing partner split up decades ago, every single song he sings sounds exactly like the one before it—bland; and? Musicals generally have happy endings, unless you’re talking about Camelot. Operas do not. I haven’t checked to see if they messed with the ending. I don’t want to know.
3. I vaguely remember the plots to the Ring Cycle. This only comes in handy when watching an episode of “Morse” or “Lewis.” And I can recognize “The Ride of the Valkyrie” when I hear it after one measure is played.

Still, when the local theatre sent out an email about the Metropolitan Opera’s season a few weeks ago (which they stream live and in HD into the theatre downtown) listing Das Rheingold, the first part of the Ring Cycle, as the opening performance of the year, I was interested. After a little bit of dithering I decided I was going. It’s today. Homecoming weekend. Town is going to be nuts. The performance is at 1 pm. The game starts at noon. That means I should be able to get to town just fine (we turn into a ghost town during the actual playing of the game), but coming back afterward is going to be an absolute nightmare.

I sure hope there are subtitles ‘cause otherwise I’m going to be a little lost. Sixth grade was an awfully long time ago, and Wagner’s stuff didn’t stick in my head the way Aida did.

Farewell Latte

I've been starting to pay more attention to how much money I spend regularly on "unnecessities." I know that's not a word, but I don't know what to call it. What I mean are things that I don't need but have come to spend money on as a matter of course--things that I used to consider luxuries, back when I had less money and more sense.

For example: it hit me this week that every morning I spend around $3 (maybe a little more) on a latte I buy in my workplace's basement cafe. That's at least $15 a week, $60 a month, just on coffee. A lot of the time (but not always) I buy myself a pastry as well. That's another $2. Not sure how much that is a week, since I don't do that everyday, every week, but it adds up. So today as they were making my latte I said to myself that this is the last one. The Farewell Latte.

This isn't the last one I'll ever have, mind you. I may upon occasion decide to go out for coffee. But I'm relegating them (elevating them?) to the status of Treat, the way I did when I just got out of college and didn't have much money. My roommate and I would occasionally go out after work for "yuppie coffee," as we called it, and wind up at a local cafe with big cups of coffee, pieces of biscotti, jazz music, and conversation. It was an event, because neither of us could afford to do it more than once a month.

I'm going to learn how to make them at home. Maybe I'll switch to cafe au lait, since that doesn't require espresso or a thing to make the milk all foamy. We'll see. Maybe I can find a cheap espresso machine somewhere.

I just took a sip of my Farewell Latte, and you know what? Knowing that it was the last one I'll have for a while has made it taste better somehow.

Yarn junkie

The cat is starting to make herself at home, finally. I'm pleased. I think.

It started last week. I got up (after deciding I could not hit the snooze button any more and still expect to have time to take a shower) and shuffled across the room, aiming for the light switch. On the way my foot stepped on something fuzzy and unresponsive. And large.

"The hell?"

I flipped on the switch to find I was standing on a skein of blue and red alpaca yarn that I bought last year and still haven't done anything with. It should have been in a box in the craft room, not in the middle of my bedroom floor. I turned to the cat.

"Why is there a skein of very expensive alpaca in the middle of the bedroom?"

She sat on the edge of the bed, gazing at me in wide-eyed innocence. If she could talk I'm sure she would have said, "What is this 'alpaca' of which you speak?"

I picked it up, put it back where it belongs, and went on with my morning routine.

That evening I came home from work to find: a skein of red wool on the stairs, the alpaca skein in the kitchen, a square from an unfinished afghan in the bathroom, and a skein of Noro (a Japanese wool/silk blend) by the nightstand. It's been a couple skeins a day ever since, and not always the same ones. I think she goes box-diving and then plays with what she fishes out (I noticed early on that she really likes boxes). Last night there was a skein of Zauberball sock yarn (wool) and a ball of kid mohair on the bed, pushed up right against the pillows. She must have dragged them up there to sleep on them. I'll say this for her, she has good taste. She never touches the cheap acryclic stuff I use to practice stitches with. The other stuff must smell a little like the animals they came from.

Well, if she's gonna go crazy over yarn, she'd definitely in the right house.

Side note: "kid mohair." Doesn't that sound like the name of a rapper? Can't you just see him in low-slung jeans, cock-eyed hat, loud jewelry, and an argyle cardigan? Of course, he'd probably spell it Kid Mo' Hair.

This sounds like fun

Found this through Ry and Arts and Dafts. On the 10th of October this year, take a picture and upload it to the 10/10/10 Flickr group.  Then take a look at what everyone else posted.  The idea and the Flickr group belong to Heather Champ, a really good photographer that I just got introduced to when I clicked the 10/10/10 link on Ry’s blog. 

You can take the picture at any time on the tenth.  But…would it be overkill, do you think, to take it at 10:10 on 10/10/10?

Fruits of my labor (day)

I have this memory of my Mom and Grandmom making jelly in Fall. It’s a compound memory, I think, because I only remember one instance and Mom says this happened every year. I was far too little to help. I sat at the kitchen table, probably with a coloring book and some crayons, while they moved back and forth between the sink and the stove. The kitchen was full of the smell of jelly cooking. That’s mostly what I remember, the smell. Like bottled grape juice, only much more intense. They got the grapes from an arbor my Grandpop built behind the garage.

“Do you remember that time the yellow jackets got drunk?” Mom asks. “We’d picked grapes the night before and left them in plastic bags on the porch. Next morning, the bags were buzzing and moving. Full of yellow jackets, but they were so drunk from grapes left in the sun, they couldn’t even sting us.”

I remember hearing about it. I must have been there. I can see it in my head, but I don’t know if I remember the event or the story.

It’s been a while since I had a Concord grape. I pop one in my mouth as we're washing them. Sweet first, then sour. The sweet seems to come from close to the skin, which is tough. The flesh is green, sour, and chewy. Definitely not a table grape. Mom puts a grape in her mouth too, and the taste of it triggers a memory about her great grandmother (who was very old when Mom was very young. She walked with a cane). She thinks maybe she used to watch her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother make jelly. So we're carrying the tradition from farther back than I thought.

“Maybe we should save some of these seeds, make an arbor here,” I suggest.

Mom says arbors are generally done from cuttings. Growing from seed takes far too long. Grandpop got the cuttings for his arbor from the people who lived across the street from Mom's aunt. These folks had a couple of outbuildings, one of them a barn (always a horse or a cow or some livestock living over there), and along the side of one of the outbuildings was a grape arbor.

Mom and I grew up in the same area, 20 years apart. As she’s telling me where Grandpop got his grapes, I’m silently comparing the Trevose/Langhorne of the 1950s and ‘60s with the one of the 1970s and ‘80s. Livestock, farming, as a matter of course? There was only one working farm left in the area when we moved away in 1986. Then I put both of these towns next to the very, very citified version that exists today. It’s a place I had a hard time recognizing when we were down there for my cousin's wedding.

"When seeing a Jaguar in the parking lot of the Shop 'n' Bag becomes commonplace," my aunt once said, "it's time to move." She lives in Virginia now.

"I think I'm getting a little too enthusiastic with the mashing, here." I say. "There are purple flecks on the sink. And the drainboard. And the wall. Oop! And on my shirt."

"Oh, that's all right. It washes off the sink and the drainboard, and the wall's getting tiled eventually. That's just a primer coat. Your shirt, though..."
"Ah, it's not an important shirt." Now it's the Grape Jelly Making Shirt.

Because I'm the one who wants to learn how to do this, Mom is hanging back, giving directions. She'll demonstrate something, then hand it over to me. This was, after all, my idea.

There it is, the smell I remember. It happens shortly after the grapes start cooking. It fills the house.
"Man, I wish I could take a picture of that smell," I say. Best I can do is take pictures of the grapes.

As we're setting up to strain the grapes, something pops into my head--a strainer made of cheesecloth suspended from the legs of an upside-down chair. But that wasn't for grapes. Apples?

"That was for apple jelly," Mom says. "I used to use cheesecloth until I broke down and bought jelly bags. They wear like iron, and they're reusable."

For making the grape juice we use this big wooden shillelagh-looking pestle in a big jelly bag-lined sieve. It take a little while, but I eventually get a nice rolling rhythm going. It ends up being what Mom thinks is a little over a gallon of juice.

Mom describes jelly-making as a really good activity for the working woman. You don't have to go straight from grape vine to jars in one headlong rush. After we make the juice and cover it, we're done for the day.

The next morning after breakfast, we get serious. All the jars, lids, and rings get washed. The jars get put in a big kettle full of water on the back burner, to be boiled and thereby sanitized.

Time to break out the pectin. While the pot on the stove talks to itself, Mom has me read the pectin packet's recipe for grape jelly, as well as all the steps I'm to go through to get this stuff in jars and processed. There are instructions in the Ball canning book too.

Thank goodness they both say the same thing. The last thing I need right now is conflicting information. And, according to the chart in the canning book, since we're on a mountaintop somewhere over 2000 feet we have to add five more minutes to how long we boil the jelly once it's been jarred.

"So what would they do in New Orleans?" I ask Mom. "They're below sea-level." The chart makes no mention of low altitude cooking.

"I have no idea." She admits.

My Dad comes through the kitchen, dog right at his heel with a toy in her mouth.

"Getting started? Sure hope this batch doesn't make our teeth turn blue."

Mom made a batch a few years ago, her first since moving upstate (I think) and it did indeed turn your teeth blue if you ate it.

"That was the weirdest thing!" Mom says. "I still don't know why it did that." I silently hope it's not something to do with the grapes grown in this region.

Mind you, the threat of blue teeth didn't stop anyone from eating that jelly. You just had to be extra vigorous with the toothbrush afterward. And no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school or work lunches, unless you wanted people to stare at your mouth all afternoon.

Once the water starts to boil, the timer gets set for 20 minutes, and we start to make the jelly. The idea is to have the jelly and the jars ready for each other at the same time. Another smaller pot of water has been set to boil for the lids. Must remember next time I do this, even though the jars get boiled, the lids do not. That weakens the rubber seal. You just want them hot and loose. After the water gets boiled and turned off, that's when the lids go in the pot.

As before, Mom directs the cooking from over my shoulder. I keep thinking of that mantra they recite on so many of the home improvement shows: "Learn one, make one, teach one." I guess by then you know it really well.

The timer goes off just in time for me to set it again for the jelly. It has to do a hard boil for a solid minute. The foam is starting to form. The recipe says to skim that off at the end, right before jarring starts.

Actually, the recipe calls it "scum," like it's pond algae or something. Mom says it's just air bubbles.

"It's still jelly, it's just not as pretty," she says. We skim the foam off and put it in a custard cup. I see a couple slices of bread in that foam's immediate future.

Now comes the part of this whole procedure that made me nervous to think about. Processing the jelly. Jars get taken out of the big pot -- we start with two, so that there's an assembly line going. After that, one jar gets removed at a time. It's to retain sterility.

The big-mouthed funnel goes into an empty jar, jelly fills the jar to about the start of the threads on the lip. Funnel gets moved to the waiting jar, lid comes out of hot water and onto full jar, screw on lid. Put full jar out of the way, take another jar from the pot. Now fill the jar that has the funnel in it. Keep on going until you're out of jelly or out of jars.

We manage to get 8 full jars of jelly from this batch, plus some extra that we put in a jar with the "scum." We decide it's time to stop for a taste test. We call Dad in to the kitchen so he can have some too.

Ohhh. This beats the heck out of store-bought jelly. The first bite brings back another memory from when I was little, of Mom making me a cream cheese and grape jelly sandwich. It must have been with homemade jelly, because I haven't thought of it in years.

"My mother used to do something when I was little," Mom said. "She'd make me a cream cheese and jelly sandwich..."

"I was just thinking of that! You used to do the same for me."

By this point, I'm starting to feel indignant for the slighted cloudy bits of perfectly good jelly, and decide to rename it "skim." Mom concurs.

After the taste test (thumbs up all around), it's time to process. Mom assures me I have no reason to worry.

"Now, if we were using a pressure canner, that would be a different story. Though they've made some improvements in them over the years. Getting jelly on the ceiling used to be a common occurrence with pressure canners in my mother's day."

"I'd rather not use one of them," I say.

"Me neither," Mom agrees.

But this procedure is pretty tame. Six jars in the hot water bath is all that will fit in the pot without the jars touching. After the water comes to a full boil, it needs to stay in there for 15 minutes (10 minutes normally plus five more for high altitude). Then take those out and boil the rest. Leave the rings on until they're sealed.

I spend the 20 minutes after the jars come out of the water listening for the "sssspop!" that let me know they have sealed. They all do just fine.

Mom does the next batch, herself. We still have 3 quart jars full of juice after the second batch, and Mom decides to process them so that I can use them later. I should get 2 more batches of jelly out of them, plus another 2 cups of grape juice that I could probably use in cooking or something. She sends me home with a dozen jars -- the 8 I processed, 1 to replace the skim jelly in the fridge, and 3 more. I'd bought 12 jars from Wal-Mart, and guess she wanted them all filled for me.

You're not supposed to store them with the rings on, because sometimes the rings rust shut. I keep them on for travel, though. Not really interested in having a jar come unsealed on the bus.

For some reason, probably because I was little when I first saw Mom and Grandmom do it, I thought making jelly was really hard. It isn't. Which makes sense, really. If it were that difficult, so many people wouldn't be able to do it. But to a little kid it seemed like magic--take grapes from the back yard and turn them into something that doesn't look at all like a grape? Amazing.

Learn one, make one, teach one. I guess this means I have to make more jelly soon.

And, no, there were no blue teeth this time around.

Snicker

Still piddling about with that post. I'm trying to make it less of a blow-by-blow description of how to make jelly (bo-ring! Though I will be doing that with the photos on Flickr. Mainly for me, so I don't forget what we did) and more about the conversations we had around the whole jelly-making thing. Was a big bonding moment, I think. Which is great, 'cause that's what I was hoping would happen.

But in the meantime, an LOL cat that had me snickering. Love the expression on the panther's face:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Snapdragon

You may be noticing a significant lack of the post I said I was going to put up yesterday. Yeah. Instead of the writing I planned to do, I spent the weekend goofing off. One of the things I did? Bought yarn I don't need with money I don't have, and am now trying to figure out what to do with it. I wonder if I have enough for a sweater?

But anyway, here's another picture from Labor Day weekend:



It's a volunteer snapdragon that's decided to take up residence in my Mom's ground pine. I liked the way all the needles around it seemed to be pointing at it.

Conversation I keep having with the cat

Sophie: Mrrrrowwww? Mrrrrrow! [Rubs her face on my arm/knee/foot/whatever body part is available] *
Me: [petting cat] Y'know, you live here now. There's no probationary period. You're in. You can relax. You don't need to be on your best behavior. Go on, release your inner diva. Be the little princess I know you want to be.
Sophie: Mrrrrowwww? Mrrrrrow! [Rubs up against me again]
Me: [sighing] Okay. Maybe tomorrow.

*Translation: "You're my best friend."

Foxglove

I'm writing a post about my weekend that I might actually publish before the end of this weekend. But in the meantime, here's a picture of the foxglove in my Mom's garden.

Scenes from the chair, or, The dentist makes me thirsty

“Uhm,” I say to the dental tech as she covers me with a lead apron, “I just want to warn you. This might take a while.”

“Oh?” She asks. She is hooking this H-U-G-E thing to a little bracket and approaching me with it. It looks nothing like the bitewings they’d used at the office I used to go to. Is she planning on putting that in my mouth?

“Yeah. I have a really strong gag reflex. I mean really strong.”

“Oh, that’s all OK.”

“No, seriously. I’ve had techs get mad at me because of it.”

“Really?” She is sympathetic. “That’s not right. Okay, open up.” Yes indeed. She thinks that thing is going in my mouth.

“What’s this?” I ask, cocking my head at The Great Big Thing.

“Oh, it’s digital. The picture will show up over there.” She shrugs to the open laptop behind her as she tries to position this piece of equipment in my mouth.

“Arggggggarrrrrggle, bleah!”

“Hm.” She steps away, the Great Big Thing still in her hand, now much wetter.

“Yeah.”

She tries again. I gag again.

“Let me try something else.” She disappears and comes back with Something Else on the bracket.

“The film is a little smaller than the digital device,” she explains while fitting it in my mouth.

“Sorry,” I say after gagging and spitting it out.

She leaves again, and comes back with this blue foam thing she wraps around the bottom edges of the plate. I guess she’s thinking maybe the sharp edges are the problem.

Place, gag, spit out, repeat. This happens three times before I manage to hang onto it long enough (chanting dontchokedontchokedontchoke in my head, punctuated by the occasional no! when my mouth tries to get rid of this foreign object) for her to set up the machine and sprint out of the room to hit the button.

“There, that wasn’t so bad,” she says as she comes back in the room.

“Pwaaaah.”

She catches the thing as it leaves my mouth and goes to develop the film. She returns a few minutes later as I’m telling the dentist what’s up with my teeth, a look somewhere between dread and apology on her face.

“It didn’t come out. We’re going to have to take another X-ray.”

-----One week later-----

Back in the chair again. The problem I originally came in for has been fixed, now we’re doing some sort of general inventory of my teeth. My last dentist has sent over my records, including every single X-ray they ever took. The entire office is impressed with me because of this—that particular dentist is famous for not giving complete records. They want to know what I said to make him give them everything. I'd love to oblige them, but I can't remember the actual exchange.

Before the dentist gets started, they have to take panoramic X-rays of my mouth. I’m not fussed.

“Those don’t bother me,” I tell the tech. “It’s the bitewings that give me grief.”

She looks at me oddly.

“But that thing where you stand up, put your chin in the bracket, bite down on something, and the machine just kinda wraps round you and takes pictures? No problem.”

“Yeah, those are great….but we don’t have one of those.”

Oh, God. We gaze solemnly into each other’s eyes.

“Bitewings?”

She nods.

“I hope you don’t have anything else to do this afternoon,” I sigh.

The procedure goes like this: Set-up, gag, remove, set-up, bite-and-concentrate-while-she-sprints-for-the-button, buzz, gag, spit, repeat. About a third of the way through, she calls the dentist in.

“Could you help us out, please? Hit the button the second I clear the door?”

“Did you try numbing her tongue?” He asks.

“Yes. Doesn’t work.”

“What about salt?”

“Salt!” She leaves my field of vision. “I forgot about salt!”

Salt?

She hands him a Q-tip. He rubs it on my tongue. It tastes like plain table salt. He places the film, then sets up the machine. And the clouds part, the light shines down, and the angels sing. I feel like he could take all day to set up if he needed to. There’s no gagging, not even a hint of it. This feels perfectly fine. They both leave the room, she takes the picture and they come back. I’m still holding it in my mouth, marveling at how not bad this feels. He takes the film out of my mouth.

“That’s amazing! Salt did that?”

“Yep. Or maybe I’m just that good.” He winks, smiles, leaves the room, and the tech continues taking pictures of my mouth. She has to salt my tongue before every X-ray or I choke--we experiment with salting every other X-ray and the results are not good.

When I finally leave the dentist’s office, I am extraordinarily thirsty. I stay thirsty until about Saturday. Four days later.

-----One week later-----

I am back in the chair for a cleaning and the filling of a cavity in between two of my upper back teeth. The cleaning takes a while because I haven’t been to the dentist in a few years (lost faith in the other guy, teeth didn’t hurt until the middle of August of this year, so I never got around to finding another one). At one point I think they’re done with the scraping part and are about to move on to the brushes.

“Done with the metal hook?” I ask.

The dentist leans over me with another, smaller hook.

“Oh,” I say.

“You know what this metal hook is called?” he asks, waving it at me. “A sickle.”

“Awesome,” I squeak.

“Though in my hands, it’s a gentle sickle.” He winks from behind the mask.

After the cleaning it's time to fill the tooth. It’s waaaaay back there in the upper part of my mouth. I’m tilted back in the chair so far I feel like I’m hanging upside-down. There’s a drill, a hose, some kind of padding, another hose, all in my mouth. I’m okay with it until he puts a metal band around the tooth and starts to pack in gauze. Oh, here we go.

“Uh-oh.” He says. He starts taking gauze out. It’s not helping. I make some sort of inarticulate noise, an attempt to speak.

“Hang on!” He takes out more gauze.

“Thawngkt?” I say. Then, more clearly, “Thalt!”

“Salt!” The tech dashes into another room and comes back with a little cup of salt and a Q-tip.

Rest of the filling goes fine. Gauze, metal whosit, equipment…hell, they could have put everything in the room into my mouth and I wouldn’t have gagged.

I think they’re going to have to make a notation on my chart to have salt nearby for every visit. And I’m going to need to remember to carry a great big bottle of water with me to the dentist’s office.

Well, that didn’t happen, did it?

Sorry.  Still haven’t finished that other post.  And it doesn’t look like it’ll get posted any time this weekend, either.

I’m headed to my parents’ place in a few hours.  They have dial-up, and I finally remembered to deactivate my AOL account last April so now I have no way to sign on up there with my laptop.  Their computer is very slow and uncooperative.  I don’t know if it’s the machine or the server.  In any event, it’s going to be a low-tech weekend.

That suits me just fine.  I need some time just chillin’ on the porch with my folks, some knitting, and the dog.  I’ve been having a bit of a Time at work lately.  The projects I’m working on have me getting a bit bored and grumpy—there’s a lot of repetitive processes—and something just got dropped in my lap because a) it’s a lot like what I’m already doing, and b) it started out as a small favor but has morphed into a Beast That Will Not Stay Fed, and c) I’m kind of a pushover when someone runs to me in a panic with a deadline they don’t think they can meet.  I am starting to wonder if when all these projects wind up I’m going to even remember how to do my actual job.

Sophie hasn’t been around me long enough to be suspicious when she sees me do laundry then pack it into a duffel.  She’s asleep on some brown paper at the moment.  That cat.  I buy her toys, she’d rather play with the ring from the milk bottle.  I buy her a cat bed, she’d rather sleep on a towel, or on packing material from some box or other that came in the mail. 

She’s a cutie.  We had a game for a while, called Shoot the Mousie under the Entertainment Center and Cry ‘Til the Human Fishes It Out with a Bamboo Knitting Needle.  Guess how it’s played?  When I got sick of doing that, I found that the phone book fits perfectly under the TV stand, and that’s where it lives now.  It acts as a backstop, so now the mousie bounces back out when she bats it under there.

I have a pictures of her now.  I’ll upload some when I find the thing that lets me do that.

Off I go to pack.  I think the dryer’s finally done.  Have a good Labor Day, everybody.

There's one coming, I promise

My mom said she was gonna stop reading my and my sister's blogs because she thought she was an inhibiting influence. We had to tell her no, go ahead and read them, it was fine. And then I had to 'splain that I get creative spurts. Cited May through July as proof that sometimes I just don't write much.

I am working on a post at the moment. I hope to publish it tonight.

I found a down-side the the Windows Live software -- while it will pull a draft post down from the blog and let me work on it, when I save the draft after some editing, it doesn't then replace the old draft with the new draft in Blogger. That means I can't work on it over my lunch break, save it, download it onto my laptop, save it, and then work on it some more at lunch...unless I bring my laptop to work. I don't want to start doing that. After the incident last October where $60 walked out of my purse while it was here in my cubicle, I don't bring anything valuable to work. Definitely don't want the laptop growing legs.

Sartorial complaint

To the young man walking down the sidewalk in front of me this morning on my way to work: Son, I'm prepared to take on faith that you're wearing underwear. I don't need to see it. Pull your damn pants up.

Thank you.

Aigh! The dentist!

This an email I just sent to my team:

Hi gang,

I have to go back to the dentist this afternoon to check on last week's boo-boo tooth. I'm leaving at 2:30, and I think I'll be back by 3:30, but I don't know what other adventures he has planned for me besides this follow-up visit. Here's hoping I don't leave there with a numb mouth. Again.
--V

Please send happy thoughts towards Central Pennsylvania, would you? I'm hoping he'll just look at the Tooth in Question and let me go, but there's always a possibility that he has car payment coming up sees something else that needs attention.

Everybody try to act natural

I called my mother this evening to thank her for my birthday present, which got here today. Rosewater perfume from Crabtree & Evelyn. Yum.

During the course of conversation she let it slip that since my sister and I started all this BlogHer talk, she's been reading our blogs.

My reaction:

• Uh-oh. My mom reads my blog?
• Quick! Is there was anything on here I'd be embarrassed to have her see?
• You know what? I'm fine with it.
  

Hi Mom! (waving) Look, everyone, it's my mother!

Better living through chemistry

Scene: The library where I work. It's my morning break, and I'm using it to return a book that's due today. No more renewals allowed, so I managed to do what I normally can't and finished the book the night before (I have trouble reading books I don't own. But that's a story of another time). I come up to the lending desk, smiling and humming.

Woman behind Desk Who I Know Slightly: Good morning.
Me (singing out): Morning!
WbDWIKS: You are entirely too cheerful for 10 AM on a Monday.
Me: Oh, that's caffeine. Nothing natural about this. All caffeine. (pausing for a second to think) And sugar.
WbDWIKS (laughs): Well, that's all right then.

We(e) little fish

There was a session at BlogHer ’10 on Saturday that I am kicking myself for not going to.  It was called “Little Fish in a Big Pond – Understanding and Loving Your Small Blog.”  I wound up not going partly because of time mismanagement (again. That plagued me all weekend.  Not like I have clock on my cell phone or anything), and partly because I felt  I didn’t need help understanding or loving my small blog. 

But now after reading this post about the session I’m really wishing I attended, and not only because one of the people running it was Celeste, whose blog I read and comment on and who comments here once in a while.  Found her blog through NaBloPoMo a couple years back, met her in person for the first time at the People’s Party on Thursday night. 

Luckily BlogHer has transcripts of the sessions, and after a quick search I found the one for “Little Fish…”.  I started skimming through it and berated myself for not keeping better track of time, and for deciding not to show up late to the session even though lateness appears to have been totally acceptable.  There was a lot of stuff in here that I guess I needed to hear.  I’m having a lot of “me too” reactions for things like:

• Why I don’t have a counter. Numbers don’t interest me. If I go by the people who’ve commented on a regular basis, I think I have an audience of about ten, give or take.  And I’m happy with that.  If I somehow managed to attract a readership as large as Maggie Mason’s or Jenny Lawson’s or Eden Kennedy’s, I think I’d be paralyzed by stage fright.
• Why I don’t want to “monetize” this.  Turning this into a paying gig would suck all the joy out of it.  Sponsors would have expectations.  The only reason I’d ever contemplate allowing advertisements is if the site that serves my blog started to charge me for the space I use.  Even then I might not.  There are worse things to spend my money on.
• Why I’m ambivalent about the whole “giveaway” thing.  I occasionally toy with the idea of giveaways, but not to generate traffic.  I just wanna be able to give my friends free stuff.  I realize there’s probably a trade-off, there.  One can’t give away things like KitchenAid appliances or Nooks or whatever else people hand out without there being some sort of business arrangement in the background.  It would depend upon the arrangement, I guess.
• Who I write for.  I write for me.  If other people like it, great!  So far no one’s left me a comment that reads, “You suck!” (oop!  Tempting fate there) so I assume I’m entertaining.  But really?  I’m happy just talking to myself.  Sometimes I write posts just to jot down things I need to remember—like the one on fixing my faucet.  When I finally need to do that again, I’ll find the post that says I need key grease and which direction the cartridge has to go, ‘cause I’m sure I’ll forget by then.

Well, now I’m going to go back and read the transcript in-depth.  I guess things I need to add to the “do” and “don’t” list for next year’s conference are: “Do keep track of time. Don’t worry about walking into a session late.”

Because it's never too early to stress out about Thanksgiving

I just spent part of my lunch break writing a preliminary to-do list of things I need to get done before Thanksgiving, complete with parenthesized notes and commentary:

• Fix downstairs commode (parts already purchased).
  
• Fix kitchen chair that you broke with your toe, for pity's sake (need wood glue, twine, brown paper).
• Refinish craft room chairs (supplies hiding in craft room).
  
• Compose and distribute Thanksgiving menu (consult your shiny new copy of The Joy of Cooking).
• Test some recipes for Thanksgiving (use up that frozen turkey breast that's been hanging around for a year; try the apricot whosit you want to make for Dad because he can't eat cranberries. Need cumin).
• Shampoo sofa and "freecycled" recliner (rent upholstery cleaner).
• Either shampoo or replace living room rug (Resolve and a long-handled scrub brush might do for this year. But really, it should be replaced with something that looks more like an area rug and less like the jagged-edged remnant it is. Something that isn't packing-taped down in the doorways by the previous owners might spruce the room up a bit, you know?).
• Rearrange furniture in living room (because now you have some, and it's all huddled together in one corner like a group of people sharing an umbrella. In other words, get rid of the boxes!).
• Is there time to sort out and arrange the craft room? (Probably, but what does this have to do with Thanksgiving?)
  
• Fix cracked, spackled bit under window (need spackling tape).
• Buy a new roasting pan & rack (preferably one where the finish from the rack doesn't rub off on the food. Gross. And possibly dangerous).

Yes, I really do write myself notes like I'm writing to someone else. It helps. And it amuses me when I look at them later.