A Life

aww man, kitty

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:38:54 GMT

Isn't she cute?
What you can only just barely see is that she is sleeping, of all the places on the wide open expanse of this couch that no one is sitting on, on my embroidery hoop with embroidery in progress.

Thank you, Chita. You're exceptionally adorable and have a talent for being in the wrong place.

Today she was mewing at Z, and rubbing against his legs. He bent down to pet her. She climbed up his leg to get into his lap, and then climbed up his torso to get to his chest, and then climbed across his back to lie there in great content, despite the fact that through this entire process he was exclaiming in pain and trying to detach her.

I'm not entirely sure either of us is precisely happy with how clingy she's getting now that the weather's turning cold. But I no longer think she's ill. She's just a pill.

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:11:39 GMT

OK, so Z can't hang a curtain rod and I don't know how either. I'd hoped that since he has more aptitude than I do in these sorts of things, that perhaps he'd have a shot. But at this point, he mastered the use of the drill, only to discover that there was a stud there instead of the hollow wall, and so he refuses to work anymore.

How do you hang up a curtain rod in a plaster wall with a stud behind it?
I do not know and Z refuses to try anything else.

At this point, I do not know how anyone has curtains ever.

I just figured that since I'm spending hours making the curtains, and he's not doing any housework or gardening or maintenance work at all, and since he's got a lull in projects after having two weeks off already, maybe he could be given a small task. I have four thousand other things to do and know for a fact that I get along with power tools about as well as water catches fire, and have the scars to prove it.

hmph

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:44:14 GMT

Z is sitting at the kitchen table at his computer, looking bored. I walk through the kitchen carrying water to the fish tank, enroute from starting another load of laundry. "'Sup," he says.
"Refilling the fish tank," I answer.
"I got nothin' to do this morning," he says. "Projects lined up, but waiting for client approvals."
"Hey," I say, brightening. "You could help me hang curtain rods!"
"What is it with you?" he asks. "You're just like my mom! 'Mom, I'm bored!' 'Oh? Clean your room then!'"
"Seems sensible to me," I said. "If you're bored, I always have plenty to do."

I like having things done around the house. I don't really like doing them, but somebody has to do them.

Of course, by 'having things done'... If he gets these curtain rods up, then I had probably better finish the curtains I started making, um, over a year ago. Yeah, that'd be nice.
I'm better at sewing now, though. Wasn't that the point of learning to sew?
OH yeah. I'd forgotten. I spent like $200 on fabric. I was making drapes.
... I should probably find out where I put all that fabric.

aww kitty

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:28:53 GMT

I'm up late, writing-- mostly procrastinating, but at least I'm sitting and doing it, and I've finally gone through all my notes so I'm not writing blind as I have been for so long.

But Chita decided to be helpful. She's been very clingy this week. She hadn't sat on my lap in weeks, months even. Tonight she was happily ensconced on Z's lap when he went to bed. I had been sitting in bed writing, but wasn't ready to sleep, so I relocated to the living room. Chita came to find me within the first fifteen minutes, and has been lying half-on me with her paws in the air for about an hour and a half now.
Aww kitty.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:27:37 GMT

Z bought Sharon Jones' album 100 Days, 100 Nights awhile back. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. I think they're Amy Winehouse's backup band. It's a really solid album, sounds like it was recorded in about 1960 only with better sound quality. Jones has one of those Aretha-esque voices-- big, nimble, and warm. I love the album.
I was listening to it in the car the other night, and suddenly flashed back to Pennsic.
(No I didn't take that many drugs.)
Just... the way some people, well-intentionedly, treated me, vs. the lyrics of Jones's song "Be Easy, Baby".

some people say
you gotta fight for a love that's true
climb every mountain
see every trial and tribulation through

and I'm here to tell ya
oooh that's only half the lesson
now if you want a girl to come to you
you got to leave a little room for guessin'

Whoa you just be easy baby
that girl'll come a runnin to you
if you just be easy baby
ahh she'll be easy too

don't you know it's just a fool plays a part
runnin' a girl down like she's a game in a school yard
now if she waits
you should turn and let her alone
she'll come to you
just as sure as you're born

be easy baby
that girl'll come a runnin' to you
if you just be easy baby
ahh she'll be easy too

don't you know a woman don't wanna man down on his knees
runnin' her down like a mouse at the cheese
you got to be mellow if you want her affection
you get too excited and she's off in another direction

so be easy baby
that girl'll come a runnin to you
if you just be easy baby
ahh she'll be easy too

be easy baby
that girl'll come a runnin' to you
if you just be easy baby
ahh she'll be easy too

Not that I really need to give people advice on picking me up. But there was this sort of overwhelming undercurrent of people, particularly men, who seemed to feel that the way to get a girl is to pick several and obsess serially over them.
Let me tell you: that's really, besides the Port-A-Castles, the only thing I wasn't totally happy with at Pennsic. Nerd boys. I love them. They're my type. But there's a reason that girls are more attracted to dudes that just aren't into them. Why? The dudes that are into them often and rapidly get creepy about it.

One dude was pretty blatantly fixating on anything that was a)nearby and b)female, and let me tell you something man, the number one way to assure that a girl is not going to be flattered by your attentions is to have been hitting on another girl just before she arrived, and not transfer your attentions to the newcomer until the first girl has had to get rude to you.
Yeah. ... Yeah. Sexy.
(Then tell the newcomer that there are all these chicks you could have sex with anytime but you're just not interested in them. Also it helps if you're like forty-five and not very well groomed, and really, really fond of yourself. But that was really just icing.)

Mostly it wasn't bad. I wasn't really offended. It was just sort of a drag once in a while. I had been cautioned that it was likely to be an issue since I was Obviously Of Legal Age-- my friend from high school has been going to Pennsic since she was 18, and wears slightly more clothing every year, and gets hit on more and more every year-- it's not nudity and youth, it's Not Jailbait that gets you the attention. She once attended with her sister, four years her junior, and said sister was awfully offended that guys never hit on her but paid so much more attention to her older, more-clothed, chubbier sister-- but kid, you're visibly a teenager: they're scared of you. Even many of the Creepy Guys do not want to be that guy who banged a fifteen-year-old and went to jail in rural Pennsylvania. Especially since that sort tends to "fall down a lot" on their way to Security.

I was adorably and drunkenly hit on by a very young and very naked boy, who was very persistent, over the course of several evenings. He was sweet, and took no for an answer for about five minutes at a stretch. He was trying to do it right, and kept asking me all these considerate questions, and marveling over how awesome I was. "What about you, though?" I thought, but couldn't think of a nice way to say. "I already know I'm awesome and at my age, I've heard it before. But I don't know a damn thing about you. You haven't done one rad thing yet. If you did something awesome, I would totally be interested in making out with you [well, for the sake of argument I would be; actually I was really Not in the Market for Make-Outs-- but he was cute and theoretically I might have been interested. Shh, this is for science], because you are young and cute and fairly articulate. But you're not actually saying or doing anything interesting on your own. Go do something awesome, but don't just do it to impress me or I'll notice and think you're lame." Be easy, baby.

I know it goes the other way, incidentally. It's not just nerd guys that don't know how to pick up chicks. Nerd chicks can be pretty obnoxious to guys they don't know how to properly pick up. Especially since they're so busy only being interested in the ones that aren't already creepily obsessed with them.
Wait, see how that works?
Be easy, baby.

Oy. Anyway. Song's been stuck in my head, now I've passed it on.

fabric snob

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:49:09 GMT

I just turned down ice cream. I know.
Well, OK, I said "Let's go get ice cream!" and Z said, "But I need to finish my drink," and I said, "OK," and an hour later when he stood up and said "OK" I'd forgotten what I'd asked him for. And I decided, since he was only going because I wanted to, that I didn't really want to go.
Now, of course, I wish I had, but it's just as well. I'm feeling rather out of shape, and eating more ice cream wouldn't help. Instead, I now have room for more booze! Right? Right?

Anyway. Just so my sole post of the day isn't a mercenary wish list, I'm going to natter on slightly about fabric. Because all I did today was sort of reread things I've written, write more scraps, and reflect a bit dully on things I want to write-- but I thought about it, which is better than nothing!
I mean, I did other stuff, I just didn't find anything else notable.

So. Fabric.

Ever since I started looking for things to sew for Pennsic, I've had this odd hard-on for 100% natural fibers. I don't know why. I mean, I know why I started out looking for them-- #1, natural fibers won't actually kill you in the heat. My Dad knew a guy who died of heatstroke wearing a poly-blend coat while everyone else was wearing wool, at a re-enactment event; no one else was suffering in the heat that badly, and they didn't realize what was different about the other guy. Polyester will kill you. Srsly.
#2 Synthetics look different. They're shinier, harder, stiffer, flimsier.
Somehow that aesthetic has ingrained itself, to the point that synthetics just don't even appeal to me. I walk through JoAnn's, absently trailing my hand along all the bolts of fabric, and almost never pause to actually look at them anymore.

So I've been wandering through fabrics-store.com looking at the linen, and dharmatradingcompany.com looking at the silks, and various sites looking at wool but I still have to find the perfect site to buy decent lightweight wool from. All these fabrics fill me with lust. But I've decided I have to have a garment in mind when I buy fabric henceforth, or else I wind up with these yards of fabric that I fall too much in love with to actually be able to bear to cut.
...

That wound up not really being interesting at all. I think it might have been sparked by my sudden interest in looking at people's photos of cosplay. I have realized that I love costumes, and I love looking at people's costumes, but the fabric that the clothing parts are made from affects me disproportionately. If the fabric is too flimsy and shiny-looking it takes me that much more effort to buy the impression the costume is generating. People work so hard to get the color matched properly, and then make their ballgown or suit or whatever out of polyester and it just doesn't drape right, catches the light funny... The wonderful details people bother copying don't have nearly as much weight for me if the shirt/dress/coat/pants are flimsy and shiny.
(Though I admit, I've seen a couple of costumes lately where either the fabric was right, or the rest of the outfit was so fucking stellar it really didn't matter. But a lot of times... I want colors and textures and the feeling that this is real clothing, not a costume. Obviously I'm on a different tangent than most people.)

Then again, natural fabric tends to be way more expensive. So it's not like I don't understand. But people who spend a hojillion dollars on just the right wig/necklace/boots...

Well, anyway. I think I'm heavily influenced by the linen I got at Pennsic, which I just like to sit and pet. It's so... drapey. So... reassuringly substantial to touch. I don't know. I'm getting all weird about it. I have a silk noil blouse that I hate, but I love the texture of it. I am consumed with the desire to buy like twelve yards of Dharma Trading Co's $5.85/yd raw silk and dye it midnight blue and make a dress out of it and wear it everywhere.
I don't know. I think I may be going crazy.

That and I just had like a whole bottle of wine. I made poached salmon for dinner because I felt bad that I haven't been cooking much lately. And you know. A glass of wine for the fish, a glass of wine for me, a glass of wine for me, a glass of wine for... what was I doing?
Dinner came out awesome, though. I poached two little frozen chunks of salmon steak in 2 c white wine, 2 c water, 10 peppercorns, a bay leaf, some coriander (just a little), and some fresh tarragon, a pinch of thyme, and a couple sliced cloves of garlic. Then I melted two tablespoons of butter, added a few sprigs of shredded fresh parsley, half a clove or so of sliced garlic, let that all melt and bubble a little, added a little white wine and some of the poaching liquid from the fish, let that all boil up, added more poaching liquid, added some salt and pepper, let it boil a bit and stirred the lumps out with a fork, and then added a little bit of heavy cream and some port so that it would be a nicer color.
Then I microwaved some frozen peas (I am fancy), and made slightly-ghetto garlic mashed potatoes (boiled potatoes, then while they drained, grated garlic into butter in saucepan, fried it a bit, added potatoes, more butter, some milk; mashed potatoes up with fork, then added dollops of sour cream until they were creamy, and some vinegar (like 2 Tbsp) until they were tangy.
Then I even put it all on a plate and put the sauce over it. And drank more wine. It was almost posh.
It's not that fancy, by Z's standards, but I've been hella slacking on the cooking, of late, so it was sort of worthy of comment. I guess.

This is a pretty boring entry, but at least I have something up besides a birthday wish list. Somehow those things make me uncomfortable. I think I just hate asking people for stuff. I'm awful at giving people stuff, anyway, so I suppose I ought to be awkward about getting it too.

What I Want

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:53:52 GMT

Since my birthday's coming up, and my mom asked for a wish-list, even though she's already bought me at least two presents (including the Croc maryjanes that I have been living in all month, yays!), I am going to put one up. It will be short. The rest of you, go on with your lives. Or go here and read my account of the roller derby bout in Syracuse.

Or, if that's not your thing, go look at this awesome thing because it's rad and I've been meaning to mention it on here for like four days. Yes, they're signs that you can only read when you're in the right place, so it's way clearer than arrows 'cuz you're never sure what they're pointing at. Awesome!

I had listed about twelve things from Reconstructing History, but it may be easier just to ask for a gift certificate. (For the interested, the twelve things included their pattern for Elizabethan pairs-of-bodys, a roll of 1/4 flat-oval corset reed, the pattern for the Shinrone Gown and yeah, like ten other things. The patterns tend to be $20-35 each, so that kind of increment would be rad.)
a really nice pin cushion of some kind, preferably the kind that has a separate little place to put needles. I keep losing needles.
The Bra-Maker's Manual. I know it's $85. I really want it.
This T-Shirt, in Women's XL.
this hoodie, in XL.
A gift certificate to Burpee would keep me honest, in that I had promised myself to really for reals make the garden good this autumn and I really need to actually do that.
Someone agreeing to come spend a few days to help me insulate my attic so that I actually do it already would also be worth a lot more than money, since I'm really intimidated by the whole process and don't know where to start.
a set of reasonable drinking glasses / tumblers, since I keep breaking them. Something the right size to drink a mixed drink or a glass of lemonade out of, but short enough to fit into my dishwasher (about four inches). I might as well ask, right?

Actually that's all I can think of right this moment. I want to buy a lot of fabric and things, but can't find what I need at Jo-Ann's, so won't ask for a gift certificate there. I have many desires, just not all of them specific enough to put into a list.

another dress diary: green apron

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:22:24 GMT

As an aside, before I get into this: was talking to a Pennsic person and he said something like, You've only been with your boyfriend six years? Shit man, you barely know him, or something like that. And my first reaction was hey, six years is a long time, especially when you're not thirty yet, but then I came home and Z had cut ten inches off his ponytail so it's not quite long enough to stay in place now and it's all hanging in his face like Kurt Cobain, and now all of a sudden he's listening to Nirvana. So, uh, ok, fine, you were right, dude, I barely know this guy.

So anyway. On to the sewing diary.
This is my first plausibly non-SCAish garment, but unfortunately I couldn't find my camera so I don't have any photos of the process. (It was under a shirt. Yes, that's my filing system...)
However. The whole garment was based on a drawing I did of a garment of my sister's, which she got in a thrift store, and it's easy, easy as pie. So here, I'm doing a text-only diary. But I swear it's awesome. This is the best apron ever.

So at Pennsic this vendor was selling random fabric on clearance, 'make me an offer'. He had all this green 45" wide fabric, looked kinda like cotton. It was about thirteen yards. I bought it, plus a few scraps of other fabric, for fifteen bucks. I made a choli out of it at Pennsic, handsewing while I sat in the common area, and wore it to work my last day.
At home, I finally prewashed the rest of it. It bled everywhere, and faded a little. It's cheap, but it's pretty definitely cotton. And I have a ton of it, don't care, and can make experimental things out of it. This has been my problem so far-- I couldn't find anything cheap enough that I could make myself not care if I totally screwed it up. I have a hoarder's instincts, honed over generations, and it's hard for me to not care about objects.
So anyway.

Whenever the last time I was home was, or maybe the time before, I noticed this great apron Ann was wearing. I stole it and measured it and made sketches of it, and wrote myself notes.
What's so great about this apron?
It wraps all the way around. This means you can wipe your hands on your butt, which is something Ann and I both tend to do, even when we're wearing aprons that don't extend that far.
What it also means is that you can just not wear pants. I can't explain how great that is. I have this thing where I just don't find any of my pants attractive or comfortable for kicking around the house-- either they're too structured, and pinch my soft fat rolls after a while, or they're not structured enough and I just feel like a slob in them. Or they're too nice and I don't want to wear them just for kicking around. Or whatever.
So I go pantsless a lot.
Yes, I'm a slob. If you've been reading for longer than five minutes, you know that.

So this is the Glorious Apron of Pantslessness-Enabling.
Also it has pockets. Pockets are super handy. All the time.

The original, which was manufactured by "Meadowbank" of Stamford, Connecticut, was made up of three equal panels of cotton twill in a multi-colored vertical stripe. They were stitched together with a straight machine stitch, the seams flattened out and the edges bound with a serger, and then a self waistband was folded under, over, under again, and stitched down. (i.e., the raw edges were folded under, then the thing was folded in half and stitched down over all of it, so it was neat edges all around. Standard operating procedure, illustrated well here, scroll down to photos.) The panels were pleated into the waistband: in the center there was an inward-facing cartridge-pleat in the center, between the two pockets. Then the rest of the waistband was done in little knife pleats, not very deep, about an inch apart.
The two square patch pockets were cut on the diagonal of the fabric, so they had stripes running corner-to-corner instead of straight up and down. They had the edges folded down and stitched under, the top folded over and the edge serged, but left unstitched, and then were just sewed to the front of the apron.
The pockets were about 8" x 7 3/4". The apron's overall length from waistband to hem was 28".

So I decided to copy it, but for my slightly-larger ass. I miscalculated, of course; when you pleat fabric, it takes more of it to cover the same area. Whoops. So mine is in four panels. The pleating is woefully uneven; I left a part of it unpleated with the idea that it would be the side to go underneath at the back, and I'm more interested in that lying flat and behaving over my non-flat ass than in having yet another layer of foofy pleating.

My panels also are not equal. I was really lazy about measuring. The panels are each around 30" wide. But then, I don't have a serger, so I couldn't bind the edges: instead, I folded them under twice so no raw edges showed, and stitched them down, then sewed them together. So that ate a lot of fabric as well. My seams are bulky and I should go back and stitch the seams open, since they're so bulky, but I haven't yet. (It would have to be done by hand, I think-- it would show, and my machine-stitching is wobbly and crazy-looking.)

There's no seam down the front, because I added the fourth panel on one side and just made the waistband slightly-off-center, so there's an extra-swishy part at the back that goes over the flatter un-pleated part before tying off.

The original also had a diagonal buttonhole in the waistband, which I think the tie of the apron was meant to pass through so it could be secured. I may or may not add such a feature to mine. The cotton I used is lighter than the twill, so the waistband and pleats aren't so crisp.

One thing I did that's notable, I think, is that I cut the waistband, folded it in and ironed it, then laid it out on the table, right-side-up but front flipped up instead of folded into place. I then pinned the skirt, right-side-up, to the front of the back of the waistband. (This would make total sense if you just laid it out, I promise.) I got all the pleats just as I wanted them, pinned each pleat into place, sewed it all down and removed the pins. Then, and only then, I flipped the front of the waistband down into place, and sewed it down with one line of stitching. This means that the skirt is sewn on to the waistband twice, but you only see one clean line of stitching from the front.

I have not yet hemmed it; the bottom is the selvedge. I will hem it. I also haven't put the pockets on yet. I really want to embroider the tops of them, since my fabric is so plain. I need a very simple motif-- I have a book of charted Celtic patterns, but I actually think I would prefer a Baltic one. Latvian embroidery uses more straight lines-- the Celtic patterns are from engravings and manuscript illuminations, and so are religious and curvy. Latvians are much more interested in textile art-- at least, that's what the Russians have left them-- and so for the most part their motifs are actually suited to weaving or embroidering. Also, most of their motifs are agricultural, and very kitcheny-homey without being cutesy. (Sun symbols, wheat ears, corn stalks, lightning, earth symbols: more on them here.) So I'm going to look up a good repeating wheat-ear type pattern, and do it in shades of yellow and gold across the tops of the pockets.

Which is probably ensuring that I will never actually get pockets on this damn thing. But that's not keeping me from wearing it everywhere. I wore it last night to the roller derby bout, wearing it over my miniskirt and striped tights because I don't really like the attention I sometimes get if I wander around a strange city or highway rest stop in full derby regalia. And when all was over, I put it on in the parking lot, and stripped off my tights and skirt and all in the parking lot, and nobody was any the wiser. I drove home much more comfortable.

So I'll probably make myself more than one of these aprons, eventually. I really like it. And this fabric is so cheap that it'll eventually fade and be icky. Maybe I'll pick the pockets off if I like the embroidery, and re-use them when the apron falls apart. We'll see. I have to design them first, and actually do them...

One of these days I'll post a photo, but I should probably hem it first. At the moment it's ankle-length, which is a bit much for an apron.

Anyway, I'll post photos at some point. If anyone was looking to get into sewing, this is totally a great starter project because I don't think it's possible to screw it up notably. I probably used, hm, 45" wide fabric... I made the panels like 34" long, and the excess parts I trimmed off the top became the waistband and the self-fabric ties. So there was no waste, it's all squares. I'd say four yards of 45" wide fabric, or two yards of 60" fabric, and anything with a high cotton or linen content would do, up to and probably including denim or twill, and down to and including something so sheer it's almost gauze for a more floaty effect. Totally an unfussy project, a couple hours start to finish, and immediately useful.

further cat warranty reflections

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:30:47 GMT

So she definitely is going in to the vet this week. I figured out what was making her limp: her right hind hip goes kinda out of joint sometimes. I won't say it's dislocated, for sure, but it definitely sends her leg slightly out of whack, and she limps and is distressed until it goes back in. It goes back in easily, I think if she just sits down it pops back in, but she doesn't always think to do that when she's distressed. It seems to stop hurting immediately-- or at least, she's back to being totally fearless again right away. I imagine she probably hurt it initially by jumping off something high-- she's not only fearless, but somewhat clumsy, so it's just a miracle she hasn't hurt herself before.

But last night around 2 am she kept waking me up by sneezing. This morning she came and got in bed with me, which she never does, and she kept having little sneezing fits. I've looked her all over and her eyes aren't particularly runny, nor is her nose, but she keeps sneezing. And she's being very clingy. She's usually pretty aloof, as cats go-- doesn't sit in laps (though that might have something to do with the fact that we have no decent lounge chairs, so there aren't usually really comfy laps available for her), doesn't hang out. But she's sitting at my feet at the moment.
Hm.
I think she just wants the chair, really. She likes this chair, but only if nobody's in it.

real life is not cooperating

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:46:31 GMT

So I just got an email from my mom half an hour ago saying that Baby Sister and Surprise Husband are going to be in Albany from tomorrow through Wednesday.
...
When I spoke to her she said they would be driving through Buffalo and would visit me, "at some point" on their way to Albany, and I hadn't time in the brief phone conversation to nail down when that would be but I had assumed, since they were still in Nevada, that it would be some time, since they planned on swinging through Chicago and doing some visiting there. So I made no plans, expecting to hear from her again sometime next week.

Tonight I am driving to Syracuse. It is more than halfway to Albany. Had I known that my only chance for the forseeable future of meeting this Surprise Husband would be to be in Albany early this week, I could have easily made plans to continue my trip from Syracuse a couple more hours to Albany, and stayed there a couple of days.

I could have made such plans up until about eleven a.m. today.

But I did not know that this would be the case until, yes, two p.m. Which is three hours too late to make any plans, and two hours too late to make any last-second plans, and one hour too late to make any last-ditch-desperation plans. Too late. Too, too late.

Am I being totally irrational to find myself furious just now?

I must be crazy.
Silly me.

This is really not helping my desperate attempts to be in a more positive mood. Really it's not.

ringing... in my ears...

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:29:36 GMT

My right ear suddenly went deaf about an hour ago, then started ringing. These things happen sometimes but it is maddening me at the moment.
I think I've been having what greygirlbeast refers to as dreamsickness. I keep having strange dreams that I wake reluctantly from, and I spend the next few hours struggling out of the strange senses-- of urgency, of confusion, of disillusionment-- that linger after the dreams. I've taken it easy all week because I've had this odd post-Pennsic funk, both mental and physical, but it's showing no signs of going away. More unpleasantly, it's manifested in being easily annoyed with Z-- who, I might mention, has been in an odd mood of his own, so there's that-- so in general, things just aren't cheerful. And my ear won't stop ringing.
So that's what's in progress at the moment. Pthbbbpt.

I need to be embarking upon several major projects that I had told myself I'd start 'after Pennsic'. The house is still half-painted; we abandoned progress on it when the weather turned last autumn, after painting the two biggest rooms (living room and bedroom), so now we, or more properly I, need to paint the office and the kitchen/dinette, and the hallway. I also need to finish the curtains for the bedroom and living room, and perhaps start curtains for the dinette, office, and maybe a curtain to partition off the basement door, finally. I had gotten a beaded curtain thing but the rod was the wrong length and it just didn't visually fit there, so I think I'm going to instead make a heavy brocade curtain and instead of a tension rod, use a properly-installed screwed-in shower curtain type rod to hold it. I also may get proper big curtain rings for it, since it will have to slide easily. If I were ambitious, I would embroider a tapestry to go there, since it's so visible. I am perhaps not that ambitious. (I am only a very slow cross-stitcher yet, though I'm already impatient with the cross-stitch format. Any good beginner kits for tapestry-style embroidery out there? I don't like the little Xs that much.)

But so far, I've only worked myself up to doing a wrap-around half-apron based off a pattern I drew of the apron Ann bought herself at a thrift store so that she could wipe her hands on her butt. I have it mostly constructed, but have to work out the pleats properly. And I'm not 100% sure I've made it big enough. Would it be weird to set in gores, or add some smallish panels? I can't decide. Should I go for overkill? Maybe. I really don't want it to gap in the back because I'll probably use it the way she used hers-- when I don't feel like putting on pants.
I am at least being sensible enough to realize that at first, the homemade clothes I make are going to mostly be suitable for lying around in when nobody else is here.

I also want to majorly overhaul the garden, and the time to do that is autumn. The lilies have stopped blooming; I should dig them up and transplant them soon, and then turn over the garden bed, pull out the weeds and sod, compost that, and spread the nearly-finished compost over it, and maybe even lay out the German mounds for the three-sisters bed I'm putting in there. The more I get done now, the better I'll do at planting time, when in the past I've always wound up too overwhelmed to do much. So I should be starting on that.
The yard is crazy-looking. I'm sure the neighbors hate me. But I admit, the things I look at and academically know that I should be pulling out and tidying up, are the parts of it that I like best. Where the birdfeeders have been, sunflowers and even a stalk of corn have sprouted up, and I am overjoyed to see them. I gave over part of the front garden to Queen Ann's Lace, and love the way it looks even while it looks like the house is abandoned. I let grape vines take over the side of the porch and I love them, even though I know they're weeds and need to get rid of them-- they'll never bear grapes. But I love the way they've made part of my boring identical-to-the-neighbors square brick house look completely rural and wild. If I had room for goldenrod I would grow it.
Obviously I've got some poorly-concealed dissatisfaction with my surroundings and there's no point pretending I love the suburbs, and it's probably rude to the neighbors, who more likely than not actually like the suburban aesthetic, to let it get like this. But I like it, and I'm going to go sit in the Queen Ann's Lace and smell it for a while.

Not now, though. I have things to do and places to go today. Mostly I have to trek to Syracuse to see many of my teammates play in a roller derby bout. It's an informal, one-year-vet-only version of our travel team, and so not really our travel team at all. But I just can't muster any excitement about roller derby yet. I'm not ready for the off-season to be over. I'm not ready to go back to it. Which is a bummer; it's going to be an exciting year I'm sure. I just can't... make myself happy. So I'm going to go be a loud obnoxious excited superfan in a city over two hours away, and hope that kick-starts things.

Maybe I'll bring my cross-stitch with me and get some of it done...

surprise!

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:37:45 GMT

So my baby sister just got surprise!married in Nevada in the midst of a cross-country trip with some dude whose name I had to ask her (and which I can now pronounce but can't spell-- it's either Zack or Zach, and I don't know whether that's short for Zachary or not). She evidently would have liked me to be shocked-- not because she is one who enjoys provoking shock in particular, though she certainly does delight in contrarity-- but my reaction was "That's hilarious!" Which might have offended her, but honestly, one doesn't get surprise married to some dude if you're not looking to offend anybody, which in my book means get ready to be offended right back.

There's much less drama over this than it sounds. "I hadn't known you were dating," I said, to which she answered, "we weren't," which also sounds awfully dramatic. But the thing is, Z and I have been shacked up for six years and we never really dated either. I honestly have been on like two dates in my life and they were awful (unless you count yesterday's unpremeditated lunch outing, which Z retroactively referred to as "a lunch date"-- does that even count??). I don't date. My family, we don't really date. It's not our scene. We make pretty quick decisions about this shit and are either right or wrong. (So far, I'm counting more "rights" than "wrongs", so it seems effective, but then, we also don't necessarily tell one another about the strikeouts, so I could be dealing with flawed data.) It's not complicated and fraught affairs of the heart. No, it's pretty practical shit, really. Not that it's unsentimental, it's just, well, sort of not.

We have in the past theorized that my baby sister is actually a reptile, but I know this is not so. We Kelly girls have our own strange internal lives, and were not raised to dance the nice social dances and pretend to feel the Hollywood fancy shit. Kill yourself for a man? Hah! Kill him, maybe, but more likely just get on with your goddamn life because you have shit to do, honey. (Though maybe you could give your sisters his home address "by accident" and see what happens.) Our father's first gift to our mother, during their courtship, was a garbage can, because she needed a garbage can. They got engaged because our mother said, well, I had decided that if nothing happened to keep me in this area, I was going to go live somewhere near the ocean, so if you haven't any pressing need for me to remain here, I'll just be off now, and our father said, Actually, if you wouldn't mind, could we get married instead? And she said, Oh sure, and the four of us were born. Well, not immediately. But pretty quickly.

We Kelly girls (she wasn't a Kelly girl yet but she soon was), we don't fuck around.

I still don't know how to spell his name, but I suppose it's not really any of my business. I'll find out if/when my sister decides whether she's taking his name or not. And I suppose I'll find that out when she sends me her new address.
Not that she's moving in with him yet. But still.
Whatever. It's not really my business.

That's not intended to sound cold-hearted. I'd be proud of her if I wasn't pissed off at her.

Why am I pissed off?

Because God-damnit, you know how many people are going to start bugging me about when I'm getting married? And even if they don't, my twenty-ninth birthday is in like a week or something, and I'm going to be dealing with all these imaginary people that I think are thinking about it, because I am not entirely a Kelly girl at heart. Well, I am, but I don't always remember that-- it's the stupid fucking novelist thing, it drives me insane. I've got hypothetical people having hypothetical opinions out the goddamn wazoo twenty-four seven. I can't even have a goddamn dream as myself.
(Although all of them have been about Pennsic lately. Weird.)
It was actually a milestone goddamn event for me when I actually had a sexual fantasy as myself last week, though what confused the everloving hell out of me was that I was having it about someone I wasn't actually interested in.
You can't have it all!!!

But anyway, I digressed. Yeah. So let me articulate my extremely Catholic views on marriage:
It's a sacred institution.
You don't just get married because you fancy yourself in love with someone.
You get married because you have a legal reason to need to be tied to that person.
Basically:
Children,
Property,
Insurance/Inheritance/HIPPA/Retirement.

My mother thinks this is mercenary. I'm just going back to the real traditional values here. You don't marry someone because they have pretty goddamn eyes. Don't be shallow. This is the goddamn law here.

I've been shacked up with Z for six years. I don't really need to "make a commitment" to him. I have a goddamn commitment: I no longer know what I own and what he owns. We have a goddamn cat together. We can't fucking break up. Christ, it would be the end of days. He's my best friend. I don't know what the hell I would do without him. He's been the most important person in my life for a really long time now-- as in, basically since college. I graduated, spent about a month in my mom's house, tore my hair out, and ran away to his place and just never came back. That's pretty much my whole adult life. I don't think I need some man in a skirt* to make me say it in front of everyone I know for it to be real. I don't need a piece of paper.
I need a piece of paper if there's any reason that a lawyer is going to have this be his business. And there are a lot of reasons like that out there. Just not at the moment, really.

I don't know if my baby sister's ideas mesh with mine totally, but anyway, that's my take on it. She felt the need to become legally incorporated with this dude; fine. I'm just bummed because the other half of bothering to get married is basically having an excuse to throw a huge party for everyone you know, and I feel gypped. It's kind of the consolation for having to go through a big legal hassle, slightly more festive (but only slightly-- we are Irish after all) than a funeral which is roughly the same thing only the other end.

Eh. We don't fuck around.
___________________________
* "man in a skirt" is a direct quote from my grandmother Kelly, incidentally, I believe on the topic of birth control. She was about 85 and watching TV, and said somewhat irately, "What's some man in a skirt doing telling me what to do with my body?"
I miss my Grandma Kelly a lot, I sure do. Her funeral, incidentally, was a hell of a party, but I'd really rather not have another one like it anytime soon.

rrrgh!

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:30:38 GMT

At Pennsic I had a terrible time with my stupid phone because I had not brought the wall charger, only the car charger, and the car charger, for no reason at all, didn't work. Plugging my phone into it would turn the phone on, but would not charge it. Somehow, it just wouldn't charge. John and Beth from Maplewood saved my bacon by having a Motorola charger that was compatible.

Now I am at home. The wall charger is not here either. I didn't pack it, but I didn't leave it where it belongs. Did I pack it after all, then, just not in a place where I could find it in two weeks of searching? Well how the hell am I going to find it now? I've got a lot of damn stuff to unpack. I'm doing my best, but I'm not done.

Meanwhile,
I cannot charge my phone,
and it is dead.
Stone dead. Won't boot up. No battery.

I have a family situation and everyone is probably trying to call me, but I don't know if they are or not, or who. I can't call out on the house phone, as there's no long distance on it. I just got an email from my mom that said "Call me". I wrote back but I know she doesn't check her email more than once a day: Mom, I CAN'T call you.

People assume telephones too easily.

I haven't time to sort it out now; I'm on my way out the door to go skate, to see if my wheels have rusted in the three weeks since I last rolled.

But in the meantime. If anyone in my family ever reads this. I. Can't. Call. You.

Later.

cat warranty?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 01:58:27 GMT

How nice, she just stepped on my keyboard and made it so I couldn't type into text-entry fields in Firefox. No idea how she did that. Closing all my windows fixed it...
But anyway.
It's what she did while stepping on the keyboard, rather than whatever keystroke sequence she hit, that worries me.
She got three paws onto the keyboard and then paused as she was lifting her right hind leg from the ground, mewed in distress, and withdrew backwards.
She's done that a few times over the last week. Z said he came in once (before I got home) and she was sitting on the floor crying, and when she tried to walk she limped on her right hind leg. He caught her and consoled her, and then she got up and walked away and was fine for three or four days.
This morning she was walking across the living room floor and suddenly stopped, cried, and was limping on her back leg again. She lay down where she was, crying, and I immediately got down beside her and investigated. She let me touch her leg. I flexed the toes, the first "ankle"-like joint, the joint that on a horse would be the hock (backwards knee thing); I flexed the hip part. No distress, no reaction, all moved as they should. No blood, no feeling of a scab under the fur, nothing. She batted at me with her paws at one point, but I couldn't tell if she were playing; she made no sound and didn't use her claws on me. When I was done prodding her she got up and walked away and was just fine.

So that's three times now, over the course of a week, that our otherwise healthy, just-over-a-year-old cat has displayed signs of distress related to her right hind leg. Other than that she is normally active, chasing birds (and catching one the other day, grr), jumping up and down from things, tearing around the house, being her normal self.
She is licking her right hind foot rather intently at the moment, but showing no real signs of distress; she was licking the rest of herself too. (She's moved on to her tail now.) She lets me touch her, lets me poke her, lets me do whatever I like and is not fussy about that back foot.

What the heck can it be?

I'm seeing a lot of expensive vet bills punctuated by a shrug and a "keep an eye on her" in my future. Grrrmmmble. Well, as long as it's not, like, kitty toe cancer or something. :(

semi-coherent Pennsic report

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:45:12 GMT

So here, to go along with the photos, is the coherent account of my time at Pennsic.
Coherent?
Well, ok, whatever. I'm trying, at least.

The photo set, which you can view here if you haven't, is in reverse-chronological order. I am going in chronological order. If these things bother you, start at the end of the set and go the other way.

I was camping with redstapler's household, the Inn of the Three Swans. The backstory there is that there was a real Inn by that name in England in like 1450, so they seized upon that as their setting, and what's going on is that they're the crew of a pirate ship that comes ashore for an annual two-week meeting with their compatriots at this inn. Pete and Nezhah are the financiers of the organization; Nez's brother Wassouf has always been the captain but stepped down this year to allow his longtime First Mate Torsten to take over. Klaus has been the Shipbuilder/Carpenter but stepped aside for Richard (in RL, an engineer/inventor) this year in order to focus his attentions on instead being the Brewmaster. And Andrew stepped up to being the Master Gunner this year.
The household was short some of its regular staff- redstapler opted to go to FRFF and Terminus instead this year, Wassouf couldn't get the vacation time, Nez and Pete camped up with other friends in the Aethelmarc Royal encampment. But four new people came to fill in a bit: me, and a friend of Torsten's named Matthew, and a longtime friend of the camp named John (a Pennsic veteran who spent so much time with the Swans it just seemed easier to move in), and Sue, Richard's wife. Nikki, Sue and Richard's daughter, is also Torsten's girlfriend, and rounded out the household.

In short, it was a family-style kind of household, meaning we ate all our meals together and spent many of our evenings together. Some households are much much bigger, some households are much less friendly. I liked the setting where I was, and it made for a great experience-- big enough that I could leave the camp without worrying it would be totally unattended, but small enough that I wasn't just another body who wouldn't be missed.

The household celebrated its fifth year this Pennsic. The first year, it was pretty bare-bones. The second year, they got their current location. The third year they got running water. The fourth year they got HOT running water. And this fifth year, they got a sink that drained into the ditch without mudpuddles, a shower built on a bridge over the ditch that likewise eliminated mudpuddles, and a tarp setup over the common area that eliminated the little rivers down the middle of the common area that had plagued them during last year's monsoons.
I could have some of that chronology a bit wrong, but that's roughly how it went. In addition, this year, the Coopers had brought in a couple of truckloads of sand to extend the flat campable area on the near side of the drainage ditch, meaning that no matter how hard it rained, the floor of the common area remained sandy not muddy.

So it was a comfortable setup, with hot shower, sink, cushy kitchen setup, new big dining room table so nobody had to balance food in their laps, and a bar, and a coffee table, in the common area. It was comfy and homey and nicely centrally-located in the Swamp/Bog area, meaning that we were in a good spot to get traffic from the various parties and such-- and thus, were never bored, and most of our friends were able to easily find us.

Our neighbors turned out to be absolutely marvellous. The closest neighbors were a new household called the Wicked Monkey Tribe, made up primarily of a pair of former Civil War re-enactors, now turned to Turkish personas named Kilij and Zaliha. He was a drummer, firebreather, and fire-spinner; she was a belly dancer. Three Swans and their neighbors, Nomads, had cooperatively ceded land to Wicked Monkey to allow them to camp on the corner of their lots. Wicked Monkey realized immediately that becoming good friends would only help; they cooked us a wonderful dinner and traded us various insect and poison ivy -killing chemicals for the use of our lovely shower. We liked them so much they wound up spending a great deal of time with us. Both had wonderful stories to share, and Kilij especially had hilarious tales of his days as a carnie, in the Navy, as a Sea World diver, and in his current environmental-safety engineering job that kept us occupied many a night.

Another great discovery was St. Jones' Mission across the street. They've been there for years, but had never really befriended the Swans, instead keeping to themselves and socializing more with the neighbors on the other side. But this year, one of them was alone for the first few days, and our land agent, Torsten, also alone and bored, helped her set up her impossible canvas pavilion in return for coffee. She rapidly became a fixture as well-- also an excellent storyteller, Regan amused us for hours on end with her tales of court cases, life as a pre-K teacher, and her father's terminal illness (which was funnier than you'd think). She was the one who was burned as a witch for her 30th birthday, and I could never tell that story as well as she could.

Big John Kilt Guy from Kindred has not always camped with Kindred-- he used to be with Die Fledermaus, and is something of a fixture of the area as opposed to any particular camp. He was wonderful as well, prone to hilariously serious-sounding booming pronouncements and the like. He coined phrases with excellent precision. And his girlfriend, Danielle, had this anarchic sense of humor that frequently destroyed us with laughter. She also was good with henna and put a beautiful design onto Klaus's bald skull, free-hand, but unfortunately the skin was so thin that it faded quickly.

I can't even count the awesome people who regularly came through Three Swans to amuse, entertain, feed, and drink with us. We sent Die Fledermaus a leftover smoked chicken; they gave us pizza and homemade French fries (Die Fledercrack), and most importantly, glow-in-the-dark Mardi Gras beads with bats on them. Yes! Bats! Die Fledermaus! Wonderful. I will treasure mine forever. Gunther stopped by, obligingly shirtless. And several groups of Tuchux came through and deemed us acceptable, and did not pillage or burn us, so we counted it a resounding victory. ("I may not be too smart," Beast said, "but at least I'm pretty.")

I know I'm missing people, but I didn't exactly take notes, and in the confusion of the last few days, much has faded into half-recollection. It really was like a dream. Now I flush my toilet and wonder, for a moment, what on earth I ever did without a flush toilet. The Mint seems like it happened to someone else.

One amusing day, I followed John on his perambulations as he visited his old camp, Maplewood (and totally scored when they had not only a power outlet, but a charger that matched my phone-- VICTORY!!! That made my WEEK!)-- only to discover that this is none other than the camp where Liesl and Dave used to stay! How amusing! It's a small world after all. Out of over ten thousand people, the odds that I would be camping with someone who used to camp with them are quite small-- I met Jill through completely different social circles than either Liesl or Dave, and they never met one another.

What did I actually do at Pennsic? Well.
There was a lot of sitting around the campsite, telling stories, listening to stories, debating esoteric points of fact or opinion, and in general amusing ourselves as has been done since ancient times: bullshitting over booze.
I made the trudge up the giant hill almost daily, to wander around the merchant areas, watch the fighters, listen to the bands playing, buy fabric (OMG $3/yd LINEN OMG), and even, twice, eat at the food court. (I did not lack for food at any point, however. Suffice to say, we ate well in our cushy kitchen.) I admired the pretty canvas pavilions, looked at the period encampments (more common Topside than down in the Swamp, but I know largely because up Top, there's time for canvas to dry-- in a year like last year's, I would have been MISERABLE in my canvas tent. Conversely, this sunny year, any topsiders in nylon tents were pretty unhappy-- sun on plastic isn't really pleasant and they all would get baked out of their tents by 8 am.) and generally wandered around in all the pretty.
I did take a few classes-- one on Lithuania that convinced me that the Baltic region is horribly under-studied. One on pirates that was entertaining. A few others. One on sea shanties full of, um, interesting people, that made me secretly slightly-thankful that I had not gone to any bardic circles. (You know the kind of people that go to a class solely to show the teacher how much they know, and are delighted if they can confuse him? Yeah. Swell. Guess what, guys, I didn't come here to listen to you talk about how awesome you are. Maybe you really are, but couldn't you throw your own party in that case? I mean, I like a good insight now and then, but I know the difference.)

One bummer was that I lost my voice. The cigarette smoke, then all the woodsmoke, left me hoarse as an old crow. I had planned on doing some singing around campfires, but the only singing I did was in the shower when the steam loosened me up enough that I could make coherent noises. I never got the middle of my range back, but I could sing either high or low. Awkward. Anyway, I was okay, and am content to leave my bardic pursuits for some other time.

The mallet my father made me for driving stakes was a resounding success. Not only did it drive stakes well, but it also looked totally rad. It also tasted blood, smashing Torsten's thumb during an ill-considered attempt at driving a metal stake with a bit of wood on top of it to keep the mallet from splitting. Thumb-crusher does not tolerate poor workplace safety measures! Thumb-crusher drinks the blood of those who misuse it! Grahh, etcetera. Many jokes were made.

I also worked several shifts at Your Inner Vagabond, the Turkish coffee house in the smaller food court near the barn. I had been scheduled to waitress, but somehow that never happened, which suited me fine; I was in no mood for flirting, strangely. (Maybe that all got used up at the parties.) I worked in the kitchen, mostly slaving over the endless dishes. I did start to master the making of various of the drinks, however. It was generally chaotic fun, and I made some fun acquaintances that way. I had forgotten: I am shy. But the drinks there are yummy, and I was there when the Health Inspector came through and can happily say that despite it being Pennsic, things are pretty much up to code in there. Except when there was a hole in the floor that I fell through like twenty times, but they fixed that. At least it was no danger to the customers.

I'm probably forgetting things, but that's the bulk of what went on at my first Pennsic. I laughed so much and so often that at one point I had sore face muscles. I actually only had a hangover once; I learned my lesson. What's the secret?
When you go wandering around drinking at everyone's bars, bring a small cup. Really. I had this little goblet I borrowed from the household stock, which probably held about six to eight ounces. It was perfect, because people's tendency is to fill up your cup, and then everyone gets a new drink at the new place so finish up what you've got, and here's a shot, and... in short, disaster, unless you're smart and ask for water first thing at every new place.
I got hung-over, like an idiot, sitting at home drinking cup after cup of mead. Whoops. I'm not twenty anymore; my body doesn't just snap back anymore.
Oh yes, I did go wandering to Vagabond, and hung out with "Multipass!" Amber and her small harem of amusing menfolks. I did not get naked at clothing-optional bar night, though. I had meant to visit the neighbors more but wound up not really doing so as much as I'd meant to. Next year!

Oh, the pictures of fire-spinning and fire-breathing etc: One night Wicked Monkey invited us down to Burning Hand, where there was kind of a Fire Night going on. We hung out there a bit, but it started raining, so we skittered back home like little cockroaches. The rain died down, and Wicked Monkey showed up and used up the last of their fuel in our front yard, which was pretty rad. I don't know the SCA name of the Monkey who wasn't Zaliha; her real name is Amanda, and she was evidently pretty new at the twirling thing, given her excitement about it. I took a bunch of pictures and put them up so she'd have copies; her own camera's flash wouldn't turn off, and I don't think that flash photos would look nearly as cool. So that's what those pictures are of. Mostly the rain had died down; I guess it's possible to breathe fire in the rain, but the water gets in your eyes so you can't see what you're doing as well.
It was cool.

Yeah, OK, so, not so coherent. But it's all the details I can still easily remember. I'm not so much for coherent narratives when it's non-fiction.

hm

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:25:29 GMT

Sadly there are no photos of me at Pennsic. Well, there is one, taken rather close-up, and I am making a horrid face, the way I do. So in effect, there are no photos of me at Pennsic. Which is just as well. There were no mirrors at Pennsic and nothing to keep me from making Bad Garb Choices, so I undoubtedly did not cut a very dashing figure; it is just as well that I may keep my memories of Pennsic unrelated to my actual appearance there.
Chita-chita is the cutest kitty, incidentally. Which is not relevant to this entry, but there she is.

In a bit of something like irony, yesterday while I was trying to do my Pennsic laundry and hang things out on the clothes line to bleach in the sun and collect nice sunshiney smells, something was going on and the air was suffused with alternately woodsmoke and burning-other-things smoke smells. We're thinking it may have something to do with a building that burned down late last week about a mile away-- the oldest building in our village, as it turns out-- but we're not sure. So all the clothes I washed the Pennsic Funk out of now smell like... smoke. Yes. I may be re-doing some laundry. Also, like an idiot, I decided to pre-wash a whole bunch of green fabric I bought on clearance, in my load of darks. This was a great idea, except that one of the items in this "dark" load was... a towel with a picture of a leopard on it. The leopard now has green spots. All my black socks came out lovely, though.

But! I have my Pennsic photos online, and should be meticulously crafting a loving blog entry about them, so I'm going to go get right on that. I had to buy a Flickr Pro account to get them up, since I had 498 photos online and felt like, well, since I've been using the service for like four years, I might as well get a paid account. It's an experiment. We'll see how it goes. I'll hopefully be more prompt at getting photos up now that there's no limit on how much I can upload.

Anyhow, I will be writing up an entry to splain things, but in the meantime, here's the link to my Pennsic flickr set.

aside

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:58:48 GMT

We have a bottle of a Canadian maple liqueur.
"Hm," says Z, standing idly in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. "Canadians have been using the metric system too long."
"What?"
He holds up the tag from the neck of the bottle, which has recipes on it. "Add one quarter cup maple liqueur to two quarters cup maple syrup."
I waited for the punchline for a moment before realizing that was it. "Wait, two quarters cup?"

The reason he's reading the bottle is that the milk has gone funny so we have nothing to whiten our coffee, so we're using Bailey's and maple liqueur. I swear to God I'm not an alcoholic. Really I'm not. Oh, hey, Wikipedia backs me up: Liqueurs are medicinal! Thank God.

huh

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:03:06 GMT

My f-list won't let me go back past skip=800.
I did read it with all the communities filtered out, but even still, I didn't get all the way back to two weeks ago. So, doubly sorry if I missed anything there.

That said, I've had enough of this damn computer today. I've got most of a Pennsic report written up, but it's in email-to-my-mom format, so I'll need to do quite a bit of editing to have it suitable for LJ. ;)

home!

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 16:40:38 GMT

Rolled into my driveway around 7 pm last night, car stuffed full of sandy-damp junk. I didn't pack really, I just sort of backed my car up to my tent (I was parked near a drivewayish area so it was easy, unlike most people), bundled it all into the car, and then went and worked for three hours on the common-area takedown stuff.
So I'm home from Pennsic.
It feels really, really, really weird to type. Everything else, I've adjusted to with little to no problem-- as if I'd just taken a really long nap, as opposed to living in another world for two weeks-- but typing, whoa. Having some trouble here. Pardon any typos.

I had a fantabulous wonderful time at Pennsic and have many, many things to say about it, pictures to post, etc. I am absolutely going to go back as many times as I possibly can. I know I was fortunate in that the weather was absolutely ideal the entire time-- it only rained maybe twice, never terribly hard; there was some wind but not much; it never got over 85 degrees; it wasn't very humid. Etc. It was perfect weather-- though I know a few who got heatstroke up on the Sweaty Geti, and the one day I spent more than 5 or 6 hours up there taking classes and shopping, I myself stumbled home pretty worn-out and slightly unsteady on my feet with heat stress, it was never unendurably hot down in the Swamp.

But at the moment, I'm trying to take my time back on the computer in small doses.

I definitely met people I'm going to want to keep my whole life-- Big John With The Kilt, and his diminutive firebrand of a girlfriend Danielle from Kindred, and Kilij and Z-I-can't-spell-the-rest from Wicked Monkey, Regan from St. Jones' Mission, and Amber "Multipass" from Vagabond, and I made the fleeting acquaintance of innumerable other people that I will certainly miss (I will especially miss the pizza from Die Fledermaus-- it's not delivery, it's Die Fledermaus!).
To say nothing of my own camp mates, but since I will probably be joining the SCA, and regardless will be in Rochester for various reasons, I do not need to feel quite so melancholy about leaving them.

I think I can sum up what I loved most about it, before I burn out on computering entirely, however (I have been on for hours, trying to get through email and catch up on LJ-- anything important I'll just have to hope that it gets repeated because there's just too much for me to sort it comprehensively):
Conversations. You can just sit there and have lengthy and interesting conversations with the most fascinating people, for hours and hours, over various quantities of alcohol or whatever (those quantities including "none at all" more often than you'd think). Nobody's playing loud music, nobody's got a TV blaring, nobody's texting. Nobody's on their Crackberry, or at least not much. And most importantly, nobody's really on a schedule. Nobody's just hanging out and marking time until something better happens-- this is what they're here to do. The most structured / artificial use of time I personally witnessed was several highly amusing and intense rounds of a competitive card game called "Pit", made yet more awesome by our replacement of the game's bell with a small squeaky-toy lizard.

In short, it was basically the most mellow time ever. I have discovered a wonderful group of people with whom I can have a wonderful time.
I will be back. Oh yes. I will be back repeatedly.

Voice Post

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:07:41 GMT

Voice Post

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:00:33 GMT

yes, this

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:20:01 GMT

I got my picture taken with Z a bunch yesterday and it's my fat ass that will probably be used to illustrate the story in the paper. For better or for worse, there I am.
So I'm a bit anxious about all of that-- I'm not a good poster child, I'm too this, I'm not enough that, whatever. But there it is, and it seems that the guy is planning on doing a sympathetic story on size acceptance (rather than just getting me to make an ass of myself and then bringing in someone like MeMe Roth to tear me down, as has been done before), so I am just going to chill the fuck out and go hang out in the woods for a while.

But I just wanted to link to a Shapely Prose post that sums up a lot of the point I was trying to make to him, at least-- I understand, if you believe the Weight Watchers explanation of how weight loss works (Calories In / Calories Out) that it must seem like I'm lying when I say that Z and I eat the same amount. It simply doesn't make sense unless you assume that I'm misguided, and am just forgetting to take into account the gallon and a half of whole milk I drink every morning [note: I don't, actually] or something, something to explain why my BMI is 30 and his is 16 on the same diet. But it's not true: I really do eat the same, and exercise more. He really does eat as much as I do. And you have to understand, I have no reason to lie.
So here's Kate Harding's eloquent take on that phenomeonon: If Your Pants Are Above Size 14 You'd Better Hope They're Flame-Retardant.

Eh well. Anyway. I am off to Pennsic, and theoretically should be putting the computer down and walking away now. (Expect four or five more posts from me today.) So off I go. Have a nice couple of weeks and be good, Internet.

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:52:23 GMT

Not in bed yet! But will be soon. Am v. v. sleepy but waiting for bread to cool so I can get it out of the pan and go the hell to bed.

Anyway, photos this-a-way: my first cross stitch, the tent I'll be living in for the next two weeks, and Chita's home redecoration project involving a ball of yarn and us not being home, among other things.

how to use five pounds of sugar in one cooking session

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:22:49 GMT

Tonight I have made Amish Friendship Bread, because two different people had given me the starter and I had just kept feeding it instead of making it and now had like an entire giant mixing bowl full of starter, but I won't share that recipe because a) you probably don't want it, and b) Google will tell you just as well as me.

But I will share my other recipes that I made tonight that used up the rest of that five pound bag of sugar.

1) Sekanjiaban
I wanted something to drink to keep myself hydrated at Pennsic, in case the water tasted foul. Gatorade doesn't please me much, and the bright jewel-tones, while pretty, aren't exactly period-at-ten-feet. So I'd read about this vaguely Arabic kinda thing that you drink when lemons aren't in season, instead of lemonade. The Appalachian version, switchel, involved molasses and oatmeal-- ??!-- so I opted for this one instead.

2 cups water
6 cups sugar
combine over heat, stirring, until sugar is completely dissolved (bring just to a boil)
add 1 1/4 cups vinegar
Let simmer 15-20 minutes.
Remove from heat and add several sprigs of mint.
Let cool (which will take a while, as the syrup is rather thick)
Add 3-4 Tbsp over ice to a tall glass of water.

2) Pickled beets
1 cup water
1 cup vinegar
1 cup sugar
1 Tbsp pickling spice
4-5 med-lg beets, sliced in thin rounds
Put all in a big pot. Boil. Let simmer 15-20 minutes. Let cool. Can, bottle, jar, or put into a Tupperware in the fridge. Eat. Beware of getting totally stained.
(I doubled this one.)

That's how you go through five pounds of sugar in a night and yet don't even eat anything.

I figure, I gotta get all this stuff outta my kitchen. I hope my Pennsic campmates like pickled beets. And sweet-tangy-pungent drinks.

ggggghhhhhhhh

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:07:03 GMT

Am not packed for Pennsic. Garb is not finished. Thought I had just one more thing to do on the red kirtle, but did it and it didn't work (using eyelet tape as front closure-- no good), so, uh, that's not finished. Blue kirtle's skirt not finished. Did the polyester "wool-look" houppelande in record fast time, but it needs a bit of finishing work and it needs facings at the collar and needs to be hemmed.
And.... I busted the sewing machine!
Just as I finished the last long seam on the houppelande, the drive belt snapped. I'm not sure that's what the part is really called, but it's a rubber belt that connects the motor to the big wheel that drives the needle. It snapped, so I can run the motor all I want but the needle won't move. I know how to replace it-- when I first discovered the sewing machine, the belt was broken, but there was a replacement sitting right there in the case, still in plastic with a Jo-Ann's receipt from 1992.
I have to buy another one, and I just freaking went to Jo-Ann's, and don't have time to go back.

So I can use my sewing machine if I want, but I have to turn the flywheel by hand. Which is actually fine by me, but it's slow. Faster than handsewing, sure, but slower than using the motor.

Maybe I'll take the machine in to get serviced once I get back from Pennsic...

But anyway. I'm not finished with, like, *any* garb. But I won't be naked, and I'm bringing all my stuff to do some hand-sewing. By the second week I'll look OK. I hope.

I haven't started packing, but I have collected everything I need and don't need to go buy anything else, so that's something.

I am getting ready now to go to the local newspaper's office for a photo shoot. They're using me and Z as illustrations for their article on "Weight Acceptance", which I'm trying to convince the guy is more normally called either "Fat Acceptance" or "Size Positivity" by those who actually are involved in it. He can call it what he want, but it'll probably be taken more seriously if he calls it what most people call it. That's all I'm really saying there.
He wants me to pose with a bunch of beets, while Z poses with a bag of pork rinds. Because those are actual foodstuffs that we had in our house, and he thought it was hilarious that I won't touch the pork rinds because I think they're gross, but Z loves them. And is the skinny one.

Eh, I hope it turns out well. You know what I mean. I'm not exactly at my ease being set up as the poster child for the unrepentant fatties of my hometown. But I'm not ashamed either. And I'm glad the story's being done, I'm just nervous about it. That's all.

Anyhow, we should go-- I have to buy replacement beets, because the ones I already had, that I was going to use, the greens have gone a bit yellow in the fridge and just don't look good. So wish me luck.