anagram of brat

I wanted to get row five done today but lost a couple hours of beading time due to a misplaced needle and no spares, since I'd forgotten to bring them with me to cell23's parents' this afternoon. The misplaced needle turned up right before we left, in my nephew's sock. D: To his credit, he didn't freak out, just went "ow," plucked the needle from his foot, asked whose it was, and when I sheepishly admitted it was mine, sternly lectured me about how I should be more careful with my things.

Shame is being admonished by an 11 year old.

Eh, it was counterbalanced by me making casserole, feeding it to the kids, and having them declare it to me their new third favorite food. So, there's that. Of course, Kidzilla then made us both sit through The Adventures of Food Boy as her Saturday Night movie. Some day, when she is a teenager, I will PUNISH her for that. >_< And for Young Hercules in 3D. Then again maybe this is the universe paying me back for dragging my sister to see Masters of the Universe when I was about her age. That movie is amazing when you're eight years old and terrible just about anytime else.

I put on Toys as brain bleach after the kids had gone to bed. That is a strange ass movie. Very pretty, but super weird.

To bed with me, I have a bell performance and I have to be at church at ass o'clock tomorrow morning. >_<

Temperatures for the next little while are expected to stay between 60 and 70 F. There are peeper frogs out at night. The cat is going more apeshit than usual and spends hours either at the open back patio door or in the newly de-plasticked living room window. Or trying to make a break for it when we open doors. Expecting her to resume her rocket powered charge through the patio screen at any moment.

Met with Lesley Arak last night to talk wedding photography. Have some lists to make.

It's pi(e) day. I don't think I will get any tasty pie today, but it's only 10:30am, who knows what lovelies the day might bring.

I took a mental health day yesterday to rest up and deal with the brain weather, though that was quickly explained by the onset of ladytimes. Feh. Thankfully the cramp fairy has the month off, but her spot seems to be filled by the EAT EVERYTHING fairy. I tell you what, this whole having an appetite thing is awful. I just want to eat ALL THE THINGS all the time. I would appreciate a happy medium between pig out and nonconsensual fast.

I baked cheddar biscuits though. Nom nom nom.

Anyway, the brain weather seems to have settled a little bit, though I clearly still have some ex-related angries that need to be either put to bed once and for all (not likely) or cheerfully beaten back into their little boxes until later (probable). No real point to stressing myself about it until I find some way back onto my wellbutrin.

Somehow after swearing that I wouldn't freelance anymore I found myself helping one of the campus cops with his photography web site after work on Monday. Oh well. Extra money is never a bad thing.

I have a date tonight with CuteGirl - we are seeing The Artist. We'll see how I do w/r/t terrified lesbian sheep tendencies.

Still struggling with creative projects and the actual working on of them.

I have accidentally an aloe plant. One of the techs upstairs was putting this pot of aloe shoots out with a "TAKE ME HOME" so I was all what the hell, I used to be really good at growing aloes. Actually I have to get cracking on this year's gardening projects. Now that it's warming up I need to empty out and wash out last year's pots and decide what things I want to grow besides tomatoes. Also repot Spidey, he's looking a little sad.

cell23 and I are into the fourth season of Breaking Bad now. OMG this show. I can't even.

I have also broken my resolution to only have three books out from the library at a time. I met Lesley at the Jones last night and the temptation was just too great. Right now I have parts 3 & 4 out from Bujold's Sharing Knife series, Justine Larbalestier's Liar, Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest*, and Justin Cronin's The Passage out right now. Also reading Stolen continents : the Americas through Indian eyes since 1492. Occasionally I have to break up all the YA and fantasy stuff, and this book so far is pretty good. *sigh* because I really have oodles of time to read. Feh.

I feel like I need to use the time between now and PAX hermited up until I get more stuff finished, or at least until I feel like I have. Except the damn weather's all COME OUTSIDE AND SPEND TIME IN ME. I suppose I ought to enjoy these precious few days of springtime before the trees all wake up and start filling the air with their abominable itchy fornications.

* intrigued, as this series seems to have the same cover artist as the first three Kushiel books.

all right, LJ, I know some of y'all are closet bakers. Talk to me about baking mix recipes, aka make-your-own-bisquick.

1) The last loaf of pumpkin bread for the season. Except this time I'm adding rum raisins to it. The raisins are currently soaking up the rum in the kitchen and will for the next 45 min or so.

2) I have achieved a rather large bottle of Licor 43, a surprising feat as I remember running around last New Years Eve looking for this stuff and failing to find it anywhere in the valley. I have also procured orange juice. There will be lovely creamsicle tasting things tonight.

3) It's cold outside, and rumors of snow abound for tonight. How about something hot? Making a big batch of "winter tonic": usually a tablespoon or so of black currant cordial, another tablespoon of lemon drop schnapps, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of honey, and two teaspoons of sugar in a large mug, top it up with boiling water and stir. Yeah. Making a gallon jug of that. Still toying with the idea of going to buy a thermos to hold it in to keep it hot - figure I've got a bit until Bed Bath and Beyond closes to make up my mind.

80 proof drinks and dessert aside, wow. I'm remembering what my mindset and overall state of life was like on New Years Eve last year and I'm kinda floored by how much better I am this year. Here's hoping the uptick continues straight on through to next. Again, I don't have resolutions so much as a few modest goals to work towards in the coming year... and at some point I gotta find time to go to PAX, code and deploy a game, hold down my jobs, go to more movies, and, um, get married. 2012 is going to be rawther busy year, but I believe it will also be a good one. I've got a feeling about it, and for once it's not utter dread.

But first, the celebrating of getting through this one, ya? Starting with boozy raisins...

One of the things I have been introduced to by way of the farmers market is this stuff:



That stuff. Is. Delicious. Specifically, it's Bug Hill Farm's black currant cordial. Seriously, I put a splash of it into a glass of lemonade with honey last night? Holy God in Seven Thousand Blazing Heavens. It's apparently really good in cider as well and currants are apparently insanely good for you, so there you go.

Anyway, if you're local, they're at the Amherst Winter Market on Saturdays, and if not, this is their web site, or explore some options local to you. Me, my next stop for this stuff is researching using it in marinade - so far all I've found is it's apparently really good on lamb. Hmm.

It seems I only had spoons and brainspace for the cooking bits of my aspirations for this weekend, but that's okay. After the frenzy of chopping and cooking tornadodom early yesterday afternoon I seemed to need the downtime and rest while stuff was actually doing the whole cooking thing, so I have no real regrets other than the usual nagging "I have to work tomorrow and the house is a mess and I haven't gotten anything done!" litanies, and since the last item is blatantly untrue (WTF, brain, were you absent all weekend?) and the house is actually better looking than usual owing to cell23 and I cleaning the kitchen, picking up around the living room and getting the bags of recycling out of the house yesterday, I'm cheerfully ignoring the little voices and resting on my laurels.

The tomato sauce came out the pot this morning after seventeen hours of cooking (!) and was quite yummy, though had more of a chili note than a pasta sauce underpinning to the taste. More wine, garlic and sugar needed I think. A jar of it is in the fridge in anticipation of a pasta night later this week (maybe) and several containers of it are in the freezer. I then cleaned out the pot and filled it with the split pea soup components I'd assembled yesterday, three large smoked pork neck bones (yeah yeah, insert your favorite southern black stereotype here) and a couple quarts of chicken stock; eight hours later there was some seriously delicious soup waiting to be boxed up and frozen for lunch. That came out perfect - other than swapping out turkey neck for pork, it tastes pretty much exactly like Ruthy's. (Maybe better, but don't tell her that! Or Dad for that matter!) Even dinner last night was damn tasty, being my usual OJ chicken fancy dinner standby, and I think I've finally solved the dilemma of getting the gravy for that to thicken up in a reasonable amount of time (how long have I been making that? five years? sheesh) and since I made a whole tray of breasts a couple of those are portioned out and boxed up for lunch too. My goal really is to quit nickel and diming money on food, be it lunches, dinners or snacks; it adds up alarmingly fast (I do like to eat when intestinal drama permits it) and when I do the math at least 3/4s of where my money disappears is down my throat. (shut up.) Need to cut that shit out if I'm ever going to a) save b) pay down anything. Hopefully between the split pea and the potato leek soup, the chicken and pasta, I'll get that in better control, at least for the next couple weeks.

Still need to figure out what I'm going to do with the last few tomatoes, cause I need to do something and no bites on anyone possibly taking them. I ended up freezing the carrot greens; maybe I'll just blanch, puree and freeze for later? I suddenly wish I'd paid attention when Carole was teaching herself to can vegetables. :/ A project for next summer maybe, depending on whether I decide to do the whole tomato vines in pots thing again. Also kinda wish I had a juicer.

I wasn't cooking QUITE the whole time this weekend - cell23, deliriumdeva and I did make a trip down to the diner late last night for coffee and light fare and shooting the shit with lysscat, which there was plenty of because the diner was dead for a Saturday. You guys, there's this Greek coffee frappe on the menu that not only is delicious, but had so much caffeine that I was sorta seeing funny auras around stuff after drinking half of it. *chuckle* not that lysscat didn't try to warn me that I'd probably start vibrating after drinking one, but at the time that seemed like more of a recommendation than a deterrent. Still is. Whee.

Speaking of interesting effects on brain chemistry, I am current buzzed nigh unto tipsy; in celebration of getting a prodigious amount of slow cooked stuff done, I cracked open one of the licor43 nips and had that celebratory cocktail I'd been craving since first having this stuff at Christmas. And oh.... dear fates, it's just as good as I remember. And as potent. I now know why two glasses at Stanley's had me more than a little wobbly for a while - this sweet sneaky shit is 62 proof, which is murder to a lightweight like me and yeah, I notice that my already miniscule tolerance to alcohol has vanished along with my weight so I'm being good and only having one tonight. I'll save the other nip for when I need a treat with a punch.

cell23 seems to be on a "so many drugs were involved in the making of this movie" jag on Netflix - over the past few days I've sat through most of both Hunter S. Thompson movies (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Where the Buffalo Roam) and today, Cannibal; the Musical. (I don't necessarily blame drugs for that one - Trey Parker and Matt Stone kind of naturally excrete crack into their bloodstream from some gland or another.) Also rewatched Hot Tub Time Machine, since cell23 had never seen it and it's just amiably silly enough to survive a second watching a year or so later. Currently behind on all of my TV watching other than Doctor Who. Still need to make a media consumption post at some point. Argh.

I think right now I need to eat something to soak some of the Cuarenta y Tres out of my blood though.

• I'm getting better. The whole forcing myself to eat until my body stops treating food with suspicion seems to be working. Balancing it with lots of fluids, which seems to help. Small snacks instead of actual meals also seems to be the right way to go, especially since my stomach still likes to be all like NO after ten bites of anything. Not exactly 3 meals a day friendly right there.
  
  Surprisingly so far what has been pretty well accepted right now is cheese. I would think it would be something that would make me feel horrible but apparently this is not my week to be dairy-sensitive. So the last few days one of my primary nibbles is chunks of hard sharp yummy. grinninfoole treated me to a small brick of Gruyere on Thursday and today at the farmers' market the lady at the Chase Hill Dairy Farm stand gave me the remainder sample chunk of her sold out Queso Veijo, so for right now at least it's an easily indulged craving.
  
  
• Speaking of which, I did indeed go out to lunch with grinninfoole on Thursday, though considering my digestive issues I opted to have chicken noodle soup instead of Bueno y Sano. I do enjoy our lunch dates, it seems to be a nice check-in/how are we doing for both of us and have some frank discussion about depression, recovery, efforts at being more social/adult/goal oriented and how all that's going for us. Other than my health issues, we both seem to be on an upswing at the same time, which is excellent.
  
  
• D&D went decently on Thursday night; after a group consensus that combat and general gameplay needed to be tightened, I think overall we all did better. Apparently putting a chart down on my combat cheat sheet listing all my dice roll values helped me a lot - a fair amount of what slows me down during game, believe it or not, is trying to figure out what 17+26-4 is. We seem to be approaching the end of our campaign, and while I like playing Mare and enjoy the band of characters we've got going, I think I'm in agreement with avalon616 here - epic tier is kinda rough and aspects of it are starting to poke me in the "this is why you never liked endgame raiding in WoW either" place. Starting to. They haven't quite gotten there yet. We'll see how we progress.
  
  
• Work is actually pretty good now that back to school rush is over and the work study minions are starting to know what they're doing. The bad part is that my layout's been accepted so now I'm on the profoundly unfun bit of website design where I have to translate pretty shit in photoshop into CSS. Eugh. And I still have Other job stuff to do so if I can find a bit of time to work on that this weekend, next week should be nice, money wise.
  
  Oh and yesterday (well actually today, but never mind) was my boss's birthday. Apparently most of a slice of red velvet cake doesn't disagree with me either, go figure. ITS does not scrimp on the baked goods, seeing as besides the red velvet there was this cake called "to die for" that looked too much like diabetes on a plate to even want to get near, but damn. Also ITS has a fair amount of Polish folks. There was a rousing chorus of "Sto Lat" as the cakes were getting cut.
  
  
• Kiddos are here, and for the most part, behaving themselves. Kidzilla's missing front tooth is ridiculously cute when she giggles:
  
  
  
  See? Oh here, since Lil'Beast decided to butt into the picture taking have a bonus.
  
  
  
  We had a nice visit this morning from their grandparents (chirping_monkey's side) who dropped off a kitchen playset for them. Lil'Beast kept coming down the stairs and serving us invisible cakes. These are the moments that keep me from eating him, I swear.
  
  Every so often I have an "AAAAH TOO FAST STOP GROWING" with them. Between Kidzilla's facial window, having to raise her bike seat this afternoon, and the fact that Lil'beast is now too big for his PJs, tricycle and almost his sandals... yeah. They've both changed so much in the two years I've been regularly part of their weekends on this end of MA. And yeah, I realize it's what kids do, lol, come on, I'm still having issues with my nephew being legal to drink and getting tattoos and macking on women cause he tall and cute. Somewhere in the back of my brain he stopped growing around 12 and his siblings and Alejandra all stopped accordingly as well, no matter what their facebook statuses say. One of those things, I guess.
  
  
• We also managed to make it out to the farmers market, as I mentioned earlier. Came home with ingredients for some ghost pepper chili (which I will not be eating, thank you) and I've been bugging cell23 for two weeks to make potato leek soup, so he got stuff for that too. Noms are afoot. And the kids got maple candy and cheese and cookies so they as usual made out like bandits. I didn't personally get too much this time around, but I'm thinking next week I'll stop by the astarte farms tent, buy up a whole big bag of their end of season tomatoes as well as any I get off Icky and Sticky in the next week or so, plus a few other bits and pieces and try my hand at making an army sized batch of tomato sauce in the crock pot.
  
  
• New eggs in the cave today! I know I know "you still play that game? lolwut?" yeah yeah shut up.
  
  
  

Yeah, that's kinda life as I know it right now. In a few hours it'll be time for me and some of the crew to head down to Northampton for burlesque, and then tomorrow I think there's apple picking happening since we didn't get to go for Kidzilla's birthday. Definitely creeping on up to Fall... cannot wait...

Farmers Market + August = so many tomatoes. (And basil. And garlic. And basil. And local sharp fancy cheese. but mostly OMG tomatoes.)

Remind me next year when I'm shopping for things to grow that I need to get a couple of sungold cherry tomato vines. UNNNFFF those are fucking delicious.

Tonight cell23 is making margarita pizza for dinner, then I'm roasting up most of the crate of grape tomatoes for tomorrow and hopefully the rest of the week (though judging how fast I ate them last time, probably not) and the sungolds are just for drive-by snacking for me and the kids. Considering little miss "I don't like tomatoes" Kidzilla has been scarfing them by the handful, I don't expect those to last too long.

Speaking of things Kidzilla will eat by the handful, Goo is kinda crazy happy with the strawberry production right now, which is funny because she's technically out of season, but now it's all FLOWERS! BERRIES! MOAR FLOWERS up in her pot. May have to toss her into a bigger pot soon, she's the only one that didn't get an upgrade.

I was a little worried about TV's Frank, as he kinda came up stunted with brown leaves, and I wasn't sure he was gonna make it after I repotted him, but no, both him and Dr. Forrester (who is in much better shape) both have proto-cukes starting. We may get something useful out of both of them after all.

Icky and Sticky continue to shoot upwards no matter how many suckers I pinch off of them, but as they are flowering like mad and still putting out tomatoes, I refuse to worry about them. Nothing ripe yet off of sticky. Beefs take a long ass while. But they are SO GOOD when they're done so it's worth the wait.

The coleus pinching I nicked from behind Packards a couple of weekends ago has been sitting happily in a shot glass full of water on the kitchen counter, and since he now has little roots I plan to put him in dirt sometime this weekend. I think I've identified him as a Black Widow variety, so he may end up with "Parker" for a name, since Spidey is taken by the spider plant, who also has babies I want to stick in dirt when I have a minute. Not that I have too many of those.

And now, time to make me a sammich out of some of them tomatoes, ham and maybe a bit of that there fancy spanish cheese I also got at the farmers market. Nom.

You guys, it looks like an entire box of Crayola crayons just exploded onto my head, and yes I mean that in a very very good way. And yes, there will be pictures, I promise. Really my one problem is that there might not be ENOUGH color radiating out of my head what with the long skinny microbraids and since I intend on wearing it in two very high pigtails for pax, I may be up Thursday or Friday night snipping out additional yarn to make into falls for the day. Or I might just decide fuck it. Whatever it looks amazing... and thank heavens I have a neverending supply of black/dark clothing - anything brighter than maroon is gonna clash horribly with this, lol.

I finished rewatching season 1 of Buffy while yarning up last night. (Can we say all hail the Netflix gods?) This is only my second time through the series, so this is the go-round in which I get to appreciate how far in advance Joss Whedon set up some of the key events later on, cause damn, foreshadowing a go-go. Also I'm kind of impressed by how well the series has held up after 14 years, The effects are starting to show their age, but everything else is still really engaging and watchable. And as usual when watching an older series, I'm O_o by how young everyone (David Boreanaz in particular) looks. You kinda want to run up to all the Scoobies and pinch their cheeks. Thanks to the glory of Netflix, it should be much easier to watch Buffy and Angel concurrently this time around seeing as I won't have the issue of having to maneuver between DVD sets. Ah the wonders of modern technology.

cell23 needs to leave stuff in the crock pot more. By 5pm the house smelled wonderful and dinner was rather horrendously delicious. Also I need to take a crack at making stew sometime soon.

Today: work, to-do list, cleaning, bells, not killing the cat for being a dickbutt. Not in that order.

What are people giving up/working on for Lent? I'm not doing it this year mostly cause I didn't think about it.

*insert crabby whining about cell23's flight home being cancelled due to snowstorm*

I know I know, it's fine, I'd rather have him safe in DC than trying to travel in this mess, and he'll be home tomorrow, but still, ugh, *WHINE* my house is too damn quiet without him, even with music/news radio on.

There, okay I'm done now, stop throwing up.


In other news, I bounced out of bed at 8:30, worked pretty much all day, handled a crisis, and conducted more interesting experiments in Asian cuisine. (ETA: I apparently make a pretty damn good egg drop soup.) Also got the kitchen cleaned up finally. I'm apparently doing something right this week. And apparently bell rehearsal is still on, which I'm mostly yay about except for the venturing out in the cold part, which I'm not a fan of doing right now.

LOVE ME MY DEVOTED MINIONS:


Get your own valentinr

NOW LOVE KIDZILLA'S DRAGONS: