In which Dr. Mel’s going to Iceland next month, so he had to do some stash reduction.
The good news is that Mel, in a sudden stash-reduction fit, sent me two boxes of yarn:
Category Archives: Play
First loaf of no-knead bread: OM NOM OMFG NOM.
In which I record my first-ever bread baking experience in great and tedious detail! Yay!
I am not a baker. I have never made a loaf of bread in my life (except for in a bread machine, and that can’t possibly count for anything). In spite of this handicap, I am going to bake a loaf of bread. And live-blog it. And hopefully be able to eat it.
In November of 2006, a recipe for bread was printed in the New York Times. It sparked some kind of bread revolution, apparently. There are thousands and thousands of blog entries about it, there are entire websites dedicated to variations on the method, tons of pictures abound online, and you can spend hours watching people on YouTube gush about how awesome it is.
I don’t know how much of a pain in the ass kneading really is, but judging from the response to this recipe, it’s freakin’ bad. Anyway, here’s the vid that sparked a baking revolution:
Continue reading First loaf of no-knead bread: OM NOM OMFG NOM.
Polaroid SX-70
In which I tell you all I know about the Polaroid SX-70!
I have two SX-70s. One is a lovely silver and leather top-shelf SLR, and the other is a black plastic Model 3 (the non-SLR model). I’m lucky in that I got them both really cheap, and they both function beautifully and close completely. They’re really cool, compact, portable cameras.
SX-70s were made to take a particular kind of film (Polaroid SX-70 integral print) that is, of course, totally discontinued now, but the cameras can be altered to shoot 600 instant film (which has also been discontinued, since as of early last year Polaroid no longer manufactures any film at all). The 600 film you can still find is long expired, so buyer beware. If it’s been stored properly it will shoot just fine. If it’s been stored badly it might give you interesting, moody images, or it might not work at all.
Christmas loot.
In which I tell you about the gifts I received.
For Christmas I got a Kindle gift certificate (yay moar ebooks!), a red goblet, candy (some of it filled with tequila, I kid you not!), a hand-made tote bag, cash, and a little herb garden kit.
I really wanna buy myself some sort of shiny new electronic device for Christmas (a new phone, Kindle, or iPod) but I’ll need to buy school books next week. After I’ve done that, I’ll be able to get myself something fun. I think it might have to be a phone, though, since mine now shuts itself off at random.
Last night, my brother and I walked over to Amity’s and stood around the fire on her patio and drank beer and talked to people. It was nice. I love having a friend five blocks away; it makes me feel like I really live here now. Continue reading Christmas loot.
Playing the 4th annual Mt Rainier Rhythm & Blues Festival
In which there’s a blues festival.
Saturday morning my alarms went off at 5:35 and 5:45 respectively. I showered, dressed, grabbed my gig bag and walked out the door at 6:15. IN THE MORNING. After sleeping maybe two hours.
Curt and Cookie picked me up, we grabbed breakfast at McDonald’s and drove to Richland, where we transferred to Tim’s truck and continued driving.
At the festival, we played the cafe at 12:35 and the main stage at 3:40. The crowd was appreciative and the sets were fun. Mineral, WA is lovely and the weather was perfect.
Then we drove home.
I spent ten hours in the car yesterday!
The Flickr set, such as it is, is here.
What I'm Reading
In which there are books. In various formats.
I’ll start school in eighteen days (if the financial aid office at WWCC ever awards me any aid, that is) and probably won’t read much that isn’t assigned for the next nine months. That being true, I thought I’d share my current reading-for-pleasure list with you.
“Real” Books
As far as treeware goes, there’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-third Annual Collection that I haul out every once in awhile. I’m not sure if I’ve read it before or not, but I don’t remember the stories so it’s just like reading them for the first time anyway. There’s also Eternal Wisdom, Upadeshamritam Part 2. I have read this before, but it was different water then and I was a different bridge.
Ebooks
The last three items I opened on my Kindle were the October 2010 edition of Asimov’s Science Fiction (the double issue! yay! delivered wirelessly while I wasn’t even looking!), Bright Of The Sky (a loss leader Amazon.com suggested to me and which I downloaded because hey, it was free), and Free As In Freedom: Richard Stallmann’s Crusade for Free Software.
The last three ebooks I added to the Kindle were Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life, Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
I have fifteen non-fiction items on the Kindle, all free samples from Amazon, that I have not yet begun to read, and I’m on page three of Cory Doctorow’s Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. I guess I forgot it was on there because I buried the ebook in a folder I haven’t looked into for awhile.
I bought the latest Clarkesworld Magazine a few days ago and am about to crack into that, and I’ve been reading Cryptonomicon on and off for months. It’s hilarious and brilliant, but somehow I never feel compelled to read it. (My favorite Stephenson book was Anathem; I actually finished that in a reasonable amount of time. It took me forever to read Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, and forget about The Baroque Cycle; I’ll never read those. NOTHING should require that many words to convey!)
Miscellaneous Book Facts
Total number of ebooks (including magazines and today’s NYT) on my Kindle: 79
Total number of ebooks on my iPod (in five different reader apps): 110 (a few of which are duplicated on the Kindle)
Total number of ebooks in Calibre: 304 (about a sixth of which are DRM-locked to devices I no longer have but most can be re-downloaded for the current device)
Total number of “real” books I own: 113 (most of which are cookbooks, and 6 of which are musical scores)
Much Ado About Nothing, Now With Moar Vodka!
In which a tradition is born.
A year ago, Left Coast Girlie and I went to see the Shakespeare Uncork’d production together and had such a great time we did it again this year.
Here’s how it went:
She said she’d be here at six, but for some reason I remembered it as seven and fell asleep. G’ma called up the stairs at ten of, inviting me to watch something about daredevil pilots on television and woke me; I grabbed my phone and saw that LCG was going to arrive in moments and damn it why didn’t I take a shower earlier?
I dressed quick like a bunny and we got into her car and went to the Peony, where we sucked down a couple cocktails each. We got to the amphitheatre just as the show started; the weather was perfect and the show was great. (We both totally cried when poor Hero was defamed.)
After the show, we went back to the Peony for a couple of rounds and hooked up with TonyG, Toni, and Renee. Then we picked up Jayrob and went to the Green for awhile. Afterhours was at Jayrob’s place, and LCG and I sat on the patio and hollered at each other about organized religion and spirituality until we decided we were exhausted. I threw her into the front bedroom and went to bed myself.
At eleven the next morning, I woke up and went and found LCG. I made some falafel; we watched Screamers on SyFy. She hung out until she had to pick her son up at three. It was a supremely mellow day.
Yay Shakespeare! Yay hanging out with friends half the night!
This is why I'm pudgy.
In which there’s a recipe. Sort of.
After my last post, I went to the kitchen feeling poor and dejected. I knew I had corn tortillas, some cheese, and half a can of refried beans in the fridge. I figured I’d nuke the beans and have a taco or two. AGAIN.
Instead, I made enchiladas!
Not only was there half a can of refried beans in the fridge, but also milk and most of an 8 oz container of sour cream, and some grated Parmesan that was just about expired. I also had a can of fire-roasted chiles in a cupboard.
I nuked three tortillas to soften them, put in some beans and rolled them up. Then I covered them with a chile cream sauce and nuked them, finishing with some leftover salsa and a chopped green onion.
The sauce loosely follows the one in this recipe, but made use of what I had lying around, so it contained Parmesan and cumin instead of Swiss.
Not only was this totally delicious, but I have enough sauce leftover to pour over eggs on toast in the morning. Yum!
Twelve of Twelve
In which I do a meme.
A quick google doesn’t reveal to me where it came from originally, but the 12 of 12 idea is that on the 12th day of the month you take 12 pictures and put ’em on the innertubes. Vuboq does it sometimes. It’s what I did today.
Behold, twelve images of my twelfth of July:
I made eggs for breakfast. Mexican eggs. This is mainly because all I had in the pantry was tortillas and a can of tomatoes, and not because I love huevos rancheros. Honestly I’m pretty indifferent to the dish, but it fills the belly. Plus: it’s Mexican food.
I worked on a data entry project for NLW. It was pretty fun until the upload failed and I couldn’t fix it ’cause I had no freakin’ idea what to put in the PID field, since there were successful uploads with blank PID fields. I was all, WTF, AMAZON DOT COM, YOU COQUETTISH BEAST, YOU.
Gratuitious.
In which I’M dieting, so YOU get to look at pictures of food.
Here’s my breakfast! Only 400 calories!
Here’s some soup I had the other day!
That soup was good! GAWD I MISS THAT SOUP!
Hmm, soup.
Oh, yeah, this was really good, too:
And this:
And this:
And this:
AW HELL!
Oh, wait! Guess what! I’ll be having this for lunch today:
Argh!!! All I wanna do is eat, and I JUST ATE.
This dorky, obsessive post brought to you by
thebastards evil geniuses over at:
the