... well, not the moon's fault anyway.

The pollen counts have been ramping up higher and higher.  My medication worked for the first few days I was taking it, but my flow tests have been going steadily down for the last five days, and we had a really busy weekend.

( Read more... )

Well... kinda, when I don't starve the boys. Our household has a tradition, on Friday mornings we almost always bake cinnamon rolls for breakfast. I usually set up the dough the night before and let it rise in the fridge and John usually does the baking when he gets up. I'm glad he's a morning person and I don't have to be. But last night, I found the roll of beignet dough in the freezer, so I pulled it out and stuck it in the refrigerator. So this morning we had beignets instead of cinnamon rolls. *grin*

But I was slow getting up. And Jet came and said he was STARVING, so could I come cook them? So I did and Jet helped by watching from very far away from the hot oil. They turned out really well, so the recipe does really freeze well, too. Yay and yummy. I make half the recipe as written and then just use half the next morning and freeze the other half... so for the three of us a quarter of the recipe makes plenty.

Uhm... I actually just threw in "enough" cherries and chocolate... so this is kind of a guess... the base is actually, kinda, derived from Barbara Albright and Leslie Weiner's Mostly Muffins. I do it as a bread when I'm not up to dishing out and cleaning a muffin pan. I'm also at altitude... so I've modified this for sea level. If you're at altitude like I am, I'd add 3 Tbs flour and one ounce of milk.

( Cut for recipe. )

... usually, when one says that one is on fire, one means it figuratively, not literally.

I've been really concentrating, for the last few days, on a multi-chapter Bleach fanfic with a lot of great help from incandescens. Part of what let me finally do it was realizing that while sketching from already existing work is easier, but it really is doing art. Writing from other people's characters with established personalities is easier than coming up with them from scratch, but the work of doing the writing is still part of the discipline of writing. I think it's the first thing that has really been able to occupy my WHOLE brain in a very long time. I'm really enjoying the complexity of braiding one thing into the next, and all the characters are starting to take me by the hand and go, "No... like *this*."

I actually started with the whole of the goal for the story. Plot points that I wanted to touch on, things I wanted to incorporate. Where it was going to end and how.

I can tell when the story is working when I start just shaking from what I just wrote. Also, there have been moments when something a character does that just floors me. It's been very, very cool.

I learned, though, from November, that I want to keep all the pieces until the whole is done. That I really needed to plan it if it was actually going to develop through a particular point and end in a way that was satisfying. While the dreams were cool to start, they have all petered out in my head because of irredeemable problems of beginnings without an end in sight.

It is taking my whole head. That's my only excuse.

The fire alarms went off when a pot pie I'd stuck in the toaster oven for lunch well... turned into carbon. I got to it before it completely caught on fire, but it was too close for me.

And, for dinner, half of the teriyaki short ribs caught on fire outside in the grill. My hair is still kind of frizzy in front from when I pulled them all out. It is very odd to blow ones dinner out.

It's been a long time since I burned that much food.

My only excuse might be that the rest of my brain is on fire, too....

I can't spell beignets to save my life. I had to look it up from the recipe. *laughter*

But they turned out great. Got up at 7 to fry them so that we'd be done with breakfast in time for John to make his meeting and to get Jet to the bus on time. Everyone really enjoyed them, but Jet was pretty tired and hadn't had enough sleep, so he was kind of teary about not being able to watch Sakura in the morning.

But he really loved watching the donuts fry (They PUFF UP, Mom!) and they did really, really well. He ate five of them and proudly showed me all the bubbles inside. *laughter*

I nearly never deep fry anything, but I finally figured out a way to do it without making a complete disaster area of the stove. I used a small wok instead of a fry pan, and kept the oil fairly shallow, so no splatters. It was deep enough, in the middle, to lay the dough gently into the oil and not have it stick to the bottom at all. So it was perfect.

We woke up to four inches of snow all over the backyard. The streets had a thin film of it still on, but when the sun came out that cleared in a hurry.

I roasted two pie pumpkins in the morning, and then made two pumpkin pies and an apple pie in the afternoon. I usually like the Best Recipe recipes and how they turn out, but I really hated the pie crust recipe they have in the book, as it uses so much equipment that it makes my head spin a bit. Plus, food processor is not the best thing for a liquid mix, which is what the pumpkin custard really is, and I had a pretty decent spill while trying to get the filling into a crust that was too small for the filling. Ah well.

I mixed up a bit more pumpkin custard and added it to the filling and brought out a whole other pie crust, and that worked out great.

But it pretty much took all day, which made me kind of grumpy about everything.

The boys did snow ball fights, went sledding, and I had a short snowball fight with Jet, too, and it was fun. We talked through what "snow day" meant, and he laughed and laughed about it being a holiday already, so he couldn't get out of school for the snow day.

John made dinner, though, from frozen steaks and green beans, and, after dinner, Jet and I got in two hours of Kingdom Hearts II, but I accidentally did the last chapter of the 100 Acre Wood when Jet really, really wanted to do it, and he was very sad about that. I was sad, too, and hadn't known that he wanted to do it. I guess I should have as that's the one world he feels comfortable doing the playing for the game. Ah well... I backed up and did the rest of the Simba world again and then handed the controls over to Jet and he finished it off again. When he was in bed he said that he hadn't really wanted me to go back. So I couldn't win.

Ah well.

I asked him to forgive me for making the mistake, and he thought about it and did.

The hot tub was fixed just a day or two ago, so it got hot again just in time for the really cold weather. It felt great, but the snow between the toes after the long, hot soak was still something of a shock. So it is.

I made apple sauce today.  A person from church was bringing in lots of big ziploc bags filled with little apples from their tree.  I'd originally been thinking about apple pie, but really didn't want to wrestle with a crust today.

So I just peeled and quartered the whole bag of apples into the slow cooker.  I added a quarter inch of water at the bottom and a sprinkling of cinnamon on top and just left it for the morning.  When we came back from lunch with the old work gang, the whole house smells of cinnamon and apples.  Yum.

And the consistency is just about perfect after judicious application of a potato masher.  Yum... apple sauce.  No sugar added and nothing but apples and cinnamon.  Can't go too wrong from that.

My sister is doing okay.  Her condo is not threatened.  I am glad.

I also made ice cream stuff this afternoon while I could.  Jet loves using his ice cream maker, and it's fun with the grandparents in the house to have them help him make it.  So I thought it would be good to just get that made and maybe after dinner, we could freeze up some ice cream.

The cuffs on the sweater have been a bit of a bear, but I'm doing both of them at the same time so I can evenly distribute the colors on them.  Instead of just going ahead and doing them red on burgundy, I'm actually graduating the colors the same way they are on the sweater.  I liked the difference of the longer cuffs on the pull over, so I'm doing that as well.  Having both cuffs on two circular needles, like knitting two socks at the same time, has made it so that I was able to use every inch of a couple of colors I was nearly short on.  But managing four yarns that way has been kind of tiresome.  Possible, but only just.  Once I'm past the cuffs I should be able to sail through the arms while reading my Disciples homework.  I hope.

The day is absolutely gorgeous, mid-70's and sunshine and it's cool enough to be comfortable doing things.  I like it when it's the two weeks of fall here.  It's just wonderful.

Worked in the OUR Center kitchen this morning and early afternoon and my back and legs are telling me that they didn't like what I did, not one bit.

But I did. Oddly enough. I did. I don't usually work in the kitchen not because the work is hard and menial but because I have to interact with people all the time. Mostly it's the kitchen staff, but when I do it on the weekdays, I serve the food as well.

It is oddly humbling to look the homeless in the eye. Humbling to have them thank me for food that I made for them, and to say, "You're very welcome." Really. You are. You have no idea how much, either. Sigh.

There was a set of about half a dozen young men, probably in their early twenties, all rosy from working out in the cold. They were laughing about something and one of them was looking at another and I blinked because he was so beautiful. They could have been from some manga like Bananafish. And all of them were hungry for the beef pot pie Rick had scrambled to make from pre-packed beef stew and Bisquick.

The weather has gone cold. Hearty, heavy, hot food really hits the spot for these guys. We went through only two of five pans of the stuff for the first serving, but when seconds were called out, the other three pans went so fast, my right arm was sore from dishing the stuff out. The biscuit was very thick on the gravy, so I had to dig a bit to balance out the meat and bread. My servings were a bit huge, but I managed to hit is just right, and served the very last serving to the very last person right at 1 pm.

One of the guys that has been a client for some time, but has gotten a steady job and worked his way out of his hole now volunteers on a regular basis. His farewell to folks was, "Stay warm." I suspect he really knows what he's talking about. That struck me. So I found myself wishing that for folks as they left.

The volunteers had to scrounge up some chicken noodle soup from yesterday for our lunch. But John had taken me to Lucille's for breakfast, so we were well fueled for the whole lunch time, and even afterwards we went to King Soopers to get our own groceries. So that worked out well.

So I'm sore, but I'm happier at heart than I have been for a while.

There is no blessing quite like the blessing of a good, hot bath.

Our house has one of those smaller soaking tubs, where I have to fold up my legs and still be kind of propped up sitting to just fit. So it doesn't take that much water to fill the tub, but I still get the full on soaking experience. Someday, if we ever build our own home, I'd love to build into it a Japanese soaking bath, something more vertical where you sit up in a square bath and it takes a minimum of water, but you get complete immersion.

It only takes half a Lush bubble bar to fill the whole tub with bubbles, so I don't go through my Lush products quite as quickly as I'd like. I still have a Flying Saucers bar from way, way back, still wrapped in the butcher paper from the mail order site rather than the stuff I've been buying locally . But it crumbled beautifully and foamed up without too much perfume and I soaked. I even managed to wash my hair in the tub and it's been a long, long time since I've washed my hair in a bath. One gets used to showers when they're day in and day out but it seemed like a waste to not just use the water and get clean all over in it.

I was pretty sore, too, from the last couple of days.

( Read more... )

This was derived from Mark BIttman's recipe for biscuits in How to Cook Everything, which is the book I most recommend for learning how to cook... well... nearly everything... even kohlrabi. Yeesh.

My Ingredients:
9 ounces of all purpose unbleached flour (a little less then two cups, depending on how you measure it)
Scant teaspoon of salt
3 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of baking soda
2 Tablespoons butter
1/2 cup of chopped green onions
1/2 cup grated Cheddar cheese
1 cup plain yogurt

What I actually did:

I think I made something of a mistake in that I mixed the scallions and cheese into the other dry ingredients before the butter.  But the results were darn good, so maybe it wasn't a mistake.

Preheated the oven to 450.

MIxed all the dry stuff together.  Then grated the cheese into the bowl and chopped the scallions and threw them in.  Mixed the flour mixture.  Then I grated the two tablespoons of butter, right out of the fridge, into the bowl.  I tried to scrape everything off the grater, then, and used my buttery fingers to squash the butter into the flour a bit.

Then I added the whole cup of yogurt (the recipe says 7/8ths of a cup, but what am I going to do with 2 Tablespoons of yogurt?) and stirred with a spoon until it looked like it wasn't doing much good anymore.  I turned the whole thing out onto a floured board (our kitchen is all tiled which is terrible for kneading on, you can use a table if you have one.  *grin*) and kneaded the whole mass about a dozen times trying to get all the dry ingredients into the mass.  I failed and gave up at that point as I didn't want them to be too tough.   Then I just patted the dough to about an inch and a half thickness.  About a thick as my biscuit cutter.

Then I cut biscuits and put them on an ungreased quarter sheet pan.  I got six out of the first pat, two out of the second, and then used the last scrapes to make the last, rounded biscuit.  The recipe says 10-12, so I must have made them kind of thick, but so it is.  I put the biscuits so that they were just touching on the edges and then popped the sheet pan into the oven.  The recipe said 7-9 minutes.  I actually baked them 12 minutes until the tops were good and brown.

When they came out I let them sit a minute or two before using the spatula to get them off the pan. 

This was derived from Stephen Cresswell's Homemade Root Beer, Soda, and Pop and the recipe for Virgin Islands Ginger Beer.  I made changes, as you might be able to see.

What I used:
3 ounces fresh ginger root
1/3 cup honey
1 1/3 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons lemon juice (mine was frozen from squeezing the lemons I bring home from my parents)
3+ quarts of water (good drinking water, bottled if your tap is nasty)
1/4 tsp instant yeast (you can also use regular baking yeast, you just have to bloom it first by putting it in a quarter cup of water before throwing it into the bottle)

Hardware I used:
3 6 oz bottles and 8 12 ounce bottles with caps (you can sub in whatever will hold a gallon of liquid under pressure)
1 gallon bottle with cap for mixing things in
1 half gallon sized pot
1 funnel with mesh strainer that could go into the big gallon jug
1 bottle funnel
1 bottle capper
1 plastic mixing spoon

How I did it.
1. I actually went to the trouble of sterilizing pretty much everything that was going to touch the pop by soaking everything in a sterilizing solution that John often uses for his beer brewing work.  He was also moving a batch of beer from a carboy into a five gallon pop cannister to put CO2 on it, so we both used the solution for our work. 

2.  I put 2 quarts of water in the pot, and then grated the ginger root right into the pot.  I added the lemon juice, and brought the whole thing to a simmer.  Then I added the sugar and honey and stirred until it all dissolved and then simmered the whole mass for 20 minutes.

3. I put a lid on it and let it cool for 30 minutes.

4. I put a quart of water into the gallon glass jug.  I strained the warm ginger solution into the jug, and then added enough cold water to make the whole mass lukewarm and up to about a gallon.  I tried using a coffee filter to filter the solids out, but it was so slow and i didn't want it *that* clear.  I wanted some ginger cloud in it, so I used the larger mesh strainer instead.

5.  I capped and shook the jug, and then added the instant yeast to the jug and shook it again, thoroughly.  If you're using normal, dried baker's yeast, you should probably sprinkle the yeast on a quarter cup of water and let it stand for 15 minutes before pouring it in and shaking like mad.

6.  Jet and I poured the jug's contents into the bottles and then capped 'em.

7. I laid the bottles on their sides in boxes and pans in the garage and let them sit in the 80 degree warmth for two days and then popped one of the six ounce bottles to test the carbonation.  It was warm enough here that it was *done* at that point.  The little sixer spouted when we tried to open it, so I put all the bottles in the fridge, and the big ones don't over flow when I open them now.  The cold seems to allow the carbonation to stay in the drink better than when it's warm.

Three down, a few more to go...

( And homemade ice cream to boot! )

On the way back from seeing Ratatouille, we dropped by the farm that sells their own chicken eggs from chickens that run around debugging and weeding the garden. You will likely hear more about *them* in the future. Especially as Jet has become a master scrambled eggs maker for the family. *grin*

Mmmm... eggs...

After a night on ibuprofen, my mouth is back to at least a semblance of normality, though chewing is still something of a chore.

That, plus the fact that we had nearly a quart of ice cream mix from last Friday prompted me to go to Target. I'd been thinking of the Krups Le Glacier, but it's been discontinued, and John did a little research and found out that there was a Hamilton Beach machine that looked compact and solid enough to be useful for ice cream. It has an electric motor on it, so Jet could just turn it on and watch it work, so I decided to go and get it for myself, since I was feeling badly. Yeah, so I do shopping therapy, too.

I got it. Jet made ice cream the next day and he was so happy to watch it churn and freeze solid and then get Puffy! The thing beat enough air into it to double the volume, easily. And John thinks and I agree, that the barrel hadn't gotten cold enough, as it didn't freeze hard enough to stop the motor. So we had very, very airy ice cream.

The local dairy (no hormones, no antibiotics unless the animal is actually sick, and they say the milk was collected within 24 hours of delivery and it's been so fresh it lasts forever in those reused and reused glass bottles) will now deliver pints of half and half!! I think we're going to have quite a bit more ice cream this summer. *grin*

Oddly enough, even with my aches and pains and stuff, I am actually happy today. The temporary crown seems to be working okay. The *gums* are sore back there, but then that's where the dentist put a BIG HOLE with his novecain needle, so I'm not that surprised. The temp crown is working okay with careful chewing, but I'm trying, mostly, to stay off it until the gum is back up to snuff. But I've done what I can. And there isn't anything left to really worry about. So I'm good, on the most part, and, just maybe, the pain was a good recalibrater of what's now "good".

I finished spinning 8 ounces of wool in something close to fingering weight. But it might be a bit too fine, all in all, sigh, but so it is. I may just have to double it back on itself to get a good sock weight, but I should try it before deciding. I still hate being *too* fine for sock yarn, but maybe I should just to a lace leg and upper with it and just do a double strand across the bottom of the foot each time? I'll have to think about it. Lots of work that last.

I also finished the dark rainbow yarn. I need to take pictures.

I'm also into the third color of yarn on the phoenix, still six more to go, but I'm actually doing the feet of the bird! Soon the wing tips! Woohoo! I bought more red from Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins, and the needles that didn't work out I returned and bought some really expensive Mountain Colors sock yarn. I really wanted to do socks, somehow, and my sock needles are in Seattle. It's all on the packing table, so that's to the good.

Jet and I found the first two Avatar DVDs that I'd bought a long time ago. We watched them and Jet now wants to see a lot more. "Not as bloody as Rave Master," was the first thing he said about it, but then followed up,"I *love* the Avatar." So I'll follow this more closely for him, and I know that RightStuf has sales on the DVDs once in a while. I'm just afraid that I can only get ALL the Season 1 DVDs and can't just pick up the ones I need... I'll have to look more.

Jet was quite the trooper.

Tonight there was a dinner picnic with dessert potluck at a park that is relatively near our house. Just about a mile as the bike spins, so it would have been easy if... well... if we hadn't LEFT our working bicycles in Seattle. Hmph.

So we walked, instead. John pulled the red wagon loaded to the gills with ice and ice cream makings, as well as a very spare dinner of cheese, crackers, and apples as well as a few drinks.

( Read more... )

I think I'm a bit lost at the moment. Since we've lost Jet's school schedule and structure (school ended at the end of May), there is very, very little structure anymore to our days. I've been losing track of the days since I stopped working, but now there isn't even any real reason to figure out which day it *is* anymore... and it's a bit wacky.

( Read more... )

... by single parents. I have absolutely no idea how they maintain this kind of thing. I'm exhausted after just two real days of just doing this myself. My.

Jet's been great, too. Very patient, and he helps when I ask. Today was extra busy, but he really helped out in important ways. Since we got a late start on the morning, he was very helpful in getting all his decisions in on lunch and breakfast right away. We didn't do any TV things or anything other than just concentrate on eating, dressing, and getting things ready for school.

( Read more... )

Spent more time doing hard physical labor in the last week than I've done in a very long time.

( Read more... )

I have only been home about a week and in all that time I only got most of yesterday to do exactly what I wanted all by myself. And even that was eaten by going to the church to help collate, fold, sticker, and label a big batch of newsletters for mailing. That was fun, though, as there were six of us who all worked very well together. I enjoyed helping with getting something done.

( The week in short. )

Jet and I were sitting in the van while John made copies of tax papers that were being sent in. Jet started by asking what 'filing taxes' meant and then it spread to what taxes are for and then paying for the things that we need and then to 'why isn't food free for everyone?' to 'why is there money?' and...

Wow.

Uhm. I didn't answer them to his satisfaction, but then maybe I was the one unsatisfied? I'm not sure.

( More. )