A Doubtful Guest

So this thing showed up on my porch chair. I invited it in.

It seemed harmless enough...

But then,
it just made itself right at home.

Really at home. It has no manners at all.

 NONE.

 

 

 

 Its a nosy parker,

fancies itself a literary critic,

and is a total couch hog.

David gave it a comeuppance.

 




 But they have since made up their differences.




Which is good, because it looks as if it means to stay for quite a while.

Merry %$#@#ing Blah Blah!

&%$#$!

I am bah humbug, but David really wanted a hermit crab. I will name it Hubert.

Seriously?!?!

Hubert expresses my mood, which, while not exactly disagreeable, is not at all festive.

Well this is just humiliating.

 I do not like this kind of sillyness, but I am willing to acknowledge that other people do enjoy such things.

C'mere an say that t'ma face, son!

I don't wish anybody ill of the season, I just want you to know that I find most of the usual ceremonial observances terribly off-putting.

Does this butt make my shell look big?

I offer to encourage you in your particular enjoyment, in exchange for being allowed to go on much as I do any other day of the year. With more sleep. And more cookies, probably more cookies.

this message approved by the admiral.

Happy Christmakwanzaakha.

BWAHAHAH!

Last night David brought home this giant-ass pumpkin.

Me: Ohmigod. Is that China? And Taiwan?
Him: It's the 'One China'.
Me: HAHAHAHAHA!

Me: Who the hell puts China on a pumpkin?
Him: I dunno...Chinese People?
Me: No dude, not even Chinese people would China on a pumpkin.

Me: Is that the Korean peninsula?
Him: I was thinking about it then I was like, nah, that's too hard.
( It occurs to me that China probably thinks the same thing)

Him: I was paying tribute to your people!

the heck is that mess

 

 
That's my first and probably only attempt to spin my own yarn. I've been curious about spinning forever and thought I'd try it out. So I grabbed a little 1 ounce baggie of prepared wool when I was at the store the other day and spent some time trying out various home made contraptions for turning it into string. Some things I discovered are:

1. It takes more coordination than anything else. It isn't physically arduous, or complicated, but it reminded me of learning to pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time. Or rotate my arms in opposite directions.
2. There are some weird old men who like to do historical re-enactments having to do with spinning flax on youtube.
3. A drop spindle is about the most low tech thing you can get, but there are better ways to make them and worse ways. I found that a bent coathanger jammed into a rollerblade wheel was more effective than a thing made out of a CD and a chopstick. The important thing is weight. The rubber wheel had enough mass to keep the whole mess turning for a good while, whereas the CD was too flimsy and just stopped rotating.
4. Between the two iterations of drop spindle, I had the rollerblade wheel jammed under a belt that I operated with the treadle of one of my sewing machines. That was much faster, but was like learning to pat my head, rub my tummy, and rotate my arms in opposite directions all three at once.
5. One ounce of wool will not make enough yarn to make anything out of, at least not if you're a beginning spinner. I would knit a bunch of little aliens out of it, but it's so unevenly made that it would make some very misshapen creatures.

how it looks stretched out, before washing

At any rate, my curiosity is satisfied. I now know that making string is about as interesting as you'd expect it to be for about 2 hours, and then I'm pretty much done.

Everything Old is New Again

 

 
I really am trying to use up my stash of materials. These 3 projects sort of go together because they all had a previous life as other things. I showed you the scooter skirt already, but it's worth mentioning that I made it out of the skirt of a half finished dress Mom abandoned back in the late 60's or so.

Why didn't I just finish the dress? Because it was cut along very similar lines to the pink and white one in the picture below. As you can see, it is a terribly dumpy looking fit on me. Mom is nearly 4 inches shorter than I am, and all of it is torso. The waist line any dress made for Mom cuts me right across my 3rd rib from the bottom. So, no point in making up the dress as it was. The material is too stiff and coarse to make a good blouse, but it's just perfect for a short a-line skirt. I'm very happy with it.

Before...

But then there was still the pink and white dress. It's one of a pair, also from Mom, but made by Great Aunt Gatha. When I was little, Aunt Gatha's sewing was held to be an acme of durable clothing construction. And durable it was- although looking at it now what comes to mind is the bit by some comedian, maybe Jeff Foxworthy, where he was talking about his redneck relatives fixing something with duct tape: If one or two layers will fix it, then 40 or 50 layers will fix the hell out of it. These dresses are obsessively, if startlingly coarsely, assembled. The waistband had a piece of material tacked in as a stay, to which the bodice and skirt were affixed by machine, having first been basted in place with what looks like button hole twist. Both parts were previously gatherd by hand with the same coarse thread. All basting and gathering threads had been left in place. Each seam had been closely but unevenly overcast by hand, and the hem of the skirt as well as the facing of the bodice placket had been whip stitched in very small, closely spaced stitches of rather erratic appearance. The under arm seams hadn't even been clipped so as to allow the side seam to flex without puckering the armpit! Altogether, the construction was rather lumpy.

After!

These two dresses were neither in wearable nor collectable condition by the time they came to me. The shoulders were dry rotted, the collars stained, and there were serious mouse bites in various places. But they were made in the 50's, which means that there is a mile of fabric in the skirt. With a little scootching and fudging, there was exactly enough to cut a hawaiian shirt for David out of it. I have a nice vintage shirt pattern that suits the material perfectly.

The third thing is this wing collar shirt I made for myself. It's the second shirt I've made out of this pair of curtains, the first being a Halloween costume I made for Cynthia. It has the distinction of being made not only out of material from goodwill, but made out of something I actually used for its original purpose for some years. Eventually I moved out of places that had windows you could put normal curtains in, and I remembered that I had actually wanted to make clothing out of them in the first place. It took me a very long time to finish this shirt because I lost interest halfway through, for no reason that I can remember, especially as I am very excited about the finished result. I always thought that tuxedo shirts were the fanciest thing imaginable, and I really wanted one.

The thing that inspired me was the idea to merge the bust darts in the front of the shirt with the seam where the pleated section is inserted. The result is a fit that is very feminine and curvy, but clean and uncluttered the way a man's shirt is. Also, I finally managed to get the proportion of sleeve width, body width, size of arm hole and length of shirt tail worked out so that it looks right and feels comfortable. I feel very luxurious wearing it.

As David said about his pink and white shirt: "Yeah, this is a really good shirt. I feel like a badass wearing it."

Hooray!

  

  
...hooray! My summer vacation starts today! Actually, it started last night with a very silly cocktail with dry ice in it.

Mix equal parts cheap white wine with decent quality sparkling apple juice drink. Add a chunk of dry ice (Chemical substance be shape like sugar cube. Prohibit to eat.) because you have some around, and because it's festive and makes these goofy boobling noises while you drink it. Very refreshing. Also makes you schnockered faster than you meant to be, which is fine because you're on vacation, Bitch!



I also made some more pants last week. Yes, more shorts pretending to be a skirt. The pattern envelope called this a 'scooter skirt', and it has a very hip looking group of young caucasian women in pigtails and knee socks on the front cover. In spite of the illustration depicting some inhumanly elongated beings, the pattern itself required essentially no alteration whatsoever to fit me. Wonder of wonders! I sewed it up in an afternoon.

It is the most comfortable thing imaginable, and the fact that it is shorts, not a skirt, just adds practicality to the whole arrangement.




Above all, it is Thursday in the last full weekend in July, in Portland. The taps begin to flow at 11:30!

Prost!

Hey look, it's a pineapple!

 

 
This is a dinky version of the Big Damn Pineapple found on Knitty. I didn't have the commitment to make the whole version, so I cast on only half as many stitches as called for in the directions and ignored the stitch counts indicated in the rows. Instead of figuring out how many beads I was going to need, I just pulled up the loop of each stitch requiring a bead and slipped one on as I went along. It worked because I was using very fine crochet cotton that would fit through the beads when doubled. Needles were 00000 size.

I showed it to David. I said "Look at my knitting", and he said "Cool! it looks like a virus!" and I said "It's supposed  be a pineapple", and he said "Oh, right on, like Victorian clothing and stuff."

*sigh.*

He makes me so mushy.

Manly Mittens

 

 
I got a great big sack of yarn at goodwill. David needed some new mittens. He always pokes the fingers out of those cheap gloves he uses anyway, so I didn't put any fingers on his mitts. This used up one whole ball of very thick yarn, and a little bit of something else.

The blue yarn worked up to about 4 st/inch, the gray, about 5 st/inch. Fiber content unknown. They look like dryer lint. After my epic scarf project, I needed some instant gratification, these took only a few days of knitting on the bus during my commute.

I was really trying to not acquire even more stuff, but it's so rare to see any yarn at goodwill that isn't 100% acrylic Vanna's Choice or Red Heart or novelty Fun Fur yarn that no adult would want to wear that I snatched it up. There are a bunch of nice wools and a pair of lovely balls of lace weight yarn that might be alpaca. And about 8 balls of Fun Fur, but I'm going to knit Jej a vest out of those. She will never wear it, but her kids might.

David said something like "I want you to knit me a pair of underwear out of dryer lint" and I said really? and he said "No, I meant gloves." So there you have it.

Chestnuts, or, Dude, you are so Asian

  

  
I found a chestnut tree! The kind that makes nuts you can eat! The other day I spent an hour stomping nut jackets in the  gutter outside somebody I don't know's house! It didn't seem like nearly such a dodgy behavior at the time; I think my roots were showing. My crazy chinese roots, that is. In my defense, urban foraging is a very Portland thing to do. At least scrounging a bagful of fallen chestnuts on a shiny October morning is not like scrubbing around in the grass on your hands and knees looking for ginko nuts that smell like poo in the dark and the rain.

Plus, everybody knows that chestnuts are a thing you eat, providing that you get the kind that are edible. So how do you tell the difference? Wikipedia of course! But really, it's easy to tell. The edible kind is on the left. They have zebra stripes that go from top to bottom, and a little fuzzy tassel on the end. The tassel can get broken off, so the important part is the stripes.

wood grain = wouldn't eat that

Stripes = sounds tasty to me.

The ones that you can't eat are on the right. See how they have this subtle wood grain pattern? Also, no tassel. Not even a place where the tassel would be. Smooth as a baby's butt. Those are the kind called horse chestnuts. The jackets also look quite different. Horse chestnuts look like the head of a mace, with just a few big points on them. Sweet chestnuts look like a little green hedgehog. They have a dense covering of amazingly prickly spines, which is why you stomp them gently to get the nuts out. Wear stout shoes, and be careful not to bounce one up onto your ankle. Gloves would be a good idea too.

AKA 'conkers'

imagine if that fell on you.

Chestnuts are unusually low in fat and high in water and starch for nuts, making them vulnerable to dehydration and mildew. Unless you are going to eat them right away, you should freeze them. I put them in ziploc bags.  Later, I'll investigate some recipes.

Go with the mojo

  

Ce n'est pas une jupe

  
Sometimes, I don't feel like making anything. Those are the times when my house gets cleaned. This has not been one of those moments. My house is now slightly destroyed, but today I made some drawer dividers to keep my skivvies organized and a blue fleece top which reminds me of cookie monster, and yesterday I made these pants. I'm not just having a Magritte moment, they really are a pair of shorts.

Here's to you, Mr. Akin

See? Neat, huh? I found the instructions over at this neat lady's blog, and thought they would be really useful. They are super comfy once they're on, but I only had a 4"  zipper rather than a 6" one that would be a more appropriate length, so they are a little hard to get in and out of.

But that's ok! They are navy blue, so maybe I can get away with wearing them to my stupid job, and they look good with knee socks, which I realized I have way too many of when I organized my drawers, and they have pockets.

Also, I did not buy one thing to make all this stuff. Hooray for using up the stash!

It's a Sweater

  

  
With a long floppy cowl neck. I started knitting again last month, and it has sort of taken over my life. I have become a Chick Who Knits On The Bus. People including a very old lady coming from the airport, a lady who spoke very little english, and a buffed up dude with a bunch of neck tattoos ask to see what I'm doing. They were all quite polite. I just don't know how I feel about suddenly having become a person who looks like they could be approached by strangers. Maybe if I knit in smaller gauges, the effort will make me scowl more. But maybe not. I tend to stare off into a middle distance while I knit.

In any case, I think I'll just resign myself. I spend up to an hour and a half on public transit per day, and whereas before, this was all wasted time, suddenly the bus ride is bonus crafty time. I now have a very nice sweater, and a pair of experimental knee socks that are too itchy to wear.

More socks are forthcoming. I'm sure the popularity of sock knitting has a lot to do with the fact that even the most ambitious sock project stays at a convenient size for schlepping around. As a side note, the yarn for the last two projects came from goodwill. The stuff for the sweater is very high quality, and was a joy to work with. It's all squishy and bouncy, and has a satiny kind of finish. I shudder to think what it would have cost if I'd bought it new. The socks are another story. The yarn seemed like it was all right to begin with, but once it was made up, it was just terribly uncomfortable.

The lesson is that high quality yarn is the only way to go if you actually want to use the things you make. It is particularly annoying to spend all that time and effort making something and then have it turn out to be intolerable once you put it on. Maybe some children of my acquaintance will want a pair of christmas stockings.

w00t!

  

  
I came home today and there was a bag left at my door in my building, which made me alarmed, because it's a locked building, and I don't know anybody who should be leaving things propped in lumpy bags at my door, but then I saw the tag.

I have received a present from the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation!! It was a present I had asked for, but I had stopped expecting it because they sent me their mailer about 2 months ago. There was a questionnaire about what I do to get around town, and the leaflet said that if I mailed back the envelope with my preferences checked off they would send me some free loot. So I asked for all the stuff I thought sounded neat. The envelope was postage paid, so why not? Then I forgot about it after a while.

But but but! They actually did send it after all, and there are lots of nifty things in the nice blue bag, including a little digital pedometer that I just dropped off the balcony. Excuse me while I go root around in the grass.

(Imagine a time lapse.)

But what else is in there? A calendar, slightly tardy. (It's for this year.) A bunch of pamphlets about all things bicycle, TriMet, & pedestrian related, 2 different Portland street maps (the one specifically for bikes is especially good but the one of NE has more detail), a book of cupons for eastside neighborhoods (lots of free coffee!), a shopping list notepad/refrigerator magnet (idiotic, but still neato), pamphlets explaining Oregon bicycle laws, helmet laws, and pedestrian laws, a flyer with a list of community gardens and pools, 

a shiny reflective pants-leg band (shiny), and a Portland bike map bandanna! Yes, an actual bandanna, that is printed with a useable map of the bike lanes in Portland. I love this dorky town.

Tarzan is a complete moron

derrr...

 

What the hell is a badass chick like Jane doing with that special ed. monkey-wannabee jerk? In Beasts of Tarzan the evil nemesis plots this stupid scheme to abduct Tarzan, who totally falls for it. Walks right onto the boat, doesn't even notice that the damn thing is running full steam ready to weigh anchor at any second. Mind you, Jane figures it out in like 30 seconds, and runs off after her mentally challenged spouse to warn him. It takes a knockout blow to the head to get Jane on board.

Doop-e-doo...

So then they're kidnapped. Jane spends the time being polite to the only crewmember she ever sees, who turns out to be a decentish sort of fella after all, and since she's been so polite, he helps her escape once they get to Africa. Meanwhile, Tarzan seems to have spent the entire voyage in a sulk.

Once they're both off the boat, what do they do? Well Tarzan spends some time being morose and thinking that he'll just resign himself to his fate for  a while, and then he postures around for a bunch of gorillas. On the other hand, Jane and the crewman hack their way through the jungle trying to escape the villain. When it's obvious that they're going to get caught, the crewman goes all noble and says he'll go back and tell the villain that Jane died. Jane knows he'll get slaughtered and is apalled. But she picks her ass up and forges ahead by herself. Meanwhile, Tarzan is flexing his naked thews for the gorillas and killing a lion for the hell of it.

When Jane gets caught by the villain, rather than weep and despond, she fakes out her nemesis, disarms him, pistol whips him into unconsciouness with his own weapon, and has the sense to realize that shooting him will make a ruckus. So she claws her way out into the jungle with her bare hands, remembers where her hapless would-be rescuer left a rifle and some ammo, picks the stuff up and runs off to steal a canoe. Tarzan gets to the enemy camp right after she and the villain have skeedaddled, and immediately comes to the conclusion that both of them have gone off to hang out with this other villain. So he doesn't even bother to look for his wife, he just toddles on back to the place he just escaped from. Did I mention that he keeps getting captured by cannibals? By falling asleep in hostile villages? Knowingly? When he could just as easily sleep in a tree?

By the time Tarzan figures out that oops, yup, he should have actually looked around first before charging about in circles, Jane has piloted her stolen war canoe all the way back to the kidnappers ship, sneaked aboard carrying an elephant gun and a bandolier, hijacked and incarcerated the crew all by herself, and started shooting down some bad guys attempting to board and re-take the boat.

eeek! my thews, my mighty thews!

Oh, and Tarzan went skinnydipping and got his mighty thews nibbled on by a crocodile. The whole book is like that, swear to god. Tarzan blunders into a mess, Jane gets caught up in it, saves herself, then waits around for her dumbass ape man to catch up. I would never in a million years have thought that Edgar Rice Burroughs could be read as a proto-feminist.

I would never in slightly less than a million years have read a Tarzan book in the first place, except that I got a knock-off Nook for christmas as my corporate gift this past year. It's pretty good for downloading ridiculous crap that you wouldn't bother to read unless it was a) free, and b) able to be acquired without getting off the couch. Other than that, it's a little slow and clunky. If I'd paid money for it, I'd be pissed. The thing is nowhere near as cool as an ipad or even a kindle, but hey, it was free! Definitely lower on the utility scale than my last company christmas present, but rather higher in terms of instant gratification.

But really, is Jane cock-whipped or what? Fucking Christ.

Hello January...

  

I was craving this the other day. I saw the Barbara's Spoonfuls at the store and remembered that they are surprisingly tasty.

I'm not a breakfast cereal eater most of the time, because I am a bit lactose intolerant (I'm asian, whaddaya want?) and putting soy milk on cereal is altogether less enjoyable than real milk from a cow. Also, at breakfast, I am generally famished to the point of extreme bad temper, and a bowl of cereal is not going to cut it. I want more fat and protein and less sugar than is in most breakfast cereal, even hippy dippy breakfast cereal. Then there's the cost effectiveness, which is minimal. Good breakfast cereal costs a lot. Lots more than bread at any rate, considering the respective number of servings in a box of cereal and a loaf of  homemade bread.

Usually I eat cereal for lunch or dinner. After breakfast, I find that sometimes I don't want  a heavy meal again for the rest of the day, and cereal fits the bill. I make it more food like by putting fruits nuts and yogurt on it. I used to use regular yogurt, but that was before I discovered greek style.

Why do people think that the 3-squares-a-day thing is so important, anyway? It's not like we evolved eating on a schedule. We snarfed whatever we could find at the time we ran into it, and spent the rest of the time goofing around. Like chimpanzees, in fact. Ever see a picture of a wild chimp that looked out of shape? Not that I'd like to live on a chimpanzee's diet, but I sure wouldn't mind living on a chimp's schedule.

Which is to say that January has not proved as restful as I had hoped. I'm sewing a lot, which I enjoy, but which not only takes up time I might use for cooking, it also does not produce a high volume of stuff that is interesting to look at. I realize that a pile of brown paper bags cut into pattern prototypes is not nearly as fascinating to other people as it is to me, but I wanted to take a minute to say that I have not disappeared. Maybe when I get home, I'll show you my lace knitting samplers.

This is not where I am. I have sneaked away. I'll see you later.

Like Tortilla Soup, only Chinese

  

  
Here's something I can't explain: why do I like this so much, when it was so repulsive to me when I was a kid? I used to be very particular about some things. Crunchy things should remain that way, and squishy things should not gain texture at a later point in their existence. A soft food that was made hard was only marginally more palatable than a crispy thing that was made soggy. There were a few narrow exceptions to the soft-to-hard rule, (crunchy bits in fried rice were desirable, but not crust on melted cheese) but none, ever, to the hard-to-soft rule.

This is made with the leftover home made noodles from this year's christmas chow mein. When Dad used to dump the leftovers from chow mein into broth, I could barely make myself eat it, I thought it was so horrid. Now it's comfort food. Go figure. If you like tortilla soup you'll like this, it's just got chinese flavorings in it instead of mexican. You could use any kind of soup if you'd rather, but if you don't have home made noodles, you should slice up and deep fry some flour tortillas. It'll taste the same. Don't start thinking you can use store bought chow mein noodles, those things are irredeemably bogus.

2 cups broth, I use concentrate in water
1/2 lb firm tofu, cubed
1 cup greens, this has frozen spinach, but baby arugula is excellent
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
1 tablespoon fish sauce (recommended) or soy sauce

sesame oil & green onions to taste

Bring the first 5 things to a boil in a saucepan, then simmer until the greens are done. That'll only take about 5 minutes. Pour the soup over a heap of noodles in a bowl, sprinkle on some sesame oil and a few bits of green onion, if you want them.

Noodles are auspicious, of course. So happy new year!