eruthros

noms, knitting

2011-04-06T04:53:03Z

1. Soup!

We made some excellent soup based on this ribollita recipe, and it turned out really nom! And also successful at its main purpose, which was getting rid of the ridiculous pounds of vegetables in the fridge - thingswithwings has renamed it "I live in the Northeast and I have a winter CSA soup." We didn't make the exact recipe - I doubled the beans-and-stock ingredients, and then T'wings chopped up, like, eight pounds of potatoes, and she put in the whole cabbage because seriously the point of this exercise was getting rid of vegetables, like we were going to put in a quarter of a cabbage and call it done. And we didn't reboil it all at once with the bread in it, because we expect it to last all week and then be frozen, so we're doing that bowl by bowl.

In the end, we had enough soup to fill our eleven-quart pot to about a quarter inch from the top. It is a lot of soup, like, I can't lift the pot and a lot of it will likely end up in the freezer. It's good that it turned out to be a great soup.

2. Pie!

T'wings made me strawberry-rhubarb pie for my birthday! Back when I lived in Northern California, my birthday was sometimes, in warm years, right at the beginning of spring produce - the tiniest of rhubarb spears and strawberries - and so I often used to have rhubarb pie for my birthday. And even though we were supposed to have five inches of snow a couple days after my birthday, I had strawberry-rhubarb pie, because last spring I chopped up a bunch of rhubarb and froze it. How awesome is that? It's like a burst of summer in the middle of winter.

Anyway the pie recipe we've been using is this lattice-topped strawberry-rhubarb pie; we double the dry ingredients in the filling and put in about 1.5 times as much fruit, depending on how the quantities of rhubarb work out. But we don't use that crust recipe - T'wings always makes the pastry dough, using her grandma's recipe, which I think she's posted somewhere but I can't find right now.

Anyway, the point is, it was super tasty. But now we're out of rhubarb! I have to wait for rhubarb to actually, like, be in season to have another slice of this pie. SADNESS.

3. Knitting, which today does not get an exclamation mark.

So I looked for a beret pattern to knit for my mom, and decided on the Lupo Beret, and I read the pattern and did a gauge swatch and etc, and everything looked good, and I have been knitting away in seed stitch.

Only I just got to the decreases, and ... wait ... it suddenly stops being seed stitch. The directions keep acting like it's seed stitch, but listen, you can't do a two-stitch decrease and a one-stitch increase without fucking up your seed stitch. And this pattern has a two-stitch decrease alternating with a one-stitch decrease every other row - so the seed stitch will stack every other row. Now I'm staring at pictures of the pattern and trying to decide if this is on purpose, or if I should be modifying the pattern a lot.

This is what I get for reading over the pattern without thinking about it.

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knitting tv recs

2011-02-05T05:03:26Z

Today is Post All The Things I Have Been Composing In Tabs day!

I need new knitting TV. The thing is, a lot of tv I'm watching or re-watching with people, so I can't put on five episodes in a row while I finish up that scarf. (At the moment, this rules out X-Files, Farscape, Xena, and probably Fringe.) I like my knitting TV to be have interesting characters and plots but also be pleasantly trope-y, so that I can just glance up every few seconds to go "right, they're doing the interrogation scene, check." If it's amazing and groundbreaking and I have to have all my attention focused on it, it's not good for knitting.

For a while I was watching Criminal Minds, first because I loved Morgan and Garcia, and later because I loved Morgan and Garcia and was staring in a sort of train-wreck kind of fascination at the sudden fail of the show, but I think that I have now hit the limit of my train-wreck fascination, so now I need something new. Other good knitting TV has included Numb3rs, the Dead Zone, Leverage, SG1, Mythbusters, the Sarah Jane Adventures, V, Starsky and Hutch, various rewatches of things, and other things I've forgotten now. Things that are generally not good tv for me include most sitcoms (I sitcom-embarrassment-squick easily), crime dramas that are really into victim-cam or into only-weirdos-commit-crimes, and fantasy that does our-(heterosexual)-relationship-is-destined.

( in which I live-IM and clip to document the end of my train-wreck fascination with Criminal Minds and distract from the main point of this post but seriously you guys this actually happened on the show I cannot even deal )

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vids, links, tech, food, miscellany

2011-02-03T21:10:57Z

1. More Festivids recs!

Attention Please, Paprika. PRETTY. I don't know what's going on at all, but I think that's part of the point. And the editing is really great, and uses the music really beautifully, and the whole vid has this cool hallucinatory quality.

Illumination, Joseon X-Files. Wow, this is completely gorgeous and atmospheric and ...oddly creepy, maybe? I love the way the vidder used movement of light and shadow, and the music is a great choice. I have never seen this show but clearly I must!

Space Oddity, Community. This is a really sweet Abed/Troy vid about their shared geekery, awwww. Their love of spaceships brings them closer together!

They Want More, Jurassic Park. I can't believe I forgot to rec this the other day, because it made me laugh and laugh. Dinosaur pov ftw.

Truth Is in the Dirt, V (2009). Oh, Erika Evans, ILU! This vid draws some interesting parallels between Erika and Anna, and uses the song and the atmospheric footage to great effect.

2. In knitting-related news, if you're going to drop a stitch, should you do it a) while doing some nice 2x2 ribbing, b) while setting up your short rows, or c) immediately after knitting your two stacked short row stitches? Yeah, I picked option c, who the hell even knows where these loops go. *rips back like twenty rows*

3. I was really sick of accidentally clicking on links that people had written to include hxxp (which some people do to anonymize links) so I installed a greasemonkey script to change hxxp to http. Then I realized that I was not respecting people's desire for anonymity and not incidentally was breaking the rules of some communities and forums, so I edited the script to change the hxxps to working anonym.to links instead. If you'd like to do the same thing, ( instructions for making an anonym.to redirect )

And now I am clicking on those links with ease. *is so lazy*

4. I am excited to see the permanent style=mine and style=site options (described in the latest news post), but reading people's comments about both options always reminds me that neither option is perfect for me. I often turn custom comment pages on not because I like the style or worked hard on it or anything, but because I want the sidebar or header (tags and links and etc) to be available on entry pages; I usually prefer to read in the site style. And especially in communities, if the entry page is in the site style, there's no obvious place to click for the rules or tags, which often leads to a lot of questions that are a pain in the ass ("where can I find ..." "but do you ..." "if I want to sign up ..."), or posts that don't follow the posting templates or rules or whatever. So I am still torn about site style versus custom comment pages.

5. Aren't these pantone-chip cookies pretty much the coolest thing ever? I love that she just mixed up colored icing and then matched it to a pantone color after it cooled.

6. And speaking of food, glass_icarus recently posted Potluck #1, a blog carnival dedicated to multicultural/intersectional posts about food.

7. And only loosely related to food, Happy New Year to everyone who celebrates! At the moment I am all eeee white_lotus Lunar New Year Exchange eeee. The fanworks are SO GREAT GUYS, I am so glad to be posting them now where other people can see them. I have been so caught up in the excitement that I have even tried to make some treats, but I keep being interrupted by spreadsheets.

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in which I have to throw out a vibrator

2011-01-18T07:09:17Z

1. ( sex toys! smoke! possibly NSFW! )

2. As a consequence of (1), I had a migraine all fucking day, because it's too cold outside to open the windows, and burning rubber is basically a guaranteed migraine triggers. Thanks, vibrator.

3. As a consequence of (2), I have been nauseated all day, and have eaten only peppermint tea, black tea (oh caffeeeine why didn't you help), bread, slightly against-the-rules OTC painkillers (shh don't tell my doctor), and some carrots and cooked squash. And sat around on the couch breathing and making faces and trying very hard to take enough naps to make the migraine go away. Bleh.

4. But my migraine is now mysteriously gone! Perhaps the burnt rubber in the air has finally gone away. So now I am enjoying the internet, late though it is, because that was obviously a story that had to be shared, and knitting some of this cowl I'm making for myself. (Burgundy alpaca! Yum.)

5. ... And to think I thought "gosh, I don't have a good icon for this post."

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two things I've read recently that have pissed me off

2010-11-07T16:36:34Z

1. helens78 sent me a bunch of knitting books that she was done with, some of which are pattern books and some of which are books about knitting. Mostly I have been flipping through pattern books and going "ooh" or "hmmm." And so I was flipping through one of the prose-and-patterns books called The Joy of Knitting and noticed this, partly because it's right at the beginning of a chapter:

( cut for gender essentialism )

2. I only just now got N.K. Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms -- I’m never really good at getting new-releases when they’re, you know, released. And so I was reading happily along, enjoying the worldbuilding, when all of a sudden:

( Cut for kink-negative language and spoilery discussion )

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some things I have done recently

2010-10-07T21:35:51Z

1. Watched Mythbusters! New episodes just started airing last night. All I have to say about it is ( spoiler cut )

2. Made cheesecake brownies! Just sort of spontaneously. happydork linked to this recipe for cheesecake brownies, and I looked at it and went, wait, I can do all of those steps! So I went out and bought cream cheese and then made a recipe.

3. Installed some non-VLC media players, because VLC started being so slow and buggy and building-font-library-y. I've tried KMPlayer and SMPlayer; of the two, I like the KMPlayer better, although I hate its icons. I'm still shopping around, though, if you have other suggestions.

4. Rewashed all of my fall and winter clothes. No, really, all of them. ( allergies are no fun )

5. Gotten excited about knitting again! I used to mostly knit projects on small needles -- fingering or lace weight socks and lace scarves and things -- and now holding those needles hurts too much and it made me cranky that I had all this stash yarn for socks that I wouldn't be using (or, at least, not for socks). So I haven't knit in a year or so, but when anatsuno was here we were talking about knitting, and I remembered I had a worsted-weight sweater to knit, so now I'm in the middle of that. (I <3 alpaca.) And I'm doing a worsted lace scarf, too. And I realized I had some super bulky local yarn that I bought when one of the sheeps-milk people decided to stop making yarn and sold it all off super cheap, and my old slippers are falling apart, so perhaps I will felt up some slippers. I'm all: knitting in front of the tv! This is a thing I used to do! Right! Only now I have to get new needles for basically every project, because I have a ton of 0-3s, but like one pair of size 9 needles.

6. Speaking of TV, I also watched the first few Criminal Minds episodes from this season. ( spoiler cut )

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