eruthros

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.

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.

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 )

I often get distracted on wikipedia or any other wiki, and end up clicking through links for a while, eventually ended up somewhere far distant from my original question. I have thus learned the following:

1. Rutabagas are a weird kind of hybrid between cabbage and turnips.

2. I knew that Klingon is a real constructed language. I did not know that the DS9 and Voyager writers were overworked and/or lazy, and just used a dictionary to translate their Klingon sentences, and thus managed to get the same kind of hilarious mistranslations that are often features of Spanish and French and Russian and Quechua on other shows. Hee.

3. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a lot of intriguing official-state-things, like the state steam locomotive, and state electric locomotive, and state soil. BUT a bill was introduced about ten years ago to name the chocolate-chip cookie the state cookie, and then the state senate was like "but we have a strong history here in PA of the Nazareth Sugar Cookie!" AND, then some people were all "but I prefer an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie!" Sadly, all bills were tabled, and PA has no state cookie.

3a. As result of the above, I have now learned that: New York has a state muffin (apple), Louisiana has a state instrument (the diatonic accordion), Kansas has a state toy (the etch-a-sketch) and California has two state fish, a fresh water fish (the golden trout) and a salt water fish (the garibaldi). And? Alabama declared its state land mammal the HUMAN BEING. The List of U.S. State Insignia is a PILE of fun, guys. Or, if you're finding the states frustrating, there's always the list of Canadian provincial and territorial symbols, but there's not as much weird there.

4. The history of Chekov's Gun from the best TV Tropes page ever.

***

In other news, I found the perfect yarn for a hooded sweater I want to knit! Peruvian undyed alpaca in a twist of tan and cream and cheap and so yummy-soft. Problem: the yarn store only had 500 g, and I need 750. Sadly, the main supply person wasn't there, so I couldn't find out if she could get that much of the same dye... um, wool lot?

In OTHER other news, you guys, if you didn't already love Leverage, this video of the writers brainstorming ideas for season two would solve that problem. But of course you already love it, right?

... I think the world has turned upside-down. The Golden State Warriors are number one in the Pacific Division right now. Have I slipped into an alternate universe? In what world can the Warriors be 7-3? Please send instructions for route back to reality. (NB: This does not mean I'm displeased. The Warriors are My Team, man!) (Note: this was written yesterday; they're now 7-4 and a half game being the Lakers. A half game only!)

Note to self: in future, please do not do the kind of knitting that requires the ability to count stitches to 21 while watching Doctor Who. It will not end well. (I had to recount a single row five times. *facepalm*)

If you're having trouble keeping track of all of the illegal letters, the misleading phone calls, the voter intimidation, and other dirty tricks in the last election, salon.com has compiled a nice list. They're a little fuzzy on the Ford family in Tennessee, but the rest of it seems to be a fairly accurate summary.

Is it wrong of me to wonder how they intended to curate this exhibition before the museum director took it down to protect "community values?" I've seen food-based shows before, and they do not age well. (Moldy peeps at one show, in a glass case that was clearly intended to keep them the right temperature. Eurgh.)

I am really, really peeved at lame-duck Mitt Romney right now. He wants to ask the courts to force an anti-gay-marriage amendment onto the ballot if the legislature doesn't vote on said amendment. "But wait!" you say "I thought he was against 'judicial activism' when the courts first said same-sex marriage was okay!" Ah, but you forget! Like AH-nold, Romney firmly believes in the supreme authority of whichever branch he thinks will agree with him. Pah. "The power isn't in the courts, it's in the legislatu... it's in the people... it's in the legis... it's in the courts... look, stop trying to make this make sense."