A Few Things

Thing the First:

I recently received a care package from India.



The way they do this in India is that the cardboard box is stitched up inside a fabric bag, which is then sewn up and sealed with sealing wax.



Inside was a small container of ground-with-mortar-and-pestle chai spices and a couple of boxes of delicious Indian tea, which I have been enjoying.

Thing the second:

I recently got to work knitting up some yak/cormo yarn my mom bought at Rhinebeck last year from the folks at Bijou Basin. She decided she'd like some fingerless gloves, so she could keep her fingertips free for her photography, and a hat. I found the glove-in-progress very amusing once it was bristling with needles.



When I finished the first one, Tolo graciously offered to model it for me.



I have since finished the pair, and I handed them off to my mom last night. For the hat, I have enough yarn that I can make it double thickness for the winter.

Thing the third:

We finally put up our tree tonight.



After the Great Monkey Massacre of Aught-Nine, I think we were a bit reluctant. It wouldn't have seemed like the holidays, though, without it. This year, it's back on top of the dog crate and has been lashed down with four holding points to minimize the potential for major crashes. I'm not entirely convinced Cougar won't kill this one, too, though.

Gobble Gobble

I hope everyone had a great Tofurkey Day. It was the first Thanksgiving in a while that actually fell on my off week, so I didn't have to work, nor was I coming off of an overnight the night before. As per our usual custom, we had dinner with Wendy and Paula at Wendy's dad's house.

I was asked to bake the pumpkin pie, so I did that and also baked sweet potato pie, in keeping with family tradition. In fact, I had enough filling for two of each. Which one do you think I've been having for breakfast and which for dinner? David made a cornbread and seitan dressing, which is his standard. He's an excellent cook, but Thanksgiving is about the only time these days that he ever does so, largely leaving that up to me.

In other news, I ran the Seacoast Half Marathon two weeks ago. Or, more appropriately, I hobbled it. I knew it wasn't going to be a good race, because I just hadn't been able to keep up my training since the Portland Half in October and I'd been having iliotibial band issues. The ITB pain got bad enough that by midway I was down to a walking pace. I did finish, though. Lee Ann, formerly of Fuzzy Logic Knits, came down from Montréal to run it with me, and we figured out that my walk pace was the same as her light jog pace, so it worked out well and I had wonderful company.

I still plan to continue running, but it's going to take me a while to work out the ITB issues, and I've not been pushing myself since the race. On Thanksgiving Day, though, I did decide I needed a pre-dinner caloric burn and walked the length of our road and back (a teeny bit shy of 10K). At our end of the road there's an apple tree right at the intersection in a little triangle of grass. I managed to find a good armload of late windfall apples that were still in decent condition, so I brought them back with me as a little treat for the sheepies. They were very thankful.

Aside from that, there's been some knitting, but on a gift exchange project. I've also been slowly processing Angus's lamb fleece to get it ready for spinning. He's getting a ton of grey in his fleece now, which is quite exciting. Come next year, he should spin up into a lovely heathery yarn, which will go well with Shaun-Fergus's mooskit, also heathery.

Yesterday was spent doing mountains of laundry and putting up plastic on the windows for the winter. We've talked about it before but never followed through, so I'm hoping that it will save us a bit on heating bills until we can get all the windows replaced. Right now we're looking at replacing our cracked oil boiler with a high efficiency propane one. The fuel costs are currently more for propane, but we'd be able to free up the chimney for wood heat, which we could hopefully get in place within the next year or two, and we could also put in a propane cookstove. Such is our fast-paced, jet-setting lifestyle.

Great Minds

One of the interesting aspects of my relationship with David is that we often have the same thoughts at the same moment. And when I say often, I mean at least on a daily basis. Maybe it's a psychic bond, maybe it's just having very similar frames of reference, but it's been that way through the entire relationship.

Lately we've been watching old episodes of "The X-Files", thanks to Netflix. Earlier tonight, we were watching an episode where animals in an Idaho zoo were apparently being abducted from their cages by aliens but then not being put back in quite the right location afterward and wreaking havoc on the local population.

One of the animals was a tiger who ended up in a warehouse across town. As our intrepid FBI agents arrived on the scene, Scully said to Mulder, "How does a tiger get all the way on the other side of town without being spotted?"

David and I both immediately yelled at the TV, "Because it's striped!"

Take That, Cancer!

So today was the Race for the Cure, and I did pretty well. I finished in 28:47, which put me in 181st place overall and 23rd out of 31 in my age division. Considering I've been running for less than 6 months and this was the first actual race I've ever been in, I'd say that's a decent showing.

Thanks to everyone who donated! Maybe if governments spent the kind of money on good medical research that they do on wars, organizations like this wouldn't have to ask for donations. Until we can manage to put such a government in place, though, folks like you make a huge difference to people in need.


Strange Symbiosis



I've noticed this summer, that my crowder peas have been especially attractive to yellow jackets. As near as I can tell, the plants seem to be secreting something at the base of the pods that the wasps find irresistible (see the photo). I can't tell if it's maybe a tiny amount of fluid or what, but the effect is specific for yellow jackets. I've seen mention of the phenomenon on some gardening forums, but no scientific treatise on the subject that I've found, as yet. It does appear to be a symbiotic relationship, though. The wasps get something they want while the plants get some serious protection - I've seen zero predation on these plants, and I've been very careful myself when picking the pods.

Miscellanea

The First

David recently finished up his fall wholesale catalog, which caused his summer to be filled with much blood, sweat, and tears. Especially the tears part. The end result, though, is freakin' gorgeous. My husband is incredibly talented.

Anyway, one of the alpaca photos used in the catalog came from Homestead Geek, to whom we are much obliged. Thanks to her, and VUBOQ, I expect that I'll probably opt for the nook when I travel down the e-reader path, but that's not what this is about. What this is about is that I highly recommend giving her blog a read. Also if you're in her area (which is I'm-not-quite-certain-where), you might also consider purchasing some of her homemade pickles to help her help her mom.

Miscellaneum, The Second

I signed up this week to run the Susan Komen Race for the Cure 5K. The race is actually this Sunday, so I set my fundraising goal very, very low. Donations of $5 or $10 (or even more, if you can spare) would be zOMG-so-very-greatly!!! appreciated and can be made through my ridiculously-difficult-to-find fundraising page (srsly, somebody needs to give the code monkeys a swift kick for their barely-navigable site), which I did eventually manage to find here.

Miscellaneum, The Third

I actually picked up the needles for the first time in a couple of months and started back in on the plait-cabled tennis vest I'm reworking from a WWII-era Red Heart booklet. I'm only slightly farther along than I was here, but I still love the yarn and the pattern. Perhaps one day I'll actually finish it, and maybe even write up the updated pattern.

Queen of Vagina (Almost Certainly NSFW)

My sister flew up with her girls Tuesday night so they could spend a few weeks with their Gram & Pa. Said sister had to turn around and fly back yesterday afternoon, so we didn't get to spend a lot of time visiting. She did, however, share this Ohrwurm, which she was humming almost constantly.



I particularly love how the QoV keeps singing "have sex with my vagina", as if she'd just be a bystander in the whole experience. Reminds me of a David Sedaris story (which I can't seem to find video of).

Geek Humor

What does it say about me that I snorted when I read this? If you don't get it, don't worry. And if you really need to know try the Wikipedia article. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

A Familiar Dilemma

This is a very frequent occurrence in our house. From xkcd, of course.

8 Miles Wide

In case you haven't seen this sweeping the interwebs:



Come on, everyone, sing along!

But Wait, There's More!

In fact, I've saved a whole set of these on my Flickr account.

Nietzsche Family Circus

From the NFC website:

The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote. Refresh the page to see a new comic and share your favorites by clicking permalink.

Green Porno

I hadn't seen this before, since I don't have cable and therefore can't watch Sundance, but I love Isabella Rosselini.



You can see more from this series here.

Döggi Långstrump

So, a bit of background first:

At the clinic where I work, there are two full-time day doctors, Doug and Sara. They're both foreigners - Doug is Canadian (and didn't see anything wrong the first time he saw this), while Sara is Swedish (and hadn't seen this until I showed her). They also have a mostly friendly rivalry that is ongoing and whose origins have been lost in the mists of time, but which mostly consists of sabotaging each other's desks.

Anyway, a couple of weekends ago, Doug shaved a ginormous mat off of a cat's back and left it on Sara's desk. Yesterday, Sara and one of the daytime techs decided to affix bits of this matted fur to a printed photo of Doug's head (which is, in fact, rather devoid of fur) and take pics of it to put up as the desktop wallpaper on all of the computer terminals. And being Swedish, Sara decided to make one of the photos look rather Pippi Longstocking-ish.

I thought that was such a good idea that I took another Pippi-esque photo of the head and went online to find some Pippi images to attach it to. Because we don't have Photoshop here, I used the open source program GIMP. The look of the program is similar to Photoshop and it can perform a lot of the same functions, but it's different enough that there's still a bit of a learning curve. Still, I managed fairly well for a rank amateur - at least for comedic effect. See if you agree.

Weekend, Plus a Little WTF

My weekend off, which included Monday, was primarily devoted to some much-needed yardwork and left me sore, sore, sore. On the plus side, I did some hard pruning of one of my apple trees and used the twigs to make this cute little woven trellis for my sugar snap peas.



And before any of you go telling me that sugar snap peas vine a lot higher than that, it's a dwarf variety that should do just fine. The front soaker hose has parsley planted along it, and I also planted lettuce mix in with the red leaf mustard that's coming up from last year's seed and some Sugarsnax carrots in amongst my garlic, which I'll have in spades (Get it? Spades!) this summer. There's quite a bit more yet to be planted outside the raised beds, too, so I'm going to need to get butt in gear and start preparing the ground.

The bulk of the soreness, though, came from doing battle with a couple of huge stands of multiflora rose behind our shed and along the road that we let go far too long. David got out and snipped a lot of the individual branches a few weeks back, but I lopped off more, pulled a bunch down from where it was intertwined in the sumac trees, and got some triclopyr stump treatment to try to kill it off at the roots. While I was at it, I also treated some of my arch-nemesis, bittersweet, which I hate with the passion of a thousand suns. As bad as the multiflora is, it at least provides nectar for bees. Bittersweet is good for absolutely nothing, period.

Hopefully, though, this weekend's endeavors will help us get both scourges under control and, eventually, eradicated from the property. I expect, though, that they'll give my back plenty of reason to ache for at least the next few years.

Um, Yeah

I was just going back through old pages on Fail Blog and just happened upon this one, which is only a couple of miles from where I went to high school.


see more pwn and owned pictures

Actually, considering the sizable influx of workers from Mexico and Central America over the past 10-15 years, that sign isn't terribly surprising. When you're used to a barter economy and the bulk of your income goes back home in remittances, you're likely to - what else - barter for goods and services. It's still kind of funny, though.

But not as funny as this:


see more pwn and owned pictures

Hurdy-Gurdy Man

I just rediscovered this video on YouTube. I first heard the artist a while back on Late Junction and absolutely loved his playing. In this particular clip, he's playing an electric hurdy-gurdy that allows for some funky sounds as well as some looping.

Another Random Internet Find

I was doing a Google search for something very, very different - manual hair clippers for use in India, if you must know - and inexplicably got a link to this video on boob jobs breast augmentation from a plastic surgeon's office in Bangalore.



I'm not even going to get into the whole women-getting-themselves-carved-up-as-objects-for-male-consumption thing. Twisty does a much better job at that than I. What struck me was that the background music they chose was Abba - specifically, the song "I Have a Dream". Okay, you say dream, I say nightmare, but fair enough.

Except that the song ran out before the end of the video and it apparently flipped over automatically to the next track, which was "Fernando". Which, of course, made me wonder if they were thinking up new lyrics to it.

Can you see my boobs, Fernando?
I remember long ago you said they were mosquito bites.
Full of silicone, Fernando,
I can play them just like drums while you are strumming your guitar.
You can hear them from around the block, even sitting in your car.

Come on, everyone join in!

Liberty Faded?

I snapped this today here in Salt Lake City, but really it could have been taken on any number of street corners across the country.

Fun with Blog Stats

Interesting searches which have brought people to my blog this week:

- An msn.com search for "titty jiggel"[sic], which led someone to this post.

- A Google image search for "wonder woman's butt", which led someone to this post.

What surprises me about the last one is that GayProf's blog didn't come up at all.

Just for Fun