Infidelity
I cheated on the blue cabled sweater this week. It was for good reason – my mom’s office is very cold and she needed fingerless glove bits so her hands wouldn’t freeze when she typed. Considering that mom spent her vacation sewing for me, it seemed only fair to return the favor by making her a pair.
With flash – a little washed out, but shows some of the colors better.
Without flash – color are a little harder to distinguish, but shows them a little closer to reality.
These were a quick little knit, taking a bit less than a skein of Claudia Handpaint in Argyle 2 on Clover bamboo US2 needles, and about three days worked in bits and pieces between working on the house stuff. They turned out beautifully and fit her perfectly. I washed them with some lovely handmade wool wash that I received in my knitting gnome swap package from Stephanie to get out some excess dye that stained my hands a smidge during knitting.
I’m going to pause a moment to wax rhapsodic about the wool wash: it’s really lovely. It’s a solid bar, like a bar of soap, that you lather under the running water. It’s 20% lanolin (so it softens your hands wonderfully when you lather it!) and smells delightful without being overpowering. I especially like that since it’s a solid bar, once it dries from being lathered, it can just get tucked away again. I’ll definitely be using this a lot, and once this bar is done, I’ll definitely be ordering more from her Etsy shop!
Mom has also requested some wool socks to wear around the house, and she picked out the yarn I won from one of the contests in the Coffee Swap, which I don’t think I ever took a picture of and posted. It’s a beautiful yarn and I’m enjoying knitting it up, but I don’t remember exactly what it is and it wasn’t labeled. I’m pretty sure it was dyed by the person who sent it though and I do wish that I had taken more care to jot down some additional information about it. I love that it has smaller and irregular splotches of the brown because it means that the yarn doesn’t really pool much.
I’m taking this as an opportunity to finally try one of Cat Bordhi’s sock architectures from New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One. I’ve wanted to try Coriolis since I got the book (almost a year ago, for Christmas last year!), and I’m just about an inch into the start of the spiral on the foot. So far it’s very neat and a dead simple pattern to memorize. My swatch was 10 stitches to the inch on Harmony US0 needles, but my actual gauge is a bit looser than that – pr’bly 9 stitches to the inch, but I haven’t measured again yet. It may end up a little looser than I’d like, especially in the toes when I wasn’t paying as close attention, but since they’re socks to be worn around the house and not necessarily in shoes, I think that will be okay in the end.
*sniff* My house is getting all grown up..
The holiday this week seemed a good excuse to take some time off and work on some more stuff around the house before Old Man Winter really got into his stride. Mom and Dad came down Sunday afternoon and spent the week, so we got quite a lot done. In keeping with the theme, I’m extraordinarily thankful that my parents are both so skilled and talented, but even more thankful that they’re both young enough for me to enjoy their company as an adult. In addition to being a rather productive week, it was also quite a fun vacation. The productive, however, is all I remembered to get photos of. *smile*
The red wall down the stairs is now a deep cranberry red with no light spots.
(As usual, all photos are clickable thumbnails; click them to load larger versions.)
The chairs are now covered in a lovely stripe-y red fabric, and the futon has a complementary red cover.
The two chairs – which were originally my grandma and grandpa’s chairs – are in rather dire need of refinishing: the varnish has gotten slumpy and tends to get sticky when it’s humid. Dad took the taller of the two (the one closer to the stairs in the photo above) home with him to strip down and re-finish and I expect sometime in the next month or two he’ll return it and pick up the other.
The upstairs hallway is freshly painted a light golden yellow. This now officially makes the craft room the last thing that needs to be done in the upstairs.
I also have four new side tables that dad built for me for Christmas (delivered a bit early) – three identical ones in the living room:
and one taller one that fits perfectly in the gap above the stairs in the upstairs hall:
They all have bottom shelves – handy for storing things like phone books and the cable modem and wireless router – and drawers – handy for storing things like my knitting notions, matches for the candles, and spare lightbulbs.
My birthday present was also delivered a few weeks early – a lovely roll top desk with lots of cubby holes and drawers – including two file drawers – that looks wonderful in my living room (and significantly classier than the cheap black desk that I was using).
The screens that were on the shelf in the garage, along with all the cardboard and two large bags of garbage (one containing mostly big chunks of styrofoam*), were removed. The tent, poles and tarps all fit quite nicely on the shelf and the lawn mower and my pottery wheel fit underneath it. The extension ladder is hung on the wall, and my bike is hung from the roof behind the door. My car is currently parked in my garage (*squee!*). I also have a working garage door opener remote.
The screens from the garage were joined by the screens from the basement, two more large bags of garbage (one containing mostly big chunks of styrofoam*), and several more big bundles of cardboard, all of which were delivered to the county dump Wednesday morning. The basement is organized and all the tools, remodeling stuff and camping stuff have homes that will keep them safe from any further incursions of water into the basement. All the tools are in toolboxes, and the toolboxes have been sorted somewhat so that general use tools (screwdrivers, tape measures, hammers, etc.) are in one, plumbing-type tools are in another, etc.
The workbench is now on the west wall next to the old cabinet that was there, making the storage space under the stairs a handy place to keep the shop vac.
The camping stuff is on the table in the southeast corner, including the box of camp kitchen stuff that was next to the fridge upstairs. The original solid wood doors are now stored against the wall under the stairs, propped up on a couple pieces of 2×4 to keep them clear of any water.
I also managed to get some knitting done, but I think that will get saved for a separate post since this one is already quite long! I hope you all had a joyous and safe Thanksgiving!
* Garbage removal is paid for here by requiring all curbside garbage to be in garbage bags supplied and stamped by the garbage removal company. The bags aren’t horribly expensive – $14.50 for 10 – but I don’t like having to use essentially one whole bag to throw out the packing material from some appliance (I think the styrofoam in the garage was from the lawn mower and the stryofoam in the basement was from the dehumidifier), so I tend to just stick it away somewhere until we do a run to the dump when I can stuff it in a regular garbage bag and drop it off with a bunch of other stuff for what amounts to less than $1.45 per bag. *shrug*
Soup season.
Mmm. I love good creamy thick soups and I love autumn. I’m not sure exactly if the two are related – I also love apple pie, which is also associated with autumn for me, so there could be something about the foods of the season that influences my love for the weather, or vice versa. In any case, when the students selected “vegetarian” as the theme for our office potluck, I decided it was time to try a recipe I had for butternut squash soup.
Butternut Squash Soup (from a recipe in the Cooking Club of America magazine)
- Split and remove the seeds from 3 medium squash.
- Brush with olive oil and fill the centers with honey or maple syrup (I used honey as I’m not a huge fan of maple).
- Sprinkle with cinnamon and nutmeg.
- Roast at 350 for about an hour (I went an hour and fifteen minutes because they were still a little firmer than I wanted after an hour).
- Let cool and scoop out all the flesh.
- Blend (I used a hand blender) with 4 cups veggie broth and a can of coconut milk.
- Throw in some salt and simmer it for 20 minutes to blend the flavors.
It turned out really tasty. I love coconut milk and it adds a perfect note of creaminess and sweetness to the squash without being overwhelming.
I’m thinking that this weekend I will make one of my other favorite creamy soups, Chicken Veloute.
Chicken Veloute (from Soup: A Way of Life)
- Make a roux with 4 tablespoons of butter and 7 tablespoons of flour. Cook it for 8 or 9 minutes until it starts to thin and get shiny.
- Slowly pour in 5 cups chicken stock or broth, whisking constantly to avoid lumps.
- Slowly bring to a boil; stir frequently to keep the flour from sticking to the sides of the pan.
- Cook just below a boil for 30 minutes (again, keep stirring).
- Sprinkle in some salt (to taste – if you used salted stock or broth, you may not need to add more) and nutmeg. Don’t skip the nutmeg; it really accents the soup extraordinarily!
- In a separate bowl, whisk 3 egg yolks and 1/4 cup of heavy cream. Ladle in some of the hot soup to temper the egg & cream mixture; when the mixture is warm, stir into the soup.
- Heat another minute or so until it coats the back of a spoon.
This is very thick and extraordinarily tasty for such a simple soup. Use good stock or broth because almost all the flavor from the soup comes from the stock or broth. If you let it sit too long, it will skin over, so keep it covered and serve it while still warm. It reheats okay, but I’ve never tried freezing it.
And since I have heavy cream, I think I’ll make up some single-malt scotch truffles (recipe from a comment at Making Light), but using Chambord instead of scotch since I picked up the Chambord a few weeks ago to use in a berry sauce for cheesecake.
From the northwest corner of a brand new crescent moon..
In my early 20’s, I was a Dead Head. This isn’t necessarily something I’ve tried to keep secret, but it also doesn’t come up much these days. I have boxes and boxes of bootlegs; they’ve been packed in those boxes for years.. possibly close to a decade now, and I doubt I’ll start listening to them again now. But I also have a third to half of the Dead’s studio albums, plus a smattering of their live CDs and as they’ve managed to come up on random in my iTunes, I remember just why I like them. In particular, it’s the songs written by Robert Hunter that tend to grab me most.
Terrapin Station has now popped twice today – once at home and once at work – so something out there appears to be trying to push a message through. For those unfamiliar with the song, the lyrics are available here, annotated. (For what it’s worth, Help->Slip->Franklin from Without a Net seems to have become a favorite of my work iTunes, which I find a little amusing.)
And because it jogged some brain cells, I also took pictures of my ink this morning. Mostly, this is for my own gratification, but I thought it might also be interesting for those of you who might be curious to see how the ink has settled now that everything’s fully healed.
(Clickable thumbnails, as usual.)
I couldn’t get a good picture of all the phases in one, and the picture of the ones on the right are blurry, but I think it’s good enough for now. You can’t tell where the touch-up in the full was done anymore, and while the later four phases still seem a little crisper to my eye, it’s no longer nearly as noticeable as it was when they were first done.
Catching..
..squirrels.
(As usual, all photos are clickable thumbnails.)
After some phone tag and other missed connections, the squirrel guy came out last night to set a trap for the squirrel(s) in my wall. I’ve known there were squirrels up there for awhile, and when dad was here a few weeks ago and cleaned out the gutter on that side of the house, I learned that the damage is worse than expected: most of one complete fascia board has rotted away. At this point, I’m not sure which came first – the clogged gutter or the rotted board (it’s possible that the board rotted and caused the gutter to flex enough so that the mesh cover was dislodged in the wind; it’s also possible that the mesh cover was just dislodged and the gutter clogged and the constant moisture rotted the fascia) – but I did know that I would need the squirrels to be vacated before I could do any real fix to the fascia. So there’s now a squirrel trap coming out the side of my house, as well as several feet of wire mesh to patch the fascia and soffit so the squirrels can’t get out (or in again) any other way. One of them is either in trying to find another way out that’s not the trap, or out trying to find a way back in and has been making quite a ruckus this morning, so it may take a few days to get them out, but it will be worth it.
..up. I’ve been watching Heroes on Netflix for a while, first on DVD and then on demand for most of the second season. The last four episodes of the third season aren’t available on demand, though, which was annoying me until I went out to see if they were available directly from the network and realized that they haven’t aired yet. This might just be the first time in.. well, maybe ever that I’ve been caught up on every episode of a television series.
..on. One “side effect” of catching up on Heroes has been that I’ve been knitting again, after a several month hiatus. I’m still not as much into it as I have been in the past, but it’s a good accompaniment to movies and the like and now that it’s winter and darker longer I seem to have more patience for those kinds of things. I’ve finished the back and front of the cabled sweater I’ve been working on, and am about a third of the way through the first sleeve. I had the cable pattern memorized awhile ago, so this is almost mindless now. The photo is terrible, but unfortunately the best of the group.
Open letter re: Choice.
Right. Yes, I know what day it is. Yes, I’ve already voted. No, it’s none of your business who or how I voted, though many of you can pr’bly make reasonable educated guesses.
Now, please, stop with the repeated exhortations, demands, orders, threats, etc. that everyone seems to think are appropriate to get other people to vote. Yes, remind people you think might not remember, post it to your blog or email your friends. Remind them that today is election day, talk about how much of a rare privilege it is for every day citizens to be able to participate in the election of their leaders, remind about the struggles to secure that right.
And then, respect them as individuals and respect their choices. It’s none of your business whether or not they choose to exercise their suffrage rights.
Think of this like the abortion debate if it helps – voting is a right, or a privilege, and not compulsory; it’s a *choice*, a decision, and for many people it’s a very personal and complex one. We all not only have the choice of whom to vote for, but also whether or not to vote at all. Just because *you* choose to exercise that right or privilege does not give you some moral authority over others who choose otherwise. Just because you may think it’s morally reprehensible not to vote does not mean you get to impose your beliefs on others. As fervently as I believe that each of us should have control over the choices we make regarding our respective bodies, I believe that each and every one of us gets to have control over our respective suffrage rights and no one has to justify to anyone else whether or not they choose to vote.
Silly bit for a sleepy afternoon.
M R DUCKS.
M R NOT.
S A R. C D E D B D WANGS?
L I B! M R DUCKS.
