My Life, or something like it...

- Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
- Turn to page 56.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post that sentence along with these instructions on your journal.
- Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

"'Oh,' the woman said."

Wow, that was a major letdown. ;)

It's in the middle of a fun little sequence, though:

"She smiled at Murphy and said, 'Of course, Sergeant Murphy, I know who you are.'

Maybe half a second after the woman started speaking, Murphy said, 'Hello, my name is Sergeant Murphy, and I'm a detective with the CPD.'

Murphy blinked for a second and fell silent.

'Oh,' the woman said. 'I'm sorry, I forget sometimes.' She made an airy little gesture with one hand. 'Such a scatterbrain.'

I started to introduce myself, but before I got my mouth open, the little woman said, 'Of course, we all know who you are, Mister Dresden.' She put her fingers to her mouth. They were shaking a little. 'Oh. I forgot again. Excuse me. I'm Abby.'"

Goes on for a while, but basically she's precognitive and forgot to let them speak first. Fun little segment.

From White Knight by Jim Butcher (part of the Harry Dresden series).

Woo hoo, free booze!

*ahem*

That is, hey look, I have a christmas present! :) Thank you so much, arethinn - this stuff is *amazing*. So much richer and more complex than any other mead I've had.

Also, holiday treats for kitties in the way of a box and some styrofoam blocks to attack! They're having a ball. ;)

Miracle on 34th street. The black and white version from 1947. I have yet to see the 1994 version, and I plan to keep it that way.

Christmas, but with a caveat. To my mind, there are almost two separate holidays - the Christian thing about the birth of Christ and all, and then the American thing with stockings and trees and toys, all of which stem from far older traditions. I don't do church, I'm not Christian, but I do still want trees and stockings and turkey and mashed potatoes and such.

Well, grammar issues aside...

It would be a tie between a new car or dumping it into the student loans (would cut my debt by half or so).

So my friend is out of town and asked if I would like her CSA share this week. Fresh food FTW! Still not sure what all of it is... ;) And really not sure what to DO with some of it, so I come to my foodie friends (yes, I'm looking at you 3catsjackson, and nicodemusrat, and herefox) for help. Please bear in mind that I am BROKE LIKE WHOAH at the moment, and have little in the way of other ingredients beyond pasta, rice, potatoes... that's about it. So the simpler, the better. I also have a blender, but no food processor.

I have a plastic grocery bag full or so of something dark green, leafy, and fairly strong tasting. Looks to maybe be kale, if google images is helping. Seems pretty sturdy, I'm thinking maybe salads (may be kind of strong for that), maybe stir-fry if I can find anything to stir-fry it with...

Another bag full of what sure as heck looks like parsley. Parsley is definitely a strong flavor. My friend says you can make parsley into pesto? I need to look into this. What does one then DO with pesto? All I know offhand is Mom used to use it as a pizza sauce, in place of red sauce... but lacking pizza crust nor anything to put ON the pizza with it... Maybe pasta sauce? Hmm.

Something long, white at the base green at the top, cylindrical at the base with some overlapping leaves at the top... I'm thinking bok choy? No clue what to do with that.

Lots of carrots and potatoes and a few heads of lettuce, I've got those covered. Some root vegetables new to me - kind of round, white on one side, purple on the other - possibly rutabagas? (google images is my friend...) Not sure what to do with those either. But I found a recipe involving rutabagas, potatoes, and cheese, that sounds lovely. (I do have a bit of cheese at the moment) And something about adding a rutabaga to mashed potatoes, interested to try that...

Ooh, and two tiny little pumpkins, not much larger than, say, giant apples. I'm thinking they might be sugar pie pumpkins. I'm debating trying pumpkin pie from scratch with them. How does one get pumpkins out of their rinds? Do you bake them a bit first? What else could one do with a sugar pie pumpkin?

Yes, I am going to google all of this as well, but I thought y'all might have more interesting ideas - and/or more practical ones. You never know what kind of crazy recipes you will find online...

So how is it that I'm 32 years old and I don't know how to roast a chicken? I've been pelting a work friend with texts - she used to be a chef and she actually knows how to cook stuff.

I happened to get a box of stuffing from the food bank the other day - which prompted me to finally thaw that random whole chicken I happen to have. The whole mess is in the oven - wish me luck.

I missed the part where it says "stuff loosely to allow for expansion". This could get interesting. And I still have roughly twice as much stuffing as I have chicken body cavity, though the box says to just put it in a greased pan and toss it in the oven for the last 45 minutes.

Which would be great except for the part where I have NO FREAKING CLUE how long to cook this chicken for. What is the last 45 minutes of an indeterminate baking time?

Fortunately she remembered to mention drippings and fat, which I hadn't thought about. Changed my plan from a cookie sheet to a stoneware casserole dish. No oven fires for me today.

Fingers crossed...

Yep, it finally happened. Actually, I'm surprised that it took over a week. Someone on the dating site was messaging with me and then abruptly quit - and when I sent him just a cheerful update type message, he wrote back that the new picture I'd put up was very different from how he expected me to look (translation: I'm too fat for him), and yes he knows it's shallow but there it is.

Jackass.

This is what I expected from the start - but it still hurts. A lot.

So we got our costumes for the dance recital this week. And ours is just incredibly gorgeous. Leotard base, but with this lovely flowing dress over it, gathered beneath the breasts and then full and flowing down to just above the knee - very flattering to my bulges. All in swirls of blue and purple with accents of green and yellow - sounds weird, but trust me, it's gorgeous.

And I'm realizing - while I know how to sew in general, I've never tried to sew sequin strips onto my costumes before. Mom always did that. And this has flesh-toned elastic straps which are adjustable, and then when you adjust them, there are slightly wider strips of purple sequins to sew over them. I do know that sewing elastic is different than regular sewing. I am assuming that I should zigzag, as I read was good when sewing spandex and such - but the straps are awfully narrow. I'm not certain I'll be able to do so. And also, I'm not even certain the machine will play nice - the sequins /mostly/ lie in one direction, but not uniformly, and I'm wondering if the presser foot will snag constantly and make me crazy. Or do I need to hand sew it? Do I have to worry about the needle piercing and destroying sequins? Doubtful, but I just don't have any first-hand knowledge here.

( In which we discuss bras, may be TMI for brothers or other random males. I don't care who reads, just be aware.Collapse )

So my doctor wants me to be consuming large amounts of probiotics for a while (ie several months) - see if my colonies are just low and maybe that's why I have all these random skin fungal infections. Makes perfect sense, don't know why it never occurred to me before.

So I've been eating a lot of yogurt. Read this nifty idea where you get a quart of plain yogurt and split it up into an ice cube tray or two and freeze it, then pop the cubes into a ziploc in the freezer. Then when you need to make some more, you thaw one into your milk and you don't need to buy an entire new quart every time. (which is rad, since you can't get plain yogurt in a small pot, and you can only start a new batch from the old one for so long before the strains get too weak to make yogurt out of)

In the meantime, I'd gotten a kombucha scoby from a friend of mine at about the same time. So I've been learning to brew kombucha. Pretty simple, make a very sugary tea, bring it to room temperature, add the colony and give it a week or so to ferment. Pour off, make sure you keep the jar about 10% full, add new tea and start again. Take what you poured off, let it sit for a few days at room temp, then chill and drink. The jar I'm brewing it in gives me about two bottles a week, which isn't much, but there's only one of me.

Well, kombucha scobies produce babies every time you ferment a batch. So I offered up some of the babies on a local yahoo group, and the lady who asked for one mentioned that she makes water kefir. I've heard the term, but the only kefir I've encountered before has been milk kefir. So I asked her if we could do a swap, some kefir grains for a kombucha scoby. I didn't know anything about making water kefir, so I'm learning now. It ferments a lot faster - 24-48 hours as opposed to a week! So I suspect I'll be drinking a lot of that. It wants a lot more than kombucha wants, too. Kombucha just wants tea and sugar. Kefir wants minerals in the water, though from what I've read you can add baking soda and calcium if you have soft water. I don't know how hard or soft mine is, but I don't feel the weird squeaky/residue sensation I get with very hard water, so I assume it's been softened to some degree or another. Some people use clean eggshells; I'm hoping to be able to get some nice fresh eggs from one of the moms at the dance studio within the next couple of weeks (probably after next paycheck, I'm a bit broke right now). In the meantime, I chopped up a bit of one of my calcium/magnesium supplements - it's food-based rather than lab-created, so it should work, right? It needs sugar to eat, of course, and I am out (used my last in the batch of kombucha I started on Sunday) - so I used powdered sugar. It's the ONLY sugar I currently have in the house. Memo to self, trip to WinCo tomorrow (powdered milk, too, for the yogurt). It likes dried fruit, I have some dried cranberries on hand, we'll see how that tastes. :) Something I read also says it likes lemon slices, so I have a few floating on top. Hoping this will work!

So, there we go. Three different sources of probiotics. They're all different cultures, so the combination should cover pretty much everything, right?

If nothing else, I'll have some new and interesting things to drink. :) About to get involved in a raw milk group again, so maybe I'll see if I can also track down some milk kefir grains. Though on a few water kefir groups, I've had people say that milk kefir is harder and they killed the milk kefir while their water kefir grains were fine. Funny, from what I recall, all milk kefir grains want is whole raw milk, which I could provide it... (Jersey milk too, yum!)