Dark Side of the Moon

Great NorthEastern War, for those not in the SCA, or even not in this region of the SCA.  It was a very good GNEW.  I got five beads and my husband got a rock. 

 

( :-) )

   
  

I made it to Readercon last night just in time for Jennifer Pelland's (jenwrites) reading of her story "The Ghosts of New York."  Awesome story, very intense, some fascinating ideas about death and ghosts.   And then to a panel discussion called "You Don't Know Dictionary" about word usage, with Greer Gilman (nineweaving) on the panel, of course, and that was interesting, too.  Sources of words and what they convey and choice of words to use and the effects, such as why readers now feel cheated if you use "wagon" instead of "wain" in your fantasy book.  

I hung out around the hotel a while after the panels.  On the way out, finally, I walked down a corridor of closed doors for the smaller conference rooms but heard what wasn't quite Nine Inch Nails coming from one of them.    Peeked in.  A small group of people were playing Rock Band, the display projected on a large screen, and yes, "The Perfect Drug".   The guy was nailing the vocals, too, in time and pitch.  Just not quite Reznor. :-)

More Readercon today and Sunday, with an SCA event (GNEW) on Saturday to ring a change.
  
Oh, and I've also made a few updates to the www.chansonarts.com website.  The "life drawing" section is temporarily gone till I get a better, more recent set of images uploaded.   For the rest, if you follow my deviantArt page, you won't see anything you haven't seen before.  It's like a "best of" version.
  

Why didn't I know about this before?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+that+for+you

Replace the "let+me+google+that+for+you" with any stuipid query that's been posted on the blog or message board and hide the URL inside a clicky here for a helpful answer link.
  

I haven't yet tried the other recipes for bannocks.

I didn't get the cushion cover done, though I may still manage by the Athena's Thimble paneling at GNEW. 

But the polymer clay & beef shank bones art piece is nearly done.  It's a piece that should have been done in something other than polymer clay because it used so much, but the herbal infusion may be worth it.

Pork cut up (cheap fatty pieces are best) and baked at 350-375 F with lots of minced fresh ginger, and some tamari, mirin, brown sugar, and sesame oil, is very good.

My mother made it through surgery even though my sister is still vocally upset that they switched to general anaesthesia instead of an epidural.  I spoke with my mother this evening and she sounds a lot better than before the surgery.  It's just that she can't quite understand why she can't walk out of the hospital already.   (And thank you for the good wishes; it means a lot to me.)
 
Having missed Buttery Birthday, I have to figure out how to get the cordials to those that worked at the Tavern event.   I'm still reluctant to take them to Council tomorrow, because, ya know, college property?  Bah.
  

Kir is a wonderful summertime drink, even for cold, wet summers.  It is less cold today and the wet is more traditional, with passing thunderstorms instead of a stalled grey soaking. Kir also has the advantages of making cheap white wine drinkable, and of simplicity: a glassful of white wine and a few dollops of cassis over ice.

Barley bannocks, on the other hand, suck.  At least, so far.  Two out of four recipes tried, and both went into the trash. They were edible, in that it wouldn't kill you to eat them.  I'm hoping for something a little better while trying not to get too far away from the traditional.

The Mediterranean chicken isn't too bad.  Bake cut-up chicken tenders with olive oil and lemon juice and thyme and garlic powder at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 35 minutes.  Drain some of the liquid off.   Stir in thawed chopped spinach (about 10 oz. pkg.?), diced plum tomatoes (3), and sprinkle with 1/2 lb. crumbled feta chese, return to oven for 10 minutes.   Chopped black & green olives can be served on the side, or mixed in at the same time as the spinach and tomato, depending on how people in your dinner party feel about olives.  Serve over linguine or spaghetti or rice.

Fimo is not as good as Premo!.  But Fimo was on a very good sale and it's not nearly as bad as basic Sculpey.  So now I have more clay for art pieces.

I'm still hoping to get to Readercon.

My mother broke her hip. She's 85 and fragile, just come from a hospital visit for another condition.  They will do surgery tomorrow morning because my sister, who is there, knows (and I agree) that it would kill her to be bedridden with a broken hip, even at home.  So now it's a question of if she will survive the surgery.
  
More Kir.  Kir Royale, btw, is made with champagne instead of white wine.  Just so you know.
  

I'll be a Readercon this year, though not on Saturday.   I've also just put in my money for Arisia next January, with the added intention of having enough relevant work for the art show. 

Meanwhile, I'm slowly reading "Cloud & Ashes" by nineweaving .  I usually glomp through books in great chunks but this one is too dense, too rich for that.  And there's also the fear that if I read it too long at a time, I'll sink in and never surface, talk Cloudish the rest of my life, which would be very awkward for discussing data repository interface services at work.
  

So it turns out we're not going to be at Buttery Birthday, because the plans for my daughter's massage class went all screwy and we've decided it's best to stay home and catch our breaths.   But I did finally make pound cake with the double-yolk eggs (not so good: I worried about it being just too dense and added baking powder, and it ended up too fluffy) and chocolate cloud cookies (sorry,nineweaving, no preview, but I'll hope that extra cookies at Readercon would stll be acceptable; also, it's been a terrible week to try meringues) and started a new batch of cordial (of blood orange peel and lemon peel in brandy) and I'm currently simmering the apple chutney (thank gods, now those apples are out of the fridge and there's ROOM!).   Maybe some clay play later.  Or tomorrow, before the next life drawing class.
  

The NIN "meet & greet" photo became the background on my laptop. 

Yesterday at work, there was a long meeting between tech people at my company and tech people at a vendor company, because we're working on a possible service interface with them.   We've had several meetings already, so we're getting pretty comfortable with each other.  At the end of the meeting as we were all getting up to go, an avuncular sort of older guy who works with me, and who'd been sitting next to me, asked about the photo:  "One of those music groups you like?"  I didn't go into details, just said the obvious: "Er, yes. That's Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails."    The 30-something male who was leading the group from the vendor company gave me a half-smile (I'll be generous and not call it a "smirk") from across the table and said, "Is that really your music of choice, Carol?"  I swivelled the laptop around and pushed it across so he and his teammates could get a good look at the full photo and smiled back, "Actually, yes."   There wasn't anything said, but the smirk sure dropped.

Because that wasn't just a fanpic.  That was Trent Reznor with his arm around ME.  *snicker*
  

Sedna by *Cimeara on deviantART

So Sedna is finally done, inspired by a poem of yuki_onna 's in "A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects.".  I last posted about it over four months ago, but, yes, other things using time and energy and I had several iterations of each section of this, where I did something, didn't like the effect, and so did it all over again to get to something I liked. This, I like.
  

My mother was in the hospital again.  The most noticeable symptom was shortness of breath, but that's from heart and lung congestion, too much fluid buildup, and her kidneys are having trouble handling the diuretics.  It was a short term stay, just to get her stabilized again, and she's back home, but when we say "at least it's not serious" we only mean it's no more serious than the general breakdown of systems due to age, which is serious enough.

My daughter got the wireless to work, go her!  I'd bought the thing back the end of last fall, and tried the given steps without success and then gone through several hours of changing settings under the direction of the DSL support people, to no success (since the apparent problem was in their connection to it), and then given up till I got the energy to talk to the wireless support, to look at it from the other end.  I did change the settings back to what seemed appropriate rather than leaving them at what the DSL person said might work (since it hadn't).   With my husband home, I'd also suggested that -he- call the wireless support people, and of course that didn't happen.  Finally my daughter, home from college and wanting more chance at the internet than a shared computer, asked me to tell her what was wrong and she'd call.   So we went through all the same steps but this time got further that I remembered.   Still no internet, though.   And so I went off to work the next day and she looked through the documentation and fiddled with one thing more... and it worked!   For everyone except the house guest's laptop.  So my daughter called up the support line and they helped her get that laptop connected, too.   My daughter is awesome.
  

The test disks of herb/spice-infused polymer clay have been turned into actual pendants, but also more in the line of testing than any expectation of selling them. Let me know what you think, please?

( ~ pendants: photos and descriptions ~ )

If anyone does like these, give me a post and I'll see how to get them to you. Note: this offer doesn't just apply to those on my f-list.  Anyone's interest is welcome, as long as you give me a critique, too!

Booklist game
List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you: list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it.

( ~ list and commentary ~ ) 
  

... and getting my LJ act together again. First up, the promised photos from the NIN|JA concert last week. Utterly awesome show. The newly formed Street Sweeper Social Club opened with some amazing high-energy rock, and wicked good guitar playing by Tom Morello. NIN's set was hardcore, sharp-edged, and full out, with the single quieter moment being Reznor reminiscing about a time and place where he'd meant to kill himself. He didn't, (obviously) but the place still holds ghosts of bad times for him, so he's exorcising them by getting married there. An unusual sharing for him, from him to us. Then on to fantasy-land rock with Jane's Addiction with Perry Farrell in a shiny gold jumpsuit, and Dave Navarro in tats and nipple rings (he doffed his shirt after the first song), to close out the evening.  Weather: damp & drizzling, but no dampener to the show.

( ~ photos under cut, click on thumbnails for full-size view ~ )

This week we were on vacation in Maine.  On Wednesday, though, I left to drive back to Massachusetts for the NIN|JA concert.   More pictures when I get everything together this weekend.

NIN - June 3, 2009 NIN donor package picture with my co-donor friend Walter Elly, backstage at the Comcast Center in Mansfield, MA, on June 3, 2009.

So here's the photo:

These are 1/4 teaspoon of whatever, each mixed into a little less than 1/2 ounce of Premo Translucent polymer clay. Top row: salt textured with very coarse salt, pepper textured with crumbled foil, thyme textured with a plastic pot scrubber. Bottom row: ground sage textured by rolling a small rough stone around on it, crushed rosemary textured with a fine-toothed comb. The textures are almost immpossible to see except on the rosemary, but they're there. The idea was from this site but I'd wanted to check if I came out with the same colours and effects. (Answer: sometimes)
  

Last night I played with inclusions in translucent polymer clay, specifically some herbs and spices, and with some forms of texturing. A picture would be worth more than descriptive words, and I'll try to get one tonight to post. But now I need more clay to go with the bones.

I also stripped the top layer of paper off a piece of corrugated cardboard so I could use the corrugations to line up rows of beads to string for Sedna's watery downfall.

The previous night, I printed out a page of reference images of Noh masks, of newborn babies' faces.

I talk about the projects more than I work on them. I write up more ideas than get done. But if I kept them in my head, then they might never come out? And if enough other people know of them, then I feel more obligation to make them real. The encouragement from others helps, of course it does, but the embarrassment if I don't follow through makes for even stronger motivation.
  

Someone has taken it to the next step. "Vabtose" now has an entry in the Urban Dictionary.

I wonder when it will show up in Wikipedia. :-)

I am a suckerfish, drawing off inspiration from others who move with more strength of purpose. I still haven't finished the Sedra from yuki_onna's poems, and now I have two more pieces I need to make from jenwrites's short stories. I'll share the ideas with you, in case they never get made. The first is a sort of Tragedy-Comedy set of masks based off "Brushstrokes", with one being the Painted and the other being the Adorned. The second is a woman's torso, hip cocked, at ease, in white or dark plaster. Dark, I think, just because the contrast will be greater. Below the navel is a large circular cut-out, and inside that is hung, rotates on a string, a two-sided Japanese mask, one side a demon and other side a maiden. And that one is entitled "Big Sister/Little Sister" but connotations should exist for anyone, regardless of whether or not they've read the stories. (If you haven't, you should consider it. They are really wonderful stories. The collection is "Unwelcome Bodies" by Jennifer Pelland and the link is on jenwrites's journal page.)

(Oh, and I continue to post open life studio drawings and a few new photographs at my deviantArt account.)

If you like learning new words, "vabtose" is a very good one to learn.

No, I don't know what it means.  But if Google knows about it, it must be a word, right?
  

So far, it looks like this:

IMs: AIM (often), MSN (rarely)

Blogs: LJ (often), Dreamwidth (single post), Blogger/Blogspot (single post), WordPress (single post)

Other: deviantArt (often), Photobucket (on & off), Twitter (profile only), MySpace (profile only), Facebook (profile only), Etsy (shop still not open), two personally owned websites: chansonarts.com (slowly constructing something someday worthwhile) and dragonbear.com (SCA related and must update sometime)

This doesn't even count places where I'm a member for casual posts, such as Yahoo groups or gaming sites.  If I wanted to have all these active, I'd need 1000 hours a week to do it!   But, they exist and so I seem to think I should be there.  I post, I have a profile, therefore I am.