Dark Side of the Moon

Sometimes I cook from recipes, sometimes I cook from my own native wit. Sometimes recipes fail, sometimes my wits do, too, and then I try to see what else can be done.

Last weekend, I made a side dish based on a recipe that I'd made once but I didn't take the time to find again. It was for sorta southwestern spicty sweet potatoes with brown sugar and cinnamon and chili powder and I used what I remembered and what else I've done with them and what else I had. I made a lot, because I wanted to take the leftovers into work for lunches.

( ~ what's happened to it ~ )
  

It's been a while. If anyone would like me to do a 3-card reading for them, just ask. You don't have to be on my friends list, and it's fine if you tell others. I use this deck. It's not Tarot, but it seems to work.
  

Not even a first draft, just words thrown down like a handful of dice, the ones that didn't roll off the table...

I want to go someplace else
be somewhere else
be someone else
it doesn't matter where
it doesn't matter whom
Just
not here
not me.

The dishes didn't all fit in the dishwasher.
I have failed.

Someone said there's a poem he reads every year
and that makes me want to read it
but it's not online
not all of it
the little I saw is good
why can't I write like that?

There's too much spice on the sweet potatoes.
I must remember to get the car inspected.
There's a message on the answering machine
from Tuesday.

It's all hallow's eve and the weather is warm
and the wind is blowing all the leaves off the trees
and I want to be out there and I want to be blown
away
away
away.
  

When I came back from Richmond, I was developing a sore back molar that got worse over the weekend (naturally).  So on Monday, I called the dentist office and on Tuesday I saw the dentist and he said the tooth had split and it ought to come out.  Do it now, or wait? Now, said I, and he did.  And he asked what painkilers I'd been taking and I said I had some leftover meds from knee pain, and so he didn't give me a prescription for more, or any prescription for anything else, just some gauze and a sheet of "what to do now."   I went to work and read the sheet and it said "do this" and "do that" and "keep taking the antibiotics" and I said, er, huh?  I called the dentist office and said "antibiotics?" and they said "let us check" and then they said "oh that sheet is for general dental surgery, just do the gauze and the rinsing and whatever else he told you."   The sheet says "Instructions Following Your Tooth Extraction."  Hmmm.   But I did the gauze and the rinsing and took more pain meds when I needed to sleep.   And the space kept hurting and it started to get worse, and frankly it didn't look so great either.  So today I called and said "it's nearly the weekend, can someone look at it before then?" and they gave me an appointment with another dentist.   He looked at the space.  He said, "well, yes, there is a little swelling..."  in the tone of voice that really says "uhoh" especially with only about 2 seconds of observation.  He went off to check on something, or talk to someone.  He came back.  He said, "I've called the pharmacy downstairs. Take two of the antibiotics right away and one at dinner and one at bedtime, then three times a day."   He also gave me prescriptions for large-dose ibuprofen for daytime and a different pain med for nighttime.  Also instructions for additional salt-water rinsing and for hot moist compresses.  Also instructions on how to contact the dentist-on-call if things got worse over the weekend, and "please do call if needed!" 

I support doctors who try not to use antibiotics as an automatic response to anything and everything.  Drug-resistance in disease-causing organisms is a big, big problem.   But in this case, 'twas not so good, and now we play catchup.
 

A while ago, I put in an order to Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab for the "Falling Leaf Moon" limited edition scent, which turned out to be an absolutely wonderful one. I've ordered from there before and they always send a couple of little sample vials free with whatever you order. The sample vials are called "imps" if you order them directly, and the free ones have come to be called "frimps". This time I also ordered a t-shirt from the Trading Post section, which has a separate website and payment process and the order shipped separately. There'd been a problem with the printing and the t-shirt was delayed, but it finally came this week. It came with a bunch of little foam Halloween stickers, and a striped orange and brown and green pencil, and another frimp of sample perfume: "The Last Squished Jelly Bean."

( ~ Guess what the scent is? ~ )
 

I've had other stuff on my mind than LJ.  But catching up from when I last posted...

( ~ nine days of updates in one easy package ~ )

And that's what's been happening.
  
 

The funeral was today. 

On the way back to the hotel, the four of us (me, husband, 21-yr-old son, 19-yr-old daughter)  talked about the differences between it and what we might want for ourselves.  My daughter wants to be dressed in Master Chief footed pajamas (she still regrets not buying the Halo 3 boxers she once saw) and her ceremony should be non-religious and no more than 30 minutes long.  They should show the video of Thriller and read quotes from Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and from Star Wars if there's time, and there should be a bag of ground coffee put in the coffin with her.  Given the coffee and Thriller, her brother offered to blow her head off with a shotgun when she came back as a zombie, but she thought her final ending ought to be more epic.  So instead he's going to get up high on a stepladder, or something, and drop down on her with an axe, and that's been deemed acceptably cool. 

It's always nice to plan details beforehand.

(Please don' t think they were being flippant about the actual funeral.  They were, and are, wonderfully understanding of when to be serious for such occasions, and when, afterwards, a touch of humor would be welcome.)
  

My mother died early this morning.  Those who've been reading this journal for a while may remember that she's been and out of hospitals for the past couple of years with congestive heart failure and other problems, that she broke her hip at the beginning of July and that accelerated the decline.  My sister did miracles of care, and there were very good days over these past three months that she was able to enjoy, and in her own home.  Even at the end she wasn't in deep pain, but she'd become so frail that her skin tore easily, there was constant aching, it did hurt greatly when she needed to be moved onto her side or adjusted in bed, the other conditions were getting worse, and there was no hope of turning any of it around.  She went quietly in a sleep that had been increasing troubled lately, but last night wasn't.  She's fully at rest now, at peace.
  

The wireless is, I think, it seems, currently at least, working.   It took a lot of fiddling with settings, of setting and resetting passwords and connection defaults (including going back to our original DSL password), and we still haven't seen if it'll stay working if we ever need to reboot the system.

Tomorrow: work.  Yes, I know it's a holiday.  But something needs to be done for Tuesday that didn't get done on Friday because I was getting my daughter back from college for the long weekend.

Tomorrow evening: Monster starts on SyFy, 11 pm Eastern US, English dubbed version.  EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH.   *cough*   Seriously, it's only labelled anime because labelling it a psychological thriller dealing with medical ethics, genetics, sociopaths, behavioral conditioning, East German experiments, Czech fairy-tale writers, secret societies, and police procedurals and manhunts, would take too long.   There are no super powers of a sort other than Dr. Tenma's tenacity, there are no demons except those that are inside... who? Everyone, possibly. 
 
The Wikipedia page is here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_(manga)  (because it's a little hard to search on "monster")
   

Our land-line phone service is Verizon.  We've been having trouble with static and on-and-off dial tone for a couple of years now, and sometimes they fiddle with the outside wires (and the service guy tells us the whole area needs replacement wires and boxes) but lately they're saying it must be inside and until we check every phone jack and circuit they're going to keep insisting it's inside.  So our land-line is unuseable.
 

( ~ and then there's Verizon DSL.. ~ )

     

I know it's been a while since I posted, but it's not that I've been absent from LJ.  I've been following other people's journals and that's made it hard to talk about minor problems or pleasures when other people are dealing with matters of life and, unfortunately, death.

There's not a lot to report.  A revitalization of a side interest, the roleplaying site is gearing up for a transformation.  Work, too, looks like a major project that's had various incarnations over the years is finally getting funding to take us past the "this is what we could do, if you let us do it" stage.  Personal creative projects?  I also need to move there, to get past the ideas and on to implementation.

Tomorrow is my son's 21st birthday.  We'll have a bottle of "his" wine with dinner, to celebrate his coming of full legal age.  When my husband and I went together, when it became more serious, he told me that at his wedding he'd be given a case of wine from his birth year that had been set aside by his father, a man very knowledgeable indeed about wine.  Supposedly he and his three siblings each had a case, and they'd joke with each other over the quality of the birth years.   It turned out this wasn't so: no case.   I understand how that works, a passing reference not meant seriously, a good intention never implemented or only partially, fading out over time.   (But I didn't care for the unsympathy of the excuse given, however joking: "Oh we drank a bottle of it whenever you were bad." )   I still thought it was a good idea.  When my son was born, the first of the grandchildren, we asked my father-in-law to pick a case of wine that would last well and so yes, there is one.  There's one for each of the kids born before his death, and that makes it an extra blessing, that in having the wine we'll also be remembering him.   We aren't saving it strictly for weddings, though.   We'll have one bottle tomorrow, at my son's permission and expectation, and the rest will be his, for whatever he considers worth the celebration. 

But next Sunday, he and some friends are going down to King Richard's Faire so that  his first legally purchased drink can be mead. :-)
  

"Supreme of Old Rooster"

This is based on the "French Casserole Chicken" recipe in Joy of Cooking, the one that's also called in its introduction "Supreme of Old Hen". The time given is for what I had: a rooster that was, if I remember right, about 18 months old. This is absolutely ancient compared to what you'd find in the supermarket. calygrey said, and I confirmed it on the internet because I couldn't believe I'd remembered correctly, that the breeds raised for meat are killed at 8 weeks old. Seriously, they're 4-5 lbs. by then, and if left alone they wouldn't get much older because their heart gives out. Reduce the cooking time to only 1 hour, or even 45 minutes, if you're using one of those.

( ~ the recipe ~ )  

Yesterday I went off to calygrey's house and learned quite a lot about the insides of chickens.

( ~ Chicken Butchering 101, or, First Catch Your Chicken ~ )

calygrey is a very knowledgeable and patient teacher with a great sense of practicality and humor, full of good information and tips. She offers these sessions fairly often, and I highly recommend the experience if you can handle it. (Maybe not for vegetarians, but I've always thought that if you eat meat, you should be able to take a certain degree of responsibility for knowing and caring how it gets to your table.)

Next post: Recipe for a Rooster.

Last night I'd checked the local forecast for the next few days:
Wednesday: High 81, Low 65... Friday: High 65, Low 38
  

The music section of a recent issue of the New Yorker (I suspect Sept. 14th) talked about the Nine Inch Nails "Wave Goodbye" small club performances and gave some background on the... well, it's hard to say "group" since Trent Reznor is the overwhelming presence.   This reviewer, like most, pushed the loud industrial dissonance aspect of the music, but it would have been nice if there'd been even a passing mention of the surprisingly lyrical pieces that do exist and are considered a serious part of the canon, not just throwaway "something different".  Now I like even the dissonant stuff (the more you hear, the more you realize how cyclical it is, how the newest lyrics reference the oldest ones and no, please, not because Reznor can't think of anything new to say).   But I started to put together my own version of a somewhat lighter and more tonal list with which to woo those who think they'd never like NIN.  When I did, I found the oddest thing: the track numbers lined up with only a single duplicate.  It's not perfect, there's a few instrumental pieces I'd switch around if it were an actual album, and some of the pieces aren't totally dissonance-free, but they have a musicality to them that a non-industrial fan should still appreciate.  Soooo... here's my take on it:

NIN : LIGHTS
01 - I Ghosts 1 (Ghosts I-IV, 2008)
02 - Piggy (The Downward Spiral, 1994)
03 - The Frail (The Fragile, disk 1, 1999)
04 - The Good Soldier (Year Zero, 2007)
05 - Something I Can Never Have (Pretty Hate Machine, 1989)
alternate 05 - Echoplex (The Slip, 2008)
06 - The Fragile (The Fragile, disk 1, 1999)
07 - Lights in the Sky (The Slip, 2008)
08 - I'm Looking Forward to Joining You Finally (The Fragile, disk 2, 1999)
09 - The Four of Us Are Dying (The Slip, 2008)
10 - A Warm Place (The Downward Spiral, 1994)
11 - La Mer (The Fragile, disk 2, 1999)
12 - The Great Below (The Fragile, disk 1, 1999)
13 - Right Where It Belongs (With Teeth, 2005)
14 - Hurt (The Downward Spiral, 1994)

What would you add? what would you change?

Oh, and re: the coinage fuss:
I like research. I like full documentation. I like details and disclosure and history and all possibilities available for discussion.  It's turning into a big piece and will need to be split into parts, but I need to get everything together first. 
  

Someone new has friended me! 

*waves to the EK seneschal*

Mmmhmmm.
  

Copy of post sent to SCA-East today (long):

( ~ post ~ )

I have already been told I should apologize for daring to compare the screwing I got to sexual assault.    

What I will apologize for is that I called it a metaphor, when of course it was a simile.  

Added:

 

( ~ follow up post to list ~ )

 

I ended up not going to the SCA event yesterday.  Things got hectic in the morning in getting everyone and everything together and I said I'd go later in the second car, but an end-of-summer cold and severe lack of sleep and the amount of rain made me keep putting it off till I decided not to go at all.  There were some classes I'd wanted to take, and I always look forward to commedia performances, but... oh well.

I did go out once during the day, to a pet store to see what could be found to help the hermit crabs.  My two kids each bought two of the things this summer, early June, when we were at Old Orchard Beach.  They ended up in the same habitat because it turns out that "hermit" crabs are actually very social and prefer living in large groups. (Helpful for them: there's a chain effect when one crab moved to a larger shell, then another smaller crab picks up the discarded one as its new home, etc.)  The habitat had some sand and aquarium type gravel, maybe an inch deep.  On-line research said that wasn't appropriate, and not sufficient depth if the crabs needed to moult, so I picked up the recommended fibrous mulch and more sand (some of it calcium-digestible), and also a half-round hollowed log for climbing & hiding, and more types of foods, and a water-conditioning spray/mist bottle.

Random hermit crab "facts" (Unverified, i.e. Wikipedia):

Hermit crabs have been using gastropod shells since the Late Cretaceous.  Before then, at least some used ammonite shells (apparently, a fossil record exists).

The coconut crab, the world's largest living arthropod, is a hermit crab, but one that uses a borrowed shell only when very young.

During moulting, a hermit crab can regenerate lost claws or limbs.

Hermit crabs were once thought to be "throw-away" pets, that would live only a few months in captivity.  Now that people know more about the needs, some species can live 20-30 years.

Oh joy. :-)
  

Busy long weekend.

( ~ Saturday, Sunday, Monday... with recipe for beef/pepper stew ~ ) 
  

WordPress is like BlogSpot/Blogger.  You can have a blog on their site or you can install a version on your own site and use your own URL accordingly.   Our regular website's hosting service has just sent out e-mails warning that a major hole has been found in the security for installations of WordPress earlier than version 2.8.4.     If you're one of the people who have installed it on your site, better update the script.