Dark Side of the Moon

Two claywork figurines were finally finished. A couple of other pieces are still in progress.


Eduin


Ashta

Yet another of the Thanksgiving desserts. This is a simple variant of my own on the ubiquitous apple pie, and I don't believe recipes that say you can get by with only six apples. (Well, yes, you can but those make very flat pies.) I used one pear for every two apples, which, after peeling, coring, and slicing, came to proportions of one part pear to three parts apple. Enough to add some additional flavour and mellowness, and to reduce the amount of sugar needed.

( ~ Apple-Pear Pie )

For Thanksgiving I made several desserts. Some I may have posted already, but it doesn't hurt to have them more accessible. Here are the recipes for the first two...

( ~ Pecan Pie and Lemon Chess Pie ~ )

There's a reason. This is what I made a few days after the chutney with the leftover pieces of pumpkin that I'd grown tired of dicing. I searched out several recipes for the dish but I liked that this one allows the pumpkin to cook by itself for a long period of time (no stirring every 5-10 minutes like the chutney) and it came out wonderfully well, very tender and flavorful. This is a dish made in three parts: (1) baked carmelized pumpkin, (2) ground beef & tomato sauce, (3) a garlic'd & minted yogurt sauce. Each part is very easy to make and the combined flavors are astonishing good together.

( ~ Kadu Bouranee, Kaddo Bourani, etc. ~ )


This could be done with butternut squash instead of pumpkin, or possibly sweet potatoes. Or, maybe, a mix of the squash and sweet potato would hit about the same notes? Must try that.

I bought a pair of Thai fisherman's pants off eBay and they came yesterday and I tried them on this morning. I love the color ("mangosteen" which ought to be orangish but it's a red-purple-brown), I love the feel of the cotton fabric and the way it flows when I walk, and I even love the puff of air across my legs as the side flaps open with each step.

But the flaps open too far when I sit, so I need to pin it or wear something underneath. And the doubly tied waist makes my stomach and bottom bulge even more than usual, so I should wear something long and loose on top. And mostly, really, it's an inner-me purchase instead of an outer-me one.

The inner-me is half my age, half my weight, and half a foot taller. She can walk in stilettos without needing full leg braces, and trek cross-country for hours. The outer-me is a lumpy ball of flesh who can barely walk down a flat sidewalk for more than a block, and the accompanying sounds are huffing and puffing and a popping knee joint, not the casually cruel click of heels. Sometimes we can compromise on ethnic chic, on Boho artwear, but I'm not sure this one will work. Eh. We'll see.

If we did look like our inner visions... I wonder who would recognize friends, family, anyone. Would the selves be cookie-cutter? all looking like airbrushed Photoshopped nonentities? Or would they be distinct enough, and would you know enough of the person, to smile and say, "There you are! I knew it was you."

Dreams are odd things.

Yesterday morning I had a very involved dream. One of the minor bits was visiting, with my family, a pub somewhere on the South Shore of Boston. It was midafternoon and we were there for a late lunch and the place was almost empty. Leonard Nimoy came in. (Fact: He grew up in Boston. Dream: He kept a house near the pub for when he visited Boston.) The pub specialized in odd drinks and he wanted to show off some sazerac he'd found. It was in a decanter rather than a bottle, and the greenish-glass of the decanter had an usual shape. The flange at the top spread out into wings.

Yesterday daytime I looked up "sazerac" because I couldn't remember what it was, or if I'd ever known other than hearing the word. It's a cocktail made with rye whiskey (orginally made with cognac), bitters, a sugar cube, and also absinthe. Absinthe is known as the "green fairy". Fairies have wings. Fairies also, usually, have pointy ears.

Very odd.

(No, I didn't forget the Pumpkin Chutney. It happened. But I need to take a photo, for better illustrating the point there.)

Pumpkin Chutney
The reason for chutney is that we're on the last jar of the apple one I made back on June 27th. The reason for pumpkin chutney is that we never carved the Halloween pumpkin, and I don't like throwing it out. But a twelve-inch tall jack-o'-lantern pumpkin isn't a sweet small sugar pumpkin, so the recipe needs to be one that doesn't make it stand on its own. But it's huge (relatively). It's taken hours. I've diced about 3/4 of it now and that's in two large plasticware containers, and I've at least cut the rest into sections and peeled them and put them in a bag to do tomorrow. Except now I've got a blister on my index finger where I leaned too hard on the knife. Yes, yes, I know, you're supposed to let the knife do the cutting, but I get impatient.

Clay Work
I'm formalizing the ideas for the figurines in my head (that's my excuse). I bought more clay (it was on very good, and very rare, sale). And I did make the torso for the image based on The Red Tree and that's something. If you haven't read Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree and you like psychological thrillers, and can deal with ambiguity in exchange for clever imagery that varies from the realistic and mundane to the bizarrely surreal, I highly recommend it.. The torso is also a practice piece for another I have in mind, inspired by Jennifer Pelland's story of "Big Sister, Little Sister" which will be a more complex work. (They're both on LJ, btw: Kiernan is greygirlbeast and Pelland is jenwrites

Friday the 13th, but at least it's a Friday. This weekend is for pumpkin chutney and clay figures. I should do these, and if I promise recipe and photos to you then it should happen. Right?

My therapist says there are too many "should"s in how I talk about myself. Feh.

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 ~ )