It's Only A Paper Rose

I have been informed by the Powers That Be (or, at least, the Powers That Keep Track of These Things) that the cat-picture-post ratio in my LJ is severely lacking. Given how much I hate to be behind the curve, and given that a very special elf gave me quite a nice point-and-shoot camera so I wouldn't have to get out Brian's behemoth of an SLR every time I wanted a quick snap of something, I thought I'd work on bringing things up to par.

So, without further ado...I bring you Leo.

( Kitty! Holiday kitty! )

A few notes:

--Leo is quite possibly one of the most photogenic cats I've ever met. (Look at that last one if you don't believe me, and tell me it isn't Christmas-card ready.) I swear he mugs for the camera - if he sees you taking pictures, within a few minutes he'll adopt some classically adorable pose and look at you with those "Picture now plz?" eyes. And then he'll hold the pose until he's absolutely certain you're done. (I think Brian may have inadvertently trained this behavior with his habit of giving him treats after taking his picture.)

--For a $200-level point-and-shoot, the Sony DSC-H55 takes some remarkably nice low-light photos. In all three of these, the only light source was the Christmas tree, and while they came out a bit dark, a bump of Picasa's auto-contrast button brought it up to just about perfection. They're not super-crisp like you'd get with a flash or a bright light source, but they're surprisingly non-noisy (and the dreaded smeariness from noise reduction isn't bad at all).

--Speaking of Picasa - I hate to sound like a broken record, but have I mentioned I love Google-made products? Easier to use even than iPhoto, a surprisingly wide variety of editing tools, and not intimidating at all - plus, auto-upload is the shit, yo. Honestly, I think a large part of the tapering-off of my interest in pictures, even before my last camera disappeared, was how much time it took to edit/crop/resize manually and then go log in to Photobucket and upload. Kind of feels like cheating, being able to do everything in one spot. And, it's free. How do you beat that?

--And now...chocolate-chip cookies! Who says the holidays are over?

"Hey, want to come over to my house on Wednesday?" I ask my friend Janae, as we clean up the winery's tasting room in preparation for a new bout of customers. "We could watch movies, or make pizza, or just hang out and read."

"I don't know," she says as she hauls the mop bucket out of the sink, its bulk looking significantly smaller against her tall frame. "I was actually going to spend some time with paper and scissors, if you get my drift. Have you ever tried it out?"

I think for a moment, pausing from wiping down the bar. "Nah, not for myself, although I've known people who were into that."

"Most people know someone, whether or not they know that they know them." She sets down the bucket, sloshing a bit of water onto the floor. "Lots of people aren't open about their habits. Afraid others will judge them for it."

"Isn't it supposed to be pretty addictive, though?" Given my family history, I can't help but worry.

She scoffs. "Only if you can't keep it under control." I watch her wring out the mop and start moving it back and forth over the tiles. "Seriously, it's no big deal, and it's fun. Why don't I bring my equipment over? I've got a few pieces I can start you off with."

"Well, I was thinking that I needed to try something new with my time." I finish with the bar and start setting up the wine bottles. "It's not super-expensive, right?"

"Depends on how fancy you want to get. But it's not like a crack habit or anything, no." She wrings out the mop. "Besides, you just can't get that into it here - not enough suppliers. You have to go to Tucson for the really good stuff."

That Wednesday, Janae came over, and she did indeed give me some paper (I already had the scissors).

Now, a couple weeks later, this is what my once-empty kitchen table looks like:



But it's been a valuable lesson, in all. I've learned that for me, there's no such thing as "one time". I can't just "try it out". When it comes to crafts, it's either nothing or it's all the way.

Here's hoping my family doesn't have to stage an intervention soon.

Bleh. Going to my mum's house tomorrow and I have a cold. What a way to start a vacation.

But! Brian finally got me one of the pictures of Monica's outfit for Halloween - the one we put together from a combination of my closet and my sewing skills. Unfortunately, the shot doesn't get my black patent-leather platform-heeled boots, which sort of complete the goth-fairy-tale-character look, but you can at least see most of it. And day-um did it come out well, if I do say so myself.

( Oh Grandma, what big eyes you have... )

Props to Monica for being able to quit being bashful long enough to pose for the camera, as well.

And now, I'm going to zone out in front of Kurosawa. Later, all.

"Crock-pot" is a funny word.

Also! We bought a crock-pot this weekend, specifically because I found a recipe so very strange that I had to try it: Pepsi pork roast. I mean, it reads like something out of a 1956 issue of Better Homes & Gardens - Pepsi, cream-of-mushroom soup and onion soup mix? And yet, of all the pork roast recipes on Recipezaar, it has the highest rating: four-and-a-half stars with 150 reviews. So, with some trepidation (aren't soda and cream-of-mushroom soup the hallmarks of trailer-trash cuisine?), I got the ingredients (and the crock-pot), tossed it all in, and turned the thing on for four hours.

Best. Roast. Ever.

Seriously. Holy cow. Tender to the point of falling apart and absolutely delicious. I made mashed potatoes to go with, and boiled the juices with corn starch for gravy, and it was probably one of the most delicious things I've ever made.

So, because I'm an adventurous sort, and the idea of toss-everything-in-and-ignore-it-for-hours cooking appeals to me greatly, I chopped up pablano peppers and a bell pepper and an onion and cilantro and a jalapeno and some other stuff last night, and this morning I tossed it in there with the cut-up remains of the roast, covered it all with chicken broth, and turned the pot on "low". I have no idea how it'll turn out - the recipe I was using wasn't designed for crock-pot use, so I was sort of guessing - but the ingredients all smelled good together, which always augurs well for cooking.

Now I just have to figure out the trick of cutting up meat without *also* slicing open my thumb. Ah well; at least I have superglue to put the nail back together.

...but Brian finally got his MacBook Pro, which meant he could process pictures without his computer dying, which meant he could get me the properly-processed versions of my 80s-night costume pictures.

I need a photo printer now, so I can put these up on my wall here at work with the caption "From my audition for Mad Max 4".

( Because they're even bigger than my hair... )

Okay, cue the uproarious laughter in five, four, three, two, one...

I really like the pictures from this medieval-reenactment wedding - it looks like the couple involved both did their research and had lots of fun with it. I particularly like the woman's dress - it looks warm and comfortable as well as stunning. One particular bit about the description stuck out, though:

Sian wore a unique court dress based on a brass rubbing that was made from 270 feet of silk in three layers. (Emphasis mine.)

Now, I realize that my costume-geekery is showing, here, but 270 feet of silk is 90 yards, which amounts to something like ten bolts of fabric. While that's a beautiful (and no doubt expensive) dress, I sincerely doubt that it used 90 yards of fabric - she would look roughly spherical, were that the case. Most likely it was a typo and the dress actually used 27 feet, or nine yards. Which is still an ostentatiously large amount - by comparison, I remember seeing a Simplicity pattern for a French Revolution-era aristocrat costume (one of those dresses with the giant skirt draped over the hip cages) that used about seven and a half.

Either way, though, awesome dress, and very fun (if expensive! 30,000 pounds?) idea for a wedding. Props to them for their efforts.

Thanks to having my morning coffee again, I was feeling rather inspired, so with the help of a Dread Pirate Roberted trial version of Photoshop, I present...

( My Tribute to Morning Coffee )

Also, given that Brian and I have actually been cooking things lately, I've started up a separate blog (roses_recipes) for recipes that I've tried and liked. I've only got two up so far, but if anyone has any suggestions I'm more than open to trying more...

...the rain actually makes the front page of the newspaper. (Or else it's just a slow news day.)

To be honest, as much as it has sucked having gallons of rain pelting down on us the last few days, I'm grateful in an odd sort of way - if it were about 10-20 degrees colder, this would all have been snow and we'd essentially have a repeat of the Great Four-Day Snowstorm of Early 2005. And that's not an experience I especially want to repeat.

In other news, it looks like Brian and I will be having a nice quiet Thanksgiving by ourselves - our friends all have plans and we don't exactly have any family in town right now. It's not like I'm disappointed about it, though - more food for us. =) We went grocery shopping and got a small turkey and yams and Martinelli's and Grands biscuits and all sorts of good stuff. I really can't wait, even though it'll be a metric assload of cooking (and cleaning, later on). Plus we both get Thursday and Friday off, so I'll have most of a day to digest before going to rehearsal Friday night.

So far as the knitting goes, I've finished two scarves (one for my boyfriend and one for my mother's boyfriend) and I'm still going strong. I've started mine, and it's coming out really nicely - I've been using a combination of that fuzzy purple 50% wool yarn I bought earlier, and some really nice white 100% wool yarn for the accent stripes. I have to say that going from mostly-acrylic to mostly-wool yarn has been a really nice experience; while the wool-acrylic blend is nice and warm and not too expensive, the wool yarn is about 50 times nicer to work with. It's softer, for one thing, and it doesn't split anywhere near as easily as the acrylic stuff does, which makes for fewer tangles. Plus it just feels nicer. So somehow I don't think I'm going to be going back to the acrylic stuff anytime soon.

I was reading older blog posts just now and realized exactly how many people from just the past year who were once big parts of my life and aren't any more. Ian's moved to Anchorage, and even though we keep in touch over MSN I miss having him around for big teddy-bear hugs when I need them; Monica had her baby and is now homebound most of the time; Thelonius-Brian and I don't really talk any more for a number of reasons; Ryan and I just don't seem to have that much to talk about anymore; and Lydia's usually busy with work or her family or some such (even though she lives next door and I suppose I could make an effort to keep in better touch). Additionally, my mother's been much more busy with her own life now that she actually has one, and while we do talk fairly often we aren't as big a part of each others' lives as we have been (which is probaby helped by the fact that I'm not financially dependent on her anymore). On the other hand, Brian and I have a relationship that is and has been wonderful and I wouldn't trade for anything, and I have my life enriched by the two felines who deign to give me companionship. So it evens out, more or less.

All that said, I think one of my holiday resolutions is going to be to keep in better touch with friends, or at least those who are left. To that effect, I'm probably going to take the part of Friday that I'm not either digesting or rehearsing and see if I can catch up with Monica and/or Jeanne and/or Lydia.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and do try to think of things in your life that you're thankful for.

Recently I've taken up knitting again. This came about for a number of reasons - for one thing, it's nice to have something to do for those moments when you need your attention relatively free but don't have much to do, and for another, it's a nice kind of indoor winter activity. Mostly, however, I figured that with all these rehearsals coming up, I'd want to have something to do with my hands aside from hold music.

In any case, I recently finished a nice vibrantly-colored red and blue striped scarf for Brian, which I knitted to replace the one he currently has (it's pale yellow and a bit effeminate for his tastes). I decided to make another one in blue and green (it helps that I have an extra skein of blue yarn left over), so I went to JoAnn's to get some more of the nice 10% wool-blend yarn that I was using (which, incidentally, costs about $2.50 a skein - not the cheapest, but not too pricey).

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), in the center of the yarn area where they keep the specialty yarns, they had the fuzziest, softest, warmest, prettiest wool blend (60% wool) yarn I'd ever seen - in exactly two colors that (of course) were the exact right colors to match my winter gear. I waffled for about five minutes (would've waffled longer, but I was on my lunch break) before grabbing a few skeins. They ended up being $6 apiece (ouch!), but man, that's going to be a nice scarf.

In other news, they printed my letter in the Juneau Empire. Got the confirmation call from the Anchorage Daily News but haven't seen it printed yet, so I guess we'll see on that one...