It Started with a Journal

It's currently 60°F and rainy, and I'm wearing a tank top, skirt, and flip flops, but I'm not even going to bitch. After hitting the 90s in the last few days, I've decided that this is better. I mean, if it has to be one extreme or another, I prefer this. But what I would love even better is a normal Seattle summer, where it's just gorgeous and perfect for 3 months. The good news is, it looks like after today, that's exactly what we'll be getting for the next 10 days -- 70-75°F the whole time. Squeee!

My vegetable garden is soldiering on, even though they're all like WTF from this insane weather that has a 30° difference from day to day (much as we all are). A few more little tomatoes are peeking out, and I saw a little bee near the tomato flowers yesterday. Pollinate your heart out, little bee! I've started to pinch my basil plants, but my lesson learned from this year is that I need way more basil. Pinching a few at a time doesn't really give me enough to work with, it's not enough for pesto, and once pinched, it doesn't keep well. With more plants, every time I pinch I should have enough to make pesto, at least. The carrots are getting super crazy leafy, except when I dug down to check on the carrots themselves, they're PUNY. I guess my soil isn't loose enough for them. Seriously, the leaves give the impression that they must be huge; they're just making a whole lot of noise over nothing. The birds keep getting to my strawberries before I do. They think the netting is a joke and are laughing at me behind my back. The garlic leaves seem to be dying down, but not as much as K.'s; it'll be awhile before they're ready to harvest. The little zucchini plant is doing well, it's now surpassed its predecessor, but it's not big enough to develop flowers yet. I bought a little jalapeno pepper starter, and it's insanely greedy for water. If I don't water it daily, it droops. O.o Finally, after a second bout with the neighborhood cat, I've moved the catnip indoors to my office, which door I am keeping closed so Jaime doesn't wreck what's left of the poor thing. I don't know if it will fare well inside, and if it doesn't I guess I'll move it back out and just hope that the darn neighborhood cat doesn't succeed in killing it entirely.

I have like four or five story outlines going right now. This is exciting because it's been awhile since I've had that many story ideas clamoring to be written. The difficulty is in concentrating on one of them; I'm not good at multi-tasking when it comes to writing. If I try to write two stories at once, they both suffer. I just need to let one of them take over. Unfortunately, the one that's calling out the strongest right now is also the one I don't have all the answers for, plot/story wise, so I can't start writing until I have all the answers, that's just how I work.

C.'s 5th birthday party on Friday was fun, though dealing with little kids -- even peripherally -- exhausts me. The Molly Moon's truck gave out ENORMOUS scoops of ice cream, HOL-EE. In pictures the scoops are like half the size of the kids' heads. Maybe it was partly due to the fact that a photographer from Seattle Weekly was there (K. had to ask all the parents if it was okay with them that he take pictures of the kids with their ice cream), and little kids with giant ice cream cones make for better photos. I also made these mini sugar donut muffins (idea from romanticalgirl), and they were an huge hit. I wasn't there when they broke them out, but D. says that kids were double fisting them and cramming them into their mouths. He also said that he tried to hoard some of them from the kids because he liked them and wanted to eat them later (shameful).

Whenever I make mayo, I almost always end up making way more than I need. The homemade variety doesn't keep nearly as well as store bought (1 week vs months if not years), so there's really no sense in making a lot, especially as I don't generally eat a lot of it to begin with. But, the cycle goes like this. I decide that I am going to make mayo the old-fashioned way, with a bowl and a wire whisk. All it takes is patience and a good whisking arm. I'm okay for maybe the first 10 drops of oil. Then my whisking arm starts to get tired. I drizzle more oil into the mixture than I should. The arm holding the measuring cup at a tense angle to control the amount of oil starts to cramp. I think, it should be safe now to add oil in a thin stream instead of drops. I adjust my cramped arms. Rinse and repeat. I end up with a semi-emulsified, not-very-mayo-like substance. That's when I have to drag out the food processor -- which I had wanted to avoid the "work" of washing -- and make a new batch of mayo. The food processor makes it happen practically by magic, with very little effort. Once I have creamy, perfect mayo, I then add in the "mayo" (aka, semi-emulsified crap) that I tried to make by hand. Because if you didn't already know, if you have perfectly emulsified mayo, you can add mayo-gone-wrong to it and it will magically make it good. However, this is why I always end up with more than I need. Sigh.

Quiet Thanksgiving, as planned. When I picked up our Whole Foods meal, it turned out that they didn't have a 6-8lb turkey as we were supposed to get, so they gave us a 10lb one. For 2 people that is simply ridiculous, lol. Also, witness our naivete: WF asked that we specify a time that we would be going to pick up the meal; my cousin chose 11:30am. We both figured that we could have it for lunch AND dinner. Neither of us knew or realized that "fully cooked" doesn't mean "hot." We still ended up having to rub a paste (provided) over the turkey and baking it for over an hour. We also had to heat up the various veggies and accompaniments, so we didn't actually end up eating until much later than we'd originally planned. I mean, still easier than having to cook everything from scratch and less clean up involved, but yeah. Now I know.

I did no Black Friday shopping this year. I was, however, very lame. Just before midnight the night before BF, I read romanticalgirl's LJ entry where she talked about her BF plans. I felt pretty wide awake and had been looking for an excuse to do BF, so I emailed her and asked if I could tag along. She nicely said yes. She planned to start at 2am. We emailed back and forth for a bit and I was still excited. Then, just as I was preparing to leave the house a bit before 1:30am, I felt like I'd been hit by a sledgehammer. A wave of tiredness came over me and I realized that there was no way in hell I would be able to stay awake much longer without becoming Ms. Grouchy Pants and/or wanting to sleep in the car. So I told L. that I was lame and was not going after all. Yes, I felt really, really lame. I generally don't like to cancel plans once I've made them, but I just knew I was going to be terrible company. That'll also teach me to make spontaneous middle-of-the-night decisions about going out. Don't I know yet that those days are long over for me? :P

I ended up sleeping until 12:30pm. When I went to bed I had thought to myself that I would just go BF shopping at a more "normal" hour, say 8 or 9am, and maybe still get a couple of good deals on things. Given the time I woke up, I didn't even bother to go to any stores. Talk about conking out, sheesh. I think I have a low-grade something or other, because the last few days before that my throat was feeling funny/sore in the mornings, and then the major sleepathon happened.

My doctor ran a vitamin D test along w/ my cholesterol test and to no one's surprise, I'm low. It's a problem for basically everyone who lives in this sunshine-forsaken state. I'd been taking 250 IU/day along w/ my calcium supplement, but my doctor wants me to take 1,000 IU/day. I ended up getting what my cousin gets, Carlson Ddrops. It's in liquid form and 1 drop of it provides 1,000 IU. I usually put it on some food or in my coffee. It tastes like nothing. You'd think "a drop of sunshine" would taste like something. So far I've been pretty good about remembering if I've taken it that day, but I'm sure one of these days I'll forget and end up giving myself a whole lotta vitamin D. Luckily that shouldn't do me any harm. I don't think. Also, I'm going to see a physical therapist tomorrow for a consult re: my back soreness from the accident. AND I've decided not to be an ostrich and have scheduled for a consult w/ an endocrinologist. My cousin points out that I've already had 2 abnormal test results, I'm going to have to see one at some point or another, so might as well start the battery of tests now.

The garden has shown very little change. My cousin's gardeners have told her that winter is a verrrrrry slow growing season so I shouldn't be concerned. The cabbage looks leafier and the lettuce has pretty much died, but otherwise everything's about the same. There were a couple of warm ("warm") days a few weeks back, and that apparently made one of the bok choi plants bolt. So I guess they really ARE cold-weather plants, because it was so not warm; the sun just came out, that's all. I removed all the flowers, but I probably should have just let it go to seed. Now it's useless. Sigh.

Last night I beat Professor Layton and the Curious Village. The games/brain teasers are fun, but the conclusion was a bit anti-climactic. I thought Flora was annoying. Only thing left is that there are supposed to be 120 puzzles, but I've only found 115, and of those, I still haven't figured out 4 of them. They are annoying me. A lot.

At the moment I'm making the custard for mint ice cream. It's really way too cold to be making or eating ice cream, but some people simply will not be dissuaded.

Edit: Oh, for those of you who were interested, this was Enterprise's response to my complaint letter: ( The funny. )

( I saw The Time Traveler's Wife. )

( I also saw District 9. )

Color me impressed with the DMV. I went to renew my license on Tuesday, and got it in the mail on Friday. Let's hope my passport is as speedy. And the driver's license picture is actually a decent one!

Tonight I'm going to make a black cherry frozen yogurt, then tomorrow a coffee chip ice cream, half of which I will take to my cousin's. I like that they can help me eat all the ice cream I'm making, so I can make more. :D

"There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love." Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

Ugh. I hate it when I do this. I manage all my bills online, as I imagine many do, and I pay off my credit cards every month. I am not a religious person, but if I were, it would be the religion of paying off my debt every month on time. However, every once in a blue moon some weird thing happens, the planets are aligned in discord, and the payment doesn't get made. And then an astronomical late fee is charged, and my brain just won't let it go. I keep thinking things like, I could have paid for a really nice meal with that! Or, I could have bought this, or this, or this! And instead it's just going to make the credit card company richer! Arrrrghhh. It's on my list of top 5 pet peeves, I'll tell you that.

So I'm trying out GoogleVoice, and I'm digging it so far. It's sort of like having my own personal secretary. One who's kind of bad at transcribing (jade_okelani tried to leave me a voicemail, and the written transcript I got of it was rather garbled), but hey, I'm not paying him anything, so I guess I'll live with it. The best thing though is getting free texts, in that I can SMS someone from the account and it won't count toward my cell phone text plan.

Got my ice cream maker and made ice cream for the first time the other day. Yes, as I predicted, the heat wave is long gone, it's been in the upper 60s lately, and right now it's pouring rain. Perfect ice cream weather. Not. Luckily ice cream is pretty yummy whenever you make it. Posted allll about the experience at my food blog, here. With pictures! ropo mentioned once that she saw a recipe for Pinkberry-style frozen yogurt, did you ever find that again?

Okay, I have another HP text gripe that I'm hoping you guys can help me with. From what I've read/understand, Voldemort decided that Harry was who the prophecy was talking about, and thus went to take him out. Right? Right. My problem with this is ... if you were Lord Voldemort, and there was a prophecy saying some boy was gonna take you out, and there were two possibilities of who exactly that boy is, aren't you going to, I don't know, plan to take them BOTH out? I mean, it's not like he knew he'd only have one shot, that AK would backfire on him, yadda yadda. His plans so should have been, OK, Imma take out this Potter tyke first, then head on over to the Longbottoms and AK me some Neville too. And yet we're in his thoughts (I think in HBP?), and we hear Dumbledore talk about it later with Harry, and not once do either of them mention any possibility that Neville was ever in any danger, because Voldemort had got a bee in his bonnet that the prophecy had to mean Harry. That was sort of Dumbledore's whole point, that that's why it was so kismet or whatever, that Voldemort chose his own fate by choosing Harry, etc. When in fact, isn't it more believable that it's just that he chose to kill Harry first? Is it really realistic to have us believe that had he succeeded in that mission, he would have gone happily on his way and left Neville alone? Or that he hadn't planned to kill them both from the get go? That just makes no sense to me.

In other fandomy news, I'm reading the Buffy "Official" Season 8 comics, and I'm digging them so far, even though it is like, so out of whack, some of it. I'm enjoying myself so much that I've ordered the Angel: After the Fall volumes, and have just finished reading Spike: After the Fall. It was really, really good. Very good Spike voice. And Spike/Illyria? So digging that.