You are #29753 on the list.

Fine. FINE. You win, Ravelry. You happy now?

(They'll probably be out of beta by the time I get in, anyhow.)
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I am completely ready for this month to be over. Enough crap has happened. Time for some new and different crap!
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I've been making bentos more often, but photographing them less. It's a really wonderful structure for making a tasty, well-balanced lunch in a good amount, but I just can't keep up with daily cuteness. So I'm just taking pictures when I think something looks especially pretty.

Today, for example, was *not* an especially pretty day. I had some leftover, unsauced pasta from last night, and I threw in some rice vinegar, sesame oil, soy sauce, and Sriracha to make a really fast pasta salad in one tier. I put some grapes and lettuce in the other tier. Now the thing I like about doing bento is that at that point I could look at it and think that I looked a little light on protein. Easy enough to deal with--I put some walnuts on the salad. I almost nuked a teeny bit of frozen edamame (would've only been a tablespoon or so), but I wasn't in the mood.

It's nice, when you have this set amount of space, to look at it and say "Hmm, I've still got this little spot. What's missing?" Sometimes things seems little off nutritionally and I can balance it there, sometimes I remember a leftover bit of something that'll go bad if I don't use it, sometimes I realize that everything's right, but a single date would *just* fit. It's a system that seems to work very well for me.

Dear New Episodes of Naruto:

MOVE FASTER. See, I'm not even a fangirl, I just watch the shows because I'm married to one. And I did enjoy them, back when watching 10 episodes meant that you'd get to see something happen.

But I just checked the episodes guide, and 10 episodes ago the *exact same things were happening*. The main fight that's happening now has been going on for *6 episodes*, and it's *still not over*. I'm sick of puppets-within-puppets already.

It's time for the bad guys to stop chewing the scenery, and it's time for the good guys to stop remembering their sad childhoods, and it's time for them to fight and win or lose already. 'Cause I kinda want the good guys to die now, just to move the plot along.

--T

ps--Sorry all non-watchers of Naruto (aka everyone except my fangirl husband). It just needed to be said. Watch the earlier episodes! The fan-done translations are all up on Youtube, and they're lots of fun.



I can't help weather-blogging right now, looking out the window at the ever-deepening pond in the yard is all I have a brain for.

Although it's obviously time for me to stop taking pictures of the yard, because every time I do, thinking that it's hit the high-water mark, we get MORE rain and it gets DEEPER. Pretty much the whole yard within 5-10 meters of the river is a big squish-hole. Our apartment remains dry. One storage area is pretty damp, but ours is safe so far.

Here are some pictures from this morning. It rained more this afternoon, and is worse now, but starting tomorrow morning we're supposed to get 2 NON-RAINY DAYS. Knowing that I'll have the weekend to breathe easy is nice.



This is the river. I realize you need some point for comparison--ignore the scarf for a moment and look at the rocks. This is the river on a normal, not-too-low day:



See how there's several vertical feet worth of rocks and stuff before the ground levels out? See how you can barely tell that they're there right now? On nice days I like to sit out there, with my back leaning against the highest layer of rocks, playing my berimbau and serenading boaters in Portugese. I generally stay quite dry doing this. *that's* how swollen the river is. It'll be a while before I can do that again.

And I want to add that we're not built on a floodplain, here. This little river's actually a canal between two huge lakes that sit a few blocks in either direction, which easily absorb snowmelt and normal thunderstorms. The water's got plenty of places to go, normally. It's just run out of those places.

Ah, well. Here's something happy and only tangentially related--I was Googling for images of the river to use as a depth-reference before I realized I'd taken some myself, and I fount a little gem. This picture is of almost the exact same spot, just 50 yards down and 80 years ago. That building you see still stands; the corner of it is sticking out behind the droopy branch in the flooded pic (the bridge is hiding behind the trestle, though it is different). The trolleys, sadly, aren't around anymore. Isn't it lovely, though? I love the behatted canoers. No one dresses up for watersports now.

I'm tempted to take a pic in the same spot, once the water clears out some. Remind me in a week or two, once the ground's had a chance to wring itself out.



Updated to add a picture of the back yard. And even then, it looks drier than it is, you can't step within about 10 feet of the visible water without mucking up your shoes (guess how I learned).

We're experiencing the wettest month on record here, right now. Notice that the month is only 2/3 over.

That announcement was made this morning. This afternoon, the weather decided to celebrate by dumping two inches of rain in less than an hour.

(we got two inches of rain on Sunday. And 3 on Saturday.)

It's still raining. More predicted over the next two days.

The yard has an inch of water in some spots.

Our apartment is about 2 inches above the level of the yard.

I'm glad we have flood insurance.

Still working on that green sweater--I took a break to play around with some laceweight (a monster swatch, I'll talk about the pattern once I really get it started), but got back to working on it this weekend. I've sewn the front and back together, and things look good! The v-neck feels too deep, but there's going to be another 1.5 inches of fabric there, which will bring it back into normal professional territory. I'm going to guesstimate the number of stitches I need to pick up for the neck by holding the sleeve up to the diagonal. I know how many stitches across the sleeve is, so I should be able to get an idea from that. (Yes, I'll measure it too, but the neck is slightly curved, so having a backup will be helpful.)

I finished sleeve #1 and started #2 on the bus ride in this morning, though I'm still eyeing #1 warily. I'll probably have to rip some of it out, because I don't trust the sleeve cap at all.

I've been having a heck of a time with the sleeve cap. Part of the problem, I think, is that unlike the other parts, I can't picture exactly what I need to do. I have broad shoulders, but only medium-sized upper arms--so should I make the sleeve cap wider? Longer? Or go with what a book says?

I'm worried that Sweater Design in Plain English has led me astray. She's emphasized a few times that people usually make shoulders too wide--okay, I got that, and was careful to knit the front and back to my measurements, with ease. But she's saying the same thing about the sleeve cap--it's always too wide, people end up with loose fabric bunching around the armhole, etc. But going with her tips, this is a really, really skinny looking sleeve cap, and now I'm starting to wonder that when the author says not to make the shoulders too wide, she's talking about her *own* experience, as a narrow-shouldered woman. It just doesn't look like I have enough fabric.

As it's a v-neck sweater, even if it's a little small around the shoulders it'll be able to stretch on either side of the v in order to accommodate my brutish physique--people who know me know I wear a lot of knit, deepish v-neck tops (wearing one as I type, in fact), and this is why--the shoulders are still stretched out, but it doesn't *look* as stretched out.

But this isn't a commercial piece of clothing that I should be "making do" with; this is my personal sweater knit to my personal dimensions.

So for now, my plan is to baste the sleeve into the armscye and see if it's reasonable. I tried to do this with the mostly-knit sleeve and a bunch of pins last night, but I just couldn't see it yet. If it's tragic, I'll rip it out and widen the sleeve cap by slowing the rate of decreases. If it's obviously perfect, I'll sew it in. If I still can't decide (a possibility, it's hard to picture the other sleeve at the same time), I'll leave it as-is, treat the second sleeve the same way, and *then* see what I think.

Of course, I'd rather not reknit anything, but I've been pretty lucky so far on that count, and a sleeve cap is about the smallest thing to redo.

More book talk. Since I didn't like so many of the books I listed a few days ago, I thought I'd pull out my book journal and list some things I've read in the past year-ish that I enjoyed, and haven't seen listed everywhere. And yes, I actually have a book journal. I don't always write much, but I like keeping track, mostly because I forget what I've read half the time. It's particularly useful in situations like this, or when I know I've read something that this person I'm chatting with would LOVE.

So, good books. Not limiting to novels or prose.

Farthing, Jo Walton. English murder mystery, combined with alternative history of the "what if the Nazis didn't lose WWII" flavor. Lots of neat bits, those things where someone makes an offhand comment that you don't understand at the time, and later the realization comes crashing down on you. So, a good book if you have the patience to remember bits like that.

It's shelved with sci-fi, for no good reason except that the author has written scifi/fantasy before. I just mention that in case you go looking for it and don't see it in the mainstream fiction section.

The Inferno, Dante. Something that cultured adults in the Western world *should* read, because most writers have read it and will make references to it. Also, because some online friends and I are knitting some Inferno-themed things, because we're nerds.

I like the translation I found, which also has artwork. It's all done in modern language, and considering that it was a big deal at the time that Dante wrote in his native dialect and not Latin, it works.

Sisters of Fortune, a non-fiction book--three sisters and their younger brother, who live in the Northeast, write letters to their father, who's in California for the gold rush. He saves the letters, and over 100 years later a historian writes a book about them. It's amazing how wrapped-up you can get in other people's lives. On the other hand, when he comes home, we have no more letters, and the only information we have comes from legal documents. It makes you realize how anonymous we all are; in 100 years, if we're lucky, someone will find our computer and read our old emails, but few of us are that lucky.

Grease Monkey Tim Eldred. Graphic novel. Aliens make apes sentient, then disappear (they take the dolphins with them). We go to space. Apes have their own culture which we don't totally get, but they live peacefully enough with us. Meanwhile, a sarcastic mechanic ape and his young human assistant live their lives on a space station. It's fun, and cute, and a bit thinky.

The City In Mind James Howard Kunstler. Urban-planning stuff. Here, he goes to a few cities and talks about what works and what doesn't. Reads more like a collection of well-written screedy blog entries than anything remotely academic, but sometimes that's necessary too. (I'm still slowly reading Jane Jacob's Death and Life in Great American Cities, which is also good but requires me to walk around my neighborhood and think about its arrangement after every 10 pages or so.)

Lies My Teacher Told Me A lot of this stuff has been more well-known since this was written, but it's still a wonderfully damning analysis of high school level US History textbooks, and also gets into why they're so bad.

The Heptameron If you like the Decameron and/or Canterbury Tales, this is a lesser-known book in that vein. Similar era and narrative framing device: some royalty and their servants are stuck somewhere for a period of time, and tell stories to while away the hours. A lot of boy vs. girl stuff happening, a lot of courtly love with a few naughty stories thrown in. I found it an interesting snapshot of the era (all the stories are said by the characters to be true, and many have been verified by historians), but you can also read J's analysis which is less kind.

Baudolino Umberto Eco. Not the first Eco I'd recommend (that'd be Name of the Rose, but skip the theology chapters because they're BO-RING), but it's fun, if you can keep track of the story, the story-within-the-story, and occasional further iterations.

No Idle Hands: The social history of American knitting Anne Macdonald. I found a signed copy at a used book store--how neat is that? Probably only interesting to the people here who are knitters, or interested in "women's work". But very interesting to me.

One thing of note: Those obnoxious news articles about the current resurgence of knitting which start by saying "this isn't your grandma's knitting anymore"? This has been happening every 3rd generation since the early 1800s. Seriously. Time to get rid of the ageism, no?

Napoleon's Buttons: how 17 molecules changed history A really quick fun read for people with a chemistry background--I knew a lot of it, but I didn't know a lot of it, so it was worthwhile. For people that don't know chemistry, it might take a little longer to get through, but most of the stuff will be new. They don't get too technical, but there are lots of molecules (more than 17, that's more like the number of types of molecules).

Salt: A world History If you like Napoleon's Buttons you'll probably like this, and vice versa.

The Uglies Trilogy: Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Scott Westerfield. Young Adult sci-fi. I bought Uglies last year on my way to the airport because I'd run out of things to read, and finished it that evening. I was going through that freaky neon-light underground tunnel at O'Hare with my nose stuck into it, it was just that compelling. Quick reads, very cool dystopian future stuff, and the whole trilogy is out now so you don't need to do like me, sweep through the first two in a week and then pace around impatiently for a month waiting for the third.

Oh capoeira, I love you so much, why you got to be like that?

We've been doing loads of "au de cabeca"s* in class recently, which is sort of like a cartwheel done on your head. You go into a headstand with your legs to one side, then sweep them around and stand up again. It's not especially difficult for me, but I put my head down a little funny a few weeks ago, and hurt a muscle in my back that controls the neck. I'm obviously no anatomist, but it's one of those muscles that gets tired out if you're cradling a phone without holding it.

So I hurt myself, and spent a day or two turning my head carefully. I was pretty careful last week, mostly substituting au's (that's a regular cartwheel). Was a teensy bit muscley-sore after that, but nothing outside the norm.

Then the night before last, I don't know if it spasmed, or I thrashed around in the night, or what, but I woke up with a knife in that spot and no way could I get to sleep. Yesterday was damn uncomfortable, but today I'm back to "typical muscle-ache" territory.

Now I'm thinking it'd be a good idea to *gently* strengthen that area, but I don't really know how. For now I'm just tenderly stretching, and hoping that'll help.

*You'll pardon obvious Portuguese spelling mistakes? I appreciate it.

So all of a sudden, now I'm "Mrs. Do-Memes".
Fillyjonk listed all the books she read on this list, from this book. The list of books I've read, with mini-reviews, is below.
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43. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen--*Hated* it. I don't like watching people fight in person, why would I enjoy a book full of it?

49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel--Just okay. Overhyped.

72 Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson--Took me a while to get into. I can see why people get obsessive about it.

86 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver--I'm only mostly sure I read this; I went through a phase where I read everything of her the library had, but I can only vaguely remember any of them.

92 The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy-- Gave up 1/4 way through. Didn't catch me.

93 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden--Interesting, though I was mixed up about it for far too long, thinking I was reading non-fiction.

109 Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood--Really liked it, can't remember much now.

157 Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg-- Eh.

195 Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel--Fun.

196 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving--One of my favorites, though I haven't read it in a few years.

236 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez--bits of Marquez always manage to get permanently stuck in my head.

238 The Cider House Rules – John Irving--I've read all his stuff, and I think this is what I'd recommend first to a generic reader (though I liked Owen Meany better.)

241 Contact – Carl Sagan--Way different than the movie. Liked both anyhow.

242 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood-- Like being beaten over the head with a dystopian future.

291 Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole-- Made me angry, hated every character, but in a way that means it's probably valuable as literature.

293 The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco--One of the few I've read here that stays on my bookshelf. That's quite a badge of honor.

301 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams-- It's fun, of course, but a bit like chocolate-chip cookie dough ice cream. So clever and delicious the first time, but then everyone tried to do it, and then even the original somehow got less good.

303 The World According to Garp – John Irving -- Not sure why this one is his best-known. I *hate* books-within-books.

315 Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison-- one of the few "minority lit" books that I fully enjoyed.

340 Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Another "I read everything else, so I think I read this one." book.

347 Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon-- Ick.

349 Sula – Toni Morrison--So womany it hurt.

367 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou--Classic high-school English class book for white middle-class kids. Better when you come to it on your own terms.

375 Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.--Not my favorite.

393 In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan-- An odd little duck, one I think of often. I wouldn't recommend it to people yet I love it. Odd.

397 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe --Stupid hippies.

399 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez-- I love the family at its height. As they decay it just depresses me.

417 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut--All I remember has to do with pubic hair.

427 Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut--One of my favorites of his.

436 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey-- Eh.

437 A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess-- I like the 21-chapter version way better. (the original American edition and the movie leave it out, but it's the *whole point*.)

448 Solaris – Stanislaw Lem--I don't remember the end, so I think I didn't finish it.

456 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee-- Loved it in high school though it didn't age well.

462 The Tin Drum – Günter Grass-- Bits stick with me although I didn't enjoy reading it so much.

494 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien-- I wish I could find the fanfic I wrote in high school (no, no elf-love).

508 Lord of the Flies – William Golding-- Wonderful and creepy.

521 The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway--Lamest thing in Lame-ville.

529 The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger --Possibly even lamer than the previous one.

547 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell-- Incisive social commentary does less for me than it used to. Loved it the first time I read it though.

564 Animal Farm – George Orwell--Meh.

574 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry--In the original French--oh lala!

588 Native Son – Richard Wright--had to read it in 2 days when I started at a new school, can't remember much.

608 Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck--I think they teach it in high school just because it's short.

609 Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston--I know I read it, but I can't remember a thing about it.

610 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien--I skip over the songs.

622 Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner--I can't remember now, I suspect it went over my head.

649 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley --I used to like 1984 more, now I think I like this one better.

667 All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque--*hated* it.

671 The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner--I impressed my freshman-year English teacher by reading this and getting it. My mother is a fish.

699 the Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald --I don't like books where people spend the whole time pining and being lame.

736 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce-- I remember where I was when I was reading this, and I remember the stream-of-consciousness, but I don't actually remember the book. Hm.

767 The Jungle – Upton Sinclair --first book of my vegetarian career. So schmaltzy though.

781 The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--I like reading Holmes when the weather is English, or on a train.

788 The Awakening – Kate Chopin *Hated* it. See Gatsby above re: people being lame.

804 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-- see 781

808 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy--I liked listening to it on tape, it made its episodicness less irritating.

821 The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy--I dont think I finished this because I can't remember the ending.

825 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain--probably bowdlerized.

889 Walden – Henry David Thoreau-- The fact that Thoreau had ladies in town bring him pie every day taints his writing, for me.

895 The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne-- I know I read it, but was probably too young to appreciate it.

897 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne --I liked it, but wouldn't recommend it because every other person in my class *hated* it.

902 Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë --Women need to get over themselves and do things already.

904 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë--see above.

909 The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe--I read piles of Poe as a kid.

911 The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe

913 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens-- The only Dickens I've ever been able to finish (I've tried about a million times, too)

931 Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley--Cool. There's a quote about shorter-than-UV-wavelength light (now known as x-rays) that's painted on a wall at the UW-Synchotron.

936 Emma – Jane Austen--Can't remember a thing.

982 A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift-- A thing to do: keep an eye out for the next time you see someone describe something as "a modest proposal" ; 9 times out of 10 they mean what they're saying, and don't get the reference.

983 Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift-- Eh.
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I was sort of shocked by the pre-1700 list. No "Divine Comedy"? How about the Decameron? Canterbury Tales? Beowulf, the earliest known work in the English language and a rockin' story? There's not a single sacred book that might lend an understanding of a culture, or other works, while Douglas Adams gets 3 entries? There also appears to be a HUGE lack of work set outside of Europe or the US, particularly Asia.

Overall total: 70/1001, not so good. I was surprised at how few I'd even heard of.

J and I went to see the movie Stardust this weekend. Hadn't heard of it? Me either--all I saw of it was a single trailer that made it look like "there's some magic junk, or something, Claire Danes does an English accent, and there's about a zillion cameos." Barf. If there were any trailers on TV around here, I missed them.

But I heard a lot of good things about the movie--and more specifically, a lot of good things about the movie which started with "I thought the trailer looked completely lame BUT... ," which gave me the impression that the people recommending were starting off with my approximate tastes.

J wanted to go to the movies for an early birthday thing, and seeing Stardust *just* edged out going to see Harry Potter again (it probably wouldn't have, if we hadn't been reading and re-reading so much this summer). And it was a lot. of. fun. I don't normally hype books or movies or whatever, but I'm very aware that I probably would never have watched the movie if it weren't for *other* people saying I should give it a chance, so I'm passing that along. A lot of what I saw likened it to "The Princess Bride", and I can see that, although fortunately it lacks Woss-name from The Wonder Years interrupting the story every 5 minutes. It has that same sense of a fairy tale gone all silly and pear-shaped somewhere along the way. Another similarity was that I wasn't very into it for the first 10 or 20 minutes, but then it became delightful.

So, yeah. Fun movie, one that will make you happy.

One thing I got thinking about after we got out of the movie was how similar a lot of the plot threads were to Eragon, which I saw in Buffalo around Christmas. I hated Eragon*, and yet, a lot of the basics are the same--based on a book in which a regular dopey kid finds a, er, *something* that hasn't been seen for hundreds of years, bad guys want the *something* and spend lot of time being evil trying to get it, random friendly people show up out of nowhere.

But in Stardust everyone, even the bad guys, were *interesting*, even if they weren't *nice*. You wanted to know more about them, and got the feeling that there was more there to know. You can picture them preferring a sandwich without mayo, or buying new shoes, or sleeping poorly.

In any case, Stardust=fun. Go check it out if you can.

*J insists that I add, he hated it too. More than me, actually--I just found it to be a waste of 10$ and 2 hours, while he thinks he should have been paid to watch it.

A fun little game: the White pages web site allows you to search the entire country by last name. It doesn't pick up unlisted numbers, and it definitely has at least some outdated info, but you can get a general idea of how many households out there share your name.

This is probably only entertaining if have a very rare name, like J or I do. There are 51 households in the country with J's last name. For mine, the number's 24, 5 of which are overlapping listings of 2 people, 10 of whom are definitely my family, or me, and a few more of whom I'm 90% sure are nephews of my great-uncles whose names I've forgotten, or something.

I'm always tempted to call the people that are definitely not in my family when I do things like this. Who are those guys out in California? Do they look at all those people in CT and wonder what we're like, the same way I do to them? When we went to Italy a few years ago, I loved picking up phone books--look! There's two people in Rome with my last name! There's also a polymer chemist with some academic publications--I look him up on Web of Knowledge once in a while and mentally wave.

I probably would *really* call these people if I thought we were related back in the old country somewhere, except that my great-grandfather was an orphan, and I've heard enough conflicting stories about the name that it all seems very suspicious.

There's some likely reasons for uncommon last names. Some of them are embarrassing-sounding. Take the Homo family: 5 people in the US, 3 of them very likely to be actual people and not IP Freely type jokes (just under 100 Freelies in the states, 1 IP). Mine's not bad in that way here--it acts and sounds like a regular Italian word, because it is. Thing is, it's *such* a regular word in Italian, I probably wouldn't like it as much if I lived there, spending my time being TJ Turnip or Drip.

(no Drips in the US, only 5 Turnips. Lots and lots of people with my actual last name as translated into English--I wonder if some of the Italian families translated it to English when they got here.)

I feel kind of bad for the Hilters (11 households), but I feel almost as bad for the Hilters (3 households), who probably get a lot of double-takes, and the same lame jokes over and over.

Other names are hard to pronounce or spell, and so got shortened or Anglicized along the way. J's last name is and was pretty straightforward, but his branch of the family Americanized it anyways, dropping the "Mc". Interestingly, in his case the Americanized name is the much *less* common variation.

I get very protective of my name. I think of it dying out, sometimes; it's a lot of girls in my generation. It's a nice name--easy to spell out over the phone, not too many embarrassing taunts to be made of it. Rare enough to be easily searchable. I hope those guys in California like it, too.

A very interesting essay about the accumulation of things (found via Making Light

I've talked about accumulating junk before, I'm pretty sure, and I do often ask myself the question that he asks: "Will this be something I use constantly?" I'd add to that "Will this be something that makes me happy every time I see it?", which opens things up to include the yarn and fiber and books.

Which isn't to say that I'm some perfect ascetic that never picks up a pretty piece of crap, but I know just from talking with some of my friends that I spend a LOT less money than they do, and have much emptier spaces.

The hardest thing for me is when someone buys me something that I wouldn't buy for myself, something that wouldn't be *quite* useful or glorious enough for me to keep around normally, except, it reminds me of that person, and I understand why they bought it, and it *is* very thoughtful, but it doesn't fit where it should, or it's a little too fancy, or not quite fancy enough, etc., etc. J is much less sentimental about these things. We got a few pieces of crystal at our wedding--they *were* lovely, and well within the 'traditional wedding present' territory, but they weighed ten pounds each and were comically out of place in our teeny attic apartment. J was ready to put them on Ebay before we'd even gotten back into town, but I told him not to, and hemmed and hawed, trying to make them fit, somehow. Because someone thought of us, and wrapped them, and hoped that we'd like them.

It took about 2 years for me to realize they'd never be right for us, and finally let J go through with the inevitable.

And that's the trick with stuff. Once it's around, it's hard to let go of, even if you recognize that it's no good for you and has no value. It's way, way easier to not buy something in the first place; that twinge only lasts until you walk out of the building. (I can only think of one occasion where I still thought of something fondly more than an hour after the fact, just some stupid fiber. I bought it the next time I saw it, a few months later, and it still brings me joy.)

Ravelry people are talking about me and it's driving me bonkers because I don't know what they're saying, I'm just seeing it come up in my referral logs.

But it's not bothering me so much that I'm going on the waiting list--I hate dealing with stuff that's in beta.
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I love being out in public with my berimbau. It always gives me the chance to give people way more information than they want. It's not often that I bring it to work, but I'm going to class this evening and J probably won't because he's got a cold (he's usually home on Friday afternoon and can bring the berimbau with him). So I gave a little demonstration for my coworkers who were curious.
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That Swiss chard I was discussing last week can be seen here:

I've been reading a foodie book called It Must Have Been Something I Ate, and in one place he talked about a super-high-end French chef that completely cut beef from his menu, and is only adding new dishes that are vegetarian. And he described a fairly simple dish that involved cooking some veggies in butter and a small amount of stock, then reducing the stock and using it as a sauce. So I wanted to do that.

For the stuffing, I ended up rolling it with ricotta cheese and very thin slices of summer squash (I actually used the vegetable peeler). Then I served it with tomato sauce, quinoa, and a cucumber salad. I was a little nervous before hand because I try to avoid doing too many new foods at once, and I hadn't made quinoa before either.

But the end result was fine for first-attempt territory. The quinoa was a little dry-tasting, but that's something I could improve with future iterations. It wasn't too far off--a little blob of the tomato sauce for the chard was more than enough to moisten it.

The stuffed chard could have done with a little less cooking liquid, because I failed to take into account that the veggies I was cooking would lose water as they cooked *forehead slap*. And then, with the amount of liquid left, I got sort of impatient with the sauce, which made the "too much liquid" situation even worse. This bothered J more than me, but we both have the tendency to like our own cooking better.

But I really liked the combination of flavors, and the rolls looked beautiful. I think a big plate of them cut in half and arranged facing up would be very impressive as part of a main course for a special-occasion meal. I mention that because something that often comes up in vegetarian/vegan communities is "I want to do something fancy for Thanksgiving so my family doesn't pity the turkeyless." And, frankly, a lot of vegetarian cooking is looked upon as poor people food--beans and rice, eggs, simple stir-frys. It's nice to have something that looks elegant, is reasonably filling, and is full of veggies. Also, the rolls could be easily assembled in advance and cooked pretty quickly later on, another good thing for dinner-party food.

Stuffed Swiss Chard

Ingredients:

-Big, reasonably intact leaves of Swiss Chard. About one pound, I'd guess.
-1 medium-sized summer squash
-Ricotta cheese (most of a 15-ounce container)
-hot sauce, basil, oregano, salt and pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and sage, about 1/2 tsp each, or to taste (I used more hot sauce, and I had fresh basil from the CSA box, and I wasn't paying attention to exact amounts because I considered it an excuse to eat blobs of ricotta.)
-Some butter or oil
-Scant two tablespoons of vegetable stock or water.

Wash the chard well, and carefully cut out the ribs. If your leaves are less than about 7 inches wide, you might want to leave the ribs intact and steam the chard lightly so it'll be flexible, but I didn't need to do this.

Slice the summer squash very thinly the long way. I used a vegetable peeler.

Mix the ricotta with the seasonings, give it a taste. It should taste a bit stronger than what you'd like to eat straight; it's going to get diluted by the squash and chard.

Make a thin layer of ricotta on top of a chard leaf, then a layer of summer squash, then another layer of ricotta. Roll it up, tucking in the sides of the leaf as you go. If it's a little messy, no tragedy.

[Notes: I was able to *just* get four rolls out of the largest leaves--they got split down the middle, then halved in the other direction. Ripped leaves and odds and ends got chopped and saved for future meals, as did the ribs. I discovered after cooking that the cheese held together better than I'd hoped, so things can probably get messier than you'd think without any trouble.]

Set them on a plate as you work, seam side down. If you'll be cooking them later, you can wrap them and store them in the fridge, probably for up to 24 hours.

When you're ready to cook them, set the butter and stock on medium heat in a big heavy pan that's got some kind of lid, though it doesn't need to be tight-fitting. I use my stockpot lid with my totally-mismatched pan. When the butter/stock mixture is nicely bubbly, set the rolls into the pan in a single tightly-packed layer, seam side down. Put the lid over them, and pull them out when the chard is all limp and uniformly dark, maybe 10 minutes? I didn't find that they needed to get turned partway through cooking.

Serve with tomato sauce, or with a drizzle of the butter/stock mixture, if you let it reduce a bit. Or both!

Modifications:
-It'd be easy to veganize this with silken tofu; it's not the kind of dish where the cheesiness is key, there just needs to be some kind of binder, and the texture of mashed-up silken tofu is so similar to ricotta that I don't think I'd notice.
-I used summer squash because I had one that was near-death, but any other veggie that's flexible enough to get rolled up when thinly sliced would qualify. Another layer of chard? Thin tomato slices? Roasted peppers or eggplant?
-Steaming the rolls would probably work, too. I think they're too delicate for baking, though.

And yet more food, because I'm excited:

We got actual bento boxes! I decided to do a fairly traditional thing for their maiden voyage. So there's sushi, an egg roll, an onigiri with scrambled egg and green onion (a mess, too much scrambled egg, but tasty). And some fresh veggies.

J proclaimed the food fabulous.