On weaving, bicycles, bread, and grammar
but not necessarily in that order.
The a week or two ago I found some cardwoven bands I had done as sort of sample projects in about 1999, I think. I kept meaning to post pictures of them, so here's one.
.
It's a good thing I took pictures of it, because as these were uploading, Maddie-cat wandered on to my lap, got her claw stuck in something, and freaked out. She managed to pull this band off the couch with her, and although I haven't picked it up yet I can see that it has some Not Good snarls and snags showing in the middle of the band.
I managed to bake! This is one of my definitions of 'normal'. I made a bunch of meat-breads, meaning bread dough wrapped around meat. I fell asleep about the same time Nate did, which means I woke up at 3:30 am going 'I wonder if the bread got put away?' so of course I had to get up and look. Been awake ever since... (it hadn't, by the way, but I'll happily blame J.K. Rowling - A. was on the last .25" last I looked, so he probably sat up to finish it after he walked the dog.) They're sort of ugly, because they didn't rise well, but that's a function of how little wheat flour I put in them, and also of not activating the yeast before I added everything else. I did add fun stuff like chicken stock to one set and tomato sauce to the other, and they taste quite good, so it's all good. They're now bagged and labeled and in the freezer. I'm skirting with food safety here, I realize, but the bread crust is quite good at sealing out nasties that want to get in and make the meat go bad, and they'd only been out of the oven since 8:30. Many of them are square, which prompts amusement and comments about 'square meals'.
Here's a non-sequiter - when I was in grad school in England in the mid 1990s, I wrote my thesis in English (not American) on an English computer with UK word processor settings, and managed to re-set (in my head) quite a lot of my American grammar and spelling to the English versions. Since then, both styles look right, and usually both spellings of a given word look wrong (flavor/flavour, for example). Since that was the last time I ever got graded on my writing, that was the last time I bothered to try to correct for what country I was in. Since then (far more than 10 years!) I've drifted a bit back toward the American versions of things, but not very much at all. I picked up Lynne Truss's book Eats, Shoots and Leaves last week at the library, and now that I'm done with Kage Baker (trust me, anyone who likes SF should at least TRY a Kage Baker novel- I recommend In the Garden of Iden to get you hooked) and the graphic novel Y volume 8, I started reading it. The publishers decided that it was such a quintessentially English book that they weren't even going to try to Americanize it (this is another pet peeve of mine but I'll let it pass for now), and I've been digesting it in huge chunks and laughing out loud at every chapter. I notice with some amusement that some pedant has circled instances where the English punctuation style is used even though the preface says quite clearly that they kept them deliberately. So this book so far has had the effect of making me hyper-aware of all of my punctuation and wording and spelling, and also has made me muse on the brief period of time when I lived in Blighty. Two countries separated by a common language, indeed. Must go back, it's been far too long (again, 1999, I think).
And finally, bicycles. Yesterday we went to The Bicycle Chain, where I rode a few bikes, specifically the Trek 7000, except in a women's step-through frame and I loved it. I had been practically sold on the Gary Fisher hybrid I rode last week, but now I'm completely waffling. I dunno, we'll have to go to Performance today, and see what we see.
Well, damn. I was just starting to get sleepy, including a brief interruption of writing this entry to have Nate sit in my lap, but then I realized that Bob was on, and he'll be on until 8, after which we'll go bagling. There's no way I'm going to go back to sleep while Bob is on, so I might as well dig out the radio extension to the 'Pod and walk the dog. Maybe I'll have to take a nap later.
The a week or two ago I found some cardwoven bands I had done as sort of sample projects in about 1999, I think. I kept meaning to post pictures of them, so here's one.
.
It's a good thing I took pictures of it, because as these were uploading, Maddie-cat wandered on to my lap, got her claw stuck in something, and freaked out. She managed to pull this band off the couch with her, and although I haven't picked it up yet I can see that it has some Not Good snarls and snags showing in the middle of the band.
I managed to bake! This is one of my definitions of 'normal'. I made a bunch of meat-breads, meaning bread dough wrapped around meat. I fell asleep about the same time Nate did, which means I woke up at 3:30 am going 'I wonder if the bread got put away?' so of course I had to get up and look. Been awake ever since... (it hadn't, by the way, but I'll happily blame J.K. Rowling - A. was on the last .25" last I looked, so he probably sat up to finish it after he walked the dog.) They're sort of ugly, because they didn't rise well, but that's a function of how little wheat flour I put in them, and also of not activating the yeast before I added everything else. I did add fun stuff like chicken stock to one set and tomato sauce to the other, and they taste quite good, so it's all good. They're now bagged and labeled and in the freezer. I'm skirting with food safety here, I realize, but the bread crust is quite good at sealing out nasties that want to get in and make the meat go bad, and they'd only been out of the oven since 8:30. Many of them are square, which prompts amusement and comments about 'square meals'.
Here's a non-sequiter - when I was in grad school in England in the mid 1990s, I wrote my thesis in English (not American) on an English computer with UK word processor settings, and managed to re-set (in my head) quite a lot of my American grammar and spelling to the English versions. Since then, both styles look right, and usually both spellings of a given word look wrong (flavor/flavour, for example). Since that was the last time I ever got graded on my writing, that was the last time I bothered to try to correct for what country I was in. Since then (far more than 10 years!) I've drifted a bit back toward the American versions of things, but not very much at all. I picked up Lynne Truss's book Eats, Shoots and Leaves last week at the library, and now that I'm done with Kage Baker (trust me, anyone who likes SF should at least TRY a Kage Baker novel- I recommend In the Garden of Iden to get you hooked) and the graphic novel Y volume 8, I started reading it. The publishers decided that it was such a quintessentially English book that they weren't even going to try to Americanize it (this is another pet peeve of mine but I'll let it pass for now), and I've been digesting it in huge chunks and laughing out loud at every chapter. I notice with some amusement that some pedant has circled instances where the English punctuation style is used even though the preface says quite clearly that they kept them deliberately. So this book so far has had the effect of making me hyper-aware of all of my punctuation and wording and spelling, and also has made me muse on the brief period of time when I lived in Blighty. Two countries separated by a common language, indeed. Must go back, it's been far too long (again, 1999, I think).
And finally, bicycles. Yesterday we went to The Bicycle Chain, where I rode a few bikes, specifically the Trek 7000, except in a women's step-through frame and I loved it. I had been practically sold on the Gary Fisher hybrid I rode last week, but now I'm completely waffling. I dunno, we'll have to go to Performance today, and see what we see.
Well, damn. I was just starting to get sleepy, including a brief interruption of writing this entry to have Nate sit in my lap, but then I realized that Bob was on, and he'll be on until 8, after which we'll go bagling. There's no way I'm going to go back to sleep while Bob is on, so I might as well dig out the radio extension to the 'Pod and walk the dog. Maybe I'll have to take a nap later.