Five Years

It’s been so long since I wrote anything here that the formatting tools have all changed and I have no idea how this will come out.

A lot has happened in the past half-decade (!!!) and recapping it all will probably depress me and bore anyone else. I admit it’s the former that concerns me more since I am the primary audience of this blog. I don’t really want to relive the pain of losing my five oldest cats — Triquet and Velcro in 2019, Rhombus in 2020, CMY and Moonstone just in the past six weeks — but I do want to remember them. And it occurred to me that some of those memories are best suited to a blog format. For that matter, things like my knitting notes tend to be written as if they were a blog, so why not put some of them here as a present to Future Me when I read them again long after forgetting?

Maybe I’ll never get back to this. As I noted in my first/second/third post, I’d like to avoid the standard blog arc of 1) “Here is where I’ll put interesting stuff!” 2) “I haven’t posted in a while but now I really will start posting again!” 3) “Here is a picture of my cat.” So I don’t want to make promises I won’t keep.

But some forms must be observed. Here is a picture of my cat.

This is Marble. She showed up in September 2020. More on her later, I hope.

This Mind Unintentionally Left Blank

So it turns out that blogging as an aid to waking up has a problem: I’m least able to think of what to say when I’m barely awake.

Since I was having trouble thinking of words, I looked through recent photos for inspiration and found other people’s words, in the form of signs.  But then when I was going to sit down and type, CMY begged me to go into the yarn room with her and cuddle. Okay, I’ll join her in the giant kitty bed where I sometimes nap with her and just write the post on my phone. That will work, right?

The good part is that the abrasions from her affectionate grooming of my face are tingly enough to keep me awake. I think. And it did prompt some words of my own:

I probably should have gone with the signs.

A Challenge

I haven’t blogged in quite a while, for various reasons.  One of them is that I’m just not using my laptop so much these days, reading things on my phone instead. But posting from my phone is a pain, not least because I have not mastered thumb-typing and do it all with my index finger.

But I need to adjust my schedule.  Currently I take my spouse to the train station in the morning, a good two hours before the cats’ breakfast.  Not being a morning person, I usually end up back in bed reading on my phone for an hour, then napping for an hour or more and often feeding the cats later than I intend to.  And then after that it still takes me another couple of hours to get myself together enough to go to work, in part because I eat breakfast after feeding the cats and take my meds then.  Ideally I would leave for work right after feeding the cats, but that almost never happens.

So, I’m going to try to do something else with that morning time.  This.  Today I dropped spouse off, returned, took meds, and made toast.  I’m hoping that if I recast the morning interval before cat feeding as time in which I get to do something that I usually don’t get around to, it will keep me awake long enough for the meds to start working so I stay awake through to kitty breakfast time.  Admittedly, I picked a very bad day to try this, because I was up very late last night and really need that sleep, but at least even if I do doze off again I’ll have gotten a blog post out of it.

Of course, it doesn’t really count without an illustrative photo.

 

Problems and Quests

Long ago (mid-late 90s) I gave a dinner party for all six of my friends.  One was vegan, and as I was setting out appetizers or something like that I mentioned that I’d checked a lot of labels to find crackers that were vegan.  She laughed and was appreciative, but surprised and a bit apologetic that I’d gone to the trouble.  Another friend of mine said, “Robin is a problem-solver. Of course she’d look for food that would work for you.”  I had never thought of it like that, but it’s true.

This story came to mind when I was looking through a box of yarns that are mostly 10-15 years old and wondering why I had so many of a similar color, which, while nice, isn’t really a favorite color.  And I remembered that I have a nice jacket that my mom made that I really like, and when I started knitting in 1998 or so I wanted to make myself a hat (beret) that matched it.  (I had already made coordinating beaded earrings that match it really well, that being my primary craft prior to taking up knitting.)  She’d made the jacket from, among other things, some Italian yarn she’d knitted into a fabric and then cut, and coordinating colors of woven wool fabric.  The yarn was black and grey mohair with dark magenta accents, and the jacket has a dramatic V of magenta fabric edged with the knit and then the charcoal grey forms the body of the jacket.

I had a bit of the yarn left over at one point in my life, which may not have ever overlapped with my knitting life. (I still hope to find it again someday, but it’s been 20 years.) Greys were not difficult to find. But I have SO MUCH magenta yarn that’s almost but not quite right.  I think I last purchased some around 2012.  No, the hat has never been made, and I haven’t worn the jacket in a while (though of course I still have it.)

This is less problem-solving and more of a quest.  And even when I’ve decided that I probably won’t make the hat it’s still sometimes hard to not get yarn that might work just in case.  It’s not the project that I kept buying yarn/fiber for even after mentally conceding that I won’t do it any time soon. (Another one was to make a cabled hat to match this shirt I bought my husband back in 2001, so he could wear his favorite shirt and the hat and match his Mii. Would he actually do this? No.  Yet, I have actually hand-blended fiber on my drum carder to spin yarn to match the shirt, which is cross-woven red and blue so it’s pretty much impossible to match.)  The quest never ends.

It was when I got to this point in my thinking about the yarn that I realized: I’m a NPC in my own life.  The story around me changes and I still have a (side)quest that will never end, walking in place in my house.

(That ending really calls for a wry screenshot from a game, but I don’t have one.  So here’s a cat photo.  Feel free to count them.)

Snake

I have a bit of a backlog of photos I took last year and never got around to posting.  Here’s one I took when I was about to leave for work. I entered the garage, pressed the button to open the door, turned back to lock the door I’d come through, put my stuff in my car, then happened to see this:

Apparently it had been just inside the door and was probably a little startled when I opened it.  As I watched, it slithered toward the nearby corner of the garage and into a 2-3″ gap between a cupboard and the outer wall, then evidently did a hairpin turn in there and came out to exit the garage and go over to the front steps and from there under the house. In the process I got a photo in the sun (lightened a bit):

It was pretty long for the type.

I thought it was pretty neat. (Rattlesnakes are, I think, the only poisonous snakes in California, so while I have a healthy fear of them, I’m not bothered by other snakes.) The coworker I texted to inform that I was running late had a different opinion, though.

She did not enjoy the pics.

They Love This Project

I’ve been posting a number of pics on Ravelry of cats enjoying my current knitting project, and it finally occurred to me to post them here too.  Colors will be a bit annoyingly off for the reasons I complained about previously (not having a decent editor on this machine), but the cats are the correct colors and that’s all anyone’s really looking at, right?

Triquet taking a nap.

Quot flossing his teeth.

Triquet “helping”.

Moonstone napping.

Also, here’s an unimpeded view of the underarm of the sweater, just to show the colors a little better.

Watch This Space

 

I just got an Apple Watch.

When I told my husband I wanted a smartwatch, he wondered what use I would have for it.  Wait, that sounds snide, and he wasn’t.  But it made him think about what would he use it for, and after some time and research he concluded: nothing much.  And it’s true that I don’t have much interest in the functionality that seems to be pushed very heavily, namely, fitness and workout tracking.  I spent most of the first hour or so working out how to disable as many of those apps and displays I could find.  (I don’t need an external device telling me how much I’m falling short or failing to do constantly; that software runs natively on my brain.)

No, I got it for making lists and notes.  A particularly frustrating aspect of my ADD is that I can’t seem to keep more than three things — tasks to do, mainly — in my head at a time.  It has nothing to do with their importance; rather, it seems to be a FIFO structure.  New stuff overwrites old.  Unfortunately, I usually have more than three things to do.  So a list attached to my wrist seemed helpful.

The other thing is that I do a lot of my thinking in places where I can’t write/type stuff down: while driving; in the shower; when trying to sleep.  A few years ago I had a smartwatch, and it was nice to be able to dictate a note to it that would then show up in my email (although I almost never succeeded in the necessary part 2 of that endeavor and reading the note).  I wanted to be able to do that again.  And since I currently have an iPhone, it made the most sense to get the watch specifically designed to work with it.

Of course, one of the first things I found is that I’d have to enable Siri on my phone to dictate to my watch — and probably Siri would’ve served as note-taker in my car this whole time, since I have a phone holder in the car so it’s close enough to pick up voice address.  So I wondered if I’d been rather stupid in not exploring that option first.  But while taking a shower half an hour or so ago, I realized: since I got the series 3 watch, it’s functionally waterproof, for my purposes.  I could take notes in the shower if I want!  Of course, when I thought of this, I was not wearing the watch because it’s been many years since I had a waterproof watch, and then I had to try very hard to keep the idea in my head long enough to start this blog post, because see above.

I’ve only had it for about 48 hours, so I’m still figuring out how to use it.  (I may have hindered this slightly by setting the watch’s language to Japanese.)

And now I need to leave for dinner and I’ve forgotten what the next sentence was going to be anyway (things in brain: message from sister; dinner; sound of cat grooming), so this is going to stop here.  Better posted abruptly than a draft forever, right?

It’s the Little Things

It’s been someting like six months since I’ve posted an entry.  I’ve taken photos, I’ve had random thoughts, whatever else would go into an insignificant personal blog without a particular theme.  What’s the holdup?  Nothing really big, just…annoying.

First, in I think November 2016 (maybe even 2015?), Windows updated its Photos program and totally dumbed it down by replacing its color/temp/cast/whatever controls with a limited number of dumb useless filters.  I discovered this when I was about to edit a whole bunch of yarn photos, for which I actually rather care about their exact colors, and was so frustrated I was about in tears.  Why…why would you SUBTRACT features that worked and replace them with far less applicable ones?  I was far from the only person to complain about this, but that didn’t fix it.

I did find another photo-editing program that basically served my needs without being too oversized, but as far as I know it doesn’t have the simple capability of browsing my photos from the folder they’re in and seamlessly doing some minor editing on them and saving the duplicate.  Which is really all I want.  If I needed to do serious editing, I have Photoshop on another machine, but I don’t want to do that.

This problem is less of a problem now because I also changed phones and the new one has a better camera, so I have less adjusting to do (and I can do some of that on the phone).  But my phone should not be more suitable as an editor than my laptop, darn it.

The second molehill I kept tripping on is that my main laptop was getting harder and harder to use, not because of software or hardware issues, but because the touchpad was becoming impossible to click.  That laptop has a touchscreen, which I have always disliked because I really don’t need to make things happen every time I brush away the ibiquitous cat hair, but for the first time I actually had a use for it as a substitute touchpad, sort of.  The scrolling functions still worked just fine, but I couldn’t click anything without extreme pressure.  I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but not for cropping photos.  And of course the photos that I’ve been saving for posts are all on that machine.  Occasionally I’d try copying a few to my other laptop for posting, but then I never got around to it.

A week or two ago I finally complained enough about it that spouse looked into it and found that this wasn’t an uncommon problem with that laptop due to battery swelling.  Which is what had happened.  The touchpad was literally being forced out of the keyboard surface.  So he ordered another battery and put it in and also replaced the hard drive and now all I have to do is reinstall the software and I have my functionality on it again, with its larger screen and fixed hinge (as opposed to the flexible hinge of the Surface I’m typing on, which is not so useful when one actually uses laptops on one’s lap).

Have I done that yet? Of course not.

However, that’s no reason not to put up a post with more recent photos.  Of course, none of these things were sufficient reason not to post anyway; the underlying problem is that I have, as spouse has put it repeatedly, the attention span of a goldfish.  But I should at least be able to manage a post per month.

Crud, it’s no longer January.  Oh well.  Still a good time to post a Find the Cat, right?

That one may have been a little obvious.  How about this one?

Better? No? Well, I’m out of practice.

Weird Dinner

Back in college, after I learned how to make a white sauce, I started calling the concoctions I’d cook “weird lunch”.  “Wanna visit?  I’m making weird lunch.”  It was generally palatable enough; the weirdness was mainly the feeling that I didn’t have any idea what I was doing.

Last night I started with the plan of doing simple pasta with tomato sauce (which I do know how to do) and ended up with weird dinner.  It went something like:

“I need to cook something.  All I really know how to do is pasta and tomato sauce.  But I have Mizithra cheese and could find out how to do browned butter.  Oh, this browned butter instruction page mentions chicken and linguine.  Say, I have chicken (frozen) and linguine.  What else do I have?  Oh, here’s some really ancient cottage cheese that miraculously is apparently still edible…”

The result actually was tasty enough to be worth documenting, so here we go.

1. Browned 1 stick unsalted butter in a saucier.  Spoiler: I didn’t actually taste it in the final dish.  Probably should’ve browned it more, but was worried I’d end up with blackened butter and erred on the side of unburnt.
2. Put 2 frozen chicken thighs to thaw in bowl of cold water, and started pot of salted water to boil for linguine.
3. Put cottage cheese (about a cup?) into bowl for later, and mixed tarragon, fresh-ground nutmeg, and a bit of light soy sauce in it.  (The nutmeg is because the person who taught me how to make lasagna used to mix it in with the egg/ricotta.  I never taste it in the lasagna, but I figure there must be some reason she put it in.)

   

   The cottage cheese had a date of Sep 07 on it.  While I know the 07 is a day rather than the year, I’m pretty sure the year isn’t 2017.

4. Spouse came home so I asked him which oil to use for browning the chicken.  Then he exited to go to Home Depot to buy a ladder.
5. Started tomatoes in saucier: olive oil, 4 largish cloves garlic, Italian seasoning, bay leaf, 1 can diced tomatoes, bit of soy sauce.  Usually I’d do two cans of tomatoes to one pkg pasta, but since I was adding the chicken and browned butter I stuck with one.  In future will probably do more, or add something else; we felt that more tomato taste or some other more intense flavor would have been good.
   
6. Linguine now in water.
7. Pulled out chicken thighs, which were nearly thawed, after putting latex gloves on.  Patted dry with paper towel, then removed right glove to salt them.  Called spouse to ask whether it was better to brown them whole and then cut up, or cut them up first (with slight preference to latter because they were already on the cutting board and I’d need to use a different board or wash this one if I planned to cut them after cooking.  Turns out spouse was still at home because Prius’s battery was flat and that’s the car that would fit the ladder.  He decided to skip the ladder and just go to Target for some other stuff.  Also concurred that cutting up chicken first would probably be fine.
8. Cut up chicken.  Because I am mostly not an idiot I kept my left glove on (for holding the chicken).  Because mostly != totally, this still happened.
   
   After taking picture, I promptly lost track of the piece with the dot of latex.  Found it later but then couldn’t be sure at first that I’d actually removed the latex because it was invisible against the rest of the glove.  Spouse comes in at this point to bear witness to this and starts to give me a lesson on how to hold food for cutting safely, until I point out that the problem was that the glove is just a bit too big, not that I was holding it carelessly.  (My fingers were in no danger of being cut.)  Spouse agrees that that’s just bad luck with extra glove material, then departs for real this time, after helping me drain linguine.
9. Mix tomato sauce and doctored cottage cheese in with pasta to get it out of the way.
10. Pour teaspoon of oil from nearly-empty bottle into pan, then way more than that from nearly-full bottle.  Shout “WAH!” which is Robin for “HELP I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING THE HOUSE IS GOING TO BURN DOWN” and then get on with cooking the chicken anyway because there doesn’t seem to be much choice.  (Considered pouring some of the oil out of the pan, then concluded that chances of making a slippery flammable mess that way were higher than just going with the amount in the pan.)
    
11. Call spouse to request some sort of sparkling juice while he’s at Target, because I don’t like wine but feel like classy fruit-derived beverage would be appropriate.  Meat starting to brown at this point.  Reassure spouse that house will probably not be burned down by the time he returns.
12. Chicken successfully burned, I mean browned.  Use slotted silicone spatula to transfer into pot of pasta. Mix in browned butter.  Grate a small mountain of mizithra cheese.  Start transferring pasta to serving bowl, sprinkling cheese after each tongsful of pasta.  Put remaining cheese on top.
13. Spouse calls. Instead of hello, I greet him with “ON TOP OF LINGUINE, ALL COVERED WITH CHEESE. GOOD THING I HATE MEATBALLS, ‘CAUSE THEY MAKE ME SNEEZE. …I mean, yes?”  He’s calling about fruit beverage.  We settle on Izze blackberry sodalike liquid.
14. Send photo of pasta to family, with slightly improved lyrics.
    
15. Spouse returns. We dine. Spouse incredulously asks what the thing he’s tasting that seems almost like tarragon is; I inform him that it is in fact tarragon.  Later, I mention the nutmeg, which gives him a bit of a duh moment since it’s suddenly very obvious.  Incidentally, he added a bit of fish sauce to his, for real.

Overall verdict is that it’s a decent effort that could use some stronger flavoring, perhaps tomato paste or red wine.  I am not a wine aficionado even in cooking, but it probably would work here.  The recipe that reminded me that I have chicken included fresh spinach and pine nuts, which have some possibilities.  Overall I feel like it was a bit too oily, which leads me to the odd conclusion that actually the butter was unnecessary in this case.  Don’t know if I’m tasting the mizithra explicitly.  The cottage cheese presence is fairly minimal, but worked well as a carrier for the tarragon and nutmeg, and I think those were successful (spouse thought it was just enough tarragon, which worries me a little as I didn’t measure it).  Fresh mozzarella, burrata, or ricotta might also be good choices.  Spouse thought shiitake mushrooms would be good.  Now that I’m typing this, I think maybe I would’ve liked it better with white meat (I had the thighs because I wanted to try making karaage, which is better with dark), which is somewhat unusual for me.

Izze was good too.  Unfortunately, later in the evening I started feeling unwell, but I’m pretty sure that’s from motion sickness watching spouse play FF XII and running around at double or quadruple speed.

But yay!  I cooked!  All by myself!

Sorry there is no cat picture here.  I should’ve taken one of the audience I had, probably attracted by the chicken cooking.  Moonstone had the roundest, most dilated eyes ever.  She seems to have figured out that that’s the way to look especially pleading and hopeful when requesting food (which she does by purring affectionately while rubbing her face on my elbow or whatever she can reach).

That Cat

We were peacefully playing/watching Final Fantasy XII when there was an incredible crash from the kitchen, with the splintering tinkles of something glassish being broken.  We rushed over to find the floor and a few other surfaces covered with shards from a large CorningWare serving bowl, and an orange tail disappearing through the foyer.

What was in this bowl that had so tempted the perpetrator to presumably poke and prod at it to the point of pushing it off the edge?  Meat?  Shrimp?  Tonight’s very tasty fish?

No, it was a corncob and some husks.  An already-fully-eaten-from corncob.

I know his mother didn’t raise him to be a vegetarian.  She’s right here to confirm.