My mom brought some dhokla mix to share, and so instead of cooking it in a pressure cooker (like I think you’re supposed to), I cooked it in a big steamer pot and the result was a little mushy and not quite what I think it was supposed to be like. That is, it was crumbly and not very tasty. So I made some chutney (coriander) to go with it, and the husband was blending it and added more sugar because it was too spicy and now it tastes weird.
He calls it Green Evil. I don’t think this is too terribly off-base.
Well, anyway, he likes it and I like it sort of and next time I will cut back on both the chilis and sugar and maybe I will find it more edible. On the upside, though, we got to consume most of a fresh coconut, which was awesome.
So, in the end, chutney 1, Happygoth 0. Oh, chutney – I demand a rematch.
This weekend was wild, and I don’t remember a lot of it, except for the part on Saturday where I got real busy and then my mom showed up (in garb) and then we went to court and ate dinner and somewhere in there I became the Baronial A&S Champion. Oh, and judged my first A&S entry.
So. In the interest of showcasing those lovely scrolls that go home with people and are never seen again, here’s the lovely scroll I got, created by Lord Cynwrig (who is the jolliest fellow I know):
Look at it. Just look at it. I am so fond of this, firstly because it’s the first ever scroll I’ve received (there’s a long story behind my AoA and the novelty scroll I got and then the real scroll that never happened), but also because it tickles that design part of my brain, being all calligraphy and absolutely gorgeous at that.
Did you see that capital A? Did you? Well, here it is, closer:
Makes me all weak in the knees, that does. And then because I wanted proof for posterity and documentation purposes, here’s my SCA name plus the part about the being of the Champion bit:
Hee hee. I best get on that bookbinding project, and now seems like a good time to figure out how to create a tassel belt for when it is warm again. I have an inkling as to how that might be accomplished, but I need to experiment. This involves nails and a 1×6 board. Aren’t you intrigued? Well, you should be.
This week, though, involves making some more chaupar pieces and teaching both that and Goats and Tigers at the meeting on Wednesday. My goal is for Indians in the SCA to be even more insidious than the Persians. We’re secretly everywhere, you know. Or we will be. When you least expect it.
Thanks to Their Excellencies and to all in the Barony who suggested I might be a good candidate. I will do my best to honor the position for as long as I hold it.
(I’ll post photos of the stripey pants as soon as I find someone who took pictures; I was so crazy busy that I didn’t get any of my own)
Anyway, there they are, in all their glory! I showed them off to Lea last night, and am stoked to wear them on Saturday with the rest of my kit. Yay! Pants! (See? I haven’t been completely out of it.)
Anyhow. I am procrastinating because I’ve hit a creative wall in my freelance project (this happens 99% of the time, anyway; nothing huge), and if I had an iPhone I would so show you the tiny little lunch/snack that I have, which is an egg and some cheese and fruit and a teeny bagel with some peanut butter (Starbucks’s food offerings have improved drastically over the past few years), but I don’t so I won’t.
The pants are finished, after a late night dinner with friends. I watched some more FarScape (I love it more every episode and am angry with myself for not having cable back when it was on TV, mostly because now it’s not cool to dress up as Aeryn Sun for conventions any more; it’s been done) and stitched stuff and cursed out my elastic waistband which did not want to cooperate, and then figured it out anyway, and then at the last realized that only one of the legs is on the true bias, so the stripes don’t really line up.
Oh, well. The pants are shiny and I can do better next time.
I’ve become really addicted to Twitter and lately noticed that I get depressed/anxious when people who post regularly aren’t posting. For example, today a friend is in town. She regularly posts. Like, many, many times a day. Only today she was about the town with another friend, and so therefore did not post (though she has an iPhone – do not have fun! indulge my Tweet addiction!), and it was strangely unsettling, although at about 4 I realized I was being an idiot and stopped checking Twitter every ten minutes.
You can tell how incredibly overstimulating this week is if I’m blogging about that other blog I have. I think this is the beginning of the end for any sort of legitimate presence for me on the internet.
So I’m here until they’re done with their “thing,” and this the first time I’ve used my laptop at a coffee shop and I feel kind of like a hipster, which is mostly ok (my bag is a Bag of Holding, so it’s all really an act).
Friday is so far away.
(Oh! Oh! And Jennie is signing books with LKH, which is why I’m in the back corner of a Starbucks. Go get a book signed! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Heh. I’m live-blogging a book signing.)
(If a pug could talk, I imagine it’d sound a lot like this fellow. Oh, Rigel. I adore you for you are so cranky. I generally prefer the crankiest characters, such as Ted Grant, my favorite Justice Society member.)
SO!
This weekend, she was nuts. I did many things. In no particular order they are:
Introduced Jennie and her boy to Madras Saravana Bhavaan. Oh, boy. Incidentally, they don’t serve most menu items between 3 and 5 pm, but do serve dosas, so there you go. The boy had never had dosas, and was not disappointed. I overstuffed myself on the thali, and also a rose milk. Yum.
Did a lot of freelance work, but am still not finished. But I did a lot of it. Also in the process of this I figured out that Snow Leopard and CS3 won’t run my old but trusty scanner, mostly because (1) CS3’s TWAIN drivers are ass, and also because Snow Leopard won’t run the OS9 interface, which is the interface the scanner uses for its import software. I’ll be buying a new one.
Watched some more FarScape. Season 2! Oh, Rigel. You are so droll.
Saw my very first WWE pay-per-view, live at the Philips arena. Did I mention that I love my husband? Well, I do, so when he got tickets for Christmas, I said I’d go along. It wasn’t too bad, aside from the drunk guy with a bad sense of personal space who kept elbowing me in the head. I find that when confronted with a match between CM Punk and the Great Kali, I cannot decide who to cheer for. It is a dilemma. Oh, well.
Aaaaand to wrap it all off with an incendiary comment about the nature of SCA costuming, I discovered that churidar are the best costuming item ever and I laugh at your complicated, multi-hour ruffs and things. Ha! (Okay, so not really because they’re lovely and I’m both intimidated and impressed by them.) I needed a pair of churidar to go with my anarkali, so I sat down, patterned them out, cut them and sewed them together in 45 minutes. 45 minutes! Never before have I created a garment so quickly! They still need a waistband and some seam finishing, plus there was some time for hemming, but they remain the fastest garment I have ever constructed. And, on top of that, because of the way the pattern works and some snazzy geometry skills on my part, I was able to construct them out of one single yard of shiny striped fabric, even cutting them on the bias. I feel accomplished. Pictures to follow when I’m not sewing on them at midnight.
Whew. This week will be long, I fear. There is more pilling of the Johnny Cat (he hates it), plus two sets of out-of-town visitors and then finishing that freelance project, in addition to the usual work and meetings schedule, and then Midwinter A&S this weekend. If I don’t’ collapse halfway through, it’ll be awesome.
Some de-stash that will probably be used as a gift for somebody. Not my colors, but fun to knit with.
Today’s fiber Friday is a bit of a mix. On one hand, the fiber is lovely-looking. On the other hand, this is a chance for me to air grievances about it.
Allow me to elaborate.
Noro is a guilty pleasure for me (and before you get too far into this, I will say that this post is an argument that I’ve heard from many knitters, and a conversation that happened between myself and the CG this past weekend, so is nothing new). I love its colors. I love that it variegates and shifts and lets me be lazy and knit boring patterns. I used it for my most recent tea cozy project, which went speedily mostly because I was obsessed with watching the color change. I know there are other yarns out there that do the same thing, but Noro seems to have something that brings me back to it. Mostly I use projects for friends as an excuse to buy it and knit with it (I don’t actually have anything of my own knit out of Noro).
Oh, Noro.
It is also expensive, and so I don’t buy it very frequently.
This brings me to my main point, which is that I cannot figure out what makes it so expensive if it is actually quite awful yarn (aside from its lovely and varied colors).
The tea cozy I knit was beautiful and a great Noro thing because you don’t have to wear it next to your skin (my Brown Betty never protests). While I was knitting the cozy, I was picking out little bits of twigs and other flotsam. Seriously? Flotsam? I realize it comes from Japan and is Fancy, but I expect my expensive, Fancy, Japanese yarn to be made from wool that is properly processed in advance. Moreover, I had to stitch it together a couple of times because the fiber came apart as I was sewing.
Why the twigs? Perhaps we can come to some sort of happy medium and knock off some of that cost so knitters don’t grump.
Well, anyway, regardless of the scratchiness or the plant fibers, the tea cozy turned out great (if a little large), and I will most likely use the fiber again in the future, even if I complain a lot.
Because it’s lovely to look at.
(This may actually become something I keep, mostly because it is kind of soft)
Or perhaps oh noes, internet. It’s a combination of the two.
This weekend was the first truly relaxed weekend I’ve had in a while. Friday night the husband and I tried the “persian burrito” place that just opened on Piedmont, which while odd is quite tasty. Not burritos, but tasty. Saturday the husband worked, so I dropped him off, bought a pillow at Target (o Target, your pillows are so much cheaper and nicer than Ikea), bought some yarn to make Jennie’s birthday present, and then bought a coffee. I talked on the phone with my mom for, like, two hours, and then sat on the couch and knit until it was time to go get the husband. While I knit, I ran out of movies I haven’t seen eleventy billion times before, and got the brilliant idea to sign up for Netflix.
This is perhaps the smartest and also stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
Smartest because it keeps me from buying Bollywood movies I don’t like just because I haven’t seen them yet. Stupidest because it has opened the doors to countless hours of on-demand entertainment that will likely impact my productivity negatively. I watched so much FarScape this weekend. But I got a tea cozy knit up in record time, so there is a silver lining. Next up I plan on doing some sewing and seeing how fast it goes with a little John Crichton on my computer. He is so charming. And! And! It was the world of before 2007, when Sigg water bottles were a novelty, so everyone in space drinks from them. Everyone! Because they’re from the future! Or something. We were obsessed with Nalgene back then.
Anyway, back to the weekend. The dinner plans we had got pushed out an hour, so we went to the mall so I could decided if I needed to invest in an iPod Touch (I decided no), and I bought some tall boots for one of my DragonCon costumes (but also to wear, for they are nice boots anyhow). And then we went to our dinner plans at Fogo de Chao, plans that centered around celebrating Jennie’s *mumblemumble-fthrdth* birthday. I ate much meat. At some point I requested some filet mignon, and from then on out I had my own dedicated filet mignon guy, which is what I imagine it’s like to have a cabana boy, only with more clothes and steak instead of grapes. It was awesome.
Also I went to see Three Idiots with the ChickenGoddess and enjoyed it a lot, although I seriously contemplated sneaking into Avatar to see it for a sixth time, but I’m glad I didn’t, because Three Idiots is an adorable film that makes me not hate Kareena Kapoor at all (I previously kind of hated to watch her in films, mostly because of the hideous character she plays in K3G – ick). If Jennie wants to go see it, I’d totally go again.
Whee. And that was the last carefree weekend I’ll have for another few weeks. I’m glad I spent most of it on the couch, knitting a tea cozy, and watching FarScape. Netflix, you’re my new best friend.
Well, really it's a mob of one, but you get the idea. I'm just me, in Hotlanta, but through me there are many others (yes, we are numerous), and we have teh pointy sticks (fear them), and besides that, we make pretty things. Mostly.
