To do list update

Posted on October 8, 2010 by HappyGoth

Probably boring, but it’s keeping me to task.

1. Get the floors refinished. (DONE. Made a blog post.)

2. Install ceiling fans in the two smaller bedrooms, as they are stuffy. (DONE. Ceiling fans make a gigantic difference. It took about three hours, but, like, whoa.)

3. Buy some hanging plants for the porch. (Cheapo ones. Also have weird non-theft contraptions on them.)

4. Get to the container gardening for the back deck. (not yet. getting cold. have too much other stuff to do.)

5. Shampoo the stinky area rug to put in the master bedroom. (IN PROGRESS. Man, that thing is stinky. We bought a hose to wash it with.)

6. GARAGE SALE (DONE. ALL THAT JUNK IS GONE. We also met our neighbors.)

7. Chimney caps (not yet, but it’s getting cold, so soon.)

8. Fireplace doors (see above chimney item)

9. Paint the inside (this will take several months)

10. Paint the outside (this will take more than several months)

That’s four out of 10. Not too bad.

I have added the following, though:

1. Halloween decorating. (Way more involved than Christmas decorating. As in, I don’t actually decorate for Christmas much, aside from lining up cards on the living room mantle.)

2. Reupholstering the free chair.

3. Making more curtains in preparation for chilly weather.

4. Replacing the broken pipe in the yard (NOTE: this will likely trump all other list items.)

Wasn’t that a blast? I know! So much fun to read!

Well, anyway, I’ve got two free pizzas and plan on doing none of the above this evening.

So. In a more interesting turn of events, I went to the Atlanta Hindu Temple on Sunday (did not tell anybody at church, for it is None of Their Business).  It was both exactly and not at all what I expected. Allow me to elaborate.

The temple has a parking lot, full of American cars (I expected this.) Inside, there are families in nice clothes (also expected, as was the fact that the nice clothes are saris and salwar suits). There was foot washing (expected), at a thing that looks like a truncated bathtub, mostly because of the faucets (not expected). Then you go inside and shake hands (expected, but sort of weirdly familiar), and somebody explains the inside of the temple to you, and then you’re on your own. And there’s a priest at the main murti (Visnu in this case) who leads things (expected), and after you’ve received blessing there you pray at all the others (unexpected! I am not used to this self-guided thing!). But mostly still surprisingly familiar, because there are statues of holy things, and flowers, and priests, and blessings, and music, and incense, only in different configurations than I’m used to. One of the differences I liked the best was the numbers of children running and laughing and playing. The temple was solemn, but there was a definite sense that joy and life was as much a part of the whole thing as quiet reflection. I like the movement.

That’s a basic summing up. In reality, it was that we didn’t know what to do, and so got one explanation from a young man in front (I think he might have been a priest; his tilak was very fancy, and he seemed to know a whole lot about the “proper Indian way” to do things). So anyway. Moral: ask questions. He asked a family to show us upstairs, where we were introduced to another priest, and older gentleman who did his best to explain each murti, and what to do during the Visnu pooja (I did things correctly), and then he said “It’s nice to have you here – you can go to the other temple if you want,” and we were on our own.

Wait. Other temple?

Sure enough, there was another temple, much more grandiose than the first, with small marble temples (pratiks?) housing the murti. The one we were in first was the Balaji temple (I think), and the other one is the Siva temple, where they were performing a Ramalingeswara abhishekam. I didn’t know if it was appropriate to participate in two poojas in one day (you don’t receive Communion twice in one day, so my cultural reference was basically useless), so I stood off to the side until a priest motioned me over, and there you go (for reference I was holding a banana, the prasad from the first pooja).

And I sort of felt like I was doing things right, but sort of not. I’m not sure what to do with myself without a priest leading things. I’m getting better at understanding this.

Anyway. There is a dining hall in the complex that sells vegetarian food, and so the husband and I got some tamarind rice and idlis, and talked for quite a while with a nice man sitting at the table we sat at, who offered to be our guide if we ever decide to come back.

I probably will. Only this time I won’t walk through the “no shoes”  area outside at the end, because I will know it’s a “no shoes” area.

So in conclusion: To do lists are good, don’t be afraid to try new things, the Hindu Temple of Atlanta is very nice, never be afraid to ask lots of questions, and be sure to read signage.

If you never remember any advice in life, remember that. Well, also maybe take lots of vitamin c so that you don’t get scurvy (have you done a google search for scurvy? Eeeeeeew.)

Posted in General stuff, hinduism, india | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

I’m a special kind of nut.

Posted on September 30, 2010 by HappyGoth

I am stuck creatively, so I’m writing in my blog.

And I drew this:

(with a pen. At SCA last night. Where I was paying attention, but found myself doodling because I was listening and didn’t have anything to say.)

The one thing it does do is keep me from listening to ghazals or watching bharat natayam videos on YouTube or any of a number of things that are not actually constructive exercises in removing creative blocks. If somebody figures out what a constructive exercise as pertains to this looks like, please share. I have been making thumbnails. I have been reading. I went outside and drew little tiny pictures of web pages for an hour. I made diagrams. I labeled the diagrams.

And still nothing.

And so then I remembered this blog, and how sometimes it helps to just regurgitate the random stuff in my head. Here’s hoping I’m not wrong.

The main thing distracting me at the moment was my recent discovery of the White Hindu blog, which has made me sort of giddy all day since finding it, because before I was this random person who is also inexplicably obsessed with India, and now I know there are other people out there like me, and while I’m still very strange, I’m the same kind of strange as somebody else, and that comforts me. (As does the use of long run-on sentences coupled with long sentence fragments.)

This is fairly normal for me. My mom and dad are culture nuts, and they were very open and accepting of different beliefs, cultures, people, etc. My mother worked for the Minority Affairs office at the University of Kansas before I was born, and has wonderful stories of the people she knew through that job – the Potawatamie Indian with whom she went to pow-wows; the man from Gabon; the dances and dinners she attended. We have portraits of great Native American chiefs in our den. We listened to world music. We ate all kinds of non-American foods. My mother, previously a devout and strict Catholic, became a student of spirituality after leaving the MaryKnoll order (the Catholic missionary order, of which she was a novice for 6 months) and because of this I am a firm believer in reincarnation and karma and dharma, even if those things were never described to me in that way (she’s now an Episcopalian, and I realize I just outed her weird). I usually don’t mention this in the same conversation as what it means to me to be Episcopalian, because these things are not exactly the same.

When I started to think about where this obsession with India came from, I started to remember these things about my childhood, primarily the fact that I went to a Montessori school with the Patel sisters and Shyamal Brambhatt (I don’t recall if this is the exact spelling; I was four when I knew him) and Matthew Pannikar and, most notably Jaydeep Desai. My parents were friends with Jaydeep’s parents. They owned a small motel in town (as many Gujarati immigrants do) and we were at their house fairly regularly from the time I was four until they moved away when I was 13 or so. We visited them in Texas (Houston, I think) a couple of  times in my teenage years, but they were a big part of my more formative childhood years. I remember the fiery chutney Mrs. Desai made, and how their house smelled, and the Ganesh on their home mandir, under the bindi-ed portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Desai’s grandparents, and the box of assorted mukhwas that I totally upended onto the carpet in their living room. I really remember Jaydeep’s Nintendo system. We didn’t have a Nintendo. This made him Very Cool. In the 7th grade, Mrs. Desai dressed me in a sari for our Geography lesson on India. I wore the bangles and the bindi and the jewelry and I felt like a princess for 45 minutes.

And then I sort of forgot about these things during high school. In the 12th grade, I took a sort of spiritual journey, and also classes on Paganism (more specifically Wicca). I practiced that for about 6 months before I decided that it wasn’t really speaking to me, and came back to the Episcopal church.

Now it’s sort of 10 years after that, but this is a bit different. I think the things that didn’t connect me to the Pagan path are things that are drawing me to India and Hinduism. Modern pagans are creating their own history and culture, something that is a little too close to the American experience for me (which, for some unknown and inexplicable reason, is not something I relate to easily); India is an ancient place with a rich history and tradition, and Hinduism is a big part of that. I don’t know where this puts the Episcopal church and that tradition. That has been in my family for generations, and it’s still very important. It still may be. I don’t know that yet. If I’m honest with myself, there’s a chance that I will go through this with an even stranger set of mismatched beliefs, but I feel that each journey is part of the path to God, and I am not the one to say that one is more valuable than the other. My own journey is the one that is right for me.

Posted in General stuff, india | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Red Tower

Posted on September 20, 2010 by HappyGoth

Sorry for no DragonCon posts – I’m still sorting through photos.

However, Red Tower this weekend was an excellent success, and the South Downs has a rockin’ new Baron and Baroness (one of whom is Blogless Lea) and there was a great feast and a hafla and an abundance of awesome out-of-kingdom guests.

Because I can’t possibly post all the awesome photos of the equally awesome event, here’s a good sampling: Red Tower 2010

(From that set by Cynwrig; the pre-investiture pep talk)

robbingpeter made a “sugar” elephant with a little candy-filled howdah on its back. She documented the process. It was really hard not to tell people about this:

The only downsides were the hot weather and a sudden explosion of ticks and scorpions (I dealt mostly with the former). But those were minor, and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen, which is where I like to be, except for a brief break during which I was brought into the Order of the Red Raven (and was completely floored by the whole thing, having not expected it). Hajji did the illumination himself! I am so attached to the scrolls created by friends. They’re almost better than the actual awards. I know the friends are.

Anyway, the kitchen was awesome, and during brief periods we looked very authentic:

(Master Lorenzo, robbingpeter, and George Ploppy cooking chickpeas)

I was personally responsibly for wrapping a great quantity of samosas, which the soon-to-be-elevated Temair (to the far right) and my apprentice brother Jareth are frying in this photo:

(All the food was delicious, but these were a big hit.)

I didn’t have any kitchen garb, so I made some.

In this miniature

is a princess (yeah, I know I’m not a princess but the garment is parallel to what I need and the materials I had on hand) in a purple angharka and yellow salwar. I had some yellow salwar already, and a quantity of eggplant fabric, and lo she’s got short sleeves! So I used my magic pattern and came up with this:

(Apologies to Yul; he was working at the Hobart dishwasher all day,  and so his front was perpetually wet.) The plan in the future is to make some blue salwar and a red angharka in a finer fabric, and keep this one for very special occasions. If I can find photos of the front I’ll send them along. I also realize that I need way more jewelry, but jewelry and kitchen aren’t exactly the best combo, so there will be other and better photos in the future. And also I’m nearly to the point of sharing this pattern (I’m going to enter it in an A&S competition in the very near future, so I’d like to wait until after that).

My biggest accomplishments of the weekend were performing a puja in honor of Mistress Jadi’s impending Baroncy, making some really excellent new friends (and being an enabler for a brand new/expanding sari stash) and putting the chickengoddess into this outfit:

My thanks to thetripper for the photos. And also to Meenakshi, whose sari paper gave me the knowledge to pull off such a rockin’ outfit for Her Chickenness.

But you know what? I’m really really thankful for air conditioning.

Posted in india, sca | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Hey, crafty ladies

Posted on September 16, 2010 by HappyGoth

Have you seen this blog?

http://psimadethis.com/

So awesome. I know you’ll all get something out of it.

Posted in General stuff | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

So behind

Posted on September 9, 2010 by HappyGoth

But anyway.

You know those really posh cupcakes that people are always raving about? Oh, sure you do. The ones with ridiculous flavors and lots of fancy sugar toppings and $5 price tags? Those cupcakes.

A while back while on a press check, we made a sort of valiant effort to go to Sprinkles, the LA cupcake chain. Apparently they’d just opened in Dallas, and since that’s where we were, we thought it would be a good side trip. Things happened, and no cupcakes. So mostly I forgot, because we came back to Atlanta and then a couple of amazing shops opened here, and it wasn’t that important.

Fast-forward to the middle of August, when Flawed Events held her wedding in Chicago. We missed our flight home and got her to ourselves for a whole afternoon and after gorging ourselves on Giordano’s pizza, we decided that the best and most healthy way to finish the pizza feast was to have cupcakes.

There are a few places in the Loop, but lo and behold, we were headed towards – you guessed it – Sprinkles. The line wasn’t too bad and we had time to kill, so we stood outside with the other poor saps and waited 20 minutes for $3.50 cupcakes. They do the flavors on rotation, so there was no pumpkin or chai to be had, but we got a good sampling of chocolate versions, plus one vanilla with lemon zest icing.

Behold:

Clockwise from the bottom left they are: vanilla/lemon, chocolate marshmallow, dark chocolate, and chocolate peanut butter.

After eating a whole cupcake, I now realize why they’re so expensive. You really don’t need the whole cupcake (okay, so you don’t really need any cupcakes). The extra third of cupcake that got eaten was too much. Completely worth every penny. And worth every penny, I mean that it was delicious enough that the guilt of spending the equivalent of a third world daily salary on a pile of sugar and flour and butter took a few seconds longer to set in. Delicious, buttery guilt. Yum.

The branding is awesome, too. You’ll notice the box is pink on the inside. The little sugar buttons on the tops of the cupcakes are a design element throughout the store. And then the rest is fairly minimal:

The little wooden fork thingy

The box (plus me taking a picture of the box)

And also the sticker is repurposeable:

Even if it’s not supposed to be.

Posted in General stuff | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

O, Blog

Posted on September 7, 2010 by HappyGoth

Huh. The garb weathers pretty damn well! I had my photo taken by all sorts of people while I was wearing it, but the best was the Indian family who posed with me. I feel so validated. Also I just noticed that my bor is crooked.

I am so sorry to have neglected you. My life has become very busy (more so than usual)!

For proof, I submit this list:

1. Bought a house

2. Baronial investiture

3. Working on a choli pattern

4. Regular day job (is crazy pants)

5. DragonCon

But do not fear! Most of these things, aside from the day job and Red Tower, have been completed, and so there will be sharing soon, especially since I’ve thrown myself in to steampunk wholeheartedly, and it merits posts and photos.

Soon, my lovelies. Soon.

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Ziggy

Posted on August 10, 2010 by HappyGoth

Since I only have three sock projects on the needles right now, and that’s evidently too few, I’ve cast on a new one. Twice.

I kind of loathe toe-up socks, but loathe the ones with flap heels less so (oh, short-row heel, how you vex me). So when I realized that my first foray into real colorwork, Ziggy, was toe-up, I was a little annoyed, but only a little.  Mostly because secretly I love how Judy’s Magic Cast-On looks when you do it right.

The pattern calls for size 2 needles, but I usually have to go down a size, and against my better judgement I stuck with what the pattern called for. I got done with all the increases for the toe and found myself with something my husband could wear. While I love my husband very much, I was not knitting these socks for him, so I frogged back to the beginning and swapped the 2s out for 1s, and am happier now (plus I’ve fixed a flub-up that I made initially, where I did the wrong sort of increase). I’ve got four whole rows!

I promise to post photos when I’m a little farther along; this uses Trekking XXL in a deep slate grey:

and Noro Kureyon sock in a sort of grey-blue-teal:

which should shift colors between the grey stripes. I’m kind of excited. The Noro is scratchy but the Trekking isn’t, and I’m hoping that combined with a bit of extra lanolin, these will be comfy.

We shall see.

Posted in knitting | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Crafty

Posted on August 9, 2010 by HappyGoth

[Adorable image from flickr user Alícia]

I had another one of those deep thought moments, still about crafting, but more so about why crafting has really taken off lately (and this isn’t limited only to  crafting – people have been canning gardening, and simply making things in a trendy way a lot these days).

I heard a great talk at TEDxAtlanta (recorded from the main TED conference, but still) in which Jane McGonigall explained why video people who are relatively unsuccessful at life are so great at video games, mostly because video games provide a platform in which they can excel. Unlike life, video games never challenge you more than you can eventually master, and have a set system of goals and rewards. You know what you’re meant to do. The problems are not un-solveable. Given any amount of diligent effort, you can fix things, or get recognition, or feel a sense of accomplishment, things that you can’t see in paying rent or fixing your car or buying a life insurance policy. Often life’s challenges aren’t easy, and there isn’t a set goal. There’s no princess to rescue. It’s not easy to be superhuman.

I’m going to take a bold step and extend this way of thinking to pretty much everybody in our economy nowadays, but especially to those of us in the middle of things. Not those of us with a lot of venture capital (though it sort of still applies). No, I’m talking about the Jimmy Olsens out there. The folks who keep trudging away at life because it’s a sink or swim kind of thing, who really want the superpowers but aren’t from Krypton or a family possessed of a trust fund.

We’ve got to work.

The frustrating thing is that the work we do, in this advanced society, is sort of invisible, or intangible, or often both. I’m a graphic designer, which means that pretty much all day I’m pushing pixels around on a computer screen, or doodling in a sketchbook, and at the end of the day I go home empty-handed, even if  I’ve been slammed from the minute I get in until the minute I leave (and sometimes even after that). And then when I’m done designing, somebody else does the physical making part, and I’ve got something to show, but it feels a little disconnected. I think that lots of people feel this way. Insurance agents, accountants, pharmacists, doctors, salespeople. And then you get home and you struggle to pay your bills and you struggle to save money and you wonder where all that time went.

I believe very strongly that craft fills that void. I have about four different crafts going at once (right now it’s knitting, embroidery, shoemaking and boxmaking). I’m doing research. I’m working on my house. So when I’ve got a rough day, I go home and I make something that I can hold in my hands and I can say, “I made this.” It’s a tangible result, and it’s rewarding and it has a clear goal. And it’s achievable. A friend of mine (robbingpeter) cans her own food. She makes delicious pear butter and pickles and salsa (well, actually everything she cooks is delicious, but I’m trying to prove a point here). And I think that while I deride scrapbooking, it fills that void, too.

Maybe we’ve all got something in common  with gamers – life is hard, and so we do things that help you cope, from stomping on goombas to crocheting afghans.

Posted in why I knit | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Floors!

Posted on August 7, 2010 by HappyGoth

I have the new floors. Of the wood.

Well, okay, so they’re not totally new, but they’re not carpeted, and I’m sort of ecstatic about that.

Wanna see? Like in the horribly blurry and not at all clear iPhone photo kind of way? Well here you go:

Okay, so that’s the floor and the cat. But that floor, it was carpeted a week ago. It’s like magic!

Middle room, what is the tv room/library. Shiny!

Front bedroom, what is the studio. It now has more bookshelves in it, and eventually a drafting table and some other crap. I kind of wish I could part with the other crap, since the room is so open and clean, but I use all the other crap.

At the moment, the big bedroom is drying, because there was this bit:

Which was a big rotten spot by the window that had been filled with wood putty, and we had to get the floor guy back to repair it. Which he did this afternoon. I’m really itching to get all the bedroom stuff back in there, since it looks like we run a thrift store out of our house at the moment. A junky, disorganized thrift store, where you can’t actually find anything, and sort of makes you give up looking. At least I know where my underpants are (they’re in the dining room).

The USAA insurance inspector guy wished us “good luck moving in,” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him we’ve lived here for two years. Just moving in sounds so much more legitimate (and less loser-y) than having lived in this weird thrift store for two years. In all truthfulness, it doesn’t normally look like this, but I am currently keeping the clean silverware in a cup on the counter, since I can’t get to the drawer where we usually keep it. It’s like camping! Only without the camping part.

On a more productive note, we wrapped the big project I’ve been working on at work, I’m putting the final touches on the freelance job I’ve been doing, and I punched holes in the soles of the turnshoes I’ve been making. This morning we went to Home Depot and bought two ceiling fans for the front bedrooms (which are stuffy and fan-less), and the husband is working on installing them (plus working on his cursing vocabulary).

To top it all off, I used my minimal Spanish skills to communicate with the floor guy and his wife. My Spanish consists of “Quieren agua,” “quieren mas agua” “el agua es aqui,” “si tu quiere mas agua, yo tengo aqi,” “hola,” “gracias,” and “gracias por todo del bueno travajo.” Strangely, I couldn’t remember “adios” until just now, probably because I was concentrating on “agua” so hard. And yes, I realize that my Spanish is pretty broken. I’m pleased that I remember what I learned in the third grade.

Tomorrow I will probably organize things back into place and pattern some costume parts for DragonCon. And I’m going to do it under a ceiling fan.

Posted in General stuff | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

And now for the lists

Posted on July 29, 2010 by HappyGoth

Not the fighting kind (wherein I don’t do anything other than sit around, drink furtively, and sometimes nap. Or knit. But not at the same time.

No, I’m talking about the “of things to do” kind. Buying the house has now made my dreamy planning more of a reality, and with all that dreamy planning comes actual things I have to do. So the list is:

1. Get the floors refinished (This is a week from being done, as it was part of what we negotiated from the seller. There will be weird kitchen camping, done by my husband, and means that we will have to play furniture Tetris over the weekend.)

2. Install ceiling fans in the two smaller bedrooms, as they are stuffy.

3. Buy some hanging plants for the porch.

4. Get to the container gardening for the back deck.

5. Shampoo the stinky area rug to put in the master bedroom.

6. GARAGE SALE (Jennie has the same problem, so we’re doing this together. Possibly also with Blogless Lea)

7. Chimney caps

8. Fireplace doors (so that we don’t get sooty cat prints all over the house, and can do something else with the canvases in front of the fireplaces)

9. Paint the inside (this will take several months)

10. Paint the outside (this will take more than several months)

And then there’s a big list of other stuff, which includes (but is not limited to) refinishing the attic, laying new tile in the bathrooms, installing new fixtures in the bathrooms, building an island in the kitchen, putting more cabinetry in the kitchen, installing fans on the porch, and also painting the porch ceiling blue, like they do in the South (or so I’m told).

Firstly, though there will be the rearranging, and then the re-rearranging of furniture so that our floors are non-carpeted and lovely. Which is soon.

I think I’m feeling a little better about this.

Posted in General stuff | Tagged , | 5 Comments