Catching Up
Feb. 4th, 2015 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sakon76Wonderful Husband and I celebrated our anniversary on Monday. Eleven years, hooray! We went to see Big Hero 6 before it left theaters, and very much enjoyed it. I think this is the first Disney film where I want the artbook not for cosplay purposes, but just for looking at the world Disney created. OMG, such gorgeous backgrounds and art and concept and everything!
I'm giving my mother's 201 a workout by piecing a quilt top on it. I've won an auction for the quilting foot I need, but given that it's coming from the snowed-in section of the country, it may take a while. A couple days ago I also found this tutorial, and it spoke to me. So I cut strips from all my green Christmas fabrics, and raided my box of 2.5" strips for more, and sewed them to various white/cream strips and cut and cut and cut... and still only had 362 of the 480 white/green sets I need. Grr. Back to more cutting and sewing, as needed.
I've also started this year's jam-making. Thus far I've done a small batch of lavender pear jam, and one of chocolate pear jam. I have plans for a habenero kumquat jam batch as soon as I get some more lids. Giving jars of jam as Christmas presents neatly cut down my oversupply of half-pint jars, to the point where I'm raiding my mother's oversupply for this year's. ^_^ I also need to start another batch of sauerkraut going, as it turns out the Squiddle likes real kraut as much as I do. (Wonderful Husband is less on board with the lactofermented flavors thing. I'm working on him.)
Last night we went through Squiddle's oversupply of toys and winnowed out the ones he doesn't play with, and the ones that are too young for him, and boxed those up. There's so much more room in the office now! But I still need to make a couple fabric baskets for storing things like his Megabloks.
And, lastly, yardwork is slowly getting accomplished. I've pruned all fifteen rosebushes at our house, and need to find time to go over and do the ones at my parents'. Weeding of the kitchen garden is a slow, steady task, but at least I've finally tossed the contents of the weed-ridden pots, and tossed as well those plastic pots in less than great condition. I need to move my succulents up into bigger pots, and now I have some free. And I've started starting seeds. I've got three flats of two kinds of corn (one had weevils so I'm expecting a low germination rate), and another flat filled with soil, ready for other seeds to go in.
And that's the news from Chez Greenwood. How're you all?
I'm giving my mother's 201 a workout by piecing a quilt top on it. I've won an auction for the quilting foot I need, but given that it's coming from the snowed-in section of the country, it may take a while. A couple days ago I also found this tutorial, and it spoke to me. So I cut strips from all my green Christmas fabrics, and raided my box of 2.5" strips for more, and sewed them to various white/cream strips and cut and cut and cut... and still only had 362 of the 480 white/green sets I need. Grr. Back to more cutting and sewing, as needed.
I've also started this year's jam-making. Thus far I've done a small batch of lavender pear jam, and one of chocolate pear jam. I have plans for a habenero kumquat jam batch as soon as I get some more lids. Giving jars of jam as Christmas presents neatly cut down my oversupply of half-pint jars, to the point where I'm raiding my mother's oversupply for this year's. ^_^ I also need to start another batch of sauerkraut going, as it turns out the Squiddle likes real kraut as much as I do. (Wonderful Husband is less on board with the lactofermented flavors thing. I'm working on him.)
Last night we went through Squiddle's oversupply of toys and winnowed out the ones he doesn't play with, and the ones that are too young for him, and boxed those up. There's so much more room in the office now! But I still need to make a couple fabric baskets for storing things like his Megabloks.
And, lastly, yardwork is slowly getting accomplished. I've pruned all fifteen rosebushes at our house, and need to find time to go over and do the ones at my parents'. Weeding of the kitchen garden is a slow, steady task, but at least I've finally tossed the contents of the weed-ridden pots, and tossed as well those plastic pots in less than great condition. I need to move my succulents up into bigger pots, and now I have some free. And I've started starting seeds. I've got three flats of two kinds of corn (one had weevils so I'm expecting a low germination rate), and another flat filled with soil, ready for other seeds to go in.
And that's the news from Chez Greenwood. How're you all?
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no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 04:56 am (UTC)I don't think I've ever tried saurkraut. And my tastes have changed as I've gotten older. Hmm.
Done p much no yard work lately. Things are starting to bloom, though. Well, other people's daffs and irises. We've got iris greens coming up, but no flowers yet. Which would be early. So.
Have been rereading the Silmarillion, over the past couple days. Enjoying it muchly! First two sections have much singing and frolicking about with Iluvatar and making stuff and Olorin - who becomes Gandalf later - wandering about can't be bothered with putting on a body eeheehee! Punctuated with a lot of MELKOR NO! And then we get to the main part about the Elves and the Silmarils, and it's Elves Behaving Badly, and a lot of FEANOR NO! but there's Melian and Galadriel off being awesome, and I'm approaching the sections where Beren keeps getting himself in trouble and Luthien has to come in, pwn Sauron, and rescue her boyfriend's ass. \o/
When one stops taking this set of texts so seriously it's great fun!
no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 06:34 am (UTC)I've always liked sauerkraut, but in making my own I've discovered that unsurprisingly it has a different taste and texture than the stuff you can get canned at the store. It's pretty easy to do, too. This (http://hungrytigress.com/2009/12/holiday-sauerkraut-3-ways/) is a pretty good tutorial. I've done a plain batch, as well as one with caraway seeds mixed in. The taste of the latter reminds me of a Reuben sandwich. Tomorrow I'm going to pick up some juniper berries and try a batch with those, as it appears to be another traditional variant.
My daffs stopped coming up two years ago, but my paperwhites come up gangbusters every year. I need to lift and separate them this year. (My god, they're not flowers, they're a bra! ^_^) Unfortunately, this year they came up gangbusters while I was out of the country. Alas....
I tried the Silmarillion once. I couldn't get past all the begats. It was too... dry? dense? something, anyway. Maybe it's just that, as you put it, it was taking itself too seriously. Perhaps some year I'll give it another try, reading it as a lark.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-06 06:53 am (UTC)::nodnod:: Happens a lot with food, methinks. Homemade is almost always better, one. Or expert and fresh made, two. Like I'll eat calamari, but I'm snobby about it. Beni Hana's is rubbery crap. Alas. At least I like their shrimp tempura. I wonder if there's different kinds of sauerkraut that one could try at Whole Foods or something... ::ponders::
Oh red cabbage, nice! Hmmmmm... ::bookmarks::
Lemon pickles????? Hmmmm!! Although the spicing sounds more complicated than I've usually done...do we even have a spice grinder? o.O
We have two or three patches of daffs still. I have done nothing to deserve them.
The Silmarillion is deffo very dense and compared to even LotR and especially Hobbit very dry and scholarly and there's almost no dialog and it's like a list of things that happened in this mythology... I tried reading it in jr high or high school and made no headway either. I couldn't get a grip on it until I'd had a handful of religion/mythology classes and thus had an objective framework for what it was doing. It's mot really a "story" in the usual sense. People who are far better Tolkien scholars than I am have made the mythos fun, though, so it's by that lens that I've come to view things, and enjoy them even more! :D
Also! HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!!!!
And I am way behind in watching animated movies. I haven't even seen The Princess and the Frog. Or Frozen. Or The Book of Life. Or Big Hero 6. ::hangs head::
no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-06 12:29 am (UTC)Ooh, Big Hero 6 - I do want to see that one, just haven't managed to get there yet.
Lavender pear, mmmm.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-07 05:58 pm (UTC)