A Quite Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving this year was a medium sized gathering in the South Bay with friends. No family, mine being scattered about this year and all the girls lacking the freedom/time to travel. Alas. Looks like Christmas will also be Steckerless for the most part.

My contribution to this year's meal was potatoes and pie. My much anticipated (by me) purple potatoes and coconut cream (aka vegan mashed potatoes) was an absolute dud this year. I blame the potatoes. The pie however went well. Earlier this year I had a pie crust near-fiasco... which is ridiculous now that I look back at it because I have/had a food processor. Used it for the first time to make pie crust and am never going back.

Adam made Pumpkin Pie to ensure a reasonable dessert was available. I couldn't top the Venn Diagram Pie of years previous but thought hard to come up with something fun. Wound up with Indecision Pie. I used scrap aluminum (from a project waaaay back when) to create structural supports for some concentric circles. Blind baked the crust with only the inner circle for the first 12 min since that has the foil & pie weights portion. Removed foil & weights and added super-thin outer circle and cooked another 15 min. When it came out of the over I removed the inner support right away (no problem) but the outer support I left in place until I filled the apple section because it was likely to topple if left alone. Middle portion was left-over pumpkin pie and some raspberry filling ended up in the center.

In hind-sight go apple, raspberry, pumpkin next time. Apple & pumpkin: that's a no.

After dinner there was some tarot reading for some folks and one of the dogs. Amusing and silly. Sadly no one in attendance actually knows much about the cards so every step of the way required flipping back and forth through a book. There was also an I Ching reading/toss(?). There was also a walk. A fine tradition, that. I love the post-Thanksgiving meal walk, wherever it may be or go.

Many things to be thankful for this year. A year of changes for myself and many around me, most (all?) of them for the better. Lots and lots of new jobs, I gained a brother-in-law, there was another Dr. Stecker in the family (for about 2 weeks before she went and got married and took his name- ARRRrrrggg!) and if things All Go Well there will soon be another one (who will keep her title/name pairing). I am thankful that these job changes have been for the better. That I've been gaining family and not losing it. Relationships starting and deepening rather than fraying or ending. I retain my health and others appear to be doing well (except perhaps for the dear Grandmothers). In fact my health along several different axes is in a much better state now than it was this time a year ago. The world at large seems to be becoming more hostile and dark (though perhaps that's just my age tinting my world view) but I am thankful that my life appears to be trending the opposite direction. I'm meeting more people who I find enjoyable. I'm continuing to add to the "things I can do" pallet of possibilities.

Life is good.

Winding down

So I'm fast approaching the 3 month mark of being unemployed and things are winding down here. I've already begun the process of finding new work- have applied to a number of places already. Am targeting Nov. 9th for a start date. Fingers crossed that I can a company that both interests me and wants to hire me. Am never able to escape that Woody Allen joke "I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member" in terms of work though...

In terms of the things winding down: I'm excited that most my projects/goals/objectives of this hiatus have been met or are very near the finish line. Other than claiming I was going to do TWO quilts rather than just one (because I'm an idiot), I feel I've done an excellent job of scaling my ambitions to my expected available time. The quilt is essentially done, just needs some more superfluous stitching and a wash. The books are going to be finished come hell or high water. I've learned to cook chicken a number of ways (some of them even fast and easy!) and feel rather confident I could prepare a "meal" on the fly now after work without excessive stress or research. I've got 3 branch libraries to hit and then I'll have tackled 'em all. I had an excellent run of 5+ mile a' days there and don't feel guilty or bad that I've slipped back down to a steady 3 miles a day because I want to, you know, DO THINGS during the day and walking takes a hella' lot more time than initially anticipated.

(I dehydrated a hard boiled egg. I DO NOT ADVISE IT)

I guess the main let-down of this whole extended vacation was I failed to advance my drawing skills. I had hoped to tackle landscapes and I've made not a pinch of progress on that these 3 months (or past 10 even- it was one of my few resolutions this year). I also failed to attend any sort of fitness bootcamp nonsense thing, which I never really seriously considered but had always faintly hoped I'd do given sufficient free time. Maybe three months just wasn't "sufficient" enough, 6+ months off and I'm sure I'd get around to it...

In terms of other, just general awesome things:

Saw the whole blood moon eclipse thing. Happiness.

Went to the SF Super Hero Street Fair with company. Had a drink even! Danced with Santa. Was swept off my feet by random silver spandex man and made very happy. Good times.

Finally took another stab at hard crack sugar. It went better this time. I am emboldened.

Suko and I have not yet abandoned archery. This makes me proud of us.

I got a calligraphic letter from Katie in the mail, and it wasn't even a reply to something I'd sent. Just outa' the blue. So nice!

Enjoyed opening weekend at the Petaluma corn maze. Highly recommend it.

One Month In

So I've had a month to myself now. Have I squandered it? Probably. Lets review:

Visit all the public library branches in SF.

Am at 10 of 28 now. I've picked off all the easy ones, they're just getting further and further away from here on out. Mostly the western half of the city left, with a few far north and south to check out. I still believe it's a good idea, gets me out of the house. I've discovered that the Teen section of the library is much larger than I thought/remembered it was. There's apparently a non-trivial section/genre called 'Urban Teen' that I've never encountered before. Also, the graphic novel section is pretty neat. And there's a *lot* of romance novels there, more than I even expected.

Today I flipped through Emily Post's enormous Etiquette book. It was fun and enlightening.

Try to walk more than 5 miles a day.

Working out reasonably well... Travel had an impact, but I'm not beating myself up over it. One thing that I find particularly interesting is that it's not so much that the distances increased that much (I used to walk to and from work, and then frequently out to dinner or activities), but that the "active time" is what most noticeably jumped up. Even sitting at home crafting or cooking, I'm moving around around so much more than when I sit and code.

Finish piecing/appliqué of quilt so I can start actually quilting it (and taking it with me when I travel).

Quilt progress continues, slower than I'd like. But it is progressing. There's just so much work to do. I still have about 7 station dots to sew down. And two track bends to correct. And some more border to piece together. And then the whole thing to assemble. And then the back to assemble. And then the quilting can begin. And then, yeah, there's that whole second quilt I'd like to kick off real soon here. Hmmm. Quilt progress, as it comes along, can best be tracked via the #quilt tag over on my Tumblr.

Wrap head around food/cooking.

Eh, going reasonably well. I cooked chicken for the first time ever in the oven. Pathetic, but at least I'm trying to correct the situation. I made some super awesome sourdough bread using just starter recently. Sour and chewy and delightful. Am going to take another stab at it soon.

Draw more.

Fucking failure. A huge gaping hole in my pretty picture of intentions. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've sat down several times, both at the Cintiq and with my pencils. Aside form Dr. Sketchy's, I've not been able to produce anything. It's getting to be a little disturbing... Not tracked in inital post, but worth mentioning:

• Code for fun : going quite well. Have been really enjoying my Google Doc-to-LaTeX document converter project. Will make a stand alone post for that soon. Just got set up today (Tuesday) to run sutro.fm locally so I can start working on that again. Gah, I've forgotten how much I for (no good reason, really) dislike Backbone. Also, after bumping into a swarm of ex-Rdio co-workers, one after another, I feel an urge to clean up my animation patch for Thor. There's also some inventory management system project mentioned in passing by Logan and the joke-but-maybe-not-a-joke idea of contracting for a friend. And finally I'm starting to bump into enough minor nits that I don't like about Stalk like Stecker that I might need to re-write it.
• Be more social : Seems to be going reasonably well. I have friends. They're pretty fucking awesome. They'll even hang out with me some times. There are things on the calendar. A number of them. I'm excited. Will post separately about it so as to not forget. Remember, future Rebecca. Life and friend can be good.

(written Tuesday night)

Public Transportation Hike : Pacifica

This post is not about coding or crafting. But an important part of coding is NOT coding. And one of the best best ways to not code is to hike.

Enjoyed another wonderful Public Transportation hike this weekend. We caught a BART down to the Daily City station and then caught the SamTrans 110 bus down to Pacifica. The connections went well there and back, but be aware the 110 runs once every 1.5 hours. But don't let that spook you. This hike was refreshing, interesting, and totally worth the time.

We started off by heading up the Sweeny Ridge Trail. Finding it from the bus stop was easy enough. The first 1.2 miles was some steady incline, but since we were in Pacifica we were blanketed in fog the entire time and never once got too warm. It's questionable if we ever were really warm at any point during the trip. There was definitely apprehension as we watched the fog out the bus windows during the approach. We've had some disastrous hikes in the past... thankfully Adam convinced me to wear not just a thermal top for the hike but also my thermal leggings under my skirt. It would have not hurt to have brought another layer... and a hat... and my own gloves (I wound up stealing Adam's)

Have you seen the movie Stalker? It's a terrible film, don't bother if you haven't, but there is some striking imagery in it of foggy landscapes. That's what this hike looked like. We were quickly swallowed up by fog and the world stopped existing beyond the small spot we occupied. The trail was a constant surprise because it twisted into trees or behind shrubs and then out of existence. Sounds were muted, everything was covered in dew, and Adam's hair and beard quickly got soaked. (My braid was too dense we think to hold the dew). At one point we were wearing sunglasses to keep the fog from our eyes and had to repeatedly take them off to wipe clean.

We eventually stumbled across a Nike missile site that had been abandoned.

The site was at the peak of the hill we think- there was wind there at least. But still fog. After that we started to decent and eventually could see the coast. A little. Here the trail gets a little iffy. In theory there's a much more leg-friendly trail down to the church by the freeway... but we got turned around and took the mountain biker path. Insanely steep trails, loose rock, poor footing. Luckily it didn't last too long.

Popping out onto Highway 1 again, next to the church, we were DELIGHTED to see Lovey's Tea Shoppe right there, across the road! That's not a typo-- while it is related to (and shares the exact same menu with) SF's Lovejoy's, its name is Lovey's. Adam and I were able to slip into the communal table no problem and had us a pair High Teas.

Given that the bus comes once every 1.5 hours we had "just" missed one by 15 minutes, and the Colma BART bound 112 wasn't any more convenient. That's fine, there was still the final portion of the hike-- Mori Point. It winds right along the coast cliff and was absolutely bursting with wildflowers. An excellent way to wind down a hike and aid in a little digestion.

After strolling along between the beach and a golf course, we reached the bus stop with a comfortable 10 minutes to spare. Our BART connection was another 8 minutes. And then we were home.

All in all, an excellent hike and an excellent lunch. GMap-Pedometer puts it at an easy 7.1 miles. Check out the link for the exact route taken. Google Maps doesn't quite let us capture it (it refuses to acknowledge the path down to the highway) so here's the first portion & the second portion.

Looking forward to trying it again (perhaps following Sweeny Ridge trail a bit further)

Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

My Oculus Rift arrived yesterday and I have no Windows machine to run it with (and they've still not released the Mac SDK). So rather than fall into a pit of despair, let's focus on some recent positives.

Visited my parents in Vancouver two weekends ago. Lounged in my verdant childhood backyard and gobbled a number of fruits and veggies right off the vine. Saw The Book of Mormon. Did a lot of reading.

Our head of Engineering keeps bringing in veggies from his garden, a most kind and appreciated gesture. On a Friday my posse & I made squash/everything/anything cookies. Too much egg resulted in them being more like mini muffins than cookies... but still good! The whole squash that was grated and tossed in did no harm!

Visited Seattle last weekend for a wedding. The planets aligned and my sisters were both in town as well (for their own Washington based weddings to attend). Always disturbing to see which parts of you come from your family, visible in the looks and behaviors of siblings. Weddings that prominently feature Jesus and preach about marriage belonging only to men and women are aaaaaawkward.

I've been carefully grooming a playlist themed on my character Jaya from the 4th Terminus game. Good times, been listening to it a lot. A lot. Have found myself doodling while sitting on airplanes (a disturbingly common occurrence lately) and I've been running through my list of tabletop characters but frequently finding myself back to drawing Jaya.

I've been pushing numbers around at work lately. Wringing my hands frantically wishing load times to be faster. Pulling at my hair trying to extract meaningful information from a pile of logged data. I appreciate the diversity of work for my current team- writing SQL statements, poking at iOS code, still battling JavaScript, and possibly getting better at python (I still hate python)

I saw Snowpiercer in theaters. Twice. Damn fine film. Most excellent. Best thing I've seen in a long while. I felt good while watching it, like someone hitting a hard to reach itch. Have finally escaped my horror shlump of reading material and am back on a good kick of distopian material. Am on book 3 of the Silo series (which starts with Wool). The author, Hugh Howey seems like a cool guy. Finally read Starship Troopers. Am looking forward to the new Mad Max movie coming out in 2015.

My old art blog just passed 10k views.

Christmas Cookies 2013

My friend Suko has a Christmas cookie swap that she has kindly invited me to twice now. Here's the write up of last year's cookie. This year I didn't have a solid game plan until the very last minute. I know I wanted a more savory and perhaps tart/sour cookie. In the end I settled on "Christmas Grinchies", which were a lard based cookie shell and a kiwi paste interior... Sadly, the idea didn't translate into reality as well as I had hoped.

The basic recipe as I half scrawled on on the back of an envelope:

• 1/2 cup white sugar = 100g => 80g
• 1 egg
• 1 1/4 cup flour = 156g => 175g
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp vanilla
• 100g lard (not melted)
• Green food coloring & black poppy seeds to resemble a kiwi
• Spices and stuff... cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla, etc...

This, I believe, was lifted from some basic sugar recipe I found online and then modified. Sadly, it wasn't great. The day before I did a test run where I used my usual lard-cookie recipe ( online recipe found here and involving melting the lard first) and it turned out stellar. But handling the goopie dough had been a real bitch. I should have stuck with what I knew.

The second part was the kiwi paste interior. I gutted a handful of kiwis... 5? 7? (they were lifted from my office) and pureed them with a immersion blender. Poored them in a small pot, added some (but not enough!) agar agar powder and brought to a boil. Then I poured them out into two dishes and let cool/set. In my case I did not weigh the puree nor measure out the agar agar and this was a BAD idea because they did not set firmly enough. My test batch the day before was smaller and had way more agar agar in comparison and they set solid. REALLY solid. So solid that they didn't budge while cooking the cookie. The larger batch I worked with was mushy and barely held its form.

Anyway, to assemble the cookie I rolled the dough into a long log then squared it & chilled it for an hour. Then I cut slices off the log and assembled them around the paste center. Then I cooked them at... 370°? for... 15 min? and it went all to hell. The paste center was not strong enough so each and every carefully assembled square went PHFFFHHFFHffhfhf... and fell over in the oven. Lame.

While that was going on I was compelled to try and add some make some meringue santa hats to gently rest upon the Grinchies. I followed this meringue mushroom recipe directly and was greatly assisted by Adam, who actually wound up doing all the initial whipping by hand. Turns out meringue is suuuuper awesome to make and work with, but really isn't my type of thing. In a futile attempt to cut the sweetness and error back towards tart I added some malic acid to the "red" parts of the santa hats... but I don't think it was really noticeable.

After the required number of cubes were made I had all these leftovers so I made little tiny cookies-- lard cookie base, kiwi paste middle, topped with a puff of meringue.

In the end it wasn't a horrible, horrible, vomit-in-your-mouth failure. But it certainly wasn't a success. I shouldn't have been so stingy with the agar agar and I shouldn't have worked with lard in a style I've no experience with (un-melted). Also, while the cookies were great if you knew what was in them, I found out from my mother's horrified expression that if you're not expecting the paste center, they're not fun to bite into. Makes you think it has a massive uncooked center.

Oh well, there's always next year... and 12 months in the mean time to expand my skill set.

The Season

While I frequently get quite depressed before Spring comes around again, I love Fall and early Winter. Which is where we're at right now. Halloween, my birthday, and Thanksgiving always come around in a wave of goodness. Eating, costumes, celebrations with friends and family. I also am quite fond of American Christmas and "The Holidays". While I've no tolerance of any of that religious nonsense, I enjoy the decorations, special color schemes, beautiful gift wrapping, cut trees, and emphasis on lights that "The Holidays" bring.

Had a lovely Thanksgiving this year. PURPLE POTATOES! SO GOOD! (visually that is-- taste wise they were exactly the same as the white potatoes... aka DELICIOUS!) Am wondering how I can work purple potatoes in to some cookies some time soon... It was the first time Adam's mother met my parents, so there was that. I'm looking forward to Christmas, where the whole family (sadly without significant others) will be together again before being blown our separate ways for the rest of the year.

Through casual conversation I have now secured myself access to carve up my mother's fabric collection into tiny squares for quilting purposes (something that I'm not willing to do to *my* precious fabric collection) and I'm quite excited! Just three weeks, three holiday parties, two birthdays, two soccer games, two gingerbread bouts, one table top game, one cookie exchange, and one crab feast to go!

November

A lot has gone on this month. Some of it really good, some of it not great, and some of it just kinda' stressful without being good or bad. I don't think I want to dwell on this month. The good things are worth highlighting though:

I turned 30. It wasn't as horrible as I expected. Adam was super nice to me all weekend long. His breakfast making skills are superior to most restaurants. His gift selection skills are quite expertly honed as well. This year I received a machete and a Cintiq. Both things make me ridiculously pleased. Then we went out to a crazy nice dinner at Sons & Daughters.

_{(a picture of me all dolled up for dinner w/ my awesome new machete)}

Friends and games! Adam and I have picked up Race For The Galaxy again and it's still fanastic. Have been playing D&D with our South Bay friends and it has been great fun! I painted my first miniature! Have been playing The Academie of Magic with other friends- an excellent custom game with fantastic game mechanics. Played Trains with coworkers twice-- it's good to find something not beer or food related to socialize with.

Poked at D3 some through work. It remains awesome. Much like Knockout, I found every question/want I had was easily answered/solved with the library. Sadly I haven't spun apart any of the code to make it share-able since it's rather tightly tied to confidential information at the moment....

A really awesome market has opened around the corner! They have fresh local food of good quality that is relatively novel/is not available at the other local markets. We are now getting Straus milk and it is tasty!

Adam and I saw 12 Years a Slave. It's a good reminder of what a great film is like. Beautiful, well acted, great music... extremely depressing subject matter though. Still, I suggest you see it.

Drawing with my Cintiq is... fantastic. It just feels good. "Fun" doesn't really capture the feeling. It feels good, like I imagine how people who enjoy running feel when they run. It's hard- I'm so badly out of practice doodling I don't even remember how to idly doodle any more... but it feels good to hold the pen and sit at the screen and draw. My joy comes not from the fact that it makes things easier/better but because it just feels right... odd. I look forward to many years with it.

I've been making food things at work with much success! I've started making progress on the free-style cookie! (screw you 1/2/3 ratio! It's 1/1/1.2 sugar/fat/flour I say!) I recently made bacon/banana/oat/black sesame/molasses cookies that were tasty! Also oat/goat ricotta/molasses cookies! They didn't suck!

| My work soccer team finally won a game! First one since I joined!







In less awesome news: _{I've been working too much and letting work follow me home. This has interfered with my ability to fully embrace my Cintiq. There were layoffs at work- I still have a job however. The overall issue of women & engineering has been getting me really down recently. There are no good answers and there are actual problems. Similarly, women & the whole damn word. I lost a really great jacket sometime during the summer and wish I had it now. I couldn't find a skirt I wanted to wear the other morning and started crying. I failed to lose any weight these last couple months and now the holidays approach. I can't find anything I want to read. I will never be able to buy a house (where I want) in San Francisco. I got < 2k words into NaNoWriMo. I continue to feel like I'm on the verge of getting sick (damn tickle in the back of the throat!). I attended 2 great Dr. Sketchy's and still haven't scanned & posted the pictures}

Things.

New Idea! New Idea!

I'm thrilled that I've been struck with a new idea for a themed dinner party. I've been scratching my head for ages trying to come up with something to top the Alien's theme party... and now I've got it! Table top gaming! The title? "Only the GM Knows What's For Dinner"! I'm giddy with glee.

The above image was made this weekend with a lazy susan, mirror, camera, remote shutter clicker, and a sweet 3D printed shape made by my friend Kyle. It's a castoff (there's a defect you can barely see) that he gave me and I hope to mod in the future into... something...

Dinner party idea is the product of a weekend spent making a new D&D character for a friend's campaign. I'm going to be playing a Warforged Fighter. Basically I'm a robot that will hit things. Am excited for that too.

Not-Work at Work

Work, the location, should be somewhere you enjoy going. I find working at home to be too distracting (or rather, distraction to be too accessible) but a dull workspace makes me depressed. You can't control your coworkers (for good or bad) but as long as you don't work for crazy dictators *coughcoughAcuituscoughcough* you can make your space into what you need it. And I need it to be "interesting".

One of my coworkers was super awesome and ordered a box of 36 mixed succulents from Amazon. He then distributed one to each member of the team and then other random awesome devs around the office. This made me happy. My friend Suko was awesome and used her Google-fu to sleuth out that the plant I got was a gasteria disticha.

It took me some time, but I eventually pulled together a teacup monster to house my new little green companion. I've named it Gretel after a book character I'm currently enjoying. Turns out Dremeling through cups is a bitch. Had to break it up over the course of several nights, so horrible was the sound and so tedious the grind/cooldown cycle. The legs didn't really turn out the way I wanted-- initially had hoped for a more realistic clay/resin type of leg... but I had to settle since I'm actually quite bad at sculpture. I'm not that dissatisfied with how these turned out. Adam pointed out they were rather elephant like, which makes me smile. I still have 2 more teacups so I might take another stab at it...eventually. Once my ears stop bleeding- ugh.

Another thing I do at work some times that makes me happy is bake. I think I've mentioned we have a fantastic oven there. Nice little well-stocked kitchen as well. The Friday before my vacation (you know, the day when it's near impossible to focus on work) I baked some bread at work that I made from scratch. In the office. Working somewhere that allows for such sillyness makes me extremely happy. I didn't waste *too* much time doing it and those who sampled the results seemed very pleased. It was one of the best loafs I've made in a long time.

I chopped up some strawberries and mixed them in with a normal batch of bread... which resulted in ridiculously wet dough. It was quite difficult to work with, I had to keep adding flour, and took over half an hour to work into a reasonable state. After its first rise (which went perfectly) I spread it out, laid down more slices of strawberries, honey, and M&Ms, then rolled it up. Pushed it into a bread tin, waited for the second rise (also nice), and then into the oven. So good. SO GOOD.

Coding with the aroma of baked goods filling the office is a good way to spend an afternoon.

Yay

Spring Delights

The weather has been lovely lately. A lot of tasty food as been consumed. Suko let me steal some of her home made lemon curd and so I had to make a batch of scones to make use of it. (picked up some Rhubarb Grapefruit jam at the ferry building for Adam. Turned out to be far more tasty then it had any right being)

Finished the quilt remains pillow from last post. In further efforts to clean the basement up, I've put more things on the wall. A hoop with some colored threads was easy enough and a sunny afternoon with a dremel enabled me to mount the random collection of pencils (mostly colored) that I've collected so far. Both projects use hatpins as the key component.

The pencils have a thin hole drilled through them and they hang on a hatpin. There's a loop of thread that is tied to the pin on one end and a button on the other. The pin goes through the button and the weight of the pencils (and the tilt of the hanging) keeps the button in place.

Have I mentioned how awesome our back deck is with the hammock up?

I continue to have low level anxiety in my life. Perhaps work related? Perhaps turning-30 related? Its source remains unclear but its effect is becoming a bit more noticeable. I feel... "frayed"? when my mood manges to swing up. This just means I'm bit wackier then usual I'd say-- as would others. This week's evenings so far have been very delightful, which made me very happy, which resulted on my actions being commented on by others. Oh well. There are worse things to be then a happy spaz.

Mary Robinette Kowal was at Borderlands and was about as awesome as expected. In fact, I'd give her an "Exceeds expectations" review. (This being the lady that wrote Shades of Milk and Honey (Glamourist Histories) [and I will punch the next person who makes a 50 shades of gray reference. That horse is dead, ok?]) She kindly signed my copy of the 3rd book as well as the new copy of her 1st book I picked up. I love my Kindle, but it does sort of happer the lending of good things... So now I have a copy of the first book! And would love to lend it to anyone who'ld read it.

Tuesday was once again Dr. Sketchy's, with a theme of Morocco. I think the return to twice a month is good for me. This month's model was Aja, who we've had before and is a talented lady. She struck a number of poses with lifted arms or turned heads and did not budge an inch. A real pro!

Sadly I don't think I really made the most of the session-- my drawing mojo wasn't with me that night. As I commented to a fantastic fellow artist [Elle?]-- I've no problem with voluminous folds of fabric if they're done up in Wester fashion, I've figured out how to draw that. It's that I don't understand what's going on with the outfit and that's what's making it hard to draw. (Which I guess just means I need to perhaps practice a bit with the classic pile of fabric draped over a chair? Or perhaps a greater study of fashion) Anyway, something for me to think....

Scattered Focus

I keep starting things and then not quite finishing them. Or not doing that great of job if I get close enough to pretend to be done. I can't tell if it's the result of this general anxiety I've been feeling recently or the cause of it. Let's start with the positive and work my way down. Made some not-horrible bread recently and shared it at work. I let it raise too long and it sort of deflated a bit. I also didn't make as much as I had wished. Alas. Anyway- I called it Vdio Bread because it shares the color scheme of our recent product at work. The black is from the ever wonderful squid ink and the yellow from turmeric which was an interesting and new (to me) flavor. I also threw in a handful of other things but in the end the overall flavor was very mild. I wished both the color and the zing of the flavors was a bit stronger.

My sister gifted me this rad raptor particle board "skeleton" thing. I've never assembled one of them before (Adam comments he did a number of them in his youth) and it was a lot of fun. Hard not to be somewhat downed by following a pre-fab thing though... if only I had my scroll saw here! I'm hoping to put it in the back yard and entice my pea sproutlings to grow up/around it. Sadly my sproutlings have sprouted and passed their peek. Am really not in my gardening grove this year, despite my wishes.

The dino bones reminded me of my sister and spurred me on to finally make use of the scraps from her Christmas quilt. I came up one square short and made the most of it. I'm saddened that it took me all of an afternoon to do this piece work and that several days later it still sits in my basement, with no backing. We have company coming in two weekends so hopefully it'll be done by then to spruce up the basement, where they are staying. My first basement guests! (sister Lindsey doesn't count)

One of the reasons I'm having difficulty focusing is probably in part due the fantastic weather. It has been super nice lately (though today, Tuesday, the streak has been broken). This weekend I finally figured out how to mesh my desire to craft and my desire to enjoy the outdoors. Here you can see my diversions in the sun- the hammock, my camera tripod, and my sewing machine. All happily inhabiting our fantastic private back porch.

The tripod is because I've got a nagging urge to do some animation. Why? I don't know. I'm doing sewing projects, gardening projects, cooking projects... clearly what I need now is something else shinny to distract me. I'm not even good/trained at animating so why I think I should even try is beyond me.

Aaaaaanyway, I picked up some velum paper from Office Max and found that my hole punch made perfectly sized holes for some bullet casings I possess. (finding that out was an odd adventure through the basement). With the paper cut down and the casings in place it makes for a perfect flip book that can be reshuffled as needed. My Eadweard Muybridge: The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs book also proved key to the process. And by key, I mean I basically copied one of the sets directly.