Subconscience Gift

I love giving gifts. I also enjoy my libations. When these two things meet up, it often leave me scratching my head and wondering what I was thinking.  To quell this buyers remorse I have resorted to online shopping and either throwing things on a wish list to look at later or not checking my virtual cart out until a day or two has passed and my head has cleared. That way I can assess if I am a genius or perhaps just a little intoxicated.

I recently discovered a private wish list I created that has left me scratching my head.  I probably started it in the summer or perhaps in the fall, but honestly I don't know when I started it.  I clearly had something in mind when it came to fruition.

Here is the list:

1. Mindful Skull Tapestry Beach Sheet
2. Set of 4 Ninja Throwing Spikes with Wrist Sheath
3. M48 Apocalypse Tactical Tomahawk
4. Kraken Sea Monster Patrol Patch
5. Tungsten Carbide Steel Lord of the Rings Ring
6. Map of Middle Earth on Silk Cloth
7. Cat Treats
8. Mudder 60W 110V Electrically Adjustable Temperature Welding Soldering Iron w/ Five different tips


To me, it looks like I am either going on an adventure to Middle Earth and I am taking my cat with me and expecting trouble or I was preparing for the end of the world and planned on surviving off of the cat treats as a last resort.  Either could be a possibility. I don't know.  Part of me wants to buy all the things and use them as white elephant gifts and the other part of me is trying to figure out the method behind this madness.   If you are ever stuck for gift ideas, I don't think you can go wrong with throwing spikes.  I am pretty sure that is something every one could use multiple of and not be upset for receiving duplicates.

Quilt of Books

My dear friends decided that they wanted to combine DNA. I was and am very excited for them. They live in the harsh New England area and it is said to get a fair bit brisk there than it does in my location.  I had this brilliant idea that I would make them a book quilt.  Books are unisex and everyone of any size and shape can enjoy them and they can grow with you and help you grow.
Quilts are warm and help you survive through the winter.  It was a perfect combination in my mind.

The only hitch in that plan, is that while I have done quilts in the past, I haven't really done a quilt.  Normally my mother and I will work on a quilt together. My job normally has something to do with the acquisition of fabric and supplies and the manual labor of hand tying it when it has been assembled.  My job has never been the math in the quilt, until now.  My mother was unavailable to assist in this adventure, and with the help of some creative excel spreadsheet mapping, I had a plan and some math flushed out.

Where The Wild Things Are

The plan was simple.  I have one large block that I draw a book cover on and then I have color block around the side of it. Then it all gets sewn together on a flat sheet with batting and add a border. It would test not only my artistic skills, but my limited sewing skills. It was a simple plan and I gave myself two weeks to get it accomplished in time for their shower.

The beautiful thing about math, is that number don't lie, however if you ignore them or perhaps don't pay attention to them, then things get a little interesting. All off that math I spent a day mapping out turned out to be mostly useless, because I bought the wrong sheet size in my supplies gathering, and had to wing it from there on out.

I could go through the ins and outs of what it takes to make a quilt and how much fun it is to try and do anything with a super helpful cat that thinks that it is his job to lay on everything or chew on any of the strips of fabric, but I won't.  I had promised that I would give a guide to the book covers that was used on the blanket. This is that guide. From the top row, where Iggins is standing going left to right is the following:


1. The Hobbit
2. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
3. Brisinger
4. Pride & Prejudice
5. Dune
6. Moby Dick
7. Alice in Wonderland
8. Don Quixote
9. Disc World (I couldn't choose just one book!)
10. The Last Unicorn
11. Harry Potter (Again I couldn't pick just one!)
12. We Have Always Lived in the Castle
13. Peter Rabbit
14. Where the Side Walk Ends
15. Where the Wild Things Ate
16. Sherlock Holmes (Okay so maybe there are several book series on here, but they were needed!)
17. Game of Thrones
18. Batman (Frank Miller's Batman was one of the first graphic novels according to my husband and everyone needs Batman in their life.)
19. The Phantom Tollbooth.
20. The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe  21. Charlie & The Chocolate Factory.

I had a lot of fun working on this, and while it might not be a perfect quilt with all the straight lines and defined lines that my mother would have done, but I am still proud of it.  It was fun to think about what sort of books should be on the quilt and whether or not I could mimic any of the art. My husband was a great support in looking for images for inspiration and listening to him campaign as to which books he felt should be on the quilt.  If anything my friends have a reading list they can pass down to future generations.

Goats

Goats!



I am a nice and normal person. Or at least I think I am, but every now and then my brain takes a turn and goes down an alley and I have no idea why.   Some people call it a squirrel moments, because they could be normally doing something and BAM! Oh Look ! A  Squirrel! They are utterly distracted and there isn't any particular trigger.

Goats!

I have what I am going to call Goat Moments. It is where I can be carrying on a perfectly normal conversation and then all of a sudden a word is going to strike me as funny. Not funny Uh-Oh, but funny Ha-Ha!  This past weekend that word was Goats and I have no idea.  I was puttering around killing time before meeting some friends for lunch/afternoon beers, and I left my coffee cup by the goats and that is all it took/  For some reason the word goats and the way it rolls off of my tongue stuck me as funny.  Funny like it was the best joke I had ever heard.

Goats!

Funny in a way that I am saying the word goats over and over again in a sing song manner and can't stop laughing at how the word feels as it is uttered. My husband just rolled his eyes as I gasped for air as we left to get beers/ lunch.    Even as I am typing this out, I am saying goats to myself and snickering. It is still funny and it has been a few days since the first goat threw me into a giggling fit.  I have no idea why I find humor in this.  And that is what a Goat Moment is. It is something that is unexplainably funny that comes out of the blue. Maybe some day I will have a better explanation, but that is all I have now. I have goats.


Goats!

Pishing About

My husband and I were on the coast for our anniversary and the weather was not idyllic.  In fact it was a cross between rain and mist and was just over all damp.  The term my husband informed me was it was "pishing" and that it was a British Term, and that is what we called it.

Fast forward a few weeks later and I am out with a friend doing shopping and the weather is very much the same sort of rain and mist combo.  I told her about the fabulous word that described the event that was befalling upon us weather wise, and asked if she had heard it while is was across the pond.  If there was anyone that would have a word for rain in its various stages it would them.

She had not heard that term and asked if what I really meant was "pissing" and it had been misheard, because she had heard the rain called that several times, but by no means was she on the up and up on all of the British colloquialisms.  While we were having a coffee break from out daily adventures and discussing how we were doing on our NaNoWriMo word could. I decided to turn to the internet looking for words that describe the rain.  

Oh my. I came across a charming article from several years back  by BBC that bemoaned the lack of description on the way the water fell from the sky.  I have never read a more British article or laughed so hard about it.  It made me want to use all of their terms to describe rain, even the some what french one that was described as "raining like a cow relieving itself," which is to say it was probably a steady heavy down pour that will muck up your shoes considering the manner of cows.  

While that article gave me a good chuckle and some inspiration for a little bit writing, it crossed my mind that perhaps I should continue my search for "pishing" and maybe it wasn't a British thing at all. This lead me to Urban Dictionary. Yeah... Well... The answer they gave for "pishing" was much like a cow relieving itself on people that enjoy that sort  of thing.  Not the answering I was looking for, but did point me in the direction that perhaps my husband just heard the word wrong. 

Once last search before giving up on the internet distraction and forcing myself to go back to my noveling brought me to The Fine Art of Pishing, which thankfully had nothing to do with urination and everything to do with coaxing a bird out of a bush and also nothing to do with doing that in the rain.  Giving up, I realize that sometimes that some of the best distractions are the one that leave you with more questions than answers, and that if I want to get anywhere on my novel I have to start giving my characters more interesting questions than them chatting about the weather. 

Bad Analogies

NaNoWriMo will shortly be upon me, and my brain will be focused onto word count and plot device and word count.  A friend from work while cleaning out some paper work found a list titled, "Twenty Eight Reasons Why English Teachers Die Young; Actual Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays".   I have no idea where this list was generated from, but it provided me more than one laugh that I felt that I needed to share.  All spelling, punctuation and word choice on the list, are exactly as found on the list. I curbed my urge to correct minor errors for the integrity of the list. Thank you Heather for some NaNo inspiration!

Twenty Eight Reasons Why English Teachers Die Young; Actual Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had it's two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making a breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. 
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.coli and he was room- temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had and eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy come on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. 
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut. 
19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work. 
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
26. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
27. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
28. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall. 
29. They were deeply in love. Her chest was heaving, like a college freshman's on one dollar beer night. 

Yes, there are 29 items on a list of 28. It just adds to my amusement. Hopefully this list gave you a couple of chuckles the way it gave me a couple. 

Bacon is My Jam

I enjoy canning. There is something about it that give me a feeling of accomplishment. It might have something to do with the fact that when I am done I can physically see what I have accomplished and there are not to many things in life that are like that. It might also have something to do with preparing for the inevitable end of the world and when that happens I will have at least a well stocked larder to get me through the nuclear winter.

It seems like since the cookbook challenge ended, I quit writing about trying new recipes and I have slowed down on trying new recipes.  That is only partially true. I haven't been hitting the cook books all that hard, but I have tried several new recipes as of late.  I have not felt compelled to write about every single new kitchen adventure as it happened, until I came across Bacon Jam. This now one of the favorite new recipes for canning and it is out of the Better Homes & Gardens Canning Summer 2015 magazine that I picked up on an impulse at the grocery store.

When it comes to canning, I look for something that is unique that I will use. I don't want to can something just to have it and then never eat it. It is a waste of food and time.  When I happened across Rebecca Lindamoods article and recipe on how to make Bacon Jam, I knew immediately that I would eat that.  The recipe was amazingly easy and it made my house smell delightful.  The smell of bacon cooking for hours wafting out of my kitchen window may have made some of my neighbors green with bacon jealousy. I know that it made my cats a little crazy and they hung out in the kitchen corners hoping for crumbs while I was jarring.

It isn't all about the smell, because it also tastes like a slice of heaven.  Kaiser roll smeared with bacon jam with a fried egg and sharp cheddar makes the taste buds sing and dance and is a right proper way to great the morning. Bacon jam has become become my jam.  It has found its way into my freezer, but is having a hard time staying there.  I would highly suggest if you are of the bacon eating mind, that you check this out.  It is delicious.

Porcelain

Sometimes it takes me a while to make head way in my to be read pile. It monsooned over the weekend which gave me ample opportunity to curl up with a book and a glass of wine. From deep with in the stacks came Porcelain A Gothic Fairy Tale by Benjamin Read and Chris Wildgoose.

When I think of a gothic fairytale, I think about Jane Eyre and architecture but mostly Jane Eyre. This story reminded of some of my favorite parts of Jane Eyre.  Jane Eyre is a piece Of classic literature that has a lot going on and most of it being examples of good things going bad. I would say the same is true with Porcelain. Porcelain is a beautiful dish that gets cracked and can never get back its original perfection which is what makes  it a perfect gothic fairytale. 

The art is well done and it fits the tone of the story very well. There are layers upon layers that make me want to go back and read it again and examine the pictures to see if there are any other nuances that I may have missed.  I am pleased with this addition to the ever growing graphic novel library.