1. The firewood guy was supposed to drop off a load of wood last week, but he didn’t show. You’re either puzzled by this announcement, or busting a gut at the deadpan humor. (Hint: the firewood guy never shows up on time. Ever. Also, he’s usually an ex-felon or a late-stage alcoholic, or both.)

2. The chickens should be moulting any day now, right? At some point around this time of year, they lose all their feathers and grow new ones.

I have noticed that their thick downy coats are starting to look a little blotchy. Martha and Ethel were both solid gold until a few weeks ago.

I look forward to posting embarrassing pictures of them on the internet.

In egg news, for the last week I’ve gotten at least three real (i.e. not shell-less) eggs a day. I got four eggs a day for five days in a row, which I think is pretty impressive from four pullets!

3. Pears!

Tags: My Peeps

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I spent some quality time with the scarf last week, and finally finished the first pattern repeat. I’m thinking of this scarf as “inspired by,” because the more closely I looked at the original, the more I saw patterns I wanted to substitute.

The first pattern repeat is 33 inches long. Stop here, or work a second repeat for a 66-inch long scarf?

As you can see, I’ve left it on the needles, because I haven’t made my decision yet. This would make a fine tuck-in scarf. And since it’s essentially four layers of yarn (knitting / yarn strands / yarn strands / knitting), it’s quite warm.

Also if I stopped here I could start knitting something else, which would be nice, because this scarf is getting boring.

This is my most favorite motif. I call it “flecky triangles.” Flecky triangles are deployed in several motifs, but I’m particularly smitten with the combination of green flecky triangles and yellow zig zags.

This is my least favorite motif. It’s one of only two motifs which breaks the overall “colored pattern against white background” pattern. I picked it at random out of my Vogue Stitchionary, and it looked a lot niftier on the page.

Every time I look at it, I do a double-take because I think I see a swastika. Please tell me you have the same experience?

Someone asked if I was making effort to de-jog the stripes at the end of each round. The answer is, “Pfft, no.” This is a bigger problem with some motifs than others. (Yet another reason to like Flecky Triangles and Zig Zags.)

This is a photograph of the best page in the colorwork Vogue Stitchionary. That pattern is named “Kang and Kodos.”

Tags: Liz Lemon's Scarf

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This morning as I was sorting out the screenshots to write this post, I realized that Lorne is the 12th generation of Alphabettis. That means we’re halfway through the alphabet legacy challenge I took up last December. Crazy, right?

Speaking of little Lorne, Klango is acting as stay-at-home dad.

For some reason – maybe because I recently confessed that I never bother to have my Sims get the mail – I didn’t get a pop-up about the bills being due. The repo man came and took away the sofa with his magic repo raygun.

Klango had a wish to see a ghost, so I sent him out to the graveyard. Being a Hopeless Romantic, he started flirting with one of the ghosts.

I got my hopes up, and started daydreaming about having a ghost wedding and eventually a ghost baby. I mean, hey, Julie is an Elder now, so she can’t produce any more babies, so it’s only fair, right?

Alas it wasn’t to be. Neither this ghost (Mary Lu Broke) or any of the other female ghosts showed any interest in his come-on lines.

The next day he started flirting with the babysitter. Naughty! But she wasn’t interested, either. Maybe he’d have better luck if he had some – any – Charisma.

While all this was happening, Lorne grew up into a child. The game assigned him the trait “Insane.” Which let’s just say is not the most culturally-sensitive trait available in the game.

“Insane” means that he talks to himself a lot.

And occasionally changes into clothing which is inappropriate for the situation at hand, like swimming trunks for a walk in the park.

Speaking of walks in the park, how much do you love the blinking 12 on the stadium sign?

Back at home, Julie used a screwdriver to repair a broken computer that was sparking and emitting smoke.

Amazingly enough, she wasn’t electrocuted. (Dammit.)

Tags: Sims Sunday

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I’ve decided that cheesemaking will be my winter project this year. By the time spring rolls around, I want to have made a giant wheel of homemade cheese. Like, ridiculously large. So I’d better start by mastering the mozzarella!

I used Fankhauser’s instructions this time, and it worked out a lot better. I also used minimally-processed milk from a local dairy. (Their milk is sold in glass bottles! Their cows have names!)

The resulting mozzarella turned out pretty well, BUT. But I didn’t realize that it would “puddle” when I put it in the fridge. I just dropped the nice ball of cheese into a bowl and stuck it in the fridge overnight. I then forgot all about it for several days.

In fact, I had still forgotten about it when I spied the bowl. For just a second, I got really excited, because I thought I had opened up a can of sweetened condensed milk for my coffee. Once I open a can of sweetened condensed milk I pour it into a bowl and put it in the fridge, and that’s just what my mozzarella looked like – a thick pool of some off-white substance.

In Fankhauser’s instructions, Simon didn’t say “wrap it in plastic.” Well duh. So the top half of the cheese dried out and got kinda crusty, and the whole thing picked up a weird “off” flavor from the fridge. (As I type this, the fridge is defrosting so that it can be properly cleaned.)

(By the way, it’s a real feat to have lost something in the fridge for two days, since I only have a mini-fridge. Which I understand is perfectly normal in Europe and Britain, but will get you horrified looks in the States. All I can say is, it IS possible, makes you very efficient with the food, and after three years with it I have to wonder what the hell are you people putting in those gigantic refrigerators?)

Err, what was I saying? Oh right, so the second batch of mozzarella turned out… meh. Tasty as a caprese sandwich, but let’s be honest, that’s mostly about the delicious bread and the farmer’s market tomatoes.

I also set aside the whey, to make ricotta. Except that it spent two days in the coldest part of the fridge, and ended up half freezing, and when I warmed it up it didn’t foam like it’s supposed to. So I poured it onto the compost pile, and no tears were shed.

Today at the grocery store I noticed that you can buy a pound – a whole pound! – of mozzarella for $6. Which oddly enough is actually less than I paid for the milk to make a pound at home. Why am I doing this again? Oh right, the promise of a giant wheel of cheese ALL MINE!

Tags: cheesemaking

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Ah, life in a rural area. I was doing a search for something else, and here is what Google helpfully provided:

Okay, so we have:

1. Coffee. (Check!)

2. A cattle ranch that sells hay. I can’t decide if this is “You’re a vegetarian? Perhaps you would like to buy some delicious hay!” or “Cows are vegetarian.”

3. Jesus freaks.

Welcome to Skagit County!

(I’m actually kind of curious about “Adventist Book Center and Vegetarian Foods.” I guess my question is, are they running a vegetarian cafe in their book store? And how would that be different from any other book store cafe, because it’s not like you can walk into a coffee shop and order a Philly Cheesesteak.

Or is it a book store with a small selection of vegetarian foods you can buy? Like Triscuits and canned peaches? And how could you sell “vegetarian foods” with a straight face like that? It’s just across the street from Haggen, for pity’s sake.)

Tags: rural life, vegetarian

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