Party of one

Yummy!!! New borosilicate cocktail set.


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On resolutions: Say "no" to crabs.

The idea of taking stock of one's life and setting goals is a worthy thing and I do admire the inclination. Believe it or not, I actually have goals and dreams of my own, as un-plotted as my path may appear to others. However, the thought of year-end reflection and goal-setting for the coming year seems incredibly lazy, to me. If there's something to which you aspire, you don't wait a day to embark on steps which propel you in that direction. In July, you don't say you're going to save your pennies beginning January 1. You drop the .03 from your pocket into a bin that day and get started.

I appreciate that someone took the trouble to figure out our solar cycle and identify our year into quantifiable units, but being a terrier at heart, I resent the tyranny of the calendar and will bloody well do things on my own time. I believe if you wish to alter your course, you must be resolved daily to that end and not functioning on someone else's time-table. Every person is capable of making more of their lives, if they will but choose to do so and there is no time like the present.

Misery is a bitch, and they say she loves company, but I don't agree. Misery doesn't love company. Misery loves miserable company. Negative people have accepted the limitations of life and have stopped looking for a way out of the morass, and want you to stop struggling, too. They want you to hunker down with them and accept defeat and squalor and to sit around licking your wounds with them.

Someone online said this brilliantly yesterday:

There will never be a shortage of people to argue for your limitations. They aren't telling you your story, they are telling you theirs. If you agree it becomes your story, too.

Have you ever seen a crab trap? It has an open hole at the top where the crabs crawl in. The crabs are nimble things and could crawl out of the trap, but once a bunch of them are in, when one canny crab starts to crawl out, the others will pull the fleeing crab back into the pot and to their communal doom.

All this is by way of saying if you must set and aspire to goals, do so at your own pace, on your own time-frame. This is merely a coincidence that today is the last day of the year, but I am resolved to not use someone else's failures and limitations as a template for my own course. That has nothing to do with the coming year and everything to do with me.

PEW! PEW! PEW!

This LOLdog never gets old to me-- I giggle just thinking about it.




They have a lot of great PewPewPew! posts at LOLcats.

Hey good lookin! We'll be back to pick you up later!

Whyzzit I feel television was no dumber in the 1970s?

Great fun for the whole fambly.

Oh, I might get a television sometime soon. For reals. Maybe in 2012. I'm kind of too busy right now.

Timelapse of Dale Chihuly Chandelier Installation

This video is seriously cool. I love the sinuous glass forms produced in Chihuly's studio. Nice splitscreen video of the piece emerging and the ambient music is nice, too.

Why I love music.

Because someone understood me once, long before my parents were born, and he wrote this:



Montagues and Capulets from Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet.
When you find music that stirs you deeply, you should seek it out and listen to it often, lest the din of life still the singing of your heartstrings.

Cranapeno jam

"Phlegmmy!" they said. "This cranberry/jalapeno jam is not nearly hot enough" they said. You want hot, tootsie? I'll give you hot. I put about 1.5 cups of these bad boys in the jam this time, membranes, seeds and all. Not hot, my foot.




Here's the whole mess, bubbling away.


Jars must be sterilized.




Filled jars must be put in boiling water-bath for at least 10 minutes for my altitude.
BTW - Silicone oven-mitts is the bomb-diggity for all cooking pursuits. I was pining for one and Himself outdid Himself and bought me a pair. Handling hot shit will never be the same. Speaking of Himself and handling hot shit-- yeah, I know that was redundant-- he also got me one of these Kuhn Rikon Cool Gripper for snagging the empty jars out of the water bath. They can be slippery and hard to pick up properly when you're getting them out of the boiling water to fill with your canning product, so this is an incredible tool for that purpose. When picking up with this tool, be sure to turn your palm outward, grip the far rim of the jar while keeping your thumb pointed back to yourself. This way you can dump the boiling water out over the pot without risk of it pouring down your arm. *shudder to think* Probably over time, the foam on the grippy bit will give way, because as with all tools, you need to make sure you sterilize anything that will be touching a surface you'll be sealing food into.

I'm besotted with my Maslin pot. This one is heavy stainless steel, has a bowed-out lip for pouring, a wonderful bail which stops short of the rim so it stays cooler than the pot for easy handling, and inside is a pint-marker for the contents, so you can be sure you have enough jars on the boil to house the fruits of your labour.

[ritual tasting of the product on the pan before washing, this is now pleasantly spiky, actually, but I still wouldn't call it hot. Now about 10 minutes after tasting, that bracing pepper icy-hotness is lingering on my tongue, but this would never break me out into a sweat as a properly hot pepper can do. Or maybe these peppers weren't that hot? Or maybe my hot-taster is throwed off? Anyway, I may be questioning the wisdom of making the mild version of this at all-- I thought this version would light my own fire, but it was not at all like licking a nettle. Hmmm... maybe over some ice cream???]


There we have about 4 pints put by for lessening the odiousness of turkey-sandwiches to come. (There were two more pints going through the water bath as this photo was taken.) Sweet!
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Sunday, Puppy Sunday: Christmas at Gramma & Grampa's

Teh puppehs had a grand holiday at the grandfolks' house this year. They were very nervous for the three hour drive down, but that anxiety quickly melted away when they discovered that here was a place where lots of folks would give treats to poor, starving pups.





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Gaudete

Merry Christmas.

All my thanks to the ever tasteful Vinogirl for introducing me to this track from Steeleye Span.

Christmas Piano by Boyce Hawkins

Christmas Piano by Boyce Hawkins


ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

A musical interlude for Christmas - scrolly-scrolly/clicky-clicky to hear some delightfully discordant tones in all-too-familiar and all-too-often-played Christmas music. Most refreshing, indeed.

Enjoy!

Lookie what I found! Mr. Q Cumber

I woulda never thunk it,


but a little bottle of carbonated cucumber soda was just the tonic in the middle of Christmas shopping. It was sweet and fresh and different. I don't normally drink soft drinks, but I may add this as an occasional player in the beverage rotation. Yum!


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Praline, Praline: sweet and nutty.

You can't imagine how impossibly sweet Miss Praline is.

She's a classic Jack Russell Terrorist which means she is Deathbringer for squirrelses and sockses, but even more than that she loves to cuddle with a reading or napping person. She is smart and attentive and wants very much to please. Sometimes I think she is looking to me with earnest, wanting desperately to convey some deep, important thought(feed me!), but then I remember that she more likely has that Indian head test pattern on permanent loop in her brainpan. The first time he saw her, Himself picked her up as she wiggled with all her might and he said "she's like a salmon on meth!" An apt description. When I come home from work, she wags so ferociously that it looks like she has a dozen hinges in her spine. How can you not smile every day with an exuberant creature like that around? I smile a lot.
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Want. One. The Washlet by Toto

I always went to a sushi bar in Dallas that had a high-tech terlit seat that had instructions in kanji/katakana/hiragana, and the little figures on the push-buttons had been worn out. I never tried to push them, because it struck me as grody to push a button where someone may have pushed it after messing with their fiddly bits.

*ahem*

Anyway, I'm not wishing I'd tried it then and I'm not saying my butt is dirty or that I'd find any pervy pleasure out of having one, but I'll tell you one thing: if Ed McMahon ever comes a'knockin', the very first thing I'll do is grab my bonnet and right right out and pick me up one of those Toto Washlets.

It's funny the way a lot of folks think Americans are obsessed with their own nethers, but I think we're not a stitch on Japanese.

Fly Klutz.

A klutzy fly interrupts a high-speed camera filming and manages to look like it has 6 left feet. Putz. Haw haw haw!



*smack!* *bounce!*

He was super-mad when all the larvae were jeering "what a douche!"