Junebug on a String

I have this little thing I do every year.  I think I talked about it once, maybe in a previous blog incarnation, in fact.

Every year, on my birthday, I sit down and write out what I think the next year’s going to look like.  It’s not a to-do list or strategic planning or any kind of productivity maneuver.  It’s visceral.  Visual.  I tend to paste in pictures and write for pages about what I want the next year to be like, taken from the perspective of an average day, in great detail.

There were a couple years here lately where I didn’t have a clue.  Too many things in the air, too much going on, too many roads open up ahead, and I couldn’t really commit to just one of them.  (To be fair, when I did pick one, often I’d talk myself OUT of that option, and find the other fork in the road was the better choice, so it’s not all bad.)

This year, not so much.  It’s easier.  Brighter.

And apparently, includes more skirts.

(Picture, above — flea market find skirt, $3.  Happy birthday to meeee!)

It also includes chickens, and possibly learning enfleurage with herbs I’ve grown myself.  Which is just kinda awesome, really.  (For the uninitiated:  “enfleurage” is one of the three ways you get oils out of botanicals.  Distillation, pressing, and enfleurage.  I just like the way the word enfleurage feels on my tongue.  I do want to learn all three types eventually.)

Hello, brand new year.  Welcome.

A bit ago, when I released the first of the Tiny Art Journals, I did so with the request that if you made one, I totally wanted to see it when you got it put together.  (Optional, of course.)  They’re just so much fun to design (there are three of them sitting on my hard drive right now awaiting testing, in fact), and really nice to carry with you for tiny bits of random art or writing, that I kinda wanted to see what y’all could come up with.

And two people have sent me some neato mods they’ve made to the first one, so I just had to share. :)  (A couple folks posted pics to facebook or plurk/twitter, but I didn’t ask them if it was okay to post those pictures.  If one of ‘em was you, let me know and I’ll put ‘em up on the next round of showings-off.)

Like this one, made by Catherine:

Check out the cord closure!  And the inked edges of the paper, too!

Catherine said:

I printed the pages on ivory Canson paper, probably a bit too heavy a weight because I glued them back to back so all the pages are printed, no blanks. Then I inked the edges of the pages and the cover with a dark purple ink, just enough to give it some definition and hide the white bits from my less-than-fantastic paper trimming skillz. I did pamphlet stitch from the outside with some perle cotton, and left the ends hanging decoratively from the spine, and used the same thread and a couple of little star brads with loops on ‘em to make a closure. I don’t love the closure, so may still rethink that bit, and I think I’ll do something clever for the inside covers.

Can’t wait to see what bits of clever you come up with, Catherine!

Then there was Rachel, who, much like myself, appears to have a button fetish.  (I could totally go into my button fetish at length one of these days.  It’s an obsession, I tell you.  OBSESSION.)

Buttons!  Here:  let me show you a close-up.

And as if buttons on the front weren’t cool enough, check out the SPINE:

I admit it.  I got a little swoony when I saw these pictures.  Okay…a lot swoony.  I hadn’t thought of using buttons on the spine to reinforce the cardstock, but that’s totally the effect they’d have.  Awesome AND functional.

Rachel said, about her fun:

The string used to keep it closed is a piece of Malabrigo sock yarn, btw. (in the Archangel colorway).  The buttons are from my own button collection.  I think I accidentally printed the cover a bit too big, ’cause there’s a significant size difference between this journal and when I assembled the monster journal.  Oh well, I still think it rocks!

It DOES rock, Rachel!  And hellloooo….Malabrigo?  That’s just, like, icing on the little bit of goodnesscake.

One thing about the sizing, too — make sure your printer doesn’t have an “autorotate” or “autoscale” type feature.  Sometimes, it’ll scale down your stuff so that it “fits better”, even when you already know how it’s supposed to fit, thankyouverymuch.  On the plus side, that also means that you can scale this sucker to be even tinier if you want — just set things to print at 75%, or, if you’re wanting really tiny, 50%.  I can totally imagine a 50% printed/bound TAJ being used to hold only tickets, or tiny bits of things you find on a single walk, or the definitions of your favorite words….something small and focused and, well, cute.

I should have both TAJ #3 and #4 up this week, if life can slow down just a smidge.  I’m taking Tuesday as an all-design-all-the-time day on my Internet Free Day (more on that tomorrow, of course), so (fingers crossed) they should be done and tested by then.  (I don’t put it up unless it’s been made by me, at least once.)

If you missed them, you can get TAJ#1, the one you see up there, by clicking right here….and TAJ#2, the monster edition (and who doesn’t have creative monsters in the closet!?), by clicking here.

Thanks to Catherine and Rachel for sharing the fruits of their labours with us!

I mentioned on Tuesday (?  Wednesday?  One of the two…) that I’ve started hitting the Piedmont Triad Farmer’s Market on the weekends.  And since we were just about out of the produce from last week, I hiked on the sunshine panties and went out yesterday, despite the fact that it was about a billion degrees with ninety-some-odd percent humidity outside.  (No, really.  It was that kind of HOT where you feel just vaguely like your body’s been beset by malevolent hot washcloths when you step out the door.  People were randomly bursting into flames if they stood in the sun for too long.^*1)

But once you set foot inside the vendor stalls and the smell of picked-this-morning, sun-warmed peaches hits you like a wall, and you forget the heat.  Seriously.

I also mentioned that this sucker is big.  Let me give you some perspective:

This, is ONE of the FOUR buildings that comprise the market.  It’s covered, with open sides, so that people can just back right up to an open stall to set up, and it keeps the air moving enough so it never smells like the downside of a farm.  (These people in front, by the way?  Totally looked at me like I had lobsters growing out of my ears for taking pictures.  I tried not to stare at her shorts.  Awesome color combo, no?)  This building usually has mostly plants and such, with a few exceptions (the soap lady, the place where I nabbed a gallon of strawberries for cheap…), but the other open-air building, just down the hill from this one, is almost always chock-full of local farms, selling actual pre-grown foodstuff.

(And one, permanent vendor building off to one side has some more commercial stuff, but I don’t go in there much unless I need spices.  There’s a lady that dries her own and makes blends and mixes, minus all the crazy additives, which is nice.  And there may be a separate garden center, and a restaurant called, I kid you not, the Moose Cafe.  You know how much I love Moose.  In general, not for eating.  Thought I should clarify.)

From the minute I walked in yesterday (and promptly bought about a zillion pounds of peaches with which to make strawberry-peach freezer jam today, incidentally), I was surrounded by color and people and the most amazing smells.  I’ve never been to the market on Saturday — it’s always been on Sunday mornings, when the vendors are there, but the crowds are thinner until mid-afternoon.  Saturdays, apparently, are much more marketlike, with people that run the whole range — from matrons with little folding carts doing some kind of powershopping to the guy next to me at the local cow farm (who sells hamburger and chicken breasts, and will make you think you’ve never eaten actual meat before, once you taste the difference.  I kid you not.  How the cows are raised makes a HUGE difference.) who had more piercings in his straggle-bearded face than I could count from a cursory glance.

I did an insane amount of shopping, really.  Both of my (hippielike hand-knit) market bags were full before I made it through the first building, and I decided I really need more bags.  (need. more. cotton.)  At one booth, a guy that looked so much like my grandfather that I had to double-take, literally, was holding two cantaloupes to his chest and calling them his double-Ds, and then turned all red-faced when he saw me behind him.  (Clearly, he does not know me.  The giggle, she was strong within me.)  I bought a cantaloupe.

One vendor, a young guy with amazingly tan legs, had a table full of plants.  It wasn’t until I got up close that I realized these weren’t just plants, they were all CARNIVOROUS PLANTS.  Pitcher plants and some kind of fern-looking thing, and tiny little flytraps smiling at me with fringed, pointy smiles.

I had to get one.  Meet Bill:

Bill wasn’t the biggest flytrap of the bunch, but he was the one looking like he was the hungriest.  One of his pointy smiles was closed around a fly (proving his resourcefulness) and the rest were waiting.  Mine.

The tan-legged guy looked at me a little strangely when I asked how much for Bill, and when I explained that I name EVERYTHING, he knocked a dollar off Bill’s price tag.  Told me how to care for him, and poured more water on him for the drive home.

Bill’s already caught another bug, from his perch in full-sun on the back porch.  He’s gonna do just fine.

Bill can’t eat this, but I’m making it anyway.  Freezer jam, for the uninitiated, is made pretty much like regular jam, but since you’re not cooking the fruit, it retains more of it’s original flavor (and nutrients, if you want to nitpick, though the amount of sugar in it doesn’t exactly qualify it for health food status).  Plus, it’s a heck of a lot easier for those of us who can burn boiling water.  Which I’ve done.  No.  Really.

You will need:

1 pound of peaches, pitted and chopped
1 pint of strawberries, stemmed and crushed
5 1/2 cups of sugar (toldja there was a lot)
2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice  (if you keep the peels, you can do thin little curls of lemon on the top for Pretty)
1 package of Shur-Jell Fruit Pectin

Stir the sugar into the crushed fruit.  Let it stand for 10 minutes.  Stir, to make sure the sugar’s dissolving.  Let stand a little longer, if necessary.

Combine the Shur-Jell with 3/4 cup of water, and bring to a boil  (saucepan — don’t try to chintz it with the microwave.  Trust me here.).  Stir constantly.  Boil for a minute or so, and remove from heat.

Stir the pectin into the fruit/sugar mix.  Keep stirring until all the sugar is dissolved.  If it’s still grainy, it’ll stay grainy, which, while not harmful to the jam, has a weird consistency and crunchiness that you don’t normally associate with jam.  Ask me how I know.

Pour into washed containers (I just used one of those faux-tupperware throwaway plastic ones, because I don’t have jars.) and let sit for up to 24 hours, or until set.  Just for the record, it look less than fifteen minutes for the blackberry jam from last week to set.

Store in the freezer for up to a year (!!!), and move to the fridge when you’re ready to eat it.  (Or…*ahem*… you can just take spoonfuls right from the freezer, and eat them like popsicles.  I’m just sayin’.)

:)

(^*1 I may have made that part up.)

Sometimes, I get letters.  Sometimes,  I get a stack of bills and junk mail, but sometimes, the magical postman sprinkles fairy dust on my mailbox, and things arrive that knock my flippin’ socks off.  (Hand knit, usually brightly colored, though I’m changing that as I go along….  The socks, not the mail, though those are often brightly colored, too.)

The past couple weeks have been fairly slow-moving.  All this slogging through stuff, throwing stuff out, and generally trying to erase 38 years of crap has had its share of challenging days.  Of course.  So when things arrive, you have NO IDEA how excited I get.  It’s like freakin’ Christmas in here.  I curl up on the bed and squeal.

No, really, I do.  It’s kind of pathetic.  Just sayin’.

I thought I’d share a few things that came in the past couple weeks, because I’m of the mind that my friends are incredibly, awe-astoundingly creative, all in different ways, and the fact that they share that with me boggles my mind.  How could I *not* share with y’all?

For example, my friend Becca.  Becca has this demented sense of humor that translates right into her knitting.  And apparently, she’s some kind of math genius, too, because when we were talking about HOW she came up with this, she said she makes a sketch and then does the math.

My math?  Does not produce things like Becca’s.  My math gives me strange numbers that don’t seem to add up when I’m balancing the checkbook.  Or makes doubling a recipe give me enough to feed the armies of several small nations.  My math does not produce things like this:

Yes.  That’s a severed horse head, a’la The Godfather, designed and knitted by Becca, and published by the Anticraft.  I have no words.

Technically, this was not a mail day, which is why I’m putting it here first.  Becca handed this to me IN PERSON this past weekend at the knitting retreat we were at.  She said it’s to use the next time I start getting threats from the unbalanced.  Just pop it right in the bed, and INSTANT MOB HIT.

I’ve named him Vinnie.  Vinnie Vendetta.  He would sleep with me if the dogs wouldn’t eat him while I slept.  So instead, he watches from a very high shelf next to the bed.  (Which may explain my weirder-than-usual dreams, actually.)

Not all the mail comes with an Ewww Warning(tm).  Or, for that matter, the urge to make really bad beating-a-dead-horse jokes.  :)

Some of it, like this next bit from Star, made me cry a little.  In a good way.

On a particularly bad day (or at least one that was less than ideal), this hand-made card arrived from Star.  She made the envelope, took all of the pictures, and made this INSANELY gorgeous bit of mail art that totally turned my day around.  (I mean, how COULDN’T IT.  Sunshine panties AND pics of the northwest?  Seriously.)  Plus, there was a note inside that made me cry.

Awesome.

So then there’s my friend Alynxia.  She hails from Canada, which, surprisingly, does not mean that she has beady eyes or a floppy head.  (ducks)

Alynxia makes stuff.  She knits, like a lot of folks I know.  But when I say “I knit”, what I do isn’t even on the same field as Ms A.  When we did the lace episode of L&V Live, she trotted out something like a half-dozen of the things.  And we won’t even talk about the GIANT BIN of handmade socks she has.  When Alynxia says “I knit”, she means it. She KNITS, boyhowdy.

People who don’t knit are looking at this wondering what the heck it is.

This, my friends, is a LACE SHAWL.

And those of you who don’t knit don’t realize it, but that bit of knitting right there?  That would’ve taken me about eight zillion years to finish.  If I finished at all before getting it so hopelessly tangled that it would be neither shawl nor ball of yarn ever again.  This is like looking at the masterwork in person.

And she sent it to me.  I boggled.

I wore it all last weekend, despite the fact that it was two hundred and seventy-three degrees in the shade and cows were randomly bursting into flames in the fields along the way.  And almost every knitter that talked to me fondled it and I got to say that a friend knit it for me.  You can’t even see it all here — there’s nowhere in my house big enough to lay it all out for a good look, and the camera lens doesn’t go that wide.  But it’s all gorgeous.

Thanks, you three.  You seriously made the last couple of weeks just that much better.  I gave the mailman some kisses to take back to you. :)

I mentioned yesterday that I’d decided to give my body a break and gave up coffee, at least for a while.  On purpose.

Oddly enough, five days in, I’ve got every bit as much energy as before, and possibly more, which I totally blame on that whole sleeping thing.  I’m actually SLEEPING now.  (Well, not RIGHT now, but you know what I mean.)  I still only konk out for about six hours at a time, and tend to get up at or before six a.m., just because that’s the way my body’s built, but I feel a TON better than I used to.  A girl could get used to this.

One of the things I didn’t mention yesterday, except in passing, is that I also cut out fake food, avoiding, in particular, high fructose corn syrup.  People have been asking me if I’m on some kind of Plan, or what I’m doing, so I thought I’d explain it here for the interested.  (Or the unwitting, who just happened upon this post expecting to see pretty pictures.  Sorry.  Call it a Blogjack for a second.)

On the way to Purl Jam this past weekend, I threw in an audiobook that I’ve had sitting here for a while now, and never did get around to “reading”.  (I do a lot of ear-reading when I drive.  Keeps me awake.)  Michael Pollan’s  In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto came on after the book I’d chosen had ended, and by the end of the first chapter, I was scared.  And pissed off.  But mostly, a little nervous.

See, the whole premise of the thing is that we’ve become a society of orthorexics, focusing so much on the components of food (various nutrients the scientists have identified) that we’re failing to realize that it’s making us sick.  Which, I know, makes the book sound like a preachy snooze of a read, about as much fun as watching paint dry.  But it’s not.  It’s well-written and manages to be fairly entertaining, even while it’s making you want to drive on over to the nearest “food” factory and light it on fire.

There’s a part that discusses, for instance, how most of what we see in supermarkets isn’t actually FOOD at all.  It’s “food products”.  It’s faux food.  It’s wannabe food.  It’s chemical lab experiments like Frankenstein’s monster masquerading as food, and boasting all kinds of GOOD FOR YOU messages on the packaging, as if by sheer label real-estate, the manufacturers can somehow WILL the slop into being actual food.  But it’s not.

And, in fact, he goes into great detail about how those labels are made to be confusing, right down to the FDA “qualified claims” nonsense, which just about ANY crappy thing can be said to be “good for you”, as long as, in very tiny print, it says that a scientist, somewhere, under very controlled conditions, was able to make, say, Twinkies more healthy than, say, bashing in one’s own head with a hammer.  It’s complete crap, and infuriating that the very agency that’s supposed to oversee this kind of thing is not only allowing it to happen, but endorsing it.  ARGH.  How hard is it to feed a family these days?!

::deep breaths being taken by the peeved blogger…one moment please::

At one point, Pollan mentions the ingredients in a loaf of bread.  Flour, water, yeast, and a pinch of salt.  That’s it.  That’s all bread’s made of, folks.  I know this because I MAKE IT.  That’s all it is.

Then Pollan reads off the ingredients of a particular brand of “smart” whole-grain white bread.

There were thirty-two ingredients.  THIRTY. TWO.  Most of which, incidentally, were unpronounceable.  And if you could, by twist of fate, pronounce them by sounding them out, you’d have no idea what they are.  Or how to identify them in a police lineup.  But they’re there, being EATEN BY YOU, in a loaf of BREAD that’s supposed to be “healthier” than other bread.

It takes thirty two chemicals to make something “healthy”?  Really?  Really?!

::facepalm::

Oh, hell no.  I’ll take my dumb four-ingredient bread over a test-tube full of faux bread anyday.

By the time I got back to Greensboro, I was done.  No convenience is worth eating a literal barrel-load of chemicals every month (no, seriously — that’s about how many chemically-enhanced foods the average person eats every few months or so.).

The next day, I hit the local Farmers Market and a local butcher.  The Market’s in height of peach season, and there were tons of vendors there.  (It’s in three HUGE buildings, two of them open-air, comprising a few ACRES of vendors on the weekends.  Seriously.  I’m blessed to be in a good area for this.)    I stopped at the store for flour and sugar (beware, even of THOSE common staples — if there isn’t just one ingredient listed, be it “flour” or “sugar”, skip it.) and it’s been five days now of OH HELL NO eating around here.

And despite my clearly inferior four-ingredient bread (::eyeroll::) and the lack of little pouches and cellophane, it’s actually been a thousand times better than before.  Fresh cantaloupe for breakfast vs. a crappy over/underdone toaster streudel or pop-tart. Green stuff for lunch, with homemade dressing and local chevre.  Balsamic-roasted salmon with roasted baby potatoes and broccoli.  Mustard-basted chicken breasts stuffed with local cream cheese and tiny slivers of ham for flavor, served with three kinds of summer squash over brown rice.

I’m clearly suffering here.  (/end sarcasm)

I won’t lie — it’s more work.  There’s cooking and dishes and having to think about more than just what take-out menu to pick from.  Wild rice takes longer to cook than the little pouches of faux-rice.  Making your own bread takes about an hour (including baking time and rising time).  It takes a little longer to go through the entire farmers market than it does to pick up a flash-frozen bag of stuff from the store.  And you run the risk of looking like a granola-crunching, birkie-wearing hippie if you’re not careful.  (Especially if you knit your own cotton market bags to take with you.  Ahem.  Not that I’ve done that.  ::shifty eyes::)

But if my own experience is any indication, I can tell you that in less than a week, I’m already feeling better.  I don’t have mid-morning sugar crashes (which was likely the caramel macchiatos, since I never really ate anything in the morning before…).  I don’t get sick every time I eat (which was happening with alarming frequency — eating literally made me nauseous sometimes).  I don’t even know what other kinds of benefits could come from it, though I can say that not spending $5 a day on coffee’s been nice, and that farmers market food is way cheaper than all the pre-processed garbage, so I’m thinking the wallet’s going to be a nice side-effect.

Pollan gave several “rules” for kicking what he calls the Western Diet, and while you should totally pick up the book if you’re interested, the couple that worked for me are:

• If your grandmother wouldn’t recognize something as food, don’t buy it.  My grandmother would have probably sneered at GoGurt or “smart” bread, for example.  And she probably would have whipped my butt with the wooden spoon if she thought I was spending five bucks a day on coffee.  Just sayin’.
• If it lists more than five ingredients, don’t eat it/use it/buy it.
• If any of those five are anything you can’t pronounce or can’t recognize, don’t eat it.

It’s easier than it sounds.

A couple folks asked for this recipe, so here ’tis.  It’s freakin’ awesome over oven-baked french toast, made with day-old home-baked (inferior, four-ingredient) bread, too.

Put everything into a pan and heat it up to boiling.  Simmer until the liquid looks thick and syrupy.  The peaches’ll soften and turn brown, but taste like heaven on a plate.

(p.s.  And there’s no high fructose corn syrup, aka Liquid Death, in it, the way there is in most syrups from the store.  Go figure.)

It’ll keep for several days in the fridge, too.  Just reheat it before using.  (It’s also unwholesomely good on pork chops, which I hesitate to mention, since according to Cassie’s mom, I’m obsessed with pork.  Will explain later.)

Has it really been a couple of weeks already?  Every day, I see stuff I fully intend to blog about, but I’m still wading neck-deep in the idea that I need a fully clean slate before I dive back into my 10kH, so I can focus on it pretty much entirely.

What I keep forgetting is that Free Time doesn’t just happen. You have to MAKE IT HAPPEN, or it won’t.  Time’s like that, the fickle mistress.

To be fair, there have been some relatively significant changes going on over here in the cottage.

• I gave up coffee.  Don’t faint.  Decided this past week that when a staggering twelve shots of espresso wasn’t doing anything for me, it was time to let my poor body have a rest.  And despite one really nasty headache that felt like gnomes were excavating my eyeballs with rusty pickleforks from behind, it’s been remarkably uneventful.  Not to mention cheaper.  Starbucks may go broke.
• Almost ALL of the boxes from the storage unit have been gone through.  It’s a matter of selling the furniture that I love now, and I’m dragging my feet a little on that part.  And listing a billion books on Amazon, which gives me an eyetwitch, but we do what we must.
• We discovered the farmer’s market.  The Piedmont Triad Farmers’ Market is freakin’ awesome.  More on this in coming days, but I just love Peach season around here.  ‘Nuff said.
• I gave my last public appearance as Miss Violet last Saturday, at the amazing Purl Jam retreat in Blacksburg, VA.  It was hosted by the equally-amazing Mosaic Yarn Shop, where I would totally hang out every. single. day if I lived closer.  As it was, I managed to only drool on a few skeins, by sheer will.  And I’ve determined that when Shannon Okey and I get together, the resulting Idea Storm(tm) is a scary, scary thing.
• We’ve also discovered the dog park.  It’s in a new-ish park here in GBO, and there’s a quarter-mile hike to get there, but the furry children have deemed it awesome, so it’s worth it, even in these insanely humid/hot temps we’ve been having.  Cash is especially fond of the full jar of treats they provide at the entrance.  Go figure.
• I gave in, finally, and had a professional Apple Genius help me figure out WTF was going on with my email.  Apparently, I’ve had one of the settings wrong for a good long time.  And while this was a blow to my technologically-competent ego, at least it’s fixed now, and I’m not getting twenty-five THOUSAND downloading every time it updates (no, literally.), or missing things coming in on the domains anymore.  This makes up for the ego-ding.
• I signed up for GoogleVoice, which means that shortly, anybody who wants to comment can do it via voice.  This’ll be important later.  You’ll see.  :D

(Figured a list would be easier than trying to explain it all separately.  More on most of those in the coming days.)

The Wizard of Oz series, shown above, is almost ready for rollout, about a week later than planned.  The heat and humidity here have changed the way things smell (go figure), and the giving up of coffee means my nose works differently.  A couple of my original formulas, after aging for a few days, morphed pretty significantly, and I’ve spent about a week doing some reading to figure out precisely why that is, and how to fix it.  (Notably, “Dorothy” went from young and bright to a kind of sophisticated thing that didn’t fit the concept at all.  It was gorgeous, but soooo not what I wanted.  Thus, the reading.)

Digitally, I’m working on something related to this:

Which is, obviously, not digital.  But it *will* be.  It’s not just a kit and a Tiny Art Journal — it’s a mini-class.  The first of, hopefully, many of them.

More on that later this week.

Along with a little sneak-peek of the first Oak River Township knitting pattern, which was HILARIOUS to write.  (Those of you on FB have seen it already.)  I’ll tell y’all all about it tomorrow or Friday, depending on how today’s hours go.

I think that’s about it for the catch-up.  Now that there isn’t such a backlog, and things are starting to clear out of here at light-speed, I’m planning on going back to mostly-daily posts.  Stay tuned. :)