ghosts are good company

Three!

Originally uploaded by capnpuck

i am so proud of myself!

the night of great-grandma’s funeral, we drove from oly to des moines for a celebration at my grandmother’s house. on the way, nat and i got distracted by my father’s house (it’s right on the way, i couldn’t not stop by) and were gifted an abundance of fruit – canned peaches, dried apples, jam jam jam, amazing grapes (how sweet) and a big bag of apples. i spent a day soon after paring them, and when i was done i noticed… that some neighbors had a bunch of apples sitting in buckets with a sign that said, of course, “free apples.”

so i pared some more. and now there is so much applesauce.

i’ve been piecing together my canning knowledge with information from The Internets, and in one minute (yes, i will be taking a break from typing this), there will be a third jar of applesauce successfully canned!

and we’re at three. there are probably ten or so more to go, as there’s a giant bowl still of applesauce, and then the apple butter. for a total of six dollar’s worth of financial investment, and hecka more time – something that i have a fair amout of, for now. i got the jars from great-grandma, and the only thing that we purchased was the lids. whenever i hear them sucking in, actually sealing, i feel like jumping up and down.

i’ve somehow managed to become nocturnal again. it’s interesting, rather like the world is hanging upside down. it’s not very good, though, because by the time i’m ready to be productive, it’s late and my mind tells me that i should be going to bed, so then i’m not productive in hopes that i’ll go to bed, but i don’t.

today i made gross scones out of strange mexican pancake mix (it was “tres estrellas” brand; i should have held out for cinco estrellas) and pumpkin. i ate one, but i still have two more sitting there and leering at me.

i also made quiche. i think that quiche is somewhat the perfect food, as it combines lots of different foods and also has protein! which is important and i don’t get enough of. however, my pie crust skills are currently lacking (they used to be good, but have declined for want of materials such as real butter). this is the second quiche i’ve made since getting home from seattle – i bought a dozen eggs and distributed them evenly. hurray quiche.

there are twelve days left to pack up my house, after which i will be moving to san diego. i’m getting panicky because i’m having a very hard time getting started. i’ve been acquiring boxes and i’m pretty sure that i have enough, and most of my stuff is actually already in boxes, but i’m still super-overwhelmed.

i started a savings account for my amsterdam trip. i’m getting 5.27% interest or something, so that’s nice – and also it’s preventing me from giving in and buying these amazingly attractive shoes that happen to be on sale and only available in my size. i love fluevogs and don’t currently have any particularly femme ones – just these boots and these in pink and black. i might still have them in white and black as well, but i wore those out pretty quickly my first few years of college. oh fluevog, you do hold claim to an extensive piece of my shoe-loyalty heart. when you’re on sale. and now you’re working on lovely vegan shoes as well? quite tidy.

that was an extensive shoe-related tangent. i have a lot of shoes. this is a problem that comes with being deeply invested in many gender presentations and having an obsession with shoes. perhaps if i picked just one gender presentation, i would have just as many shoes pertaining to that one as i do now. of course, i could just have more (of course we would, we’d just eat more).

i’ve recently come to adore this comic. usually when online comics release books i manage to convince myself that their online presence will be enough for me, but here… a bit of me aches to hold suspenders and glasses tangibly in my hands. i’m a little bit too much like suspenders. seriously. the author has an art show in san diego that’ll still be running for two or three days that i’m there. maybe i can go.

i have to decide if i want to, on saturday, go to a blythe doll meetup in san jose or to a flashmob dance party at the ferry building or to watch clueless at cubbie’s house. i’ll probably end up at the latter, because (can you have latter if there’s more than two items? if not, final) it’s people i know, but it’s so so weird trying to be his friend.

recap since last entry (if just because that’d be a sad note to end on): i did not go to ground kontrol, instead i went to a store called collage (i think), where i purchased things to make a thank you card for the folks’ at whose house i spent the night. i did go to see the bishop allen show, and it was delightful. i am still obsessed with roller derby, and the san diego derby dolls have their bouts a mile and a half from where i’ll be living. hurray!

i hope you all are doing well. recommend me good podcasts, if you want to.

i haven’t updated many things in the back end of the blogs recently – nor the front end, for that matter (this is the part where i look shiftily at my “it is beginning to be autumn!” image). but! today, tonight, i updated wordpress to 2.13 (apparently 2.2 is coming out very soon and has tags…) and i created a tag cloud… list… for our categories. hooray! while i was turning off all of the plugins so that i could do the installation, i got seven spams in two minutes! insanity. thank goodness for the amazing spam filtration of akismet.

so, those are things.

also, i made a marble cake today. except that i don’t know where the baking powder is, and the molasses/baking soda suggestion… worked, but not so much. so it’s a half-risen cake, but that’s *much* better than my not-risen cakes of late. i substitute things much, and it’s a bad plan. i need to either recipe or not, i think. at least when it comes to baking.

do any of you want a blog here? especially those of you without blogs – i keep meaning to ask. there’s plenty of space.

what else? oh! i’m almost done listening to my music in alphabetical order by song. that means that i can return to listening to biased random mixes. i’ve been missing some of my favorite artists, who just don’t have as much music out as other folks.

i really want to go to daiso! my mother trained me to adore asian things by first doling out infrequent trips to uwajimaya, and then moving us into the fringes of an asian neighborhood in san diego (not *the* asian neighborhood, although i spent time there after school sometimes, but definitely a neighborhood that had lots of asian groceries). so, i miss mostly the shiny cookie aspects of these communities, and chamalyn, although amazing, isn’t doing enough – it’s too tiny. besides, where else could i get dinosaur origami paper? or mini bamboo furniture for aviva alexander?

i’m glad that you understand.

things are feeling a little better, planswise – i had double advice to let time figure things out, so while that’s hard to explain to people sometimes… that’s what i’m doing. mostly. :D

tonight i made seitan. well, today i made a few things. we had a stale loaf of bread, so i had some of that for lunch with garlic and butter, and then i wanted to make…. something… so i made breadcrumbs and then wanted something to fry in them, so i made seitan. it wasn’t from the ppk recipe, which i had used before, but it was very similar…. here! i used garlic instead of powdered garlic, and… we didn’t have some of the flavorings, so i used extra veggie stock for simmering. and molasses. it turned out fine, a bit soy saucey (becuase i used the high end of the suggested amount – i wanted flavrs!) and was completely underwhelming when baked in breadcrumbs. alas. now we have a bowl of seitan and a bowl of garlic butter in the fridge. i’m not sure what to do with them, but it’ll be… something. i stood on the phone with my father and cataloged things i could cook in breadcrumbs – green beans? a beet? squash? … none of them seemed appetizing. i wouldn’t have done well cooking on rations.

tomorrow i have a midterm, and then after that hopefully maybe i will go to a self defense training for trans and genderqueer folks. we discussed hate crimes in one of my classes recently, and that was a major suggestion (of course) for survival. but, i’ve never felt comfortable in any of the self-defense classes that i’ve taken. this one seems like it would be optimal, but it actually starts *during* the midterm. rawr, says dinosaur puck.

sleeping is optimal for children and other living things. and extinct things. including dinosaurs. goodnight or goodmorning or whatever works for you. xo