I’m still deciding which pottery classes I should take. Right now, this one at the Clay Art Center is winning. The fact that it’s a 12 session class makes it a strong contender. I’ll also admit that I’m still intimidated by picking out a loom and a spinning wheel. And I haven’t even really given much thought to Japanese yet. But I have started a second item on my to learn list:
Starting at the beginning.
Since my mother remembers nothing of her macrame days, a couple weeks ago I finally cracked and bought a book:
Even though I hate reading directions, I decided I would approach macramé methodically. The book recommends using sophisticated things like “project boards,” but I decided that since Sivvie the Cat has already decided that my mattress is a scratching post, it might as well be a project board, too. Halfway through learning overhand knots, I decided it was time to start with the first project. The book refers to it as a belt, but mine wasn’t really appropriate for much more than a headband.
When Nigella used the word “wodgy” to describe her chocolate gingerbread in Feast: Food to Celebrate Life, I knew instantaneously what she meant. Isa’s Fudgy Wudgy Blueberry Brownies in Veganomicon are definitely wodgy. Any good chocolate dessert is wodgy, really. (Except that all good brownies are required to be a little crispy in places they’re not wodgy, too. I know many disagree, but I love edges.)
The thing of it is, making something both gluten-free and vegan at the same time is definitely a trial and error situation. Not to mention that, from the moment you read a list of recipe ingredients on a page, it’s easy to formulate an idea in your head as to what you think the recipe should taste like. I should have bore in mind the truth that chocolate is a flavor bully, not unlike green peppers and onion. Strong things like mint and raspberry (and I suppose I should say orange even though my brain does not really register orange as a food, outside of those mostly orange-free jellied orange slices my daughter-craving neighbor used to feed me as I cleaned her fish tank and learned to sew Cabbage Patch Kid clothing and watched every Hayley Mills movie known to mankind) tend to hold their own. Ginger normally does, too, but I will be the first to admit that I expected the classic gingerbread spices to resonate a little more boldly.
Unlike the slight fall suffered by my mini loaves, the spices are more of a matter of taste than that of veganization/de-glutening, so those will be simple to adjust. I think I’ll probably cut back on the Earth Balance a touch in the final version to balance out the fat, and hopefully minimize sinkage. You can’t really see it once the loaves are glazed, but it just seems as if I should fix it anyway to be thorough. I’m reluctant to cut back too much on the EB, though, because I want to make sure they stay wodgy. So, bearing my caveats in mind, this is the current recipe.
When you’re feeling a little sick and a little under the weather, nothing heals you like oodles of ginger tea, too many kiddie movies and cookies. For some reason, I never think to take sick days. I always end up in my office, hacking like an idiot and feeling miserable (this can be differentiated from normal days in that I’m not hacking like an idiot unless I’m trying to choke down a comment or two). But I made Saturday a good sick day. I slept through most of the cartoons, but I did manage to catch Viva Piñata, TNMT and Dinosaur Kings. I’m hopelessly in love with Dinosaur Kings. It is like Pokemon, but with dinosaurs. More importantly, unlike Pokemon, it has all of the old Pokemon vocal talent and a spot on non-cable TV. And dinosaurs battling their way through modern urban environments. And the occasional geographical lesson (important, since I missed most geography studies due the lack of national lesson plan requirements and my family’s unfortunate timing of our move from Northern California to Abilene, Texas when I was ten, which left me, sadly, without knowledge of where any state is except for the ones I’ve lived in or driven through . . . yes, I could have acquired this knowledge on my own, but I digress).
I also watched Dragonslayer, Popeye, Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky. I hadn’t seen Dragonslayer since it first came out. For some reason, I was obsessed with it as a kid despite only seeing it once. When I heard it was finally being released on DVD, I asked for it for Christmas, but did not receive. I decided to hold off on buying it, but it was going for seven dollars at J&R, so I couldn’t say no. I was not disappointed. I’d like to say that watching the movie again gave me ideas about creating a cape for winter, but truthfully, the cape idea has probably been kicking around in my head since I first saw the movie. That, and the scene where the baby dinosaurs were gnawing off the princess’s hands. Popeye is another movie that I haven’t seen all the way through since I was little. I’m not too sure I’d be in love with it if it hadn’t worked its charm on me before I was old enough to know better, but I like that it is very cartoony and exaggerated. And, what can I say. I always gravitate towards Miyazaki movies when I’m sick. There’s something about the worlds he creates that I find very soothing when I’m not feeling well. Lastly, I watched April Fool’s Day. It’s definitely not a kid’s movie, despite the fact that I was a kid when I saw it:
It was just too hot, even in Northern California, for off-the-shoulder sweatshirts and leg warmers. Besides, I was the worst kind of tomboy when I was a kid, so while I may have been impressed by her welding skills I could care less about her dancing. And I’m not kidding about being a tomboy. I played too many sports, knew the names of all existing major NFL teams (I don’t know why my father felt he had to school me on this . . . I never played nor watched football and had a younger brother . . . ) and didn’t wear anything but dress pants and jeans between the ages of seven and fifteen. I grew up using any clothing below the waist as a napkin, and I never was unsure of where to shove a fistful of change, papers or action figures.
Then something changed inside. It wasn’t puberty . . . I was forced to wear nothing but skirts at Girl’s State. At some point in my life people were interested in turning me into a model citizen. All the rrrriot girls left on Day 1. I found it more amusing to stay behind and became the prime instigator . I encouraged my town to be the worst town on record. We didn’t decorate the halls, even though I would have found it fun even as a tomboy. We were generally disruptive. I fed the other girls great lines about how POWs don’t exist and almost got into a brawl with the woman who was the equivalent of a den mother over how people trade for deals in Congress all the time. Clearly, Girl’s State didn’t make me into a better citizen, but I’ve been impersonating a girl ever since, spending the second half of my life wearing nothing but skirts and dresses.
I’m going to pretend that it didn’t hurt a little when I wound “Deeper Shade of Soul” into this cassette tape yarn ball.
There are things I keep because they remind me of events or people, things I keep because I think they’ll be useful one day and things I keep because I don’t want them to end up in a landfill. Three bags packed with cassette tapes that I’d collected over the span of a couple decades had become a bit of all three. I haven’t had a cassette player in years, yet I couldn’t convince myself to throw the tapes out. I kept telling myself, despite the fact that I was sure the sound quality would be subpar, that I would buy the necessary equipment to turn them into mp3s. Or that I would, at the very least, get nicer storage units for the tapes and a player so I could use them again. But, truth be told, they’d been languishing under my former couch for a couple of years now. I decided it was time for them to go. But when I told my friend that I knew that there was a service that would recycle unwanted CDs and CD cases, but that I didn’t think there was a parallel service for tapes, he said: “Why don’t you turn the tape into yarn?” I’m sure he was kidding, but then he noticed that far off look on my face.
