The Salt-Water Thief

fiberlusting

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:49:44 GMT

Beelish

Pigeonroof Studios

Also I want ALL of Pigeonroof's roving, holy crap. But apparently a beginner's spinning wheel is $200-500. And of course I need another hobby.

And now... I am going to open Google Scholar. And read about bees. yep. I am going to.

And the winter rolls on.... (or in)

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:00:53 GMT

Knitting. Homework. Considering term paper proposals. I haven't finished a book for weeks, though I've been drifting in the middles or almost-ends of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Konrad Lorenz's King Solomon's Ring, Tanith Lee's The Book of the Dead (re-read, partly because I lost my first review of it), and Robert Stone's Bear and His Daughter for weeks, if not months. Arrrrrrgh I just want to finish something. (of course complaining about it will help!)

I also owe someone on devart an ACEO trade (not to mention some incredibly overdue art for stereophilic and silencestation), and I have some new Microns in sepia that I'm dying to break in... but tonight I must read papers about bee decision-making and immunology. :B Beeees.

Reasons why Thanksgiving was awesome, plus a meme

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:28:35 GMT

1. Cousins + family
2. Cousins + family + food (+ more food + more food)
3. Going to parks with cousins (and playing Monopoly, and watching Ninja Assassin...)

We've had a mild autumn, but I was still impressed by the resilience of these roses. Also, beautiful little green beetle.

Also, a meme from scylladakylla:

• Leave me a comment with the name of your favorite song.
• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

1. If you could only wear one scent for the rest of your life, which would you choose?
I'd say Selkie, for the olfactory love + sentimental (...pun narrowly averted) value, but on the basis of sheer wearability, it'd have to be Black Opal. (also, scylladakylla, I demand your answer, too.)

2. If you were to be an animal (real, fictional, extinct), which would you be and why?
When I was about 8 years old, I had this complicated and extended fantasy about being a silver cheetah. lol. Ummm... I don't know, I must say I'm pretty fond of being a human, but I must also say that bacteria are so freaking cool that I wouldn't mind being one, assuming I could somehow maintain enough consciousness to appreciate my awesomeness. If we're going to go for fictional, being a cryptid and scaring the crap out of people seems like it would be fun. Is Mothman an eligible target for reincarnation?

3. If you suddenly got really rich, what's the first thing you would do?
Invest it? boring answer, next.

4. I've already used this one, but it's a fun question, so: If you could slap anyone in the face really hard with no consequences, who would it be?
Uhhhh. At the moment, either my roommates' more reprehensible exes, or people who don't flush the toilet.

5. A nuclear holocaust kills every human in the world except you and a male. WHO WOULD YOU REPOPULATE THE EARTH WITH.
SOMEONE WITH NO DELETERIOUS ALLELES. Or an obstetrician?

Tra la la la

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:27:37 GMT

It's unseasonably warm, I'm almost done with grad school applications, and I just want to sewwwww. (or should it be seeeew?) My new scarf makes me want to get my hands on a heap of vintage doilies and ribbon and trim and buttons and make tons of drapey, tattered, layered scarves.

*fidget!*

Stars, in your multitudes...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:51:15 GMT

For a while now on Etsy (actually they're the first thing I started selling) I've been selling various receptacles filled with the thousands of stars that I folded in high school. (For the many of you who undoubtedly also folded thousands of stars at one point in your lives or another... yeah, you'd be surprised what people will buy when 1. you photograph it well and 2. they don't have the time to learn how to make it themselves. this is practically the Ultimate Truth of Etsy.) This is the last of the ornaments that I bought last year to fill up with stars; someone requested an ornament with more festive, holiday colors. in my usual fashion I put in all the icy colors first... this is what it looked like when all filled up.

I'm going to miss it here when I leave. :(

One of the trees nearby drops all these enormous, spectacularly needly seedpods in the autumn, so the grass around it looks like a field of unripened hedgehogs. I can't figure out the tree species though.

For size reference, these are bigger than tennis balls. About baseball-sized, really.

I liked the coincidence of red roses, car, bricks, leaves, and tail-lights.

The sky on Halloween morning. *grin*

One of our lab members is having a dinner party tonight. He and his wife are Indian, so I am soooooo stoked for the food. mmmarrrrrgh I'm already hungry.

In Monk Woods, the birds

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:39:29 GMT

Titus Alba is melancholy and tender-hearted; he likes thinking at night and hot cider with a little blood stirred in.

Etta Alba-Lin is Titus' older cousin and tells fortunes with the bones of animals she's eaten. :B

BIRDS BIRDS BIRDS. I'm a wee bit obsessed with barn owls right now. For once I'm not mercenary enough to want to sell these guys, either. They're all ACEO's, of course.

WIP:

Not sure what I want to do with him, colorwise. I just like drawing skulls, I guess?

Anyone who can help me think of a (species... thing...) name for the creepy little mime-bird gets cookies. *_*

Autumn

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:32:53 GMT

Don't these look 1. interesting and 2. nommable? I spotted them growing at the base of an oak tree on campus last year (yep, once again I'm epically slow in editing photos). They're chanterelles, which are in fact edible, but I didn't learn that till after the fact. Oh well.

So... rococo.

Also, this is the bell of the bicycle that I rented this semester for fun and $15:

ding ding ding ding

Her name is Alphonse

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:55:24 GMT

and all the fairy ladies dig her. :B

Crossing my fingers that I'll have the chance to recolor her sometime because lol wtf. Doing some stuff again for the children's library, whee.

Indian summer Sunday

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:05:57 GMT

Moth enjoys flowers, so of course a mum-filled October calendar page appealed to her. :3

I've missed taking photos for fun, and the light lately has been perfect for photos that don't need any fussing in Photoshop, which are my favorite kind.

This makes me feel like an advertiser, but seriously... gadgets that work score reeeeally high in my book. My brother got me this cool loose-tea steeping contraption for my birthday a few years ago, but I hadn't used it till this week. You toss the leaves in, then pour in/microwave hot water. When you set it on top of your drinking vessel of choice, a valve opens and the tea strains into said vessel. It is pretty and hard to spill and makes delicious beverages, which is all I need to make me happy.

Recycled-map bookmarks from ravennagirls.etsy.com, via stuffu's and my bi-monthly mini-Etsy-present exchange. Cream and blue and nautical miles, eeee!

In discussing these bookmarks with people I have discovered that "compass" is yet another word for which I use non-standard pronunciation. What's up with that then eh.

Clione, you're the one!

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:55:24 GMT

stolen from here
How cute/amazing are these little fellows? They're Clione limacina, a species of sea angel, which is a type of mollusk (specifically, gastropods). We learned about their motor system today, in the class that's my current favorite (integrated dynamics of animal behavior, ahhhhh so cool!). There's a good amount of useful information and several more photos in the blog post where I found the above image.

Fly, little sea angels!

Separately, my roommate sent me this mind-boggling, astounded-gaze-inspiring Wired feature about unusual cloud formations:

Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them

That glovin' feeling

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:32:33 GMT

Yes, I has an addiction. My lovely roommate modeled for me this time, which made things 100x easier, too. Click for 'em on Etsy

This semester has been weirdly busy, in part because I've been absurdly indecisive about classes, but I think I'm settled now. (Corollary: Sorry I haven't been keeping up with the f-list; I've been doing the whole reading-but-not-commenting thing.) So many good bio classes this semester! I haven't been back to lab yet, but I have been nibbling at my poetry thesis here and there (when I finally meet my adviser next Wednesday, I might ask her about sneaking in some fiction too), so overall things are looking... okayish. Although I am already massively in sleep debt. lol.

I've been reading from Steven Strogatz's Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, which is cool as all get out. I can see now why my roomie is so obsessed with science writing - I haven't really read anything beyond actual papers and the occasional NYT Science article. :X So reading whole chapters of stuff you're meant to actually understand without reams of background reading and side discussion is pretty refreshing. Makes me wish I were actually good at math, too. oh you rakish biological mathematicians, with your proofs and models!

Today I sat in on one of my roomie's classes (American Women Writers), for the purpose of listening to her professor lecture on Twilight. (She paused at one point and murmured, "This book makes my head hurt.") Fanfreakingtastic stuff. I promised fairnymph a while ago that I would try to pull together an essay on the eroticism of vampires, and the last 10 minutes of the lecture were basically that. *clings to her notes* It was all too glorious! I wonder if she's ever taught a vampire fiction course? xenophobia! class/race tension! queerness galore! Also glorious. Also also, it totally made my day that she referred to "fantasy literature" and "vampire literature."

Also also also, at the end of the class I was writing so quickly that I spelled Edward as "Edwad," which only seems appropriate.

It be garden times

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:38:07 GMT

The weather has been sunny and perfect, low 70's to low 80's. But all the bees have mysteriously vanished already, which is strange and upsetting, especially given that the obedient plants are still blooming. There are still a couple of syrphid flies, small butterflies, and skippers hitting up the marigolds and remaining thyme and chamomile blossoms, but they've been ignoring the obedient plants for the most part. ???

Overall this has been a strange year for the garden. Spring was too cold and wet, so the marigolds got extremely damaged, and quite a few died. My mom and I also suspect that the lavender wasn't flowering as well for the same reason, even though I have an English variety (Munstead). Most of it still hasn't filled out after I pruned it three weeks ago, too. The fallout of all this was that we didn't really get any of the amazing butterflies that we did last year.

The garden was a mess when I got back home, as usual, so I've been undertaking clean-up a few hours at a time. Pulled out the obedient plants that have been done blooming, cut back a bunch of intruders (too hard to uproot them, especially the Bradford pear sapling that keeps coming back), re-pruned the lavender, cut back the chives and thyme (which squished the new compact thyme that I planted this spring ;_;), and weeded, weeded, weeded. Also took a stab at pruning the azaleas, around all the lilies and obedient plants. The azaleas in the secondary bed got a lace bug infection again, and look terrible. Yay.

It looks like more of the plants that I seeded sprouted than I initially thought, but too late to bloom. Fingers crossed that they'll come back successfully next spring. Fingers crossed, also, that everything I cut will harden in time for frost. Last year I didn't prune the lavender until the end of August, and that still turned out okay, so...

Sometimes when I'm gardening I just want to fast forward two-three weeks to see the results. Eeeergh. This is me mentally pacing in the meantime.

One of the benefits of cutting everything right and left, however, was that I ended up with a motherload of cut herbs (duh). I threw the chives into a potato & string bean salad and a pasta salad, and supplemented the potato salad with some rosemary and thyme dried from last year, too. yum.

I dunno if anyone likes recipes (errr, scylladakylla, I guess?), but here's an extremely vague approximation of the potato and string bean salad. All of the vegetable amounts are highly adjustable depending on what you like, so I basically made up the numbers below.

- 4 cups potato (russet potatoes are prettiest, since they match the onion and contrast with the beans :P but any type works)
- 1-2 cups string beans
- ~1/4 of a medium red onion
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1/4 cup vinegar (any type works - balsamic is great)
- Black pepper
- Any herbs you like (I used rosemary, thyme, and chives)
- Several garlic cloves (I actually used pickled garlic because that's what we happened to have)
- ~1 tsp salt, if you want

1. Cut the potatoes into eighths, then into half-inch slices.
2. Cut the string beans into about inch-long pieces.
3. Dice the onion.
3. Boil the potatoes for 10 minutes.
4. Add the string beans and onion to the pot, continue boiling for 5 minutes.
5. Mince the garlic cloves.
6. For the dressing, whisk the olive oil, vinegar, pepper, herbs, garlic, and optional salt together.
7. Take the vegetables off the heat and drain. Let cool for a couple minutes, then transfer by portions into a large dish, adding a little dressing to each portion and mixing as you go.
8. Serve warm or cold.

Uh, obviously it's all stupidly easy, and you could easily substitute frozen green beans if you can't get any fresh ones... the only part that I think you could mess up is overcooking the potatoes, which I did once when I didn't have enough room to chop the string beans quickly enough. It just turns out as mashed potato salad that way, which tastes fine anyway.

Quick!

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:53:33 GMT

Which quirky, gangly, gayish, usually floppy-red-headed, violin-wielding musician is quirkier, ganglier, more gayish, more usually floppy-red-headed, and more adroitly violin-wielding?

Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy)

- or -

Patrick Wolf?

---
Pallett on the left, Wolf on the right.

I love the Met

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:27:20 GMT

Once upon a time, I hated New York, but that's only because I didn't know how to get anywhere. :P I went to the Met a few weeks earlier with aihre (!), but went again this weekend with some of my roommates, none of whom had been before. This time I got to hit up the Asian art galleries, the Greek & Roman sculpture gallery, the Africa & Oceania travelling exhibit (magnificently eerie - we saw a hollow-bottomed spirit canoe crewed by spirits, including an immortal turtle and a "malicious, Z-shaped water spirit" - !!!), and the modern art gallery. Then we got exhausted and scurried away to eat and look at pretty clothes.

---

Unrelatedly, knitting YoSD scarves reeeeally makes me want to pick up some sets of sock-sized double-pointed needles...

Autumn already?

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:23:35 GMT

At least in Retailville it is. Moar Modcloth ogling. *shrug*

Also, I've been idly considering getting the pattern for this sweater from spinninglab on Etsy, although I'd have to buy another set of size 4 needles:

puffed sleeves zomg. I'd be tempted to reduce the ribbing in the body, however. And I don't know what colors I'd use - maybe berry & brown or cream & brown. Or maybe cream and green? Anyone have ideas?

Haha, I just realized that my music for this entry is hilariously appropriate to discussion of sweater-knitting. And I want to buy moooore yarn but I don't have time to knit it all. Boo hoo hoo.

And I have a new layout, yay! Courtesy refuted. It's so hard to find layouts that aren't utterly messed up by the presence of horizontal photos, and I always have to go into the CSS to change the font sizes, at the risk of going blind otherwise.

The sea-maids went out

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 03:07:15 GMT

I haven't been drawing that much again... whoops. Too many other things to do! (For example, someone commissioned another Dr. Who scarf. *head-->desk*) This is from the beginning of summer. It's still available on Etsy, also. Excuse my blatant self-promotion.

Musical meme

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:23:12 GMT

Ganked from sailorpenguinz.

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly, CLEVERLY, answer these questions. Do not repeat a song title. There is no try.

Pick Your Artist: Patrick Wolf

Are you male or female: A Boy Like Me [...whoops.]

Describe yourself: The Libertine

How do you feel about yourself: Afraid

Describe where you currently live: The Railway House

If you could go anywhere, where would you go? Penzance

Your favorite form of transportation: Jacob's Ladder

Your best friend is: Enchanted

Your favorite color is: Bluebells

What's the weather like: This Weather [HA]

Favorite time of day is: The Sun is Often Out

If your life were a TV show, what would it be called: Accident and Emergency

What is life to you: Secret Garden

What is the best advice you have to give: Don't Say No

If you could change your name, what would it be: Magpie

Your favorite food is: Vulture

Thought for the Day: Get Lost

How I would like to die: The Magic Position

These here parts, we call 'em Glove Land

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:39:24 GMT

It was only so long before my glove-making addiction and my ruffles-and-buttons addiction made friends. Yarn by sqwish, vintage mother-of-pearl buttons. Totally indulged myself in the materials on this one, really.

Same customer who ended up buying the above pair requested another pair in cream, shorter in length. Too much fun! This pattern is also convenient in that it's guaranteed to fit pretty much anyone.

I want to do so many more ruffly-buttony things, long ones and short ones and ones with fingers and ones with more vintage buttons...

And yeah, my nails were blue a week ago. XD

Now these... were SUPPOSED to be for Etsy. But I'm deeply, deeply tempted to keep them for myself, even though I already made a pair for myself. ;_; What do I dooooo?

Yarn by sewknitnbeads2.

Also, I don't know what to call them, if I do sell them. My roommate and I came up with "Orchid Rose" or "Winter Orchid."

Wish I could say I'd done more than these in this time, actually, but I was lazy knitting-wise for a couple of weeks, and now I have a huge commission taking up my time...

Brainlessness

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:03:53 GMT

Firefox-window-shopping on Modcloth. don't mind meeeee

When did I become sooo interested in shoes?

My Day, up to 7:20 PM

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:20:33 GMT

Sum up your day in the form of a haiku.

Submitted By cpnspuff

View 507 Answers

Experiments failed.
I annoyed my professor.
I'm really hungry.

ganked from stereophilic! I haven't done a meme in forever. In fact I think I accidentally deleted my memes tag the last time I was cleaning up my posts, so I might as well never have done any, ever. XP

Little things

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:32:16 GMT

Order from KnitPicks - all my favorite colors, as usual. That self-striping yarn turned out to be much more neon than in the advertised photos. >_>

Moth that fluttered into the room an evening earlier in the summer; it eventually found its way out again, after some confusion.

My Moth, guarding the mail tower. Hee. (She matches!)

And the other kids. They're still alive (so to speak), but I've been so busy that I haven't taken them out of the bag for a month. ;_; This was when I was sewing back home - I like having them on the chair next to me.

View from the parking lot when my roomies and I went to see Public Enemies.

And of course some Fourth of July fireworks. From where we sat, it looked as though they were going to hit the moon.

finis!

Roll 'em out!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:24:22 GMT

I had previously mentioned a Big Project that was coming close to fruition - the moment has come to unveil it. :X For the past month and a bit, my partner-in-crime stuffu and I have been working quietly on TheBlackLetters.net, our joint literary blog and general celebration of all things bibliophilic.

As you probably know, we both read a lot, in pretty much every genre (although we're especially heavy on fantasy, sci-fi, and graphic novels), so we'll be filling up the blog with plenty of interesting material; we already have a good smattering of posts to give a taste of things to come. We'll mainly be featuring book reviews, but we'll also have reviews of bookstores and book and author events, fun literary links, and discussion and analysis. In the future we hope to feature author interviews and other such tidbits.

click me!

Take a look if you have the chance; we really appreciate any looks, links, or comments. Hopefully some of you will enjoy this! And thank you - this is our baby and we're way excited to send it out into the world. ;o;

Somewheeeeere zombies

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:56:06 GMT

This morning, I

Ate a cookie and a plum for breakfast
Went to work late
Accidentally woke up a squirrel that was sleeping on its belly in a sunbeam

Summer rainstorms make rainbows and amazing sunsets:

My roommates and I were taking a walk when this was happening, discussing a zombie defense scenario. This was the team of 20 that we eventually decided upon as being the ideal survival team, given a scenario in which the ~6000 other campus residents were turned into zombies:

1 professor in policy with experience in areas of conflict
the holder of the university's 100m dash record
2 building services employees
1 member of the rifle team (they can train everyone else)
3 football players
someone with extensive culinary expertise
several mechanical, chemical, and electrical engineers (I've forgotten the exact distribution
two people with high leadership abilities
someone who watches a lot of zombie/survival horror movies and/or plays video games in those genres

Following that discussion, we've watched Shaun of the Dead (third time for me :X), 28 Days Later, and Jurassic Park, and are going to watch The Thing next. hee.

Hmmm... Flight of the Conchords are on repeat in the background, all is well with the world.

Sushi soapies

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:58:27 GMT

These were a slightly belated b-day present for my sushi connoisseur brother. Awesome or what? Made by DirtyAssSoaps @ Etsy, who also does insane waffle, peanut butter cup, NES controller, etc. soaps, many of which I have witnessed firsthand. (get it? get it?)

Ahem.

The Hazards of Love

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:57:33 GMT

I'm around, just busy with research, work, and a Big Project that has been under construction for several weeks and will hopefully be unveiled Soon, though I'm not sure how many people here it would interest. XD;

Exciting stuff? hemmedwithgold, ohniki, and I went to see the Decemberists' tour of The Hazards of Love on June 10, at Radio City Music Hall.

People chilling in Times Square, which was apparently having a lawn-chair event...? I don't know what they're officially called.

All three of us expressed much desire to possess murals like those on the inside of Radio City Music Hall. *_* I haven't been there since I was 10 or so, so I didn't recall these at all, but they showed something like a troop of personified winter clouds on horseback bringing snow to the red-and-gold landscape.

hemmedwithgold and I also played a half-assed game of LaTFH from this balcony. The little blue glows are drink swizzle-stick things. People waved them back and forth, classily, during the slow songs.

Tiny the stage was, and far away, the former really being a product of the latter. Excellent were the acoustics, however.

The opening act was Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus Three, which sounded nice but... deafening.

The first time I saw the Decemberists live, they were touring with the band My Brightest Diamond, whose frontwoman Shara Worden was a collaborator on this album. She seemed extremely shy the first time I saw them, but here she was a badass and extremely sexy Queen of the Forest. (The Hazards of Love is an elaborate rock opera/concept album about a young man & woman who fall in love, except that unfortunately he's the adoptive son/sort-of-slave of the Queen of the Forest and must brave her jealous wrath in order to 1. lie with his love and 2. subsequently rescue her from a devilish abductor/would-be rapist. Typical Decemberists.) I wish my camera were better. :< Here you can sort of see Shara on the right doing her crazy ninja dancing.

Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond (why all these diamonds?) was one of the other major vocal contributors to the album; she plays the hapless maiden. I love her solo in "Won't Want for Love," but zomg, she is basically an escapee from a Renaissance Faire. Watching her elven trance dancing makes me feel really awkward.

As soon as I heard "The Rake's Song" (link is for free download) on the album, I knew it would be evilly epic in real life. Ohhh man. So good. Drum kits were EVERYWHERE! Becky Stark looks hilarious when she flails at hers.

Setlist:

Pt. I
The Hazards of Love

Pt. II
The Crane Wife 3
Billy Liar ("this is a song about truancy and the dark paths it can lead to" - with multipart audience singalong)
Sleepless
July, July
Dracula's Daughter ("this is the worst song I've ever written... it opens with what we call douchey chords. they're full of douche.")
O Valencia!
The Bachelor and the Bride (with extended organ solo, hurrah)
The Chimbley Sweep (with 50% awkward "guitar solos" from front-row audience members invited up on stage, one of whom could play; the other could not, hence the 50%)
Begin the Begin (R.E.M.)
Crazy on You (Heart; with Shara Worden and Becky Sharp)
Sons and Daughters (also with singalong, yay)

'Kay, my fannishness ends here. :P