serinde

Having determined to go down and restart aikido today, I was gifted with raving anxiety both before (heart racing, explodo brain) and during (wacky dreams involving trying to get downtown via skateboard to meet people for brunch and being delayed by, first, an SCA fighter practice/hangout involving Their Majesties processing in with elephants, and then by getting into a fight with trucker guys who were unloading their shit into a bike lane) sleep. I have no idea what is triggering this bullshit, but I will none of it.

Today I also intend to shed the stigma of my NJ driver's license; the express DMV is tolerably near to the dojo, so that should work out nicely. For a trifecta, I shall either start the process for my 2nd pair of glasses, or shop for a vacuum (requirements: 1. small, 2. ACTUALLY WORKS) as my current fur-management system is wholly inadequate.

Current Music: The Cult, "She Sells Sanctuary"

syringavulgaris: !!!

syringavulgaris: Nigella has a recipe that she came up with after having Nobu's cod-in-miso.

elibalin: Nifty.

syringavulgaris: And it's scaled for 1 or 2 people.

elibalin: SUBSCIRBE!

syringavulgaris: I don't know what mirin is. Please hold.

syringavulgaris: Oh, it's like sake with a lower booze content.

elibalin: "O'Doul-San"

I commit to starting aikido again next month; I commit to going at least twice and preferably thrice a week, even if this means getting up at fuck-off o'clock to make the 6:45am class or scaling down my evening entertainments (yet more) (since I keep backsliding anyways) to go to the 5:30pm class.

( Since Wednesday night, I have been laid flat by the magic nose goblins... )

We have some several small-form-factor PCs which we were testing for use in the student terminal 2.0 roll-out. One such is a Dell Optiplex 760, which was way too big for the job at hand; and since trying to run Windows in a VM on my desktop iMac eats all my computrons, on

spride's advice I snarfed it to stick under my desk and remote into when I have the need to be plunged into the warm gelatinous mass of Redmond.

While I'm at it, why not see if it will PXE boot and talk to our management console? So I hook it up at our testing bench and turn it on.

1. No BIOS, it just
2. goes directly to a crippled XP configuration screen
3. THAT PLAYS REPETITIVE HORRIBLE MUSIC REALLY REALLY LOUD THAT YOU CANNOT TURN OFF UNTIL YOU GO THROUGH IT ALL

Ensued then a Three Stooges-like routine involving me frantically searching it for a volume control (there isn't one), or an "off" tickybox on the screen (there isn't one), or a physical control on the machine itself (there isn't one), or failing that A PILLOW TO STICK IT UNDER (none of those either) so as not to disturb the fifteen other people in earshot.

Eventually it booted to XP proper, and hopefully this will not recur on the next reboot; but I have procured a heavy coat to throw over it just in case.

I woke up today with a feeling of upset and off-kilter-ness, in part due to a dream I shall not recount at this time. Today at work kinda sucked rather lots, which didn't help. I came home intending to cut out the lining for a new 14th c. overdress (running a copy of my green wool one that has garnered acclaim) (because yes it's great but I NEED TO HAVE MORE THAN ONE OUTFIT FDJKLSFJDKLJF) (ahem.) (It shall be, per pale, black velvet and gold-tapestry-woven-with-a-diamond-and-fleur-de-lis-pattern.) (Should I counterchange the sleeves?) (Am I speaking in LISP?). Instead, in the middle of ironing, I felt myself getting more and more agitated, unable to settle for the state of the apartment as it is, with things bursting out of closets and cluttered dresser tops I can't dust and STILL A BOX OF BOOKS UNPACKED and and and and. So I pulled apart closets and have been rearranging and letting things go and so on. It is going promisingly so far, and I feel calmer and less agitated. So maybe no new dress to fit this weekend, but it seems that I needed to do this thing.

I think I'm even ready to let go my boom box. This is a large entity Mom gave me when I went away to college. The tape decks don't really work so well, the CD player works but is fussy; chiefly I use it for radio (or CDs) when I'm playing games at the computer and so don't want gfefx also playing music. It has really good sound for its size, but...the size. It's huge. It takes up half of my dresser. It could be replaced. What I replace it with won't sound as good, but does it really matter?

If I can sort out a way to keep all the sewing stuff together and accessible, I will have done a good evening's work.

Yoga has been really, really good for me over the past year; and since sometimes the exigencies of duty have kept me from going, it seemed to me that I might profit greatly from doing some at home in the morning. I have found many excuses not to do this thing, ranging from "bleh morning snrk argh" to "wood floor is haaaaaaard". To deal with the latter whinge, I bought a Real Yoga Mat (which has koi on it! How can you not be inspired by staring at koi? ... ) about a month ago, which has sat idle since; the new excuse being "but I'm doing morning pages! I can't spare the time for both, not unless I want to get up super super early, and then what's the point of living so close, wah wah wah wah and anyways I'm going thrice a week and that's good". Well, okay; but the last several weeks, between vacation and the student email migration and lack of personnel and what-not, I haven't been going thrice a week. Sometimes I've been lucky to go once a week. And lo, yesterday I was up a pound from the holiday festivities; and I am feeling sniffly in my head, which I never seem to get sick if I'm exercising regularly; so this morning I had a nice tall glass of Shut The Fuck Up, rolled out the mat, and did a 20 minute workout from yogadownload.com. And it was Good, although lord does my balance and flow ever suck rocks right when I get up.

Current Music: Hawkwind, "Space Is Deep"

Faced with a nearly-past-edibility tupperware full of leftover roasted cauliflower and potato, my choices were either to mush them up and make fritters (which would be delicious, but I mean, we are dieting here), or the time-honored fate of nameless leftovers: soup.

Herewith:

Olive oil
Generous slice of onion, diced
Clove of garlic minced
garam masala, I dunno, a half-Tbsp?
20-oz receptacle filled with squidgy cauliflower and potato leftovers
1 c. chicken broth

Gently fry up the onion and garlic in the olive oil. When about that, add the garam masala and turn the heat up a bit, frying until the kitchen is full of curry goodness. Add the veg and toss to coat with the spice. Add the chicken broth (which is actually frozen into cute 1/2 cup hockey pucks, but never mind) and cover to cook for a bit. When the veg is entirely squidgy, mash with a potato masher because you can't be arsed to ladle it into a food processor or blender. Forget the salt. Add the salt. Realize that you have created porridge. Add another hockey puck of chicken broth. Feel it's too bland, add too much cayenne. Stop screwing with it. Dish out, eat. Not bad, especially since all you can taste is CURRY!~. Makes about 2c, and it's probably more or less healthy.

Failing to escape the gravitational pull of the Hungarian Meat Market on 81st and Second, I entered one of those fugue states and came out with a half-pound of an unlabeled paprika-dusted entity described by the shop girl as "bacon, but you don't have to cook it". (Research indicates that this might be some variant of szalonna.) It's more than 50% fat, and the meat bits are rather shreddy in the way corned beef gets. There is no rind.

Not being a starving Hungarian peasant, I'm not gonna just eat the stuff--I think it will make a better flavor-enhancer (

shechameleon has already proposed using it as a base for potato soup, and I was seeing it in a pot of beans)--but I can't be arsed to make soup tonight. Therefore, my intent:

~2 Tbsp of maybe-szalonna, diced fine
1/2 of a red pepper, sliced in strips
1/4 or a bit less of onion, sliced in strips
A potato, which happens to be rather lambently purple-red, scrubbed and sliced thin

Render the maybe-szalonna in a skillet, nice and slow. When it's good and drippin', add the potatoes, then after a few minutes, the other veg. Serve as soon as the taters are nice and brown, or whatever color they get when they start out porphyros, with a hunk Brooklyn Brewery Dark Rye bread.

I shall report results anon.

Edit for results: The veg didn't really take up the bacon flavor (or the paprika flavor), unfortunately. I am perhaps executing the rendering stage incorrectly. It's fine and all, but the units are not, in the words of one of the plaques we saw at the Saarinen exhibit today, entering into a dialogue.

3 c. cranberries
The juice and zest of one orange
A second orange, peeled, de-pithed, seeded, sectioned
3 pieces of true-cinnamon bark, macerated in a burr grinder
~1/2 cup of fig preserves
~1 Tbsp of sugar

Throw it all into the food processor and pulse it unto a uniform consistency. [N.B.: The actual process was more hesitant, as I added stuff, tasted it, and said "It needs more X"; but the result is the same.] [A splash of Cointreau or Grand Marnier might not go amiss, either.]

It was, in my opinion, a good representative of its kind; I just personally prefer a cooked cranberry sauce.

nedlnthred was greatly pleased by it, however, and claimed the leftovers with glee, which she intends to put over yogurt. I think it would go well as a relish for cold meats, too.

So, I'm posting to DW, and auto-xposting to LJ. This seems to work pretty well (except most people who read me are still on LJ, so the comments don't back-port, but that's not such a big woo). However: the LJ-to-Facebook wall-posting widget that activates when you post to LJ does not appear to be triggered by whatever magic causes a DW post to appear on LJ; and moreover that widget does not seem to exist in the DW codebase. Am I just missing something?

Current Music: Cracker, "Darling One"

1. Go to Gourmet Garage, intending to just grab eggs and yogurt and kitty litter (and to dine on mac and cheese with tuna). Enter a fugue state and wake up with a 1.3lb boneless "mini-roast of wild boar", with a USDA stamp declaring it to be from "Feral Swine".

2. Return home. Visit the vendor's web site for recipes, as the package suggests, only to find that they don't have anything for this particular incarnation of boar.

3. Pour a drink.

4. Remember the packet of dried wild mushrooms that has been staring accusingly at you for a couple months. Start reconstituting them to buy time.

5. Stuffing? It's boneless, so there should be convenient gap. Slowly work loose the net thingie holding it together, realize that not really is there a convenient gap, but perhaps we can make something of this.

6. Go to chop an onion. Realize that the last of the onion went into the beef stew Sunday. Well, shit.

7. Cook rice in the mushroom soaking liquid, add the mushrooms and sauteed garlic and herbs? That might work.

8. Realize we had better get the roast in if it ain't bein' stuffed. Ponder what a good forester would rub his pig with. Drink more. Default to sage, thyme, and long pepper.

9. Surprise yourself by actually getting the net thingie back around the roast. Realize the roasting pan is way too damn' big. However! Grandma's enameled handled pan that she made mac and cheese in! Yes.

10. Heat oven to 4something, for searing. Drain mushrooms, reserving broth (almost forgetting to). Smells kind of like gym socks.

11. Chop a few carrots and celery to throw in the roasting dish, because why the hell not? Put roast in oven.

12. O NOES COCKTAIL IS GONE make another.

13. Measure mushroom soaking liquid, eke out with water for 2c. Begin to put it on the stove, then realize you have a rice cooker, idiot. Transfer operations thither.

14. Chop garlic and some slightly wilty scallions found in the back of the fridge. Sauté for about that long, adding the chopped mushrooms (some of which look disturbingly like horrifying sea life).

15. Turn down the oven to 325. Uncork last bottle of red. Where does all the wine go?!

16. This drink has too much grenadine. However, the kitchen is starting to smell awfully nice. Realize that the mushies have not been herbed. Leap up to rectify.

17. After that's settled it for a bit, add the mushies to the rice, which is still madly cooking away. Lordy, we love the rice cooker.

18. An hour five after beginning productions, everything seems to be ready (modulo letting the roast rest for a few minutes). The meat thermometer seems to think it's about 155 deg F. There is almost no liquid produced by the roast to make gravy or other joy from, alas; a teaspoon, at a generous estimate. This be some lean meat in spite of the nice square slab of fat on the top of it.

19. OM NOM NOM

Current Music: The Bongos, "Numbers With Wings"

elibalin: Goat grabbing!

syringavulgaris: This appears to be what, a millenium ago, they did and called "polo".

elibalin: If I remember correctly, it's called "Buzkazhi" in one of the places it's practiced.

syringavulgaris: "A mounted version of the game has also been played in the United States. In the 1940s young men in the Cleveland area of Ohio played a game they called Kav Kaz. The men - five to a team - played on horseback with a sheepskin-covered ball. The Greater Cleveland area had six or seven teams."

syringavulgaris: WTF.

elibalin: What else was there to do in Cleveland in the '40s?

syringavulgaris: Drink beer. We had many breweries.

elibalin: And what do people do after drinking lots of beer? They throw goat carcasses around.

As a result of the Plan to Take Over the World, I must needs get access to the university-wide ERP implementation thingie; and not only the account that, eventually, everyone shall have, but I must also get access to the "CRM", which is "Customer Relationship Management", module, which is The Thing What Lets You Submit Trouble Tickets.

So. I activate my account. (The web site is, unsurprisingly, steaming piles of shit, but at least it's better than the new Payroll application.) I go to acquire the form. Behold, this form: it is a PDF, but one that you cannot fill in the fields of. You must print it out, and fill it out, and then send it unto the Mothership.

AT WHICH POINT THEY SCAN THE FORM BACK IN.

OK, well, that is par for the course; so I print it out and start filling it out. And I stupidly start writing in my home phone instead of work, scratch it out, and then realize they only left about an inch of blank for phone number (tons of space if you're typing your PDF! but less so for handwriting), so I cannot fill it in.

So here I am with the jar of Liquid Paper I stole from downstairs, to get access to our shiny new system that's going to be all about electronic signatures.

For the past week, I have been babysitting Dr. Livingston, Adventure Kitten!, who is possibly the most lovable kitten to have ever existed. (You pick him up, and he instantly starts purring, whether he knows you or not.) He'd had a very bad infection of some kind, and managed to pull through, but needs antibiotics 2x/day for about a month; so to give

nedlnthred a break, I took him for a few days.

Ranger has coped with this surprisingly well. --Perhaps not surprisingly; he has dealt with (by which I mean "hid from") much more obstreperous and interfering felines; but I expected a great deal more fuss. I'm not saying he's delighted, but we sit together on the couch and sleep together on the same bed in reasonable harmony. No bloodshed, no peeing incidents. Now that Livingston is feeling a bit better and regaining some of his natural vif[1], I guess it's just as well he's going to go home tomorrow; but I'm sure going to miss him. He's so very people-oriented and friendly and cuddly and WOOGIE WOOGIE AWWWWWW *flail*

[1] I am particularly thinking of him tearing through the apartment last night and rear-ending Ranger, who was just standing near the fridge minding his own business. Ranger was Not Amused.

I submit Yet Another bug report to Payroll about their precious new web app, which is once again puking unindicative server errors at me. The response, in its entirety:

"You need to find out first if you filled out it, please call me to go throu. x 12345"

Current Music: The Pixies, "Monkey Gone To Heaven"

Grandma died early this morning.

As has been noted, intimated, and occasionally ranted about in this space, one could say that she has been gone for awhile. I have not felt like My Grandma Who I Know And Love has been there for well over a year, maybe two, and I have been intermittently tearful and howlish about that; and she has been in varying states of mental and physical discomfort for most of that time, which is now thankfully over; but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference to how I feel right now.

...aaaaand I realize it's the same as when Grandpa died, so you might think I'd've known to expect this?

Funeral is Monday. Airlines are useless (dear JetBlue: plz start flying to Cleveland, kthxbye) so I guess I'm driving. I think Bud can make it. I was just musing last weekend "I should get him a tuneup in case I need to make the long trip", ho ho ho.

Gotta pull my shorts up and get to work. Later for thinking about her loving kindness, and never-failing patience, and true faith, and [aaaa stop now]

elibalin and I had A Plan for today: meet downtown, cruise around Nieuw Amsterdam Village, and then take the ferry to Governor's Island, where there is art, sculpture, bike rentals, and apparently a wacky cool minigolf course. The first section went off okay (except that they were out of stroopwafels, can you believe it?!), but we arrived at the ferry terminal to discover that the island is closed for Labor Day.

A PUBLIC PARK CLOSED ON A PUBLIC HOLIDAY. That's the kind of smarts we've come to expect from the Parks Department of late. So: new plan. We ended up walking the greenway along the Hudson from Battery Park up to the High Line, then turned off at 14th St. to try and find refreshment, something we utterly failed at. My foot was by this time screaming imprecations at me, so I just came home and fell down.

I really, really like what they're doing with the Hudson River Park. It's beautifully done (a different aesthetic in each section, but they're all good), and people clearly sat down and thought about things like seating and potties and refreshments and traffic flow and (etc). It gives me a large happy to know that my city is doing something this well-executed.

The High Line, on the other hand, is a classic case of "No one comes here, it's too crowded". I can see and appreciate (and even applaud) what they've done with it, but since it's become the Next Big Thing, it ends up being an endless shuffling promenade of gawkers. Avoid until the hype dies down.

I was on the way home tonight, for the third evening running of being at home (which may be a new record since moving in), and I found I was castigating myself for wasting a beautiful evening & not going out to Do Something. "But I'm tiiiiiired..." "SHUT UP GO DO SOMETHING YOU ARE WASTING YOUR LIIIIIFE"

I am indeed at home, though will go out to drop the sheets etc. at the laundromat since the coin-op is closed for sorely-needed renovations. Possibly I will bake.

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serinde

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