Tuesday Stitchers import: life sure got away from me!

I feel like I owe you all an apology for not having posted for a couple of weeks now!

Life kinda got away from me --what with my grandmother's injury, dance obligations, a twisted ankle, and a bout of maybe-I-should-just-stay-in-bed-all-week, I am really far behind in everything. My garden is weedy and caterpillary, my laundry is piling up, my plans are all taking longer than I think they should, etc.

So I'm feeling rather accomplished to have managed a stitch or two every other day or so. I'm falling behind in that too, but at least I'm still moving forward.

I thought spring was supposed to be the season that brings an infusion of energy and strength! ... but I guess for me that usually coincides with the arrival of Rainier cherries in the grocery stores in early summer instead. We're only just now beginning to see the first batch of Rainiers, and they're still 10+ dollars per pound, so I guess it's still early in the season, really, and this June has been a two week stretch of clouds and rain, so I don't even have the sunny weather to trick me into thinking that winter has passed.

((local humor:
Where do Seattle folk spend their summer?
---Well, if it falls on a weekend, they go to the beach.))

I still need to get photographs of my CQ work, but I let not having them be a procrastination already last week, so this week I am going to just write this note now to reconfirm my devotion to all of you and to the project I'm working on, and I will follow this post with pictures, and start catching up on my read-and-response of everyone's amazing work by Wednesday.

Hugs all!

Tuesday Stitcher import: chatter

Over lunch quilting was a topic of conversation, and my mother, and brother and his wife, and I made plans to make family friendship blocks to exchange with each other. After much debate we decided to leave the colors and techniques and even the size open to creator's interpretation, so this could be a very interesting hodgepodge to try to integrate into a single quilt-- anything from geometric piecing to applique to crazy quilt are possible.
If we each only make one block per person, that's only 4 blocks total, which would be a very small quilt (or more likely a wall hanging), but I'm thinking that those of us who sew might make blocks for other members of the family to write on. I'm not sure when I'll find time to add this new project in to the work basket! but there you have it-- momentum inspires more momentum. :P

I still need to get photographs of my week's progress before I can write that post, but I figured you'd all like an update on Grandma.

Chatter: Stray Cat update

Stray Cat spent his first day at the vet's office getting his health assessed. He got aggressive at some of the poking and prodding, so they wanted to put him under sedation so that no one (including him) would get hurt. Sedation was also the perfect time to rid him of the horrible mats in his fur, and this is how he came back after his vet visit:

He makes it pretty obvious how he feels about the situation!

He doesn't get to roam the house for now: I have a pet rabbit whose health takes priority, so the stray cat needs to be kept in quarantine for at least a couple of weeks while we get his ear mites and etc under control. I won't be able to assess his long-term potential in my household until after I find out what his stabilized health status is and whether he causes a problem for my rabbit.
In the meantime, the stray cat happily naps away the days on the heater vent.

Chatter: Life Will Conspire to Keep You From Working

One of the things that I (and many other Artists that I know of) constantly battle is the tendency for Life, or our own habits, to get in the way of our creative productivity.

My own habits are often to blame: maybe it's that my studio isn't clean or organized, and I can't find the pair of scissors that I need, or the fabric I intended to use, or the pattern I wanted to work from; maybe I just don't feel like working, so I fritter away the day with little unproductive distractions; maybe I do feel like working, but I'm up against a creative block and I just don't know how to break through it....the list goes on.

Most of the reasons we artists don't get things accomplished is, truly, our own doing. We over-schedule ourselves, we procrastinate, we wait for inspiration, we insist on perfection, we harbor unrealistic expectations, we overestimate our skill set or underestimate a learning curve... in short, we undermine ourselves at every opportunity.
Eventually, we learn how to curb these habits and apply ourselves with regular effort to achieve brilliant results of which we never could have dreamed ourselves capable. And we get to ride on that comfortable and exhilarating little wave of "I am ON A ROLL!!" (ah, how we look forward to that feeling!)

And that is the moment when Life steps in to undermine us since we dropped the ball on undermining ourselves. Life: that chaotic process that surrounds us and confounds us and even nourishes and inspires us -- that chaotic process with which we are inevitably intertwined for better or worse, which will be our steadfast companion to the day that we die.
For the most part, Life is well-behaved- and by well-behaved, I mean predictable. Gravity works predictably with astonishing regularity, as I am always dismayed to reconfirm when carrying just one too many items on a slippery walkway. I generally reconfirm the solidity of objects in the middle of the night with my little toe.
But overall we like predictability. It gives us a sense of security and comfort. It allows us to adapt ourselves to circumstances we don't feel able to change (e.g. Stockholm Syndrome), or to adapt our environments in ways that suit us (e.g. deforestation). We do this for better (an ergonomic office chair to bring comfort to the hours we spend in front of our computers), and we do this for worse (aforementioned deforestation, possibly as a tangential result of the production of our ergonomic office chair).

But now and then Life is not so predictable.
Of course, Life is extraordinarily complex, and perhaps if we had access to all the data all at once (assuming we even recognized what "all the data" would be!), we might be able to discover that Life is, indeed, thoroughly predictable, and the butterfly in Suriname does, in fact, cause the tsunami in Anchorage.
But in the meantime, snowstorms, floods, and power outages still catch us by surprise (as does, occasionally, gravity and the density of solid objects).

Life throws us curve balls to see whether we can retain our composure. Last week it was snow and a power outage. Last night it was this fellow:

He's a scraggly, undernourished, bone-thin, matted, beleaguered stray cat.
He walked right into my house yesterday.
When I picked him up to put him back outside, I felt how thin he was.
It's still cold outside.
I'm not sure how he would stay warm.
And he hasn't had enough to eat for a while.
But he's very pleasant and well-mannered (or maybe he's just too exhausted to be opinionated).
He's also intelligent.
He purrs a lot.
A LOT.
I mean constantly.
I couldn't put him back outside in the cold.


I opened up a can of chicken and fed him about half of it. I even squished it all up so that if he had problems chewing or swallowing, he wouldn't choke.
Then I gave him space in our bathroom for the night. It's warm and it's dry- perfect for a good night's sleep.

Today I took him in to the vet for a diagnostic.

Apparently he is not so well-mannered when he disagrees with what's happening to him.

The price for the diagnostic doubled.
(They need to administer a sedative for everyone's safety, and want to do all the tests while he is safely sedated instead of spread out a test at a time over several visits).

What we did figure out before he got too rough to handle: he is a geriatric, neutered male with ear mites and a slight heart murmur, and no microchip to track down a previous family of origin.
Oh great.
What am I doing?
This is NOT in the plan!
sheesh.

Urban Skiers, or Why I Don't Drive in Snow.

Well, the snow started falling a week ago Sunday. It let up a bit on Monday, and Tuesday wasn't bad--the streets were even clear by evening, but the forecast called for another snowstorm Tuesday night, and sure enough, by Wednesday we had more snow. On Wednesday I was working in my studio and took this picture out the window:

Yep, skiers. Right down the middle of the road. Because, let's face it, NObody in the Seattle region drives when it snows. Okay, that's not entirely true, but pretty close. People who live in regions that get a lot of snow like to snicker behind our backs, or point and laugh to our faces about that little quirk of ours which they see as unreasonable timidity. But that's not the full story. Here's the heart of the matter:
We get snow maybe once a year, usually in February or March.
It is usually followed very soon by rain that melts the snow and washes it away.
So we don't have a whole fleet of snowplows on hand for those few times that the snow sticks around for several days.
Because it only rains once or twice in a year and generally melts pretty quickly, we don't get a lot of practice with the whole driving-on-snow skill. Some of us go up into the mountains and keep our skills honed on the snowy passes, but most Seattlites stay in the lowlands throughout winter.
We don't tend to put snow tires on our vehicles, because--hey, we just don't get snow that often.
Our streets have a lot of curves and a lot of hills.
Our streets, especially in the hilly downtown Seattle area, have heated pipes running underneath the streets.
The heat underneath the streets melts lingering snow from underneath, and when nighttime temperatures plummet below freezing, that melted layer turns into ice.
Ice hidden beneath snow.
The rain that sometimes sprinkles across the top of the snow does the same thing-- turns to ice.
We don't have SNOW to drive on! we have ice. It's a little different.
Okay.
Then we have a bunch of people, either transplants who think they know how to drive in the snow because they drove in the snow back in their hometowns-- they're usually pretty smart about it: they figure out quickly what type of not-really-snow conditions they're driving in and they draw upon their years worth of blizzard-braving, ice-storm-enduring finely-honed survival skills -- or locals and non-snow transplants who believe they can drive in the snow because "how hard can it be?" -- they're the dangerous ones.
The how-hard-can-it-be crowd often base their idea that they can drive in the snow on the basis that they own a four-wheel drive vehicle. There seems to be a blind spot to the realization that snow and ice can make all four wheels spin just as easily as it can make two wheels spin. Four-wheel drive means that if any one of the four tires is on a nice surface with traction, you can probably get the vehicle to move, but if all four tires are on ice, well... Heh.
Long story short ("Too late!")...
By the third day of lingering snow, all of the bravado-puffed how-hard-can-it-be types have put their cars into ditches (or streetlamps, or parked cars, or moving cars, or heaven forbid what else), and the streets are relatively safe to drive again.
And by then the snow has generally melted anyway.
So there are a bunch of us Seattlite types who honor the snow in our own very particular "quirky" way: we stay inside, try to keep warm, and shake our heads slowly at the skidding vehicles:
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/seattle-drivers-snow-seattle-weather/60361

This time around, we had two snowstorms in a row and then an icestorm before the snow had melted away. We almost never get that combination of weather patterns, and what it meant was that a lot of the snow-and-ice laden tree branches couldn't carry the weight and splintered, taking out powerlines.

Okay, so the picture's not of a tree, it's an azalea bush, and it isn't exactly menacing any powerlines. Think of it as a scale model that I found not too far outside my own front door.
Or I could show you this one:

See the tree branches of the evergreen in the background? Those are head-height branches weighed down by the snow and ice until they drag on the ground.

We lost our power on Thursday morning, and didn't get it back until Friday night. We consider ourselves lucky that it was restored so quickly. :) It sure is nice to be warm again! and to have access to my internet, and lights to sew and read by!

On the plus side, I had a fireplace to cuddle up near on Thursday, so I didn't turn into an ice cube. :)

irrelevant chatter: I know it's borscht because it tastes better with sour cream

The thing I hate about cooking for myself (which is what happens any time I knowingly or inadvertently cook something my husband won't eat. My husband won't eat soup. I don't understand it, but aside from those times where the quickest way to heat up a decent dinner is to drop it all into the same pot together, I don't mind. We all have quirks, and being a choosy eater is a quirk I can live with.)... oops, that was a long interjection! .. okay, the thing I hate about cooking for myself is that when I cook up a decent sized pot of something (which happens anytime you've got more than three vegetables in the ingredient list) I end up eating it over and over and over again for a week or more.
So today I'm eating Excessively Orange Borscht. It was Flaming Fuschia Chicken Soup a couple of days ago, but that was before I'd given up on my denial about the power of beets. Now that the denial has given way to resignation, I'm calling it Borscht because of the beets. That's all it takes to make borscht, right? A couple of beets in the soup pot? and any time you put beets in the soup pot that makes it borscht, right? Now I don't speak much Russian, but I'm pretty sure that if you take the word "borscht" to its etymological roots, it must translate as "Oh great, it's pink. Now what do I do?"
And I wasn't in the mood for Flaming Fuschia Borscht two days ago, and I decided to play around with the color a bit. Silly me, I thought somehow that I'd be able to conquer the Flaming Fuschia. I added cumin and a little bit of yellow food coloring, and tipped the balance into the orange zone. Frankly, it looks like I started applying photo manipulation filters and forgot when to stop. Now orange is a nice enough color, but cumin is a very bright, intense yellow in its own right, and when paired up with the beet juice, I'm pretty sure this resulting orange could be worn as a safety vest. (Which I just might do if I accidentally tip the bowl into my lap while eating and typing at the same time. Still, better my lap than the almost-white carpet at my feet. Better yet, it should stay in the bowl.) Now "Safety Vest Orange Chicken Soup" didn't quite roll off the the tongue, but "Excessively Orange Borscht" is a name I can live with. It's a name that almost makes the bowl's contents endearing even on this third day after creation (with half the pot left for the next three days).
As you might have guessed by now, I am not much of a recipe person. I *can* follow a recipe, and in fact I have a small handful of sacred recipes that I don't mess with: lemon meringue pie, butterscotch-chip cookies, peanut-chicken soup, pancakes from scratch. Those select few recipes are the ones for which I go back to my recipe card every single time and follow it faithfully. Pretty much everything else is subject to whim and experimentation. I have about a 98 percent success rate with my experimentations and whims, which means that only about 2 dishes out of 100 are so unredeemable that I won't eat them (and while I'm not exactly as choosy as my husband, there is definitely a well-defined zone of "edible"). The other 98 run the spectrum from "it'll do, but I hope the leftovers don't last too long" all the way up to "OMG! I *HAVE* to have that recipe!" (which is a real "Doh!" moment because I don't keep notes as I cook, and back-engineering the recipe is never quite as successful as I'd hoped.) I have learned to treat every meal that comes out of my kitchen as a one-off, a fluke event, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enjoy this specific dish because it will never again be seen nor tasted on this Earth (excepting the 7 days of leftovers, of course).
Excessively Orange Borscht is one of those rare dishes, like a good curry, that seems to get better the second or third day out. Maybe it's because the flavors are blending, or maybe it's because the initial shock and distrust are wearing off, but EOB is inching its way up the scale into "Hmm... I might make this again if I'd kept notes... except I might leave the beet juice out next time."
Some of my most brilliant experiments come from desperation, one of those "Oh no, I need to eat again and I haven't gone to the store in the past few days" occasions. EOB was one of those. I was feeling a little sick and lethargic, and what I wanted was a good, honest, therapeutic chicken soup. I was off to a great start: I had a refrigerator full of leftovers I didn't want to eat, and I figured that the worst thing that could happen if they all ended up in a pot together is that I still wouldn't want to eat them, and if my experiment turned out to be one of those 2-%ers, I'd have a good excuse not to. :)

So into the crockpot went:
+ the bones of a rotisserie chicken (from Safeway, I think), with the remaining meat pulled off and set aside for last-minute addition into the soup.
+ a couple of leaves of kale. I like to think that it makes the soup healthier.

After an overnight slow-cook, I pulled out the solids and strained the broth. Then I started adding the stuff that would stay in as part of the soup:
+ chopped carrots
+ chopped celery
+ diced potatoes
+ diced onion (sauteed first)
+ diced bell pepper -- green and orange for festive color
+ a handful of raisins
+ the leftover chicken meat, finely diced
+ salt

The handful of raisins was supposed to have been my exciting "take a chance and see what happens" ingredient. I know that I like raisins in my rice pilaf, so it wasn't even that much of a stretch.

A couple of hours later I got a bit hungry, but the vegetables weren't tender yet, so I made myself an auxiliary snack of potatoes, beets, and kale. Flora, this is where you get to point and laugh, because when I'd been looking through my refrigerator, deciding what to add to the soup, I'd taken one look at those beets and very distinctly thought, "nope. Beets will turn the whole thing pink, and I'm not in the mood for borscht. I'll cook them up on their own in the next couple of days." So naturally when I went looking for an auxiliary lunch, I remembered that I had to cook up the beets anyway, so into the steamer they went along with some potatoes. (The kale I stir-fried)
The beets were delicious. When I tidied up dishes after lunch, I noticed that the beets had sweated a little of their juicy goodness into the steamer's drip tray. I seem to recall a snippet of the train of thought that turned my chicken soup pink, and it went something like this: "Hmm! The drip collector in the steamer has water that's loaded with vitamins from cooking the beets and potatoes. And it's bright pink. I'd better not leave it in the steamer for long or it will turn the white plastic bright pink and I'll have a terrible time getting the stain back out again. Well, I guess I could add it to the soup pot-- it's only a couple of tablespoons: hardly enough to even influence the flavor" and in it went.
+ 2 tablespoons dilute beet juice
It might not have been enough to change the flavor, but it just about instantly dyed every single ingredient in the pot a bright pink (except for the raisins which were dark enough not to show any significant change alongside the fuschia potatoes).
By this time the vegetables were just about tender, so I dished myself up a small bowl to see how the flavoring. It wasn't bad! ...but I just couldn't come to grips with bright pink chicken pieces. Beef is just fine in a borscht. Beef is a rich enough brown on its own that it doesn't suffer from exposure to pink broth. I can't say the same for the chicken.
I felt compelled to change the color somehow.
It occurred to me that cumin has a nice earthy color that might help mute the soup's visual intensity. Cumin is frequently used in chili and has a fairly strong flavor. Since I didn't want to use too much cumin, I supplemented my color adjustment with a couple of drops of yellow food coloring. I also thought the cumin on its own might be an odd flavor to add to the soup, so I balanced it with a dash of cinnamon.
+ cumin
+ cinnamon
The raisins were losing their claim to the title of my "throw caution to the winds" ingredient.
The cumin and cinnamon added an interesting flavor component, but even with the aid of yellow food coloring they couldn't offset the pink.
So I added a dash of turmeric.
+ turmeric
I might have added a bit too much turmeric, because my soup turned bright orange: Neon-, flourescent-, safety-cone orange.
It dawned on me that despite my attempts to adjust the color, what I had in my soup-pot was borscht: almost-entirely-beet-free borscht, but borscht nonetheless.
Now, whenever I make borscht (on purpose, at least), I add some beef stew cubes to the pot. My refrigerator, however, illustrating the lack of foresight that my culinary whims had embodied, was distinctly void of beef stew cubes.
It held no leftover pot roast, no fajita steak brought home from a Mexican restaurant, not even a hint of ground beef.
My refrigerator held exactly one beef-containing product: half a package of Ball Park beef hot dogs.
So I added them.
+ Ball Park beef hot dogs
I started to wonder whether the raisins might not have been the tamest decision I'd made.
And then it occurred to me that perhaps the raisins were the tipping point: perhaps the raisins were the culprit that brought the entire string of questionable choices descending down into my soup pot. If I hadn't tossed in the raisins on a whim of curiosity, maybe I wouldn't have tossed in the steamer's beet juice in a moment's indiscretion. If I hadn't added the beet juice, I would have had no reason to add the cumin, the cinnamon, or the turmeric. And beet-juice or no, the cinnamon would never have gone in the pot if the raisins hadn't already been in there.
It just goes to show how one whimsical, off-handed, ill-considered choice can influence an entire string of choices to follow.
Fortunately, it's not bad. It's odd, to be sure, but it's not bad. It's actually kinda yummy. I just had to give up the idea that it was ever "chicken soup" and just accept it on its own merits as one of those kitchen experiments gone awry.
In the words of John Krakauer (author of Into The Wild), "a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all." Or put another way: It wouldn't be called triumph if you knew you could bank on a successful outcome.

irrelevant chatter: soup

Note to self: when going to the trouble of buying lots of different colored ingredients for a festive soup (green and orange bell peppers, yellow corn, orange carrots, green celery and beans, etc) don't put beets into the pot! argh. I ended up with a bright fuschia soup. When I added the beets, I'd thought I would get a lovely bright fuschia broth with all sorts of festive vegetables floating around in it, but no! of course not. Beet juice stains everything. All the vegetables ended up some variation of fuschia. I'd have known that if I'd have stopped to think about it. Doh!

For the past couple of weeks I have been focusing my time and energy on getting my sewing space cleaned up and organized. This week I get to focus on putting together my first CQJP "block" (wedge shaped). Yay!