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I recently made another batch of Carrot Cumin Soup. In previous batches, I've left out the onion and used an equal amount of sweet potato and ended up with a lot more soup than the recipe originally called for. This time I used only 3 pounds of carrots, 2 medium sized red potatoes and a few stalks of celery for something different. I also only food processed about half of the soup so I have been enjoying some texture and vegetable pieces I can identify instead of having a more baby-food-like soup to enjoy (and it's good that way too, but this was something to be different).

A few days ago at work I had a serving with the addition of a sliced cheese stick (I get the Frigo Cheeseheads brand mozzarella string cheese and occasionally their variety pack which adds in some colby jack and cheddar options... I think the other day was a piece of colby jack sliced into the soup). There was also a leftover bag of chips from a box lunch at work that I decided to mash up a bit and add to the soup. That turned out pretty tasty with a bit of crunch and the additional potato flavor - also recommended, although not quite as healthy as the soup is by itself.

Any of you been cooking anything out of the ordinary lately? I have delusions of making some sort of mixed berry pie this weekend and maybe some variation of a chocolate chip cookie ice cream cake... we'll see. I also found a recipe for blueberry pancakes that looks good with ricotta cheese and I've been starting to yearn for some scones again recently, too.

So: back to The Shelf.

Some days you do the best you can just to keep it all afloat. Gladdy and I settled down into a hard-working routine--me trying to finish my e-book project, and her trying to unravel the alethiometer prophecy, such as it was (next up: tea leaves).

( A truly harrowing experience, let me tell you )

Feminists and the mystery of Sarah Palin

There's no mystery. They hate her for the same reason they drive Priuses. It's four parts stuff-white-people-like status signaling, and one part high-school-girl-clique bitchiness. A martini for unhappy women in their 40s who are probably still paying student loans on a useless women's studies degrees. No doubt abandoned by a whole string of men, starting with daddy. Status in the clique is important because it's all they have.

And there's Sarah, with none of the status, doing all this stuff, getting all this attention. What an affront to the natural order. She doesn't even drive a Prius!

We got another good group of contributors to Everyone's Favorite Online Collaborative Poetry Game - Exquisite Corpse: from livejournal,

wescobear

pgdudda

and from Facebook:

Originally published at Tawdry Talk - Use your OpenID (username.livejournal.com) or Facebook Connect to comment!.

I'm nervous.

I just sold almost everything I had left for Kirsten in two enormous lots, to the same person. They have positive feedback, but the actual comments are private. She hasn't paid yet.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but I really don't have time to wait to see if she'll pay. If she doesn't pay, I can't ship, and I don't have time to list everything again, because I'm going to England. Which is why I needed to sell in the first place.


I kind of really need that money, you know?

This is tricky.

When we were sick, Before Midwinter (BMW), chestnut_nag and weaver_of_duart, gave us a care package.

It included lemons, garlic, ginger, soup and elderberry syrup.

I finally got around to working out what the elderberry syrup was for, and I'm off to try some.

My labmate just got me SO GOOD.

Our developer is broken, so we were going to take all our film over to the building next door to develop. But I couldn't figure out, so I came back to my building and exposed the film in the darkroom and put it in a cassette for safe keeping. I closed it up and put it on my bench and gave the empty cassette to my labmate for him to use so the 2 wouldn't get mixed up.

Then he comes over to me and asks me, "Is this the one I can open?" And I turn to look and am about to say, "Not if it's closed," when he starts to open it. All I got out was, "Uh...!!" and then he was busting up when he showed me the EMPTY cassette. BASTARD. I totally hit him for it.

Ah, we finally have an image for the Comic-Con exclusive Tonner Edward, courtesy of the Tonner email newsletter that I subscribe to religiously:

( Read more... )

The hair is rather meek, and for a full $129 I wish it had more accessories than "a shirt,"* but it does seem to have the black eyes to indicate "hunger" (~*EXCITING VARIATION!*~), and I have to say? This is the least horrifying/most accurate product image of the character that they've put up yet. I mean, compared to my doll's prototype pictures.

* YOU'RE KILLING ME HERE, PEOPLE. IT'S THE SAME DOLL, EXCEPT THIS TIME IT'S DEPRESSED. IT HAS LESS STUFF THAN THE FIRST ONE; IT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A JACKET. YOU CAN'T THROW IN SOME EXTRA CLOTHES? A SPARKLE VENEER? A TINY MOUNTAIN LION? COME ON.

I mention this specifically just to let y'all know not to worry about trying to get one for me (as I'd previously asked--for someone to snag one at the convention, and I would have paid them back). I'd like to get one, but I think I'm going to get my bargain hunter on and go to eBay after the convention. Besides, like I said last time, no one would have any way of knowing who else might or might not have snagged one, and I'd end up with seven Edward v2s WHO HAVE NO ACCESSORIES and no way to pay everyone back.


Also: WHOA BLACK CANARY. They really need to lay off using the Lara Croft body (literally, that is the Lara Croft body sculpt) on every single flippin' DC doll.

Hello, my friend is getting a tattoo and he wants it to say "unable to be tamed" in French. I told him I would help with the translation because I took French a while ago and studied it for many years. However, since it was so long ago, I was am confused about the proper translation of this quote or idea. My translation so far is " ne pouvoir pas être apprivoisé" but it looks like there may be too many infinitives? I can't remember the exact rules of infinitives. Also, he wants the message of the tattoo to be that he can't be tamed, or that he is unable to settle down and is kind of like a troubador. Do you think this translation fits the meaning of his message? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Miscellany:

I have tickets to Midnight Harry Potter! The Lovely Emily and I have done this for years now--maybe since Prisoner of Azkaban; certainly since Goblet of Fire, I can't remember. (I think GOF was the one where she nearly killed some photo-with-flash-taking kids in the row in front of us. With her knitting needles. And if she was knitting, it was probably November--rather than, say, summer--which would make it Goblet of Fire. Meeeeemorieeeeees...)

Got three tiny packages in the mail, one of them addressed to "Anna Dollerious." You are all very, very strange people, and I love you.

(What was in one of them:)



(Actually, I think Anna's package may have saved my ass, because it'll give me a better way to keep her "onstage," as it were, even though I will have to keep the contents secret for a while. There's only so many balls I can juggle at once, people.)

(Also, and I am telling you just this so you'll keep an eye out for it, next week we will have a Very Important, Long-Awaited Shelfian Event. It won't be tomorrow's entry, but rather, the installment after that one.)

More jaw-clenching. Lovely. Also, with all the drizzliness, I think it may be time to test out that full-spectrum lamp. Except that by the time I decided this, it got sunny again. Go me.

As for my hair--I'm not saying it's completely healed or anything. I mean, hair is not a living thing; you can't really "repair" it. I was thinking more in terms of the beauty equivalent of, say, fabric softener--something to help the tangles and the breakage before it got any worse. So, first thing I did was ( Read more... )

And finally: Ice Cream Deathmatch is still under way!

My friend, Will, and I decided that we should go hang out and have ice cream down at Ghirardelli Square. Hot fudge sundaes, fun conversation, then we wandered around looking at the tourists and taking in the view. I had to get to my office for my work day, so we decided to ride the cable car over the hill. As it was such a perfect day, we didn't mind waiting in line with the other folks who were also there to ride the rails.

Today, I have a client, then a photographer is coming over to take pictures of me and my fabulous massage table!

Originally published at Tawdry Talk.

If you want to know the truth about the ongoing conflict and genocide in Darfur, watch this documentary, available as instant play if you have Netflix. This is about an ex-marine sent to monitor the ceasefire, who had access denied to photojournalists. Be forewarned - this documentary contains graphic photos of dead bodies. It is not for the faint of heart. And is heartbreaking.

The trailer:

I'm looking at a possible "volunteer" trip in India working with women in the red light district. It's an organization based in New Zealand that has been around a while and with an endorsement from Bill Gates. It's not an NGO, but would likely be a more gentle first trip before I go hardcore with organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières. I would have to pay a bit for a more "touristy" type trip, but I think that's not a bad thing for the first go-round. I don't want to do anything medical just yet.

It would be oh-so-Mary Ellen Mark...

"So it's like a badly designed livejournal?"

"What the hell is poking? Do I have to poke people?"

"Who is this person? Why would I care?"

"There's no porn on this."

Sigh. I have to use it for work stuff, and social networking and all that, but it's like going from a vast rambly second-hand bookstore with big comfy seats and good coffee to a mall bookshop that only sells bestsellers and plays soothing muzak.

Nobody likes brutalism.

...thank you for returning to me! Let's never be parted again. <3

It's finally back on. I'm addicted, I admit it. But I missed it!

Still working on the unpacking thing. Still have to sell a lot of stuff on eBay and mail a few more things out to people. Emily's sister visits this weekend. And then we're off to England. Eep!

Am still uber-busy, but needed to take a brief foray into linkspam to say: Ryan Reynolds, you so crazy!

Along with working on Deadpool for 2011 (yaaaaaay!), Reynolds is also going to be starring in Buried, an indie flick where Reynolds is the ONLY character, and he spends the entire movie buried in a coffin with a knife, a candle, and a cell phone. Say what? You heard me. I have no idea if this is going to be awesome or just nuts, but I will definitely have to see it. Here's an article with a quote about the movie from Reynolds:

‘Buried’ is the story about a guy who’s buried (laughs). It’s the only movie I’ve ever heard of with only one person in it. So it’s just me, I’m the only person in the whole movie so, I don’t know. We’ll see. It’s either going to be, you know, the greatest, most experimental cool movie ever made or God knows what.

I also have to link this article, not because it has any different news, but because it contains a hilarious typo:

So, Ryan Reynolds announced that he was going to be following-up his studio flicks X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men Origins: The Proposal with an indie thriller by Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes.

X-MEN ORIGINS: THE PROPOSAL. HEEEEEE.

You know, I'd kind of love to see that. Like an eXtreme version of The Proposal, where instead of Margaret Tate proposing to her employee Andrew Paxton to stop her deportation from the U.S., we get like, Black Widow II proposing to the guy she's supposed to capture, Deadpool (and hey, ScarJo and Reynolds would barely have to act - they've already done the thing in real life!) as part of a scheme not to get booted from the Thunderbolts team by Osborn or something (well, you know, he did want her to capture Deadpool's heart. It could work!). And then there would be crazy shenanigans where Black Widow THOUGHT Deadpool was just some poor slob who lives in a crappy apartment in Manhattan, but then they fly out over the ocean to meet his family (Cable, of course) on the family estate and Black Widow discovers that if he wanted to, Deadpool could take over governance of the island of Providence, but he's just HAPPIER living in Manahattan and narrowly escaping death or capture by Black Widow, because he's a masochistic romantic at heart. And of course that suddenly makes her realize that she loves him too much to marry him and let Osborn kill him!

But then, this would be an X-Men movie, so by that point there would have been lots of yelling and explosions, and Deadpool would be trying to convince Black Widow he'd risk Death by Green Goblin for her, and Black Widow would beat Deadpool up in an over-the-top martial arts fight for being such an idiot as to prefer a crappy apartment in Manhattan and being shot at all the time to life on Providence with Cable, and Osborn would appear on a glider to try to fire Black Widow and deport Deadpool to outer space, and some minor characters would die, and there'd be a giant fight scene where Deadpool and Black Widow would prove their love for each other by fighting "back to back!" and taking on some ultimate killing machine engineered by a corrupt military, and then they'd kiss passionately, and then Deadpool would get shot in the head by a special bullet and become more crazy than he was before by forgetting his love for Black Widow and developing split personalities that talk to each other via little boxes, and the movie would end with Black Widow dying in the sands and Deadpool running off to go assassinate somebody.

Hey. I could totally see it.

Speaking of Deadpool (as we do, often), I happened upon a fantastic new (I think?) Deadpool sculpture. That, sadly, appears to be only in the Philippines right now (what's up with that??). But take a look. It's Deadpool as seen in one of my favorite pics from Cable & Deadpool. It looks amazing. I WANT IT. (*sigh*)

And speaking of both Ryan Reynolds and Deadpool, my favorite Ryan Reynolds & Deadpool pic of the week.

And speaking of comics in general, via cleolinda, we have Panels 66: Why Chicks Cry. The captions are hilarious.

(And via spectralbovine, the follow-up: Ladies, Beware. Heh.)

And now, back to work.