Succulence

If I ever become a queen, I want to be addressed as Your Succulence.

This is where I went on Saturday morning.

All the spiky, prickly, weird, moisture-retaining crazy plants you could hope for. I performed some retail therapy but I don't have any pictures of those yet.

This Haworthia seems pretty happy. This one was in the show. I was especially looking for houseplants so it was kind of a haworthia year.

Spiky!

Not a lot of agaves, but I did see this awesome one, also in the show. It's like that Far Side cartoon: How nature says "do not touch"

There was a whole table of blooming cactus for sale. ORANGE!

I have this theory that desert plants haven't been crossed and cultivated and groomed for thousands of years, like roses and hydrangeas and lilacs have, so they often still have these weird, misshapen forms that I am growing to enjoy.

Another fabulous Haworthia. This one reminds me of the castle in the Dark Crystal, while it was still eeeeeevil. (I, ahem, might have bought a much smaller version of this.) I'll take pictures of the medusoid euphorbia this weekend. It looks like a nest of baby snakes.

Domestic

I got all domestic today and did some canning.

Pickled Rainer cherries, ready for their closeup (the brine is pink! PINK!)

Actually, it was more of a case of finishing what I started, which apparently is not a natural talent of mine. And a case of the cherry season in Northern California being so very short this year and maybe me going a little nuts at the farmer's market?

I am so not accustomed to the fruit seasons here. So many years in the Pacific Northwest firmly imprinted the idea into my brain that July is cherry time . June for strawberries, July for cherries and raspberries, August for blackberries and peaches, September-October apple EXTRAVAGANZA. That's a simplification, of course, as many of those run for more than a month. But cherry season has always been a bit short, and out of season cherries are just… no.

Also, I might have bought a few more strawberries than I could handle this week. I pick them up from a market stall that's (very nicely) right on my way to work, Tuesday mornings. (Northern California strawberry season: February through November. Really, it's official . But I still kind of miss hoods). And then I gobble fresh strawberries at my desk most of the day because, duh, fresh strawberries. But I went for the double batch this time, and even I can't consume that many strawberries.

The top pan is Strawberry preserves, although I skipped the vanilla beans because I didn't have any, and used a Meyer lemon, because I did. And on the bottom and in the right picture is strawberry-balsamic vinegar jam from the same source. I haven't cracked open that one yet, but preliminary signs point to YUM.

(I have no idea what is up with all the foaming on the preserves. I've never had a jam recipe do that to me. I did do the maceration, and I did it for almost the 72 hours. (Ha, because that was planned, sure. More like I should know better than to think I'm going to cook jam on a weeknight.) So maybe it was the maceration + the extra sugar? Oh well, we'll see how it tastes).

I was googling about for something to do with the strawberries, and found those two recipes. And then the pickled cherries on the same site, which could be weird or maybe really good, so this is a test. Her site appeals to me because honestly, we don't really consume that much jam, and don't have a lot of extra space. I maybe get through two half-pint jars a year, and regular batch sizes are way more than I need. I still have Meyer lemon marmalade from last July. You want some marmalade? Email me. Should still be pretty tasty, but it won't be as good in a few months (it won't be bad, just not as good.) I do stick to jam and pickles because they're acidic enough that they won't grow botulinium. If you open a jar up and it smells bad, it means it IS bad. It's not just going to silently kill us all).

2 half pints of the balsamic-strawberry, 3 half pints of the preserves, and 3 pints of the pickled cherries. That should hold me for a few days.

Adventures in Dairy

Well hello there, May.

I made butter last week. It was surprisingly easy.

The Google can tell you a lot of ways to do this. What I did:

1. Dump a pint of cream (pasteurized, not ultra-pasteurized) into the mixing bowl of a standing mixer.
2. Use the whip attachment
3. Whip on medium-high for awhile (8 minutes?)

Oh yeah, once it starts to butter-ize, it will start to get messy as the buttermilk starts sloshing around, so drape a kitchen towel over the mixer. I hear a handheld mixer works just as well, just requires a little longer. Or, you know, an hour of hand whipping.

Overwhipped cream

Starting to butter (see the moisture at the bottom?)

I took a Beginning Dairy class a few weeks ago (no, not really the name) where we made butter by passing around a sealed mason jar full of cream and everyone shakes it for a couple minutes. After about 20 minutes you get the same results. We also made ricotta and discussed yogurt, feta, and other young cheeses. Apparently I need a good cave to make aged cheeses. Bummer.

I really like very fresh butter that hasn't picked up any off flavors. I have a problem with most grocery store butter, as it so often tastes just that little bit funky. It's fine for cooking, but straight up, it tastes like whatever else happens to be near it. I admit to occasionally paying way too much for fresh farm butter from the farmers market, since it just tasted like butter, and nothing else (which I would use a tiny bit of, and freeze-hoard the rest, slowly thawing out pieces for myself). My butter tasted pretty close to this, which makes me happy.

Oh, to make it last longer, I did rinse it in several washes of ice water:

1. Pour out the buttermilk into another container
2. Pour ~a cup of ice water onto the butter
3. Squish with rubber spatula
4. Dump out the cloudy ice water

And repeat until the dumped ice water is no longer cloudy. 

I should have froze some of it, because it makes way more butter than I can eat in a few days. Although I did then have to go bake a loaf of oatmeal buttermilk sandwich bread, so I could a) use up the buttermilk, and b) have my butter on my bread. Yum.

Frances

I haven't been posting because I've been avoiding this. I don't particularly want to talk about it now.

Frances died at the end of last year.
I still miss her all the time.

Biblical Precipitation

The weather report says it's supposed to rain A LOT tomorrow, in a small amount of time (check out that Total Precipitable Water graph: nice Pineapple Express jet, huh? It's aimed pretty much directly at where I live. I get unhealthily interested in being at weather epicenters)

Image from the University of Wisconsin - go take a look at the animated one, it's neat.

They're predicting 3-6 inches of rain in the city in the next 24 hours, along with heavy winds. They've already canceled school in SF, Oakland, and Marin (which is supposed to get even more).

Now, to be fair, 6 inches of rain in a short amount of time creates big problems in a place that:

(1) already has saturated wet ground, so the soil can't soak up any more. This is kind of hard to explain to anyone who doesn't live in a desert, but the rain doesn't soak in, it RUNS OFF. (Or even more fun, it feeds underground springs and creeks. See also the sinkhole that opened up last week). Back in Portland the ground could absorb enormous amounts of water before it just got waterlogged and couldn't take any more and suddenly you had a pond not a backyard. The soil here is totally different.

Other cities that are used to flash floods have infrastructure to contain them. Albuquerque, New Mexico has an extensive system of storm drain arroyos to funnel off all that massive precipitation so that it doesn't just run down streets, e.g. the path of least resistance, like it will here tomorrow.

(2) Also there are a bunch of plants and trees suffering from the drought, so many of them are either dead or parts of them are dead, leading to:

(3) expected high winds at the same time == trees falling down and bringing down power lines.

So if the worst happens, it'll be fairly dangerous driving around, with pouring rain, downed trees, and possibly power outages and downed live wires.

But still, it makes me wince a little inside to think of school called for rain. Oh, California.

Roadtrip

At the end of October, my Mom and I drove from Utah to Florida.
We went from this:

to this:

in five days.

It is a long story, but the upshot is that Mom decided she was going to spend the winter in Florida this year, and that she was going to drive there. I came along to keep her company and share the driving.

Before this trip I'd never been to most of Texas or the South, except for the occasional layover in Atlanta and Dallas/Ft Worth (I once spent a week in Houston in July, which I hope to never repeat.)

Since we spent most of our time driving and this trip had an emphasis on Getting There,  we didn't see as much as either of would have liked. We missed almost all of Louisiana, much to my regret. We had to pick and choose where to dawdle. But we did have time for a few things. It was an interesting trip.

Cadillac Ranch, outside of Amarillo, TX

Indigo-go

First: Aw, thanks, LynneW. It was fun to make it! I'm very pleased with the result.

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A few weeks ago a friend of a friend invited me over for an indigo dying session. I haven't ever messed around with indigo before and so was interested to try it. Friend of a friend's friend (this is getting confusing. Let's just call him Alfred, and her Tien) was well-practised in the indigo and prepped a vat for us. We also did some katazome, which is Japanese water-soluble resist dyeing using rice bran paste.

Indigo legs

I was fairly happy with how my samples turned out, even though they weren't great (shut up, inner perfectionist). Indigo is kind of fascinating to work with from a chemistry perspective - the dye exists in soluble, reduced form in the vat, but once removed from the vat it oxidizes into the blue with which you're familiar (blue jeans!). Wet out of the vat it's a beautiful teal-ey green that slowly turns blue. It's got a copper sheen to it as it dries.

We had such a good time, Tien suggested we might go do a weekend workshop with a master artist she knows up in Northern California.

So this is how I found myself last weekend in Covelo, CA, taking a workshop with John Marshall.

One of my samples of katazome & fresh indigo dyeing, on cotton. The flower pattern is woven in.

We learned an enormous array of things - fresh indigo dyeing, growing tips, Japanese textiles, block dyeing, rubbings, natural pigments, katazome preparation and application. Yar, I need to sit down and write out all my notes. I've also got about a billion pictures. Fresh indigo dyeing produces a blue that's a bit more green and less grey than regular indigo.

The plant itself is nifty - you can see the blue in the leaves!

Blurry, terrible picture of fresh Japanese Indigo, Polygonum tinctorium

Fresh vat (abetted by some commercial crystals, as we ran out of time steeping the fresh)

Sadly I don't have much space to grow indigo (or enough water. Stupid drought). The weekend was fascinating, though. It was like being able to talk to an encyclopedia and him being able to answer back and go off on tangents like those wikipedia link wanderings I like to do. It was also lovely to talk with someone who absolutely knows what they want to do and is actually doing it. And who after all this time is still fascinated with it and learning new things about it. I only wish that I could feel so grounded and content. Contentment doesn't necessarily mean boredom.

Beautiful Covelo, CA.  Do cows have mid-life crises?

Adventures in Figs

I don't know about you but I never ate much in the way of figs (except in Newton form). However, now that I live in a Mediterranean Clime, I find figs in the local grocery stores, in little green plastic baskets like the kind that hold strawberries.

Aren't they pretty? These are Black Mission.

I had some plums from the CSA, and found a Grown-Up Recipe involving figs and plums in a brandy-sugar reduction, and though maybe I'd pretend to act my age and try it out. It was fairly simple, and very, very good. I am so making that again if I ever host any dinner parties (Ha. That happens about once ever 10 years).

I had some figs leftover after Grown-Up Recipe, and since roasting makes everything better, on another night I brushed them with some olive oil and stuck them in the oven. We had them in a salad with blue cheese and nuts. Mmm so good.

I used to hate salads when I was growing up, and I pretty much still despise crappy lettuce salads. I don't much care for lettuce drowning in some half-assed vinaigrette, and I can really do without the iceberg except in certain specific cases where I'm looking for crunch. I prefer salads that balance all their flavors together. The lettuce is just one of those flavors. Look at me, a salad snob.

We did this last week with peaches (not really roasted as much as just warmed up). Oh WOW. I'm usually not a huge fan of sweet-savory, but these peaches weren't particularly sweet, and with some goat cheese and arugula they were amazing.

In other news, I made a throw pillow. With an invisible zipper, even! I have a new friend, and she is called Invisible Zipper Foot.

There has been much fabric

And not a whole lot else.

This is only a small bit of it. But it's a cute bit.

(There is, of course, the Current Commuter Socks, and I got bored one night and started Glockenblume, but doilies don't count.)

Crazy Aunt Purl once had a post about how she noticed that she was buying stuff because at work she missed her current stuff, and her speculation was that she was just buying things so that she could "visit her stuff" on the weekends. That is an excellent description of what I've been doing lately. It's not really how I want to live, so I am working more on actually doing and not just acquiring.

The quilt shops of San Francisco are small but well-curated. They are definitely aimed at a particular audience, but as I appear to be pan-fabric-phyllic, it's all good.

Back before I gained the pile of yarn, I did a lot of quilting. Since I got distracted by yarn and dyeing, there's been all this interesting new modern quilting movement, and it's been fun to look through quilting blogs. I am so dating myself.

(except I am so over perfect women with perfect houses and perfect children and the rest of their perfect  lives. Also I might twitch a little at blog posts signed with big swirly signatures. Not a hater, just reminds me of those elementary school girls who used hearts instead of dots on their i's. I didn't have a great experience with those girls.)

I do not have a perfect life, although I am extremely lucky to have my own studio space.
My very messy studio space.

That's the panorama shot I took a few weeks ago. Huge, unworkable mess. Here, I've annotated it for you:

I got tired of not being able to find anything, and finally committed on some shelving. With Ikea and the Love Monkey's help securing things to walls, it looks a little better now. I'm still working on it. I'll take an after picture when I can see more of the floor.

A couple of San Francisco pictures:

Dr. Seuss called and he wants his flowers back

This is the bloom of the Red-flowering Gum. Yes, I know it's pink. San Francisco has such a weird really-it's-a-desert-except-for-all-that-fog climate that very odd things grow here. Australian and New Zealand natives seem to have done the best. And enormous, so-large-you-would-not-believe-it jade plants. No seriously, they're considered an invasive species.

Bay Bridge at sunset, from the Embarcadero

This looks very much like Pacific Northwest picture to me. I think it's the ferries coming in that does it.

Frances and I, basking in the sun

Days sliding by

I have no idea how it got to be the end of August of 2014.

In kitty news, Ms. Frances is still among us, despite a couple times where we thought she wasn't going to make it. We take it day by day.

Hello, sleepy cat

The other day I finished up some long-suffering socks that I think I started 4 years ago

I ran out of yarn for the toes, and couldn't decide what to do. It wasn't actually the toes, but about 1/3 of the foot. A kind person on Ravelry sent me her leftovers in the same colorway, and I finally completed them. It's the Gentleman's Sock with Lozenge Pattern from Nancy Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks. An easy pattern to continue once you set it up.

Hello, fancy socks with lozenge pattern in 2 dye lots, but I do not care

Sunday we went for a ride. Today my legs feel they might be happier with some other person. Hmph, it wasn't that far. It's just been a couple years since I've done an 18-mile bike trip. Bah. I need to get out more.

We passed First Cake (The Original)

Then climbed up the Presidio and stopped to admire the view

And then crossed the view. This is at the 2nd tower of the bridge, looking south. I didn't realize that the Marin headlands side of the bridge was higher than the San Francisco side.

And then we went back.

And in case you're curious, yes, I woke up at 3:20 am on Sunday morning and the bed was shaking and the windows rattling and said "is it an earthquake?" But it was very mild, short, and nothing at all fell down (which, to be honest, is semi-miraculous as we have been very laissez-faire about earthquake-securing.) I went back to sleep and K put in an entry on Did You Feel It? (also, these MMI pictures from a 1958 text book are great)

Succulents

I bought some new friends (because that's apparently how I roll these days, buying friends):

The cactus is echinocereus rigidissimus var. rubispinus at home in his new pot.

Thank you all for the comments. I'm very sorry I haven't responded to any of them. Frances isn't doing well, and I'm having trouble coping. That partially translates to not responding to email in timely manner. I try, then people say "so how are you" and I reply "not so good, my cat is dying" and then it doesn't really go very well from there. So it's easier to just not open the inbox some days. And then days becomes weeks and it just gets more embarrassingly late.

I'm so tired of being this little puddle of goo of a person. I often wish I could just ditch the sensitivity, just get to the damn ending of the Velveteen Rabbit without bawling every. single. time. And it's not a good cry, oh no. I cry ugly, with my face all squished up and my cheeks flushing red and my voice goes all high and squeaky, when I can get out anything at all. I could use a little Vulcan reserve but I cannot damn learn how. Where's a class on how not to tear up over kittens or emotionally manipulative movies or just a stupid pretty picture, even? Just how is all this emotion useful anyway? I need some spines. Pretty pink ones.

This one is for my evil twin

Feel better soon, evil twin, and continue to wreak all your havoc.

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What's it been, like 6 months?

So. Stuff! Happening!

I'm still in San Francisco. No change there. The new place is still fantastically wonderful. I would like to mix it up with the plants, but with the drought this is not a good year for that. For now I'm restricting myself to a few herb pots, watered with the greywater left after washing dinner veggies.

Looking East to the bay

I got a new job. It is a really good job. I miss some of the people from my last job, but I very much do not miss others. At new job I'm frustrated a lot less of the time, and ALL my coworkers are really smart people and funny in the same kind of nerd wavelength way that I find funny and best of all, I feel like I can trust all of them. Altogether it's a good thing. I didn't realize quite how defensive I'd become. This is what happens when you can't trust that your coworkers will believe you. You make sure you backup and triple check and are absolutely sure that what you're saying is correct. You leave no holes or weaknesses in your armor.

I still spend much of the time drifting and/or hiding under the bed. But hey, I finished some doilies!

That would be the pile of thread from the last post. Blocked, that sucker is about 2 1/2 feet in diameter (if you look carefully, you can see the toes included for scale). The pattern is Mitteldecke by Christine Duchrow (82.4), although I used the pattern from the Rachel Penning booklet. The thread is DMC Cébélia Cotton size 30 in ecru, and I used 2.0mm needles. Link to my Ravelry project page.

I'm comfortable enough now that I am OK doing my own thing on the edging, which I did, because I like a VERY CONTROLLED edging and not some loosey goosey SC 3 together chain 7 and away you go. It's akin to matching the ribbing at the top of cabled socks to the cabled pattern below. Sure, you could do any old K2P2 ribbing and then just start the cables and not care how the columns fed into each other, but why do that when you could CONTROL THE UNIVERSE? I'd just like to say that my internal perfection monster (generally) doesn't extend to matching up sock stripes. I find the bit of chaos charming. But I guess I am anal about my doilies.

Succulents!

The Love Monkey and I both have a nasty cold that's making the rounds. It's going to be a quiet weekend.

Frances is not so happy that I am not home all day every day.
This is one of the big drawbacks of new work.
My kitty is also not feeling so well lately. bleh.

She's lost a lot of weight this year and her kidneys are slowly ceasing to function. This is not an unusual thing in older cats. We think she is 13 or 14 but she was a stray, and the vet gauged her age by looking at the amount of tartar on her teeth. Not the most precise of methods.

She was doing all right for a long while but not so much in the last couple weeks. So I have become the crazy cat lady that gives subcutaneous fluids to her cat every couple of days. K helps immensely by helping me hold her, as you don't really need to aim very well, but she is (understandably) not so happy being stuck with a big needle. I really need 3 hands: one for the needle, one for securing the cat, and one to control the flow. I do not enjoy sticking a 18 gauge needle in my cat, but she is still up and stumping about and yowling loudly, and gives no indication that she is tired of being here, so we keep on with what we can (I believe I will be exploring smaller needles).

In other (not so sad) news, something is distracting me away from the doilies.

Knitter Bait

Yesterday I went down to the Ferry Building to go the Saturday Farmer's Market there.

Let's play spot-the-seagull

I don't usually go, because it used to be kind of a pain to get to and because you have NEVER seen a farmer's market as fru-fru as this one. OK, it can't compete will full-time indoor produce markets like inside of the Ferry Building. I'm talking temporary, put-up and pull-down markets.

I don't have evidence. Maybe NYC can beat it. But I'll just let you picture it, all the gentrified California farms you can imagine. I think all the stands there have websites, and probably facebook pages too. (I bought a pack of cosmetically challenged bell peppers. When Kurt saw it, he said 'The farms of East Palo Alto? Really?' I didn't even know there were farms in East Palo Alto, which wikipedia says had the highest homicide rate in the country in 1992, but it's gone a down a lot since then and also says is exactly due north of Palo Alto.)

That said, there is some really fantastic produce you can buy there. It's not all snobby celery.

It appears that the oranges are coming in. Also in full force: persimmons, asian pears, eggplant, and lots and lots of greens.

I went for late apples, since we've been invited to Thanksgiving at a friend's place and I am under threat unless I bring pie. While nobody had any Mutsus, my most favorite pie apple, I found a tiny stall with a variety of bizarre apples I'd never heard of and because surprises are great! I bought a bunch of weird stuff. (oh hey, here's their website)

I sat down near the Gandhi statue and knit for a while on the latest.

Yes, another doily. They don't have to fit anyone and the pattern never gets boring.

Within 2 minutes someone had stopped and was asking me about my project and details about the  needles and construction. Heh.

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Days are sort of sliding by right now and while that's not good it could be much worse. I should have goals and plans and action and change but it's hard sometimes to just work through the day and keep the the laundry going and the dishes clean. I feel bad about just taking the easy way out and drifting along, which feeling of course just makes the problem worse. Ha.

For today I'm just going to pay the bills, and anticipate Thanksgiving pie, and knit on my ridiculously useless doily, and maybe try to ditch the guilt if only temporarily by crossing off a couple of the must-be-dones off the list. The should-be-dones are still lurking, as always, but I'm not going to think about them for a little while.

Frances is taking her mid-morning nap in the sunshine.

Well, hello.

Downtown, on a park ramble a couple weekends ago

I haven't felt like I've had much to say for a while. Not that there weren't Things Happening, just that they seemed boring and inane to talk about. 

To catch things up: I never caught Mama cat. Even with tuna fish she wouldn't go near the trap. She stopped coming for a while. I hope she's all right. We moved and I stopped feeding her. The SPCA reassured me that there were lots of feral feeders around there, that if she got pregnant, then she was getting food from somewhere. I should have figured out some way of going over every day, but it all dropped out with the move. 

Thing 2. We moved, across town. The new place is wonderful. Not that the old place wasn't nice, but the new place is amazingly fantastic and I still find myself looking up and not quite believing I'm living here. We even have a backyard. With sunlight. I know, that sounds ridiculous, but look again at that picture. 

There are way more stairs and uphills at the new place than the old place. The first couple weeks my knees wanted to know WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE TO US?? We had movers (oh, so much worth the $$. Way cheaper than 3 months of physical therapy), but I still had to do a lot of lifting,  packing and unpacking. It was a toss up sometimes between whether to abuse the knees or the back. Me and my ice pack were BFFs. The knees have mostly gotten used to things and only occasionally seize up. I do have to remember to stretch my calves, oh, all the time. 

Other than the expected lifting and unpacking and packing and crap, it was about the easiest move I've ever done. I still have too much junk. A year later and I STILL HAVE TOO MUCH JUNK. argh. But now I've got more space in which to ignore it. Maybe not such a good thing.

Frances, with pile o' boxes. These have been since moved out of the front room.

The in-laws visited. We went looking for iconic views.

And I have likely lost my mind because I've made plans to visit, of all places, New York City for Christmas. Because obviously I don't get enough of the urban every day.