Chicken Wings Party

Thanks to our wonderful friends, we have an abundance of wing and barbecue sauces. Because it's not really all that convenient or cost effective to fry up a bunch of wings for dinner for just the two of us, we had a bunch of people over and a multitude of wings and french fries to fry up. Since the fries had frost on them, Lee had his lovely protective gear on to minimize blinding from spitting oil:


Mmm, I love a man in safety glasses! We went all Martha Stewart and put the melba toast and carrots for blue cheese dipping in our bread pans (because all the bowls were being used in the wings process) and had biscuits and garbage bread. We also offered a salad and ice cream sundaes for dessert, with homemade caramel and whipped cream. Lee scoffs at my dessert making attempts, but the caramel finally worked after burning only two batches of sugar.



Lee had a nice assembly line for his frying going on, drying raw chicken in the sink, pot of cornstarch to coat the chicken before dunking them into the oil:


We had about 15 people, so it was a good sized party. It was nice to be able to have a little taste of home, even if it wasn't quite the same.

What have I been doing?

1. Chicken Wing party - post as soon as I remember to do stuff with the pictures.

2. Local sight-seeing and recovering from said party (not like, hungover or anything, just house cleaning and all). Last weekend was pretty much supposed to be the last weekend before the miserable, wet, cold winter season, so we walked about and took pictures (which will be on Flickr probably tonight).

3. Swearing to myself I will go to bed early tonight.

4. Not going to bed early any night.

5. Being tired and lazy because I have not been getting quite enough sleep.

6. Knitting on a couple of projects I can't blog about as of yet.

7. Not sewing on the remaining button so I can give the baby gifts away after photographing and blogging them.

8. Making some progress, but not enough, on the projects I can blog about. Actually, I really should show off my Blooming glove again, now that it's all done minus the weaving in of ends. Must get on that.

9. Studying Japanese.

10. Watching Dan Brown movies. Rather disappointed in Angels and Demons, really impressed by how they showed the cognitive processes with DaVinci Code.

11. Not blogging. Not even logging onto blogger. Reading other peoples' blogs though.

Skills: +10 in formatting

Sometimes my image hosting site (Ripway) likes to cut off my access to images. Things like the progress bars over in the sidebar. I log in to see what the problem is, and get this message:

Our system has detected that downloads from your account over the last 24 hours has exceeded your daily download limit. Public downloads of your files are temporarily unavailable.") As soon as your downloads for a 24 hour period drops below your daily limit, public access to your files will be restored.

Use the chart to the right to see when heavy downloads occurred, and how much was used.

I also have this information about my usage, just a couple of lines above the temporary account locking notice:

Data Transfer
In the last 24 hours you have used 4.95 MB of data transfer, out of 150.00 MB.

So I should have 145.05 MB of data transfer remaining for this 24 hour time period. That is not exceeding my limit. I was always annoyed to see the little "pg" on my progress bars when the images went away, so recently decided to change them to status updates on each project. Cute little things, like "Finished!", "Needs blocking", "Slowly but surely", "Soon" and things like that. Well, I realized that that made for very wonky formatting. Why, I was never sure. The last time I saw it I didn't have time to sit and fix it, but this time, by gosh, I was going to do something about it!

I realized that all of the ones that said "Finished!" were okay. Others, not so much. The words would cut off and continue vertically down the screen, obscuring the names of other projects and cute progress bar messages. Not good. Two projects, one at 90%, and one at 98%, had the same phrase, which was fine for the 98% bar but cut off in the 90% bar. Of course, this didn't clue me in.

What did clue me in was the fact that the one that had only 35% progress cut off at about the 35% mark. A-ha! The alternate text for the image only shows up underneath where the image would be! So, something that is finished can handle any phrase up to 100 pixels long. I changed all of the phrases to something that can fit (OTN can fit any project at least 35%, UFO needs 40%) and removed alternate text from all the projects too small to be able to handle any. Awesome.

I also went through and closed the website formatting for some of those titles. This way all of the alternate texts are black instead of blue or grey. Check out the sidebar, I'm sure it'll still be image-less for the next few hours, and see how lovely it is now!

Mmmm, dinner!

I made a lovely wintery dinner because we had a cold snap, and I told Lee I'd make him whatever he wanted for his birthday. Feather Stew! It's a family recipe (Lee's family) and delicious. Pretty simple, or at least, our version was.

You take a bunch of chicken, preferably with skin and bones, and brown it in some oil with garlic. Add sauteed mushrooms and water until chicken and mushrooms are just barely covered. We didn't saute the mushrooms and used big mushrooms because they were cheaper here than the button mushrooms we'd typically use. I also am not a mushroom person, so we left them large for Lee.


Simmer until chicken falls apart, remove bones and skin and shred the chicken. Typically, you'd then refrigerate this overnight, and remove the layer of gross the next day. Re-heat (or use these fancy oil and fat sucking pads we found here and make it all in one go), then add some white wine and cream, salt and pepper to taste.


Serve over white rice with the wine you used to flavor it (we had a lovely Riesling) with some crusty bread. For dessert, apple pie! Mmmmm, delicious!

I need more pictures

I have a box bag I've been using to cart around my yarn. It's a perfect size for small-ish projects, and the handle fits around my wrist nicely. Is it photographed? No.

I have my finished Cinderella's Castle Art of Disney cross stitch framed and hanging in my craft room. Is it photographed? No.

I finished my Rogue hoodie months and months ago, and have worn it out a few times. Is it photographed? No.

I made another Fetching to match the non-missing one from the first set. There is a definite difference in gauge. It will make an amusing blog post. Is it photographed? No.

I have all the baby stuff ready to go, after stalling out on the final finishing since I was unwell for the 10 hour stretch it was originally supposed to be done in. Are they photographed? No.

I have three, count 'em, three! pairs of socks in the sidebar that are finished. One that is for gifting, so is not getting a post yet, just in case, but two that are work socks and have been worn a bit since getting finished, my Hourglass and Nebula socks. Are they photographed? Yes, but not well, and I want better pictures before blogging.

I want to publish Betty's Scarf, so it will not be photographed until later.

The one crochet item and the one stamp are gifts that (still) need to go out, so won't be shown until they're gifted, just in case.

I haven't been working on any cross stitches, so no pictures of that.

Most of my long-term knits haven't moved since I last photographed and blogged them.

My current knits are either secret or have been recently photographed and blogged.

I have blog fodder, I just need to exercise my camera a bit! Maybe I'll do a major photo session today since it's nice and sunny out, if I get home before the sun sets.

Books, Books, Books

Squeaking in just under the wire for a post on the 4th, I'm going to mention books. And be a bit random.

I like books. I like to read. A lot.

I'm on Goodreads. Join me if you're a reader too. I also have that widget over in the sidebar, which if you read my blog from an rss feed, you've never seen. I like Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, Robert Heinlein, and sensational history, like things that verge on historical fiction (A Treasury of Royal Scandals is amazing!) and things that are decidedly historical fiction (or plain old fiction with historical settings) but good (The Red Tent, Memoirs of a Geisha, any Arthurian legend like Mists of Avalon), and I am, if you didn't know already, a big user of lists.

I like crossing things off of lists. I used to carry a planner around with me with all kinds of lists in it. Things don't get done nearly as well as they used to because Franklin Covey stopped producing the kind of pages I like and it's expensive to get pages that would probably work shipped to Japan, so I haven't done so yet. I really should. It would help a lot with remembering to e-mail, mail, and do various little things that I just can't seem to remember on my own anymore.

Anyway, the point of mentioning the lists is that I've been going through the book lists on the sidebar and bolding any book that appears on more than one list. I've got the first three lists completely done, and am working my way through. This way, if I'm trying to decide between books, I can read the ones that appear on multiple lists to somewhat artificially up my score.

Right now, I'm reading Last of the Mohicans on my iPod (so it doesn't advance very far very often), Freakonomics (not on my lists) as a hard copy (which can't be read as easily while knitting, so again doesn't get touched often enough), Discworld #8 Guards! Guards! on my laptop (which is on the BBC Big Read list and what I read while knitting), and I'm starting something new on my work laptop. That one doesn't get touched often either, which is why it took me a year to get through the last 1/4 of the Count of Monte Cristo. It's only for if I am eating lunch at my desk or am waiting for a meeting after school or something - during the workday I work or work on Japanese, including attempting to read Harry Potter. That's not going too well just yet.

I'm trying to decide between Mrs. Dalloway (crossed off on my list but I have no recollection of reading it), Jane Eyre, and A Clockwork Orange. I think I'll go with Mrs. Dalloway followed by Jane Eyre since they're both available through free online sources. I love Project Gutenberg!

I am also annoyed at some of the lists I have for good books. Any of them that list the Lord of the Rings books list it as a single entry. It's a trilogy. Three books. Not one entry. Same with His Dark Materials, and on one of the two 1000 book lists, Discworld. Discworld is a huge series of nearly 30 books! You had 1000 books to choose, and you put a 30 book series, 3% of your total list size, as ONE entry? Come on now! At least the BBC Big Read people took the best of that series (and the Harry Potter series) and put those books on individually. Yes, that means that 7 of them are in the top 100 and there are eight more from 101 - 200, but they are just that good! Also, it takes quite some time to get to cross things off if it's listed as a series instead of by book. Especially when the series is Discworld and not yet finished.

Indigo Moon Samples

I actually did write this on the 3rd, and forgot to add images and post it when I got home. Crap. Pretend it showed up on the third in addition to being dated on the third.

I got to work with some lovely Indigo Moon yarn to knit up a couple of pairs of sample socks. She dyes everything naturally and it's one of the "greener" yarns you can find (if you don't count the penalties for transporting it from the west coast of Canada to you) with some amazing colors. It's some pretty nice sock yarn that feels as though it will last quite some time under typical wear. Wouldn't be able to definitively say without wearing some for awhile, but they feel pretty good!

The first pair was a pattern made specifically for Indigo Moon yarns, Chains of Love, this time as a sample for shows and out of the same colorway as the pictures in the pattern, West Coast Sunset from the West Coast Musings line. This particular skein was a 120 gram skein, so was perfect for this pattern (it calls for a longer leg than most), but I wouldn't count on being able to do the full extra long leg with a typical skein.

Pattern: Chains of Love Socks
Yarn: Indigo Moon West Coast Musings in West Coast Sunset, one generous skein.

Needles: US1/2.25 mm, DPNs
Timeframe: August 28 - September 21, 2009, but I knit a different pair of socks in between the first and second.
Mods: None because it's a sample knit!
Problems: Not really, I'm just not all that pleased with how the row of twisted knits between the purls looks on either side of the center pattern. I'm not sure why, but one side is nice and tight and the other is loose. I think it might be the order of knits vs. purls or something, but I'm not sure.

The second pattern was Blackrose, knit in Turqoise. I love this pattern and plan to make it for myself in a darker color someday. This skein was 106 grams, still a bit generous!

Pattern: Blackrose
Yarn: Indigo Moon Turqoise, one skein.

Needles: US1/2.25 mm, DPNs
Timeframe: September 4 - 15, 2009.
Mods: None because it's a sample knit!
Problems: None, fast knit, love the pattern, want my own!

Continuing with the sidebar cleanup, next we'll have...some other post? Not sure yet, I need to figure out what I have pictures for and what still needs photography. Rogue still needs photography, as do the Nebula socks. Hmmm....maybe a current projects post? No, that'll be boring. Meh, we shall see!