You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Apple gets extravagant’ tag.
When I was little, there was a darkroom off the living room – I’m pretty sure it had once been a closet. It was my father’s darkroom, built with his own two hands. There was a red light, and there was equipment and paper in there, and it smelled of chemicals that I came to associate with my dad and with grownup stuff. My dad carried his camera pretty much everywhere when I was little – it may or may not have been a Minolta. Whatever the camera was, he took some truly bitchin’ black and white photos, and he processed them himself (I was really impressed by this when I was little – I still remain impressed, to be honest) over the course of my childhood, in a series of smallish rooms cordoned off in every house we lived in. When the digital age arrived, he moved on to digital cameras, of course, and the darkrooms disappeared. At some point he picked other hobbies,* and really only shoots pictures now at family events or when he and my mom go on vacation. They’re still really good pictures, just not as many.
Me, I never got into photography that much. When I was thirteen, I ended up with a Minolta that had once been my dad’s. I dropped it directly on its lens onto a brick sidewalk in Princeton, NJ, and the cap got jammed so tight it had to be taken to a camera shop to get fixed, and I had to borrow two weeks of allowance in order to do it. I brought the camera home from that outing in tears – I was mortified, and also afraid to pick it up ever again. I think I shot something like two rolls of film, all told. When my son was born, I shot lots of pictures for, like, two years – but I never had the money to develop them,** and once it became apparent that I took pictures and never developed them, I stopped taking pictures altogether.
But now, zomg, I got a phone.
Have you read The Hunger Games yet? One of the nicest things about Our Man Cub being thirteen now is that we not only read together*, but we can share books independently. I read the book (well, books) after hearing about it for probably a year from all my friends. I have no idea why it took me so long to get around it it – prolly ‘cos I was buried in the Song of Fire & Ice books for the better part of three seasons, right? But anyway, Hunger Games, the whole series (there are three books), was wonderful – a page-turner, and a quick read as well, and I passed the books on as I finished them, to Man Cub, who devoured them, and then passed them off to Jaquelyn, who also loved them. Her beau listened to them on audio book, too, so all of us wound up chatting quite a bit about these books after we’d all caught up – a merry little book party, for sure!
Well! When it was announced that the first book is being made into a movie, we all got pretty excited. It’s coming out on the 23rd, and I’m keeping fingers crossed that it’s done well,** and planning to pick up movie tickets in advance. We are stoked =D
Also out soon (June 22nd) will be Brave, a Disney Pixar film that looks pretty fantastic. It appears we finally have a Disney with an actual girl hero \o/ The trailers give me chills, both with the content and the beauty of the whole thing (also the score sounds gorgeous). Look! Look!
So December by us is such a flurry full of celebratory business as to make the whole thing nearly overwhelming – actually, it starts in November, with the full family Thanksgiving and my family in town, and doesn’t really slow down until a few weeks into January, but let’s just concentrate on what’s going on by us in this fine month*:
Man Cub and I have birthdays, then Skipper Jane’s comes up. Hanukkah, Christmas, then Will Dearest’s birthday. Then right there, BOOM it’s New Year’s Eve. It’s a good thing I like cake,** I’ll tell ya. It’s a little zooey, and I joke that we hemorrhage money, but I try to take it one piece at a time, and it generally works out. I’ve finally finished shopping for Hanukkah and the birthdays, and the Hanukkah stuff is wrapped, with just the rest of the Christmas stuff to pick up and wrap, and I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m even a little bit in the spirit of things \o/
Tonight we will sit down to a traditional Hanukkah meal*** of that pasta I made last week that was so yummy, and we’ll light candles and trade presents, and it will be lovely.
Which is to say, A Very Happy Hanukkah (or just a Very Lovely Evening if you’re not celebrating) from our family to you and yours ♥
Also, the Maccabeats have a new video out for the holiday!
(more videos under the cut)
I’ve always been a little bit fascinated with armour – maybe it’s all the sci-fi and fantasy that I read and have read since I was little, maybe it’s just a preoccupation with fashion, but I just think the stuff is terribly neat-o. As you may or may not know, Dear Will works at the Higgy as the conservator, and I worked there briefly, in education, a while back. So I’ve managed to learn bits and pieces about the stuff over the years.
So in 2oo8 when Man Cub wanted to be a knight for Halloween, I dug in with gusto. He and I discussed the matter at hand (fashion!), and decided on some fanceh scale armour. I researched, asked a ton of questions, and then I cut about a zillion pieces of black craft foam into chevrons, pulled an old long-sleeved tee out of the closet, and fired up the glue gun.
I fashioned the shoulders by molding them around a small pumpkin, and scaled up the shirt from the bottom up, and when I got most of the way around, I ran out of foam chevrons. So, um, I made him a cape and called it a day. Will finagled a helmet and a wooden sword, and our man cub brought home much candy that Halloween. That costume actually made it through two Halloweens (the second year spray painted gold and, “blood” spattered) before it was too small. I believe he would have worn it a third year had it not gotten tight.*
I loved the process of building the costume – the shaping and molding, and even the cutting out of chevrons was kinda meditative. And ever since that costume, I’ve been wanting to build another armour.
HONK HONK!
Ok, so the blue ox horns are finally finished \o/ For those of you not following along, Jaquelyn announced last month that she and her beau were going the couples Halloween costumes route, with her beau as Paul Bunyon, and her as Babe the Blue Ox. Which necessitated the making of horns. If you go back an entry, you’ll see how this whole thing started, with the spray foam and the carving it down with a box cutter (fun teims!).
It started with the craving to go apple picking a few weeks ago. Actually, no – it probably started when we made the pickles. I had never made pickles before, so when I went to get the stuff to do it, I really had no idea what I needed, and I overbought like zomg. Which is to say, I picked up three different sizes of jars, a box each, and then we had a ton of jars left over.* And of course, I was like, We need to do something with these! What goes in a jar??
So when the urge to go pick apples hit, I totally took it up on its business, and we went to Stowe’s. We usually go there once a year, in October, to pick out pumpkins and check out the petting zoo. I think we’ve been doing this every weekend before Halloween since Man Cub was four (three?)** and it’s a really nice afternoon – we buy ice cream cones filled with feed and get mobbed by the goats, we check out the ponies and the chickens, and choose pumpkins to bring home and carve. We almost always come home with an apple pie or a jug of cider. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that we should go apple picking. But this year we did, and it was totally fun. After we’d filled our bushel bag from the tree, and fed groundfalls to the horses across the street, we headed home, where the bag intimidated me for a week.
23 pounds of apples is a lot of apples! I took some to work for lunch, Man Cub took some to school for his. We fed slices to his pet rat. And I made plans to turn them into sauce.
The problem being, I had no idea how to make sauce. I checked out recipes on the interwebs and managed to get confused – everyone has their own recipe, and everyone has a different amount of water they add to the pot. Some people keep the skin. Some people put them through a food mill. Some people add sugar, some don’t. Everyone insists on a particular kind of apple. I forgot what kind of apples we’d picked almost as soon as I was told. Our apples wound up being a variety that’s a little more tart than sweet – good eating apples, but no clue from me how they would do as sauce, right? So I read a bunch more recipes, and decided that I would make stuff up. ‘Cos that’s how I roll.
It’s true! We downed Shannox last night \o/ After a couple weeks of fumbling and strat tweaking, we did it – we have officially dug our heels into Firelands.
I’m deeply enjoying the content dropped with 4.2 – for one thing, the TH and TB dailies (which were the only ones that I was bothering to do since I maxed reps with everyone) were starting to get a little stale, tbh. For another thing, ZOMG DURIDS STORIES, right? And new reps to grind, and new achieves to work on, and new pets – all that stuff is stuff I love.
Well, somehow, in the midst of all of the new content, I managed to grab a quest to craft a legendary. Wuuut? No, really!
Had I really understood what I had in my quest log, had I known what osmness I could be building, I would have had more stake in the /roll last night when an Eternal Ember dropped out. Maybe I would have been nervous, or giddy with anticipation when I rolled for the order of who would get to build the legendary first. Maybe I would have waited till everyone else had rolled. The truth is, I never do expect to win a roll, so it didn’t occur to me to get worked up. And then this happened –
Dude. I have sat down to write this post eleventy bajillion times now* and keep coming up with another post, but one that I’m unhappy with.
The post I keep writing is about staying adventuresome and not being self-limiting, but I don’t like the way it keeps getting snarky and finger-pointy in the middle, and anyway I really just wanted to talk about how much I love Game of Thrones (both the book and the HBO series), and tell you about this marvelous cake I made!
SO. I made a crepe cake, guise! I used the crepe recipe from Smitten Kitchen, improvised a dark chocolate ganache (my very fist one) by mashing together a bunch of recipes I found on different sites and the advice of lovely downstairs neighbors Jaquelyn and Daniel, warmed up some orange marmelade, and went to town. 31 layers later, it was delicious!
So we had a strep throat scare this week. Poor Man Cub was down for the count over the weekend with what felt like a golf ball in his throat, fevery and a little nauseous. By Monday Will and I had sore throats too, and we all shuffled off to the pediatrician Tuesday morning, sure that we would be making appointments with our doctor on the way home. Thank goodness, no strep – it’s just something disgusting that’s rolling around in our area right now.
So instead of calling the doc on the way home, we hit the grocery for ibuprofin and popsicles. As fate would have it, I had a coupon for the popsicles. This is what our freezer looks like this morning* –
Also, I’m having issues with today being Thursday already – where the heck did the week go??
*Edy’s Fruit Bars are the bomb. ZOMG, the pineapple ones! And now they have peach! I need to find some of those.
I’ve been feeling a little blue this week – the job search has been an annoying litany of, “I’m sorry, but you’re over-qualified,” and other pursuits are blooming in their own time (read: slowly), and my arms are a little sore from yoga. Life just had me by the tail there for a little bit, y’know? So I wanted to do something nice for myself.*
I had some test fabric left from the batch of tees that I made last weekend. A Hanuman print that came out pretty on plain muslin. I’d had it sitting since last week, trying to decide what to do with it.** Well, a girl can always use a handbag, right? Right!
Apple Tells All 