I radiate innocence

Or, A Portrait of Persuasion:



Did I mention?




















(Schacht Hi-Lo, 1.1 oz. I teach low-whorl because that's how my teacher started me, and what was good enough for half a dozen 10 year olds once upon a time is good enough for any collegiate whippersnapper.)

Fruits of labour

Or, ill-gotten gains:

Twelve pints of quince jam, plus about two pints in a container in the fridge for want of jars.

Quinces are related to apples and pears, about apple-sized, but more bulbous. I hear tell that in warmer climes the fruits ripen to edible softness, but here in the frozen tundra of the Mid-Atlantic they stay hard as the dickens despite turning from mango-green to banana-yellow. Post-harvest, the Pocket Linguist and I conned some friends into coming over to help with the peeling and coring and worm-slaughtering part of the work. Yes, worms-- the quinces we used were not grown for sale, so we had to wrest a fair number of them away from previous claimants. I tried to drown out the worms a couple of days before using the fruit, but that only worked on three or four worms. (Not worth it, I've decided. I just lose the use of my sink and get the heebie-jeebies from seeing worms hanging half out of the quince.) (Bleargh.)

Quince flesh starts out white, turning a dark orange-pink during cooking. Aside from the appeal of having pretty food, though, quince is an excellent jam fruit because the natural pectin content is so high that no additional pectin is necessary-- all you need is fruit and water.

Oh-- and sugar. Lots of sugar. More sugar, in fact, than I had left after assorted baking projects and the Pocket Linguist's batches of sorbet (spicy chocolate) and ice cream (vanilla buttermilk, mmmm). This year's jam is, perhaps, a wee bit on the sour side. Maybe just a little. Still, I can assure you that it is very tasty with ice cream, in yoghurt, and on slices of brown soda bread, and I fully expect it to be delicious as a filling for sandwich cookies. Hmmm... quince macarons, anyone?

4 oz is more than you think

With this project I decided to tell myself that I'm not spinning for evenness, I'm spinning for fun. The finished skein is fingering-to-sport-ish weight (unwashed), and I'm spinning the rest with something similar in mind. The prep is commercial, hand-dyed combed top, spun semi-worsted-- I want to maintain some of the colour variation in the fiber, but I don't want the yarn to be as dense as short forward draw would make it. Variably semi-worsted is probably a better characterization, since sometimes I draft the fibers out mostly parallel, and at other times my drafting more mimics spinning from the fold, drafting more from one side of the supply to the other instead of from the bottom to the top.


4 oz Superwash Merino/Alpaca, 70/30 from Squoosh in colorway "Missing You" spun on what I believe to be a Greensleeves Barebones top-whorl of indeterminate weight.

as it turns out...

...you can do the hustle to the intervals song.

thought you should know

Don't take this as an invitation to join me in it or anything, but I have a ridiculously awesome bed. I've just returned from two months of sub-optimal sleeping environments-- all I'll say is that peasants apparently don't go in for luxury-- and I am frankly astonished by how comfortable, how welcoming, how completely excellent is my (newish) mattress. I just tried to take a nap, but was unable to go to sleep because I was thinking too giddily of how wonderful my bed is.

That's all.

I laugh because I can't really believe it

"In the first thirteen episodes, Schwartz has already included a pregnancy scare, a marriage proposal, an attempted rape, a lost virginity, a near-deadly accident, a divorce, a suicide attempt, multiple thefts, blackmail, a drug addiction, a threesome, at least two counts of breaking and entering, and an eating disorder."

The Genius of Gossip Girl

Seriously, guys? What on earth are you teaching my baby sister?

this doesn't look like a seminar paper to me

Rolags of mystery brown wool (not v. soft), mystery white wool (rather soft), and pink merino rescued from a former life as intestines (quite soft).

Not pictured: the impressive array of standard yarn weights achieved in each spindleful. It was teach-yourself-long-draw week chez detritus. Results have been, shall we say, mixed.

To do:

• Procure necessary accoutrements for Big Damn Party
• Unearth not!ghillies for same
• Write grant proposal
• Also seminar paper
• Contemplate restraining the jubilant efflorescence of my stuff, which appears to be propagating itself à la slime mold (although hopefully with fewer detrimental effects to my respiration) and organizing itself into ever-more-complex piles on various horizontal surfaces

relief

So my internet just experienced a miraculous recovery after being dead for two! whole! days! and I have to say, those two days (from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon) did not make me feel free, relaxed, untethered, one with Nature, or anything else that people claim disconnecting from technology makes them feel. I was just grumpy and out of sorts, and now that the internet has returned to me, I'm just sitting here stroking it lovingly.

detritus of vacation

This is what I was doing last week:

This is where I was doing it:

This is who I was doing it with:



Not pictured: Miang Lao, grapefruit pound cake, or apple-potato galette.

I know, I know, cruel to mention those delicious things and then go on to rant about a yet-unmentioned single ingredient that is unrelated to all of the above. But I'm going to do it anyway. So: let's talk about white balsamic vinegar.

The Stonehouse Olive Oil company has a store in San Francisco's Ferry Building Marketplace, cleverly located next to Recchiuti Confections (don't get me started talking about their cardamom chocolate) and it was through Stonehouse that I first encountered the lighter sibling of dark balsamic vinegar. Their website informs us that white balsamic is aged for only one year-- decidedly on the young end of balsamic vinegar. Wikipedia tells us that your better class of balsamic is aged for twelve years, and your spiffiest variety is aged for twenty-five. I certainly had no complaints about its youth, however. It tastes a bit sharper and sweeter than dark balsamic, and a bit lighter. And mixed with olive oil as dressing for a salad of spinach, beets, blue cheese, and salt-roasted pecans, it was delicious. (The Italians are probably horrified at the mere thought of white balsamic vinegar.) I curse TSA for preventing me from bringing liquids or gels (mmm, pepper jelly) back on the plane, but I'm happy to have found a third possible salad dressing if I see white balsamic again. (The other two? Dark balsamic + olive oil and lemon juice + olive oil.)