June 4—The three main ingredients in French cooking: Butter, butter, and butter.
Today I started a two-day baking binge. I'm planning on bringing an enormous quantity of croissants to work on Sunday, and since croissant dough has to chill so long in the fridge, I figured I'd better start now. My motivation has less to do with kindness and more to do with the fact that every time we go to the grocery store, my dad tosses butter in the cart whether we need it or not, with the result that I opened the freezer this morning and saw five pounds of butter. What the fuck. So I decided to get rid of it all by making croissants till I ran out of butter. Of course, I failed by overcompensating. I started to make the last batch of croissants and didn't have quite enough butter left, so I ran to the store and bought more.
It didn't end there. I had to run to the store again to get and brown sugar so I could make brown sugar butter to go with the croissants. So, ultimately, I haven't really gotten rid of my excess groceries at all . . .
June 5—Only I would struggle with a decision of such low magnitude.
Today marked the end of my baking binge. I finished the croissants, wrapped them in plastic wrap, and piled them in two H.E.B. green bags. Then I got the raspberry preserves and the brown sugar butter and honey spice butter I'd made and put them into a third bag. At that point, I realized I'd need something with which to spread the butter and preserves onto the croissants, and I didn't want to take my own cutlery to work. Thusly, I headed to H.E.B. again to pick up a packet of cheap plastic ware. I stood in the aisle for about five minutes, wishing the loudmouthed redneck family next to me would make up their minds and get out of my way, and then, when they did, I couldn't make up my own mind. I stared at the fifteen varieties of plastic ware on the shelf, wondering why you could purchase a box of forks or a box of spoons but not a box of knives. I realized in mild irritation that I'd have to buy the kind that had forks, spoons, and knives all together. Then I stared at the H.E.B. brand of cutlery and the other brand on display, wondering if the fifteen cents separating the two made any difference. The second brand looked as if it were of slightly higher quality; the former seemed like it would snap in two more easily, so I selected the marginally pricier package and left.
June 6—For once, it wasn't my klutzy incident.
I worked the Star Wars concert at the Erwin Center today. I showed up at five a.m. with the green bags full of croissants. They were a hit, of course. Also, I was on the audio crew and worked with a couple of my favorite people, so it was a good day.
After the load out, I hung out in the office for a while and socialized with a few of the other hands. Then it happened. There was a cooler on the floor with melted ice in it, and it was starting to dribble from the small spout on the side. One of the other hands went to adjust the cap on it, and the cap broke off in his hand, causing icy water to pour in a deluge across the carpet. I laughed hysterically, mostly in sheer relief that for once, the clumsiness had not been mine.
. . . Of course, it just figured that this happened immediately after somebody else had said, "Oh, we can't have nice things." Too true.
June 11—If he'd only had a brain . . .
I worked the load in for The Wizard of Oz this morning. Feeling charitable, I brought a bunch of snickerdoodles to work and left them in a box on the table stage right where the hands sit during breaks. About halfway through the in, I spied a sign informing the hands not to have any food or drinks near the stage when Toto (or rather, the dog playing Toto) was nearby. Oops. Instantly fearing for my career, I encouraged the other hands to eat the cookies quickly. I needn't have worried; they didn't last long.
Of course, that was the least of my problems. The worst klutzy incident of the day was, mercifully, somebody else's. Later in the day, one of the road crew broke his ankle when a Genie left fell down with him in it. He went up in the lift without any outriggers, so the outcome was somewhat predictable. The lift fell down, hit a batten, almost destroyed audio world, and bounced off a light tree, mangling the basket of the lift in the process. The roadie jumped out of the lift but landed in the rover (thing at the base). He broke his ankle but was otherwise fine. Nevertheless, it was the scariest thing I've seen at work; I'll die happy if I never see anything like that again.
As I was leaving, I briefly talked to the master carpenter. He complimented my hand knit Dead Kennedys shirt but referred to it as a sweater vest, triggering a brief rant on my part on the distinction between the two. I left quickly to catch up with somebody else, it occurring to me far too late that I may have offended the master carpenter. Brilliant. *sigh* I shall have to make up for this later somehow; he's really nice, and I don't want to offend him.
I worked the load out for The Wizard of Oz tonight. I was a carpenter again, as I had been on the load in, and the first thing we did was put a bunch of set pieces back on their carts. Within about thirty seconds, I managed to get a splinter in my finger. That fucked me over for the next twenty minutes while I tried to pick it out. I struggled with lifting things without being able to use my first finger, I got distracted and tripped over an air pocket, and finally I pulled the damn thing out. The night improved after that.
Nervous about having possibly offended the master carp at work the other day, I located him on Facebook this morning. I thanked him for the compliment and offered to knit him something. (He thanked me but has yet to follow through.) I then looked through my yarn stash, wondering if whatever I knitted could be made with scrap yarn already in my possession. As I looked through my twelve wire baskets filled to bursting with yarn, I thought irritably that I probably had enough yarn to knit something for every stagehand in the place. Then I thought 'Why the hell not?' and decided to do just exactly that. In retrospect, of course, "what the hell" is not the best motto when beginning a project of this scope. Oh well; I want to do it now. I figured if I knitted one new, small item every week, I'd have enough knitted stuff by the time the cold weather hit to give out something to every member of the crew on some big call. I will, of course, make sure to give first dibs to the stage manager, his assistant, and the master carp who inadvertently gave me the idea. So I created a new page in the knitting section of the site, dubbed it the Project a Week Project (to which I shall refer as PAWP from now on), and set to work designing the first pattern, that being the Trellis Rib Cap.
This evening, my dad and I each made a cup of tea at the same time. There's a reason I hate trying to do anything in the kitchen, even making tea, with my dad in there at the same time. He gets under my feet something awful, and of course the problem multiplies when I'm actually cooking. That's half the reason I have an iPod; it helps prevent interruptions. So my dad opened the silverware drawer to extract a spoon with which to stir his tea, and of course we each grabbed the same spoon. There ensued a brief scuffle for possession of the spoon, which he won, shoving another spoon at me and turning around. I, of course, immediately dropped the spoon on the floor with a terrific clattering crash.
June 16—The pattern repeats, and so does history.
I worked on my trellis rib cap this evening, completing the cable pattern and making headway into the ribbing before realizing that I had botched the cable pattern by adding an extra row of plain knitting in the middle of the second repeat. I had to rip out my impressive headway and redo it, only to have to redo it again later, complete with a dropped stitch fiasco.
June 17—Next time, I'll check the weather before painting.
This morning I did some spray painting. I wanted to touch up the little wire baskets that house my tea, and while I was at it, I decided it was finally time to paint the wire baskets I use for storage in my bathroom cabinet. Then I thought, what the hell, may as well repaint the miniature English phone booths that house aforementioned wire baskets for tea. I laid out the baskets and phone booths in the backyard and primed the baskets from the bathroom, touched up the tea baskets, and repainted the phone booths. I, of course, got paint all over my jeans and AC/DC local crew shirt in the process. I realize that's what ratty, ill-fitting clothes are for, but really, surely I could have spilled less paint than that. Oh well. I returned to the house and logged onto instant messenger. Mid-conversation, I looked out the window and remarked to my friend, "It looks like rain." "Yeah, it rained a bit here earlier," he said. On the heels of his words, it suddenly started raining very very hard. "Shit! brb," I typed, and fled. I bolted out the back door in my sock feet, squelching across the wet grass, snatching up my still-drying baskets and phone booths and dumping them onto paper towels on the living room floor. I returned to the computer and typed the sole word, "Alas." "Saved them?" my friend asked. "No." It wasn't that bad, really—The paint was mostly dry, so it wasn't horribly splattered, but it will have to be touched up again in a day or so when I'm sure it's not going to rain anymore.
June 18—I should have tumped it out the window.
In the wee hours of this morning, I'd had enough of Windows Vista's bullshit and decided it was high time to transfer the last of my stuff onto my laptop and ditch the desktop once and for all. I finished transferring my music files to the laptop, and then I set about transferring my e-mail.
It took six hours.
I don't mean I had that much e-mail; I mean it took six hours to get Windows Vista to cooperate. The files wouldn't transfer right. The network died (repeatedly). The desktop refused to allow me to move Thunderbird onto the laptop, so I had to download it from the Internet onto the laptop. In the process of trying to get the desktop to let me move Thunderbird to the laptop, I somehow managed to create a user on the network called Mozilla Thunderbird, which of course when I realized my mistake and went to delete it, the desktop kept giving me error messages seeing I needed permission from the network administrator to delete it. Guess what, mother fucker, I am the admin. So I got rid of that, though not without much protest on Vista's part. Thanks a lot, Vista; I had to hack my own network. Oh well.
So, with a fist full of passwords and user names, I started all over. None of Thunderbird's help tips helped, and none of the message boards I checked helped either. In the end I downloaded a program off the Internet (MozBackup) to back up my e-mails on the desktop, downloaded MozBackup on the laptop, transferred the backup file to the laptop, and opened it with the new installation of Thunderbird over there. Fixed. And it only took six hours. I still don't believe I had to hack my own network. Sad.
Anyway, with that finally done, I was able to move the rest of my stuff, what relatively little there was—forgetting, of course, to transfer MGI Photosuite, the cheap little program I use to edit images for the site. Oh well, Microsoft Paint frankly does a better job. Then I uninstalled a bunch of stuff off the desktop, disassembled it and put everything but the mouse and ergonomic keyboard next to the door to my dad's computer room (happy Father's Day, dad, you get my shitty old Vista machine with the noisy fan), and cleaned my desk. Then I set up my laptop, plugging the mouse, studio headphones, and my two iPods into it.
Finally, just when I was settling in, there was an incident involving an open window, a sudden breeze, a stack of sheet music, and a bottle of glass cleaner on top of my chair cushion. A domino effect, if you will. I rolled my eyes and tossed the chair cushion into the washing machine. It didn't get dry enough in the dryer, so of course when I sat down on it a couple of hours later, I found myself sitting in warm dampness. Gross.
June 19—It's okay to tell me if there are bugs in my code. In fact, that's preferable.
Today I finished the trellis rib cap and ran it through the wash. Then I started the next project for PAWP, the Parallelogram Cap. I started to make it in bright blue, but then I decided that the parallelograms pattern, which looks vaguely leaf like, would do better in a mossy green. So I spent the afternoon going through my list of ideas for PAWP and delegating colors of yarn to specific project ideas. Of course, many of those will probably change once I get down to the business of actually designing the patterns.
Then I updated the PAWP page and began editing the code for the next update of the index page, during which time I realized that I had a few typos and the like in the archives pages and a couple of pages in the knitting section. That brings me to the real point of this post: If you see an obvious mistake or broken link on my site, please e-mail me and tell me. This site hangs by a thread on the edge of acceptable dorkiness; I really don't need bad code to send it over the edge of that cliff labeled Suck.
Today being Father's Day, I made pancakes for breakfast. My dad, not feeling well and being a night owl anyway, slept right through the whole thing, so I had to put my pancakes in the refrigerator. They weren't my best anyway; they were too brown around the edges. Oh well. Anyway, realizing that my initial plan of taking him pub crawling would no longer be feasible, I set out to locate another gift. I headed downtown, located nothing (though I did cast a longing glance at the Dog and Duck, one of the places I'd planned on taking him), and returned to the house. On the way, I missed the turn onto 38th to get onto Mopac, so I went up to 45th. On 45th, I turned right too soon, wound up in a residential area, and had to turn around to get back onto 45th and then onto Mopac.
Once at home, I changed into my painting clothes (paint stained jeans and my AC/DC local crew shirt) to work on painting the wire baskets and mini phone booths. I ran out of red paint and hopped in the car to head to Lowe's to get some more, only to arrive at the Lowe's and discover they'd been closed for an hour. Stupid Sunday hours. Whatever. So I hopped back in the car and sped toward the Wok Express and bought some takeout for dinner. It was a rather sad Father's Day gift compared to what I had in mind, but it was good. Or at least, mine was good; my dad complained that his upset his stomach.
I mopped my kitchen floor tonight after I walked past the cats' water bowl in my sock feet and felt a little *splish* under my foot. I hate that. They tend to knock the bowl over without telling anybody, leaving me to learn of the mess the hard way. So I poured hot water on the floor, only then remembering that I had used the last of the Mop & Glo. I squirted some 409 on the floor instead, which doesn't smell as nice, but it got the job done.
June 27—Who says you can't herd cats?
My dad and I woke up around the same time this morning, and he started down the stairs just ahead of me. I began thundering down the stairs after him, causing him to speed up. Freefall was waiting for me on the landing until he saw us coming, at which point he took off running to the foot of the stairs, where he encountered Bolie, who also took off running. The four of us ran in circles around the stairs until both cats panicked and dove under a shelf in the front room. Freefall had to be dragged out by force.
I was working on the basketweave cap for PAWP this evening when I decided I wanted to make it a size smaller, so I frogged it and redid it. Then I realized the garter stitch brim wasn't long enough compared to the rest of the pattern. It measured an inch as I wanted it to, but it looked too short, so I had to add another two rows to get it in proportion, meaning I had to frog and redo a few rounds. I finally worked a repeat of the pattern and decided that working two repeats of it would make the hat too long, so I redid the pattern for the decrease rounds. I will be most annoyed if I have to redo anything else.
I made some Cornish game hens this evening, together with steamed wild rice, avocado wedges, and canned grapefruit and mandarin oranges. I didn't actually have any wild rice, but I desperately wanted some, so I sped to the grocery store to grab a package. Then I stood in the rice aisle for seven minutes, wondering where the hell the wild rice was. I saw white rice, white rice, and white rice. I saw a few bags of brown rice, but the closest thing to wild rice I saw was a few miserable packets of horrible instant rice and Rice-a-Roni. Bastard rice. No. At length, I spotted a tiny box of a mix of brown and wild rice for a mere seven dollars. (!) Again, no. Finally, I spotted a box of brown and wild rice for half that and grabbed it. Then I grabbed a small can of mandarin oranges and two boxes of Irish breakfast tea and got the hell out.
Once at home, I realized the Cornish game hens only had twenty minutes left (there had been fifty minutes left when I left for the store). I hastily removed them from the oven, basted them, and replaced them. It didn't matter since the hens were not done when the timer went off and needed another twenty minutes or so, which worked nicely since it allowed time for the rice to cook. However, I neglected to rinse the rice, which would have been much better had I done so, meaning the rice was a little mushy. Oh well.
Finally, I popped in the DVD of Oliver! and sat down to watch it. I hit play and saw the words "Entr'Acte" on screen and realized I'd put it in upside down, so I had to get up again to flip the DVD over. After I sat down, I realized I'd forgotten my napkin, so I got up to retrieve it. Then I realized I'd forgotten my tea and retrieved that. Finally, I settled down to eat and decided my rice needed some salt, so I got up to get salt.
It was a good meal, though, despite me bounding around like a malfunctioning Jack-in-the-Box. Here it is:
. . . Man, that looks gross. It was sooo tasty. *sigh*
June 30—"Basket tangle" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
In the wee hours of this morning, I sat on the couch working on the basketweave cap. I had just reached the decreases, and I unwound a bit of yarn to work with, promptly tangling it in the process. I couldn't see what I was doing to untangle it and had to get up to adjust the lighting, making it blindingly bright in the living room. Then I tangled the yarn around the needles trying to pass a loop of the tangle over the work, and in the process of untangling that, I dropped a few stitches off the needles. *sigh* But at least I sorted it in the end.
