Hello, yes, I’m still alive. Fell out of the habit of blogging, but I’ll try to get back in.
Hmm, what has been going on…. On Dan’s recommendation I read Neal Stephenson’s “REAMDE” and loved it. Really fun plot, great characters, beautifully written. I would say “I couldn’t put it down” except I did force myself to put it down occasionally so that I could postpone reaching the end!
I played a lot too much Skyward Sword in January and did something awful to my right arm. Had to take a break from knitting which pretty much drove me crazy. Eventually I found out that I could crochet without too much pain so I had a ton of fun making lovely lace-edged hankies to replace my nasty old cut-up-t-shirt ones.
It’s a collection of children’s stories and rhymes, and includes:
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
The Old Woman and her Pig by Sara Cone Bryant
The House that Jack Built by Randolph Caldecott
Mother Goose by Eulalie Osgood Grover
The Old Man’s Bag by T. W. H. Crosland
Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures by Heinrich Hoffmann
Johnny Crow’s Garden by L. Leslie Brooke
Johnny Crow’s Party by L. Leslie Brooke
Book About Animals by Rufus Merrill
‘Twas the Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Androcles and the Lion by Joseph Jacobs
The Master Cat, or Puss In Boots by Charles Perrault
The Little Red Hen by Florence White Williams
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
The Slant Book by Peter Newell
The Rocket Book by Peter Newell
and
The Mythological Zoo by Oliver Herford
They’re almost all picture books (except for a few that are chapters from larger books) and you can find them online at Project Gutenberg if you want to look at the pictures.
Thanks for proof-listening and cataloging, Elli! :)
My LibriVox and “Kayray reads to you” links will not work tomorrow, January 18th. Our file host, The Internet Archive, will be holding a black-out to protest the internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA:
The Internet Archive believes that it is critical to protest and raise awareness of pending legislation in the United States: House Bill 3261, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).
Archive.org is going dark from 6:00 am – 6:00 pm PDT on Wednesday January 18 (14:00 – 02:00 GMT) to drive a message to Washington. We need your help to do this.
Legislation such as this directly affects libraries (pdf) such as the Internet Archive, which collects, preserves, and offers access to cultural materials. Furthermore, these laws can negatively affect the ecosystem of web publishing that led to the emergence of the Internet Archive.
These bills would encourage the development of blacklists to censor sites with little recourse or due process. The Internet Archive is already blacklisted in China—let’s prevent the United States from establishing its own blacklist system.
For United States residents, please take action.
For non-US residents: Sorry for dragging you into this, and if you are willing, sign a petition to the State Department to express your concern.
Here is the Congressional Switchboard Telephone Number:
1-866-220-0044
Be sure you have your ten-digit zip code so the switchboard can direct your call to the correct congressperson who represents you. You can find your ten-digit zip code on any piece of junk mail that reaches your home.
I really need to do a quick wrap-up of the end of December so that Future Kara can remember all the stuff that happened. Let’s see… I finished making Dan’s “Discipline” hooked rug on Christmas morning before he woke up. He loves it. In fact, he loves it so much he doesn’t want to walk on it, so we’re going to hang it on his office wall. Henry loves his cozy warm robot quilt. I love my tangerine-orange KitchenAid stand mixer and the wonderful stack of books that everyone gave me, and my jigsaw puzzle, and the amazing huge framed Link to the Past map!
Henry and I had a bit of an adventure when we bought the Christmas tree, a new variety called a Grand Fir, which was beautiful, inexpensive, long-lasting, and smelled amazing. I hope we can get a Grand Fir next year too. Anyway, after we bought the tree we discovered that Henry’s learner’s permit was missing. We retraced our steps and asked the tree guys to look for it, but it was just gone. And Henry was scheduled for his driver’s test a few days later, so it was a real problem! Next day we went to the DMV and got a new permit, and then immediately found his old one in the car. Hilarious. Problem solved. :) And he passed his test! He can now drive himself to and from kung fu, and even run errands for us. Excellent.
Henry passed his driver’s test today. I’m so proud of him! Way to go, Henry!
It’s a really odd feeling, though, knowing he’s at Kung Fu but that he drove himself there and will drive himself back. I’ve driven him everywhere for 16 years.
Baked two kinds of cookies and two enormous pizzas with Chloe this evening. Super fun! And then we watched most of this great George Harrision biography, which had a ton of footage and photos that I’d never seen.
Well, after all these months I finally have the scans ready for you to download. It took a lot of work because the original book was quite large, so I had to slice up every scan and do a lot of rearranging to make them all fit on 8.5 x 11 paper. Sorry, non-USA friends, I don’t have it in me to optimize for A4 paper, but each image is no larger than 7.5 x 10 (I allowed for a half-inch of margin on each side) so if you print at something like 95% I think it will work. Test first on one of the larger images and make sure nothing gets cut off.
Dragonsong and Dragonsinger were my favorites. They made a huge impression on me when I first read them as a 10-year-old (I still re-read them every few years). Menolly was a wonderfully real girl — brave enough to run away and live Holdless for the sake of her music, but as shy and insecure as I was.
I’ve been having a lot of fun cooking and baking in my new, big, bright kitchen, especially on days like today when I didn’t have to drive anywhere and I felt relatively energentic. Today I made Jason’s Tear and Share Cheese and Onion Loaf, which I saw him bake on the Great British Bake-Off. (We all LOVE the Great British Bake-Off!!!) It was one of the most delicious-looking things of the whole series and I’ve wanted to make it ever since.
it’s a basic white bread dough, which you divide into 19 pieces. You flatten each piece, fill with a bit of sauteed onion and grated cheddar cheese, then seal each roll and place them on a baking sheet so they form one loaf. And then sprinkle with more cheese before baking.
YUM!
It was very time-consuming but not at all difficult; however, I never remember how long it takes to make bread, so I’ve always got the timing wrong and dinner is ready while the bread still has to rise one last time. Because of this poor timing, I didn’t let the loaf double in size before baking — I let it rise a bit but I was impatient to serve the lovely beef and veggie soup I’d made, so I went ahead and popped the bread in the oven early.
Despite this, it turned out just beautiful — soft, flavorful, delicious! Wow! Everyone loved it.
Gah! How has an entire week of November gone past already? Thanksgiving will be here in just over two weeks. Yikes.
Ok, we’re all settled in our new house and it’s lovely and spacious and bright and comfortable. Dan just bought me two wonderful big handsome sturdy IKEA bookcases so all my books have a home and none are in boxes anymore! I chose the “Hemnes” bookcases in brown-black because they are plain but attractive and made of real pine. Henry helped us bring them home in Chloe’s van yesterday, and then Chloe and I built them with a little hammering-help from Dan. We really love assembling IKEA furniture.
Here’s a photo. The junk on top is Chloe’s quilting project, only there temporarily to be away from the cat when she’s not working on it. As you can see I have room for even more books! I also have a low shelf in my knitting area for all my knitting books so they are handy.
Today, while watching “Digging for Britain”, I started knitting a little zig-zag cap for my cousin Ashley’s new baby boy, who was due in a week or so but actually might be arriving while I type this! Ravelry Link (no login needed)
Chloe and Bob helped me clear out the last of the stuff from our garage today. Yesterday Chloe and I spent an house and a half organizing and consolidating the garage, so when we had Bob there to do the lifting for us today it went surprisingly fast! I gave away a ton of my old stuff that I had been dragging around with me for years. It felt so good to let it all go.
Today I also moved furniture around and did laundry and put many things away and hung a curtain (with Chloe’s help) and drove Henry all around the universe so I am bone tired tonight. I hope someday soon things will be less busy and I can lie around and do nothing for a while.
Lordy, moving sucks. This house is totally worth it, but moving still sucks :)
Tomorrow is Moving Day! All week Chloe and I have been boxing the small stuff up and taking it in her van over to the new house, so all that’s left for the moving men is the furniture. Well, there’s a lot of junk in the garage still but we’ll take that over on the weekend, maybe, when Henry can help.
Chloe and Dan and I spent hours over at the new house today. Chloe built Dan’s new Ikea desk (I helped a bit. It was quite a logic puzzle) and Dan wired the house for nice fast ethernet upstairs and down. Hooray!
We’re moving to a bigger rental house in one week. Very exciting! The house is nearby, and large, and clean, and filled with closets and windows, and the kitchen is huge, and there are roses and grapevines and fireplaces, and a hot tub in the back yard (!).
But moving is just so horrible. So dreadfully horrible. Chloe is helping us a ton. I really don’t know what we’d do without her, since I’m not able to do much lifting and carrying and I get exhausted so easily. I’d also be in the looney bin by now, probably. She has done nearly all our packing. We don’t officially have possession till Saturday but the owner is nice and doesn’t mind us bringing some stuff over sooner, so today Chloe hauled two van-loads of stuff over for us. The moving men are coming next Tuesday but we’re trying to take all the light, awkward, small stuff over ahead of time. Chloe is also helping plan where furniture will go and she’s going to help us make it all nice and home-like after we’ve moved, too.
Within two weeks it’ll all be over and we’ll be settled and able to move around without bumping into each other all the time and we’ll be soaking in that hot tub.
Trying to stick to my “blog more often” vow. So here I am.
My cousin Jon and his wife just had their second daughter yesterday! Welcome to the world, baby Johanna!
Chloe lent me her copy of “The Help“. Can’t put it down. As one amazon.com reviewer put it, it’s “compulsively readable”.
Also worked a lot on my yellow Hartfield saw this weekend. I just took a photo, but the sun is going down and the color turned out so bad that I converted the photo to B&W :) Just imagine a sunny yellow or see my previous post.
Boy, I really got out of the habit of blogging regularly. Sorry about that, life has been hard for the last few months. Now I have about a million things to say but I will just have to choose a few and space them out.
First — Happy 16th birthday (a little late) to my dear Henry! You’re really fun to hang out with and I am so proud of you!
We went to the zoo together on a cool cloudy Sunday for photography fun:
Here’s another nice thing I want to share. Dan gave me a tiny rug-hooking kit for my birthday and I had such fun learning this new skill! Very soon I want to make something bigger. It seems like a great craft for using up the small amounts of leftover yarn that I end up with, and all I will need to buy is a bit of burlap for the foundation!
And I’m working on a beautiful yellow lace shawl. The pattern is “Hartfield”. Details on Ravelry: http://ravel.me/kayray/h1
Also published as “Three Men and a Maid”. The maid of the title is red-haired, dog-loving Wilhelmina “Billie” Bennet, and the three men are Bream Mortimer, a long-time friend and admirer of Billie, Eustace Hignett, a lily-livered poet who is engaged to Billie at the opening of the tale, and Sam Marlowe, Eustace’s dashing cousin, who falls for Billie at first sight. All four find themselves on an ocean liner headed for England together, along with a capable young woman called Jane Hubbard who is smitten with Eustace, and typically Wodehousian romantic shenanigans ensue.
