kayray.org

04 The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill – 00:15:36

Susan asked me to post my oatmeal-chocolate chip cookie recipe. I vaguely remembered putting it on the web, so poked around in my home directory, and finally found it at http://nyip.net/~kara/cookies.html. Looks like I originally posted it before I bought my own domain :)

Gingerbread Cookies

Ingredients:

2 cups white flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons ginger
1/3 cup sugar (brown or white)
1/2 cup molasses
1 stick butter (1/2 cup), softened
3 tablespoons hot water
Preparation:

Mix all dry ingredients well in a large bowl. Then add sugar, butter, molasses, and water. Mix well. If the dough seems too wet, add a few sprinkles of flour until it is quite stiff. Chill the dough, then roll out on a floured board and cut into shapes. Arrange cookies on tinfoil, place foil on a cookie sheet, and bake at 400 degrees for 8 minutes–do not overbake!! Cookies will still be soft when they come out of the oven, but will harden as they cool. You can fill a new piece of foil with cookies while the first batch bakes.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip (or Raisin) Cookies:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 sticks butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
3 cups rolled oats
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 bag chocolate chips (or one cup raisins)
Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in egg, water, and vanilla. Combine dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then add to batter. Add chips or raisins. Drop by spoonfuls onto tinfoil, flattening slightly. Bake 12 minutes. Cookies will be soft when removed from the oven but will firm up when they cool. Prepare a second batch while the first batch bakes. Enjoy!

While I was recording Alice in Wonderland, I got to thinking that although I know a couple of the original poems (e.g. ‘Tis the Voice of the Sluggard) that the author parodied, I didn’t know them all. And that most kids today probably don’t know any other than Twinkle Twinkle (and maybe not even that one). So I started searching around for information on the original poems and bumped into a great article in a periodical called The Bookman, Vol. 18, September 1903.

Here’s a link to the article on google books:
http://is.gd/aIufD

I also recorded the article and submitted it to the current Short Non-Fiction Collection at LibriVox: http://librivox.org/short-nonfiction-collection-vol-016/

And here’s my little recording; it’s only about 14 minutes long.
The Poems in “Alice in Wonderland”, by Florence Milner

Dear German speakers, would you like to help me with a translation project? I want to create a public domain German translation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess” , so I’ve set up the first chapter on Bite-Size Edits: Translation into German of A Little Princess, Chapter 1, “Sara” (link edited out; chapter 1 is done!)
It will feed you one sentence at a time, with the previous and next sentences for context. There are a few very simple sentences that I can translate myself, which is fun, and my friend Elli, who is a native German speaker and also speaks flawless English, will help smooth everything out.

To prevent random strangers from bumping into the project and editing rather than translating it, I’ve made it visible only to my contacts. So if you’d like to help, please make an account at Bite-Size Edits and then ask it to make me (username: kayray) your contact, and I’ll OK you right away.

Vielen Dank!

A few months ago I installed a wordpress plug-in, twitter tools, that would automatically publish each day’s tweets in a post here. Tried it for a while but decided I didn’t like how it cluttered up my blog. Also it made me nervous about writing posts in case I repeated myself, which is stupid. But anyway, if you want to read my tweets, follow me on twitter, @kayray. If you want to read my blog, come here :)

03 A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale – 00:10:32

Sorry, forgot to post this on Monday!

02 – The Pool of Tears – 00:12:55

Me, at breakfast:

I finished the Hap Blanket for pthree’s baby a couple days ago and blocked it. Yesterday I took photos, and today I will ship it off. You can read all about it on the ravelry page, even if you don’t have a ravelry log-in!!

http://www.ravelry.com/projects/kayray/hap-blanket

It turned out about 3′ square, so just right for a receiving blanket. And very soft and cuddly.

Yesterday I listened to the Fresh Air interview with Wes Anderson about Fantastic Mister Fox. I hadn’t wanted to see it because I love the book, you know, and most of the time kids’ movies that are based on books are a complete disaster. But it sounded like Wes really loved the book, so it seemed possible that he hadn’t wrecked it, and also the information about how they created the movie made me want to see it.

So Dan and Henry and I watched it in the afternoon and we all really enjoyed it! Yes, liberties were taken, but they expanded and decorated the original story than altering it beyond recognition. The puppets (or whatever they’re called) were remarkably expressive; their body language was beautiful to see. The voice acting was fantastic. The miniatures were marvelous. And there was none of the horrible X-TREME-ness that I’ve come to dread in kids’ movies. It was charming and even touching in places but without gloopy sentimentality, and the humor was often subtle and sharp. I laughed aloud quite a lot.

Also there was a brief scene in which an old Burl Ives tune played faintly in the background. (Buckeye Jim)

01 – Down the Rabbit Hole – 00:13:16

I’m knitting a Hap Blanket for a friend who’s having a baby in May. Such a simple, pretty pattern! I’m using Knitpicks’ Simply Cotton, which is a great yarn. Soft and nice to work with, and I haven’t found a single knot or flaw. I bought 4 skeins of Malted Milk (off-white) and 2 in Envy Heather (dark green).

My gauge with worsted weight yarn on size 5 needles is 3.5st/inch, so I’m modding the pattern somewhat:

CO 80 using provisional cast-on (the pattern doesn’t say to use a provisional cast-on, but it will turn out much nicer if you do). I prefer to counter garter ridges rather than rows. Double the numbers if you count rows.

Knit 8 ridges in MC, then 1 in CC, 15 MC, 1 CC, 15MC, 1 CC, 15 MC, 1 CC, 15MC, 1 CC, 8 MC (in other words, 15 ridges for the fat stripes and 8 ridges for the end stripes)

This gives you 81 ridges, so when you pick up for the edge, pick up 85 on each side (pick up a few extra, evenly spaced, to make up the difference). The edge pattern is a 12-st repeat (plus one st at each corner) so this will work out perfectly and you won’t even have to think about the extra pattern repeats.

Obviously, you don’t cast-off when you’re finished with the garter-stitch square. Just keep going after your last row and commence picking up edge stitches. Now you will be glad about that provisional cast-on because you can just slide the loops onto the other end of your circ and knit them as you come to them. Don’t forget that you need to end up with 85 st per side, with a marker at each corner.

I finished the Baroque Socks, finally! Now, I have nothing against the pattern. It’s well-written and certainly very pretty. And the finished socks are lovely. But oh my, they were not actually that much fun to knit. Terribly fiddly, so no good for casual tv-knitting, and I couldn’t seem to memorize the chart. If I hadn’t promised them to Mom for her birthday, I would have ripped out the first one when I was halfway through. :)

Needles: size 0
Yarn: Knitpicks’ Risata

Henry’s charter school has their yearly 3-day camping trip to Catalina Island this week. This is Henry’s first time going and he’s looking forward to it very much. The kids get to do all kinds of ocean-science things on the trip; sounds so cool!

We got up at 5:30 and left the house at 6:15 to get up to Long Beach by 8:30. We made it, even though we got stuck in some nasty traffic near Long Beach. Here’s Henry in line for the ferry to Catalina:

I drove home down the coast highway which was much more pleasant than the nasty freeway. Got home around noon feeling pretty wretched but lay down and actually slept for an hour and a half!

Now Dan and I are off to hear Rockola play and acoustic gig at a place near us.

Switched on the radio on the way to fetch Henry from Kung Fu tonight and caught the middle of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I’m not a big Vivaldi fan, but a couple of facts floated up out of my subconscious to the surface of my thoughts: red-headed priest, music master for girls at an orphanage in Venice. Don’t know why I remember that from long-ago music history classes, but I checked wikipedia after I parked and it’s all true.

Brenda Montiel, you were a good teacher!

My recording of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is all done. I’ll be adding it to my podcast feed, but if you want to hear it right now, here it is:

http://librivox.org/alices-adventures-in-wonderland-by-lewis-carroll-4/

(As always, all LibriVox audiobooks are in the public domain and free to download, share, remix, whatever.)

This was so fun and easy that I got it done in record time.

Yesterday (3/14) was Pi Day, so I baked a pie. We loved the apple-blackberry boysenberry pies we bought in Julian last weekend (did I tell you we drove up to Julian in the pouring rain and walked around and had lunch and bought wine and pie and had a lovely time?) and I wanted to make something similar but couldn’t find fresh or frozen blackberries boysenberries so bought raspberries instead.

I made the pie similar to my regular apple pies but left out one apple, added an entire bag of frozen (thawed) raspberries, and skipped all the spices.

So: five apples peeled and chopped, one bag of raspberries, mixed with a cup of sugar (this made a VERY sweet pie, could probably cut back on the sugar), a half-cup of flour, a half-teaspoon of salt (or so).

Pour into pie crust (I use a Trader Joe’s frozen crust). We like crumb topping: 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup flour, a bit more than an 1/8th cup cold butter. Cut everything together as if making pie crust; sprinkle all over pie.

Bake at 425 F for 15 minutes, then for an hour at 350. Cover with foil towards the end so it doesn’t burn.

It turned out AMAZINGLY delicious.

21 The Story of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe – 00:7:15

I’ve had such a hard time picking a book to record next. I’m still in the middle of the giant kids’ US history book, but I wanted to do some fiction at the same time. I finally decided on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (in English this time), and I’d like to do Through the Looking-Glass as well, and then maybe Tom Sawyer after that. Yes, we already have a few versions of each in the librivox catalog, but none of them are read by me, plus I love all three books and would just really enjoy recording them! :)

So today I got my Alice project set up (well not quite all the way, but it’s in the database anyway) and downloaded a copy of Alice into Stanza on my iPhone. And then I recorded the first three chapters. And just now I sat down to start editing them and got to the part where Alice doesn’t want to drop the empty marmalade jar for fear of killing someone underneath her… except the part about not wanting to kill someone wasn’t in my recording. So I double-checked against the text — had I imagined that part? No, there it was in the version I had been looking at on the web. But it seems that I had put an abridged version on my iPhone! It doesn’t SAY that it’s abridged anywhere, but it clearly is. Sigh. So that’s three chapters wasted. I thought they seemed kinda short…

Now I’ve got the proper unabridged version in Stanza so I’ll start over tomorrow.

19 Bacon’s Rebellion – 00:19:01