Category: To Occupy my Time

New Glass!

My Aunt Carol has been on a clean and purge streak and boy, did I win.  Do I want the cactus glasses that were my Great-Uncle Tom’s?  Yep.  Do I want the cocktail glasses that were my grandmother’s?  Yes ma’am.
Uncle Tom’s cactus glasses. There were 12, but I’ve learned that they don’t stack well, so now there are 10.

Grandma’s cocktail glasses, which would be even more amazing if I had put them against something white, so you could see the fabulous color.

They have these pretty roses etched on them.

And this is fabulous.  It has a glass stir stick and I love the shape.  Plus, the cups stack.
And now I must purchase something to contain all this glassware.

What we still write and mail in these modern times.

Judging from the amount of shelf space devoted to thank you notes, one can extrapolate that the only thing people hand write and mail anymore are thank you notes.  This is a shelf at Target, where I had a gift card.  Maybe I will get some stationary, I thought to myself.  I was excited to see the huge selection they hand and then, as usual deflated to realize that 90% of the offerings are thank you notes.  Grrr.

What I’ve been up to: collecting rewards and making bread.

I feel like I haven’t been taking very many pictures of late.  Although I’ve written over 475 posts for this blog alone this year, so perhaps a short break is in order.  But here’s what I’ve been up to, aside from reading, writing, watching movies and blogging.

I didn’t realize I had backer rewards coming, but here they are.
 

I made some bread.  It’s from Laurel’s Kitchen Break Book, which is the best book to pick up if you are thinking of taking up whole-grain bread baking in the new year.  This is the milk bread recipe and made two very nice loves.  The book itself teachers you step-by-step what to do to create excellent all-whole-wheat flour bread.  Most “whole wheat” recipes use a bit of whole wheat and a goodly amount of All-Purpose Flour.

Bread making is a good skill to have if you want to save money and control your ingredients.  It’s also kind of magical.  This started as two cups of milk, a quarter cup of honey, some yeast, flour and salt.  A bit of mixing (with a mixer) and a few hours of rising and deflating and shaping and there is delicious bread waiting for me to eat.

Two tips should you embark on the bread journey:
1) Buy some vital wheat gluten (Bob’s Red Mill carries this product) and add 1 tablespoon per cup of flour.  It makes all the difference.
2) If you don’t have a warm place for rising (our house is mostly pretty cold) turn the oven to 170 and when it comes to temperature, set the timer for 10 minutes.  Then shut off the oven.  The heating turns the oven from a cold cave to a warm environment and if you turn on the light to the oven the temperature will be maintained.

Too many music distributors.

I really would like one, compact thing, with witch to access all of my music.  Instead I have a menagerie.

Here’s the stereo, which plays the radio, CDs, cassette tapes and also records, if I hooked up the record player.
 

Because the stereo doesn’t really get good radio reception, I also bought this radio which I love! It’s small (notice it tucked away next to the stereo in the above picture) and the knob gives a satisfying “click” when I turn it on.  The reception is superior, which is great because I listen to the radio a lot.
 
Unless you factor in podcasts.  With the new phone, I found an app that gives me podcasts I love.  Because I don’t like to walk around the house with ear buds in my ears, I bought this Bluetooth speaker.  It stores nicely in a drawer.
 
And then, if I want to listen to any non-CD, non-cassette music, I have the iPod, which is old.  It doesn’t even have all of my music because it doesn’t all fit (the rest is stored on my computer.)  I could listen to the podcasts via iTunes on the iPod, but I find iTunes incredibly unfriendly (and I know I’m in the minority here, but iTunes just doesn’t work the way my mind works) so I don’t get the podcasts through iTunes.

Someday I would like to have a compact stereo system with speakers that can play in different areas of the house, and my music/podcasts on one device.  But right now?  I straddle many worlds.

How’s it goin’?

As you may recall, I’ve taken a break from writing essays so I can focus on writing 500 words per day in November and December of the novel I am working on.  Here’s an update on my progress.

I’ve missed two days.  One was Thanksgiving, which had me going from 6:15 in the morning to 9:30 at night.  In all that activity, I completely forgot to write. I woke up suddenly at 11:30 the night of Thanksgiving, was stricken by breaking my streak, and then decided to stay in bed instead of hauling myself out to bang out 500 words.  The other day was a game night we hosted.  I miscalculated just how long the gaming would go on.  It was a very long and hard day, and by the time it was 11:15 and I had the choice of writing or bed, I chose bed.  In general, it has been no trouble to find the time to write, though Fridays and weekends are more difficult because my time is not as scheduled as on the other days of the week.  I’ve had a few sessions of cranking out the words and then going straight to bed because of this.

I’ve done a good job of meeting my words written per day goal of 500 words.  Only one day did I write exactly 500 words, every other day I wrote, I exceeded the goal, including one day where I wrote 3400 words.  I was suspicious of that outlier, but I went back and double checked and indeed, I churned that day.
By far my usual practice is to write 500-599 words.  I did so on 21 days.  The next most common is 600 words, happening on 6 days and then 700 words (5) days.  From there we step down to 1 to 2 occurrences.
All that writing is adding up.  When I set my goal of 500 words per day, I accepted the fact that I would “only” have 48,000 words by December 31.  This was seen as lesser achievement because in order to “win” National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) you need to write 50,000 words between November 1 and  November 31.  I was beginning with a bank of 17,000 words and taking two months and still coming up short.  But I’m happy to report that exceeded my original writing goal on December 11 and I crossed over the 50,000 word mark on December 13.  
Overall, I’m quite pleased with my progress.  The book is still fun to write, I’m chugging along and the rest of my life hasn’t been thrown out of control.  Plus I get to make nerdy Excel charts as explanation.  Win-win.

Confusing messages in packaging

I had a total impulse buying moment at Powell’s today.  And all stuff for me.  It’s the worst.

But anyway. I was seduced by this Tangle Art kit, inspired by Zentangle, which I learned about through Postcrossing.
 

On the front there is talk of a 40-page book!
 
On the back, it has become a 33 page book.  Plus 7 blank sketchbook pages.
 

Home

From a series in the Oregonian about US 26:

“This is where the rubber hits the road.  This to me is what eastern Oregon is all about.  This is where you can picture pioneers slogging through the desert, running low on water and wondering how much longer it will take.  This is a very lonely section of the road before arriving in Vale close to the Idaho border.”  Thomas Boyd.

Or, as I call it:  home.