beetiger

Extremely water-damaged but completely readable copy of World Tree RPG, free to good home. First commenter gets it.

When I discovered that the boring, passive-aggressive meeting I had to go to in NYC (and was dragging the good-natured lediva to in promise of awesome date action before and after) was only a few blocks from one of the branches of the Korean chicken joint featured in this Slashfood post, I knew that lediva would take the bait if I suggested that we get a Col-Pop after the meeting. We peeked into the window of the place on the way to the meeting, and the cute girl working there mouthed to us "I love your hats!" (We were wearing our black kitty and tiger hats, respectively, and actually attracted a few other comments as we walked around the city as well.)

When we actually walked into the place a few hours later, the same girl (whose name turned out to be Piper) said "You came back!" and seated us. We had thought it was a fast food place, and I guess it was, but it had sit down tables and menus, and mood lighting, and karaoke on Thursday nights (or Fridays by request of enough people at once), and it served beer, and oh, did I mention how very cute the waitress was? Piper laughed when we said the Internet sent us. Apparently they pretty much never sold the Col-Pop at all before the Slashfood article, but people had been coming in all weekend looking for it.

The place smelled good -- the olive oil frying really did make a difference in the aroma of frying chicken. We enjoyed the Col-Pop, though it was a pretty silly thing to eat sitting at a table, and the nuggets were a bit spongy but obviously freshly and cleanly fried. It probably would be very convenient for a walking snack through Chelsea. We laughed about what dorks we were, and Piper promised us that the rest of their food was really much better and we should come back and sing karaoke.

This is me, drinking diet coke through my chicken. I don't know if they'd put beer in there, but I also am not sure if I'd drink beer with a straw. Maybe if the Internet told me to.

Col-Pop in Chelsea

Apologies for being a little underpresent around here lately. I'm feeling rather driven by other people's needs and emotions lately, but feeling like their stories are theirs to tell, and not mine so much, so I haven't had so much to share.

Many of my spare cycles have been spent thinking about politics, which I don't really want to discuss too much here except to say that if you are eligible to vote in the primary for the party of your choice, that I hope you will. And if you're an Independent in a state that lets you vote in a primary, I hope you'll vote for the candidate you like best, and not for the candidate of the party you prefer less that you think is the weaker candidate.

I have been crafting some, though, and I wanted to share a picture of a little furry monster I made, before he goes off on his swap adventure.

Furry Monster

Today I took projectmothra to a Tae Kwon Do class for preschoolers. He had a great time jumping and kicking, and near the end of the class, the teacher had him break a small pinewood board by kicking it. He was thrilled to do it, and even more thrilled when the teacher handed him the pieces to keep.

As we were leaving, he asked me what we could do with the broken wood. I told him he could keep it in his room to remind him how loud and strong he could be when he focused. He looked up at me, hopeful, and said, "Well, can I paint it in pretty colors and glue pompoms on it and we could use it for a little table?"

That's our family values for you. ;)

p.s. I've been posting this sort of stuff over at the projectmothra journal and not here, but the kaiju has actually been posting there himself now (about once a week, a few sentences per post, you can go over there and friend it if you like, he loves comments), so I think I'm going to start making my posts *about* him over here instead. Thus, a poll.

[Poll #1126993]

I've been dealing with the headcold of doom, and the first ear infection I've had in over a decade, so I've been short and cranky with everyone, for which apologies if you've had to deal with me, and consider yourself lucky if you haven't.

I'm trying to remember to take pictures of at least some of the craftystuff I've been doing lately, and I just did a download dump of the contents of my camera, so here are the projects that seem to have made it into digital format recently.

( Warning: cute below. )

Rhys is starting to read books with words he doesn't know -- "bolted" was today's -- and I'd like to teach him "looking in the dictionary" as one approach to finding out what a word means. Anyone have a good recommendation for a kids' dictionary, aimed at a 3nd grade- 5th grade reading level or so? (No, that's not the level Rhys is reading at, I'd like this to last for a little while. He's reading level 3 readers, which is I think about a 2nd grade level?)

Thanks.

via deliciouspear

Pair me with anyone, real life or fandom. And tell me why.

(It would really make my day if you would do this for me. Just this one little thing. Thank you. <3)

So what if my grandmother never really taught me how to cook? I just made mini-knishes with Rhys -- from a cookbook recipe-- and they came out completely awesome.

Sadly, I can't move in with my girlfriend, but you can!

bard_bloom and lediva arranged a very nice birthday party for me on Saturday. I'd requested "getting a bunch of people that like me together for something, and I don't have to make arrangements or fuss about who is or isn't coming or even know very much about it ahead of time". I was hoping to minimize my social anxiety (which for some reason was coming out in full force around this), and my frustration with feeling like I never get to do or have anything fun unless I do all the work planning it. I pretty much got what I wanted -- not a surprise per se, but something that other people put together for me.

A random collection of people I know from a variety of social contexts, about 40 or so in total, showed up at what I personally consider the best Indian restaurant in the county. The room was set up with a number of round tables, which nicely separated itself into sort of special-interest groups naturally -- the local poly contingent, which has a non-zero overlap with local UUs, so the new minister (who is an awesome cool guy) felt comfy with them; the gamers-and-their-new-girlfriends contingent, which also ended up with some locals who live near each other and have kids the same age; the family contingent, at which my mom and stepmom managed to be pretty friendly to each other; the alternative parenting contingent, which came with kids and with whom allessindra and family ended up, though they could easily have been with the gamers or polyfolk too, and the freaks from Boston contingent, which is also where bard_bloom and projectmothra and lediva ended up as home base.

It was kind of fun to have everyone in one place -- sometimes I tend to compartmentalize those different pieces of my life but it's good to know that if I stop doing that in selected situations the world probably won't fall apart, that the differences in the "me" that all those various people know is probably more in the fine details than I usually remember.

lediva's big gift to me was running karaoke for the second half of the party. She'd bought a whole bunch of additional music for her system that she thought I'd like, organized spreadsheets by title and artist so people could find stuff easily, and at the last minute had to go running around looking for a universal remote because the TV we'd brought wouldn't let you change the inputs without it. Due to some combination of shyness, not knowing any pop music, and not thinking they could sing over the booming bass from the other party next door, adult participation in the karaoke was a little limited, but lediva sang beautifully as usual, braved the larger than she thought it would be kid/preteen contingent who wanted to sing (between friends' kids and cousins, there were about 8-10 kids, I think) and may not have fully learned karaoke etiquette, and facilitated my sister and I pretending we were back in our parents' basement, singing "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".

projectmothra did not hide his crush on shatterstripes. Lots of the grownups asked about it, and projectmothra's buddy Quan finally got frustrated with the lack of attention he was receiving because of it and came and whapped projectmothra over the head with his stuffed Tigger to express himself. If only I were still that good at clearly expressing my frustration with my friends when it comes up!

After the party, a few of us went over to a lounge/bowling alley to chat, drink, and actually not bowl. There were big cozy U-shaped couch pits big enough for eight of us to chat and cuddle, and no one really wanted to get up once a lane became available. :)

I'm feeling very deacquisitional in terms of my stuff right now, but the fact is that I still like presents, so I was happy to have some. Among other things, I'm now graced with a gorgeous feathered Carnivale mask, some handmade jewelry, enough fancy soap to last me until 2009 or so, a Lampe Berger aromatherapy lamp, a subscription to the squid-of-the-month club, a box of floppy disks that I wanted for an art project, some new card games, and a big package on its way from Amazon that made a huge dent in my wishlist there.

I feel loved. Thank you.