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I am feeding my son a snack of a cashew butter sandwich on whole wheat bread. With marshmallows on it. Homemade marshmallows.

I am really not sure where on the scale of good to bad parenting this falls. :)
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Here's a shout-out for a very happy birthday to [profile] ladyperegrine.

You're one of those people who makes my life, and the whole world, a little better just by existing and being yourself.

I wish you every joy and blessing.
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My sister continues to buy my son more stupid toys that attempt to be hygienic/neat by replacing dirt with chemicals. Ove the last two years she's given him lots of Color Wonder stuff, which replaces colored crayon/marker/paint smudges on your wall with greasy pale yellow chemical smudges. It has the bonus effects of having a second or so delay between what your child draws and what he sees, which makes for oh-so-good visual-motor learning, of not showing what colors the fingerpaints are in advance so they get mixed together and your kid gets furious, of requiring you to continue to buy expensive special paper in order to use the toy, and of having kid art that fades in about six months.

Now she's gotten him a big set of Moon Sand, which claims to be useable indoors by replacing sand+water with sand+some chemical goop that keeps the sand-stuff at roughly the consistency of wet sand. Yech. Still messy, and gods know what's in it. After the whole Aquadots fiasco, I'm not really happy about this.
***********************************

I'm feeling incredibly misanthropic today, yet strangely at the same time I'm wanting people to pet me about it.
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I've been going through my costuming stuff, and I just threw a whole bunch of bodices and belts on eBay for cheap.

Come take a look if you are into that sort of thing. Waist sizes range from 24 inches to 35 inches.

(Why, yes, I have had some weight issues. Why do you ask?)
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Back from Midwest Furfest. I had a pretty low-key time, overall, having meals either just with [personal profile] lediva or just a few other people, going to a few parties and a little bit of programming, saying a lot of hellos to old friends but not really getting much intense time with too many people, meeting a lot of people in passing whom I'm not sure I'll run into again. I did some fun costuming that I was happy with, but it wasn't of my usual character, so I think that some people who might have otherwise recognized me didn't, and it was much more of just enjoying dress-up than any kind of roleplay for me. I got up and did a little bit of something at the improv show (which went adequately), and I participated in the Pirate Fashion Show (and lost). Apparently the advice I gave someone last year as a fortune teller has manifested as a successful and unusual art project for them ,and I felt strangely satisfied by that. The con wasn't intense for me, and it wasn't really in as much of an alternate universe as cons sometimes get, so I'm not really feeling much of a letdown as I get back to my regular life. Which is good, I suppose.

On the other hand, I had a lot of time, energy, and motivation to do some deep reconnecting with [personal profile] lediva, something which I think we both needed individually and which our relationship really needed as well. It's been something of a rough year for us, and I think I may finally have managed to come to some closure over the weekend over some of the tougher leftover emotional crap that's come out of that. -

Meta-owl

Nov. 12th, 2007 12:37 pm
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One Hundred and his toy owl One Hundred and his toy owl
As promised --[personal profile] projectmothra's toy owl, with its toy owl.

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Yesterday, I took away my son's Aquadots toy, the one his best buddy gave him for his birthday. For those who don't follow the breaking news in preschoolland, the hottest toy for the preschool set apparently is made with a precursor to the date-rape drug, which metabolizes into it if the little beads get licked or swallowed. Kids had been showing up at hospitals in comas. 4.2 million units recalled.

This afternoon, I took my son to the Chinese grocery, and bought packaged goods with almost no English on them to feed to my family, Korean mixed-grain rice and weird tapioca beads and candy made with tamarind, sugar, salt, and chili peppers ground together, without even the slightest qualms. Only now that my son is in bed and I'm putting that stuff away does it feel a little bit weird.

So meta!

Nov. 8th, 2007 02:07 pm
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[personal profile] projectmothra has a toy owl, named One Hundred Zen Bloom, who goes everywhere with him. One Hundred likes to do everything [personal profile] projectmothra does, of course. And since [personal profile] projectmothra cuddles his toy owl at night to sleep, One Hundred needed a toy owl to cuddle too. So out came the felt and the fiberfill and the BPAL TKO, and now the toy owl has a toy owl to cuddle in bed.

That was fun.
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I had a very nice weekend, despite the rain, out in Boston with [personal profile] lediva, which I'm really not in the mood to talk about in a lot of detail, but it included accompanying her to an audition to a reality show, which she'll probably tell you all about eventually. And hey, bonus hour. That's good.

I am having a very frustrating time with an old Nokia tablet that [personal profile] lediva gave me. It doesn't seem to work, Nokia customer service was not helpful, and moreover, the software I wanted to try to download to maybe help with it doesn't appear on the webpage when I look, so I felt kind of silly with the CS rep while not actually getting anything I needed. Blergh. The fact that my son is now an "expert" in everything and insists on giving me random and unsolicited advice about it doesn't help either.

May I pick your muscial brains? I'm putting together a collection of songs for someone that are about creepy, stalkerish, or other grossly inappropriate or one-sided "relationships", anything from things like "Don't Stand So Close to Me" to "#1 Crush". I'd love more ideas of songs on that theme, as my own sources to draw from are not that broad, and my memory's not that good.
beetiger: (ducttape by elven_wolf)
I've got a bunch of Possettes (1/32 oz sample vials from Possets Perfume) that need to go to new homes.

Possets perfumes are kind of in the artisan style of BPAL, but overall a little lighter and more playful. She's got a special fondness for chocolate, violets, and lavender.

I'm feeling lazy about wanting to send them out piecemeal -- anyone want a whole stash of them?

$20 for the whole pile includes postage and delivery confirmation.

Here's what I've got:
The Observatory
Luminaria
Ultramarine Blue
Pomona
Gibbous
Ault Park
Cadmium Red
Hyde Park
Madame X
Orion
Fabienne

And a full 7 ml bottle of Cambienne 8-29-07 (Hot Wet Virgin), tested once.
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Trying to decide how long to wait after having put [personal profile] projectmothra to bed before firing up the Guitar Hero 3 on my wii. If I miscalculate and he hears it and wakes up, my evening is ruined. but wanna play!

ps if any of you have the game on wii and are really crappy on it like I am and want to play online, give me a yell.
beetiger: (Floosh!)
1) Find this recipe. Decide it looks awesome and you want to make it right now.

2)Do the best you can with ingredients on hand, which include giant multicolored boba tapioca you bought during a bubble tea obsession in 2002, skim milk, and bottled key lime juice. Double the eggs since the fat's low. Remember too late that there's a reason you didn't use up that tapioca in 2002, as it's strange and powdery and disintegrates into nothing. Note that the pudding however is strangely thin after the specified cooking time, and let it cook another hour. Scrape barely-edible matcha-scented casein paste out of slow cooker, and determinedly eat it anyway. Clean cooker. Toss out rest of boba.

3)Go shopping the next day and get organic small tapioca, organic grassfed BGT free whole milk, and an organic orange, after discovering that the regular grocery no longer carries non-instant tapioca so you have to go to the health-food store. Make recipe as specified, except you decide that the tea thing was really not that great, and decide to skip that and add a slug of decade-old triple-strength bourbon vanilla instead. The first step takes 2 hours instead of 1 1/2. Also, an orange is bigger than a tangerine, so you guess you put more acid in there than you meant to, so it's thinning out again and a little gritty, but not bad after overnight in the fridge. Creamsicle tapioca.

4)Determine that you're just going to make plain tapioca this way. Plain. Lose resolve when you add the egg and add a slug of rosewater and more of that ancient vanilla. It still doesn't thicken up in the pot as you'd expect for a cooked pudding on the stove, but after overnight in the fridge it's pretty much perfect.

5)Feel satisfied that you don't have to cook tapioca again tonight.
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BPAL update's up early, yay!

Long Night Moon and Ivanuska - $3.50 each
Sagittarius - $4.00
Fairy Wine and Lady Una - $5.00 each

Shipping $2.00 for any amount. PayPal to vickib AT bestweb DOT net.

Want some feedback? Here.

(No, I'm not doing the Good Omens scents. Trying to keep this circle small, and nothing from that series (including prototypes I've seen) has worked on me so far. Sorry.)

ETA: Order has been placed. Now fill the rest of those slots up. :)

signups below )

Context

Oct. 24th, 2007 09:26 am
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I'm working on some things in Panera this morning, while my son is in preschool, and a woman who is the spitting image of my mother, 25 years ago and maybe a foot taller, just walked through the place. High high heels, clickety-clack on the tile floor, business wear except the skirt's very short and the neckline of the blouse is pretty low, long bleached blonde hair straight down her back.

It's weird to look at it as a grownup.
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Not that it's news that kids need sleep, but here's an interesting article on the topic.

We're not really that great about this in our house. Neither of the adults here are really very good sleepers, and although we're moderately firm about bedtime (8 pm), we haven't really shifted it earlier to go with this fall's earlier speech therapy schedule, and we also do make quite a few exceptions.

I'm afraid that in the depth of my heart, I guess I believe that having adventures is more important than sleep. And my son doesn't really have meltdowns - he's a very cheerful stay-up-too-late boy. We stayed at a wedding until after 9:00 last night, and then he stayed up for most of the drive back home, without really anything resembling fussing.

Defintely one of those aspects of life in which I'm a crappy model.
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Five new bras, all roughly identical to the one I'm wearing now but in different colors, the new Debbie Harry CD, and a quick glimpse at an attractivegeeky woman reading in a big chair in the lounge area. I feel strangely satisfied.

Busy hands

Oct. 16th, 2007 11:30 pm
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I've been hands-busy lately.

I've been doing a lot of things with Rhys --pie making (with the too-many apples from the local pick your own orchard) and crystal growing (from a Smithsonian kit someone gave him for his birthday) and glycerin soap molding (from a kit that someone sent me in a swap, except that I replaced the crappy apple scent in the kit with slightly old but still usable stuff from my essential oils stash).

Tonight I made a steampunkish necklace to wear to an event this weekend (thanks Z for the focal components), and rolled some incense to send with a promo swap I'm running (from my own kits-- I was feeling pretty lazy in the midst of all this busy).

It's kind of a curious place to be, having such a drive to make things, and at the same time being in a mode where I want to declutter my world of stuff.
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Here, have some old Halloween albums. Gotta love this stuff.
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I do not seem to be able to make apple jelly this year. I have tried to make several batches, and although one came out just fine, the rest haven't jelled and have just turned into hard-candy in a glass jar, of pretty much no value. Today's failed as well, but at least this time I've had the foresight to pour it on a silicon baking sheet and I'll hopefully have honey-apple-jasmine candy, in eadible pieces, not stuck in a glass jar.

But I'm really really confused. I've been doing this for years, and I've never had a batch fail before, and this is the fourth time. I must have forgotten something in the last two years, but I really can't figure out what.

I'm sad and confused by this.
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My son is four today. It seems like he was born so short a time ago, and at the same time, some days it's hard to remember anything before.
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