Smokey the Magnificent

1. I have discovered a new breakfast: Greek-style yoghurt mixed with a little cream and holier-than-thou Anathoth seventy-four-strawberries-to-the-inch jam. It’s verrah nice.

2. A few weeks ago I made a list of all the things we need for the new house, including bookshelves, a single bed, a desk, several chests of drawers and a hutch dresser. Panicked, Helpdesk Man went on TradeMe and bought a projector and a fedora.

3.Yesterday practically my only mother left for the other side of the world after having lunch with me and the snortlepig. It was unrelated, though. She’s probably at Singapore airport right now (and when I say “probably”, bear in mind that geography was never my strong point and she could be anywhere from Auckland to London, not discounting the bottom of the Seine).

4. Helpdesk Man and I had a lovers’ quarrel yesterday due to him being a friggin’ tard. You may help us settle it in my favour. Is a goose more similar to a duck than a fox is to a dog? Answer carefully. To foster impartiality I will not reveal on which side of the question my loyalties lie, only pointing out that good grief, foxes dig burrows and leap!

5. A wily reader will note I have not updated my Challenge progress from last week. It was… passable. “Lacked Vigour”, I would have scrawled on it in red pen if I were the teacher. But I did write several articles (no queries, though) and do a fair few houseworky things. My raised bed is now snugly full of earth - and if the weather clears up, I’ll plant spring onions and carrots in it today - and I’m slowly filling the half-wine-casks with garden mix.

6. I am making a baby quilt. It was going to be a very simple affair, 5-inch squares of pink and leftover brown from my patchwork skirt. But when I did that I wasn’t too thrilled with the colours, and my squares lacked the gridlike precision every other quilter on the Internet seems effortlessly able to accomplish |)how, people, HOW?). So I thought I’d disguise both aspects by covering the thing in appliqued leaves and Suffolk puff flowers. So far the effect is pleasing, but it has tranformed the project from  a quick whip-it-up-in-a-spare-morning affair to a fairly labour-intensive gig. And the woman in question tends to have her babies a few weeks early; so. Wish me luck and expedient blanket-stitching.

7. Two words that should be banned from the English language? Manky and sook. It is a little-known fact that Anakin Skywalker may never have turmed to the Dark Side had Obi-Wan not happened upon him after the death of his mother and sarcastically enquired “Having a bit of a sook?”

Yes yes, we’ve moved house, boxes everywhere, can’t find the screws, no Internet for several days, psychically distressing. I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to share is a rule of thumb you can live your life by: movie taglines are almost always improved by adding “LOL” to the end.

IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM LOL.

You see?

And to further illustrate the point:

A JEDI SHALL NOT KNOW ANGER. NOR HATE. NOR LOVE LOL

A MONSTER SCIENCE CREATED - BUT COULD NOT DESTROY LOL

ON EVERY STREET ON EVERY CITY, THERE’S A NOBODY WHO DREAMS OF BEING A SOMEBODY LOL

YOU’LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY LOL

SEVEN DEADLY SINS. SEVEN WAYS TO DIE LOL

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE LOL

WHEN THERE’S NO MORE ROOM IN HELL, THE DEAD WILL WALK THE EARTH LOL

OH YES, THERE WILL BE BLOOD LOL

HIS LOVE IS REAL. BUT HE IS NOT LOL

I rest my case.

Is this sort of awesome, or awful? I really don’t know. Bear with it for a verse or two - her voice is, ah, Raw and Untutored - but let me know what you think. Is it fanfiction - which I hate, loathe, despise and abominate - or somehow cooler than that? You tell me. I know it’s filk, but I’m so new to that concept I actually don’t have an opinion about it yet. Which pretty much puts the universe in a state of flux.

Patchy, I’d say. Some of the lyrics are touching, and some of them just sound obnoxiously faux-Jossian - too many damns, for one. I hate it when fans try to emulate a writer’s writing style - it’s like all those commenters on Pioneer Woman who talk about their punks with self-conscious beeziness and say “dadgum”. Weedy, is what it is… which is largely why I hate fanfiction. The other reason is that I’m a LOTR fan, and to see people who think they can emulate Tolkien’s bleak, spare, deceptively arid writing style by keyword-stuffing “glimmering” and “fey” into descriptions of violet-eyed half-Elven princesses, well, it makes me want to cause messy death. Which is not the case with this song, I hasten to add. At its worst it just makes me wince a bit and go “Puh-leese”.

And that’s what I look for in a song.

The puff pastry performed admirably, rising to glorious heights and flaking into as many layers as could be wished. The custard squares as a whole weren’t quite as successful, though. They tasted good, but I was unable to replicate the rubbery solidity of bakery custard squares. Instead it made a thickish custard that promptly squoze out the sides when I tried to cut them. Any ideas? Helpdesk Man suggested using gelatine and it may come to that, but I don’t quite fancy the idea. Maybe I could try doing a baked custard - they tend to be firm and cuttable. Sort of a Spanish flan deal which I then slapped between puff pastry and iced. It seems tedious though, and none of the recipes I’ve found suggest it. Maybe Firm and Upright Custard is simply not reproducible by the home cook, being comprised of chemicals too vile to name. I suspect that is the case… but I like Firm and Upright Custard. A conundrum.

Took the pig to Lollipop’s Playland on Saturday. It’s an indoor play area thingy with a ball pit, bouncy castle, tunnels and so on. The pig had a marvellous time, although much of it was spent in examining, dropping and laboriously finding again (and again and again) a number of large sequins which had presumably fallen off some child’s clothes. In between times she amused herself immensely by bouncing on the bouncy castle, stealing her aunt’s fries and trying to climb up slides in the toddler section (a vulgar and loutish practice of which I disapprove). When we left at the end I was surprised at her biddability, vaguely expecting a tantrum… and then we discovered she still had the sequins clutched firmly in her fat wee hand.

Right, well, this week’s challenge is to be productive. Because I have things to do, including sorting out some drearily soul-sucking matter with the IRD (turns out throwing away letters from them on the grounds that one is not really into taxes and finds the whole process sordid isn’t as sound a financial plan as one might think); binding a quilt; hastily making some summer tops for the snortlepig; and plowing through a huge number of books, DVDs and CDs lent to me by various folk who want them back. And I need to write more articles, of course. I keep getting behind on my Hair Care articles - once a week comes around more often than expected.

So anyway, I am reluctantly allowing myself no internet again this week, except for email and work-related purposes. Hopefully I’ll either do useful things out of boredom or read some of my borrowed books instead.

Question: If you were going to sing an a cappella medley of TV theme songs, other than Friends and Scrubs and Charles in Charge, what would you pick? It would need to be something that matched those three fairly well in tone, so not the Enterprise theme (which is weedy and pathetic anyway) or the lyricised version of M*A*S*H* or anything.

Would you rather write the funniest book the world has ever seen, or the saddest book the world has ever seen?

So Deb tagged me as a Kreativ Blogger - and I’m with you on that, Deb, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. Here we go, then. Deb’s blog is Green V-Neck, a literary endeavor I am happy to endorse because a) her header contains the phrase “foundation garment” and b) just this week she blogged so eloquently about her child throoming on her Blackberry to its ultimate destruction. Plus, she tagged me and them’s the rules. And we all know if you ignore memes, ten of your love ones will die. (And what with the cancer thing and my sister getting hit by a car the other day*, this is no time to take chances.)

Seven Things I Love:

1. Vanilla essence.

2. The high note Tracie Thoms hits at 2:58 in this song:

3. That feeling you get when you really, really really need to finish a book but it’s too late at night and you can’t keep your eyes open, and when you wake up in the morning you try to reach for it before your eyes are open, and grudge every minute of extra sleep you need in order to keep reading. I haven’t had that for a while, unfortunately; used to happen all the time when I was a kidling. Of course I’m currently reading “More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave“, which, while in fact very interesting in its own way, hardly inspires the sort of die-hard fanaticism that afflicts one as a youth discovering The Princess Bride for the first time.

4. Job 38-42.

5. Maple syrup.

6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

7.

I’m here supposed to pass the meme along to my seven favourite blogs: but you know, I’m not entirely sure I have seven favourite blogs; I don’t read any on a fanatically regular basis, and those I do are mostly big swanky ones like Pioneer Women who probably eat memes for breakfast. So, tough. If my loved ones perish, they perish. ** (Should I read more blogs? Is this like the thing where websites tell you you can win a trip to Tahiti if you sign up ten of your friends, and you count them up and realise you can only summon about six who would greet you in the supermarket with anything approaching genuine enthusiasm, and four of them you haven’t been in contact with for a year and might possibly have had a baby in the interim, you think you recall hearing from your sister who knows these things, even though she lives on the other side of the world and wasn’t in their class at school?)

*Sprained her ankle, apparently. Not the same leg she recently broke by tripping on a pebble on the beach while getting lost trying to find the ferry; the other leg, because a car “wasn’t there and then suddenly was”. I have sympathy, because I’m a noble and beneficent person, but at times I start to wonder if the gene pool is trying to tactfully crowd her out.

** Sorry, Mother.

…is to atone for my housewifely and culinary deficiencies of last week, occasioned by The Quilt, as a pre-emptive strike against Helpdesk Man running off with a large Swedish masseuse. So lots of cleaning - my sewing room is a sight to behold - running a bunch of long-overdue errands, and so on. I also need to make some mooshy foods for Mother, who is now allowed to eat but not to chow down beefsteaks. And just to mix things up, Helpdesk Man and I are going gluten-free this week. Not for health reasons, particularly; mostly because I got a book on gluten-free cooking out of the library, in fact; but if it should give us an extra twinkle to our toes and shinier spleens, so much the better. (Or not, actually, because giving up bread and baked goods would be a heck of a nuisance.)

I also need to catch up on my Suite hair care articles and try to do something with sister-in-law before her infant makes its appearance. It will be a busy week, I think. Plus I need to finish the snortlepig’s winter top before the weather heats up unduly; and oddly, making The Quilt has inspired me to finish a flimsy I made for the snortlepig’s changing table before she was born. You’d think I’d be put off quilting forever, but no - the free motion quilting was fun, or would have been if I hadn’t been doing it at a frantic hundred miles an hour and snapping needles into my eye, and I even enjoyed the binding process.

1. So it turns out Mother has papillary thyroid cancer. We’re all being terribly British about it, and apparently if one insists on having cancer this is a good kind to have; but still though. She comes back from hospital tomorrow, but goes back in in two weeks to have iodine splashed round in her throat and her thyroid removed. Father and my small sisters are more or less drowning in church-made soup, and the snortlepig is becoming very confident at striding around hospital corridors.

2. Sister-in-law’s baby shower was yesterday, the preparations for which involved much panic and angst. I stayed up until 1AM the night before, quilting in a frantic fashion; got up at 8 to begin again, and finished the accursed thing seven minutes before the woman herself arrived to pick us up. Not a pleasant experience. One would think that quilting was a pleasant and tranquil experience, allowing one to relax and bathe the item in a warm vibesy glow of love and contentment. Not so. I swore like a sailor, broke four needles, jammed two more deep into my thumb and felt, during the hairiest moments, a great oneness with Stalin and Hitler. If inanimate objects do indeed absorb karma, the poor kid will grow up with an unexplained psychotic twitch.

Fortunately the baby shower was a success. Sister-in-law liked the quilt, and one of her friends even asked if I made them to sell (fortunately Mother-in-law, who also sews, interrupted sternly with a well-timed homily on Recouping Costs of Time before I could respond with the sort of pithy epithet only the events of the previous twenty-four hours could craft). My quiz went down well, even if sister-in-law worryingly insisted that the third stage of labour was breastfeeding; all the guests brought gluten-free food, for the sake of said s-i-l, so she didn’t miss out on any good eats; and nobody’s guesses as to the size of her tummy were so outlandish as to cause offense. Unfortunately, only one person signed the roster for making her a meal after the baby was born, and that was me. Do I simply move in circles with an overabundance of casseroles?

3. I have added “Write or edit fiction for 15 minutes” to my Points system challenge thing. Having been on a big non-fiction kick of late, both for reading and writing, I feel I should get back into the swing of things before I wake up at the age of eighty going “When I grow up I wanna be a novelist“. Incidentally, I am currently up to 173 points or thereabouts. Finishing the quilt gave me ten… a woefully low figure, entirely underrepresenting the time and mental anguish the proceeding cost, but I decided on the figure when the quilt was still in its early stages, and it would be unprincipled to inflate it after the fact. One has one’s morals.

4. Speaking of points and such, the chappie who was supposed to make my steampunk spice chest is proving woefully slack in getting the plans to me. Last I heard his father was in hospital, and he promised faithfully to get me the specs by the end of the week; but that was a few weeks ago and I dare not nag him via email, in case I found out I was Harassing the Bereaved or something.

5. Watched the movie version of Rent last night. Quite, er, something. I liked “Seasons of Love” and played it triumphantly for Helpdesk Man today, who started humming along and informed he used to sing it at school. Nobody ever lets me know these things… it’s little wonder I was 15 before I discovered Star Wars. But that is a dark story for another time.

6. Would you rather down a pint of watery gravy or find a live cockroach in your ear? I thought this one was obvious, but Helpdesk Man informs me he’d go for the cockroach. All the saner people I know say gravy - including Mother, who pointed out that having been fed strawberry-flavoured diabetic moosh through a nasogastric tube for a week, watery gravy would seem by comparison manna of the gods. (Incidentally, according to a book I read about the life of Mrs Beeton, during the eighteenth century cooks were much plagued by the love of their masters for gravy. Apparently the gentry insisted on more gravy than the average joint of meat could produce, and got very offended at the notion that gravy was a finite commodity limited by the juices of the beast in question.)

7. Well, would you rather never be able to eat steak again, or have to eat chicken at least once every day for the rest of your life?

That’s it. I am through. Enough shilly-shallying, enough meandering around the point and repeating the same formula ad nauseum. When Lana finally got around to telling Clark they needed a break, I told Helpdesk Man the same thing. A break from Smallville, that is, not Helpdesk Man; I like Helpdesk Man. But I don’t like Smallville. Mid-season 5, all the vaguely interesting elements have been rehashed to screaming point. Lex doesn’t like his father; we get it. He’s slowly turning evil; duh. Lana has doe eyes and Clark looks shifty and then angsts in private about his irritatingly holey rationale for not telling her his secret; yawn. I was thinking of inventing a drinking game based on the following buzzwords:

• A shot every time Jonathan Kent mentions How He Raised Clark
• A shot every time Lana flings herself embarrassingly at Clark, either for the purposes of making him ask her out (seasons 1-4) or tell her his secret (season 5), and another every time she pauses again while going down the stairs of the barn to let him change his mind, which he never does
• A shot every time Lex points out that he is his father’s son
• A shot every time anyone makes an ironic joke foreshadowing a) Clark’s eventual relationship with Lois, b) the Superman costume, c) Clark working at the Daily Planet or d) Clark and Lex becoming mortal enemies
• A shot every time Clark storms into Lex’s room flinging the doors wide
• A sip and a discreet cough every time someone showers in the room above the Talon
• A shot every time it becomes clear the plot of the episode is a ripoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Finishing up the bottle every time an episode does all of the above

Only trouble is, your liver would give out before the first ad break. I’m not saying the show doesn’t have some good concepts - Lex and Clark initially being friends, f’rinstance - but the writers seem determined to knock said concepts into our head repeatedly with a sledgehammer, and it is beginning to damage my calm. Plus, when the hairline on the forehead of the leading lady starts making you want to kill, you know it’s time to take a break from the show. So Helpdesk Man and I are returning to the X-Files for the time being.

I measured the small child’s waist discreetly at Bible study today, and only need to add the elastic and sew up one side to her frilly skirt. Feel v efficient. I have also gone through scads of old Suite articles to tweak keywords, add photos and perform other revenue-increasing bits of magic. Plus, this morning I got to send a fiery cease and desist letter to Associated Content, one of whose writers - a scabrous and misbegotten wench - has been ripping off my articles as well as those of a number of other Suities. It was fun. :p

Did you know Dean Cain, aka Superman in Lois and Clark, is one-quarter Japanese? I had no idea. I found it out while perusing the IMDb user comments for said show… apparently his Of Colourness caused considerable outrage during the show’s run, as did the fact that he was, apparently, five foot nine - another factoid that had escaped me for four seasons, but hey, Lois didn’t notice he was Superman and she was an investigative reporter, so I’m not beating myself up over it. Anyway, I was somewhat surprised to learn of the vitriol surrounding him - my favourite quote, buried on page nine of the Comments, was “Hang up the Superman tight’s Dean, and go pick your nose!” Makes me proud to have a degree in Screen and Media. Anyway, how can you not love Dean Cain? He did this:

Which, aside from  promoting pure evil, is all kinds of awesome.

In searching for that, I also came across one of the Internet’s more disturbing phenomena (in a quiet, reflection-of-the-society-in-which-we-live kind of way, not in a making-fluffy-dice-out-of-underprivileged-kids way): the Celebrity Wishful Romance Fanvid. For the uninitiated, this is where fans of a show decide that the lead actors have such amazing chemistry that they must be together in real life, despite the fact that one or both is married. So they edit together sappy clips of Teri and Dean, during and between takes, to a schmaltzy love song and garner dozens of comments about how Dean looks sooooo much better hanging off Teri’s arm than Teri’s actual husband, and how it’s Not Too Late. I once saw a similar video with Torvill and Dean (the other Dean, obviously, not Superman, although now I think about it the tights wouldn’t look out of place on an ice-rink); and another with Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz. And really, how sad is that? Not only does it denigrate the actors the people profess to love by insinuating their onscreen chemistry isn’t the result of, yaknow, acting, but it seems the sign of a highly twisted psyche to desire vicarious fulfilment through the not-so-storybook situation of an actor cheating on her husband with her costar. I mean, sheesh, people. (Note to self: look up origin of the term “sheesh”. Google keeps directing me to kebab pages.) Anyway, Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle dated and ended up breaking up, and that sort of thing would surely be more disillusioning than the fact that actors occasionally marry outside their cast; no?

Anyhoo. This week’s challenge is to edit 20 of my older Suite articles - either content/keywording or pictures - and write at least one article based on solid use of the Google Adwords keyword tool. It’s a fascinating tool but one I’ve only used sporadically; and having just learned that a fellow Suitie earns enough to pay her mortgage with only 50 more articles than myself, I feel compelled to step up my professionalism a notch. Granted, she writes about taxes and finance, which probably has better CPC than articles about washing your hair with baking soda; but still.

I also gotta read a book a day to the snortlepig, and make a birthday present for her small friend who’s having a second birthday party on Saturday. (So it begins.) I’m broke and have a bunch of nice fabric left over from my patchwork skirt/sister-in-law’s baby quilt, and the small friend is about the same size as the snortlepig: so I was thinking of making her a wee twirly skirt. Which is, of course, yet another thing to sew, and with a deadline too; but hey. My current list of to-be-completed sewing items now also includes a Gibson Girl skirt and waistcoat; a steampunk/rockabilly chocolate brown skirt and corresponding tulle petticoat; a padded camera case; and two long-sleeved shirts for the pig.

In fact, I should probably go and sew something right now. Leaving you with the question: Would you rather be married to a man (or woman, as the case may be) with Superman-like abilities, or an average joe (or jane, respectively)? It’s a tricky question; on the one hand, constant feelings of inferiority and the probable impossibility of having biological children (although I’m not sure on the canon of that); on the other, free trips to Hawaii. And a husband who could do the housework in ten seconds flat, but then, what would that do to one’s personal oomph? I for one would always be tempted not to do anything useful, on the grounds that Superhubby could do it in a tenth of the time and I may as well leave it for him; which would not be healthy.