Why is it that the recipe for Sugar Cookies in The Joy of Cooking has totally failed me, these last two years, whereas when I was younger, yea! even when I was making Hamster and Musketeer cookies to take to the Millenium Philcon/Worldcon back in 2001, I had no trouble at all? I follow the recipe exactly, with special attention to the  quantities of the varied ingredients (especially flour), I chill the dough for the length of time suggested in the recipe, but when I attempt to roll out the dough between sheets of waxed paper, all I get is a sticky mess that cannot be cut with the cookie cutters and cannot be moved onto the baking sheet?

In the end, I threw in another half to 3/4 cup or more of flour and remixed it with my new Kitchen Aid mixer until the dough was stiff enough to work with.  But I cannot believe that The Joy would steer me wrong -- where am I going astray?  It does nothing to lower my stress as I try to make large batches of Christmas Cookies to give as gifts and to take to tomorrow's Office Party.

I want to make note of some of the things I'm thankful for this year.

For Friends, first of all, and family. For those in Real Life, and for those in Cyberspace, both those who love and care for me, and for those who simply inspire me and keep my heart up by their example, when I'm feeling battered by the forces of entropy. For those with whom I shall be sharing a meal in a couple of hours, and for those I see only in my mind and heart.

For my health, especially for the fact that it's 22 months since the reversal of my ileostomy and all seems to be going well with no recurrence of the diverticulitis. And for the fact that, out of my experience with the ostomy, I can reach out to folks who are newly coping with that same condition and offer hints to make life easier. For my good mammogram. For my doctors and other caregivers, and all from whom I've learned ways to improve my physical and mental and spiritual well-being. For those who care for the health of my friends and family.

For our president, Barack Obama, and the hope he has offered to our country and to the world (may he be able to fulfill some of our hopes!)

For the beauties to be found in the parks here in New York City, and for those who work and give of time and treasure to ensure that the parks will continue to be available for the people, and to maintain or improve the landscape.

For the wonderful diversity of people here in the city, and for all that has helped to make me aware and more appreciative of it.

For books, and blogs, and films, and other arts, that have comforted my soul or enlarged my horizons, and for the authors and creators who made them and the publishers and distributors who set them before the public.

For good food, and clean water, and air to breathe.

For all of these, and for so much more, I am thankful today.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate!

Having trouble learning to use an LJ-Cut - Attempt follows!
( Read more )

Sigh. No matter how closely I hew to the model format I downloaded from LJ, it just doesn't cut it. :-( Or does it? Sorry for any repetition in flists.

Back in June I floated a proposal that folks without other plans for dining with friends or editors might wish to band together to explore the restaurants of Montreal, and got quite a response. I'd hoped to check in with everyone as the Con came closer,  to see if we could settle on particular nights, times, and restaurants that were especially appealing, but "stuff" intervened, and here we are on Monday of Con week.

First off, it was proposed that folks who were arriving early might want to get together for a meal, and it turns out that I won't be arriving until Thursday afternoon so I won't be around to help put up signs or coordinate such an activity.  But I still think itmight be fun and perhaps anyone interested could coordinate through responses to this message and then run with it.

As for the rest of us, one of the Montreal residents had kindly offered to make reservations for a group of us at one or more restaurants, this to have been done the week before the con. I don't know if it's still on offer, but if we can arrive at a consensus as to where we might want to eat, and the time and date that would be most convenient, I'll inquire of her.

Could you check through the online version of the Program and see what days and what time you'd most like to have a group meal? With so many responding I thought we could perhaps do this more than once, and thus be able to sample more than one cuisine on more than one night,  Or more than one group setting out on the same night to allow for different taste preferences -- I think there are enough of us to make up several good-sized groups and have a wonderful time chatting and eating.

I'm off to check the restaurants listing and con schedule in between stabs at the day job, but I wanted to get this up here so we could start synchronizing our watches!

<blockquote>
Are there any other singleton con-attendees who might want to make up a posse to have dinner at some one of the marvelous restaurants Jo describes so well over at the antici_food  community? The folks I know are always already tied up with professional obligations, or have commitments to catch up with the friends they only see at cons, but there must be hundreds of us {whispers) semi-mundanes who'd enjoy the chance to dine with other people to talk to, so we wouldn't have to worry about getting poutine on the pages of our new books! [snip]

ETA2: If we get enough folks, we can subdivide according to which nights people have free, or which cuisine is calling them most loudly, or whatever, and perhaps keep track of ourselves on the what-do-you-call-them, message boards at the con itself, as time gets closer.  Meanwhile I'm saving all these posts to memories, so it will be easier to keep tabs on responders.  Welcome! (Nom nom nom as the LOLcats would have it)
</blockquote>

that I still had, at 57, the energy and curiosity and spirit of adventure that I had When We Were Very Young....instead I grew up to be a hobbit, portly, sedentary, and settled in my ways.  But wait -- who is that at my door?

	Via  roadnotes : "a question from fuyukodachi
	Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- The first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes."

The Lord of the Rings
The Party Pig
The Wizard of Oz
The Sheik
An Old Fashioned Girl
The Scent of Water
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Mr. Wicker's Window
The Pilgrim's Progress
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
The Beekeeper's Apprentice
The Deed of Paksenarrion
Manchild in the Promised Land
A Girl of the Limberlost
Further Fables For Our Time

Last month, when everyone was passing round links to this video, I fell in love with it. It's such a brilliant pastiche and reworking of the material, so perfectly realized by the vid makers (whoever they are). And it made me go back and dig up my old Broadway cast CD, and prowl around on YouTube and iTunes searching out various versions and productions of Les Miserables.

And despite whatever one might say about the overblown bombastic quality of some of those Cameron Mackintosh musical extravaganzas, I sat here at my computer watching scenes from Les Mis and hearing the words of the idealistic students willing to die on the barricades for their dreams of a better world, and weeping when I thought of what has happened to my country over the last eight years. And wondering if we really dare hope for actual change. And hoping.

And so, because tonight is the exact time specified for the actions of this video in its stage directions/subtitles, there can be no better time to present you with an encore performance of

While browsing 'friends of friends' this morning, I ran across this video, recommended by zoethe and it inspired me to post it on my LJ (also I really wanted an excuse to make a few posts using my Ballot Box icon - see last entry).

I love this little detail from Thomas Nast's 1880 political cartoon for Harper's Weekly and several years ago I made it my icon for early November. An old-fashioned Ballot Box, from the days of real, countable, verifiable paper ballots, stands on a pedestal incised with the words "Liberty - No Man - No Party - No Country Can Destroy It". The Ballot Box is crowned with a liberty cap (which Nast converted from the (red) bonnet rouge icon of the French Revolution to a "Stars-and-Stripes" version) surrounded by the victor's laurels and adorned with a star-shaped "US" badge.

Years ago I borrowed this image from a copy of the cartoon we had in our collection at work, and put it on that year's ballot form for elections in my professional association, changing it slightly by adding the initials of that association to the cap just over the star. And when I wanted to make this icon, I couldn't locate the original cartoon, so I took a copy of the old association ballot, whited out the group's name and inked the stripes back in the positions I remembered they should have, and scanned it for my LJ icon. But you can't really appreciate it at 100 pixels by 100 pixels, and courtesy of my friend Google I found the following full version, along with many cool images related to paper ballots, at a webpage from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/vote/paperballots.html



Eek! On the full cartoon, you can see that Nast's original caption read "The Coming Crown." A Republican victory, and an everlasting Republican form of government. Presumably back in 1880, Nast was calling for a GOP victory for that year, but not for a Rovian "permanent Republican majority", rather for an everlasting version of that form of government to which Benjamin Franklin referred in his famous words, "A republic, ma'am, if you can keep it".

LIBERTY - NO MAN - NO PARTY - NO COUNTRY CAN DESTROY IT

May it be so, please God. May it be so.

VOTE!!!

Meme from many friendslist entries:
1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing (except resizing if they are HUGE).
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

Well, THAT resolution worked out about as well as most New Year's resolutions, didn't it?

But here it is, June 1st. What better time to make another stab at "posting regularly" :-)

And a good time to look back at how far I've come since last year, too -- back then I was just starting to recover from surgery, with a huge incision that didn't fully close til sometime in July. I was staying with a friend, away from my own stuff, and feeling rather cut-off from my normal life. And looking forward (if that's the word) to a lot of stressful moving -- both my office and my home -- and wondering where it would all end up.

And now, here I am on a perfect June Sunday, sitting in front of an open window in my third floor brownstone apartment with the beautiful woodwork, looking out at green leafy treetops and listening to birdsong and the sound of the breeze rustling through the leaves.

ETA: And now it's June 23rd, and I'm back from a most enjoyable and thought-provoking weekend at 4th Street Fantasy Convention in the Twin Cities, and a whole bunch of things have happened in between (as is the nature of Life). The draft of this post disappeared into the ether back in the day, and magically re-appeared just now under the guise of "do you want to post from a saved draft?" when I meant to wrestle a few words about 4th Street onto the screen, and I can think of nothing better to do than to post the June 1st thing and then Do It Again! Post Early and Often!

Happy New Year to all and to all a good night!

from HLC in NYC
whose resolution for 2008 is to post regularly in LJ :-)

Well, I'm home.

I've just been in hospital for a week having part of my large colon removed due to complications of diverticular disease -- I realize I should put this under an Ick! linkie-thing but my brain is pretty fried at the end of a long day wondering if I'd be released today or have to stay over again as I did yesterday, and then packing up and coming home, and getting ready to go stay at a friend's while I recover, and I can't deal with the coding. So there's the brief edition.

Suffice it to say, the op went quite well all things considered (though I have an ostomy bag now for a few months) and I'm doing OK with coping with the various new attachments.

I missed all of you a great deal == probably never catch up with all of Bear's posts -- and I'm looking forward to catching up as I lounge around recovering ;-)

I have just about the best Real Life Friends (and family) that there are.

And Doctors and Nurses are pretty damn kewl human beans.

More anon.

For all my friends who celebrate, may the light and warmth and joys of the season be yours. (And may there be Peace on Earth!)

O Tannenbaum O Tannenbaum Last Christmas a German friend invited me to see a real Christmas tree in the old style, with real candles.

I voted.

I went at mid-day and the turnout seemed pretty light - there was one person ahead of me for my Election District, and I didn't really see any lines for any of the, maybe three, maybe four, ED's whose voting macines were all in the one big room.

My polling place is a couple of blocks away, at a residence for the blind, and they were having a bake sale, so after casting my ballot I scored a couple of cupcakes, one chocolate and one seemingly vanilla, but as it was wrapped in green saranwrap I couldn't yet swear to it :-)

I have to keep my fingers crossed that this election goes as the people actually vote, and not as some crypto-corporate-fascist group alter the voting machines to make it come out.

And that it is the start of a turnaround for the country, and a return to the values of the Republic for which our Flag stands, and all that.

I can't believe that no-one on my f-list (which includes several very active communities) has posted a single message since the middle of the night -- is something wrong with LJ this morning?

The beadses have been speaking to me again...as you see, I've been busy making a pair of earrings to go with my elisem necklace "Wyatt's Cat".  These earrings have been prowling around the odd corners of my mind ever since I found the little cat beads that matched the eponymous Wyatt's Cat bead in my necklace, and they've finally taken (temporary) form.  I expect they'll evolve a bit as my skill increases and they speak to me more clearly about what they're supposed to be, but in the meantime I can wear them :-)

Apologies if the series of Scrapbook photos has clogged your friend's page -- I'm still getting the hang of working with the LJ Scrapbook feature and haven't mastered the LJ cut, either.

Not Wyatt's Cat - Mr Zak is Really In (the inbox) The ruler of my office surveys his domain

Earrings by Aitchellsee (Alt. View): Another view of my earrings, an homage to the necklace "Wyatt's Cat" by elisem , named "Wyatt's Kittens". [Sterling silver, bone, early Moe's beads, dalmatian jasper, fancy jasper, glass, horn, coral, and some other stuff]