Today on twitter:

• 09:58 I missed you, @nicole_r_murphy! :) #
• 14:36 True Blood Season 2. WAAAAAAY better than Season 1, which I almost couldn't finish. Gah, Sookie, you live up to your name! #
• 14:55 So exciting: have discovered 'authentic' Mexican food supplier in Sydney! Via Food Safari, SBS: www.fireworksfoods.com.au/ #
• 21:23 One of my fave end-of-year activities: emailing the future, at www.futureme.org. #

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Because Pearl bottom shuffles, she goes through a lot of trousers. Once they wear out (ie. the material gives way) I have been cutting them up for rags. And the decorative bits of the trousers are cut off and have a new life as decorations on cards.

My mood: quite proud with crafty abilities.

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Another toy store - http://www.fairyring.com.au/fairyring

With home-made felt toys. I love felt, it’s the nicest material of all (I plan to do more sewing with felt this year), and these are super cute.

The End of TIme is to Dr Who as Spock's Brain is to Star Trek. Alas.

I swear junk food taste better to me now that it did back before I knew I was gluten and dairy intolerant. In fact, a lot of things taste better now.

I think it's down to a) my body not being poisoned all the time, and b) my new philosophy of eating. Basically, as there are so many, many things I cannot eat, I am now allowed to eat anything I want, any time I feel like it.

It is awesome!

It sounds simple, doesn't it? But it took a while for it to really sink in. I'd keep looking at cherries at $26 per kilo or salmon at $10 per 200grams, and think, "No, it's too expensive, it's special occasion food." And then I'd wander the aisles full of stuff I can't eat without poisoning myself, and then go back and get a kilo of cherries and three serves of salmon. What the hell else am I going to spend that money on? A doctor's bill when I poison myself with crap? The car I don't own? The synthetic high fashion clothes that make me break out in hives?

No. I have to eat, but I don't need any of that other stuff. So why not eat things I actually like? Asking that question has changed my whole outlook on what's expensive and how I feel about food.

Like, just now, I had the munchies, because vidding uses the same mental muscles as writing, so I burn up fuel like crazy. And what I really wanted was junk food. So I ate junk food, by god! Of course, junk food for me in this instance equalled plain corn chips and homemade guacamole. NOM NOM NOM.

Later, I might have my current favourite: a salmon salad as big as my head. Then I might have nectarines for desert. I might have two or three of them!

Seriously, I love this philosophy of eating, and I've actually lost weight since I started it. I don't suppose it would work very well if I could eat lashings of butter or cheese or cream, or sauces, or potatoes, or deep-fried foods, or... pretty much anything with cholesterol or calories. But as things are, it's freedom. I love it.

And speaking of junk food, I had a thought the other day. I have a supply of delicious gluten free bread now, and I was wondering if I could make garlic bread using garlic aoli. I might have to try it.

And now? I will have tea, and then make more of my vid.

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/334841.html.

Almost no hives from the cherries and strawberries.

I've been working away at reading for Sprawl, you couldn't tell I am on holidays! I've nearly read the submissions, and almost with only a few stern talks from Tansy. I am off to possibly dodgy internet for five days from Tuesday so will be hopefully ready for editing etc, away from distractions (you know who you are).

I seem to have acquired about a book a day for packing ... I got two books for xmas and bought one as a present. aifin has just passed me a very thick graphic novel which I intend to inhale at some point between now and Tuesday.

The hardest thing I did today was explain to an almost five year old why the sky is blue. I think I did ok. However, I completely failed at yo-yoing.

My sewing is progressing, photos after the sewing day tomorrow.

Here is the gorgeous necklace which aifin was kind enough to help me go back for today at Salamanca. Whereupon I discovered that they freight interstate! Oh my!! I think I might need to find something to bribe myself for a reward for a large, glass, pink vase. Or something equally gorgeous!





So um, I actually finally tried this on after this photo. Ooops, I might have bought it because it was pretty. The good news is it sits gorgeously, and the colour is not really all that great in this photo but more true than the one that was in focus.

The lap quilt I have been working on in class is now done.  I finished handstitching the binding last night.

Voila:



and the back...



The psychadellic pink and green strip on the back was to correct a happy mistake (the backing wasn't quite wide enough).  I think it looks better for it.

So on the subject of new year's resolutions. or at least, thoughts and ideas and possible goals for how next year might go if it goes how I sort of plan it...

I'm considering going ( drug and alcohol free )

Thoughts?

... continuing on from the last post where we were at Constitution Dock:



The dock has been cleared in preparation for all the boats heading our way. This is the only remaining boat:



I got a bit of a tour of Constitution Dock. For those who have read Siren Beat, these are the rocks where the bodies are discovered, at the beginning of the story:



Nicer in daylight, and with less dead bodies but the sky seemed ominous and the call of the kraken faintly present.
And then we had a bit of a wander around the other dock and had a look at the fishing boats docked there:





And this is a photo I took (don't be misguided into thinking that I like boats or anything) because I found myself walking along the jetty, peering into the boats tied up alongside and checking out what kind of things were in the kitchen and other random signs of life aboard. Which, was funny because for six years I was on the other side of that, being docked alongside, being forced to eat food I didn't like, and having people walk past and peer at me to watch what I was doing.



And then we finished up the day with delicious fish and chips from Mures - fish caught locally. Yum!

Made a pilgrimage to Launceston today to take in the new Guy Ritchie directed Sherlock Holmes flick, with Robert Downey Jr in the title role, and Jude Law playing Watson.

The journey was not without mishap. I phoned the Friendly Neighbour People to see if they wanted to send a couple of their kids with me and the boys - and instead, we wound up travelling in their car, with five of them. My two lads performed brilliantly. We all climbed out into the car park in Launceston, and Elder Son promptly turned green and puked all over the tarmac. Younger Son poked his nose around the rear of the car, caught sight of Elder Son's stage-show, and immediately hurled his own breakfast in sympathy.

I'm afraid I wasn't very supportive. I was too busy giggling, pointing, and trying to get Friendly Neighbour Dad Tony to stop making comments designed to set off two little chunderbuckets all over again.

They paused for a breather. I took 'em to a sammidge shop, put some food and drink into 'em, and it was okay after that.

The verdict on the movie?

Really good, yeah. But one of those films where they never really had any chance of living up to how awesome you hoped it would be.

What do I mean? Well -- it was a Guy Ritchie flick about the London underworld and crime and stuff. Which is what Guy Ritchie does best of all. And it had Robert Downey Jr (who is one of the best performers of his generation, in my opinion) playing one of my all-time favourite characters. Sherlock Holmes has been part of my life since I was maybe four years old.

There was really no way they could have created a film awesome enough to fulfill my hopes.

But they tried pretty damned hard.

Guy Ritchie's visuals were a treat. The colour palette was used with beautiful, understated, gritty blue-grey elegance that gave the whole film real atmosphere. The music was by Hans Zimmer, who did the rich, lush score for the three Pirates of the Caribbean flicks - except this time he kept it sparse, and thematic, and it was excellent. The villains were suitably villainous. The action was top-notch, with really solid, well-crafted fight scenes. The pacing was really good.

And the acting?

Well, Jude Law has now become THE Dr Watson. No more Nigel Bruce bumbling here: Law's Watson is tough, competent, smart, and very nicely torn between his off-beat relationship with his best friend, and his wife-to-be. In a wonderful piece of screenwriting and directing, the film enters the Holmes/Watson partnership at just the time when Watson is moving on with his life - getting out of 221B, setting up in his own private practise, and preparing to get married. The whole thing between Holmes and Watson reverberates around this separation. We get to see the pair of them as long-term buddies, complete with the jokes and the habits and the backstory, and the feeling of trust and affection between them comes through very strongly.

To be honest, for me the least effective part of the film was RDJr as Holmes.

I'm not referring to the director and scriptwriters' re-invention of the screen Holmes as an action hero, master of fisticuffs, eccentric and abrasive and socially impossible. All those things are on the page in Arthur Conan Doyle's books, and frankly, they've been missing from the screen versions of Holmes for far too long. Even as the new Jude Law Watson is much closer to ACD's original character than the perpetually bumbling sidekick of so many films and TV shows, the Holmes given to RDJr is a lot more like the Holmes I knew and loved from the books.

No - for me, the trouble lay in RDJr. For my money, he laid on the arch humour just a little too thick, played it for laughs just a little too obviously, couldn't quite understate the role effectively enough. This isn't the Holmes it could have been: this is Tony Stark (hard-drinking genius with a dark side) shoe-horned into Sherlock Holmes' Victorian-era wardrobe.

Having said that -- well, I'm being nit-picky. And if I hadn't seen RDJr doing Tony Stark, I probably would have been a lot more forgiving. But I did, and once the connection was made, I couldn't shake it.

Overall? Definitely worth seeing, and very enjoyable. The plot's complicated and appropriately over-the-top, and there are a few scenes that don't quite make sense -- but it moves along nicely, and the visuals are brilliant, and the action and fight scenes are really well done. A very strong thread of humour surfaces often enough that I giggled a lot more often than I do at most comedies, and the strength of the Holmes/Watson dyad laid out by these two very fine actors has me already anticipating the sequel.

So: gtfo and SEE the thing. Several times, so they make enough money to hire everybody back for the next movie.

EDIT: Wait a tic, I just realised there's a bunch of things I want to mess with.
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It's kinda hard to get to bed early at the moment cause, yo, hello? I'm in HOBART at cassiphone and aifin's and I now totally understand the sheer pleasure of post-children's bedtime :) Last night we trialled slushy seabreezes - or seabreezetinis - which, well, produced much giggling and amusement. Anyway, I got to bed late which meant I got up late.

Today we headed off to Sorell and luncheoned at the Berry Farm.



This was on the to do list for the finalised decision on whether I like cherries or not aka if they are as fresh and as ripe and perfect as can be, will I *then* like them? And if they need to meet this requirement, then do I actually like cherries? aifin hunted out this punnet for the deciding round:



So the thing about the cherries is this, every where I go in life, people smile and "mmm" when you say "cherries" and I just don't really get it. I'm not that fussed, to be honest, about fruit in general nor about cherries, specifically ("Well they're not chocolate," says cassiphone). What I did like instead was my very first ristretto, which the Berry Farm also boasted that they specialised in:



Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Bit of food pron up next, imagine a long decadent afternoon in a lovely flower garden, not too hot, slight breeze, the best company, delicious food.



Waffles with warm strawberry sauce, strawberries and vanilla ice cream:


After we had our fill, we headed back home via Constitution Dock, where the yachts will soon come sailing into after their long voyage from Sydney:





to be continued ...

I've been reading a slightly odd book, by the name of "The Human Side of Statistical Consulting". I suspect it wasn't such an odd book when it was published (1982) but changes in the power, availability, and ease of use of statistical computing packages, as well as changes in the availability of desktop computers, would appear to have made amazing changes in the practice of statistical consulting. Such gems as:

"Even the least mathematically inclined statistician is good at arithmetic. " (ha. arithmetic is something I get the computer to do most of the time. I only resort to pen and paper when I have to manipulate equations. )

or 

"Clients' computational resources are commonly very limited, such as to a desk calculator"

and

"Getting everything in writing is a good thing to do ... however it has some drawbacks. A more or less minor drawback is that it takes time. For you to write it and get through the typing pool may take a couple of days."

Having pointed these out, I should say that it is a very interesting perspective on the practice of statistics, rather than the more theoretical stuff I normally read. I'm fortunate that I'm not having to work with scientists from a wide variety of backgrounds, and it would appear, also fortunate in that they all value what I have to say, and generally don't disregard it (even if they sometime misunderstand it).

Now that we've calmed down slightly from frantically adding caching and bugfixing I've had a chance to do some reading - and it was good :)

• An Ever-Fixèd Mark by Anonymous (Modesty Blaise - O'Donnell) In which it is all Steve Collier's fault, except when it's Willie's. Just gorgeous. Modesty and Willie might not be as compatible you think :p
• Complete Blank by Anonymous (Grosse Pointe Blank) Martin is going to have a perfect wedding if it kills ... well, everyone but Debi. And Marcella and Bart. Pitch perfect and funny, omg funny.
• Small Favors by Anonymous (Girl Genius - Phil and Kaja Foglio) Times are tough for wild Jägers without a Heterodyne in sight. Jenka picks up the pieces of her boys (in a very literal way). A Jäger friendship fic. Delightful vignette with a heart... and hat first aid :)
• Killing Elvis by Anonymous (Alien series (1979 1986 1992)) Dr. Liu, Got your final report yesterday on Project LV-426. I'm amazed. Great work all around. It's been forwarded to the Chair, our friends at the Pentagon, the Defense Appropriations Committee, and DARPA. The acid-resistant armor is something that should really catch their eye. We're expecting some big grant money from this. Burke Beautifully put together, funny and dramatic. This is a gem.
  
• Start At The Edge by Anonymous (Aliens (1986)) After the events of Aliens, Ripley finds herself in a situation she would have preferred to avoid. How it should have gone after Aliens

This entry was originally posted at http://samvara.dreamwidth.org/443926.html.

As soon as Hope's "12 Days of Cliché" idea was expanded from being a fiction fest to something more multimedia, we started throwing around ideas for types of fanworks we like to make.

I don't usually think of recommendations as a fanwork -- not in the same way as fiction or art. But you know what occurred to me during that brainstorming session? They sure are a lot of work! And I only go to the effort because I'm a fan. I would guesstimate that if you squashed all the time I spend making recs back-to-back... it would take up maybe two or three weeks a year. (crack_van alone takes up a week: the best part of a day for each set.)

That's really quite a lot! So, after that rather stunning realisation, I decided to celebrate both all that work, and the love of fanworks that drives me to make all those recs.

In keeping with our fest theme of "clichés," the result is a set of favourites about born and unborn children, or mpreg and kidfic in our evocative fannish vernacular. :)

I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

( Musing on Mpreg )

Stories

( Leading up to happily ever after... )

( Crack and angst... )

( Temporary adoption... )

Songvid

( Constructed mpreg (un)reality... )

This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/334499.html.

One of the funny and irritating things about working on the opt-in basis with our child is that you don't have as much control over when things happen as you might like. Current instance: after two or three days of various little difficulties, I finally put two and three together to get five and realised that Sparrow was ready for two major changes in the getting-used-to-solid-food process. The first was that she definitely needed to eat at least one solid "meal" each day, though it didn't replace any of the breastfeeds. She'd been mostly playing til then, she got a "meal" most days but if it didn't happen neither of us were too worried. Now it's a necessity. The second change was that she is opting-in, without any knowledge of what it's all about, to the next class of foods that we're introducing her to: the vegetable proteins. Cooked legumes - split peas, kidney beans, dahl, lentils, that sort of thing. I was going to leave soy and broad beans until after she was accustomed to the others, but she's already had soy flour in a few of her bread and cereal products without sleep-deprived-me being able to easily avoid that. I will still leave tofu for another couple of weeks though.

So this is all good, and roughly on schedule as much as there is any real schedule. The only problem is: these changes have become obvious and definite while we're travelling, and I finally worked it all out while I was at the MIL's house. And the MIL controls her importance to the family by controlling the food chain. She does all the meal planning, the shopping and pantry stocking, the allocation of ingredients to meals, the meal preparation, the meal timing, the meal serving. When dinner is ready You Must Come To The Table Right Now Or It Will Be Ruined. It can be really hard to get her attention away from that absolute rule if there's something that actually is more important, like noticing that her two granddaughters have been wrangled into matching Oma-made outfits and would like a photo with Oma before at least one of them gets covered in food. Actually, it can be hard to get her attention away from any of the above steps, because it's the absolute rule that she is in charge of all these things. She's got a little better on that with me, after various encounters such as where pregnant-hormonal-morning-sickness-me emphasised that I would put food on my own plate in my own time by running away from the table in tears and throwing up when she tried to ignore my request to wait and just started serving me something malodorous anyway. And she does try to do things like organise with people beforehand what time would be best for her to have the meal ready, which at least gives us a chance to have input.

My and James controlling Sparrow's introduction to solids has been a challenge to her. Because, *I* decide what Sparrow gets. Well, James too, but as the parent-at-home, (more crucially) the parent-who's-awake-at-breakfast-time and the one who's been given the current official health information to read and research I'm the one driving it. So when we were visiting in November the MIL had bought a number of traditional foods for babies, and I wouldn't let Sparrow have them because she wasn't ready for them yet. We had lots of arguments over that, though they stopped noticeably after the MIL managed to feed Sparrow something she thought we were being too fussy about and then Sparrow spent the evening howling in inconsolable pain. She still tried it on James that he was just doing these things because I said so and he should get a mind of his own, but thankfully he was able to ride that one over.

So here we are, in my MIL's house and kitchen on Christmas Eve, wondering what to do next. In my own house I'd just grab a handful of this, handful of that, get it cooking, base my dinner plans around the new information and go from there. Can't do that in the MIL's house - can't bring in any sudden changes, and especially not on Christmas Eve when everything has been planned to the Nth degree for at least a month. Plus (as far as I know) she doesn't tend to have on hand the ingredients I might first turn to, despite also being vegetarian, unless she's been planning to make something with them. Her cooking habits are still very conservative. So I decided that my best plan of action was to avoid having her see me make a sudden change to the rules we were following re feeding Sparrow because I'd never hear the end of that - you can't change a rule, that just isn't done, despite the fact that it's a changing system. And the decision that it's time to change a rule is another way in which I would be obviously exerting my control on the food chain, which is a challenge to her importance. That meant avoiding taking that next step obviously until we were somewhere else where I had more direct input into the food system, i.e. holding out only an extra day and a half til we got to my family's farm, where my mother stocks her kitchen cupboards pretty much just like I do and is absolutely delighted for someone else to say "I'm doing dinner tonight, is that OK?".

Ah, opt-in and demand-driven. You never quite know what's going to happen when. But it's all fun, and a great mental challenge.

Oh my gosh, I have discovered Lindt chocolate.

I'm never eating Cadbury again.