Posts Tagged ‘2009’
Project Spectrum | East
Today marks the turning of Project Spectrum from North to East. East is represented by the element of Air, the season of Spring, the material wood, and the color yellow.
Yellow is a really hard color to work with in a Web site design. It’s either pallid and babyish, or eye-numbingly bright. I hope I’ve been able to balance that a little, but please let me know if that yellow is blinding on your monitor.
I feel like this blog design is way over the top for me and, to be honest, it makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because yellow just screams LOOK AT ME and I tend to feel more comfortable fading into the background. Yellow isn’t a color I normally wear, my mother’s efforts notwithstanding, and it isn’t a color I’m particularly fond of, for the most part. (The one exception would be with daffodils, which are my favorite flower. I love them yellow and bright and eschew the white ones in favor of the sunny faces of the yellow ones.) But Project Spectrum is about exploring your relationship with the various colors and elements, and about pushing boundaries to some degree, so I’m stepping outside my normal comfort zone with this bright and over the top blog design.
It’s fitting that today is the beginning of the next phase of Project Spectrum, for today is also Beltaine. (Though you wouldn’t know it looking out my window.) I have a love/hate relationship with Beltaine. To see the world bursting with life and color and promise makes my heart sing, but the associations with fertility make me cringe. It’s holidays like Beltaine that make me feel like a failure as a Pagan. It sounds silly to say something like that, but so much of Paganism is about fertility. I try to not take that so literally and make up for my lack of fecundity in body by nurturing my creative fertility, but it’s not always easy.
I haven’t decided yet what my focus, other than the blog design, will be for this phase of Project Spectrum. I’m considering finally starting on Flicca, because I have a mountain of yellow yarn waiting to be knitted into that sweater. There will certainly be photos, and tree bark is one of my favorite things to photograph, so I’m looking forward to that. We’ll see where this goes.
G Is for GEnie
Sometime in 1993 or late 1992, one of my housemates, John, in the Hippie Hut – aka then and now as “the Norwood house” – got onto an online service called GEnie. He wanted to be on GEnie specifically, as opposed to Compuserve or whatever else was around back then, because he wanted to play Battletech and GEnie had it. We’re talking the way early days of online gaming, and GEnie was the place to be. I used to watch over his shoulder when he played and chat with the guys – because they were all guys – he chatted with.
After a while on GEnie, John discovered a text-based RPG call GemStone, and G is definitely for GemStone. It was when he started playing GS that I decided that I really wanted to get online, because I really wanted to play. So sometime in 1994, I rolled up my first GemStone character. Her name was Rhiana and she didn’t last long. Later that year, I rolled up my bard, Warble Singsong – go ahead, make fun of the name – and she still exists to this day.
It was because of Warble and my time in GS that I reached two of the most significant turning points in my life. First was that I met Scott there. It’s kind of funny, because John’s character got married in game, and Kyrion (aka Scott) and Warble were the best man and maid of honor at the wedding. That was where we met, and it still makes me laugh that the real world cliche of a best man and maid of honor getting together took this crazy virtual world twist for me and Scott. Our characters became pretty good friends after that meeting, and we did quite a bit of chatting as Kim and Scott, too. Eventually we met in person and the rest is history.
The second turning point was that it was because of GemStone that I became a Web developer. I made a friend in game who liked me so much that she hired me as her assistant for a gaming site she was launing. She was a mentor to me, teaching me about project management and HTML. Though the Game Grotto – two more G’s – had its plug pulled after just a year or so, that was the beginning of a career path for me.
So I owe my marriage and my work to a game. Hey, that’s another G.
F Is for Family
And this is mine:
This photo was taken a few years ago at my Great-Aunt Migs’ 75th birthday party, and represents the entire maternal side of my family. The only surviving person missing from this photo is my Great-Aunt Kate, who estranged herself from the family some years ago for reasons I don’t understand.
The back row, from the left: my mom’s husband Denny, me, my mom holding my cousin Darrin’s daughter (who’s name I don’t recall), Aunt Migs holding my cousin Darrin’s son (who’s name I also don’t recall), Aunt Melissa, cousin Michael
The front row, from the left: Scott, my brother Alex (known around here as the Punk Ass Kid sometimes, even though he’ll be 26 in a month), cousin Denise, her husband Glen, cousin Darrin, his wife Dawn
We used to be a much more tightly knit family than we are these days. I know my mother speaks to Aunt Migs once in a while, but I really only speak to my immediate family. Denise and I were close as kids, but don’t talk at all now. It’s kind of sad, to have such a big extended family and not really be in touch with any of them.
New Theme
It was my intention to do a new theme for each phase of Project Spectrum. So here I am, only a month late into North!
E Is for Eggs
Is there a more versatile food than the egg? You can use it to prepare any meal of the day, and it can be fancy or plain. Anything from a quick dinner of scrambled eggs to a fancy brunch with quiche to a quick and dirty fried egg (particularly yummy if you calorie-plurge and fry it in bacon fat after cooking a couple slices of bacon).
Eggs are definitely a staple food around here, and we usually eat omelets for dinner once a week or so. Recently, thanks to Everyday Food, I discovered a new favorite way to serve eggs for dinner: Baked Eggs in Tomato-Parmesan Sauce. We tried this for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and it will definitely be staying in my repertoire.
D Is for Done
Done, done, done! As in finished. Complete. No more!
Yesterday I got official word from my doctor that I can stop using the wound vac. It’s impossible to say how happy this makes me. Over the last 9 weeks, I have grown to despise this machine.
There’s still a small hole, but it’s not deep or long, so I just have a wet-to-dry dressing on now. I have to change it myself twice a day until the skin grows over it, which should take a couple of weeks.
I’m just going to consider this another tool in my kit for the end times or the zombie apocalypse: wound care knowledge. Between the knitting, soapmaking, and now this, I’ll have several skills to fall back on when society collapses, be it from rogue computers or zombies.
But I think I digressed a little…
D is for Done! And I couldn’t be happier.
C Is for Comfort Food
This is pastina, my ultimate comfort food.
I don’t remember if it was my grandmother or my mother who cooked it like this for me, but this is the food I must have when I’m sick or hurt or depressed. Before my recent surgery, I taught Scott how to make it so he could cook it for me when I got out of the hospital.
It’s a very inexact recipe, if you can even call it a recipe, but here’s how I do it:
Open a 14.5-ounce can of chicken broth and pour into a saucepot. Bring to a boil. Reduce to a strong simmer and pour in the pastina. You should use a little less than half the volume of the chicken broth. I like to keep a kettle of hot water nearby in case it starts to dry out, because this should be creamy. I call it “poor man’s risotto,” actually.
Keep simmering until the pastina is cooked through. I think this takes about 8 minutes, maybe less. It should be soft and the broth should be absorbed, but the pasta should be creamy, not dry. Add water as it cooks if it looks like it needs more.
In the meantime, lightly beat one egg. When the pasta is cooked, remove the pot from the heat and quickly stir in the egg. This is just like egg drop soup, and the heat from the pasta will cook the egg completely. Add a generous handful of grated parmesan or romano and stir.
Serve hot and topped with more cheese. It is the absolute yummiest, most wonderful comfort food ever.
B Is for Beer
I’ve been wanting to post this for a while now, but the problem has been that I’m not drinking much beer lately so I haven’t had anything to photograph. To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, I’ve been living on Perc, Sennakot pills, and Colase. The Percocets don’t play nicely with beer. But now I’m only taking 2 Percocets a day, so I can enjoy a beer now and again.
We drink a lot of beer around here. Neither Scott nor I is particularly knowledgeable about beer, but we know what we like and we’re willing to experiment.
This is how I feel about wine, too. But wine has taken a back seat to the beer over the past year. Maybe it’s because beer seems less fussy, but these days I’ll opt for a beer with dinner instead of a glass of wine.
Shown in this photo is a Tröegs Nugget Nectar, one of Scott’s recent finds. I love its hoppy bitterness, and it’s become one of my favorites.
A Is for…
A is for Altar.
I use a butcher block in the kitchen as an altar. We decorate it seasaonally for the current holiday. Here, it’s all dressed up for the Winter Solstice.
The altar always includes my broom, a silver goblet and bell, a small cauldron, and candles. For the Solstice, we added evergreens, decorative trees, and all the holiday cards we recieved. I’m in the planning process for Imbolc decorations.
(The Popsicle sign isn’t part of the altar, but it makes me smile to have it there. Same thing with the Red Rider switchplate cover. What’s religion without humor?)
