lolajl: November 2006 Archives

Got a job interview today, and another one at a different company tomorrow, so wish me luck! It'd be great if I could get hired before 2006 is over . . .

Finished the pair of Wildefoote camel socks, but I think I'm going to rip it out as these are too tight. I've started another pair, this time in Blue Boy; I increased the stitches by 4 more stitches and the fit seems more comfortable. I'm really loving the short-row toes and heels.

I'm working on an Christmas gift, which I won't go into details right now.

Turkey Day's over and we survived two dinners. Whew . . . delicious food, great company, good time to be had by all. Today Hubby and I are chilling out, just taking it easy and watching Firefly. We thought about going to the movies, but there's no good movies to be seen and the only one that looks remotely interesting is at Arundel Mills Mall (The Queen), which will be packed to the gills with shoppers looking for a bargain. Umm . . . no thanks.

My third attempt with No Knead Bread finally turned out terrific. The key was to reduce the amount of liquid to 1 1/2 cups to start; you can add more if the kitchen is dry. The other key, it seems, is to use as fresh yeast you can get. The yeast I used previously was Fleischmann Rapid Rise bread machine yeast and I've had it quite a while. I think I'm going to have to toss it. Sorry about the picture being a bit out of focus. See how "holey" it is? That's how it's supposed to be, and very light as well. The 2nd attempt bread was quite heavy. It's been tossed into the trash - too salty and dense.

Here are 3 pictures taken throughout the process. In the first photo, the dough is very bubbly and "wet", after an overnight rise in the spare bedroom. That's how the dough is supposed to look like. Also, at the bottom it's not supposed to be runny with quite a bit of liquid. If it is, you've got a problem, buddy. You'll be dealing with very, very sticky dough.

See the middle? That's after it's been folded and left to rest before being reshaped into a ball for 2 hours rise. And the final photo - look how delicious it is. There's a reason why the recipe says to put the bread in seam-side up you get that artisan bread look.

We used most of the rest of the bread leftover that we bought back home for French toast (delicious, I might add; later on I'm going to try using egg to get sweet bread - egg-based bread such as challah is great for French toast). There's only a couple slices left to munch on, so I'm going to have to mix up another batch later today.

Back to knitting . . . need to get that 2nd pair of Wildefoote sock finished off as we watch the Firefly videos that we borrowed last night from J and C . . .

Fr. Alexander Schmemann delivered his last sermon on Thanksgiving Day, before he reposed in the Lord in 1983. It is a beautiful, simple prayer.

Thank You, O Lord!

Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.

Thank You, O Lord, for having accepted this Eucharist, which we offered to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and which filled our hearts with the joy, peace and righteousness of the Holy Spirit.

Thank You, O Lord, for having revealed Yourself unto us and given us the foretaste of Your Kingdom.

Thank You, O Lord, for having united us to one another in serving You and Your Holy Church.

Thank You, O Lord, for having helped us to overcome all difficulties, tensions, passions, temptations and restored peace, mutual love and joy in sharing the communion of the Holy Spirit.

Thank You, O Lord, for the sufferings You bestowed upon us, for they are purifying us from selfishness and reminding us of the "one thing needed;" Your eternal Kingdom.

Thank You, O Lord, for having given us this country where we are free to Worship You.

Thank You, O Lord, for this school, where the name of God is proclaimed.

Thank You, O Lord, for our families: husbands, wives and, especially, children who teach us how to celebrate Your holy Name in joy, movement and holy noise.

Thank You, O Lord, for everyone and everything.

Great are You, O Lord, and marvelous are Your deeds, and no word is sufficient to celebrate Your miracles.

Lord, it is good to be here! Amen.

It's that time of the year. Thanksgiving marks the start of the Holiday Season, at least for us Americans. I love this time of the year - you get that special, tingly feeling fueled by the smells and sounds of Christmas. True to form, there are celebrations that occur every year, such as the Nutcracker Ballet at Kennedy Center and the Tree Lighting Ceremony.

If you happen to be in DC during this time, you should stop by the Union Station for Norwegian Christmas. Every year they put up the train model, and feature a Norwegian region. It's the Arctic Circle this year. And they hold a bazaar where you can buy food, clothes, and so forth. Hopefully I'll get a chance to go to the bazaar.

For years, I've wanted to take spinning classes with Judith MacKenzie McCuin, but always events conspired against me, lack of funding, time conflict, and other reasons. It was to my surprise that I discovered that she is working on "Teach Yourself VISUALLY Spinning". This is certainly welcome. What would be even more nice is if she'd produce a spinning video to go along with it.

Here's a really good site - Brillant Button Maker - where you can create buttons, if you can't find what you like. You can preview what your button will look like, and make changes until you're satisfied. You can even add images to it, although I can't guarantee that your images will come out looking great on the button. You'll just have to tinker around with it.

From time to time, I see people walking around with Che Guevara t-shirts. I wonder what they know about what he really was like. In short, he was a sadistic, murderous thug, who, after Castro had taken over Cuba and revealed his true self, ran a prison where people were tortured and killed, and who ruined a lot of people's life. Here's the truth, at Anti-Che Guevara website, run by a Cuban-American. I have to shake my head at people who don't bother to take the time to learn his history. Yes, he's supposedly a symbol of rebellion against authority. Well. There's rebellion and then there's rebellion. Such as Ghandi, for instance.

There's a recipe that's apparently spread like a wildfire on the net - Lahey's No-Knead Bread. Unfortunately, the NYT article has now expired and you'll have to pay an exorbitant sum to retrieve it. Fortunately, there are countless sources that have reprinted the recipe - The Wednesday Chef, for instance. And the video can still apparently be viewed by the general public. When I found out about this, I was stoked, as I love artisan bread, but right now I'm not working near a bakery (no, Safeway and Giant don't cut it) and it costs too much to buy on a regular basis.

However. My experiments, thus far, have not turned out so well. The first batch I made was so wet that there was actually some liquid on the bottom. I may have used too much water - apparently there's a discrepancy - in the printed recipe, it says 1 5/8 cups (now, how am I supposed to measure 5/8 cups when the standard measuring cups only have quarter and third measurements???); in the video he states 1 1/2 cups. I have a sneaking suspicion that either it was a typo, or Bittman twiddled with the recipe a bit to put his personal touch on it.

My second experiment - dough wasn't so wet, but it barely rose, and it was too salty as I'd added a bit more salt after some online research. No, I didn't get that chewy, holey inside. It came out heavy as lead, and according to Hubby, rather tough. Sigh.

I'm on my 3rd experiment. This time, I went and found Fleischmann's Instant Yeast at the grocery store (for some reason they're selling this with the holiday food on that table that they use for promotional items). By the way, Safeway, could you please put the price into your database, so that I don't have to wait forever during a price check call while the employee, whose task is apparently to collect shopping carts and move boxes, looks in the wrong aisle for this product?

I got it mixed up nice, after reviewing pictures at Flickr, so it was shaggy and sticky. I put it in the oven with the pilot light on, but then Hubby said temperature was 80 degrees or so, which I thought was too high (recipe says to have temperature at least 70 degrees F). So, I moved it to the other bedroom, where the temperature is about 77 degrees. Hopefully 3rd time is the charm . . .

Oh, knitting . . . err, umm, what knitting? Well, working on sleeve #2 and we all know how exciting it is to see pictures of sleeves in progress. I really should push to get it finished so I can get this pullover out of the way.

I didn't do much knitting last week, because, well, you know. That and I've been busy working on refreshing the look of my domain. I need something to fatten my portfolio, and it's slowly coming together. I'm hoping that I can get it all up by end of week. Right now my dilemma is whether to display links for pages that I don't quite have in place yet due to lack of content. I'm trying to decide whether to put in a place holder page with something like "coming soon", or just to comment out the links in the navbar. These "coming soon" pages really irritate me because these stick out like a sore thumb. Looks like I should just pretend that I'm a visitor, and duly comment out these links, no?

Last Saturday Hubby, G and I went to the Greek festival at Annunciation Cathedral. As always, a good show and the weather cooperated by being nice and warm, just how I like it. Perfect for celebrating my birthday. When I wandered into one of the rooms open to the public, I saw this costume. I forgot to make a note of which part of Greece this came from. But, isn't it beautiful? I wonder what it must have been like for the owner of this dress to leave her native country for the unknown. She would have had to put it away carefully, because it would have been very backward to walk around like this here in the United States during the turn of the century (no matter that Americans don't really have a colorful native costume . . . the closest one comes to are the cowboy costumes, and the Native American costumes, which of course, is politically incorrect to be worn by anyone not of Native American descent).

I'd like to replicate this as accurately as I can someday. There's something missing . . . knitted socks. I can only imagine what these socks would have looked like.

First - let's just get this out of the way . . . yes, I voted, and by absentee ballot. I just don't trust the electrical voting machines. If the British can run an election with just paper ballots, why can't we? And, I'm tired of the Democrat party taking black people's vote for granted - they shouldn't expect me to use my vote for them all the time. Enough of the political rant here.

While checking up on a list of cheat sheets, I came across this Gmail Shortcut Cheatsheet. It's simply a reformatted version of the one that you see in your Gmail account if you go through the Settings portion. What a lifesaver. I have two gmail accounts that I use regularly, and I'm getting tired of using the mouse to navigate these accounts. It took me a while to figure out the key shortcuts, but it is very intuitive and should make it a lot more efficent. Especially as I have a good amount of email that I need to delete . . .

Last Saturday Hubby took me to Stitches so i could mingle with all those "crazy" women [in Hubby's words] and drool over the yarns and such. I have to thank him for being very patient - I know it was boring for him, and so I'll have to remember to do the same if we get to go to one of those tool shows. It will help to have a WIP, probably a pair of socks, along with me then.

It was really overwhelming with all those skeins of colorful yarns and piles of books. Especially since I didn't have a lot of money to play with. I was able to score a skein of yarn from Blue Moon, some Harrisville shetland yarn that was on sale, a pattern, and that new Victorian Lace book. Oh, yes, one of those Euro Steam iron that will come in handy for my sewing projects.

Referring to the title of this post, yeah, I guess you can tell that I'm really tired of not having work or being able to get a firm job offer. So, I'm going to see if I can get some freelance work. That means overhauling the design of my Lolajl.Net domain - if you go to the main page it still has that stale pre-Internet look when I learned HTML (I cringe when I look at the source code). I've found a couple of websites where you can put out freelance work bids and such. Wish me luck there . . . Of course, I'm still going to be looking for a full-time position.

As for knitting - not done much lately the past few days. Did work on the sleeve for the pullover. And I worked on my sewing on Sunday. I had a bit of a struggle with it because I forgot to latch the bobbin thread over that notch before putting it back in, and I kept putting the spol on backwards. I did get the pockets sewn on, and one handle partly sewn on. I think I'll get back to it later today.