Quoting, for truth, long after the fact, my own Twitter feed. (Feel free to let me know if you ever do anything more hubristic than this.)

people on bicycles sometimes make mistakes. i don't think that's any reason to go calling anyone a dumb bitch.

I hate my bank, but soon they will be my ex-bank, and meanwhile I got a new camera out of them for free! Here's a picture of the bag I carry everywhere. Click through to see the remarkable amount of crap inside it.

Hi.


This post is for people who write, or people who know people who write. Por Vida Press is the brainchild of octette; I'm its resident librarian (what? every small press needs one), and I am super excited about it. We're open for submissions effective immediately. Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art: bring it. Go see the website for more information.

Submission guidelines in PDF are here. Print out or link, and please do distribute them far and wide.

You guys I have a volunteer gig petting bunnies. I'm just back from the bunny farm. Seriously: petting bunnies. Amazing.




(oh look a public post. Hi, we're mostly friends-only here, come say hello if you want in.)

I have this thing about mandolins. It has been a long time coming, unlike my other new preoccupation, the furry one, which ambushed me under cover of darkness. First I thought it was way awesome when Amy Ray held her own on a mandolin on top of an electric guitar and later declared that she didn't know how to play "Maggie May" and she really needed to fix that, then I was admiring Tracy Grammer's mandolin skills, and now I'm listening to old Counting Crows and Indigo Girls songs just to hear the mandolin parts and fantasizing about someday sitting on my couch playing along with some Whiskeytown song (possibly this one, even). When I went to Springfield last weekend, I had some idle thoughts about idly hunting for mandolins up there, because I know there are much better places to go looking for them than there are in Ann Arbor. Truly, I wasn't expecting to come home with one, but I did. It looks like this; it is shiny and pretty and gently used, and it sounds beautiful provided I am only trying to play a chord and not an actual thing of any sort that involves moving my left hand from one place to another. I'm working on major scales and calluses, mostly. Lessons soon, when teaching myself gets old.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Herman is on Myspace. This is the best news I've heard all day.

For fans of my last sweater, I forgot I took a picture from the front and a 3/4 view. They're on Flickr.

( more sweatering under here )

There was going to be a picture here of me in the purple sweater I finished last week, except, uh, now I'm blocking it for a third time and therefore it's wet and pinned to the daybed in my living room. This, instead, is a picture of the rather silly sweater I finished a couple of weeks ago.



The pattern is this and the yarns are two different kinds of chintzy acrylic.

It's snowing here and I have another sweater in progress. It's wool, but at this rate, I bet I finish it well before it's too warm to wear it, which means I win either way, I think.

Also, this is so beautiful I think I might cry.

Thanks to a weird combination of extenuating circumstances (who the hell just loses a bottle of salad dressing? me) and cravings, I'm eating a bowl of arugula, flat-leaf parsley, roasted beet slices, and avocado chunks, with ground-up sesame seeds and salt, olive oil, and lemon juice on top. I wouldn't feed it to anybody else, but it makes the raspberry ginger beer I'm drinking miraculously delicious. The combined aftertaste of everything in the salad makes the raspberry jump out like red in a blue painting. Flavors are mysterious things.

I meant to make up this recipe a year ago but never got around to it. I had to wait for late summer/early fall to come around again, really, because only about now is it both possible to get decent peaches (argh, Michigan) and cool enough for baking. I like fruity quick breads in the fall; I made apple bread last week.

( ginger peach oatmeal bread )

(Shit. I'm afraid the middle might be underdone.)