Author / Sixer

by Sixer

Skipping a Beat: Or, the Tempo Revs Up

Dear Readers,

I have been thinking of you quite often over the past few weeks. For one thing, I really wanted to post at least once every month this year, and was all ready to pop in on the last day of March, even if my entry only said “Made it!” And yet, somehow, I missed it. For once it is productivity that is stopping me, for now when I have both energy to do something and time to do it I find a dozen different projects lie happily at my feet. Thus the theme of this blog, I suppose. A woman of many hobbies, and devote of none.

To show how much I’ve thought of you I have some pictures. They prove my intent to share these mini-milestones, for I certainly do not take them for myself, and I have yet to start instagraming. See, here’s one from March showing the first little seedlings:IMG_0687

Behold, arugala (I’m pretty confident about this, but considering the lemon balm/lime basil incident. . . . ). There are also little poky leaves which are either cress or borage (or lemon balm, I suppose). Now that they are developing real leaves I’m siding towards borage. The dill is coming out too now, its seedlings like little blades of split grass. A volunteer army from last years horridly lanky pair. Saturday I went out and “weeded” as an excuse to stare deeply into the dirt and soak up the beautiful warmth of the sun. I did a little thining, and confirmed that the mundane looking seedlings in the door-wise corner are indeed cilantro, as I hoped. The seedlings smell of it all ready, and I wait in hungry anticipation for the summer. All I need now is for some of the winter thyme to show itself and my joy will be complete, as far as the large box goes.

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Look, whales!

Oh, what is this picture? Knitting? Yes, do not be shocked, this is a glimpse of a Christmas present for the Geekette. Finished in March and given hastily before I could find yet another thing wrong with it. I am really happy about them, but those decreases on the left hand! Finishing wool mittens in March was an excellent strategy to chase away the chill weather, but not a good idea if you want immediate confirmation of their long-term comfort. That’s okay, they are done and it’s not her birthday. I can cultivate a little patience for the weather’s whims.

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Now this is really for you, I have been learning HTML and CSS. Prior to this I’ve picked things up mainly by poking into themes and making Decollate – fun but maddening. This time I am trying to learn from the ground up. I have watched the first few videos of Do Not Fear the Internet, interspersed with the appropriate lesson section from Code Academy. Here is my review of Code Academy after completing their basic website course: they make things quite easy to follow and allow hands on application to drive each point home. I love this way of learning, their use of badges and percentages, and their general layout. Only three things have annoyed me so far:

1) The window where you get to see your changes magically manifest is buggy (in Safari) and instead of scrolling you have to select the contents and drag in order to see anything below the top two inches.

2) The website likes to refresh and Boot You Out. I googled it and, for once, I’m not the only one with this problem. Frustrating but not really a big deal (it usually saves your progress).

3) The course I’m taking is how to make a website. We had just gotten started on the topic that I really, really care about – positioning – when they pulled out the magic wand and shouted “Bootstrap.” I think bootstrap is cool and all, but not in a class. Please teach me how to actually position things first, and then introduce me to possible shortcuts. I’m taking their HTML & CSS language course next and I’ll let you know if it covers the subject any better.

Between these two sites I am learning quite a bit, and you can keep up with my progress here (when I finally insert a link ^_^ EDIT: Done!). Eventually I will be able to make my own theme, and then there will be no stopping me (bwhahaha!). Look forward to it!

 

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A more recent picture of sprouts.

by Sixer

An Unlikely Piece of Cake

Okay, so I wrote this a few weeks ago now, but it’s nice to step back sometimes and check to make sure you didn’t miss a turn. So here it is, just a little story about how good a little folly, and a bit of cake, can occasionally be.  

 

It was kind of a lame idea to begin with. Just a joke, really. We had got to talking about Blue’s Clues at work, brought together by memories and the Mail Time song, and I mentioned that my mom had a cake pan featuring the hound. “If I can find, it I’ll sign up to bring cake in for your birthday month, when is it?” I rashly volunteered. And so there I was, in January, knowing that the cake needed to be made now. But I had no idea what to do. I eat cake but I don’t really make it. I prefer cookies and brownies and pudding. Cake, in my mind, is rather like a blank canvas. It can look nice, it can taste nice, but it’s still just the thing people put the actual food on – or in – and I had no idea what kind of cake to make. Worse yet, I had no idea how to pipe it.

I ended up using my Martha Stewart dessert book and modifying the coconut cake recipe to be more coconut-ish. The original assumes there will be plenty of coconut on the outside, but I wanted to make Blue, not a snowball. In the end I put in ground up flakes and added orange peel and orange juice (that is, the juice of the orange I zested).

In other words: I winged it like a mad scientist.

It should have been a disaster. I used the last of my homemade yogurt for the sour cream, and when I poured the batter into the pan and discovered I needed to double the recipe if I didn’t want to end up with a jelly roll, I subbed the rest of the sour cream for coconut milk. I was positive it was too big to cook through in the middle. The bottom started browning, so I covered the narrower half of the cake in tin-foil, my mind full of images of burnt dog. Then when I finally took it out I was convinced it had completely dried out. Not being able to cut a piece off to see was torture. I put the cake in the fridge and went to bed, gloomy and defeated (and, yes,  a little melodramatic).

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The next morning brought a few more hitches that really should have put a stop to the whole thing. I used a medley of sugars for the Italian meringue because I was running out of white. It boiled just a bit too long, caramelizing a little and then hardening on contact with the cold egg whites. The beige and brown sugars gave a pleasing, rustic color to the frosting that made me afraid of how it would handle dye. The three frosting tips I have were all too small for this job, so I tapped up two zip-locks instead (a la this extremely useful video). I substituted coconut oil for half of the butter and watched in anxious anticipation as it mixed. There was no way this was going to work.

 

And yet, somehow, everything came together fine. My blues are too, too close together in shade, and I forgot how truly hideous pink dye taste, but the result is satisfactory. I can’t remember ever liking any of my frosting jobs, but my mom is a master cake decorator and maybe some of her mojo passed through to me via osmosis. Or maybe it was all the magic of meringue buttercream. Even when it seemed to be melting in my hot hands it piped out steady and true (well, except for when unmixed clumps of coconut oil got stuck in the tip. Yum). When I brought the remains of the cake home that night, after it had been siting in the breakroom all day, I was able to wrap it in plastic without the frosting squashing and sticking. It stayed perfect down to the last bite, though texture wise it definitely was (marginally) more pleasant at room temperature than straight from the fridge.

Basically, the cake was a complete dream. A credit to no one.

It was both more, and yet less, dazzling in real life . . .

 

When I tackled this cake I was in the middle of another long, stressful week at the office. I got a new responsibility in October, and slowly I have started feeling less and less capable of doing my job well. I’m not motivated enough to be a perfectionist, but I have standards and assumptions about my abilities, and it’s depressing to feel oneself continually fall below those. Having this cake turn out, despite my inexperience and my hasty shortcuts, made me feel such a flood of relief that it’s hard to find a word worthy of describing it. It was just the reminder I needed to help rediscover that solid bit of hope which is always there to stand on when things are bleak and uncertain. Faith isn’t expected to be fed by cake, but maybe sometimes that’s what the soul really needs.

by Sixer

Impractical Work

 

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Wednesday I got off work mid-day and came home, happy and content and dreaming of the sewing project I was planning on finishing. As I turned up my walk and passed the tall, raised bed at the corner, I let my finger trace the brown branches of my fragrant monster-shrub, bare but for the downy remains of empty seed pods. I had pruned the plants a lot last fall, but had not had the heart to rip them out completely and leave my beds stark naked all winter. So they had stayed. But today was so warm, and the sky so clear and bursting with joy – why not clear them away now and be part of the world’s awakening? And it wasn’t to early too plant just a few things, right?

So I did a little gardening yesterday, taking a more careful stock of what plants survived and what didn’t. There are little patches of rubbery German chamomile – stubbornly green. Some of my mint has kept it’s leaves, and there are even glimpses of its purple stem amidst the brown cascade. I thought this scruffy green stuff was nigella last October, but it hasn’t died or gotten taller since then.

 

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Most likely it is just a weed, but for now it adds color so it gets to stay. My blueberry bushes seemed to have survived fine. The top hat is positively greenish, but the Jelly bean has some sinisterly gray branches which speak of neglectful, slap-dash gardeners. I can’t wait ’til they start putting on leaves so I know how well they fared.

Because I am impatient, I scattered arugala, parsley, borage, cress, and coriander seeds in my herb box. I realize it’s the first week of February and I have another month to go before it makes sense to start sowing these, but there was something in the air, as if spring was shouting from the distance “I’m coimng, I’m coming!”

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Come quickly Spring, I have more seed packets waiting in the wings.

by Sixer

Looking Back: 2014

This is my 2014 Japanese review. Really I should have written this in August or September, because that’s when my language study suddenly took off and flourished. I could feel myself improving everyday, and was happy to sacrifice other pursuits in order to spend more time studying. I started watching Jdramas  without subs, though, I’m afraid, not my favorite one and none of my anime simulcast.

 

The instigator of all that new found momentum was Kawaii Japanese. in the beginning of August I read their post about HabitRPG and joined without blinking. I participated in their Japanese subtitle challenge, winning the first one and completely failing the second (but still attempting it, which was worth something). For the challenge I watched Nonbiri with Japanese subs open in a window next to it, and paused to enter sentences into Anki whenever there was one that seemed eligible.

This was basically every minute.

And entering the sentences meant breaking them down, word by word.

 

I have never watched a show so slowly before.

 

I didn’t translate the sentences into English on the cards, oh no. I went hardcore and made them JPN>JPN. Nonbiri turned out to be a good show to do this for. The girls all had a different way of talking, which meant I was exposed to various styles of Japanese (as a language with varying forms, mostly based on politeness, such variation is important). Not only that, it’s a rural, slice-of-life comedy, so the sentences I translated were often short and somewhat funny, while still containing those ubiquitous phrases that pop-up everywhere once you know them.

Here’s an example of one of my cards:

Front : まさか　ウイルス感染で登場人物全滅とは

Back:

ウイルス→　”バイワス”
感染（かんせん）→病気　（ウイルス方）

登場人物（とうじょうじんぶつ）→映画と本の中に人たち。

全滅（ぜんめつ）→全部死ぬ。人も。所も。世界も。

(Ah, going through these reminded me how fun it was, but also how completely unhelpful my cards would be to other people. I went a little out there on some of my “definitions!”)
That being said, the show made me want roll my eyes in a bad way, though I’m willing to consider that this might just have been the process, which took forever. As soon as the second competition was over I ditched it. In fact, as soon as the competition was over Nanowrimo was upon us, and as soon as that was over the holidays were here, and, basically, I did nothing but the bare minimum – put a podcast on in the background, listened to some songs, watched my (subbed) anime, and read 精霊の守人.

 

Ah, Moribito (守人), where do I began? Moribito has long been one of my favorite anime, I watched it over two years ago when Crunchyroll first put it up, and immediately re-watched with my brother. And then they took it offline and I couldn’t watch it anymore. Last summer I bought the light novel off of Amazon. It was ridiculously cheap for an imported item, about $11, and considering that it’s 340 pages of words, words, words definitely more bang for your buck than a manga (sorry Natsume). I dived into the book and, despite being completely over my head in incomprehensible kanji, found I could keep up with the story well enough thanks to the furigana and my familiarity with the plot and characters. I might not know exactly what was going on in detail, but I understood just enough to know where in the story people were. And then there were the times when I understood whole sentences. Magic.

 

Don’t let the past tense fool you, I’m still in the middle of this book. I’ve been “reading” it with minimal lookup since July. At first my reasoning was that reading near a computer is impractical. But with my iPhone loaded with imiwa this is no longer a valid excuse and I’m forced to admit that it just goes completely against my boar-headed nature to pause in the middle of reading. Looking up one word leads to looking up another, and soon I’m no longer reading, just word collecting (more on this in another post). Still, even with minimal word lookup, my reading ability has skyrocketed. From understanding unconnected sentences like, “チャグムの目がまるくなった,” to being able to follow conversations. To everyone out there studying: take heart and force yourself to stay exposed to multiple media even if it seems totally beyond you. Your mind was designed to learn language, you just have to give it enough materials. I really think that watching shows without subs reinforced my reading skills. It’s almost like I can imagine how the conversation sounds now even if I don’t know exactly what they’re saying.

Okay, we’re almost done. In 2014 I started cleaning out my podcast library. This has been done with far less enthusiasms than my other learning methods. A few years ago I went on a wild spree and downloaded something like thirty likely looking podcasts. I subscribed to some of these, but only listened to a few, and those only rarely. The result is that I had over 600 podcasts episodes waiting for me in August. I have taken that number down to about 550 . . . . My goal is to whittle that down to 0 (as best I can, some of them are still updating) and then delete them all and keep only my four or five favorites. I already know what the first four subscriptions will be: MHN (Music Hyper Market), Sound LIbrary, Kikudrama, and Udon Chururchuru. I have a few contenders for fifth place, and might end up with a sixth if I ever get the hang of listening.

 

So, there’s 2014 in review, with a bit of a sneak peek into my 2015 plans. I spent more effort than usual in August and September and the result is visible enough to make me want to up my game a bit this year. Next time I post I’ll show you how I’m planning on using technology to make the most out of 守人. Until then,  またね!

by Sixer

Skipping Ahead

I am sitting here by my window, watching the world awake. No passionate dawns today – just a warm, happy glow slowly intensifying into daytime. I have moved my furniture twice in the last thirty days. I liked where my desk was before, but I realized even though I could see the window from my chair, I couldn’t really see out the window. So I moved it to a better spot. But that threw my bed placement off a bit, ergo the second rearrangement. Now it’s all settled and I love it, which might not be a good thing. See, I’m already thinking ahead to next year and the changes and challenges I want to to take on. One of them is the dreaded Go Out More, so having a perfectly restlful house is going to make it harder. However, it will make my other goals a little easier. I’m still wanting to start sewing, for instance. But mostly, I’m wanting to start reading, and that’s where my planning has focused.

There are all kinds of reading challenges, but the ones that make the most sense to me are those that let me dig into my already overflowing shelves. For this reason I’m joining one of the many TBR (to be read) challenges.

I’m throwing caution to the wind and pledging 24. Mount Blanc. That’s two books a month. I think I’ve been averaging one every three month this year. To make things more interesting, I’m adding the color challenge in as well. Any ideas for a third one? There are lots of challenges out there, but most of them seem geared to a certain genre (mystery, sci-fi, romance, fairytales, etc.) and the books I’m drowning in right now are all non-fiction or plain fiction, so I need something more like the sewing or knitting challenges that people host, which go by theme (reminds you of spring, gifted, plaid . . . . ). Maybe I’ll follow one of those challenges, translated into books? Hmm, could you call Tonybee’s A Study of History foundational?