Category / Bunberry

by Sixer

From the Desk of S. – Re: the Fax

It feels weird to say it, but’s it’s been almost a month now. Almost a month since I started my new job. My first “real,” “9-to-5,” “hard day’s night,” job. It’s been fun and scary and an adventure. Now that I’m a little more comfortable I find my mind sometimes . . . . drifting. Listening to the electronic operators asking me to leave a message, trying to figure out if “Lewis-Kent” goes after or with “Lewis,” standing in front of the fax. . . . .

Ah, the Fax and I.

I knew from the first time I heard his beep of greeting that we were destined to rankle each other’s souls. I’ll admit I was intrigued, I had never met someone like him before. I didn’t know what he was like. I thought he would help me connect with other people. But soon after I heard his dialing tone, like an electronic goose clearing his throat after swallowing bagpipes, I began to suspect otherwise. Soon the very mention of his name caused me to roll my inner eye. We differed on practically everything, bickered in a manner barely professional, and even grew to argue outright.

Through this process I could hardly help but get to know him, that Fax machine. I learned what buttons it was safe to press and which I should just let be. Suddenly, I found myself holding my breath when I heard him preparing a response for me, the sound of him printing seemed breath enough. The world seemed set on giving me excuses to visit him, and when he helped me get through, when we communicated together – I’ve never known such a beautiful sense of satisfaction. His simplest, most routine OK could make my heart soar. I began to notice a new tone in his messages. They seemed at times like a warm blanket to my sometimes weary soul. I  discovered – quite by accident, and yet inevitably, considering how often we were together – that he had a warm side. Hidden, but strong.

Though we still disagree, still end most of our meetings with him clamming up stubbornly and I stomping away to my desk, we can no longer pretend we hate each other. I can no longer pretend. He is no longer “That Fax” in my mind. Perhaps he isn’t “my Fax” yet, maybe he never will be. Fate seems to have other plans for us. And yet, we now belong, in a strange and crazy way, to each other.

I and the Fax.

The Fax and I.

by Sixer

Letter to a Linguist

Dear Theo,

I know I told you a while ago that I was studying Korean.

I lied.

I was actually doing something diametrically opposed to the very idea of studying, but since that something involved hearing hours and hours of colloquial Korean, I felt the term “studying” was justified.

Not that I didn’t study at all, of course. I looked up how to read Hangul (한글) a few months ago. It was kind of a mistake, because I found out that words I’d been hearing as “kamsamnida” and “bian,” were actually, when using a strict romanji system, spelled “gamsahapnida” and “mian”  (감사핲니다 – thank you, 미안 – sorry). Not being able to differentiate the k/g, ch/j, b/m sounds really threw me off. You know I have problems enunciating in English, I don’t need another language’s issues thrown in. It seemed obvious that Hangul would require actual study to be able to read or write it properly.

Actual study was what I was avoiding.

But fast forward a couple of months to the present and I still spend countless hours loafing around while listening to Korean being thrown back and forth am exposed to the quirky character of the Korean tongue every now and then.  I can no longer point to the measly fifteen words I know and say, “See, I am doing something edifying.” The moment of truth has come. Either I must actually study, thereby justifying my intake, or give up all things Korean.

Except the food. We must draw the line somewhere.

In all honesty, the moment of truth came a few weeks ago, but my inbox was full so I didn’t get it right away. After I did get it, I made a quick pro/con sheet:

Con: involves actual work;  sucess, as unlikely as it is, means eventually admitting you can do work to people you’d rather have think of you as a bum; failure is inevitable unless redefined; it has no benefits but the “joy of learning” because, though knowledge is power, scientist have yet to figure out how to use it to fuel a car

Pros: You get an excuse to say “buooyol!” (뭬예요 – what,  Romanji – mwoyeyo); you get a chance to learn why all the M’s sound like B’s; You’ve been looking for a good excuse to exercise your researching skills; It’s the only way you can make “well rounded” sound like a virtue.

It was your fairly typical tie, the kind that makes you wonder if your subconcious is just using you as some kind of behavorial experiment, when I realized that starting a new project would mean making a new binder. You know I’ve never passed by a chance to make a binder, and it seemed rather late in the game to stop now. “Besides,” I threw out the infinity decision making, “I can always stop when I want to.”

So, since Thursday, I’ve completed my research and have started using Talk to Me in Korean, which is a completely free site with podcasts, pdfs and (swoon) workbooks. The podcasts are just what you’d expect after listening to JapanesePod 101, only I feel I’m learning more from them. Probably because I know less, but still, it’s an encouraging feeling. I’ve listened to the first ten lessons of level one a few times and am preparing to go through the corrosponding workbook before moving on. I’m stalling because I haven’t practiced my spelling at all as much as I should have, so I don’t really know how to write half the words I’ve learned. I’m loving these podcasts because they help me understand what I’ve been hearing these past six months. Not necessarily the meaing of the words, that’s a given, but the logic of the sounds. I’m pretty used to listening to Korean, so it no longer sounds strange to me – it’s no longer indistinguishable from a Mediterranean language, you could say – but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. The podcast takes all the niggling little observations that the incurable scholar in me has made and ties them all together into a neat little bow. And then attaches the bow to a present. I’m dying to open the present, even though I’m pretty sure there’s no chocolate inside, but I get the feeling it’ll need a few more bows before it’s complete.

Anyway, Crazy,  I know you love languages so I thought I’d keep you up to date about my studies. Sometimes I learn something that’s so small it’s barely even worth mentioning  but it causes me to geek out in the worst possible way. And then there’s the long-winded, introspective looks at my own native tongue which I could hardly share with the World at Large. So yeah, you’ll be hearing from me again shortly. Don’t leave town.

Love,

B. Sixer

P.S. If your name was Shirley, I’d say you’re Shirley mine ^_- My New Job is filling my head with bad, bad puns. “Bi”-yane.

by Sixer

Miso

I cannot find the words to describe miso. Perhaps there are somethings that can only be truly understood after a long familiarity. If this is so, miso is certainly one of them.

It’s not that words simply stop coming to me when I sniff at a box of miso, or raise a spoon to lips for a quick taste. Licking my fingers absentmindedly, I find that it is sharp, salty, strong. But the only usefully informative word that has come to me is cheese.

Not that miso tastes like cheese, my mind refuses to accept this statement, more like miso has the same spirit as cheese. It’s aged, for one thing, and it is, as previously alluded to, salty. Its odor is pervasive and its taste distinct. These are attributes of cheese as well. I suspect that, scientifically speaking, tofu is closer kin to the cheddar than miso, but tofu has few qualities. Cheese has many.

I’m looking forward to growing closer to miso, close enough to tell the color of it’s eyes, you could say. Right now I am still learning to like it. It’s the person who you would love going to a movie with but would hate having to eat dinner with beforehand. Who’d you play cards with all night, but would never invite for a walk. You might frown at it in baked goods but savor its presence in soup. It is irreplaceable in my udon’s broth, and that binds it to me forever – like a brother-in-law.

Hello miso, fancy seeing you here. Want to go for a walk?

Triple Soy Loaf, from JustBento
by Sixer

Rind-up

This pie, cake really, was great. So delicious and moist . . . . The recipe came from Cooks Illustrated, which has to be the most enjoyable cooking magazine, whether for pleasant perusal or serious study. Bon Appetite has pretty, glossy pictures, but Cooks Illustrated has art, not to mention actual articles to accompany each recipe, sprinkled with good advice and culinary science. The cake itself is harder to find than cook, in the index it’s not called “Boston cream pie” but something like “wickedly delicous boston cream pie,” which can throw off even the best index skimmer. There are three parts to this delight: cake, cream, and glaze, and I cannot wait for an excuse to bake the cake all by itself. It’s that good.

If you click it, it expands.

The cake was for Easter, which was delicious thank you, but even before that blessed day arrived I managed to check off one of my culinary goals: the watermelon rind pickle. I found this recipe in The Woman’s Home Companion Cookbook, which was published in the early forties, and also in The Foxfire Book. If you have never heard of The Foxfire Book (I believe it’s derived from an old magazine series, but I haven’t actually looked it up) than you are missing out. Such useful information lies within their covers. Everything from building a log cabin to slaughtering a hog. There are even pictures.  My copy of Foxfire comes from my misspent childhood, when I went around reading The Black Stallion, My Side of the Mountain, and Stalking the Wild Asparagus*. Now I read Heyer. Oi vey.
Anyway, the idea of pickling rind, an hither to useless substance, tickled the remainders of my childhood fancy. Especially since the recipes called for cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. And yes, the two sources provided nearly identical recipes. So last Monday the Geekette came over and helped me boil them into existence. The Geekette has been a co-conspiritor of mine since before we really care to remember, and is responsible for such experiments as fried angel food cake. With her help we combined the ingredients and managed to make the sweetest pickles I’ve ever had. We used the rind of one watermelon, which yielded about one quart of thin, unevenly proportioned, white squares. We left out the slacked lime, because for some reason we were out (I’d also never heard of it before out side of historical fiction, which I make a habit of not learning from. Can you buy this at the grocery store?). The result was a slightly gummy confection with a bite only slightly reminiscent of bread and butter pickles. The squares were deep brown, mostly because we used ground spices instead of their whole counter parts. In fact, the ground spices were such a bother that we had to rinse off the pickles before eating them in order to avoid covering our tongues in cinnamon paste. Blech. Even though these pickles were peculiar I’m definitely going to make them again. Especially since I found a use for the left over juice.
See, the Geekette and I deemed actually pickling the pickles to be a waste of resources, since it wasn’t like we had a whole truckload of them. So there I was, with a whole bucket of christmas scented syrup in my fridge, wondering what to do with it. Mouse? Ice cream?  Delicate lemon squares? The last was the clear winner. When I was a child it seems my mom made desserts all the time, every other memory is about us beating egg whites for meringues – innocently called kisses throughout my whole childhood – or sniffing at the lemon scented air as mom pulled a pan of yellow goodness out of the oven. I haven’t had lemon squares in ages now, so recreating them with pickle juice was a lot of fun. The best part was my family didn’t touch them. Score for the pickle bar.

In other news, I am now the proud owner of a Honda Fit, and Doctor Who has started up again. Oh, and I discovered how to make my dad’s camera zoom and focus. Like, at the same time.

Wow, it’s been quite a week.

Be blinded by the cake, ignore the absence of pickle pictures!
*Speaking of Euell Gibbons, someone I trust and admire deeply told me they had made wisteria fritters before. Wisteria. Fritters. Oh my, imagination overload.
by Sixer

A Change of Sorts

Okay, I’ve got those creative itchies again. I’ve been making shrinky-dink jewelry all morning, and now my finger are a little sore from closing wire rings without pliers. Luckily I have something to post, to give my poor fingers a little rest. I was staring at my computer screen a few nights ago, thinking “ugh, now I have to go to bed,” when my desktop caught my eye. It was pretty boring. A few weeks ago I had changed it, hastily, to a reminder to pray for Japan, but I had kept all my Desktop goodies from my last make-over. The result was haphazard and utilitarian, which describes half of my life (the other half is haphazard and just for show).  I was staring at this rather pathetic surface when an idea came to me. I had just taken a hundred pictures of a teapot, because my life really is that exciting right now, why not use one of those as a springboard for something tranquil and efficient? So that’s what I tried to do.


Although, efficient might not have been the best adjective.

This is where my real skills come out, because finding all the components for this is little more than researching, and that’s what an English Major is all about (and you thought all we did was read. . . ). I knew I wanted a vintage feel, I’d been siting on the Faber Castell pen and Gramophone icons for a while and the hazy image of used tea leaves called for something elegant and old world. So that morning I went in search for some complementary icons for the other things I keep on my dock and desktop. I also downloaded this interesting app, which converts pictures to .icns. Nifty. It means I no longer have to worry about downloading png. files. Most of the icons on my dock come from Babase’s Old School set, but here’s the run down on the rest:

 

Hardrive: Teacup

Random Folders: Vintage folders (I normally keep these folders off my desktop, but the vintage folders just had to be used, so I pulled them out)

Misc. Pics Folder: Old world camera

Safari: Samurai compass

Firefox: Wooden tablet

iTunes: Gramophone 

iPhoto: Antique Camera

Textedit: Faber Castell

Booxter: Fedora  . . . . or not, but equally cool. 

Numbers: Baking Containers (I thought they looked like the graph bars on the standard icon)

iTaf: Coffee pot (iTaf wakes me up every morning – I thought coffee was an appropriate symbol)

 

 

As for the other goodies on my desktop, I’m using the Bowtie theme “Geeky 2.0” by Laurent to keep track of iTunes. The rest is all Geektool. I thought the sunrise shell was a cool idea, and I’m  so happy to finally have found a weather script that actually works. I can’t make these scripts myself, but I can copy and paste like the best of them! Halfway through this project I tried switching to Geektool 3 (which I didn’t even realize was out. Sadness) but . . . shell text can’t have drop shadows? Eh? Besides, somehow in the switch my words from 2.1 were stuck on my desktop. Saved, but not transferred to 3.0.  So I just switched back and pretended nothing happened. 


Changing my desktop is the closest I can get to rearranging the furniture in my room, which is what I did in college whenever I needed a change. There’s something soothing in looking at a space, sizing up your resources, and making something new out of the two. So soothing that I actually zoned out for a while on it, working from seven ’til ten without even realizing how much time was going by. Today I’m going to try to cut out some fabric pieces (test run of project runway 2848, in a blue cotton knit), and make some decisions regarding a car. Looking at this background I can believe that it’s all doable, especially if  I stop to brew a pot of tea first.