I spent my nights off baking and cleaning and being a good little martha stewart, plotting this year’s garden and longing for chickens, sheep, and goats. First I baked a lovely roast chicken, complete with gravy, stuffing, and mashed potatoes whipped up in my fancy KitchenAid mixer. Then I went on to bake a little loaf of white bread - very good, and very simple, especially when using the mixer.

Then, last night (Saturday night to all you non-night owls), I baked up four loaves of Amish friendship bread from my starter, sealed off one starter package in the freezer to bake up for later, and left the final one lying on the counter to be mushed for another 9 days.

If you don’t know already, Amish Friendship Bread is made from a starter. You mush this bag of starter mix for about ten days, adding some more yeast-food stuff twice along the way, and on day ten, you bake your bread. You also get like, a bunch of excess starter, so you’re supposed to package it up and give it away to your friends so they can do the same. See? Friendship?

Well, it doesn’t usually work like that. See, nobody wants the stuff, because then they have to mush the darned bag for ten days, and find more friends to give it to, and pretty soon, your whole town is saturated in friendship starter, and everyone hates you. This has happened so often in my town that nobody will even take any starter from me when I ask.

But it just so happens that I didn’t have any - nor did I know anyone who had any - when I wanted some friendship bread, which is a moist quickbread not unlike banana bread or spice cake, so I dug up a recipe for starter and began growing it.

It’s simple.

Amish Friendship Bread Starter
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

Pour all ingredients into a gallon size ziplock bag (make sure it’s a sturdy one, nothing cheap) and mush it together, and leave it on the counter (no need to refridgerate). Mush it every day (like, just a couple minutes to keep it mixing together) and add ingredients as follows:

Day 1: You just made the starter this day. Mush it.
Day 2: Mush mush.
Day 3: Carry on the mushing.
Day 4: Mush it some more!
Day 5: Add 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk. Mush!
Day 6: Mush!
Day 7: Keep mushing.
Day 8: Mush it some more.
Day 9: And… some more.
Day 10: Add 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 cup milk. Mush together, then…. Carry on making the bread as follows.

Get some ziploc bags. Put 1 cup of starter into each of 3 bags, seal, and date. You will be giving these away, or keeping them for yourself, or freezing them for later use. You should have approximately 1-1.5 cups of starter left with which you can make your bread. If you have more starter than this, continue to seal it up into bags until you only have 1-1.5 cups left. (The excess starter thing happened to me once. Dunno how….)

Put your starter (1-1.5 cups worth) into your mixing bowl. (Either a big stand mixer or a little hand mixer, or just a spoon and some arm power work fine.) Then add:

1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup applesauce
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk
2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 large package (or 2 small packages) of instant vanilla pudding mix
Any nuts, raisins, dates, whatever you’d like, in 1/2 - 1 cup amounts. (I use… none. We don’t like that stuff.)

Preheat oven to 325. Mix everything up, pour into two greased 9×5 inch loaf pans. (I used that new Crisco spray, loved it way more than Pam!) Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar if you’d like (I usually do.) Then bake for approximately 60 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted. Let cool for a wee bit, and then pop out of pans and let cool on a wire rack.

Eat. Enjoy.

You can freeze the starter mixture on day 10 if you’d like, or if you can’t find any suckers to pawn it off to. When you’re ready to make more bread, just take it out, let thaw for a day, and make the bread. There are other recipes/variations for bread out there on the internet. Next time around, I’ll be making some lemon flavored bread, with lemon extract and lemon pudding instead. We’ll see how that goes. :)

My grandmother’s birthday is coming up on March 17th - St. Patty’s Day - so I picked up some of this:

and have begun to knit this:

Come closer?

Pretty, ne? I think so. I’m one ball down, working on the next, and still unsure if I’m going to make a fairly short scarf with just two balls or tack on my third skein. I think that perhaps she’d find three excessively long, since she’ll likely just be wearing it indoors anyway. If she wears it at all.

I know, I know, you’re thinking: What? It’s a /beautiful/ scarf, and soft, too! Why wouldn’t she wear it? And if she hates scarves/knitted things, why are you knitting them for her? But it’s not like that. I swear. See, the woman is… difficult. She’d love a scarf that I made her. But this is a woman who loved the dishcloth I made her so much that she refused to use it, and just… puts it away for safekeeping. If a dishcloth (and nothing special at that) is too precious to touch, a scarf would be even more so.

Anyway, it’s coming along nicely, and I’m really wanting to keep it for myself, but I need a birthday present, and darnit, this is green. And it’s knitted. Insta-gift.

It’s Lent. Actually, it was yesterday, but to me, it’s still today. (See this post to understand.) So yes, today was the beginning of the Lent season, that season of giving things up for God. The way I always understood it, the point of the whole thing was to take up a sacrifice that would be difficult in order to keep one’s mind on the ultimate sacrifice that Christ made. I’ve never - even when I was a practicing, bible-beating Christian - participated in this. It wasn’t mandatory in my church by any means - in all the years of Sunday School, it was never even discussed. But I always found it intriguing.

Tradition holds to a fast of some sort, but many people give up a favorite activity, or a bad habit, or whatever. And some, of course, don’t go the path of giving up, but just giving - charity work, money to a good cause, volunteering, more prayer time, whatever. (That’s like a sacrifice of time, I’d say.)

I’ve been thinking about this, and I find the idea of a spiritual fast of some sort intriguing. It’s certainly demanding. Doing some sort of fast for 1-3 days before each new moon is something that has occured to me in the past, and something I’m considering even more now that sacrifice is on my mind. Due to certain medical issues, a full fast would be inappropriate in my case, but day or three of dietary restriction wouldn’t be all bad, and might actually be - gasp - spiritually enlightening. On the other hand, perhaps all I’ll be enlightened to is my ravenous hunger. Seriously, it shouldn’t be too hard to drop to a fruit and vegetables type fast for one day - sundown to sundown, if I could get some fruit and vegetables that were decent on the day before the fast, of course. Where I live, that can sometimes be a joke.

Just a thought. For anyone participating in Lent, good luck!

Thirteen Things About Letting GoSomething

Since this is Thursday Thirteen’s Retirement Edition… the last one ever, I thought I’d commemorate it with a few last notes on letting go.

1. All things must come to an end. The Buddhists have a saying: This too shall pass. Everything, good or bad, will eventually pass us by.
2. There is a natural cycle to earth - birth, life, death, and rebirth. When one cycle closes, another can begin.
3. Tears are only natural.
4. Laughter truly is the best medicine.
5. Memories get sweeter with time.
6. Some of the best things in life are the most short-lived.
7. When the time comes to say goodbye, have no regrets, but burn no bridges. Life can bring you down this same road again in the future - but then again, you might never see it again.
8. Honor your blessings, and grieve for your losses - not the other way around.
9. Try not to worry too much about what could have been. Life has a funny way of taking us right where we need to be - even if we can’t see it at the time.
10. What fulfills you one day may bog you down a year from now. Let it go and cherish the good memories you once had… rather than letting the bad fill you up and breed resentment.
11. The world does go on after tragedy. Move with it. All things soften with the river of time.
12. Let go of the old to make room for the new.
13. Don’t cling to the past, or relics of it - remember it, cherish it, and honor it, but don’t let it rule the present or the future.

1. jude&elise 2. Raggedy

3. A Knight's Lady 4. You're next!

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To work graveyard shifts day in and day out is a difficult task, and one I relish being done with once it has passed me by, though only the goddess knows when that will be. While I am - and have always been - a night-owl of sorts, it’s become increasingly difficult for me to reconcile my inner cicardian rhythm to the earth’s cycles to the shifts I work. Everything changes when you begin sleeping through the day and working through the night, from sleep to meals to socialization to shopping. It’s almost like living in another world, or at least on another plane of reality.

I work from midnight until eight in the morning. I typically sleep anywhere from 8:30-10am until 5-6pm. Today, when I woke up at 5:30pm, it was just growing dark. A month ago, it would have already been dark for almost a half an hour. Today, when I woke, it was February 19th. By the time I settled down with my tea at work, it was February 20th. I live every day split in half and straddling the line. Every day is two days, and sometimes, it feels like it, too. My ‘last night’ was really your ‘today’, and somtimes my ‘tonight’ was your last night, and my ‘tomorrow’ is actually your ‘day after tomorrow’, or, depending on the time, it could very well be your ‘today’. See how confusing this is? It confuses me, too. Today is now Thursday, February 20th, and at eight am, “tomorrow” will still be February 20th. That’s because I might still be thinking it’s “today, February 19th”, but it’s not, not anymore. And “tomorrow” on February 20th, at, say, eleven pm, I might look at the calender and think to myself: “Gosh, it’s Friday already [because it almost IS Friday, if Friday actually starts at midnight, which, according to my work schedule, it does], and tomorrow [meaning Saturday], I have to clean house!” But then people are confused, because ‘tomorrow’ is actually Friday to them, not Saturday… because in fact, it’s still Thursday.

See, it makes no sense, and that is why I never know what day it is, and sometimes, today can be yesterday, today, and tomorrow all at once.

Then there’s sleeping. It’s hard to sleep in the daylight. Even with black curtains, light still seeps in through the adjoining bathroom window, and around the tops of the curtains, and through the doorway leading to the living room. And it’s warmer in the daylight. A person’s body temperature drops slightly when we prepare to sleep, and the cooler night air aids one in this task. I’ve learned something in the last two years - I cannot sleep if the room temperature is over 70 degrees F. I wake up, I sleep restlessly, I wake and sleep and wake and thrash and toss and turn and struggle. It is difficult, even with air conditioning in the summer, to keep a south facing bedroom below 70 degrees. In the winter, it’s easier on both conditions. Unfortunately, that means I suffer a bit from SAD, since I…. never ever see the sunlight.

Last December, I walked home at eight in the morning and could watch the sun finally poke over the horizon from my living room window before I went to bed. And when I woke, it had been dark already for over an hour. Sunlight was a bit foreign to me, and I grow a bit… homey and lazy and a little depressed because of it. Believe it or not, darkness makes me want to sleep! *laugh*

Other oddities - I eat ‘breakfast’ every day… but my ‘breakfast’ food turns out to be more like… dinner. Because everyone eats dinner at exactly the time of day I’m waking up. So for ‘breakfast’ I’ll often have, say, tacos, or roast beef, or spaghetti. And for ‘dinner’ I’ll have hashbrowns after I get off work, or cereal, or eggs. Breakfast food at normal breakfast time, but definitely not ‘breakfast’ for me. And for lunch, of course, it’s leftover ‘breakfast’ or something nukable since I have no lunch hour at work and must just be content with whatever I have at the office. Not like there’s any stores open at 3am!

More, I deal with being social, spending time with family and friends, right after I wake up. In fact, A often calls me within 2-3 minutes after I climb out of bed. Yes, this is deliberate. Sometimes, she calls many times in a row hoping I’ll be semi-awake while I’m in bed and hear the phone, and get up to answer it. Because hey, it’s social hour for her. For me, it’s like… wtf, can’t I shower, man? So often, I’m up and out of bed and having company before I’ve even eaten ‘breakfast’. Which is a little odd. I actually would love to be able to, say, get up and have some me-time before I greet the day. Doing yoga right after I wake as the sun rises or whatever sounds lovely… but it’s just not practical. For one, the sun is going down, and for two… people don’t like to start calling on friends after like, eight o’clock. I mean, they have lives, too, and sometimes they actually sleep during the night…

So some of the daily rituals I’d like to do just aren’t very feasible. I’d love to live a more natural, in tune with nature daily cycle, but I just can’t do it with the shift I work.

Oh well. Bigger and badder things to worry about, I suppose. But it’s something that’s been vaguely pricking at me for… like… a year.

What tools do you feel are essential when performing rituals? (Give the reasoning behind each tool and what it means for your ritual)

Mmm. Good question. Essential tools would be:

Candles: And lots of them. Why? Because that, to me, is really what helps me make the transition from ‘average everyday’ to ’spiritual magic’. Certain candles mean certain things - my spirit candle, elemental candles, etc. - but I’ll just lump them together.

Oils: I’m big on scent, as well. Annointing myself with oils is a spiritual thing, almost like a repeat baptism.

Tarot: I do a bit of divination most every ritual. It’s important to keep connected, and more, to keep focused.

Salt & Water: For purification of the ritual circle/altar area/whatever.

Everything else varies by the ritual at hand. And mind you, these are things that are essential to me - not essential to ritual. While it’s been said by many that magic - and ritual - can be done without anything whatsoever, I’ve always been a bit of a material girl. I like my things. I love my things. I like to use them. I don’t have any particular designs on simplifying my life (though I do need to do some serious decluttering/organizing) by ridding myself of my possessions, and I don’t see any particular need to better enlighten myself/work pure magic/whatever by forgoing the tools of the trade just because they aren’t /necessary/.

I’ve met a few pagans who seem to have designs on impressing to others how cool they are because they aren’t trapped by all the trappings - they don’t need to use [insert tools of choice here], all they need is their mind, themselves, yadda yadda. Well, that’s fine. They might not need a spoon to drink soup, either, but I’m sure not going without one, and it doesn’t make for a better person, or even a more sincere/honest/better pagan to do so.

That said, I like to have lots of things on my altar. Herbs and candles and cloth and plates and bowls and water and salt and oils and random stuff piled everywhere. Some people might look and cringe. But it’s important to me. And dammit, I’m not gonna change it just because certain people feel no need for frivolous earthly trappings.

Eventually, it had to happen. I mean, I’ve known these guys in my head for TWELVE years. Twelve years, can you imagine? Finally, I gave the Chains a home of their own.

Who are the Chains, you ask? A fictional mobster family living in a fictional metropolis in Illinois. Why Illinois? Who knows - I was like, 12 at the time, okay? It stuck. Anyway. They have a home on the web now, where they can keep in touch with each other and whine about the crap that happens in their daily lives. Just… don’t tell them who I am, okay?

I stole this from here. I know. Shameful.

Two names you go by:
Kate
Katia

Two parts of your heritage:
German
Irish

Two things that scare you:
Bees
Heights

Two everyday essentials:
Email
Cheese

Two things you are wearing right now:
Turquoise ring
Comfy stretch jeans

Two of your favorite current bands/artists:
Goo Goo Dolls
Nickelback

Two things you want in a relationship (other than love):
Trust
Humor

Two truths:
Life is what you make of it.
Magic is.

Two favorite hobbies:
Knitting
Sewing

Two things you have to do this week:
Make a kitty cat grooming appointment.
Give mom her credit card back.

Two stores you shop at:
Amazon
Walmart (I know, I know, they be evil, but dammit, they be cheap!)

Two shows you like to watch:
If I have to choose (since I don’t actually watch tv…)
CSI Miami (I’ve watched it a few times, liked it)
NYPD Blue (used to watch it at work when it came on at like, 2am)

Two things you’d buy if money were no object:
A nice house for myself.
A ragdoll kitty.

Two wishes for 2007:
May it be better than 2006.
That I leave it richer than I began.

I called this theme Hope Springs, and I love it very much. It’s about time I had a new theme on the blog, eh? Let me know how you like it.

So I decided to make myself a cake on Valentine’s Day - and not just any old cake, but a Red Devil’s Food cake, which I’ve loved for years, but have never actually made. My mother or grandmother or someone always did the making, and I just did the eating. But this year, for my birthday (which actually isn’t until late March) I decided I wanted one. And I figured that asking for such a complicated cake (it’s layered) wouldn’t get me very far, so I expected I’d have to make it myself. But it /is/ a complicated cake, so I wanted to try it out first. Give myself a practice run at it, so to speak.

And a good thing I did, because the cake was a disaster. Oh, it tastes good. A little on the dry side, but it’s definitately good. But… well, look:

And that’s the good side - the side that hasn’t crumbled to pieces, the side that actually looks /okay/. The thing fell in the middle, and then the top slid nearly off the bottom when I went to take this picture (and gosh, it’s so dark in the background, and I don’t know why!), and I didn’t get enough frosting in the middle, and I had a helluva time getting the cakes out of the pans and properly stacked on top of each other.

But it is good. And the frosting? To DIE for. I’ll post the whole recipe up later tonight.

But for now, I’ve got a few more pics to share - like this beautiful package of goodies from my secret pal, Stephani - who was such a wonderful secret pal all through SP9! I was thrilled to know her and to have been spoiled by her! Everything in the photo EXCEPT the little heart dish was from Stephani.

A book on coffees and treats (soo many good things in here to make!) and some coffee flavored chocolatey things that spilled all over the box and made everything smell coffeeish, and the cutest little cup and saucer… actually, there’s two saucers, and there WAS two cups, but one got busted in the mail *sniffsniff*… and some uberdark chocolate that I’m tempted to shave up and make some real hot chocolate, and of course, the YARN. Holy cow, do I love this yarn:

It’s cotton. SOFT cotton. Sooo delicious. Patagonia’s Nature Cotton or something like that. I’m at work and can’t possibly look, but it’s gorgeous and soft and… it smells like coffee! *laugh*

And last but not least, something I made up a couple weeks ago - some flannel pillowcases, wintery themed! I love the material, and wish I’d had enough money at the time to buy much more of this, for a blanket or quilt.