What did I do on my days off? Here’s a rundown:

• Cleaned bathroom. At last.
• Put up some decor - some shelves and sconces. Picture!

  

• Bought another book. Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Just saw it at Walmart, bought it for no good reason… I’d better get to cracking with the whole reading thing, eh?
• Bought groceries, too. Go me!
• Thawed out a pot roast from the deep freeze. Will dump it in the slow cooker in the morning.
• Began knitting a mitten! Picture!

  
  The book in the picture (Holiday Knits) is the inspiration for said mitten. However, inspiration is a good term for it, since I keep changing things. Like, I didn’t have size 5 needles (I could swear I did… where are they? Do I? Or was I imagining it?) so I’m using size 6. I thought that maybe if I just knit tightly, it’d be okay. But it wasn’t, really. It’s a bit too large. Should’ve went down a /size/. So I sort of modified it to “go down a size” after I discovered this by removing a couple stitches. And I’m doing the seed stitch patterned mitten, but with a ribbed cuff, not a seed stitch cuff. Feh. Whatever. *lol* It’s working, so far. Hopefully it’ll all be okay in the end, even if my ribbing is rather awful for no good reason.

• Decided to make a Kitty Pi kitty bed. I have a lot of sitting-around-uselessly brown and green wool from KnitPicks, and… I may as well use it. Will double up since I’m knitting with worsted instead of bulky weight yarn.

That’s my weekend in a nutshell. How was yours?

Last night was the Storm Moon, or so said my witchly planner. It was indeed a gorgeous - though thankfully not stormy - moon: a bright, pale-yellow disc half shrouded in clouds and set against a darkening blue sky, all seen from my kitchen window. I had the urge to howl at it, but since I was making spaghetti and had company… I resisted said urge, and instead called A to the window to peek. She was impressed, but not as impressed as I was.

I considered doing some witchy things, but I got caught up in the more mundane but still satisfying house-enrichment activities. I put up some St. Patty’s day decor, mingled it with some springtime decor, and then, since it appears I’ll be staying here for at least another 18 months, barring some miracle, I put up some more of my regular decor. Unfortunately, I discovered that my special handy screwdriver no longer works, and I’m now in need of a new power screwdriver.

Instead of power-driving screws into the wall, I suffered through screwing two in by hand, which took some time, and then discovered a quick trick involving a small nail and a hammer to create a bit of a path for the blasted thing. Worked like a charm. I now have up two of my three shelves, and the third would’ve joined the others if only I had mrew screws of the right size. Evidently, they got lost in the move.

I also put up my two little sconce lanterns, which I adore, to complete the look, though frankly, I’m not sure I like the look or not. Whatever, I guess. They’re off the floor, anyway.

Now I just need some larger artwork/decor type stuff. Hmm, where, though?

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. :)

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.

January has been a month of reading. To be honest, I haven’t done a lot else. Knit 1/3 of a scarf. Finished up a sewing project I should’ve finished in November (the advent calendar - which, by the way, is totally super adorable), no baking, no intriging projects, nothing but cozying up and reading.

January’s a good time for that - unpredictable weather, harsh winds, chilly snow, so very little daylight, so very little warmth and energy. The rush of the holidays and the excitement of autumn long gone, I just sort of… curled up and rested all month long. I suppose I might have went into a bit of a hibernation like the bears. Is that so bad? All this month, I’ve been berating myself for it. Lazy! I’d write in my planner for the day’s events. Sometimes I wouldn’t write anything at all. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

But then I think of the animals that curl up and rest in the winter, and I think of all the furious knitting I did throughout autumn, and I think of the sewing and the crafts and the moving and the baking and the rush, and I think that perhaps a month-long resting period wasn’t so bad at all. Maybe it’s just what I needed.

I’m starting to feel the fires of creativity burn again. I want to sew, I want to knit, I want to /do/. I wanted to knit tonight, but it’s been a couple weeks since I worked on the scarf, and I’ve forgotten the pattern, so I’ll have to dig it up. Perhaps tomorrow.

But I read! Tonight I finished a book I would recommend to anyone who loves an enchanting story: The Thirteenth Tale, which is lovely and haunting and mesmerizing and too many other words to put down. If you have a love of books, read it! I also read On the Banks of Plum Creek - one of the Little House series books tonight, and those books always make me feel so warm and cozy and wanting to have a little house and a little family somewhere out in the middle of nowhere like that.

I read 14 books in January, and you can see which ones, and short, semi-coherent thoughts on each, on the 101 Things Booklist, linked to the right. Not bad. Approximately one book every 2 days or so. Not too shabby at all! A good way to kickstart my imagination.

Soon, it will be Imbolc, and then, I will pay homage to Brigid/Brigit, Irish goddess of creative inspiration, among many other things, and perhaps then, I will rise from this hibernation to return to life again with the growing light.

Thirteen Tidbits About Me

1. I was always a control freak. As a kid, I used to get “rather upset” if I could not be “the most powerful/fastest/kickass” pony [yes, we played My Little Ponies] on the playground. I have not changed all that much. *laugh*
2. My first memory of my best friend isn’t of her at all. Rather, it’s of her little sister begging me on the playground not to ‘be mean’ to her big sister, A. I was baffled, since, while I was a control freak, I was not near mean, powerful, fast, or kickass enough to /actually/ kick other kids off the swings, even if I was in third grade.
3. I used to believe that I wanted to live in this little town forever, since I loved it so. Then, as a teenager, I hated it like my grandmother hates snakes, and wanted nothing more to leave. This lasted, actually, well into my early twenties. Then I moved back anyway, and found that while I still want to leave, it’s not so bad as all that.
4. I am a freak of nature. Read: virgin at nearly 25. This not really bother me [too much], but I’m starting to feel like an old biddy. Certain friends (A…) think I /am/ an old biddy. Not just because of the virginal chasteness, but because I actually act like one, too. Knitting, baking bread, buying appliances…
5. Actually, the words she used was “has no life”. This, she tells to my coworkers! As if they couldn’t tell. You don’t work the night shift and have a life anyway.
6. I have found the coolest song ever. It’s called Baba Yetu, and it’s this sweet tribal African Swahili music or something. Incredibly catchy. The fascinating thing is that the lyrics are actually a songful rendition of the Our Father prayer, and it is a great piece of music.
7. Speaking of Christian music, I still have a large collection from my teenage “listen to only pure, chaste, Christian stuff” phase, and surprsingly, I still like a lot of it. Spiritual music is spiritual music, and even if the names and faces and words don’t match my current ideology, there’s something incredibly reverent about some of it. And other songs are just plain fun.
8. On the other side of the coin, there are some really catchy raunchy rap songs that I can’t help but love to sing dirty with. Their ideologies aren’t mine, either (trashing women? Puh-leez, go back to your caves, you jackasses!) But what can I say, I’m a dual-faced tiger, and sometimes those beats are just sexy.
9. I do not shave my legs in the winter, except on occasion, like at Christmastime, when I might be doing something in some sort of outfit that requires it. I think I got this habit from the hippies at Evergreen State College.
10. I will probably be moving this fall to go back to college, though it’s not set in stone. I’ve been wanting this for two years, and yet… a part of me hopes it’ll all fall through and I’ll be “stuck” here for another year. I hate school. I hate apartment life. I don’t want to move again, for god’s sakes, I just moved last September! I want to have a garden, and I can’t if I’m gonna leave before I could get around to harvesting it. [Well, I could, and I will, but it won’t have most of the things I want to grow in it.]
11. I am secretly desperately afraid I’ll fail if I do go back to college, even though I know I am friggin smart and completely ABLE to do the work, it’s just that I am also friggin self sabotage master.
12. I have been wondering lately: what is WITH all the new ten trillion flavors of doritos? They’re all, like, the same. Spicy, Spicy, and More Spicy.
13. I have started a knitting project that has not gone belly up! It’s the Misty Garden scarf, from Scarf Style, though I got it out of Interweave’s Holiday Knitting magazine, not the book. And I’m not doing it in the same yarn, or even anything remotely close, but instead, I’m doing it in Elsebeth Lavold’s Silky Tweed, in a pretty pretty sage green. Very soft and cottony and silky and lovely. Maybe it’ll be a present for someone!

The tree is down, and in a box. Sure, the place is a Royal Freaking Mess, and I have tree lights scattered from here to there and half a pot of friggin DIRT on the ground since the cats knocked a dead plant over that should’ve been thrown out ages ago, and I’ve got my tree skirt on the floor needing washing, and my chairs all out of sorts, and more plants dying, and dishes piling up, and thank the gods it’s finally my Friday.

Because at last, my monthly Week In Hell is over with, and despite a rampaging headache and insomnia contributing to this complete Loss of Motivation, I HAVE to get shit done. I cannot live like this. I’m going crazy.

But at least the tree is down. That’s a damned good start, in my opinion. In the morning, I’ll haul out dead plants and vacuum up the dirt I should’ve vacuumed up four days ago, and I’ll do the bloody dishes, and I’ll feel at least marginally better. And tomorrow night, I can actually get some work done - laundry, cleaning out the fridge, and a more thorough vacuum job.

I’m starting to think I need to take up a patron housekeeping goddess to give me a kick in the rear, because my own inner housekeeper must’ve fallen asleep sometime in the last week.

This week, I decided to do something difficult. Really difficult. But I’m trying to be appreciative of what I have, rather than constantly lusting after what I cannot. So… without any further introduction, here is 13 Things I Love About Montana. Okay, maybe ‘love’ is a bit harsh for all of these. Hopefully, I’ll actually make it through to number 13.

Thirteen Things I Love About Montana

1. The night sky. I lived in Washington State for several years, and though I loved it there, I never really could see the stars in the sky. Here, I can. And I love it. All I need now is a telescope, or even a pair of binoculars.
2. The sunrises and the sunsets. Goes with the above, but I thought I should split it up. I’ll be lucky to get thirteen things on this list as it is! But god, the sunrises and sunsets are beautiful here.
3. That there’s four seasons here. Sometimes, they get all mixed up, and we get seventy degrees in the middle of what should be Cold Enough To Freeze Atoms, or a snowstorm over Memorial Day, but whatever. It’s Montana. The weather is unpredictable at best.
4. Bread does not mold as fast. On the other hand, it does go dry as a bone real quick.
5. The low crime rate. I have to say, this is a definite plus.
6. Everyone is friendly. (Way too friendly.) Super friendly. (IS this really supposed to be a plus?) And they all know each other, or know someone who does know you or the rest of friends and relatives. The six degrees of separation for people who live in Montana is closer to like, three degrees.
7. Charge accounts. If you don’t shop at a chain store in one of the few “big cities” in Montana, most every store will allow the town/county citizens to “charge it”. They’ll let you pay the bill at the end of the month, interest free. So if you don’t get paid till Friday, but your kids are starving, you can get food without robbing the bank, or your mother.
8. No Sales Tax. This should’ve been #1 on my list. That’s right, there is no sales tax! I love love love love love this, and having grown up here, hate hate hate hate hate sales tax with a passion. It’s cruel and unusual punishment, I swear.
9. Low cost of living. Things tend to be cheaper here. (Because nobody gets paid worth dick, but whatever.) Unless, of course, you shop at a small grocery store like the one in town. Then you’ll pay out your ass for simple things like milk and eggs, but whatever.
10. The scenery. Admittedly, we have a lot of gorgeous spots in Montana. I don’t live in one of them, but I know they’re here, I’ve seen them.
11. Lack of traffic. The highways and intererstates are fairly traffic free, except in the cities. Traffic jams are not so common occurances. You might make a 30 minute commute, but that’s because you actually live thirty miles away, not because you’re inching along at the speed of a snail.
12. The fresh air. While it smells like pig shit, or sewer lagoon (anything but this, please) on occasion, the rest of the time, the air is clean and fresh and healthy and so, so good.
13. It’s unique. Face it, there isn’t too many places like Montana. We’re the 4th largest state in the US, but we have less than a million people in it. We have an average of 6.2 people per square MILE. That’s a lot of space to yourself out here. A LOT of space. Our largest city is only around 90,000 people. We routinely experience 100 degree weather in the summer and -50 degree weather in the winter. We don’t get much rain, but we can get a TON of snow. We have lots of wind, but few tornadoes. We can buy fresh beef and bread (and in fact, most of us are beef ranchers or wheat farmers, and if you’re not, you know several people who are), but it’s hard to find decent fruit, and our idea of ‘fish’ comes in a box in the supermarket labeled “fishsticks”. We love to hunt and fish and hike and do outdoor sports, and we treasure our land, but there’s hardly any tree-huggers in sight. It’s a strange place, this Montana. A very strange place.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

I haven’t been doing a lot lately. Mostly sleeping late and reading books (One Hundred Years of Solitude was the latest, finished just tonight) and working. This whole week was work, ever since Christmas Eve. Christmas Day didn’t even exist for me this year - I woke at around six, went to Mom’s to have some leftovers and missed dinner, opened a present from my brother, and then went home. Exciting, eh? And the whole week’s been like that - dull and blurry, mostly.

However, I’ve been planning a new year’s ritual, and I’ll do some of my Yule stuff then, too, as I didn’t much think about it on Yule itself. Tonight is my last night of work for the week, so I’ll have the next three off, where I can hopefully do something useful with myself.

Like sew.

Thirteen Random Things About This Week

1. I have finally ordered my mother a Christmas gift! From eBay, no less.
2. Some of my gifts are wrapped, but not all. I like to do special wrap jobs - no “wrap it in paper and put a sticky bow on it” for me. Nope nope. I go all out. This year, the theme is red and white (like last year) - however, I’m doing white paper this year, with red trim, instead of last year, where I pretty well did the opposite.





3. I have decided that while my tree has enough decor, the rest of my house is not near decorated enough.



4. I am not in the mood to knit. I’m just /not/. Post-shawl rebellion, perhaps?
5. My lastest QPB review has a LOT of books in it that I’d like to read. Or at least skim through at a bookstore to check over.
6. I am waiting anxiously for DIYplanner’s 2007 calendar templates to come out, so I can redo my planner. This time, I swear, I’ll do better.



7. It’s that time of the month again and I’m mourning being female and eating pretty much nonstop.
8. So what better time to make cookies, anyway? Mom and A came over, and we baked. And baked. And baked some more. We have about 16 dozen cookies. Chocolate chip, chocolate chip without the chocolate chips (this sounds bizarre, I know, but it’s my dad’s favorite), cry babies, raisin puffs, (all three of these are my mom’s recipes - rather, my grandma’s), and then we tried a couple new recipes, too - cinnamon coins (not so hot), and kiflins (an almondy cookie that’s VERY good!)



9. I am not done baking yet. I intend to bake more - peanut butter cookies, and sugar cookies, and gingerbread cookies, maybe. Mmm.
10. In light of the fact that my Windows computer just doesn’t want to return to a state of happy life, I’ve ordered myself pieces for a new one. Will gut this baby out and pop in a new motherboard, a beautiful dual core AMD processor, sadly only a gig of ram (gugh, the DDR2 stuff is pricey!) and a new SATA hard disk. Hopefully, I’ll get no DOA parts, and all will be well!
11. My cross-stitch project is nearly done! Just working on all the backstitching, which is going pretty fast, and then I just have to put the buttons on! Of course, then I must make it into a pillow or something.
12. I love Maddy the puppy!



13. I am getting a mixer (Kitchen Aid Artisan!) for Christmas! Except, I’m getting it early. Like… as soon as Amazon ships it here! Thank you Mom! I’ve been wanting one for a while now. Saving up the money. Figures that as soon as I have enough to buy it and it goes on sale, Mom tells me she’ll buy it for me for Christmas! *laugh* But that works for me! Mine will be Empire Red. Perfect.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!