We had Stowmarket Thanksgiving last weekend. It was a definite success - the turkey from the butcher (pre-ordered in August, of course) was v. tasty, and all of the sides were both yummy and hot! I was inspired by the NYT stuffing "muffin" suggestion: I made my mom's (NYT circa 1970s) stuffing recipe, John used the blender to mix it together, then we mashed it into a muffin tin and baked it with the rest of the sides after the turkey came out. They were really tasty - crispy on the outside and mushy in the middle.

Because it's cold outside, the knitting has taken hold. I went to Wibbling Wools yesterday and impulse-bought some Rico Pompon yarn. It's a synthetic yarn: cording puncutated by little nuggets of fleece. And when you follow the pattern on the inside of the ball band, makes a scarf like this:

It's kind of fiddly at first, but the result is SO soft. I'm psyched for the end result.

I also had picked out a pattern a few weeks ago for another sweater, and I decided on some yarn. The original pattern is for a now-discontinued mohair yarn. According to the knitting/pattern guru at the store, I can substitute an aran. So I did. It's kind of hard to tell, but it's a charcoal-grey alpaca cotton blend with little flecks of light grey in it. Going to be v. warm and lovely. Once I finish the fleece-nugget scarf, that is.

Inconspicuous

I sang in the Bach Choir concert in Bury last night. (Come to our next one! Saturday 19th December, Christmas Music, Lavenham)

Because we live 20 minutes away (not including parking the car in Bury), the logistics of coming home between the afternoon rehearsal and the evening concert tend to be sort of complicated. We stayed in Bury and went out to supper with some friends. FWIW, it's the third time I've been to La Tasca, which is inevitably empty, and the service and food were just as bad as last time (and the time before). Consider yourselves warned.

Anyway, because we didn't go home after the rehearsal, I needed to change into my concert outfit between dinner and the performance. Mostly it involved taking my jeans off and putting a dress on - not too complicated. There's not really anywhere good to change in the Cathedral, so I decided to get dressed in the car. Which was parked in the Angel Hill parking lot in the center of town. It was dark and rainy, so there weren't too many people around, and the back windows of our car are tinted. Totally cool.

Except that right after I'd taken my jeans off, as I was wrestling with the dress to put it on, I sat on the car keys. And somehow hit the "panic" button. Which made the alarm go off. Flashing lights, honking horn, the whole thing. Oops.

Finally, Owls!

It's now officially cold enough to start wearing wool again. It was freezing at bells on Tuesday. I'd forgotten how cold it gets in churches when you're just standing around.

I wanted to wear my Owls sweater last weekend, but when I tried it on, John and I agreed that it smelled a little...er...sheep-y. It's untreated wool, so it's not really surprising. I soaked and blocked it, and it's ready to go. Thanks to John for the pictures (and Andrew for the camera).

It's strange - I was looking for the tag when I was putting it on, and then remembered that there isn't one. Mostly because I started out with some wool and ended up with a sweater. WOOT.

It was one of the fastest projects I've done, considering how cool the outcome is. I'm tempted to make the same sweater again in a different color, possibly without the owls. There are some others on Ravelry that are pretty tempting, though.

Now we just have to figure out how to get me to STOP wearing it - it's warm and cosy and I'm obsessed with it.

Other things I'm obsessed with at the moment:

- Cooking with apples. Going to try this recipe with the sm. boy for the inlaws (coming for coffee tomorrow)
- Eragon. I'm on the third one and am gutted that there aren't any more (yet).
- Trying to find a tv cabinet that I don't hate. They're all either ugly, too big, too expensive, or just plain wrong. I've come close with this one, though. I think it might still be a bit big. One day I'll find it.

Lost again

I know it's a busy week when I get behind on my rss feeds. And when it took me nearly a full day to notice that the Yankees had won the World Series.

We rented Lost (season 5) last Sunday, and have been watching it in our spare time, which has been surprisingly infrequent. It's definitely a good way to decompress from work, though. You can't think about the Lost plot and have room in your brain for anything else!

I think it's quite entertaining that when I took an improv class in college, one of the first rules they taught us was "Never put yourself on a desert island. You immediately eliminate most of your dialogue and prop options." Apparently not, if you're JJ Abrams.


-- Posted from my iPhone

New Scarf

I can't remember who pointed me to the link, but I'm really psyched to have started in on the Palindrome scarf by Kristin at Silver's Place. I'm knitting it using the leftover skeins of Berroco Ultra Alpaca that I bought in Rhode Island two years ago. (I finished the sweater and decided it was too big for me, so my mom has it as a dog-walking sweater.)

I'm still trying to pick a pattern for my next sweater project, and there are a few on Ravelry that are strong contenders, but in the meantime, it's knitting season! I think this is going to be really good on the chilly days at work - it'll look great with a white shirt.

I started it while watching Coraline with the boys last night - it was spooky, a little trippy, and quite close to the book. We all really liked it.

Oink?

Um, yeah. Since I wasn't busy at work or anything, I caught Swine Flu. Too much time spent licking pigs?

I've never had flu before - it was exceedingly unpleasant. The only upside is that I didn't eat for nearly a week, so my skinny jeans fit. Back to eating now, though, and still feeling pretty tired. I'm thrilled not to have a fever anymore, too.

A few weeks ago, John's brother gave us a new digital camera (Christmas/Birthday presents for the next...um...forever? Thanks, Andrew!) This is from the inaugural photo shoot, the night before I got sick. John thinks I look great, I think I look...tired. Nice camera, though! And lots more pictures to come once I leave the house, at some point in the next few days.

Aaand she's back!

Work has been a zoo. All I've wanted to do after getting home every day is collapse in a heap on the couch with a cup if tea and a book.

As a result, I've been doing quite a bit of reading. I finished Wuthering Heights, and while I didn't enjoy it, I'm glad to have read it.

I struggled through The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, a pseudo-biography of a slave boy in revolutionary Boston. It was interesting and well-written, but not my cup of tea.

Next up, The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's latest caper. It was a birthday present from my brother, and I enjoyed every breathless minute of it. All very silly, though. I think the NYTimes reviewer had it when the said it was hackneyed, mellodramatic, and overwrought, but that she loved every minute.

In other birthday news, John and I have new couches, from SofaSofa. We've had them for about 3 weeks and sofa-sogood. They are beige, which makes the whole living room seem a hundred times lighter. But they were crying out for some color.




As my super awesome parents gave me a new sewing machine for my birthday, I had to get sewing.

Result:


Woot!

Rrufus' last ball

My parents' dog died two weeks ago - I've been avoiding this post because it wrecks me if I think about it too much.

His favorite things (in order):
1. my parents
2. balls (preferably squeaky)
3. butter
4. walks
5. sleeping on my parents' bed (with his paws in the air, mouth open, snoring)
6. car rides
7. swimming
8. his best buddies Fred (human) and Abigail (canine)
9. my brother and me
10. snow


Rrufus looking dignified:

And slightly less so:

I'm a Junior Foodie

First foodie credential: Sylvia Schur, who died last week (the link is to her obit in the NYT), lived across the street and gave my parents a high chair when I was born. Her second husband (before they were married) gave me and my brother a set of wind-up sushi toys.

Second foodie credential: I've been 'putting up' food in the last few weeks. Plum jam a few weeks ago and oven-dried tomatoes last week (which we're going to finish eating long before winter). The tomatoes were from the garden and were quite tasty before they were roasted. But after? With some salt and olive oil in the oven at 80 degrees C for 3 1/2 hours? Really awesome.

Third foodie credential: John and I have been watching the Hairy Bikers quite a bit lately, and in one of the recent recipes they made a meat pie. It looked REALLY tasty, and John has been demanding Pork Pie since then. So we asked the Good Food website what to do, and it told us to make Gordon Ramsay's Pork & Ham Pie. From scratch. With pork mince, sausagemeat, ham, sage, eggs, and pastry made with lard. Yes, lard. Gordon's picture:

And our picture:

 

We don't know what it looks like inside yet (or how it tastes), but it sure smells good. We will be taking it to the choir picnic today and thoroughly tasting it. From this angle, you can't see the decorations on the top very well, but they are an "H", and a pig, made out of pastry. Swoon.

Junior Foodie credentials: complete. Please proceed to next level. Involving foams.

Maybe I'll blog more...

In the hopes of blogging more than once a week, I've downloaded a blogging app for my iPhone. Which I'm still obsessed with, by the way, even though I've had it for almost a year.

Both bells and choir are back in full swing, and the September rush is definitely on at work. As a result my downtime has mostly consisted of watching The Hairy Bikers' Tour of Britain with John on iPlayer, and then going to bed early. The HBs are very entertaining, and our favorite episode so far is Kent. Mostly because of their hilarious antics in the kitchen with an extremely skillful chef. We liked the Suffolk episode, too, of course, but mostly for the "we've been there!" aspect of it. Yum.

-- Posted from my iPhone

I've been cooking again. I made a salmon, dill & potato tart, from BBC Good Food. It was more of a quiche, really, since I mixed the recipe with a quiche one (and added milk and eggs). It was really yummy - John doesn't normally like quiche and even he had some. I'm now trying to convince him that what he wants is for me to make MORE quiche...

I've been ringing lots of bells (and have my very own Buxhall shirt to add to my Trinity shirt). This was Alison's first quarter peal, at Tostock. I nearly lost the plot in the middle, but thankfully Lesley was paying attention and put me back in the right spot. I always feel bad swearing in church...

Oh, and if you haven't already, read the article from this weekend's NYT Arts Section about the bellringers at Trinity Church. I KNOW them!! The Ringing Master (interviewed in the "multimedia slideshow" attached to the article) was the one who kept me right during a course of Bob Minor. WOOT!!

Sometimes I forget that I don't live in a city

In case I ever forget that I live out in the countryside, things like this bring me right back to earth.

We have some friends who live on a farm - they have a cosy farmhouse, a veg patch that makes me drool, and a zillion chickens. I think I'd miss being able to walk to the library and the station, though.

And when we parked our car in the farm yard across from their house, the combine harvester was sitting there. I'd seen them in the fields and on the road, but never up close. They're enormous!

And, this one was special: I got to stand on it!

In other rural pursuits, we bought some plums last weekend, and I made my first jam. It's not going to win any prizes (and I've come to the conclusion that I don't really like plum jam), but it's a start. I need a better funnel, though - there were a few dribbles of jam that ended up on the counter rather than in the jars.

Oh, and we washed our sheets and discovered a stowaway at the end of the wash. Oops. At least he's clean now. Looking a bit reproachful, though, don't you think?

Adventures on two wheels

I spent a day in London a few weeks ago, where I went on a Fat Tire Bike Tour. I went on the Paris tours (and applied for a job as a tour guide) when I lived there. I think Paris is a slightly more bike-friendly city, since most of the London tour was through Hyde Park/Kensington Park/Green Park.

Lovely parks, all, (and the guides were great), but if I only had a weekend to see London and spent it on the insides of the parks, I might be annoyed. As it is, I know London pretty well and enjoyed the spin through town on the bikes. Especially as it was Sunday so the roads around Buckingham Palace were closed.

The bikes all had names (of people mentioned on the tour). I was being shown the town by a Mr. Eric Clapton. We got along very well.

I learned in Paris that taking a picture from the bike while riding is...er...hazardous to your health.  So here is the back of 10 Downing Street with the London Eye in the background.

Continuing the bike theme, John and I took our bikes to Cambridge on the train last weekend. In spite of the extortionate ticket prices (and recent railway strikes by overpaid but disgruntled employees), it was actually pretty painless. Bringing your bikes on the train is free (woot!), and there are special racks for them. I could see how the racks might get kind of full on a weekday, but we had plenty of room when we were going.

We met up for the day with some family friends from New Ro, who were enjoying a vacation in Paris/London/Cambridge. We rode our bikes out to Grantchester, where we hit up The Blue Ball Inn for some extremely tasty warm, flat beer of the Adnams variety. YUM. We then wobbled to another pub for more beer and lunch. Tough life. Then we went into Cambridge itself, where we walked through the gardens of Clare College and went into the Kings' chapel.

If you can't make it good, make it RED.

We had a blast of a day - the weather was gorgeous, the company was great, and we have now decided that the ONLY way to get around Cambridge is by bike. It's a long walk from the station to town, and the car situation is a nightmare. There was even a free bike parking garage at the mall. What more could you want?

Pictures, soon, I promise!

There are pictures on my camera that I'd like to blog, but they're downstairs and I'm upstairs and it's not going to happen.

While I was in Rhode Island, there was a huge marketing campaign on for "The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane." I definitely thought the book looked interesting, but not so much that I wanted to buy it. Instead, I went to the super awesome magical Stowmarket Library. Apparently in the UK, the book is called "The Lost Book of Salem". And it was a great read. I love magic/witches/historical fiction/romance, and while the end was a little unsatisfying, the book on the whole zipped right along.


It was my father-in-law's birthday a few weeks ago...I made the "Best chocolate cake ever" (according to the website). I have to say, I agree with them. It was pretty darned awesome. I left out the coffee, and put strawberries on top instead of the chocolate curls. Make it - it's yummy!

New Rochelle Noms

I discovered a new favorite meal while I was in New Ro. My parents sold the Big Yellow House last fall, and have been living in a surprisingly nice (for downtown New Rochelle) apartment near the station.

My first morning in, my mom suggested that I head around the block to the Starlite Diner. My dad is a regular customer (probably more regular than his doctor would like...), and it was the perfect re-entry into NewYawk.

On the front door, there is a sign that says "Breakfast Special: Bacon, Egg & Cheese on a Roll with Coffee: $3.50". Mmmmm. It doesn't actually come with a coffee, it comes with a caaawfeeee. The bacon is super-crispy and entirely un-English, the cheese is solidly American (and gloriously melty), and the roll is one of the quintessentially New York squooshy ones.

Here's a picture my dad took, last week, of Michael, the dispenser of bacon-egg-and-cheese-on-a-roll-with-a-cawfee.

I think it's probably good that I don't live in New Ro any more - the temptation to go every morning would be more than I could resist.

Notes from the garden

I'm not sure what happened with my seeds this year. I meant to plant 2 courgette plants and 2 sunflowers, and somehow ended up with 4 sunflowers and no courgettes. So here is one of the happy sunflowers, living in my vegetable patch. There's a bee on it (we have a very bee-friendly garden), which is good. Not as good as if there were courgettes on it, though.

The rest of the veggies are coming along - we have a ton of tomato plants that are all full of green tomatoes. A little hot weather and they'll be ready. YUM. And yes, those are more sunflowers.

To continue the flower theme, this is my new favorite necklace. I bought it with Andrea at Surya Satya [ed: I got the Yoga words mixed up and the websites look deceptively similar!] down near Christopher Street. It hits at just the right place on my neck and is really pretty.

Between flights, train trips, afternoons by the pool, and the plague that I seem to have picked up on the way home, I've been doing lots of reading.

I'd been recommended Eragon, and it was perfectly absorbing airplane reading. A little Harry Potter, a little LoTR, and some dragons. Surprisingly well-written, especially since the author was in high school at the time. I have it on good authority that the movie is terrible - don't bother with it.

For my book group, I read Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. It took me a little while to get into it, but I loved it. It cracked me up - it's full of really dry and British humor, and the ending was really clever.

I also read the second Matthew Shardlake novel, by C.J. Sansom. Dark Fire takes place in Tudor London and is a somewhat forgettable but entertaining whodunnit.

I'm about half way through Stephene Meyer's The Host. Yes, she's the one who wrote Twilight. I reserved it at the library back when I finished Breaking Dawn, and it finally came in last weekend. So far, so good (but no sparkly vampires...)

Back from NY

Holy moly - it's been a month since I posted. I was in NY for two weeks of it, which is my excuse. Sort of.

I finally managed to connect with the bell ringers at Trinity Church on Wall St in NYC. This picture is of the never-before-seen-by-Kate combination of a bell tower with working bells and an American flag. The bells were amazing, the people were SUPER nice and great ringers, and if/when we move back to the US, I will be putting in more appearances at their tower. Awesome.

I basically spent the two weeks going from meal to meal, and person to person. I missed a few (you know who you are and I apologize), but in the end I ran out of time. I also fit a few days up in RI with my parents, which was really nice. Dels and fried clams and the bike path and the Bristol 4th of July parade. Here I am with my Dad (the fried clams are just off camera).

The award for "most distance travelled," which usually belongs to me, was awarded to my college roommate, Liz. She flew in (not just to see me) from New Zealand. We spent a very fun New York City day together, waving at tourists on open-top buses and pretending to be models in Soho. Wait, normal people don't do that?

And we were both Pinkberry virgins. Not anymore!

Below, the TRUE reason for the trip (yes, Mom and Dad, I love you a lot, but she wins on cuteness): my (other) friend Liz's new baby girl. Her name is Gabi and she's awesome. It was all I could do not to baby-nap her and take her home with me. Liz would have noticed, I think. Isn't the cuteness just overwhelming? Liz took this picture on my last day in the US - I got to feed, burp, stroll(er?), cuddle, and generally hang out with Gabi. And Liz, of course. Well, not the feeding or burping.

I come by it honestly!

Our Evil Fridge of Doom is on the fritz again. We're starting the formal complaints process with the manufacturer. 4 callout-requiring faults in 2 years is too many, we think.

We're also anticipating needing to defrost it (again) some time in the next few weeks. Which means that the culinary delights that are currently in there are being eaten up.

We had some people over for a BBQ last weekend, and had a last minute cancellation which left us with a bit more food than we needed. Mostly peppers (we were going to roast them on the grill). I don't particularly like peppers, unless they're in something. However, on Sunday night, they really did need eating. I found a recipe on the web for stuffed peppers, which basically used rice, a meat of some sort, stock, and some herbs and spices, all together in the oven for 45 minutes. As part of the freezer raid, I found some turkey pieces and some stock (which we think was turkey stock). Followed the instructions, mixed it all together, cooked and ate it.  Reasonably yummy (remember, I don't like peppers to begin with).

Then, John said, "When was this turkey from, by the way?"

"Hmm," I mused, "We last had turkey...um...oh. I think it might be from...er...Thanksgiving."

Oops.

When I mentioned it to my parents, though, my mom reassured me that I do, in fact, come by it honestly. My maternal grandmother was a really good cook but as a child of the depression had a reputation for keeping "vintage" meatloaf  (meatloaves?) in her freezer. And the scary part was that she would eventually eat it...

I also have started using Evernote, which I think is going to be a good way to keep track of what's in the freezer. A sort of anti-shopping-list.

An Indigo Girls review, 2 months late

The latest Indigo Girls album, Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, came out at the end of March. However, that was the US release date, and since my iTunes is configured for the UK (so I can use my iPhone), I had to wait. And wait. And wait some more. And then I got distracted.

I finally downloaded the album this weekend, and listened to it all the way through at work today (hooray for having my own office). Amy, Emily and I go WAAY back - my dad first heard them on NPR back in the early 90s, then I spent lots of time sitting around campfires in Vermont singing Closer To Fine, then listened to them all through high school, went to a few concerts (and wrote a few musicology papers) in college, and then have seen them perform in New York (lots of times) and Cambridge (just once). I'm predisposed to enjoy me some Indigos.

I'm still on the fence about this album, though, which I think is partly a result of the way it's presented. I bought the 'deluxe edition' on iTunes, and it features every song in both a "studio" and "acoustic" version. Why? Give me the same number of tracks, once, and YOU as the artist decide if it sounds better as the studio version or the acoustic version. Please? Even I, the hardcore IG fan who can listen to hours and hours of Amy 'n Emily, have trouble listening to the same album twice in a row. And what will become of me if I put the album on "shuffle"? I may suffer the indignity of hearing the same song twice in a row. On MORE than one song!

Taking the album as ONE set of songs, though, the songs are classic Indigo. There were two where I found the music particularly interesting:

First, "Love Of Our Lives" opens with Amy and Emily singing in unison, followed by a section with them singing in octaves - I can't think of any other songs of theirs where they sing together without harmonising for more than a note or two.

Second (although it's earlier on the album), "Sugar Tongue" has Amy singing a very "Emily" song, in a much higher register than she usually sings. It makes her sound completely different - it's almost like a falsetto.

Musicologists, start your engines!