80k and still spry

Approximately one month shy of my eight yeariversary of car ownership, my little black car just rolled over to 80,000 miles. I know, normally you photograph the odometer at 100,000, but considering this car had 25k miles on it when it came to me, a little bit of math tells you that it's going to be a while before I hit 100k.

The ironic bad news is that a dealer inspection today suggested $3,000 of repairs, so even though my car is still young at heart, it's showing its age. So if anyone wants to donate to my beloved Honda Civic's Preservation Fund, I have a PayPal.

how i got a macbook for less than $100

I don't know how many of you know this, but I'm broke. Some days, it sucks. But sometimes it's like a fun challenge, because clipping coupons and saving tons of money on grocery items is a really satisfying game. Sometime in September, I started thinking that it would be nice to get a new MacBook. I'd had this thought over a year ago, and wanted to act on it while I could still get some cash for my old MacBook. It often blows me away how insanely lucky I am.

Not long after making this decision, a few things fell into place - ultimately for the best, though sometimes it wasn't immediately evident.

1) Geoff alerted me to an excellent credit card bonus that I waffled on for a couple months. For me, spending $3k in 3 months is unfathomable! But I eventually realized how I could make it work.

2) My coworkers pointed out that my MacBook battery had bulged. I didn't realize that was a cause for concern. I hightailed it down to the Apple store and shelled out $100 (thanks, parents!) in a panic, because I thought my laptop might spontaneously combust.

3) Not long after receiving a brand-new replacement battery, the entire computer stopped recognizing the battery and only worked on adapter power. Another frenetic trip to the Apple store, and a two-day overnight stay for my MacBook. They replaced a part, as well as my top case and display bezel - pretty much half of the exterior of the computer. And they didn't charge me a penny.

Armed with a neatly remodeled computer, I drew up a Master Plan on an orange post-it note. My awesome landlord had confirmed that I could pay rent on a credit card. Better still, I could pay three months' up front. I received the card on a Friday (it's beautiful, by the way: a metal composite, thick, heavy, and shiny), paid my rent the following morning, and was at the Apple store feeling a bit dazed that evening.



I showed my old student ID and got a discount, too:


So I'd spent $2,750 in a single day. I promise I did not sleep very well that night. The next $250 went by in a blur (damn, that card is fun to use) and I had a $3k balance on a brand-new credit card, and two computers.

Reformatting the old MacBook is a long, technical story that nobody cares about. It took me several days. Afterward, I had it on Craigslist for several weeks, and most of the interest I got was this one dude trying to trade me one of any type of smartphone (that's not suspicious at all), or a bunch of fake scammers who wanted to pay me via money order because they suddenly lived across the country. Ultimately, I met up with a very nice fellow who had never owned a laptop and who promised to give my old friend a good home. I pocketed $500, because that's what I wrote down on the Master Plan, and that is akin to writing it in blood.

Then, just yesterday, I received my first Chase statement. I did, in fact, have over 53,000 points applied to my account. I turned that into a $533 statement credit, and after the $28 in interest I accrued (oops!), I'm still just under my goal of getting a MacBook for $100. It's only costing me $95.

The moral of the story is always write your plans down on an orange post-it.

i took a ceramics class.

i threw some clay back in high school, so i had some delusions of grandeur in regards to my skill. there's a bit of a learning curve, and even after i got the hang of it, most of what i produced paled in comparison to my classmates' work. so let's cut to the heart of it: i have photo documented every piece of pottery i made, in somewhat chronological order.



my first cups. chunky, misshapen, and the one in front actually took an extra spin around the wheel while i was trimming it. whoops!



tiny bowls. one has been holding jewelry (all three pieces that i own), and one is currently awaiting some fancy sea salt.



then i moved on to actual normal-sized bowls, without taking into account the approximately 15% shrinkage that occurs during the drying/firing process. fortunately, i eat small portions, and now i have a dozen jenna-portion-sized bowls.



the last bowl spawned this one - i dubbed it "the better bowl." an improvement on the last bowl in every way, "better bowl" is lightweight, delicate...oh, and still really small. this is one of the earliest pieces i finished, glazing and all, and was clearly a fluke. not positive i could reproduce it.



where the mug fits into my artistic timeline, i'm not quite positive. it must have been early on because i tired of mug relatively fast. handles are not fun, which is why this has a nubbin. it's got a bright blue glaze, which we'll return to many times.



i had a brief period of frustration with large bowls, so i turned to "tea bowls." i don't actually know what those are. i just made a bunch of small, handleless bowls. the blue one (front left) had such thick glaze, it dripped down the sides and stuck to the inside of the kiln. my love affair with "tea bowls" was brief.



i returned to normal bowls, and achieved some mild success. some of these are actually not bad. my glazing technique was not quite up to par, though.



here's that electric blue glaze again. my very knowledgeable and experienced classmate, leslie, allowed me to assist her in mixing a glaze. unfortunately, it looks nothing like we expected. it's even better.



then i tried my hand at a plate. still chunky, and not quite what i was anticipating.



my last day throwing clay, i churned out a few pieces. this bowl is pretty alright, and glazed okay too. maybe i am getting the hang of it!



judging by these little guys...no, i'm not. thrown from a delicate, "buttery" porcelain that another classmate gave me, these looked beautiful pre-glaze, but had very little structure or substance. so they were kind of a challenge. worse yet, i used them to experiment with the glaze leslie and i mixed up, only to discover that it's extremely runny. and the second coat of glaze i dunked them in "melted" off.



this is my "piece de resistance." early on, i learned not to set goals for myself because i often didn't achieve them and met with frustration. that wasn't the best method. i often found myself directionless, cranking out bad bowl after bad bowl. so i decided to challenge myself at the end, and try to make a pot. and it worked! i'm actually proud of this little guy.



oven safe! and perfect for jenna portions!

(there might be one more piece i'm missing somewhere. but in the meantime, here we can segue into the goodies i scored that aren't mine!)



another classmate, dan, is crazy talented on the wheel, and threw pot after pot after pot, all of a similar style. we found these on the shelves on the last day to fire ware, forgotten by him amidst all his other amazing work. he charged me with cleaning them up, and gifted them to me. i got to test out a couple of glazes on pieces that were going to end up in the trash, and now they are mine! yay!



and because i glazed dan's other pieces, he rewarded me with a couple rad pieces. now i have a giant bowl!



and a big pot!



and (yes, there's more), because talented, knowledgeable leslie was dissatisfied that the glaze dripped on some her mugs, she was designating these for the trash when abby and i intercepted. beautifully glazed, with only minor imperfections, i couldn't let these lovely mugs be tossed. trust me, they look phenomenal in person.



she was also about to part with this beautiful baby blue (one of her own glazes!) and coppery black mug. gee, some people are perfectionists.

ceramics class is over, so my artistic career is on hiatus. the end!

a couple recipes

Hi internets! I'm returning to you with a couple intoxicating (tee hee!) directionless recipes. Hold on to your pants!

Jenna's Drunken Sweet Potatoes
I'm tempted to call these "yams," but I have been informed that technically, yams are not available in North America. But the name has so much more flow. Yam. Jenna's Drunken Yams (see?).

You will need:
-some sweet potatoes (I used a 3 lb bag, but after peeling, may have been 2.5 lbs. You know, if you want to be precise.)
-brown sugar
-maple syrup
-butter
-bottom-shelf bourbon
-also, a crockpot

What you want to do first is commit to bringing a dish to a family Thanksgiving, and then get drunk the night before. Mix a few types of liquor - it's ok, Thanksgiving is a weekend! Stumble home at 11:30pm and find your pre-peeled yams awaiting you from a better, soberer time. Throw them in a crockpot with a sprinkle of brown sugar, half a bottle of good maple syrup, and a glug (or 4) of cheap bourbon. Half a stick of butter doesn't hurt too. Maybe some salt and pepper. Cover, set to low, go to bed.

When you wake up hungover in the morning, the smell of delicious sweet potatoes will coax you out of bed. They kind of fell apart in the crockpot, which is what I was hoping for. About an hour before serving time, I poured remaining liquid from the crockpot into a pot on the stovetop, added about a 1/4 bottle of maple syrup and a couple more splashes of bourbon, and cooked it over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it thickened. (See how professional that sounded?!) Then I drizzled this over the sweet potatoes still in the crockpot. People REALLY seemed to like these. It doesn't make an impressive amount, but they are quite rich, so a little goes a long way.

Geoff's Pre-Twilight Cider Concoction
(This name is still a work in progress. But I think it needs to have "Twilight" in it, because everyone should drink this during Twilight if they want to enjoy the movie.)
You will need:
-2 cinnamon sticks
-1 tsp of allspice berries
-1.5 tsp of whole cloves
-half a cup of brown sugar
-2 quarts of cider
-1 orange, quartered
-still a crockpot, but preferably one that is not a burn hazard

Yeah, this an actual 1970s recipe for hot cider, from a book that came with a possibly-malfunctioning estate sale crockpot. Geoff gets credit for that, though I'm the one who made the cider and tested the performance...and fire hazard. Cook over low for a few hours, until everything in the house smells delicious.

This is where Geoff's genius improvisation comes in:
Mix one part cheap bourbon with two parts cider, and add

a dollop

of vanilla ice cream.

You won't regret it.

Smuggle into Twilight and enjoy!

what does the yarn want to be?

Three years ago, or something like that, I embarked on my second-ever sweater project. The first three sweaters I ever made were weird Frankensteins, ignoring this super important thing called "gauge." It took me three sweaters to figure that one out. So this particular sweater, which was a thermal, which is a ubiquitous pattern, and which nearly everyone seems to have attempted at some point, didn't really come out so well. It was boxy and unflattering, and bunched up in weird places. So after fully completing it, I ripped it all the way out and decided to start over. I never really got back into it.


The only actually in-focus picture I have of this. If only I could stop my past self right here, but I know I had the sleeves finished elsewhere.

I think the reasons for my lack of interest were pretty obvious, yet I chose to ignore them. I didn't like the color of the yarn - mainly, although I think the color name was "Dolphin," and I'm a sucker for colors named for aquatic animals. I also didn't, and still don't, live in a climate where a thick silk/wool sweater is comfortable or necessary. And, most importantly of all, while in every other facet of life I am pragmatic and prefer simple, unadorned articles of clothing, this is NOT true of the things I knit. I like to go wild with lace and cables and colorwork, and leave the plain thermals to American Apparel (who has provided me with some seriously cozy though rarely-worn thermals for like $20.)

So, Saturday night, after binging on tea, I pulled this out of the closet and took it all apart. Then I spent the next day researching sweater patterns, and finding nothing that piqued my interest.

I had an architecture professor once who suggested we think, "what does the brick want to be?" My ceramics instructor recently said, "let the clay be what it wants to be." I'm seeing a trend here. What does this thermal really want to be? How can I re-dye this yarn so that it's something I will want to work with, and that the finished product is something I will want to wear?



So I decided to take this one step at a time, and tackle the dyeing first. Sunday I reskeined it the yarn, tied it off in quadrants, threw it in a pot to soak overnight, and just now, like half an hour ago, pulled brand new yarn out of a giant pot on my stove. And as soon as I did that, I knew what it was going to be. Magic!



It's going to be Abalone. Embarrassingly, I just got done telling a knitting friend earlier that "stockinette sucks," but when yarn speaks, you can't argue.

i have three giant balls

...of yarn! Thanks to Rachel's dad, who sent me a huge, ultra soft Italian cashmere sweater just riddled with holes! It took a while but now all the yarn is scrapped. I think I might ply a couple of these balls together to make some heavier weight yarn. Stay tuned?

wahclella falls

A couple weekends ago, on the last really hot day in Portland, Geoff and I went on a mini-hike to Wahclella Falls. But as soon as we got out there, the temperature dropped ten degrees, and as we got closer the falls, I think it got even colder.



It's a beautiful area, and the trail isn't too steep. Geoff is a mountain goat but I am not, so that was nice. I even saw an older couple walking with the assistance of a cane!



I had to get super close to this raging waterfall for this picture, and the spray was freezing cold. And the rocks were super slick. It was dangerous!



Mountain goat!



Geoff claims he's seen longer moss tendrils. I don't believe it.



Hello little friend!



I like that there are waterfalls half an hour away from where I live. What a great place!

the final final fantasy, for real

I did something today I'm not proud of. I listed my copy of Final Fantasy 7 on an eBay auction. I threw in a controller-less PSone, because I once had a controller, but probably broke it in a teenage rage. Back in 2003, I used the cash money from my first summer job to purchase said PSone and Final Fantasy 7, and proceeded to play the dick (technical term) out of the game for each successive summer. Oh, PSone and FF7, we had some good times. FF8 had nothing on you, and although FF9 was quite fun, it lacked some of your hilarious translation-affected dialogue.

Here's to all the late nights spent playing awesome video games, back before we all just made fun of the graphics.



:(

bad pictures to accompany bad analogies

Let's take a minute to look at Project Libby. If you don't know how to knit, this won't seem too monumental to you. So let me put it in terms anyone from the 1950s would understand. Normally, knitting is a little like a typewriter. You type a row across in one direction, then slide the platen back to start, and type another row. (You and I both just learned something new about typewriters; congratulations, us!) The same is true of knitting, so that your work generally grows in a vertical direction.

So, now that you totally understand all the basic concepts of knitting, here's something new to throw into the mix. Project Libby requires a border, and this is where it gets weird.


What may not be clear from this picture is that I am knitting perpendicular to the scarf. So let's imagine rotating that piece of paper 90 degrees and resuming typing in the margins. That's kind of like what this is but way cooler, particularly because it doesn't involve any sewing.

I drew a really bad MS Paint diagram to help illustrate my point, but I think it fails at that. (I should really do my blogging from a computer with fancy drawing programs.)


In conclusion: this is pretty rad. If you're into this knitting stuff, the pattern is available here, and is very clear and easy to follow.

this is totally worth a blog post

A little bit of color on a grey morning. Perfect. I realize I'll be demonized for saying it, but I'm loving the overcast weather these last two days. Sorry, summer lovers.

I would like to do a baby picture montage here:







I really can't believe this one tiny little seed sprouted into a plant as tall as I am, and is bearing fruit! It's like having a baby, except the kid grows up in a couple months, and never talks back.

seven hungry caterpillars

My kale had a rough weekend. I wasn't here, but apparently it was very hot, and I came home to find it drooping almost all the way to the ground. A bit of water revitalized it, but later in the day, I noticed these almost completely camouflaged caterpillars. Lots of them! All over my kale leaves! I thought it would be ok for a couple hours, until I could enlist Geoff to come remove them, safely and organically, by hand. I was so wrong. I came home two hours later to a kale plant stripped of its lush leafiness.



I sacked up, put on some gloves, and plucked the little guys off. I even found a tiny eighth little caterpillar, which doesn't reassure me. I suspect there are many more lurking in the stems and leaves that I can't see.



I took them outside and dumped them in some more foliage, far away from houseplants. This is a sad day in kale ownership.

Oh, did I mention I moved?

jenna's glowing blog recommendation

Back in October, just days after my one-year climbingiversary (that's a technical term, there), I tweaked my wrist picking up a box at work. It's pathetic. It felt like a pop and then a shot of pain down my forearm, and I couldn't make a fist for the rest of the day. So I rested it, iced it, took some time off climbing, and when I finally went back about a month later, I still had pain and weakness in my left wrist. For the last 9 months, I've been climbing at 50% strength, and avoiding anything remotely slopey or left-hand-intensive.

A few weeks ago, after months of limiting myself to v2s (I even stopped knitting for a while!), I figured it was time to just play through the pain, and spent an entire lengthy (comparably) climbing session working a challenging v5. My soon-to-be-roommate Amber gently advised against this, but naturally I didn't listen. The next morning, I could hardly move my left hand. Any amount of impact (pushing, twisting, lifting) was excruciating. I scheduled an emergency appointment for that afternoon with my primary care physician - yes, I have one of those despite not having any health insurance. The potential cost forgotten in my pain, I had an x-ray. The doctor called it tendinitis, a diagnosis which frustrated me to no end. The stretches she assigned me were impossible due to the extreme pain; I couldn't bend my wrist more than about 30 degrees in either direction. I had a nagging feeling this wasn't tendinitis.

Days later, I get a call from the doctor. The x-ray results showed a calcification in my wrist, just above the wrist bone directly below my little finger. I had even seen it on the x-ray. It looked like a little triangle of white mass right in my wrist joint. So that was somewhat satisfying, because at least now I knew what I was really dealing with, and how to treat it. Except they recommended acupuncture. I had a brief "WTF" moment before deciding I'd give it a shot. Acupuncture isn't that expensive. And this is Portland, after all.

I left after the first appointment feeling disheartened. My pain was somewhat alleviated, and I had napped for almost two hours in the middle of the day, but I was going to have to receive treatment at least twice a week for a month. I just couldn't afford that. I remembered a Facebook post by my friend Jeff talking about a low-level laser treatment he was going to receive for a tendon injury. Months ago, he'd suggested it might work for me. I finally followed up on that, and went to see Dr. Rob.

Dr. Rob, not to mince words, is a fucking miracle worker. My first session was less than half an hour. He scraped at my wrist with some metallic scrapey-tool, and did four minutes of LLLT on my wrist. Without even seeing the x-rays, he knew what to treat. And holy shit, if I didn't feel amazing the next day. I had my range of motion back, and significantly decreased pain. Three more sessions and two weeks later, I can put weight on my wrist enough to do a pushup, finally. I was able to help carry my couch when I sold it two days ago. The pain, stiffness and weakness I've been enduring for most of a year are all 90% gone.

And, hey, climber friends! Dr. Rob used to climb too. If you have any sort of climbing injury and you are being an idiot like I was, and not treating it at all, I highly recommend him. It's totally affordable. And it was 100% worth it if I get to climb again, which is looming on the horizon.

You should know that if I'm blogging about something, it's because I really like it. So do it! Get some laser on your injuries!

carpal tunnel, here i come

Working on some super top-secret double knitting today. I'm finally getting accustomed to holding two strands of yarn in one hand.

the best sandwich ever that i just devoured

This is my go-to. I feel a need to post it, due to my intense love of it, and desire for everyone to know how to make it.


Not such a beautiful picture here.

I have adapted the TLT recipe from 101 Cookbooks to include bacon - I'm not a vegetarian, I can eat delicious, delicious bacon. In my tempeh-liking opinion, this is a major improvement.

I used to make it on bagels. Toasty gluteny bagels. But those days are over. Udi's gluten-free hamburger buns substitute nicely. I didn't notice much of a difference, because I ate it too fast. And because everything else was so overwhelmingly amazing.

I prepare the tomatoes like Heidi does. Let me please note here that I did not eat tomatoes until these. I am not kidding you. These are so deliciously tangy and sweet and soft and flavorful that I changed my dietary habits for them. My mouth is watering again.

I also prepare the avocado the same. It's good. So good.

And then I fry up a few slices of bacon. Five should do it, but you can make more if you like. I've done it with more, too. I make this sandwich a lot.

That's all I have to say about this. You, too, can eat delicious and probably unhealthy food, even if you are gluten-free.

a tale of two scarves

I remember this clothing swap, back in October. Rachel had this pink scarf she was swapping, in some hideous shade of bright magenta. It was finely-knit 1x1 ribbing with a weird flare at either end. It was all sorts of misshapen, and full of holes. And it was 100% cashmere.

I knew about recycling good quality sweater yarns (none of those cotton/poly blends, ew) but I never figured it was worth the effort. Something about this ugly duckling scarf awoke the urge in me. I needed to turn it into a swan. So I snagged it, revealed my intentions to Rachel, and immediately that evening began snipping away at the ends until it unravelled.



It was time consuming. At first, I just unravelled like a crazy person, piling loose yarn into a lump. Big mistake. It tangled when I tried to wind it; I figured out I had to wrap the yarn around my hand, to be felted and rejoined into continuous strands later. I had little curly balls of pink yarn bouncing around everywhere. I think it took something like a week before I formed two complete skeins.





Bear in mind, this was before I discovered what setting on my camera produces real-life colors. It was a little more ugly in person.

Then the fun part! I dyed it, using tea bags and a splash of red food coloring. I didn't want to deviate a ton from the original color, just tone it down a little (a lot). The result was fairly successful.





See the difference?

The original scarf was maybe 4 feet long. I figured, I'd hold the yarn double, work it in lace, and end up with something light, airy, warm, and crazy long.

Rachel right away expressed interest in it. It's not really a color I like, but it's right up her alley. According to Ravelry, I started this scarf in January, with the secret intentions of giving it to Rachel at some point. I anticipated working on it for maybe a couple of months, at most.



Here's where I was after one month.

Fast-forward to July! Rachel's birthday is coming up, and this scarf has been at the bottom of my bag for six months. I'm procrastinating by starting new projects left and right. It's hard, guys. Lace knitting is not great. The pattern took me months to get accustomed to. I forced myself to work on it, and it's slow going. The scarf was about three feet long when I started worrying that I'd run out of yarn. I toyed with the idea for about 20 seconds of unravelling it and starting over. Oh god.

But then it just kept growing. And growing. And growing. And soon, it was a snake:



The day before her birthday, literally (July 28), one of my skeins ran out of yarn. I wound them unevenly. I was so grateful for that. I just bound it off there, and immediately washed and blocked it. No time to waste!



Blocking something you've worked on for ages is easily the best part. It's all soft and pliable, and you can shape it however you want. For this scarf, I decided to leave the edges a little scalloped. That's how they wanted to be!



Post-blocking: the scarf is now super long, super crazy airy, super light and luscious (hey, that's the name of the pattern!) One of the things I'm discovering I love about dyeing with tea bags is the multifaceted color. It really pops in natural lighting, but it takes on a different appearance in different environments. (There's also the fact that I discovered the next day which setting on my camera produces good colors. I'm going to harp on this until the day I die.)


I took some artsy shots:







In the interest of sounding like a broken record, nearly all of the yarn in my Etsy store will make a much, much longer scarf. This is the least amount of yarn I've ever acquired from unravelling something. It seriously blows me away how much mileage you can get out of a lace pattern. Go get some!