The Wild Life and Times of a Botanical Geek

If you're looking for a little pick me up, I discovered Movies in Real Life, which appears to be a comedy troupe's reenactments of famous movie scenes around NYC. It's utterly adorable and fun.

Poor Gandalf, everybody passes him. <3

(Also, while not part of the movie series, this group apparently also did a treatment of Ghostbusters at the New York Public Library. For that alone, they are infinitely awesome for tickling my geeky bone. <3

The verdict on the cheese:

It's DEFINITELY cheese, so that's at least a starting place! The texture seems like it works, but the taste is...not quite mozzarella. It's extremely mild, and I realized after a few nibbles that it tasted amazingly like Babybel cheese.

I'm not entirely sure what to do to make it more mozzarella-tasting. I'm thinking a fattier milk, definitely, like 2% or whole. I think adding more salt will help too. I used a coarse sea salt, and using a finer sea salt might up the salt content. I also think I need to give the cheese one more drain before sprinkling the salt on and beginning the stretching.

Hopefully next week I'll be able to initiate cheese mark II. <3

This is very exciting, you guys! I am writing this post on my brand new laptop! As some of you have heard (some multiple times before), I have had a dinosaur of a laptop for some time now. It was clunky and the battery is basically a corpse and it had nightly spazzes and was kind of senile and took FOREVER to do anything useful. I finally bit the bullet and got a new laptop. Uruz is shiny and a little bit smaller than kenaz, but is FAST and omg it is lovely to be able to actually DO stuff on it. We're still trying to figure each other out, and it means I have to convert to Windows 7 (as I am crotchety and I like XP better), but yay for productivity! And it has a webcam, so I can actually videochat with people if anyone is interested! :D

HOPEFULLY, this is all a good thing!

impersona was in need of a story. So I wrote her one on the spot. <3 And then she double scoop dared me to post it, AND WHO AM I TO TURN DOWN A DOUBLE SCOOP DARE.

So here it is, for your enjoyment, in its off-the-cuff format (which basically means I copied it directly from gchat):

Once upon a time, there was a banana! It was a very green banana, and all the other bananas made fun of him, because they were all pretty and yellow.

Banana was very sad, and cried a lot. But then one day his fairy bananamother came, and gave him hope! "DO NOT WORRY, BANANA," she said "ONE DAY YOU WILL BE A GREAT AND WONDERFUL BANANA AND ALL THE OTHER BANANAS WILL LOVE YOU." And Banana said, "That's great! Would you stop screaming?"

So Banana went on his fruity way, and tried to keep his spirits up. One by one all the other bananas were eaten, as befitting bananas. Our friend Banana willed and willed and willed with all his might to turn yellow, for surely it would soon be his turn!

AND THEN. One day, he looked in the reflection of the kitchen window, and to his surprise, he found he wasn't quite so green as before!

THIS WAS VERY EXCITING. He willed some more, and he became more yellow! And more yellow! And even more yellow!

"HOORAY!" thought Banana, "Soon I will be as yellow as the other bananas and then I will be eaten!"

And so Banana waited for the day when he would be eaten. At that point he was the only banana left. But tragically, the person who had bought the bunch had grown tired of bananas every day, and missed out on that perfect point at which Banana was perfect to be eaten.

Banana started to grow spots, at which point the person that bought the bunch wanted nothing to do with him anymore. He sat on the counter, alone and forgotten, turning browner and browner.

Banana started to cry. "Oh why," he lamented, "Why did I have to be the last one? I'm so lonely now!" That's when his fairy bananamother came back again.

"WELL THIS IS SOMEWHAT UNEXPECTED," she said, "BUT TAKE HEART, BANANA. I STILL SEE A GOOD FUTURE FOR YOU." Banana cried again. "How?" he asked, "How can you?" "IT'S A MYSTERY" Banana godmother said, and disappeared in a cloud of ethylene.

And so Banana sat and sat. And then one day, he found himself getting picked up! He got very excited. Maybe now was when he was going to be eaten! He was peeled! This made him even more excited!

And then he was put in a bowl. Well this was very disconcerting, he thought. And then others were put into the bowl with him. "Who are you all?" he asked as he swirled about with the others, mingling as the spoon turned. "We're sugar!" some little white creatures said as they whizzed by, "I'm an egg!" another said before it mingled with Banana.

"What are you all doing here?" he asked, "I'm a banana. I was peeled. I was supposed to be eaten!"

"You will be!" a chorus of raisins said joyously, "You were perfect to join us! You'll be our friend, won't you? You seem very sweet." "Oh yes!" a cloud of baking soda said, "Very sweet indeed! We like you very much!" "Really?" Banana said, "Gosh, how nice!"

"We're all going to be eaten together!" The milk said, "And you're the whole reason behind it, Banana!" Banana would have blushed, if bananas could, and if he wasn't already incorporated with all the other ingredients. Still, he was deliriously happy, "This is like a dream come true!" he said as they were all popped into the oven. And it truly was, for it is the dream of every forgotten banana to become banana bread.

Here they are together in an awesome music video.

Just had to share. <3

And now, some random updates and tidbits. <3

While I am still, of course, still all about the knitting, lately I feel like I've been having an affair with my spindle. I got ahold of multiple samples of different blends of yarn, and I have been a spinning fool as a result. In the evening I would want to rush home so I could pull out the spindle and try a new fiber out. It's been great practice, and I have lots of teeny selections of yarn that I could use on little projects. I do wish, however, that I could spin a yarn with an even weight. Maybe that will come with more practice. Don't worry, knitting, it all comes back to you, you'll have lots of new yarns to play with soon. <3

When I have been knitting, I have been all about the hats. I'm expecting something of a minor baby tsunami later this year, due to my parents' coworkers apparently all feeling the need to procreate all at once, so I've been using this as a good excuse to make baby hats. It's actually kind of fun, and nice for instant gratification. I've made a stripey hat, a milk hat that came out WAY too big and will probably go to my cousin, and an eggplant hat. Yep, an eggplant hat. It's a hat that looks like an eggplant. I'm going to need to make the recipients aware of the fact that I'm going to want pictures of babies in hats. I demand to see eggplant hat in action. I've also still been working on the Citron shawl. I'm hoping I'll have enough yarn to make it the size I want it to be, as I think the yardage is starting to get low, but I'll need to get a bit further into it before I can be sure.

On the cooking front, yesterday Eien-chan and I got experimental and we made what basically amounts to avocado pudding. To those of you in Kingdom, amazingly, this is not something Alice dreamed up (although I wouldn't put it past her XD). It's actually Brazilian, and it's surprisingly good. Basically it involves taking avocados, mashing them up, mixing in lime juice, and letting the mixture sit in the fridge for at least half an hour. During that time, the acid in the lime juice breaks down the avocado, making it smoother and creamier. You serve it up with sugar so people can adjust the sweetness accordingly. It really doesn't taste all that avocado-y, and comes off more like a lime pudding. I think the next time, I should try adding some whipped cream. Mmm, whipped cream.

In the realm of the garden, we're starting to gear up for the growing season. The tulips I planted last fall are coming up, and we've got some new plants to go into the front yard, including some daisies, a lilac, and a couple rosemary plants to replace our huge rosemary bush, which tragically up and died over the winter. I'm still not entirely sure what caused it. I've started thinking about what to put in the beds for growing. I still want us to construct a fourth box for pumpkins and cucumbers so that they can fight it out, gladiator-style, and we can have delicious cucumbers and pie pumpkins. I'd love to add dill and lavender to the herb box, the former because I like it, the latter because I could use it in soaps and the like. I also really want to try out growing some edible flowers. I got a cookbook a couple months ago that has lots of recipes that use flowers and other more peripheral edible plants, which I would love to try out. We'll see how that goes.

So tomorrow, Eien-chan and I are going to pile into the car and make the journey to Charlotte to stay overnight. Our mission? To visit Ikea. We have some things in mind we plan to get, but this is also to find out more about this magical land we've been told of, a land of flat-packed furniture, tiny tiny rooms, and princess cakes (I am going to hunt down these princess cakes I keep hearing about). This should prove interesting. If nothing else, it's going to be an adventure!

I would just like to point out: Knitting is awesome. Star Trek is awesome. Klingons are awesome.

Combining all three?

AWESEOME TRIPLE TRIAD OF AWESOMENESS

I would bet that that's tea in the cup, but having an awesome quartet would create an awesome singularity and suck us all in to oblivion (an awesome oblivion).

I'm probably going to regret it in my thighs tomorrow, but for now I'm going to be AWFULLY proud of myself. A couple weeks ago I attended the local arboretum's annual plant giveaway. This event is an exercise in controlled chaos--a mass of plant lovers and a mess of plants, all essentially free, minus what you pay in arboretum membership of course. They've got it to the point where it's fairly well controlled, but it's still a frantic sight to behold.

In the end I came out with ten happy fun plants, including something called a bronze loquat, which I think produces fruit after a fashion, some new butterfly bushes, an unusual lavender, an elderberry (not sure if it's edible or not, though.), and some Cotoneasters, which supposedly produce red berries and will hopefully attract the waxwings we supposedly have in the area. And today, with the exception of the lavender, which I planted last week, I got them all in the ground, with a little help from Dad to dig the big holes, and a lot of non-help from Arnold, digging dachshund extraordinaire, who was more apt to get in the way of my trowel, attempt to garrote the plant I had just planted with his rope, or, in his enthusiasm for dirt, dig in the pile of dirt next to the freshly excavated hole, dumping it back in in the process. I also managed to plant some tulip bulbs, including some nearly black Queen of Nights. I'm hoping they'll do well in the spring. <3

On a different note, the cooking bug is starting to gnaw on me again. I got some new cookbooks with some really interesting recipes that I want to try, including some ice cream recipes that look like they don't need an ice cream maker. There's also some neat looking desserts and breads I want to try my hand at (including naan bread and pita bread. Mmmm). I just need to get the time and ingredients. I'm not sure I'll have the time this week, though, as the upcoming week is going to be hectic and insane. But we'll see, I guess. <3

I'm also getting the urge to work on soapy goodness again. I still really want to work on the Gesma soap idea, and I learned of a couple new ideas for soapmaking that I want to give a try, thanks to things like this blog. Oh, so many things so many things.

Darn it, somebody invent that 36 hour day already!