Am I Really Okay with This?

Doing some editing on a dissertation, and the references have no style. Fashion police, no; they adhere to no one school of style. And this really bothers me. BOTHERS ME.

But they are mostly consistent to themselves. And the dissertation committee members apparently do not care.

However ... I care. Poor little unstyled citations, I care about you. Because I know three different schools of style and can recite them. Honestly. I recognize them on sight. I am an editor. This is what I know.

I am leaving them alone. I am. I am. I am. Breathe.

And should I capitalize "with"? I am undecided on that one.

Squash, Rotten, with Deceit and Broccoli Pesto, Updated with Photos of Railings

I slow-cooked a spaghetti squash today. Set it out last night and everything. Made this broccoli pesto with generous amounts of parsley. Tossed and ... tasted and ... it was totally rotten! I should have surmised that from the weird root looking things inside it with the seeds when I cut it open.

Definitely the first time I have cooked something ROTTEN without knowing it was rotten. Oh squash and slow-cookers, so useful, and with a hidden currency of deceit. Deceit!

The broccoli pesto was tasty with some whole-wheat fusilli, though.

Should I walk to the library now? Yes I should.

Update: Kaffe Fasset's book, Glorious Color, makes me wish I was twenty years older, living in Fasset's pattern photos; Gary Paulsen published a book for adults in 1992 that I picked up, fell in love with, and thought sadly, No one publishes books like this anymore, on great paper with full-color paintings, with no real plot; David Sedaris is really funny but I keep hoping for a happy ending anyway; and these photos of railings make me feel indelibly peaceful. LA, maybe? I don't know.

Oh Hai Guyz

Aren't you always thinking in lolcat?

Let's see ... hosted a Passover seder, chopped things with few painful repercussions. Went to a large Easter brunch full of excellent largess. Am making the second batch of chocolate matzo crack right now. Dyed yarn; feel like I'm getting somewhere on my dye trials. Good lord I am the same girl I was in college, mostly; I think in the same trials, I record results the same way (haphazardly), I try to be kind of scientific about all of it, and I freak the hell out when I encounter toxic materials.

Oh, toxic you say?

The dyes I use are only toxic in their dry state. Once water is in there, well, I wear gloves and wouldn't drink it, but it won't kill me anymore. But, let's say, a container full of dyestock leaks and leaks through the plastic bag and leaks into the large bin it's inside of and ... all the liquid evaporates. And there's dry dye everywhere. Oddly enough I moved so fast I forgot to wear gloves during the whole ordeal. And given the lack of migraine or sinus freakout, I am assuming I have not absorbed too much toxicity.

In college, I used cyanide to make cloth blue in the sun. I crushed glass and didn't wear a mask or gloves (bad idea) with a hammer inside a piece of canvas. I mixed clay in a room with an incorrectly-installed vent fan, which pulled nothing out of the room. Yay clay so light it floats on air, living in your sinuses for a few years. In grad school, in my ceramics class, I angrily and kind of crazily left the clay lab in a blaze at the end of the semester ... and forgot my beautiful particulate filter mask.

Well, I'm sure I'll get a new one soon enough. Because I have sinus trouble and I don't want to die. From my dye ...

I think I just forgot my laundry. Uh, bye again!

Darning Socks, Insulting Peasants, and Food

Perhaps I am overly excited about this, but I just watched a video on darning socks, and let me tell you, I have more socks that need darning than I want you to know about. I am a bit of a sock lover, a sock-wearing fool, and I decided in college that it would benefit me far into the future to amass as many high-quality wool socks (Smartwool, really) as possible. And to love them forever. And hopefully own enough to only do laundry every two weeks ...

Anyway, few of my to-be-darned patches will match, you know, at all, but the holes will be filled!

Brief interlude: younger cat Eto just brought home another maimed bird, two in two weeks; I am closing the blinds again, as I cannot take such violence. I think some of my neighbors are witnessing this as well ... I hope it's the dog-owners whose dog maybe, hopefully, scared Eto away and hopefully didn't see him and his bird-victim, or maybe one of the many immigrant neighbors, who I imagine are not as freaked out by this, since they cook a lot of cabbage and peanut oil and onions, which I find to be earthy, like peasant/farm earthy. I am revealing all my assumptions, aren't I? In other words, maybe peasants don't mind animals eating animals? I am two or three generations removed from farming, so I should be more realistic about this. And the main neighbor in question is a graduate student in physics with a gigantic Apple TV or iMac thing.

Since I am not making a lot of things right now except food, and am insulting my neighbors, all farmers, and all peasants, I will change topics. I plan to write more about those foods I am making in days to come.

SUCH AS:

--Mole skillet pie with greens, teamed with sauteed corn, red onions and kale
--Chinese noodles with stir-fry vegetables and orange pan-glazed tempeh
--No-knead bread with steel-cut oats, served with roasted carrot "fries," garlic tahini sauce, sun-dried tomato hummus, and parmesan-yogurt sauce (which is exactly what it sounds like)
--Lentil soup with spinach, teamed with poppy-seed polenta (accidentally made with 3 tablespoons, not teaspoons, of poppy seeds, postponing all possible drug tests by necessity)
--Almond-quinoa muffins with dried cranberries (they are a bit weird, almost too health-food for even me)
--And lots of nori rolls, when the mood strikes, rolled by Noah the master roller

We are eating more home-cooked food because my arms are a little better and I am chopping a little more. Yum, food. Yay, lower food bills. Yay, food that is more real-ingredient-centered.

It's NaPoWriMo and I am not participating. Go elsewhere.

Change in Plans

Well ... we won't be moving to Seattle until sometime between September and November. Not May or June. Accenture can't start Noah until then, which has some very real effects on our projected income ... and where we are working, and how we are living.

Anybody want to sublet my place after we move? Heh? Or, you know, let me live in yours? While you live somewhere else, I guess? This is a quandry. We have some time to figure it out, though--August sometime.

All cost-saving and money-making ideas are welcome. Comment below, pls. And I'm already planning things like selling books and clothes and other things ... we live very low-cost, so looking for ways to lower cost is difficult. But not impossible. We will work it out. Positive thinking.

I've been wanting to dye yarn a grey-blue shade, and I looked at the nearly-raining still-winter sky a few nights ago and realized that was it. Yarn to come in some semblance of shade.

I keep singing Arcade Fire songs out loud, and they make no sense at all. "Come on Alex / you can do it / come on Alex / there's nothing to it" ... "All the neighbors can dance" ... "The crown of love / is now upon me" ...

And, yesterday, while cleaning our apartment in ways it has not been cleaned in some long, long time (with baking soda! mixed with rosemary essential oil! it smelled great in here--spring cleaning!!!), I took refuge in not one but two Saint Louis radio stations, KWMU the NPR affiliate, and KDHX the community-supported independent station. I know one of the DJs, I grew up listening to this, and I have positive associations with nearly every show of theirs. Yesterday I was all, "Mid-Day Jamboree! Wahoo!" And now I'm all "Songwriters Showcase!"

I'm sure there are good radio stations wherever I am, hopefully, but maybe there are not, and maybe I am lazy--whatever the case, hearing those two stations shout out their call signs is comforting wherever I am.

Oh, And Kelsey Keyes! Or, Increase Your Karma Now!

If anybody here has time on their hands, click through the links below ... and help out my friend Kelsey.

Karma! Do it! You don't need to know why! The more clicks the better.

MY BLOGS
http://kelseykeyes-kelseykeyes.blogspot.com/
http://kelsey-keyes.blogspot.com/

CARL'S BLOGS
http://kelseyanncloughkeyes.blogspot.com/
http://spiridontrepka.livejournal.com/2138.html

Robin
http://kelseykeyesrecipes.wordpress.com/

Christy:

http://kelseyannkeyes.blogspot.com/
http://cruellestmonths.livejournal.com/

Christine (yes, me)
http://beingamaker.blogspot.com/2009/02/shout-out-to-kelsey-keyes-and-food.html

Helen
http://kelseyanncloughkeyesrocks.blogspot.com/

Andrea
http://helpinafriend.blogspot.com/

Susie
kelseykeyesblog.blogspot.com

Agnes
http://happybirthdaykelseykeyes.blogspot.com/


OTHER SITES I'VE SET UP
Flickr
http://flickr.com/photos/56496703@N00/
http://flickr.com/photos/56496703@N00/3203836103/

Yelp
http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=HjfYmrBBTaXnlD_rAB1ViQ

Naymz
http://www.naymz.com/search/kelsey/keyes/2448114

LinkedIN
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/kelsey/keyes

Delicious
http://delicious.com/kelseykeyes

Brainify
http://brainify.com/Details/User.aspx?id=3562

OTHER EXISTING LINKS THAT ARE GOOD TO LINK TO

Skyline
http://www.skylinehighschool1999.com/

GSLIS
https://apps.lis.uiuc.edu/wiki/users/viewuserprofile.action?username=keyes

Accountancy
http://www.business.uiuc.edu/jdperkin/Accy304/Announcements.html

RateMyProfessor
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=757427

Knox
http://deptorg.knox.edu/newsarchive/news_events/2002/student_english_conference.html

Library Cards and Turmeric-Infused Trash

Yeah! Changing it up, "blog redesign," etc. Soon I will figure out the graphics stuff about what I'd like to see in my banner. I am perhaps surprisingly inept where design and computers interact.

And now Goodreads.com can tell you what I'm reading. And seeing it here will remind me to actually read rather than watch Project Runway and Legend of the Seeker. Put that Book Gem to use.

I got a library card today! This seems ridiculous, to have not had one in the public library system here AND have lived here five years. I found the textile area (746.42, oh yeah) and didn't leave for a long time. Eventually they will see me every week, I am guessing.

While "business plans" are something I have never dealt with in my life, except for that sport management skills book, wherein I read about them via flowcharts, I am probably going to write one with Noah sometime. About yarn. And dye. And etsy.com. And on and on.

You know, being a maker and all that.

I am also a maker of lentil soup and no-knead bread. Served together with some turmeric-infused yogurt. Somehow my jar of turmeric shattered inside its lid ... it's a latch-top jar, so maybe it fell and the force of impact messed with that part. I do not know. Noah sifted some out through my teeniest whole-leaf-tea filter. The rest is in the trash. Turmeric-infused trash, that is.

And after a day at work, of a literal five hours of voice-typing and index-reformatting (loop "move left, move down, tab" in my scraggly voice), I am amazed by voice typing as an entity and am also tired of it. Or perhaps more tired of index-reformatting. Freelancers, beware: format your work correctly. I have no sympathy for incorrect formatting. Honestly, no sympathy at all.

Neverwhere or Fabric, huh? Where to start.