Last night I created what I'm called a "rainy season" cloak, or rain cloak, for short. *grin* I used dark blue polyster so it would be really lightweight and not wrinkle easily (and still looks nice - not like a leisure suit - although I'm sure most SCAers and historical recreationists would laugh derisively at it and rightly so), and also so it would not be too warm (particularly in CA) - just something to wear to keep the rain off. This morning, I took what was left of a can of spray silicone (just something I had in storage from sealing suede boots in the past) and sealed the cloak with it. Mostly the hood and shoulder parts. In a bit I might spray it with some water and see how it does and if I need to buy any more sealer. It's got a nicely generous hood and looks good on both John and me.

I'll certainly wear it outside around here, as I don't have a jacket with a hood at the moment and carrying umbrellas is cumbersome, but I'm not sure about wearing it 'to town' yet. I wish we lived in an area where people wore something besides what you can get at KMart or Target, or the standard jeans and baseball cap kind of approach. I miss seeing DIFFERENT. Anyway - it was a fun project and it came out really well, so I'm happy. :-)
posted:11:41 AM | link |

I will never again make calzones with anything but WHOLE MILK ricotta and motzarella cheeses. Yeah, they were OKAY, but they weren't creamy enough, and certainly not tasty enough. So, if all I can find in the store are low-moisture SKIM cheeses - you can just forget it. :-)
posted:5:19 PM | link |

I woke up this morning with the most unpredictable song in my head. It's something I remember from my childhood. Something my parents had on an album with an orange cover. I assume it's called "Winchester Cathedral" because the song has these lyrics:

Winchester Cathedral
You're bringin' me down
You stood and you watched as
My baby left town

It kinda goes on in this vein. Strange that I had completely forgotten about it but still remembered most of the lyrics from so many years ago. It also made me wonder how many other songs out there are in the 'building as passive observer' category - LOL. Anyway - here's one link I found to the REAL Winchester Cathedral in the United Kingdom. (It happens to be Jane Austen's final resting place - interesting tidbit there.) Update: And I finally found a link to the actual SONG, which is from 1966 and by "The New Vaudeville Band". There - that should fill you up with trivia for today!
posted:10:10 AM | link |

Our current and seemingly constantly changing situation has so far kind of precluded certain rituals that I used to do, and I'm realizing now that I miss them. Someone once said something like - have an orderly physical life so your artistic or creative thoughts can be wild - and that really seems to fit. When you're constantly compensating or fixing or altering your physical activities, including times, etc., that seems to leave less energy to really focus on other things. One example - it's hard to get up in the morning and immediately write for 30 minutes when you've got to start a fire in the wood burning stove or your hands will shake too hard from the cold to grasp a pen. LOL. This is one thing in my life I'm going to change - back to rituals I am going! (Talking like Yoda, I am!)
posted:3:03 PM | link |

I'm starting to redesign and add pages to this site. (not online yet - won't be for a while - relax - LOL) For the first page I've worked on, I'm using a non-repeating background image as defined in a style sheet - naturally it doesn't work right in Netscape 4.7, the background image scrolls AND the color is off. BUT it looks good in IE and Mozilla (thanks tom!) and Opera, and works in NS6.0 even if the color is still off. I mention all of this because in the past I've been a minimalist - using really basic designs out of (laziness to learn much about CSS and) a desire to make my web page appear 'correctly' to everyone who might come. But this is a problem we also ran into in the tech. writing field. How far backward compatible do you make something? How many platforms do you accomodate?

I COULD of course use javascript to figure out which browser people are using and then send them to the appropriate versions of pages, but frankly, that's waaaay too much work for me. Especially considering that I only have two browsers that will run on our little PC here, and one is an older version at that. SO... I may have to start putting those little warnings on pages "This page best viewed with Opera, Mozilla, or IE6.0" Oh, the inner torment! Oh, the conflicts in my soul to be artistic AND a perfectionist. *grin* Ahhh well, screw it. As a good friend of mine used to say, "Sometimes you just gotta say... what the hell."
posted:9:55 AM | link |

Be ever questioning. Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion. You don't go to heaven if you die dumb. Become better informed. Learn from others' mistakes. You could not live long enough to make them all yourself.
- Hyman George Rickover (1900-86)
posted:11:14 AM | link |