Joueuse de Tympanon – automate

If your skin isn’t crawling, you’re not watching.

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A is for Automata, The Avengers, and Anime.

So here’s the first installment of the Encyclopedia of Me meme (special vowels only edition):  three things beginning with A.
Automata:  I have always been creeped out by things that move when they shouldn’t.  Ex.:  the clown doll in the first Poltergeist movie (although in all fairness, that’s at least partly clown-related).  Also, fortune-telling mannequins in [...]

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Over at BellaDia

Cassie is starting the “Encyclopedia of Me” meme.  Here’s what she has to say:
“Okay, here’s the meme that I was thinking of: Starting tomorrow, August 1st, I’m going to make a post each day of the month beginning with “A is for…” and on the 26th day, “Z is for…” Now, I know there are [...]

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The Dominion Favourite

My dear friend in New Zealand sent me an early birthday present that has filled me with delight:  the Edmonds ”Sure to Rise” Cookery Book–best selling book ever published in New Zealand (more than 3m copies sold!), continuously in print since 1907.
Nothing brings home the differences between English-speaking cultures like their cookbooks.  The fun of this [...]

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Hot Weather. Late Nights. A Certain Amount of Insanity.

Some years ago, I read an exposé about over-achieving housewives on meth, which reported breathlessly that middle-class housewives were turning to methamphetamines to help them get more done.  Trawling through the sordid details (She mortgaged her house without her husband’s knowledge.  To get money for DRUGS!), I found myself thinking, “ Well, you know, she did get all [...]

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Buchanan Graveyard

Buchanan Graveyard is one of the many small local graveyards of Latah County; none of them are very old, of course, but if, like me, you have a morbid taste for cemetery tourism, they are often very pleasant.  My graveyard, as I like to call it,  dates back to about 1890, when the town of Cornwall (now [...]

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Survivors of the Great Chicken Massacre

Two weeks ago, Little Sunshine woke me bright and early to say that she thought something was wrong in the chickenyard.  Boy, was she right.
Six chickens–including all of our new fledglings–were dead, pulled to pieces inside the run.  One was badly wounded, trying to get itself to shelter.  And one was MIA.  Chicken #7, one of [...]

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Zakka

Isn’t this cool?  It’s a pencil bag, which I made myself, using this pattern.  You should make one, too.  Be warned, though, that the instructions are a bit sketchy, especially if, like me, you can’t think in three dimensions.  The designer is so good at this that she probably can’t imagine the struggles that flat-brains like [...]

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Friends

Here’s a set of knitted and crocheted friends who live in Tuxedo Boy’s room. The pirate, Captain Jack, is from a great old Jean Greenhowe bazaar knitting leaflet. The snowy owlet is my own design. The little cardinal is one of my first ventures into amigurumi. Squiddy is from an inspired pattern on Knitty.
They make [...]

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Love and Spinning

Spinning on the Spindolyn

The best thing–actually one of the several best things–about being married* to Joan is that she genuinely wants me to have things I want, even when they are mysterious to her. So while she can’t imagine what in the world I would want with such a thing, she [...]

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