Orderly Transition of Power Salad–with homemade chutney!

Despite the scorching heat (we were really pleased when it only got up to 82 F in the upstairs today!), I stood over the stove stirring a pot of boiling fruit, because I had a mad craving for Coronation Salad, or my determinedly Paleo-Fabian version thereof, and the price of store-bought chutney is a scandal.
Coronation [...]

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Project Project Gutenberg: B is for The Bars of Iron

It’s so, so hot here that I can hardly bear to breathe.  The amorous slugs you see above had the energy to contemplate the making of baby slugs late last night, which gives me some questions about the word sluggish.  I barely had the energy to contemplate the slugs.  But I wasn’t going to let [...]

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Project Project Gutenberg: A is for Average Jones

Welcome to the first installment of this summer’s reading project!  We’re reading our way from A to Z through Project Gutenberg.  You’ll find the rules here.  Today we start with Average Jones (1911) by Samuel Hopkins Adams (it was going to be Marion Harland’s At Last but I didn’t like it very much, so I [...]

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And the Punchline is: $9 apiece

We had a yard sale today.  90 degrees in the shade–not that there was much shade to be had.  Lots of toys and books, of course, and the usual odd kitchen-y things, bundt pans and extra muffin tins and bits of jewelry and all the wedding cake pans I’ve acquired over the years, so that I [...]

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Butterfly Wishes

In February,  I started doing this very strange (and strangely addictive and amazing) kind of yoga called Shiva Nata, the Dance of Shiva.  The god Shiva, among other things, superintends the destroying and creating of the universe; this form of yoga essentially destroys and creates your brain while you’re doing it–in the best possible way, I [...]

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All New Monday Feature: Project Project Gutenberg

Once upon a time, I was a very new, very provincial, very naive graduate student in the English Department at Ohio State University.  Jane, whose last name I can’t remember, was in every way my antithesis:  tousled, world-weary, wreathed in cigarette smoke, so fabulously thin that her hipbones had worn holes in her perfectly-aged Levis.  And she [...]

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Music for All Occasions: Power Femme Edition

Because it’s useful to remember just how much ass we can kick, and in how many different ways, when we choose to:

In my next life, I’ll be able to dance like that.

What I really, really love about this video is at 2:47, where she gives a little stomp, [...]

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Curse You, King Arthur! Curse You!

These are the best turnovers ever in the history of that portion of humanity which has evolved sufficiently to devote its energy to turnover making.  Really.  I curse the day I ever starting taking hits off the crackpipe that is King Arthur Flour, because, like that crazy Norwegian folktale where the mill grinds salt (that [...]

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