Saturday, January 16, 2010

A Scattered Squee, it is.

I like the idea of blogging. I enjoy putting thoughts "out there" in the world, whether or not someone actually reads them. It's a very freeing exercise. However, that's not the major reason that I decided to start a blog.

I'm getting back in touch with my creative side. After way too long of doing (and being) school, both as a student and as a teacher, I finally have a schedule that allows me time off. When I've had time off before, I feel like I've wasted a lot of it. I spent a good deal of ti
me sitting on my butt and dicking around on the internet. "Dicking around" in this instance is defined as "several hours of activity that produce no useful result and can't even be accurate described to someone else because of their entirely limited range of accomplishment."

I decided, when I quit my job teaching high school, that I wasn't going to d
o that anymore. That might have been slightly ambitious. I still spend a good quantity of time dicking around online. However, I'm trying to temper that with actually accomplishing things. To that end, I've taken up several hobbies:
1. Quilting.
2. Crochet / knitting
3. Canning
4. Tie-dye

This is in addition to my activities involving my family of furries:




6 Degu - Dora, Imogene and Isabelle are pictured above. Kitten, Deja and Vu were later additions and are not pictured.

Rags, my faithful mutt. I've had him for roughly 10 years. He's about 12.

The Chin, the most recent addition to the family. Apparently there's some deeper meaning to her name because it relates to some movie or webcomic or something. I just thought it was that we were totally uncreative when it came to naming animals and should probably never be trusted naming a child.

"We" includes myself and my boyfriend, TD. We live together in slightly organized chaos with the furrballs. Our two bedroom apartment has one bedroom for us and one bedroom for the rodents. The dog's "bedroom" is his crate, which sits by the bed. It's covered with a blanket (to make it cozy for him) and several random shelves we had lying around (to make it into a bedside table for TD).

The area formerly known as the dining area has been converted into my crafting area. Right now, the kitchen table is roughly half covered with fabric, pattern pieces, and sewing implements of mass destruction. The reason that it's not entirely covered is that TD has this silly idea that meals (especially dinner) should be eaten at the kitchen table. I cater to this delusion by cleaning one end of the table off at dinner time so we can eat.

Back to the reason I am starting this blog. I need a record for my creative endeavors. Based on what I know about my attention span, I should be able to remember what projects I've completed for about 3 days. I can remember details such as ingredients or patterns or who got a project as a gift for about a half hour. If I want any sort of crafting institutional memory, it has to be written down. And I've lost the ability to write legibly since college, so "written down" actually means "typed".

For instance, I made several different types of pear jam (I do remember that they all had pears in them). I know I made plain pear jam. That one's easy. The raspberry pear jam and the cranberry pear jam were also both easy to identify: raspberry seeds and cranberry seeds look different from each other and also from pears. Then I made a mystery jam. It's basically a pear jam, but it has raisins in it. I remember boiling the raisins in wine, then draining them and adding them to the jam. I have a vague memory that there were supposed to be spices added to the jam, but that I forgot them. Or maybe I didn't. I don't really recall... after all, it was the fourth type of pear jam I made that day. At the time I thought, "I don't need to put labels on these right now, there's only four of them. I'll remember what they are." Yeah. Right. Now I have Mystery Possibly Unspiced Raisin Pear Jam. I can't find the recipe for it in any of my canning books. That means I probably found the recipe online... which means it could be ANYWHERE. If I'd blogged about it, I would know what it was. I might even be able to figure out if I had, in fact, left out important spices.

So that's the point. Create memory of things that I do and create so that I remember what I've done. Enjoy.

No comments:

Post a Comment