( Chill of Fear, Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon, Castle Waiting, The Red Wolf Conspiracy, Rainbows End, The Death Artist )

Tags: book reviews
Current Mood: hot
Current Music: the Playground

I brought various Meat for Derrick's barbecue; shumashi asked for the recipe for the skewers, which is approximately as follows (chenoameg may recognize the bulgogi recipe...)

Get a bunch of boneless short rib meat from McKinnon's. Cut it into pieces.

Blend together:
1 kiwi
1 onion
1/2c soy sauce
6T sesame oil
6 dashes black pepper
4T plum wine (it says use rice wine, but it's what was in the fridge)
2T vinegar
10 cloves garlic

Marinate meat in sauce overnight. Stick onto skewers (soak them in water for a while first), and make Derrick grill them.

Current Mood: happy

For those who find thinking of Five Significant Words the hard part, post "Badly Chosen Words!" here and I will give you five words which are not necessarily significant at all, and then you can use this mutation in memes of your own. Here are the five words justom picked: ( glom, marmoreal, calypso, testify, stub, mickle )

Here are my five words from desireearmfeldt. If you want me to pick five words for you, post a comment here saying "words". :) ( Projects, People, Contentment, Collection, Whimsy )

So, a while ago jdbakermn suggested I put my book recommendations into an Amazon list, so he could buy things I liked. I have (sporadically) been remembering to go in and add things that I gave four or more stars to, and my list is now up to four lists.

But... for a list that lets people magically click to buy things from Amazon that I tell them to, Amazon seem to have invested very little effort in making it convenient for me. It's happy to let me add arbitrarily many books to my list-editing page, with arbitrarily long review text - and then, after I hit "publish list", it tells me "You have more than 40 entries; you must remove some" or "One or more of your entries is more than 400 characters, you must trim it down" or "One or more of your entries uses inappropriate language, which you must remove". It does not find it necessary to tell me *which* entry is over 400 characters (let alone have technology to stop me from entering more than 400), or what the objectionable language *is* (in this case, it was "kick-ass", though I think I previously ran into trouble describing Mordred as Arthur's bastard son).

(I wonder if it would be easier if I set up some sort of affiliate thing, if I could customize it better. But then I'd actually be making money from people following my recommendations, and that seems vaguely wrong. I don't *think* it would tempt me into giving more books high scores...)

desireearmfeldt recruited a bunch of people to see And Then There Were None at the Footlight Club. I had read the book (the first Agatha Christie I ever read), but not seen any of the the play or the movie versions.

The ending is different than the book; I think the book is better, but I can see that ending being difficult. This production included ghosts of all the backstory deaths - I was kind of suspicious going in (is this going to be like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?), but it worked really well. They were creepy and haunting and ratched up the tension a lot, very reminiscent of first reading the book at age twelve or whatever it was, and finding it nervewracking.

(From this evening)

"Why are you making a crochet magnetic mine?"
"Who are you making a magnetic mine for?"
"Are you going to throw it at people? It's heavy!"
"Why is she not answering?"
(I roll it over various objects, picking them up)
"Oh!"

Tags: knit
Current Mood: sleepy

(Why is it "February"? Because it's from a book with twelve projects, one per month.)

Elizabeth Zimmerman's patterns are always very clever, but I tend to think that I would understand them better the second time I make something, because of things like not mentioning buttonholes until too late, or not being clear about whether the gauge is for the lace pattern or the garter stitch. But, there is a whole new crop of babies coming, so perhaps I'll try it again. :)

I made this with Malabrigo sock yarn, which was very soft and nice to work with; I was a little suspicious that it wouldn't be hard-wearing enough for real socks, so this worked well.

Tags: knit

( The Black Ship, Shadow Man,The Ghost Brigade & The Last Colony,Sharp Teeth,Black Dogs )

Tags: book reviews
Current Mood: sleepy

These socks were designed by the designer of the Vintage sock. They're called Kitri, after the heroine in the ballet version of Don Quixote (taken from just a few chapters of the book) - so red and black and fans and lace.



They were a lot of fun to make - the fan lace pattern is interesting, the black lace overlay was a little trickier but much quicker, the beading wasn't as scary as I thought it would be (though there were Not Enough Beads, which was no good; twe gave me some of her bead supplies to finish). These are for desireearmfeldt, who said she would wear socks with beaded lace. :)

Tags: knit
Current Mood: cheerful