Stop: Winter time!

Is my SO trying to remain anonymous here? Nope, he's just dressed up for a nice little trip to the grocery store, in full winter biking regalia. This includes a ski mask, neck warmer, a coat that probably came from a German army surplus, work gloves and a pair of cropped old man wool pants that came from the thrift store (too bad you can't see these in the picture, because I did a really terrific blind hem on those bad boys!). It's been coooold the past few days in Ithaca, though, so this isn't quite as insane as it looks.

I've been working my butt off on applications all weekend, and I'm tired times four. I'm going to settle into bed now with a tasty sour cherry cupcake, so goodnight, mystery reader!

Bacteria attack

Okay, I finally broke down and did it -- I put the antibiotics in my tank today. I've been hesitating on this for a while, because I really don't want to cause some sort of disaster that would end up taking out all of my fish along with the bacteria, but my SO pointed out this morning that my plants are starting to look really sad. And indeed they are. My water sprite, which was once so prolific that it was nearly taking over they tank, is now all but dead, and my java ferns are getting totally sad and brown looking.

So I dosed the tank today, with as many precautions as I could think of -- I cleaned out as much junk as possible by hand so it wouldn't foul up the tank when it died, did a 20% water change, tested the levels (nitrates down to 5pmm this week, and the freakin' BGA continues to grow!). I also took out the bio-beads from the filter and stored them in a little tupperware container of tank water in the fridge. I don't know if the bacteria will actually survive for five days this way, but I figured doing this really couldn't hurt. The other filter media should have more than enough bacteria to keep the tank going, and if the antibiotics take those bacteria out this might work as a backup plan.

Nothing to do now but sit back, cross my fingers (or press my thumbs) and take the levels tomorrow AM. Send my fish positive thoughts, and my BGA very negative ones....

Bike tire changing

Believe it or not, I've actually never changed a tire on my bike, or possibly any bike (that I can remember, at least). When I was living in Portland I had a few rather annoying flats, but I always wimped out on changing them myself. Portland is already such a bike savvy city that I felt pretty silly being "that girl" who goes into a bike shop and has never even changed a tire before, so instead I opted for being "that girl" who's willing to pay someone ten bucks to do it for her. When I was biking this summer by myself a lot, I figured it was probably pretty important that I take at least some steps towards learning how to repair a flat, lest I find myself in 15 miles from home with no way to get back. I watched some youtube videos, carried around tire levers and a spare tube, but never managed to run over anything bad enough to slow my bike down. Amazingly, I still have yet to get a single flat in the 1.5 years that I've had this bike.

Don't worry, nothing bad happened to my bike today, although I'm sure it will have a rough encounter with a beer bottle or something eventually. Tonight's tire change was entirely voluntary, although not entirely painless. My SO got a generator hub for me for christmas (yay!) and built it up for me, and I asked him to show me how to take the tire off of the old wheel and put it on the new one so that I could finally get some tire changing experience.

I'm pleased to report that I got the thing on and off mostly on my own, with my SO sitting over my shoulder and giving directions. The most difficult part was getting the tire back onto the rim, which required some help from someone with stronger fingers than the biketopus. Tire levers were flying everywhere, and I thought I was probably going to snap the tire levers (or my fingers) trying to get that stupid thing over the rim. Suffice it to say that if I had to change a tire alone in the wilderness, I would have arrived home pretty late/annoyed. But, I'm proud that I finally gave it a go. Do you think I should get this bike jersey now?


Oh, and I also made it over 850 this week, with my highest ever moving average: 15.09 mph over a 25 min ride. A 25 minute ride fueled by Lady GaGa, that is!

First day of school dress will have to wait

Did you ever get to buy a new outfit for the first day of school when you were a kid? I loved doing this (along with buying new school supplies in September). I thought I would make myself a back to school dress for this semester, but unfortunately the dress looks like it's not going to make it in time for the bell.

I started working on this pattern, using some plaid fabric that I got from fabric.com:


The plaid doesn't have one inch stripes, but I figured that this wasn't really essential, as long as I took out tucks big enough to reduce the waist area by 50%. After reading up about the pattern on patternreview.com, though, it seemed like a lot of people were having trouble with the waist ending up a bit smaller than planned. Taking out just a little extra to make sure that the white squares are tucked out adds up, and people were suggesting to size up by one or two sizes to make sure that it didn't end up being too snug. I thought I could solve this problem by simply taking out a bit less than half on each tuck, thereby ensuring I'd have a roomier waist. Well, it turns out that the problem is just as annoying in the reverse.

Do I look unhappy here? Yeah, that's because the waist of my dress is now 40 inches, instead of the 34 inches that the pattern promised. I could go back and make each tuck a little deeper, but that sounds so unappealing after carefully sewing each of these 60 tucks or so to make sure that the plaids lined up. I think instead I'm going to just try to reduce the dress at the side seams, which will also make the shoulders a little less droopy (I'm not sure how these ended up so big on me as well. WTF?).

The bigger problem is, of course, that I now have no dress to wear for the first day of school :) What to do, what to do?

Canning chutney

I finally got around to making some chutney this weekend with the two absolutely gigantic asian pears I bought last weekend. We're on the last jar of the green tomato chutney we made aaaaages ago, and so I thought I would stock up on some of the asian pear and red pepper chutney that I made a few months ago. The recipe is from the Millennium Cookbook, which is one of those fancyfancy cookbooks with time consuming recipes that become even more time consuming when you have to hunt down all the crazy ingredients that the recipe calls for first. This chutney is surprisingly straightforward, though: It has asian pears and red peppers (surprise), a sugar-vinegar base, some chili paste and roasted cumin seeds. With all the vinegar/sugar/spice in there, I think this one has a good chance of surviving on the shelf, so I made a big batch to can.

I've done some canning before using regular kitchen equipment, but this time I thought I would invest in some proper canning tongs to make the process a little easier. This did make a BIG difference. Pulling those cans out of the boiling water with barbecue tongs is a bit slippery and unpredictable. I'd say the rubberized tongs were totally worth the extra five bucks and kitchen drawer space.

After 25 minutes of rattling cans, and the fun sound of lids popping as they cool, I now have five nice jars of chutney. Nom.


I also made some spicy corn chowder for dinner, which unfortunately I didn't take a picture of. I always get really excited when this soup comes up at CTB, but my SO doesn't really get my love of this soup. Last night I made a veganized version of it so that he could finally try it, and I have to say it turned out really well! The CTB version is already vegetarian, but a lot of the internet recipes I found called for bacon. Ah, bacon. It's one of the few meats that I really do miss the taste of. So, I thought this might be a good time to bust out the bottle of liquid smoke that I've had in the cupboard for a while (impulse purchase at the grocery store) and see what that did. It's fantastic! A couple shakes of that stuff really did give the soup that smoky, bacon-y smell. I'm getting hungry again just thinking about it.

Impulse buying at the asian grocery store

I am admittedly a huge impulse buyer when I go to the grocery store (okay, and other places too, but it's particularly bad at the grocery store!). This is one of the main reasons why my SO does most of the grocery shopping, because his rational German self is able to buy the one best brand of canned beans without getting swayed by cool packaging or the fancy chocolate on sale on the endcap. When I do the grocery shopping, I tend to forget to buy things like rice and end up carrying home a bunch of fancy sauces and weird vegetables instead.

This weekend we were out doing some shopping and popped into an asian grocery store in search of bok choy, which surprisingly they didn't have, but they did have a lot of other cool looking stuff screaming "try me!" from the shelves. I got a few asian pears for making some chutney later in the week, and this bottle of aloe beverage.

My first thought was, "woah, does this really taste like aloe?" Answer: Not really. It's fairly sweet, a bit tart, kind of chalky tasting, and past that I don't really have the vocabulary to describe the rest of what's going on in there. It's tasty, but I'm not sure I'd be running to buy this one again. This may not have been the best way to get the full on aloe experience, though, since this beverage is only aloe enhanced, so next time I may splurge and get the 1L size bottle of aloe juice that was next to it in the fridge. Or, just juice some of my aloe plant? Can that possibly produce a tasty beverage?

Oh, and quick bike update: 826.12, as of last night.

Ask and you shall receive!

Guess who has a 40% off one item coupon at the moment? And guess who's going to get a giant Olfa mat today? :D