Periodically, I re-link to an older "who am I" post as occasional new "friendings" turn up, but I've decided to just finally put it right up front here and just edit it as necessary. I am shamelessly stealing the idea of a "welcome mat" post from cadhla, because damn it's a good idea.

( But it's long, so behind a cut: )

To all anonymous/non-livejournal-member readers:

The default in my journal is to screen all anonymous comments, so no one sees them. I can remove that screening at my discretion, though, on an individual basis -- and I have only one criterium for unscreening things.

If you want your comments to be pubically seen, please sign your name in some way when commenting -- either with your real name, or give yourself a nickname. Otherwise I'll leave them screened.

Thank you.

I usually pride myself on not immediately jumping on any trend that comes down the pike. Sometimes this leads to my picking things up late -- I didn't get into the B-52's until well after their heyday, I still don't even have an iPod, and turn up my nose at an iPhone -- but on the other hand I am pleased that I can say I have the individuality to not just jump into every trend, and can judge it on its own merits first.

So I sort of don't know what to make of the fact that my subconscious has jumped onto an ongoing bandwagon.

....What I'm trying to say is, I had a dream last night about zombies and I don't know why.

Really quick: do you know what this is?



This is the first cheese souffle I ever attempted to make. And it came out perfectly.

Go me.

I know I haven't been posting much here lately -- I think it's a combination of a lot of writing going on elsewhere and the well running a little low, and also a bit of a financial holding pattern (which will be breaking up very soon, fortunately).

When I'm not writing, I'm doing a lot of cooking -- I am still being overrun by the CSA stuff. It's getting to the point that I have a sort of endless container of egg salad in the fridge, because I get six eggs every week, but I've only used a couple by the end of the week, and I need the empty carton to take the next half-dozen home, and the only thing I can do to empty the carton is make hardboiled eggs, and then I have to have something to do with the eggs, and...

Yeah.

I'll be back in a bit when things have settled more.

I am overwhelmed with vegetables.

Today my CSA pickup included one pound each of cucumbers, yellow summer squash, and zucchini; one bunch of carrots; two onions; two beets; one head of lettuce; one bunch of chard; and six eggs. I stopped at the farmer's market on the way home and picked up a quart of cherries; a quart of peaches; a pint of apricots; and a pint of raspberries.

Then I came home and tried to cram it all into the fridge where I already had another TWO heads of lettuce, two pounds of summer squash, one pound of zucchini, and another quart of cherries. And a dozen eggs.

My very next act was to make a big container of egg salad and a chocolate-zucchini cake. I have no idea if I'm going to eat the entire cake, but I have no idea what else to do with all this zucchini. I'm also going to make preserves out of the cherries and the apricots tomorrow; I'm about to head out to the movies with some friends, but I'm leaving early so I can pick up jam jars. I'm thisclose to figuring out if there's any way I can make lettuce jam as well.

So I've been doing a lot of writing for Trazzler.com, a travel-tips site. They have an interesting way of generating content and attracting and fostering new writers; they let anyone sign up and post travel tips, and hire writers from that pool of freely-contributed writing content. They also have monthly contests based on a theme -- the winners get "hired" for a month, and are paid to write ten more tips.

...And, I'm one of the winners for this month.

I need to work out what I want to do still, but I have broad-strokes ideas...including quite a few sites right here in Brooklyn. Hee!

Every time I visit the neighborhood of Red Hook, I like it more and more -- it's got a quirky, village-in-the-city feel, lots of waterfront, that free kayaking, an immense food market I would kill to have as my go-to supermarket, a place that sells key lime pies on a stick...the rents are a bit out of my price range right now, alas.

However. Through that web content gig, I've found myself writing about: mortgages, construction loans, and boat loans. And -- in one of my Red Hook fantasy scenarios (attainable only if I win the lottery, mind), I would be buying a building right by the pier and fixing it up, and then I'd buy a little boat I could take out and tool around in the New York Harbor.

....Interesting, isn't it, that the fates have actually sent me the tools to research that very scenario?....

I've mentioned before about how each summer I go mad for some kind of crafty hobby thing -- knitting, canning, soapmaking, something like that. I think this year it may have been supplanted by an actual sport instead.

See, there is an all-volunteer kayak club in Red Hook, Brooklyn -- just a bus ride away from me, and that bus stop is on my block -- which sets up at a pier every Sunday, and anyone can just show up, sign a waiver and then go tool around a little inlet in the East River for about a half hour, on one of their boats.

Now, I have not been kayaking since the one week that I tried it at my old 4-H camp when I was about eleven. But at least I'd done it, right? I got the basic concept, I thought, this shouldn't be too hard.

The spot was tucked into a little inlet along Valentino Pier, a pier jutting out into the East River, a spot with an amazing close view of the Statue of Liberty. About five volunteers oversaw everything, signing out about six kayaks and a canoe and showing new kayakers the ropes. I chatted with the one who signed me in a bit, asking him about a recent article in TIME OUT NEW YORK which spotlit the group and asking whether they'd been slammed by newcomers. Not really, he said; a few more people had shown up, but not huge crowds.

He pointed out the inlet facing us, and told me I had to stay within the bay, pretty much. I mentioned I wanted to come back a lot this summer, and he mentioned that later in the summer they may coordinate a longer trip to Governor's Island -- "it's actually not that far," he said. They'd cross out to Governor's Island, dock, and explore a bit and then get in the kayaks and come back to Brooklyn.

After a bit of an unsteady start -- I got launched into the water backwards, and fumbled a bit trying to turn myself around -- I set out, the strokes from camp coming back to me. The bay we were in wasn't very big -- probably about the square footage of a city block. But I could poke about a good lot in there -- paddling away from shore, peeking around the mouth of the bay towards Staten Island on the left and towards Manhattan and Governor's Island on the right -- wow, it really wasn't that far. The pier cut down the middle of the bay, and a lot of other boaters paddled under it, even though it was high tide and we all had to duck a little.

I definitely am going back. For one, I need to work on my form a bit -- for some reason, rather than my shoulders or side muscles, my right bicep was feeling a little fatigued as I was paddling, which feels like I was doing something wrong. But that just encouraged me to stop and sit a bit, just enjoying being out on water, looking around, being out in the sun and the wind and the water. Twice I paddled out to the very mouth of the bay to peer out -- the first time I did, I saw a loon also bobbing in the surf about 20 feet away. After a moment, it flew right past me south over the pier and out of sight.

Oh, my, I'm going back.

Remember the video with the inmates in a Filipino prison doing the dance from Thriller? When they learned about Michael Jackson's death, they started work on a memorial.

A Kentucky pastor is encouraging his parishoners to bring guns to church with them.

A thought.

Yeah, I grew up in the 80's, and Michael Jackson's music was just as ubiquitous for me -- we had Thriller, I think my parents even had Off The Wall (on 8-track, natch) but whatever musical feeling I had for Michael Jackson faded quickly -- I was just more into other things. I do remember teaching myself how to Moonwalk when I was about 14, but other than that, he was just a figure who was on the news now and then, and sadly the news was becoming increasingly weird.

In recent years I've been thinking that, sweet Jesus, Michael Jackson desperately needed some kind of help; he needed some way to just pull the plug on everything and find peace somehow. I was half-hoping he'd take a page out of Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam's book and publically announce that he was retiring from music forever, he'd found some kind of philosopihcal or religious or some kind of path that he was going to pursue now, and he was going to drop out of the spotlight and take care of himself now, thanks everyone, and goodbye. And then he'd work on resting and healing and mending himself and living a quiet life and finding peace that way, because that was the one thing I don't think he ever had, was peace.

It's sad that this was ultimately the way he had to come to it, but at least now he has peace.

I joke at times that between the CSA and the knitting group I belong to, that sometimes it sounds like I'm living in Mayberry. A few months ago I was telling my mother about trying a recipe involving stewed pork shoulder because one of the other women in my knitting group had been talking about how it made good work of an inexpensive cut of meat, when I stopped mid-sentence and realized, "my God, that sounds like something I still could have said if this were 1933."

At this point, I've gotten even deeper into urban crafting, gardening, and food processing, to the point that I actually may be able to issue agricultural reports.

( The Gardening! )

( The Larder! )

( More cooking! )

( Other crafty-homey-stuff! )

Okay. For a writing project -- what are the absolute cheesiest 80's songs ever? Stuff that someone would play to prove that "this is why I wasn't cool, because I had to listen to this crap"?

(ETA: Total Eclipse of the Heart and Say You, Say Me are good options -- but I forgot to mention that I'm looking for poppy, faster-paced stuff rather than ballads. My apologies.)

Okay. I'm pretty sure that I do better living in an urban setting; I grew up in a smallish town, which was great when I was a kid, but in my teens I started going mad from boredom.

And yet -- I keep on gravitating towards the kinds of cruncy-granola, back-to-the-land country projects that are more appropriate in the country. I'm growing my own tomatoes in a tub on the windowsill, I knit -- and even belong to a knitting circle -- I'm teaching myself to crochet (that squeal you just heard was shogunsquirrel and half my knitting group celebrating that I finally gave in on this), I make my own pickles, I can my own tomatoes, and if I had my druthers I'd start a larger vegetable garden on a small plot. I've even tried making my own cheese.

I poke my nose into Stephen King's book The Stand every summer, and keep finding myself drawn to the section where everyone's gotten to Boulder and is trying to put society together again. Something about the very last scene in Wall*E also triggered this -- the idea of starting over after some kind of event that effectively just hits the "reset" button on civilization. Something about that seems appealing.

I'm well aware that these are both romanticized ideas about civilization, however; I've found quite a few holes in what Stephen King set up for the world in The Stand. Oh, sure, people have seeds aplenty in the garden stores now, but what happens next year? Do people know how to harvest seeds? And what about meat, what are they doing for that? Does anyone know how to make cloth? Yarn? Glass? Fuel? How about milling flour? How about growing wheat? Harvesting it?....Stephen King did have an excuse for not getting into this -- his focus was more on setting up the conflict with Randall Flagg, after all, rather than getting into post-apocalyptic agricultural techniques. And yet that's the thing I find myself wondering about.

I have no idea what to make of this -- could be this is some kind of a weird reaction to societal pressures and some kind of Utopian wish-fulfillment. Or I just really want a garden.

So, a building collapsed in my neighborhood Sunday, and I didn't even know it.

To be fair, it happened while I was down by Brooklyn's town hall shopping for a book, and my bus home didn't go anywhere near where it happened. But in theory, I probably should have heard the sirens when I got back home.

Reports state that everyone made it out okay -- there were some injuries, but no deaths. The building inspector had issued a summons to the owner back in May, when he noticed a crack in the wall running from the ground up to the roof; all the rain we had probably didn't help any, and it just gave way.

The building housed a bar which had just opened up when I moved in; it sat across from the supermarket. I stopped by the market today to pick up a couple things, and there was a crowd clustered out front, behind the police tape along the supermarket's sidewalk, watching as a couple newscasters taped updates on the scene.

A local blogger started a photo pool for the site if anyone wants a look...

People all over New York are grumbling about the weather; out of the past 21 days, we have had rain on 17 of them.

However -- there's a reason you haven't read anything from me grumbling about the rain. And that is because I have actually been so busy that I didn't notice. I mean, I saw that it was raining or whatever, but it was just background noise to everything else I was contending with -- I had to be at work/in rehearsal/at a reading/at the laundromat/at the supermarket/somewhere I was required to be anyway, what difference did it make whether or not there was rain outside the window while I was there?

The only time it made any kind of a dent in my consciousness was at Reverie's party, which was outside in a back yard in Williamsburg. The people who owned the place did set up awnings for us, but there were a couple of unfortunate gaps in them which periodically let the rain pool up and dump things onto unsuspecting partygoers. Still we all stayed outside until we heard a few rumblings of thunder before everyone simultaneously looked at each other and then all grabbed various food platters and beverage pitchers and scurried indoors.

It has been an insane three weeks.

In the beginning of June, I began a new temp gig -- it will definitely last to the first week in July, but is showing growing signs of running longer. (If it goes throughout the whole summer, I'd be very happy.) At the same time, we started the finalist readings for Reverie's contest -- which meant two or three nights a week I was running straight from work to a theater space to watch play readings; and, usually, this also meant heading out to a bar for the post-post-show socializing. And, we were preparing for the big benefit/cookout/party we would have at the end of the three weeks when we would announce the winner. And, Jacob announced he is moving out to California -- ideally we'd find someone to take the space in early July, with August being the real deadline. And, this past week I was also playing bed-and-breakfast to human_loser for a few days, in town for his own contest entry. And finally, I started getting hordes of vegetables every week from the CSA -- which meant that I also had to get up every Saturday morning and go get them.

So the past three weeks have been somewhat of a blur of office work/script discussions/housecleaning/tourist stuff with HL/finding room for lettuce in the fridge/making sangria for a party/laundry/interviewing possible roommates/cleaning again/more script discussions/reminding myself to breathe.

But finally, we are done. I still have work and I still need a roommate, but -- we have picked the winner and feted them, and today is the first day in a long time that...I have nothing to do other than what I set for myself. And I love it.

I planned to have very little planned today. My fridge is in a really unfortunate state -- I've got the past two weeks' worth of CSA vegetables just sort of jammed in, along with some leftover couscous salad and hamburger meat from yesterday; so I'm going to have to spend a good hour or so pulling everything out, packing it better, sorting through it...but, I actually like that. Seeing all the food I have usually ends up inspiring something fun for dinner. I also decided to treat myself first, and took a quick trip out to a bookstore to pick up a book on preserving all sorts of produce, so I can put up a lot of the vegetables I get. I've already been out and come back, and save for a quick call home again (happy father's day, Dad!) and one quick new roommate candidate visit, I'm looking at a very grounding day of cooking, preserving, and just...not needing to be anywhere.

Thank God.

Spotted today in the park: a man seated on a box near the street, wearing a full-head Boba Fett mask and playing the accordion.

I've been blitheringly tired lately, so I really, really hope that that wasn't a hallucination.

As I was heading in to work today, I passed a couple movie trailers set up on the street. This is nothing all that unusual, actually -- even just from Law And Order shows alone you are likely to run into at least ten film trailers in the city per year.

What was unusual, though, was the cluster of paparazzi standing across the street from one of the trailers. They were all hovering, cameras out, staring at the door to the trailer. Another cluster of beefy-looking guys hovered by the door to the trailer, glaring menacingly back at the paparazzi.

It did get me curious. So I stole a glance at the film permit tacked to one of the service van's windows -- they always have the name of the film they're shooting written on them -- and looked it up on IMDB's upcoming movies page.

Robert Pattinson is in it -- which explains it all. The thing is, the corner is about two blocks down the street from where I am, so I expect a crowd to gather over the course of the day and at some point we'll hear a loud scream when he finally emerges. Fun.