Thoughts after spending last weekend sewing several dance costume pieces: if you ever think to yourself “hm, stretch panne velvet seems like the perfect fabric for this project”, that’s the devil talking. Say no. Will you turn around 10 minutes later, having accepted your fuzzy, annoying fate? Probably. But for one shining second, sanity will have won out.
So this weekend I tried (for the third time) to do the tiktok baked cherry tomato pasta…and I think my experiment is over. I tried ricotta cheese this time - I’m doing curbside pickup of groceries and haven’t been able to get feta recently - and it tasted really good…but the texture was just not very nice. I think I might look into other sauces that would start with a roasted cherry tomato and garlic situation, but doing the tomatoes+cheese simultaneous roast…probably a no from me in the future.
If you can get the feta though, I would TOTALLY recommend revisiting. We’ve had it twice now since the first time I made it, and even my “choosy” 7 and 5 year olds liked it!
I had that for dinner tonight!
I think the best version I’ve had so far is when I added a couple tablespoons of creme fresh. It really improved the texture and tamed the feta flavour a bit so it wasn’t overpowering by the end of the portion.
Mixing the baked feta/tomatoes then adding pasta seems to help too, otherwise it seems to clump together.
It’s not a dish I’d eat every week, but I do like it as a back up meal, the ingredients tend to have a pretty decent self life.
In a stunning turn of events, I had enough of a stash fabric for an impulse dress pattern I wanted to make! I’d had the fabric for…many moons…so this weekend I was only able to iron it and get all the pieces cut out, but I’m deeply excited!
Life achievement unlocked: trimmed my own bangs! Usually my mom helps me trim my bangs…I wear long curtain bangs that routinely confuse hairdressers (yes, I do need them that long; no, I don’t want them to frame my face - they need to be able to go into a ponytail for lab/machine shop work), so my mom does them for me when I go home. Given the current circumstances though, I haven’t been home in over a year and my “long curtain bangs” were just…too long. I didn’t do anything drastic, just 3 inches straight across…someone looking at me probably wouldn’t even notice. BUT I cut them pretty straight and level and I don’t think I wrecked them! So that’s all a plus all around.
Congrats! I still have nightmares about trying out bangs in high school…my parents wouldn’t bring us to hairdressers, and I couldn’t afford to go on my own…
Oh I feel that…I used to have like, traditional bangs through early high school and it was not a good look for me. The way I wear my hair now, “bangs” is a stretch since they’re so long, but there’s just not a better word for it
Oh man…it’s been a hot second. Things have been…a bit all-over in the last few weeks. The good: I’ve gotten my first vaccine dose, with a second one scheduled. The less-good: I’ll be moving in the summer, and the property manager of the house that I’ve been renting with a friend for the last few years scheduled a LOT of showings, so there were many, many strangers in my home which is less-than-ideal at the moment.
But in more important craft-y news! Still nothing super exciting! I’ve made some progress on the spontaneous dress I started, but it’s not quite done yet (button-holes and hemming left…aka the least fun parts). I’ve made a couple books…some gifts, one relevant to a certain TTRPG that was recently announced . I have my first non-woodshop woodworking project to do…but the size board I have is juuuuuust too wide to fit in the inset clamps of the portable worktable I have, so I’ll need to order some clamps before I can do anything else with that. So like…lots of projects in the air, nothing done yet
Just like my actual journal, I’m not so good at consistent entries I guess
Since my last post, I’ve gotten my second vaccine dose. I’m one week out now, so still one week to go to max out those benefits…but also I’m still wearing my mask and being cautious as much as possible. But I have to say, it’ll be nice to be able to go to a craft store or a bookstore and be able to browse a little.
I haven’t really made much progress on the sewing I’ve mentioned previously…though I did print and assemble a new sewing pattern to help bust some stash fabric before I move in July. And I’ve got another craft going that I’m planning on posting about in the Court of Grandmothers when I get a little further along.
Talking about the impending move…now that my next lease is signed and showings of my current home are done, the stress of planning the actual move is hitting me pretty hard. But the move is so far away that there’s nothing I can really ACT on yet…I can’t really start packing things because I’ll either need it in the next two months, I won’t be getting the right boxes for a while, and even if I had the boxes, I don’t have a great place to store partially-filled moving boxes until then. I’ve been pondering maybe doing a closet clean-out or identifying some potential spaces for pre-packing declutters, but haven’t really settled on anything yet. On the one hand, I’d love to just get the stressful parts over with, but on the other hand I don’t want to waste the rest of the time that I could be enjoying this current living arrangement. I almost wish my lease overlap were longer…not that I want to pay more double-rent than I’ll already have to, but being able to do a slower move with an earlier start would have been really nice…
As someone who had planned to have most of January to move, and had less than two weeks with only one option for when to move all the big heavy things, I know this pain.
Yea, I’m looking at having about a week to move I don’t have a car, so I’m getting movers for the big heavy things though…so expensive but hopefully not too much of a pain…
I’m now about 1.5 months away from the move and the anxiety-to-ability-to-do-things ratio is still not great. The big anxiety is around like, clothes and furniture and things like that…the stuff I’ll need to be using leading up to the move. Also big things…like blankets and winter clothes and stuff. I don’t need them now, but I don’t have a ton of viable box storage space, so it doesn’t make sense yet to take them out of the closets they’re in just to put them in boxes that won’t fit back in those spaces. I’ve been saving small-to-medium shipping boxes since we decided to move, though, so I’ve been able to start packing up small things that I won’t be needing. I’m sure it will be fine once the time comes - my apartment is only a 10 minute walk from the place I currently live and I’ll have a 9 day overlap between the leases…but I do wish there was more I could do now.
Otherwise, my dance group is ramping up to start performing at the town street festivals this summer and my feelings are…deeply mixed. On the one hand, I’m vaccinated (as is everyone in my group) and the events are outside…but on the other hand, the vibe I get from the organizers is that they’re not going to be putting any special safety rules in place. And our town dropped the mask mandate a few weeks ago, while vaccination numbers are still just under the national average. Usually our shows are very heavy on audience engagement (both intentional and of the drunk-dudes-getting-too-close variety) but I raised some concerns about that and the people in charge of the group were really supportive of planning some additional safety measures - removing our planned interaction stuff, roping off our area to make a more defined stage to prevent people from getting too close. So I think we’re making our space safe…it’s just coming down to maybe a little bit of reentering-the-world anxiety and a little bit of discomfort in like…being the entertainment at an event that I think isn’t taking public health the most seriously? But also we’re essentially a four person group, and two of our members are pregnant/recently had a baby…so it wouldn’t be fair for me to leave the last member alone on the hook for a 2 hour show. So wrestling with all of that has been…heavy.
Ooof…today was a day. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night…I thought I smelled something burning and even though it was probably just dust heating up on the lightbulb of a lamp we don’t use often, my brain wouldn’t let me go to sleep until stupid late just in case the house was actually burning down. Cut to this morning when the movers come for some of my roommate’s big furniture (she has access to her new place now, but she’s going to do a slow move over the next month, starting with some big things today). I wasn’t needed for any coordinating, and I probably would have been in the way if I had been in the living room/my office, so I was planning on staying in my bedroom while they were here…but also they arrived like half an hour before my alarm was set to go off which is, categorically, the worst time to be woken up. So I ended up like, not quite getting up but also not quite falling back asleep and being quite groggy during the day.
Two of the things my roommate moved today were her sofa and dining room table. We did have an extra table (which we inherited from someone else and are probably just going to try to sell when we move) and a futon (mine, relegated to the upstairs when my roommate decided to buy a Real Adult Money sofa), and both of those needed to come down from the loft to the main floor…and boy, was that a struggle. The table was mostly fine, except that I had to remove all the legs so we could get it down the stairs and some of the bolts did NOT want to cooperate…and the futon was such a struggle. We didn’t think we had taken it apart to get it up the stairs, so we tried just taking it down the stairs and couldn’t get it to work. We ended up taking a sanity break and coming back to decide to take it all apart in the loft and just reassemble it downstairs. None of those jobs would have been too bad except our loft is awful in the summer…it’s all finished off and our landlord advertises it as a bedroom but it is unbearable once it’s the slightest bit warm outside. It gets stuffy and humid and there’s probably no insulation at all…which, given that it has a “fancy” halogen light fixture that puts off more heat than light, means it’s approximately the temperature of the sun up there right now. So the 30-45 minutes I spent wrestling with furniture up there ended up being completely exhausting. We got the futon reassembled, but the table is getting assembled tomorrow for sure. At least now, on the plus side, all of the big furniture things live on the ground floor, so there’s more space for some packing storage up in the loft and the furniture move-out next month should be pretty smooth.
Silver lining of the day: I decided it was finally the “right” time to open up a nice soap I got in New Orleans when I went in 2019 and it smells so gooooood!
. I have my first non-woodshop woodworking project to do…but the size board I have is juuuuuust too wide to fit in the inset clamps of the portable worktable I have, so I’ll need to order some clamps before I can do anything else with that. So like…lots of projects in the air, nothing done yet 
I don’t have a car, so I’m getting movers for the big heavy things though…so expensive but hopefully not too much of a pain…