Although I’ve seemed relatively quiet these last few weeks, I haven’t been idle. Today’s book review is of Deidre Knight’s Red Fire, a paranormal romance involving Georgia and immortal Spartans. Really.
I’ve been taking a ton of photos while out and about, mostly of plants and flowers; here’s a sample:
I’ve also been putting together (and posting at our etsy store) plenty of jewelry and beaded bookmarks. Of course what with the economic crisis this was exactly the wrong time to start such an endeavor—I hear even the long-time sellers at Etsy with large followings have made few sales in the past weeks—but I have patience. I can wait until things get better, and in the meantime I’ll build up our stock of lovely things. I’m getting much better at taking photos of items, thanks to a light box and lots of practice:
If you want to buy any of them, the photos at DeviantArt have links below them to their listings at Etsy, or you can go directly to our etsy store (errantdreams.etsy.com). There are a few items that are more expensive—usually jewelry sets—but there are also plenty of items that are under $10.
Plenty more things to come soon! I have some cookware to review, as well as a ton of books. I’m in the middle of reading Ad Hudler’s Man of the House, and we’re making recipes out of some cookbooks I haven’t reviewed yet. So stick around!
A couple of months ago I noticed that there was a new organic market opening near us. ‘Great!’ I thought. ‘We won’t have to go all the way into Annapolis for good produce and specialty flours and such!’ Eventually this last week I noticed that they appeared to be open (it’s hard to tell from the road) and I did a little searching online to find out their hours. Eventually I located their site. I discovered the owners used to operate a smaller health food store that mostly carried vitamins, nutritional supplements, and health foods, off somewhere on a side street in the area. They’d decided the time was right (and the newly-built location was right) for opening a real organic foods market. They opened on the 8th of August; we went in on the 31st. By the time we went in, it looked like they were already dying on the vine.
Anything perishable (meats, produce, dairy) was in short supply, and either in perfect condition (i.e. just laid out) or really piss-poor condition (i.e., no turnover, and I guess they can no longer afford to throw stuff out and turn it over themselves). I could only find one usable tomato. Of the three(!) quarts of milk on the shelves, two had expired three days earlier. The shop was very clean and very well-organized, so I don’t think it was a case of them not caring—I think they’ve just hit the end of their money and stuff isn’t selling. There was only one other customer in there while we were there, and at any other grocery store we go to it would have been prime shopping time (late Sunday morning, just before lunch).
It looked like they’d made some questionable decisions. The location isn’t great, IMO: it’s tough to see from the road at all. The only reason we noticed it is because I caught sight of it as the passenger; as my husband noted, if it had just been him as driver in the car, he wouldn’t have had the time in passing to read the sign (small sign on a reasonably fast highway). Also, we heard nothing about their opening other than the one sign I spotted, so I’m thinking they must not have done much in the way of effective marketing. When I searched online for them I found a couple of brief mentions in local forums, and one short article printed before they opened in a publication I’d never heard of.
I think they also made some questionable decisions inside the store. They appeared to be carrying a lot of highly specialized stuff that only a few people would want. Whole trays of wheatgrass, but no squash of any kind, either winter or summer? Don’t get me wrong, the bags of pappadum snacks are freakin’ awesome and I could gain several pounds on those alone, but I’m thinking most shoppers would rather buy chips. I’m glad I finally found a source for amaranth and teff flours, but so few people are interested in those that even the Whole Foods Market in Annapolis doesn’t carry them, and Annapolis has a higher-income selection of residents who are thus more likely to shop for such ingredients. (Besides, it isn’t huge as grocery stores go, and even people who want amaranth flour or teff flour will probably only buy them once every handful of months. So it’s not a great use of space.)
I feel really badly for them. They clearly put a lot of love into the store, stocking items they thought were cool and that couldn’t be found elsewhere in the area, and I loved being able to buy those things. They got top of the line checkout equipment with touch-screens. But they don’t appear to have done the market research necessary to make sure they had the right inventory, location, and marketing, and it was probably just the wrong time and place for such a store. Certainly if they stay open I’ll go there when I can for specialty stuff, but honestly, a lot of what I want an organic market for is the produce—and for that, it’s clear I’ll still have to go to Whole Foods.
In more upbeat news, in light of the crafting stuff we’ve been doing lately, I finally initiated a section of crafting links in the links directory. Feel free to sign up for a free account if you want to submit links for crafters’ supply shops, storefronts, community sites, or blogs. Just make sure it has something to do with hand-crafting!
Speaking of hand-crafting, here are a couple more shots of recent projects:
We’re getting closer to opening up that etsy shop—we’ll let you know when it happens! In the meantime, we do have some new stuff up at cafepress. I turned some of my flower photos and photomanipulations into gift items like mugs, prints, and greeting cards in our flower-lovers’ section. The mixed flowers section so far includes items with four different photos on them. Here are a couple samples of our new designs:
We also have a little bit of psychology humor for you geeks out there, with our ink blot test design:
No book review today, I’m afraid. Between taking a four-day weekend, dealing with a new cherry allergy (having a rash on the roof of your mouth and on your lips sucks), sewing a bunch of bags from that scrap of skull fabric, making jewelry, and putting up designs on cafepress, I didn’t quite finish the book I was reading. Soon!
At least, I have a magpie’s fascination with shiny objects. I don’t actually wear much jewelry at all; I’m a jeans and t-shirts gal. But that doesn’t mean I don’t drool over shiny things. So, it seems I’ve taken to beading rather naturally.
When I was a kid I loved little artsy-craftsy kits. But I also have a practical streak a mile wide, and didn’t have the patience for the kind of things they put out for kids—you know, crafts that come out looking big, blocky, and useless. The kind of things you give to your relatives at the holidays, and they smile with that fake, plastered-on smile that you reserve for ugly things your family gives you that you’ll never use but have to pretend to like anyway.
So, I stopped doing crafts. I picked up sewing briefly in the 90s, but tendonitis scrapped that and I stopped again.
Then I saw one friend of mine sewing beads onto trim for garb-making several weeks in a row, and another friend of mine happened to mention having a catalog for Fire Mountain Gems. The lure of potential shiny objects sent me to the website, and I was a goner.
Ever thought about doing something, and just KNEW it was the right thing to do? That’s how I felt when I looked at beading. It never even entered my mind that I’d make cruddy stuff or no one would want it—it just felt right. So I picked up a bunch of materials and set to work. I posted photos at DeviantArt. I’m thinking of opening an Etsy shop (just at a hobby level for the moment), but haven’t yet, and someone already asked if they could buy one of my pieces. I posted some photos for critique at Craftster and several people said they didn’t look like beginner pieces—they looked pro.
Yeah, I’m bragging. I’m really proud of that last bit. It’s slowed down my reviewing a little, but I AM still reading books for review, and making anywhere from one to eight pieces of jewelry at a time (24 done so far!). Who knows—it might or might not turn into a business later down the road, but right now it’s incredibly fun.
Book reviews posted since my last entry: Easy Beading from BeadStyle magazine; Ace is Wild by Penny McCall; Jinx by Jennifer Estep; and Into the Shadow by Christina Dodd.
I believe I mentioned that whole thing where I posted a bunch of texture images on DeviantArt. Well, hands down so far the most popular one is the hardwood floor texture, which has been downloaded 37 times in the past day and a half. This led to a wry observation on how popular our floor was.
I turned our slate porch surface into an interesting ‘window’ image, which I’m pretty proud of. I’m also playing with part of it to create an eventual banner for a possible craft-selling etsy store. Yeah, fine, that’s more than a little premature, but once I get an idea into my head I just can’t let go. And besides, I think it looks pretty cool!
Just to really pile on the artwork, here’s a new cafepress tabletop roleplaying design. It came out of some truly spectacular D&D fumble tales from the last few months:
Yes, it really does say “An arrow in the butt is better than a spear in the winkie.” Did I mention that our GMs have some particularly vicious fumble tables?
Here are the latest book reviews for you: Vicki Lewis Thompson’s Wild & Hexy and the awesome Jean Johnson’s The Storm.
The Little White Thing You Stand On (oops… I mean Wii Fit…) is WAY too much fun. We’re contemplating dropping our gym memberships, although we’ll wait to make sure that in the long run (say, a month from now) we still feel we’re getting an adequate workout with this. If that works out, it means the Wii and Wii Fit will have more than paid for themselves.
The aerobics stuff, like the running, is definitely enough to work up a good sweat and leave you out of breath. The strength training is surprisingly effective—it uses core conditioning techniques to pit you against your own body mass so you don’t need machines. The yoga stretches and balance exercises, of course, work perfectly with the balance board. Someday I hope they come up with a balance mat version that’ll allow a wider array of activities, but I think this works surprisingly well for now. There are quite a few benefits to working out with this thing, as silly as it may seem at first:
The ‘game’ format keeps things fun, challenging, and entertaining, not to mention less chore-like.
Since you can do this in your home, you can fit your workout easily in around chores, work hours, dinner, etc.
I find it easier to work out when I have the most physical energy and motivation—which for me is usually late morning. That’s a horrid time to exercise outside where I am, as I don’t deal well with heat & humidity, both of which are pretty nasty here. It’s also a time when I can’t get to the gym.
The workout pieces seem awfully short at first, but you swiftly ‘unlock’ extra reps and such, quickly building up to a level you’re comfortable with.
The board and program are surprisingly good at noting how you’re doing by measuring how shaky, steady, etc. you are.
Presumably they’ll be able to put out additional disks later with additional exercises on them—and there are already plenty to begin with.
The tracking and charting functions are so well-integrated that you hardly have to do a thing. It measures & tracks your weight, BMI, and exercise levels for you. No more having to remember to write that stuff down.
Because there are some easier exercises in there, such as one or two of the yoga poses and some of the balance exercises, I can imagine continuing to get exercises even on days when I’m tired, sick, sore, etc. That means fewer breaks in the routine of working out, which means I’m more likely to keep it up as a habit.
All in all, as silly as the concept seems, the execution is brilliant.
Last Friday night I ended up staying up almost all night with lots and lots of stomach pain. This led to a very exhausted and nauseous and headachy Saturday. At some point I had just two of the speckled minty m&ms I’d gotten, and was incredibly nauseous all over again. That’s when my husband reminded me that he’d had to stop getting m&ms at work occasionally because if he had them for a couple of days then skipped them, he’d get splitting headaches. I stopped with the m&ms, and felt better. I wonder if it’s all those colorings they put in them, because I couldn’t see anything else in there that I don’t have in other chocolates. But normally I don’t tend to get candy bar type of chocolates with lots of colorings and such in them.
In fact, oddly enough, in this case I bought them largely because they looked cool. I wanted to photograph them, because they had this funky shimmering speckled coating. At least they did, in fact, photograph well:
Luckily I felt better in time to go visit friends on Sunday, which was fun. I ended up trying out their Nintendo wii because they spoke so highly of it, even though I knew, KNEW that if I did, I’d be lost, and I really didn’t want to buy a console. Anyway, Cathy and I played bowling (way too much fun), and I had to try out billiards, fishing, and that weird game where you ride a cow and try to knock over scarecrows.
Here’s the great thing about the wii: it’s the console made for casual gamers. And as much as I love to game, when it comes to video games I consider myself a casual gamer. I have a husband. We have lots of great friends. We have hobbies that take up our time. I don’t have the time for hours and hours of gaming at a time most nights. I love the kind of silly, entertaining games that you can play for ten minutes at a time if you want, and companies have really stepped up to the plate in delivering unusual and original content for the wii.
So, yeah, I’m hooked. I really want one. But here’s the thing: it’s way past buzz-generating time, but it’s still freaking impossible to get one of the things. We tried every store in the area; no go. Not a one of them could predict when they might get them in. I finally found an online store that claimed to have one in stock (Toys ‘r us) only to have them yank it from my order because it wasn’t really in stock (of course they left all the accessories on order, so I canceled the rest of my order). The ones listed at Amazon are listed way above list price, and are being sold by merchants I’ve never heard of, so I don’t trust that they aren’t going to repackage a broken unit given the demand.
Eventually I did find a bundle at Walmart.com that was supposedly in stock; I’m still waiting to see if the order actually ships.
But seriously, there’s no logical sense to this. Why put up barriers to people’s ability to give you money? I understand that at first they do it to create buzz, even though I loathe that tactic, and frankly I try to avoid anything that’s being sold in that manner. Now, however, when the thing isn’t new, there just isn’t any point to it.
Of course, rumor has it that the lack of units is due to a production problem. I find myself very curious as to whether that’s the case.
So far this week we’ve posted two reviews, of Bertrice Small’s Dangerous Pleasures and Carole Hart’s Pleasure U. To be honest, I’m a little behind on my reviewing this week in large part because I’ve been playing around with photography and Photoshop a bit too much:
Some of our plants are finally fruitful, but I’m not sure I’d call them entirely successful. The first zucchini plant got dug up so many times it finally died; the second might be following suit. I’m not sure what’s digging them up, but suspects include the local bunnies, squirrels, and cats.
The medusa peppers were stunted by the overly-wet start to the summer I believe. Still, they have put out a fair number of yellow fruits. Unfortunately the most successful of them got hit by the weed-whacker. (Generally our lawn guy is extremely conscientious, so I can’t bring myself to be annoyed—just disappointed.) The others seem to be slowly ripening, so hopefully they’ll produce a few edible chilies. (Medusas are primarily ornamental, but they’re also edible.)
One plant was supposed to be a medusa pepper, but instead seems to be something similar but not quite the same. It’s producing smaller peppers with a rounded end that go straight from dark green to red, rather than spending most of their time in yellow. Unfortunately, that too got stunted. As you can see from the photo, it got VERY stunted: (more…)
I have a second review up for today: John D. Husband’s incredible Maggie Again.
I also have some new pictures. (Speaking of which, I finally ordered a good-sized memory card for my camera! I won’t run out of room after 17 pictures any more!) Some you won’t see yet; they’re from the cookbooks I’ll be reviewing soon. One is of a cheesecake that came out surprisingly poorly. There are also some new cat photos up at the ErrantCats collection. Finally, here are a few pics from the garden today:
The medusa pepper plants are a bit stunted, but some of them are putting out chilies, although they aren’t ripe yet. The tomato plants got somewhat blighted, but we’re definitely getting clusters of green tomatoes. The particular ones pictured should end up being yellow pear tomatoes.
Here’s the good thing about IKEA: while it’s true that a lot of their items are cheap in a pejorative sense, if you look around carefully you can get some great deals on some wonderful pieces of furniture. We found an awesome dining room set there, a couple of very nice dressers, and some bookcases we desperately need.
Here’s the problem: since there’s no way we could fit that stuff in our car, we ordered it over the internet and arranged to have it delivered. It arrived last night, and about half of it is going to have to go back.
Three bookcases were totally loose. As in, the shelves and hardware were stacked freely in the truck. The delivery folks even looked shocked when they saw that. One of the pieces of backing is cracked through; several shelves are splintered, crunched, or broken, even just at first glance; and we have no idea whether anything’s missing.
Several other boxes had been so thoroughly broken open that things got damaged or, once again, we have no way of knowing if anything’s missing—that’s a fourth bookcase and BOTH dressers. In fact, the only things we’re going to be able to hold onto are one full-sized bookcase, one narrow bookcase, and the dining room set. Truthfully a couple of those boxes were damaged, too, but the damage was little enough that we could see the items themselves weren’t damaged or missing anything.
Well, it’ll be an interesting test of IKEA’s customer service to see if we end up with what we ordered, and how difficult the process is.
In the interests of not simply griping on this rainy Friday morning, here are two review links and two cute cat pics. First, reviews of Crichton’s classic The Andromeda Strain and Pamela Clare’s new and fantastic Unlawful Contact. Finally, cuddly cat photos. Well okay, the first one isn’t so cuddly; if you tried, you’d probably get a few playful scratches:
Oy… I meant to post a bunch of stuff today. I put up some new designs in the Gamers’ Heaven cafepress shop, finished a book to review, wanted to chat a bit about a 48-hour reading marathon coming up in June (and some friends who will most likely be guest-posting here as a part of that)… lots of stuff like that. I also wanted to do more agave nectar-baking today, although I think that’ll have to wait until Sunday.
Anyway, at least I did get some gardening done, and I’ll post a slideshow of the latest pics at the bottom. I’m also going to see Ironman tonight—usually I try to avoid opening weekend, but it’s one of those ‘meet up with a bunch of friends’ things. It’s also at 11 pm, which is rather late for me. And tomorrow there’s a friend’s retirement picnic…
But I’m babbling, so I’ll just post those pics and go. Have a great weekend!
