all your bake are belong to us

As yet without a lusted-for camera, I am baking. No, I don't  think of baking and photography as directly interchangeble activities, but creative energy's gotta go somewhere, so there it is. I love cooking too, but the funnest activity for me lately is under the stovetop. I like the process of preparing stuff to bake, and it's a pretty cheap and easy hobby. And baked goodies always go over well; Cookies, pastry, etc., are easier to present to neighbors you don't really know all that well than a thing full of leftover stir fry, say. You never know what people like or what's gonna get wilty too quickly, etc.
So now I'm super jonesin' for the camera, because I want to take delightful photos of this yummy stuff. It's coming ASAP. I've never tried anything 'molten' before, so I thought I'd challenge myself with the Guittard recipe on the back of my sack of  chocolate chips. They came out looking something like this:

And they tasted even better, mmm :) Sexiest chocolate thing I've ever created.  I get some sort of impish glee out of tweaking recipes, especially if booze is involved, so trust me when I say that these were not only molten, but drunken (Grand Marnier). I'd like to tell you exactly what I did, but I forget (Absolut).
I think I'll tweak my Posterous into an occasional amateur food blog as soon as I get that camera.
Bon Appetit!
.

An Eye On Quora

I'm not using Quora much yet, just watching (like most people do with @twitter).


My grasp of what it is and how it's evolving is getting firmer. My perception of its culture is resolving ever more sharply. I like it & feel it has potential. I believe that if it was not too broadly conceived, it may be too broadly presented. Although Quora has tags, I think it might work more smoothly if questions could be categorized (upon submission) on a more basic level (Yes/No? Philisophical? etc.). Here's an example illustrating why I think this would be helpful:
Gabriella is incredulous at what she feels is an abominably low rate of pay for copy writing services, which prompted to her to ask,
"Would you do anything if the price was right?"


Huh? I finally understood her to be getting at something like 'If you were say, hurting badly enough, would you accept an atrocious rate of pay just because it was better than nothing?' But since she was specific in her subtext about that rate & the type of work, I offered a reply which extracted the predicate from her query and addressed that:

http://b.qr.ae/Rhetoric2Logic

Here is an example of random cool shyte to be found at @quora:

http://b.qr.ae/QuoraAnimalBand

Notice the great question, simple and straightforward in concept and language.  Notice the smart, jaunty 'To the Cloud!' pop culture reference in Erik Frey's reply. That answer, upvoted (as of this moment) nearly 500 times, is not only interesting, fun and maybe surprising, but it demonstrates its data (proof! See 'the cloud' atop the list of animals). I like the charming gameness implicit in both the asking and the answering of such a question in a more or less formal environment.  The whole thing makes for a good solid example of what Quora is becoming.

Mimi's Blonde joke: Blind Cowboy

My mother, Mimi, just sent me the most roflmao I've ever heard:

An old, blind cowboy wanders into an all-girl biker bar by mistake. He
finds his way to a bar stool and orders a shot of Jack Daniels. After
sitting there for a while, he yells to the bartender, "Hey, you wanna
hear a blonde joke?"

The bar immediately falls absolutely silent.

In a very deep, husky voice, the woman next to him says, "Before you
tell that joke, Cowboy, I think it is only fair, given that you are
blind, that you should know five things:

1. The bartender is a blonde girl with a baseball bat.

2. The bouncer is a blonde girl.

3. I'm a 6-foot tall, 175-pound blonde woman with a black belt in karate.

4. The woman sitting next to me is blonde and a professional weight lifter.

5. The lady to your right is blonde and a professional wrestler.

Now, think about it seriously, Cowboy. Do you still wanna tell that
blonde joke?"

The blind cowboy thinks for a second, shakes his head and mutters,
"Well, no...not if I'm gonna have to explain it five times."

Not Asleep.

Bored, looking at iPod skins. I just fell in love with the work of Joe Ledbetter:

Love this Angel & Devil Bunnehs image:

My favorite new artist :)

Rescued!

The Employment Verification thingy mentioned in the last post WAS RESCUED!!!! It is, as we speak, waiting for me up at the drugstore.  I am even more blissfully relieved as I was mad with frustration last night.

Thanks to your amazing superpowers, today's a great day.

Peace & happiness to you on this lovely Wednesday

<3

The Dog Ate My Employment Verification :P

  
Download now or listen on posterous

Memo.m4a (2798 KB)

Sent from my iPod

Seahawks NFC West Champions!

Good morning. :)

Laughing, Seahawks Head Coach @PeteCarroll said, "Hey, it's cool we're doing something that's never been done before...!", referring to the fact that he took a team with a losing record to the Playoffs.  He also said, "I guess we won for all the teams that have a losing record and think they can't be champions. It can get done, you can do it." That's a genuinely sporting, fun, positive attititude, and I love it. I feel proud that he's a Seahawk.

I love this coach to pieces. Rather that being your typical surly, hard boiled Pro-football coach, he is happy, positive and knows how to have fun no matter what the circumstances.  He has perspective, humor and grace. He does things like tweet whatever he's chosen as the Seahawks' #SOTD (Song of the Day) - usually a spirit-building & motivational tool for the team; in this case, a gift to the UW Huskies' Coach Sarkisian). If you ask me, that's awesome.

Carroll remarks on what made last nights' win happen, the season, QB stuff & a few other things (audio's a bit low):

http://www.seahawks.com/videos-photos/videos/Week-17---Rams-Postgame-Recap/c71bd727-d83a-4fbf-920d-4613f4a3d26b#?id=ca86f419-2361-4a72-927f-67e5a0b3488e

Colossal congrats to the Hawks!!! Let's go hammer the Saints next week!

1.1.11

Happy New Year!

<anti-jinx>I have a pretty good feeling about 2011.</anti-jinx>


I kicked it off spending a lovely afternoon out with my friend @nwmargaret. 

 We shared appetizers at Julia's on Broadway, chatting & entertaining each other. We stopped on Thomas near Melrose, looking west, and alternated between shuffling through her Christmas pictures and ogling the spectacular Olympic Mountains (w/Space Needle in the foreground), pre-sunset.

At this moment, I have this Haydn piece in my head and an excellent cup of coffee beside me. I have elevently hundred tweets to go enjoy & SNL to look forward to this evening (a rerun, but new to me). There is a kitteh watching me intently from across the alley. I keep recalling the sunset on my short walk home from the store, which was the most insanely beautiful Technicolor spectacle I'd seen in ages. I made random strangers pay attention to it and gasp in awestruck wonder.

Some of them looked at me funny for making them gasp ;-)


Tomorrow, the Seahawks take on the Rams here at home, a game that's been fraught with some intra-12thMan conflict.  In my eyes, it's a sportsmanship issue; I stand firmly in the Pro-Win camp. The Pro-Tank camp can go to Hell is well-intentioned, I'm sure, but misguided. And wrong.

 

GO SEAHAWKS!!!

In the less immediate world, I have other stuff to look forward to. Things are brewing. Some small but important things are shifting and changing a bit. 

All sorts of stuff is plenty fucked up, don't get me wrong. but I'm seeing that there is a more hopeful & peaceful way to be, right here in the midst of it all, and I'm headed there. Whatever I can possibly work out, heal up, improve, etc., in myself and the world, can be done probably a lot more effectively from there.

I know this was just pointless rambling. Just marking the day, I guess.  I wish you the very best of all things, anything you might want for yourself, and a few happy surprises in 2011.

Love,

Catherine
:)