Get off my lawn!

One of my coworkers has done gone insane decided to do the National Triathlon, in collaboration with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training. Which means that she's going to swim in the actual Potomac River. Freely and of her own volition, she's going in that water, and she doesn't even get to keep the money. Talk about going above and beyond.

I'm impressed by her resolve and I have a dog or two in the fight to cure blood cancers, so I'm asking people to visit her page and consider adding a few dollars to the jar. Help Tiffanie fight the good fight!

Yeast is yeast and west is west

Pursuant to yesterday's post, I should mention that fasting in the Orthodox tradition involves giving up almost all animal-based foods, including meat, dairy, eggs, and fish, as well as olive oil and wine (technically speaking, alcohol of all sorts is verboten, but the Russians claim that beer is actually a form of bread and thus permitted—don't think about it too much). The week before the Great Lent begins, the Orthodox dip a toe into the waters of deprivation by giving up meat, and in theory you spend that week clearing the larder of all the remaining dairy products. Really you're building up a cushion against the coming weeks of thin food: To quote a small child of my acquaintance, when asked whether he was storing berries in his stomach instead of his basket, "No, I am eating them." So say we all.

Which brings us to blini. There seems to be a some disagreement online about the taxonomic differences between blini and oladi, but wevs, every thin spongy sourdough buttery pancake crepe-like thing I've had has been referred to as a blin. Back in ze old pagan days, when people got sick of the endless Russian winters, they made round warm yellow pancakes as an attempt to encourage the sun to get its ass back into the sky; these days, blini are an integral part of Maslenitsa ("Butter Week"), aka Carnaval for Slavs. It not being bikinis-and-feathers weather in that part of the world, samba parties are replaced with feasts of blini. The blini themselves help explain why, even when bikini weather rolls around, many of us are not fit for it.

God do I love blini. It's not enough that the average blin is made with eggs and whole milk, fried in butter, and kept from sticking to its neighbors with butter; it's got to have toppings at least as rich as the blin itself. Blini can be served savory, each person applying the appropriate personal measures of sour cream, chopped hard-boiled eggs, chopped green onions, smoked herring, smoked salmon, caviar, and/or extra butter, and sweet, with preserves, honey, sour cream, and/or extra butter. It is not unheard-of for blini to be filled with ice cream or Nutella (although this is rare and considered faintly indecent). You can pile your doctored blini in layers and cut them into wedges for genteel forking into face, or you can roll them up like burritos and end up smeary with butter. In a wonderful example of evolutionary symbiosis, icy shots of vodka help keep the cholesterol from building up to lethal levels and the blini help cushion the effects of the alcohol. At larger events, there may be dancing to help you process your sudden lipidosity, but in smaller gatherings the evening is likely to wrap up with conversation, possibly dessert, and maybe a pre-bedtime serving of yet more blini.

This morning, after spending yestereve at The Voice's and putting away three generous plates of blini, four glasses of red wine, and several shots of vodka, I am not sure I will ever move again. Hail to the blin, says I. Hail to butter, hail to smoked salmon, hail to the people who managed to eat dessert. Hail most of all to a friendly and fattening farewell to winter.

I am a visitor here, I am not permanent

Things I found when I stopped by Teal's apartment on Monday:

• One fish, not labeled, still swimming
  
• One gallon jug of water labeled "Fish H2O"
• One smaller bottle of water labeled "Plant H20"
• One ziploc bag, containing about three tiny flakes, labeled "Fish food"
  
• One double-sided sheet of instructions, with footnotes, on how to deal with the above, including a declaration of absolution should the first-named join the coral reef invisible
• Two bars of Xocolatl labeled "[3pennyjane] food"

I could get used to this fish-sitting business.

Tending to one's knitting

With Orthodox Christmas a mere two weeks away (we're not just rehashing an old argument, we're also in ur salez, takin advantidge of yer barginz), I'm working on several knitting projects, including a Fair Isle tea cozy. And, really, if anyone's got a more old-ladyish thing to say than "I'm knitting a tea cozy," I would like to hear it.

This is my first foray into Fair Isle knit, as opposed to intarsia work, and I'm keeping the pattern pretty simple, just alternating stitch rows (1-0-1-0, offset each row) and a sequence of small diamonds across the middle. Weebat and I have been exchanging idle thoughts on the options for knitting in code using Fair Isle, since adding a second color doubles the amount of information a given stitch can convey (knit versus purl, color 1 versus color 2). Madame Defarge is the obvious reference, and because Dickens leaves it vague as to exactly how her knitting was coded, we are free to speculate. Binary, we decided, is too unwieldy; you need too many stitches per character. Braille might work, but it would require keeping close track across up to three rows, it's not widely read by the sighted public, and unless you knew someone pretty well you might object to having your sweater read (or not, depending--no judging here). We settled on Morse code, although we were still debating the formatting and hadn't come to any conclusions about the format.

And then it turns out that Kristen Haring got there first anyway.

Finding joy

While I was off in the ATL cooing over my fluffy bed and whining about my schedule (unjustly, as mine was freer than many), I got a sobering e-mail forwarded through the church network. A man I knew, actually someone I had a monster crush on from about age 8 through 28, had slipped and hit his head while leaving a New York bar. He insisted that he was fine, but his friends noticed that he was bleeding from the ears and demanded that he let them take him to the hospital. A paramedic who periodically posts at Making Light once said that if you're wondering whether you ought to call 911, you should already be dialing. The doctors found hairline fractures above both ears and some intracranial swelling. He seemed oriented, responding to the time and place questions with "March" and "Pluto" respectively, indicating no damage to the smart-ass structures, and has been doing well since, apart from some blurred vision and a ringing in his ears. Today I got an update that he's being moved out of the ICU, has had the spinal shunt removed, and may be released as early as tomorrow. He may have some damage to one ear and will need rehab and observation, but the prognosis is very good. For this relief much thanks.

After a conversation about C.S. Lewis with a friend earlier this week and since I'm midway through The Narnian, I spent my first evening back rereading The Magician's Nephew for the first time since my teens. As a kid, I found it the least engaging of the Narnia books, what with the tedious logic about the green and yellow rings and the hopping between worlds, but this time I went through it at a good clip and even found myself getting teary at the scenes of creation. Now that I know a bit more about Lewis's mother's death, which by all accounts was slow and painful, I find Digory's temptation to steal a cure for his dying mother much more affecting. Reading it as a child, I don't think that I really understood that she was actually likely to die. I still prefer the allegory in Til We Have Faces, about which I get sniffly no matter how often I read it (dust mites in the binding, maybe), but I am glad to have my old copies of the Chronicles to revisit.

No comment

Nosirreebob, I have no comment AT ALL about this picture of the Expelled Expat in a German Christmas market. Except that the picture reminds me that anybody who hasn't heard the Expat's hilarious tale of her second date with her now-husband is missing out on one of the best "and you went out with him again?!?" stories ever to end in a happy Vegas wedding and shared responsibility for a cyberkitty.