zombies and fake leaves

The very first L4D tv commercial went live recently. There were some awfully talented people putting in long hours to make this thing, and now that I know what kind of development goes into such a short spot I am more impressed than ever.



And it doesn't hurt that they picked some kick ass music to go along with it. Listening to the whole song is definitely a treat.
Embedding directly from YouTube is disabled, but here is the link.

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I got the itch to do a random fall craft the other day, and was inspired by a paper leaf covered wreath I saw at a shop. Instead of a wreath I made a garland for the fireplace. All it took was a package of fall colored cardstock, some brown floral tape, glue, and a spool of wire. Oh, and let's not forget what really made this possible: the die-cutting station at my local Ben Franklin's store. If I had cut out every single one of those leaves (and each finished leaf is two pieces of paper with the wire sandwiched in between) my hands would have been bloody stumps.



It came out exactly as I had hoped.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 2
Eggs laid in the coop Thursday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Wednesday: 4
Eggs laid this year: 285

Dirt Digging Party

Aubrey, 20 seconds before spitting out her pacifier to gnaw on a leaf

Oh, the scramble of the last few days of fall Before The Rains. I keep thinking that we are on the cusp of ceaseless drizzle, but there are a few days that sneak in where the sun is out and the air is crisp.

Julian, Wheelbarrow Technician

Isaac, Rake Enthusiast

I was hoping today would be a day like that, since I invited friends to a Dirt Digging Party. There are a couple of toddler boys in my life who love dirt, and also a few little girls who are too tiny to hold a shovel but will happily chew on leaves. I got up early and started digging, and took many lovely breaks to brew tea, draw with chalk in the driveway, watch Kristie's awesome dog Danger chase a ball, eat soup, drink hot chocolate, kick a ball around, and just chat. In between all of that I managed to get six wheelbarrows full of dirt down to a tarp next to the un-built beds. Several friends were brave enough to take up the pickaxe and shovel and help fill the wheelbarrow. We dug several shallow graves out in the woods behind the shed.

Need anyone buried?

I'll still need plenty more dirt, but at least there was a start. Then once everyone left I picked up my drill and got one frame put together. It is too heavy to carry on my own, so I'll need to get Charlie to help me move it down to its new home. I think we excavated enough dirt today to fill one bed and it will be nice to see how it looks when full.

One bed done. The board in the middle is just a temporary prop. Behold my hardware cloth, ravenous moles, and despair!

Charlie and I went to dinner last night, and I told him about the dirt party. His response? Let's go home and we'll cook soup to feed people. I made Avgolemono (a greek lemon chicken soup) and Charlie made his now-famous tomato squash with Harissa soup. We were cooking till midnight, and it was so much fun.

chop chop chop

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Monday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Sunday 5
Eggs laid this year: 276

Zombies As Big As Your Head!

Charlie has worked on an awful lot of games. And over the years we have smiled to see the occasional ad in PC Gamer and other trade magazines.

But baby, there's not much out there that beats Times Square:




Here's a picture of a local billboard:


I can't wait till this game comes out. Not just because it means that Charlie will get to come home for dinner, but also because let me tell you this game is So. Damn. Fun. Co-op games are fun at the content level, and the single player game has some very helpful bots, but when you're playing with your friends it's a gaming experience that satisfies like no other. Now that some of the exhaustion of nonstop playtesting stints has worn off, I am ready to start playing all over again.

Orange

My favorite fall color is orange.

It is the color of tasty neutrality, neither a complete failure or a total success:


The resulting pumpkin butter was more like pie filling. It just didn't seem right to spread on toast. It's in a big mason jar in the fridge and I may make a tartlet pie next week or something. Its still pumpkin season, so I'm going to do a little more research and find a different recipe and try again.


It is the color of nature's finish line:


The japanese maple in the back is happy. I keep digging it out from underneath the rampant prehistoric ferns that dominate the woods. They commonly grow to six feet or taller.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 2
Eggs laid in the coop Friday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Thursday: 5
Egg laid this year: 264

snikt

I had a touch of The Insomnia again last night and was puttering away online when I thought....let's see if I can find him on Facebook. Everyone's got one, that first blushing kiss, always remembered. In my case it was the late eighties, furtive, behind the elementary school down the street. It wasn't even the kiss as much as it was the friendship. Here was a boy who loved the same things I did: comic books, fighter jets, the Canadian Brass, and being nerdy. When you are that age and you find someone of the same gender with like desires you become Best Friends Forever. When you are a girl and he is a boy, well, you get called Boyfriend and Girlfriend.


This was fine by me. I didn't really care about the labels, just about the camaraderie. We had great times going to air shows and movies and amusement parks. There was also a little kissing. And through my much-older eyes and with a dash of experience I realize there was a fair amount of exploration into what exactly a relationship *was.*


Tonight I dug into my box of treasures to see what I could find. I am not a hoarder on a grand scale, but I do have one box of snippets from my youth. I smiled when I discovered a batch of letters he had sent me over the course of a few summers. There were a few saved drawings too. One of the later letters is from after I moved to NH and includes such phrases as "I've found math to be a great source of peace for me, especially heavy calculus" and "there's oodles of cute sophomores, not just Munster." If my calculations are correct, this cute sophomore later became his wife.

So, to Jonathan, a toast to adolescence and best hopes for the future. Mine still involves Wolverine, though I have branched out a bit to include more than just the Marvel universe.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 2
Eggs laid this year: 253

yarny cheesecake

I was working on a crochet project last night while Charlie worked late. Eventually it was tea time and I roamed to the kitchen to boil and brew a cuppa. Elapsed time: 5 minutes maximum. Upon returning to my chair and taking up the hook, my ball of yarn was nowhere to be found. Not under the chair, not accidentally kicked across the room. No. My ball of yarn started at the bottom of the basement stairs. Someone (I am looking at you, Harry) picked up the ball of yarn and trucked it all the way down the stairs and proceeded to unravel the entire thing around and around the pool table.

villains

When I got down there, Henry was batting at the last of the bit of unraveled yarn with huge saucer eyes. Harry was hunkered over a big loop, gnawing loudly. I probably pulled a good foot of yarn out of his mouth. Then I had to fight the two of them while trying to wind the yarn back up into a ball. Parts were entirely sodden with spit and completely revolting. Damn cats. But they did make me laugh.

re-wound

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A few weekends ago I was gifted with a post-birthday cheesecake by The Master. It was caramel, and I tell you that thing had not one single blemish on it. It was almost a crime to cut into the thing to take a slice. A tasty, irresistible crime.

eat me

ok!

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 2
Eggs laid in the coop Sunday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Monday: 4
Eggs laid this year: 251

History

History arrived in my mailbox yesterday.

like most Washington voters, I vote by mail

Mom, don't worry I will make you proud.

Also: there are an awful lot of candidates for President! Many more than I thought there would be.

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Eggs laid in the coop Saturday: 3
Eggs laid this year: 242

Resumed

sunny mornings like today, I will not forget you when you are gone for the season!

Much of my before-zombies life has resumed. This week I worked on some sewing projects for my favorite one-and-a-few-weeks-year-old, Maya. The first was an idea that came to me while she was crawling around in the mulch of my yard while Mona and I were putting out measuring stakes for the garden. Maya was having a grand old time but the ground was quite damp from rains and the mulch stuck to her clothes like crazy. Why not have an outfit that you can just pull over whatever clothes a kid is wearing, point them towards the nearest mess to play in, and then peel it off when they're done with no harm done to clothes underneath?
I have a pattern for overalls that I made for Calliope last year (her dragon pants) and I used some mostly-waterproof backed nylon fabric. It is thin and smooth and supple, but definitely creates a moisture barrier. It's the same stuff that is used to make some cloth diaper covers. Mona bought red and black, and I experimented with the red first. It turned out well. Maya tried it out as a full-body bib while eating some excellent eggs.

you can faintly see the red-bandanna-patterned fabric I used to line the top

Second project: overdue birthday present. Quite a few birthdays got overrun by zombies and Maya's was one of them. I used a great poncho pattern from Knitting Pure & Simple (scroll down for poncho #243) again, tried out on Calliope first last year. It's a quick knit, about three evening's worth. I intentionally used acrylic yarn so that it can be washed intensively. There is a time for gorgeous virgin wool, and there is a time for acrylic.

pom poms being vigorously shaken!

Speaking of gardens, the plots have been staked out and I'll buy the wood sometime this week. I took a picture from the back deck so you can see where they are in relation to the fire pit. Keep in mind that each plot is 10feet x 4feet. It's a little hard to get scale from these pictures.

front plot for greens, back left for tomatoes, back right for who knows what!

those brown mounds are from me trimming down the dead ferns and brambles; must compost

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Eggs laid in the coop Friday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Thursday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Wednesday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Tuesday: 3
Eggs laid this year: 239

Ditch-digging

We lost water pressure yesterday as Charlie was finishing up a shower. This happens every so often if the power goes out or a fuse blows at the pump-house for our well. Outages usually resolve in an hour or so when someone either turns on the generator or flips the breaker.

A quick note to our water group message board told me that it wasn't an isolated problem and everyone's water was out (one of my fears is a "just us" problem which means it could be anything). I went out for a few hours, and came back to a message from the neighbor down the street. It wasn't a blown fuse....it was a full-on busted pipe. Luckily our water system counts among it's members a dedicated engineer who also happens to be a whiz at plumbing.

the newly capped end of the pipe

The original pipes had been buried a good 4 feet down, but over the course of 10 years this particular pine tree had thrown out a root that pushed the pipe up, up, up (you can't really see the root in this picture, it's too far down). It is fascinating to me to know that the tree actually grew a sliver enough to take the pipe to it's cracking point at 10.30am exactly. But crack it did. Brian dug out a big hole and managed to cut, bend, extend upward, and cap one end of the pipe. That restored water to everyone between the well and the cap. Unfortunately this did not reach down to our end of the street. He needed to put another 90 degree bend in the other side of the broken pipe and run a bypass up and over that root. He also had, you know, a life and had to take his kids to karate.

I will take this moment to give a shout-out to Boeing for their current strike. Thanks for making my neighbor available to fix our pipes! You're free to resolve things and let him come back to work now!

So I took over and with pickaxe and shovel and trowel and saw I hacked through a foot deep layer of tangled roots and then down into the dirt. By dusk I was crouched in the hole like a demented troll, reduced to flinging handfuls of dirt up one at a time. The hole was just too deep to wield big tools without bumping the new pipe. I got a few feet of the broken pipe exposed just as full dark set in and walked wearily home as it started to rain in earnest. My muddy clothes were left on the front porch and I treated myself to a gallon of heated up water and a washcloth bath in the kitchen.

Trust me, this ditch is huge! You can actually kind of see the root down on the left of the hole. The original pipes were at the very very bottom by that piece of paper towel.

My reward for hard labor? By the time I walked down this morning to see how he was getting on, the pipe was already fixed and he was waiting for the glue to dry. I got to participate in the ceremonial turning-of-the-valve and suddenly our water was restored. Five minutes running of the garden hose got out the worst of the sediment. Laundry is going even as I type, and a hot shower is in my future.

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Eggs laid in the coop Monday: 5
Eggs laid this year: 224

catching up

Chilean flamingos at the zoo

This weekend was like a crazy dream. Charlie took Friday off and we went to the zoo with friends.

A funny zoo story: Upon arrival I stated the animals that I had to see before leaving. I knew that the zoo had added a flamingo exhibit last spring and was super keen to see them. Charlie was nonchalant. We finally go to their area, and I was excitedly pointing out ridiculously obvious things like "they have such long legs!" Charlie was still playing it cool. Then he laughed and told me that he hadn't been able to figure out why I was so excited to see flamingos until he realized that they were a novelty to me. Since Charlie spent much of his childhood visiting his family in Florida, flamingos were common. It was like me saying "I can't wait to see the seagull exhibit!" They're still exotic to me, and I can't imagine seeing them outside your kitchen window.

We had many fires in the living room. Multiple board games were played. Friends arrived and Charlie cooked and we played more games. Then we cooked some more and more friends came and we played lots of Rock Band. Then yesterday, ahh, yesterday, we pretty much did nothing at all. Other than buy comic books and read them. There was leftover soup from the night before so we didn't even have to cook.

Harry approves of the fire

And appreciates it to the fullest extent

Today it's dreary and I am going to plan out garden beds. It's been killing me not having a vegetable garden at the house. Tomato plants on the deck this year yielded a whopping FOUR tomatoes. That's 1/3 tomato per plant. Weather was the cause...it was unbelievably cold this summer and tomatoes were an epic fail everywhere. But if I had had them in a proper bed I could have hoop-protected them for almost the entire summer.

So using some fiscal birthday help from parents and grandparents, I will be making a trip to the cedar lumberyard this week to get the goods to make a few raised beds. After looking at so many designs I've decided to go with 10x4' beds, with segmentable and add-on options. One will have hoop-posts so I can set it up for tomatoes. The others will have some raised covers to protect greens and other tasty treats from the myriad deer, rabbits, squirrels, doves, moles, and other vegetarians that roam our land. All of the beds need to be hardware-clothed on the bottom because boy howdy do we have mole issues.

Time for a cup of coffee and some graph paper.

another birthday present from mom&dad, displayed proudly on my bumper.

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Eggs laid in the coop Sunday: 5
Eggs laid in the coop Saturday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Friday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Thursday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Wednesday: 2
Eggs laid this year: 219

a lull

There has been a lull in the zombie apocalypse. To celebrate I made avgolemono soup last night and Charlie and I ate at the dining room table like real human beings. And then we played a board game.

Today I made granola and did a lot of cleaning around the house.

I have a new respect for professional video gamers. They must have hand-massagers on call.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 5
Eggs laid this year: 203