Yes, I am back. I have not updated this in forever, but I am still here. My second semester of college is drawing to a close, and I have made up a schedule for semester #3, which is two days a week (YAY!) and I have four classes; Sociology, Math 150, Human Potential, and human ecology. I may sign up for another one, but I don't know if I will be able to fit it in. :-)

also, I will be having another art gallery showing at the local community college in the upcoming spring; I am working on new drawings for it as well-- and for this month three of my drawings are down in the Pikeville Artisan Center. So I am slowly but surely making connections around the art community. (Important thing to do, there!)

It looks like I will have three more semesters in college unless I take a few extracurricular classes to add up the hours. :-( I don't want to do school during the summer ... Wah.

I won't be able to spend much time on this entry, because I have to study for a test tomorrow. So ta for now. Will post later!

Imagine. I finally tried to poach pears! It wasn't all that hard either. This is a recipe that has been bugging me since I was a kid and saw it in my mother's "Cooking for Two" recipe book. I remember staring at those luscious baked pears for hours, but we didn't (and still don't drik red wine, so there wasn't any around for me to try it with.

So finally I broke down at twenty-two and put on the oven. We'd just gotten a package of Harry and David treats from one of Dad's fellow Doctors, and so I thought it was about time to attempt this after seeing poached pears in a blog.

Cooking blogs, by the way, are nothing less than awesomeness. The best ones have pictures, instructions, recipes, and tidbits from the author's personal lives and full of helpful hints.

Again, we didn't have red wine, so I substituted our peachy-pink Sutter Home wine, doused the pear in it, sprinkled sugar over the top, and stuck it in a 425% oven on bake. The blog said to add baste more sugar and wine every fifteen minutes for a crackly, more caramelized texture, so that's what I tried. By the end of 45 minutes, the pear was done and ready to take out, slice, and eat. ^.^

Didn't really get a caramel crackly sugar top, but it was still awfully good. Since I was not able to eat the whole pear, I may save it and use it in a crepe tomorrow afternoon or so.

I love this video. ^.^

Hey, you know, it would be interesting to start a livejournal for people to figure out what eachother's names mean in other languages. For instance I just found out my name in Korean-- "질 = zil." The poster told me that "chinese is harder because there is no character for "jill", but you can call urself "zhen", which means "real" = 真" when I mentioned somebody had translated it into Chinese-- my brother's Chinese Professor Gao. (I think that's how her name is spelled, anyway. I could be very wrong.)

OH, and I just finished watching At World's End . . . . I am feeling the need for good fanfiction, but I have no idea where to look. FF.net is the *obvious* choice . . . however, I was on there a few years ago and the stories seemed rather lacking and childish. I should check again now that the fandom has had room to develop. I don't really have any shipping preferences PoTC movies-- the way the movies were set up just about anything could have happened.

My Dad watched A.W.E. with me too and seemed to enjoy it--more than Pirates 2, anyway, which he just thought was silly. And it is. That's just the genre.

Have caught up completely in scans for Fullmetal Alchemist. Man is that an AWESOME series or what? I LOVE, LOVE, love, the recent story line with Ed in the far North. In manga-canon, it's Scar who kills Winry's parents, and now they have to work together . . . . . there's tons more (including Prince Ling ^.^ <3 ), and it's worth the effort to read the manga to find out what happens next. The changes start becoming really noticable around book six or so. I certainly was not satisfied with the movie-ending, and the current manga is making up for the end.

Also catching up on Hunter X Hunter, am at chapter 244. Man, that manga artist has gotten really sketchy lately with his artwork, but it's nice to have more story.

My latest read, though, has been Hajime no Ippo, which I've found far more enjoyable than I thought it would be. My only beef with it so far is that it feels very unrealistic as far as how Ippo changes into becoming a pro boxer. His new techniques are learned within weeks and months, and it only takes three months for a complete beginner at boxing to beat a young man who has trained to become a professional boxer since he was ten years old. Also, Ippo hasn't lost a battle yet. I'm sure there's a loss coming, but . . . well, it's not at all like Hikaru no Go, where Hikaru learns Go from a Master and only slowly starts becoming a Pro himself. But HnI's artwork is awesome, although I think artist who drew Yu Yu Hakusho must certainly have read it himself. There's a character named Yuusuke in Ippo who looks EXACTLY like Kuwabara, same greased hair and everything.



Yeah. I've been having fun this Christmas break. ^.^ Oh, and I wanted to show off my new icon, too. Well, I downloaded it, but it's still pretty sweet. Iroh lives on, even if he does have a crappy new voice actor. *cries.*

May be deleted. Need Photographynewbie's permission to post to D.A. ^.^

. . . BEAT THAT.


And I made them both myself, too.

So here are the chocolate crepes:





and the Okonomiyaki :-)




(Modern 'Yaki because I put Ramen in them.)


Here's the process for the Okonomiyaki:

1 egg
1 cup flour
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 teaspoon baking powder
dried ginger & garlic to taste
finely chopped cabbage (I used two leaves, but one person said four. depends on how much you like it. >.<)
1 can shrimp
1 package ramen
crumpled, dry seaweed


Mix together egg, flour, baking powder, water, and soy sauce for base. Add cabbage, shrimp & seaweed. Cook packaged ramen (not the kind w/ oil packet), add to above mixture. Turn stove to medium heat or about what you'd use for pancakes, cook 'yaki about three or four minutes each side until brown. Put on plate, serve with Okonomiyaki sauce if you have it. I used Soy Sauce again and it was just fine. ^.^

Tasted great! Which is good, cause it makes a lot more than you would think. I'll have leftover batter and I doubt anyone in my family will be adventurous enough to try them.



Chocolate Banana crepes:

1 ounce semi-sweet chocolate
1 teaspoon butter
2 eggs
1 cup flour
1 1/4 cups milk
1 T sugar
2 tablespoons oil
pinch salt

ricotta cheese
sugar & vanilla flavor to taste (or whipped cream.)
bananas
honey


Melt chocolate and butter over very low heat, let sit during next process so that it has a chance to cool.
Batter for crepes is eggs, flour, milk, sugar, oil, and the pinch of salt. Whisk together until lumps are gone and batter is smooth. Could probably use a blender, but don't over-blend. If chocolate isn't hot anymore, add to batter and stir in until incorporated. (I didn't have a lot of luck with this. Probably next time I will try Hershey's cocoa powder and see how that does.) Let sit in fridge for at least one hour.

Stir batter again. Heat up non-stick baking pan medium heat and spray w/ vegetable oil. If you're using a large one, 1/4 cup of batter per crepe should do. Pour in pan, swirl around carefully. Cook 45-50 seconds top side and fifteen seconds the next one. Transfer to plate outside on the bottom. First crepe will look awful because of the spray oil, so discard it, but next ones are pretty.

Crepes are EASY. There's no need to be intimidated by them.


For the filling, I used ricotta cheese mixed with vanilla flavoring and sugar, spooned it onto a crepe and added bananas on top. Then I squeezed honey onto the bananas, carefully rolled it up, and ate it. Delicious.
If you have whipped creme you could use that instead of the cheese. Both ways would be good I think. If you really want to get extravagant, you could also pour some chocolate drizzle on top of the bananas too. Whoa.

don't have to go back to school until Jan 14. Sweet.

In the meantime, I've been cooking. Today I have made chocolate crepes with bananas and honey, and now I am cooking a Jill-version of Okonomiyaki right now as soon as the pan heats up-- mainly because we don't have the proper ingredients and I am fudging because I want to try it. And I don't even LIKE omelettes or cabbage normally. I am crazy. . . .

I'll post some pictures later! I think the pan is hot now.

You know, you could replace Death Star with Vista and Windows ME and Gateway. ^.^

At least XP is a reliable system. I'm taking a computer class next semester and the bookstore was telling me I had to have Vista for it. No way am I installing it on my Mac or on the upstairs computer. >.< I'll use the labs at school; they've got Vista.

but I can't seem to bring myself to do it. maybe in a few minutes.

Oh, but I was gong to write down what I've downloaded so far onto my MacBook. ^.*

NeoOffice (Awesome texteditor)
Schoolhouse (haven't really had a chance to try it out yet)
Maelstrom (yes, like the old Mac version I played as a kid)
N_v14 (another game, with a ninja!)
Glyphh3, a joust port to Mac OS X
Glider ^.^
Quinn
****

AND in my dashboard:

Igo program
Daily Comics
This day in history
Stone matching game
Solitaire w/ bunch of games in it
madlibs



I'm pretty happy so far. I still have to decide if I want to download, say GIMP to my computer so that I have a drawing program.

See, I'm back again, like a little lost penny. (man that was bad. Oh well. I'm happy, deal with it, I get silly.)

Whoo-hoo! I rock-- all A's in my courses this semester-- sign language, History 108, GE class, Writing 101, and Art History. ^.^ Now if I can do as well for spring 2008 I'll be happy.




Pizza-slacker night tonight. Means us kids'll fix up pizza and watch movies while eating them in the living room. Basically, while the cats are away the mice will play type deal. I'm about ready for some pizza.

are EXPENSIVE. Especially textbooks. Especially when classes require two books at once.

So, I'm officially signed up for all my classes. I'm still debating whether I would like to take sign language 2 this year or not. It would fill my humanities requirement and the teacher is retiring at the end of the year, but it IS a night class again and it's on tuesday/thursday instead of just one day a week. But since it is in Paintsville and Mom already goes to town those nights anyway it might not be that much of a problem.

and also getting back my papers. I'll probably print a copy of my paper on lying for Mr. Begley and see if he wants it sent to him via e-mail, because he wanted it to use for his students next semester as an example of a proper 'exemplification' paper. (awesome. And I go a hundred percent on it, too.) Hopefully paper #3 will have a great grade as well, although there's really not much better than having a very strict teacher giving such a high grade and asking to use it in the future.

Also downloaded Tofu for my macintosh, which is like columned reading in chunks. I had a bit of a time getting my gutenberg document to work on it, but now that it is it's PERFECT. Seriously. So much better than Mac's text reader it isn't even funny. I'd call Tofu an essential free download program if other people read as much on their computer as I do. I discovered a lot of the classics that I have on my bookshelf due to project gutenberg, especially since I didn't read very many classics when I was growing up. I'm currently reading a Rafael Sabatini book, which you can't find anywhere. Well, I found Scaramouche, Captain Blood, and the Sea Hawk, but he wrote tons of novels and nobody has them, even used bookstores. >.<

Have I said how much I love my new computer yet? I do. Seriously . . . ^.^ I just wish it could open Classic folders, because we have a lot of old macintosh games and programs. I need to figure out how to emulate, that's all there is to it. What I've read seems to make sense, I'm just not confident enough to try them out myself. That way I can run DOSbox games too later once I know the basic theories behind emulation. I'd like to play old games like Lemmings, Prince of Persia, King's Quest, etc., on this thing.

Sign language final is over. I used a song from They Might be Giants called "Another first kiss" which is really sappy, but I think I did pretty good signing direct English to it. That is, the song wasn't interpretive and I had to do ALL of the words. It was faster than pretty much everyone else's, too. I messed up on one part but was still able to keep going, so I don't think I did too badly.

Tomorrow, of course, I will pick up my final papers from the english class, pay for next semester's books and classes. I looked online and my score was 97%, but I don't know if he had already added in my extra credit stuff or not.

I am so looking forward to Christmas break. Maybe linz and I will go to huntington again to look at a new load of scrap fabric that's supposed to come in at the fabric store we visit. The manager said she had 3/4 of a ton coming in from Nashville. That's a seriously LARGE amount of fabric. I'm hoping there will be cool batiks or Japanese-y/Chinese prints as well, because those are awesome.

I'm trying to think of a really good 'everybody' christmas present for my friends, like a cookie mix or a soup mix in a jar,so I think I will look around online to see if I can find anything like that.

Two finals left: History and Art class. Neither are cumulative, so that's okay. I think I will do all right on them. I already know what the essay question will be if I get the same test as my friend.

Had the last class of my first semester yesterday, so I'm pretty happy.

And also: I got an original painting from a friend in Poland that she sent me via mail. It is so gorgeous. Obviously if I want to send her anything in the return in hopes of getting it to her realatively-ish close to Christmas time I'd better start working on it now!

Sounds like my sister may be going to Huntington tomorrow so I'll see if I can't tag along.


Tom Lehrer is hilarious. I've just been watching old video clips while he plays the piano, and he is a genius. I highly recommend "Poisoning the Pigeons" or "Masochism Tango," but his songs are great.

Well, I don't know about you guys, but much joy was had at our Thanksgiving FEAST. Mom roasted a twenty-two pound Turkey and we had a LOT of food.

Here were some of the dishes:



cranberry sauce

*deviled eggs

large green and black olives

sliced hard salami *unfortunately not as good as California Salami, but fairly decent.*

artichoke hearts

*Challah bread

mashed sweet potatoes with brown sugar and nuts on top

multitudinous potatoes

beautiful-looking green beans

stuffing

pomegranate seeds

the TURKEY

weird lumpy gravy

Mom had starfruit and parsley on the side to decorate stuff with, but they're nasty so they don't count

Sparkling apple cider to drink for everyone.

and later apple pie

and *pumpkin pie--

with whipped cream.




am I leaving some stuff out? I don't think so . . . anyway, the stuff with the asterisks were what I did on my own to help Mom and Linz out. So I made Challah bread for the second time (I still haven't got the hang of braiding four strands) and pumpkin pie for the first time, and also I made deviled eggs which were DELICIOUS. I don't put cruddy relish in it, but I did have mayo and mustard and a bit of red pepper spice with paprika sprinkled over the top.

Fortunately everything I did came out great. ^.^

But anyway, I guess this list doesn't really show how much food was simply on our table tonight. Yum. And what's more, there's tons of leftover turkey.

you know how the room looks ten times worse after you pull everything out trying to find a place to put it? I've just been cleaning it (this is by order of the father-person) during this weekend, and right now it is a MESS. Seriously. I've taken out about three shelves worth of books that I have no space for, but don't want to sell unless I get a half-way decent price for them. I have no place to keep my collection of Jacques books anymore, even though seven of them are signed. I'm trying to decide if I need to move my manga collection (which is not too large, I've only got about thirty-five volumes or so) to a different shelf as well, but I kind of like where they are right now.

I got into reading classics in the past couple of years too (due to Project Gutenberg, mostly), and those take up HUGE amounts of space. Because if I like them I try to go ahead and buy them too. Modern writers like to be more plithy, but man . . . writers during the last century act like they got paid by the word, even if they didn't.

I've got up a new shelf for all my adult sci-fi and fantasy books as well and have finally taken out my Lloyd Alexander books. *sniffle*. Those bring back good memories. He was one of the first authors I really paid for all of his books on my own as a kid, back when I got only eight dollars a week for cleaning the house and my allowance. Back in those days I really did spend all my money on books.

I've also been doing TONS of laundry in hopes of helping out my disaster of a closet.

So far all this has taken about five or six hours and I'd say it's not even half-way clean yet.

I have no idea yet what I am going to do about my art stuff yet. They need to be framed or stored somehow though. Soft pastel gets everywhere otherwise, even when you spray it. Maybe I'll buy a 16 by 20 art portfolio since I have been going large recently.

I'm not a pack rat. Really and truly. I just like books and art a LOT and those two things take up a lot of space. >.< woe is me.

So, I now have my first laptop computer sitting on the desk installing Leopard downstairs. Man that's taking forever in comparison with Tiger. >.< But hopefully it will be worth it. One thing that amazed me was how FAST it was to get connected to the internet. That would never happen on a Windows computer.

Also, I don't know what the big deal about heating up is. I've already had my computer on for about forty minutes and I felt the bottom and it was not that hot at all. It's a LOT cooler than my Toshiba.

Doesn't look like any games at all came with it, but I mostly play online games anyway.

Yeah, I've got 11,147 words on my NaMoWriMo novel. It's day seven and I'm keeping up! I thought I was behind, but actually, not! How awesome is that anyway? Tomorrow I'll need to start working on actual *plot;* so far it is just character descriptions and introspections of the past. But how do you do something to characters who are stuck out in the middle of nowhere, trapped in miles of desertish, stony land?



****

My friends at college are such geeks. They started talking about Naruto, Death Note, Bleach and Inu Yasha and I was thinking to myself, yep. Uh-uh. I've watched pretty much all of those, does this make me a geek too? But I'm not usually vocal about my obsessions. My brother especially loves to tease me. The best anime, he asserts, is Cowboy Bebop. Only Myazaki tops Bebop. Of course I agree with him, but I can't dismiss awesome stuff like Full Metal Alchemist or Naruto either.

And One Piece REALLY develops characters well and has good fight scenes once they actually happen-- and is funny, despite the odd artwork. (it grows on you, seriously. I never thought I'd watch either Naruto or One Piece. But Japanese with English subtitles is entertaining instead of sucky.) And then there's ones like Hikaru no Go, Hunter X Hunter and Haibane.

Yay for Avatar. The latest three episodes were amazing. The Puppetmaster was spooky, the Dreamsequence nightmares were awesome, and overall I thoroughly enjoyed the better writing.

Because, again, the Beach Episode SUCKED.

But I am all caught up again.

^.^

Right, so, the computer is finally ORDERED.

It should arrive sometime through the 9 and 15th of November.

I'm happy.

I'm nervous.

But I am finally getting a decent laptop that won't screw me over every time I need to use it. Hooray. Down with Windows and Vista. Let's hope this Macintosh treats me all right. >.< I'm so sick and tired of Windows crap.

******

One of my friends at college is becoming an aunt. She is so giddy it was almost hilarious. She was giggling all throughout writing class. More than usual, that is.

*******

And lo, the great writer is slightly behind in NaMoWriMo. Never fear. This afternoon I shall catch up again.