May. 1st, 2008

mousme: A view of a woman's legs from behind, wearing knee-high rainbow socks. The rest of the picture is black and white. (Baker's 12)
I am spending Walpurgis Night at work, defending the country from terrorists and not really waiting for spring (it's chilly enough to make me think that we may have skipped summer and gone directly to autumn), but I thought I'd post this anyway.

[livejournal.com profile] owldaughter and [livejournal.com profile] bodhifox came up with the idea for a Beltane Bake Day the other day. The concept is simple: bake something on May 1st and, if you can, post a picture in your blog/LJ.

Here are the rules, quoted quasi-verbatim, with minor alterations because I'm posting late:


Now technically speaking May Day, AKA Beltane (Beltaine, Bealtinne, Latha Bealltainn, Walpurgis Night, etc.) is the first of May, traditionally beginning at sundown on April 30 and carrying forward to sundown on May 1. This year it happens to fall on a Thursday, and so I am declaring the Beltane Bake Day a THREE-DAY HOLIDAY! Yes, it will begin on May 1 (however you want to determine when it begins) and end at midnight on May 3. This gives everyone a chance to bake with a relaxed schedule whether they work full-time outside the home or otherwise.


The rules:

1. Bake something.

2. Your baked item must be from scratch. No mixes, unless they are an ingredient in a multi-ingredient recipe. (Using a pudding mix in a cake recipe, for example.)

3. Brag about it in your on-line journal. This is your opportunity to wax poetic about your love of baking, and/or the specific product you have baked, and/or the process and your experience baking it. If it falls flat, share your woes with the rest of us and we will console you.

4. Brownie points to those who post a picture! (Seriously, what other kind of points belong in a baking holiday?) If you don't have a camera, describe it as best you can. Or borrow one from a friend, bribing them with a taste of your baked item!

5. Because bragging inevitably engenders envy, people will likely ask for your recipe, so you can post it as well. Unless it's a closely guarded secret, in which case you can gleefully withhold it and taunt us all.



That's all there is to it! This event is simply to give us all a reason to bake something and talk about it, sharing it in the only way we can with people scattered all over the continents. Your baked item can be as simple or as fancy as you like.

I propose that we use the original post over at my main Owls' Court non-LJ journal as a home base, so to speak: When you've participated and posted about it in your journal, leave a note there with a link to your post so others can find it. Feel free to repost the link to that original post in your own journals to share the event with as many people as you like.

You have three days in which to plot, plan, and prepare. Have fun!

(There's a redirection issue linking to the original post, so here's the URL to copy and paste into your browser: http://www.owldaughter.org/blog/?p=2145)
mousme: A view of a woman's legs from behind, wearing knee-high rainbow socks. The rest of the picture is black and white. (Reason is a Flawed Tool)
I'm going to talk more about working night shift, because it's all I'm doing lately and it's eating what's left of my brain.

Another new and exciting facet of working night shift is that it sticks me in this weird limbo where I feel all energetic around 03:00 (so, right about now), and I start thinking up projects in my head. I have about five or six projects lurking at the back of my mind. So I think to myself: "Cool! I have all this energy and all these projects, I can probably get started on them later today!"

For instance, I want to do a major purge of all the extraneous stuff I have in the apartment before I move. That way, I will spare myself having to pack a whole bunch of stuff that I don't ever use.

I have laundry to do, and floors to wash (yes, even using the Scooba, I still have some prep work to do), and cooking and baking projects. Cooking and baking means I need to stop by a grocery store, etc.

I get all revved up about all this, which keeps me going until, oh, about 05:30 or even 06:00. Then I start getting a bit tired, since my shift is nearly over. By the time 06:30 rolls around, I'm ready to go home and pass out.

Then I think to myself: "But what about all my projects?"

Myself answers: "It's 06:30. You can't go to the grocery store because it's closed. If you do laundry now, you need to stay awake for the entire cycle, so you can then hang it outside to dry. Multiply that by three loads of laundry, and you'll have been up all morning. When exactly were you planning on sleeping?"

So I generally get to bed somewhere around 07:30 or 08:00 at the very latest. Sometimes if I have a really important errand I'll get up at 14:00 to run it, but I don't usually have the energy for more than that. So I go home and go back to bed. Today, since I had a couple of errands to run, I split my "night" in half, and ended up sleeping from 08:30 (I had trouble getting to sleep this morning) to 13:30, and then from 16:00 to 20:00. I left for work at 21:30. Can we see where this leaves me no time for the aforementioned shiny projects?

Now, the rational part of me knows that I have no energy for anything except sleeping and working when I'm on night shift, and especially not when I'm working night shift *and* overtime. Right now, I'm working fourteen days straight, for a total of 128 hours. This will all be over next Monday, when I'll be on holiday for a little less than a week. The rational part of me reassures me that it's not the end of the world that my laundry isn't done, that the floors aren't clean, that the cat pans need more attention than I'm currently giving them, and that I have six unattended projects in the works. The rational part of me is being very forgiving.

The irrational side of my brain is pitching several screaming, kicking fits every day. It yells that I'm going to be moving soon (never mind that it's going to be a *minimum* of six to eight weeks before that happens under the best of circumstances), that nothing's being done, that I'm wasting all my daylight hours by sleeping, and that I'm frittering away the entier summer ZOMG. Yeah. Did I mention irrational?

I'm just glad this is going to be over soon. I think anything more than two solid weeks of night shift might just drive me round the proverbial bend.
mousme: A view of a woman's legs from behind, wearing knee-high rainbow socks. The rest of the picture is black and white. (Easy to follow instructions)
It appears that my happy new camera can't load pictures onto my computer, because I don't have enough RAM to install the software. Cleopatra, my faithful laptop, is old and crotchety, and didn't come with that much RAM to begin with.

So... computer people out there: is there a way to improve the RAM on a 2002 Mac iBook? Or am I screwed?

Egg Bread!

May. 1st, 2008 08:03 pm
mousme: A view of a woman's legs from behind, wearing knee-high rainbow socks. The rest of the picture is black and white. (Baker's 12)
So I decided to experiment for the Beltane Bake Day, and I tried my hand at egg bread. I have no idea how it will taste, but it looks okay...

Behind a cut in case the pictures turn out to be huge )

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