Oh noes! Rice two nights in a row!

Last night I made a successful curry.
If you just happen to have onions, garlic, a few carrots and a few potatoes, you're golden!

2 carrots, sliced into thin rounds
2 potatoes, diced small
1 can peas, undrained
1/2 C red lentils
1 can light coconut milk
1 onion, diced
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
1 T oil (I used peanut!)
1 T curry powder
1 T brown sugar
1 t salt
1 t jarred ginger
1 1/2 cans water

Make rice.
Dump* everything in a pot and bring it to a boil, lower heat a bit and cover for 10m or so to cook carrots and potatoes.
Uncover and simmer for a long time, as long as you have.
There are a million recipes on the web for curries, so go forth and curry!

*Okay, so dump is a generalization here. First, saute onion, then garlic in oil. Then add potatoes and carrots and cook a bit, then add curry powder, mix well, then red lentils, mix well, then salt and sugar, mix well, then ginger, mix well (do you see where I'm going with this?), then the peas undrained and then the coconut milk and then the water. 1 1/2 cans of water is a poor measure, I apologize, but it was what was at hand and really, you need to cover the veggies plus a little.

Knit the mitts in Heilo, an on the thicker side of sport weight sport weight yarn. Found another error- just a wee one!

No reading. Must get to library- stat!
I will give you a retroacted ?grandfathered in? book review (meaning, I read this a while ago).
My local bookstore has this thing where if you're a member, you have access to this one shelf where they put all the books they are sent by publishers ahead of time. So I was in there, looking at Artisan Bread in Five Minutes (props to Minnesotans!) and I checked out the shelf. I'm scanning, scanning... Doctorow! Little Brother. Well, I've read Cory Doctorow's stuff online, and really enjoyed it, so I grabbed it right away. It was a truly fun read and I learned a lot. It's aimed at young adults, but it's such a fascinating (I think the term is 'cyberpunk') world he creates and you get pretty attached to the characters. It made me really paranoid. Like even when the SPOILER love interest is introduced I was all like "She's a plant! She's a spy! She'll kill you in your sleep!" Gah, I must be getting old, I couldn't even watch the latest in the ?what's that trilogy of movies with the dude and he's like, always running from the government?...
anyway! How's that for a review.

I have lapsed in my not double spacing after a period ways.

I made something yesterday.

















Be gentle, it's my first tutorial...

















Here's what you'll need.
A bunch of flowers, I found one with three roses on the stem. And some filler plant like things.

A scissors.

Some florist's tape.

Some pens.

1. Remove cap from pen.

2. Cut one of the flowers off of the main stem (if doing the filler, skip this). 'Cut'; I use the word loosely, what I did was cut the plastic around the wire, then bend and bend and bend while muttering "Fatigue, d**n you!" under my breath.

















3. Start wrapping the florist's tape around the base of the flower, being careful not to get any of the leaves trapped in there. Stretch the tape as you turn the flower- this is how florist's tape adheres to itself! When it stretches, it gets sticky! It's really cool! I had to Google that!

















4. Okay, once you've wrapped the base of the flower a few times, stick the (non-writing) end of the pen next to the flower, with half of the width of the tape over the end of the pen. Stretch the tape around once and then start working your way down the flower (without stretching), on a diagonal, with just the edge overlapping the previous wrap.

















5. When you get to the bottom, cut your stem again if need be, wrap the florist's tape straight around once, then start wrapping back up.
Oh yeah, if you're going to do any little leaves branching off on the side, take the leaf off on the way down and then on the way up, stick it on there and wrap the tape around the base, sort of sticking it onto your pen.

6. When you get back up to the top, carefully streeeetch the tape tightly around the bottom of the flower and rip off. It takes a few tries to get this down so that they tape adheres nicely, I found that if I can sort of wrinkle it in there above the pen and below the base of the flower it works nicely.
7. Tada, you have made a flower pen.

















Now, this may seem cheesy, and it is, but if you have a preschooler, and they need a gift for their teacher, it's nice. I think it's cheesy, but when I was teaching, I got one from a student, and it became my favorite pen because I could a) always find it and b) it was identifiably mine. Plus, writing with a flower!!!!