I have just successfully brewed mead. This is something I've kind of always wanted to do. In college one of my roommates was a biochemistry major who worked in a lab on a project to determine the precise locations of proteins on the cell walls of yeast. He decided somewhere during this that he just couldn't get enough of yeast cultures, so he began brewing mead in our kitchen.
He started off using bread yeast, and did some recipe that involved a long fermentation. Then he got busy, so he left it kind of too long. By the time he siphoned the yeast out into a plastic pitcher (we were all class, people), it was... Well, he gave me a glass of it, and I took a sip, and made a face. It was strong, somewhat sour, a bit pungent, rather horrible.
But he'd spent a long time on it. So I smiled, and waited until he looked the other way, and then held my nose and drank the whole thing down.

A little while later, noticing my glass was empty, he happily poured me more.
I waited a bit, and did the same thing again.

Then I fell over and lay on the floor for about twelve hours while the carpet talked to me and fairies buzzed around my head.

We'll just say it wasn't the most mellow drunk I've ever had.

But I remain convinced that mead is great, and I've had some I bought in liquor stores that was OK, but expensive. You can get it at premier for $15 a wine bottle. And it's good, but it's not as good as $15 wine. (I normally buy wine that's between $5-10 a bottle, with the $15-20 range being saved for either proven favorites from vineyards I know, or something personally recommended by a friend. Hey. I am all class, people. Also I've been working really hard to NOT develop expensive tastes, with limited success. [Sadly I can't drink Johnny Red but must drink Johnny Black. I refuse to try any of the higher grades for fear I'll like them still better. Bastards.])

So I made a "quick mead" recipe I found on the Internet. Side note: did you know we have an excellent home brewing supply store right in Kenmore? Yes! Niagara Tradition, on Sheridan just past Military. Friendly staff, decent stock, very knowledgeable and helpful, and a good selection. So there's my plug.

Here is my recipe, and in true Livejournal fashion, about fifteen pages of mumbling:

I invested about $20 into this venture, buying sanitizer, plastic tubing, four fermentation locks, yeast, honey, and ginger. (The last two I got at Wegman's. If anyone knows any good farmer's markets or whatevers that'll sell you unprocessed honey, I want to try that next. The Coop maybe?)
As primary fermenting containers, I didn't purpose-buy anything-- I'm just using the big glass growlers you can buy beer in at Premier. They have like a two-dollar deposit, but the same bottle costs four dollars at Niagara Tradition, so I think I'm doing good. And if I want more, well then I'll just have to drink more fancy beer, which is a terrible fate only not at all terrible. (The fermentation locks and rubber stoppers to fit them (size 6.5) are about $1.50/$2 each and are infinitely reusable.)

My first batch is a success: light, slightly sweet, slightly fizzy, tasting of honey and ginger and a little bit of yeast. I don't know if it's called "quick mead" because it is only supposed to take four days (I took a week because I had it in too cold a room at first), or because it is sparkling, but it's good. Weak, and probably mostly non-alcoholic, but quite good. (Fermenting it longer might get rid of the yeasty taste, but it would also make it less sweet. I think I like it as it is.)

I have a second batch going but it's something more complex, requiring 18 days fermentation, then another 2 weeks secondary fermentation in the bottle.
I think I need to buy a bottle capper. But on the bright side, the fact that I haven't taken back my deposit bottles means I am well-stocked in glass bottles. Five cents apiece ain't bad for these suckers. I should take the cans back, though.

ok 2 things in this post.
Yes we are attending a lesbian shotgun wedding.
It's not... exactly... a shotgun wedding. It's a civil partnership ceremony. (You can't call them weddings!! Weddings are for heterosexuals. But at least there are civil partnerships now.) And it was scheduled before my friend got knocked up. But she will be quite obviously pregnant for the ceremony.
See, they scheduled the ceremony, and said, "Once we're legal partners, we'll have a child!" And that was good. But you know, the human body is not a machine. So my friend figured, what the hell, let's start trying now. They've had this reciprocal agreement worked out for ages with a m/m couple down the street, that one of them would donate the, you know, necessary, when it came time. So my friend figured she'd start making the attempt now, and since it usually takes six months to a year to be successful, she'd most likely get pregnant shortly after the ceremony, or perhaps just before, which would also be nice.
Anyway...
Yeah, it worked the first time. So she'll be nearly ready to pop by the end of April. And so it's going to look like a shotgun wedding. As long as they're married before the baby's born, it's all legal, and I think they'll both be allowed to put their names on the birth certificate, which is the important part.


I stayed in a hostel in London (with said friend, actually! Ten years ago now) and it wasn't bad at all, but (e:zobar) is young and not wise in the ways of the world. It is fine and I really doubt anyone will molest his butt. Not with me there to protect him.
But the exchange rate... oh my GOD, I may have to sell my body to pay for booze. Because everything's, like, Manhattan prices there-- what costs you a fiver here costs you a fiver there, and beer is like, seven-- except it's POUNDS not DOLLARS and a pound is TWO DOLLARS NOW! *faints*
It was $1.67 when I was there. It was a long time ago. It was painful even then. Yikes.

Anyhow.
The second thing:
Chita!!
Napping with me:

Yes she's licking Z's beard in the photo below. He calls her his "assistant" now that he's working from home, and she sits on his lap and licks herself and sometimes him, and headbutts him while he's on conference calls. It's cute.

Missing Image ;(

Missing Image ;(

Aw I guess I can't get those to work-- they're really big files but I figured it could resize them. Bummer.

Apparently if you're not on (e:strip) you're not considered human company.
Chita should have her own (e:strip) journal so (e:zobar) would take her more seriously. (E:Chita) isn't taken.

So I am sorry I do not update more. I am on strike over at Livejournal for today-there is a Content Strike protesting the latest round of, "We Own The Site So Fuck You Who Generate All Its Content And Actually Make It Interesting To Anyone In The World, Including Our Advertisers" wankery. You realize now that LJ has been sold so many times it actually belongs to a Russian company with weird shady Russian ties to Russian things.
But apparently some of them are Jewish, and so the fact that the opposition has chosen to have a Content Strike on Purim is Deeply Significant. Which means, at the moment, that I am either Part of the Solution, or maybe I'm Part of the Problem, over there.
I wish I didn't have my entire adult life invested in the archives there. I am serious, it is my entire adult life. I got that journal in 2001, when I was just about to turn 21. I've updated it almost daily ever since. (I think I've gone up to a week without touching it, but that's unusual.) It's not about the site, it's not about the server architecture, it's absolutely not about the graphic design. But it is, somewhat, about the communities. I've had diaries on and off since I was barely literate, and could never keep them up, because nobody would ever read them. Moving to an online journal (I still don't think of it or treat it as a blog) has not only made me stick with it, but is also far more responsible than my $100,000 creative writing degree for any maturation or improvement that has occurred in my writing. It's also made it possible for me to engage in any kind of introspection / retrospection about my life, because I have no real other records of what I did, thought, said, or felt at any given time in my life, and my memories, where they exist, are often wrong. Memory's a tricky thing.

There's also the added controversy that... well, yes, two or three members of my roller derby league are also members of Livejournal, and read my LJ. I write on there about my whole life, including derby. When I wrote about our last bout, one of the readers linked it to her whole team. (I sort of half-expected she would, but I hadn't said anything I felt was controversial, so I wasn't worried. HA!)
There was a small explosion. And the league's governing Board thought that perhaps it could tell me what to do in regards to my own personal journal. I simply excised any mention of the league by its full name and told them if they wanted more than that, they could fuck themselves. Not in so many words, but more or less. If I'm not going to let some shady Russians who own my servers tell me what I can and can't write about, I'm certainly not letting some overzealous volunteers in an organization that has taken over my life tell me what to do. For one thing, the volunteers don't have Putin on their side.

Anyhow. That's my deep thoughts on "blogging", a word I hate. I am sincerely and truly glad that I have a site I can journal on whose owner I can get drunk with on a semi-regular basis. (E:paul), you are better than lj user=bradfitz, in that I know you and you don't take money from shady Russians.
Well, that I know of.

And here's the real litmus test of whether roller derby peeps read my blog here too (how thoroughly am I being stalked?): the kerfuffle is that I dared to mention that there was controversy over the officiating at our last bout (March 8th), and that I felt like the skaters have really improved from last season but the refs haven't had the same training opportunities and may need some more support. Apparently saying that on the Internet is tantamount to tossing a primed grenade into one of our Board meetings.
I am thinking of making myself a t-shirt (I used to do that a lot, hand-silkscreen/stenciling t-shirts) that just says Trouble on it. I already have one of those O'Reilly t-shirts from ThinkGeek that says "I'm blogging this", which I may just wear to practice next week and see if anyone's head fucking explodes. HA HA.
Sorry. I actually already have a shirt stencil I made in college, that just says, "difficult", because that's what my mother told me I was.
Anyone else want one?

I'm also sort of slowly edging into radical size-acceptance politics. My experience over a year ago of having a doctor be completely disgusted with me and unable to help me at all because I was "obese" has been wearing at me, and so when somebody linked to an article at Shapely Prose (http://www.kateharding.net) I read it, and then spent the rest of the week devouring the site's archives. I love Kate Harding, but I also love the two other women who contribute there, Fillyjonk and Sweet Machine. And I discovered that Sweet Machine is ME:
i.e., Too fat to not be fat, too skinny to be accepted as fat, completely fucked when it comes to finding clothes that fit, etc.
I also got kinda addicted to the blog Junkfoodscience, because OMG SCIENCE. (Incidentally, that's the source for the study (e:Zobar) was writing about the other day.)
The movement is more commonly called Fat Acceptance but I'm more interested in the concept that (radical as it seems) it's just not right to judge someone based solely on their body shape/size/condition. Even on their perceived health. A person is a person, whether they're 135 or 535 pounds. Most size-based discrimination is really income-based or race-based, but hidden behind an acceptable veneer. And almost 100% of the "concern" people express at other people who are too fat, too thin, or engaging in "risky" behaviors like having a glass of wine while pregnant, having a cigarette ever, or, you know, walking down the street while fat: it's the same as concern trolls on the Internet, and it's not about concern for a stranger whose life you know nothing about. It's about the person expressing the concern feeling morally superior. All the "drive-by mommies" who tell other mothers they're not parenting right because their kid is only wearing one sock because the other fell off: Concern trolls. Concern trolls. Concern trolls.
The moral of the story is, mind your own fucking business unless you truly, truly think you can help. Be fucking nice to people and have some goddamn manners. That's all it's really about. And don't assume you know everything because you read a study in the Times that said something, because media-reported studies are usually incomplete, biased, or just plain fabricated. (Just go read junkfoodscience's archives. I'm serious. It's addictive. And fascinating. And depressing. Did you know being obese raises your risk for... surviving a heart attack, or not having one at all? Yup. Take that, concern trolls. ,
And, ha ha, )
So anyhow. I'm kind of glad that this obsession is one that (e:Zobar) can kind of share. He gets shit for being a skinny tall person constantly. I get shit for having fat tits all the time. It's a common interest. Go figure.
So, that's me. How have you all been? I do read on here occasionally, but not enough.

I think I am going to become a size-acceptance activist.
But I am not necessarily going to do this in a conventional way.
I am going to do it by making porn.
I think that would be awesome.

I recently got my fat ass onto a scale to see if I'd lost any weight, since I've been tracking my caloric intake and half-heartedly restricting calories. Sparkpeople.com recommended for my weight and height that I aim for 1600-1900 calories a day, and I went with that.

I weigh 200 pounds now.
I had never been more than 19....3ish... 5ish... it's not a very accurate scale.
But I'm 200 now.

People have been telling me I look good, I look thinner.
I'm not; my size 14s don't fit me. Which means I'm back in the not-misses'-size, not-plus-size ghetto where I was before I started waitressing and skating.
I've got much more toned upper arms than ever, and my thighs are like rocks, but muscle is heavier than fat.

I now have a BMI of 31.3. Anything over 30 is considered "obese". When I had that run in with the doctor last year who yelled at me to lose weight and told me I was "dangerously obese", I had a BMI of 29. Which is Overweight.

(Did I blog on here that I found out that the knee pain that sent me to her office in the first place was patellar tendonitis caused by improper arch support making my feet pronated so the knees weren't bending properly but had too much lateral pressure? Which is, by the way, entirely unrelated to my weight? Not that she even connected the knee pain with the weight, it's just that the weight is the only thing she saw fit to discuss with me. I've a feeling that if I'd come in bleeding to death she'd still have lectured me about my weight, as if it were relevant.)

Anyway. I just wrote a huge rant on my Livejournal about how I am not ashamed of my fat titties and fuck you if you are (ashamed for me, that is). (http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/981187.html)

I really do think I should at least do some pinup modeling.
If I could dance I would do performance art.

But I'm tired of feeling ashamed that I don't feel as bad as I ought to about the fact that I'm a fucking fatass.

So... if anyone's ever wanted to practice their portrait/pinup photography skills, I am a willing model. Let's make art.

And then sell it to porn sites because hell, I need money. I have a lesbian shotgun wedding to attend in Europe this spring and I don't have the dough for it.

How often do you get to go to a lesbian shotgun wedding???


p.s. I never shared my roller derby team photos here!




There I am! Clinically obese.

I'm x-posting this from Myspace because I finished writing it and liked it, and figured it was as much about Buffalo as about roller derby. (I tend to compartmentalize my journals, so (e:strip) is for Buffalo things while Myspace is for roller derby things.) To contextualize, on Myspace I've recently had cause to comment on my high pain levels; my knee is injured and this weekend my team had two very intense practices that both left me very, very sore.

So, in short, I'm really miserable at the moment and am writing this while self-medicated, so I'll be very interested to see how this appears to me when I reread it tomorrow.


So: Handles.

This is kind of a roundabout story, so just hang on to the end. I promise there's a punchline.

I live in this kind of weird little house. My boyfriend's great aunt bought this house when she first arrived in Buffalo after fleeing wartime Latvia. They'd had to spend some time in refugee camps along the way, so it took them a couple years to get here: let's just say the house must date from 1950.
Great-Aunt Matilda [that's her real name] lived here alone; her only son died at 16 from lukemia, and her husband died of heart failure in the llate '70s or early '80s. Her sister died in the early 90s. She was a very alone woman, with only her neices to care for her-- though they did so attentively and faithfully, still they were women with their own families to mind. One by one the aging population of Latvians who had made the journey with her died of old age, leaving Great-Aunt Matilda more and more isolated.
So Great-Aunt Matilda got by mostly on her own.
She was a Latvian, and a refugee, as I mentioned, so her survival instincts were well-honed, and she had very frugal and meticulous habits. She clung with the stubbornness that had helped her escape the Soviets to her independence, insisting she could manage, that she was fine, that there was nothing wrong. Even as her health failed, she stayed in the house and did everything herself.

An aside:
Q: How many Latvian grandmothers does it take to change a light-bulb?
A: None. "I just sit here in dark..."


The upshot being that the house in which I live was customized over several decades by a stubborn old lady living alone, who saved every plastic bag she ever got, and wrapped the pipes in the basement in tinfoil to keep them from becoming dusty. (She regularly changed the tinfoil.)

But finally, poor Great-Aunt Matilda had to go into the nursing home. One too many falls left her hip so damaged there was not enough bone left to stick the metal fastening pins into. Her vision deteriorated until she was completely blind. It just wasn't possible any longer for her to manage on her own.

The house passed to Z's mom's management. Z's older sister was college-age, and looking for more independence. So she moved in, repainted some things, updated the wiring in the office, etc. She removed the tinfoil from the pipes. But the door-chains at floor height she left, because she never fastened them and didn't care. And the chrome handles bolted into the wall next to the door stairs, the basement stairs, and the stairs down onto the sunporch she never bothered to remove; they were handy when she came home drunk and needed support while unlocking the door.

Z's sister moved to California and got married. But Z's cousins were looking for a place to live; newly-married, their grungy apartment downtown was no longer satisfying. So they lived here a few years, had a daughter, put child-safety covers in all the outlets, childproofed the cabinets, and repainted things again. But they, too, left some things behind: the door-chains and the wall handles. "Yeah," said his cousin-in-law to us when he moved out, "those wall-handles are actually pretty handy."

We moved back from Jersey [long story], and Z's cousins, ready for a second child, had moved out to a new place. We moved into the house.

"Uh," I said, "why are the door chains so low on the doors?" It seemed weird to me to have to stoop to fasten them, and it seemed rather silly that an old lady would make it so difficult for herself. Then I thought about it, thought about how poor Great-Aunt Matilda had fallen and broken a hip on several occasions. Oh. Yes, I suppose you would want to be able to unlock your doors in those situations. Grim. I shivered at the thought, but didn't move the door-chains, because you know, why rock the boat? I never fasten the things anyway.

I thought the chrome handles in the walls were pretty weird, but funny. I never liked bannisters anyway-- the one from the basement is handy to grab if you're trying to lever a huge laundry basket through the narrow entryway.

...

Now I use them all the time, and actually need them, every day, whether I'm drunk, carrying a laundry basket, or not. Just like poor Great-Aunt Matilda.

I might change my derby name to Great-Aunt Matilda.