Ballooning in Napa

Since I insist on calling my blog a "vlog" as if there is a bunch of video content here, I thought I'd add the video I made of our recent balloon ride in Napa. It was so much fun making the video I was really excited to make another one, but filming stuff and taking pictures of xmas and xmas eve made me realize how fortunate I was to have that ballooning footage to work with...most of the time things are just not that exciting or picturesque.



and then I found this...



Probably just as well I didn't watch that BEFORE we went.

Veggie Pr0n

Fact...Ladies in the orient used to make dye from the skin of eggplants, which they then used to stain their teeth gray, because it was thought to be very stylish.

Today I thought I'd FINALLY inoculate and sow my lady peas, which should have been done about two months ago when the fava beans were transplanted into the raised beds freeing up my grow lights. Not sure why I procrastinated so long, but while the peas were soaking in some water and inoculant for a bit I checked the mail and found my box stuffed FULL of big, glossy vegetable pr0n catalogs.

I guess it's that time of year...the time when you start going through these things, dreaming, planning, circling stuff, figuring out how much you can spend, where you'll put it all. I'm trying to be annoyed that these places would so wastefully send me these big, gorgeous color catalogs full of exquisite vegetable (and and fruit and flower) pictures and luscious descriptions claiming each hairloom tomato, french melon hybrid and Thai eggplant is better than the last, especially when this is all available online, but I have to admit I really enjoy getting these stunning catalogs.

I was trying to pick my favorite, but it's hard...

There's Johnny's Selected Seeds, which has a huge selection and allows you to buy seeds by the pound (I figured out from their catalog that 1 pound of lettuce seeds is aprox. 232,000 seeds, which MIGHT be a few more than I need, since so far my bf has only allowed me to plant lettuce in one small windowbox.) Despite the quantity and selection, the pics are small and the descriptions terse. Also, I was excited to see they have sweet potato slips but it seems they can't/won't ship them to California.

Then there is Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Their catalog has some HUGE and gorgeous vegetable pictures, and some other funky pictures, too. This place tries to preserve rare and heirloom seeds and they are located in Mansfield, MO. a kind of historic town where they have "Heritage Day" festivals all year round and you can listen to people wearing straw hats and overalls or long dresses and bonnets singing bluegrass and yodeling, when they aren't churning butter or something. I was inspired to buy the book, "Good Bug, Bad Bug
" after seeing it mentioned in their catalog, and the only thing I didn't like was that they don't have a picture of every item. I definitely want to order some stuff from them again, especially the "Moonshadow Hyacinth Bean" which says this in the description: Pick when small and tender, as old pods and dry beans may be poisonous!

Last but not least today was Territorial Seed Company, a place in Oregon which also won't ship sweet potato slips to California but at least they print their catalog on non-glossy paper, and they have an interesting variety of stuff that goes way beyond vegetables, like mushroom growing kits and vegan fertilizer mix. Oh, and they have an INDEX, which is one thing that was quite lacking in the other two catalogs.

All this has served to be quite inspiring to me today. I'm not placing an order (yet) but besides the lady peas I now plan to start germinating a few other things tomorrow (like some pepper seeds I got from Australia a few months ago!)

I'm really missing all that fresh produce we had in August/September, but we should be eating our own lettuce any day now, and it won't be too long before we have fava beans, garlic, and shallots. I wish I'd planned the winter garden better (or hadn't basically forgotten about it for a month or so) but I'm back on track.

Wavy Gravy and the Ultimate Citrus Juicer

I couldn't let the whole month of December go by without updating my blog even once, so to try to get back into the swing of things I'm posting something I realized about myself...

Yesterday I realized I only like ice cream with chunks of stuff in it. Well, or floating in alcohol sometimes maybe. The thing is...I'm vegan and there isn't much of any vegan ice cream with GOOD BIG chunks of stuff in it. I want like, Chunky Monkey, Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, the one with the giant chunks of Heath bar in it, Chubby Hubby with its huge chunks of peanut butter filled pretzels.

Not for me though. Vegans do get a selection of different rice, soy and coconut ice creams but at best they maybe have anemic little flecks of chocolate or microscopic and dissolved bits of cookie that you wouldn't know were there if they weren't on the label. I guess I could make some cookie dough or maybe chop up some vegan sandwich cookies and mix them in myself, but for the most part I'm thinking I probably will eat less ice cream. If this prevents me from just grabbing, from the store or my home freezer, and downing a whole pint of Wavy Gravy in the future (actually, they don't make Wavy Gravy any more...which is nice of them because it makes becoming vegan sooooo much easier) then it's probably a good thing.

Of course they still make tasty vegan ice cream sandwiches, like mocha ice cream between two oatmeal cookies that has all been dipped in chocolate, or the classic Tofuti Cutie. Yum. So I guess it shouldn't be too hard to be vegan and still eat junk.

In other news, I make myself some fresh citrus juice almost every morning. Lately it's pretty much always been grapefruit, but I do use fresh orange juice when making a post-workout smoothie for my bf and I after the gym. Why am I telling you this? Because my juicer, my second cheapie $20 juicer in six months, has really been limping along and annoying me with its design flaws but for x-mas, I got the Breville 800CPXL Die-Cast Stainless-Steel Motorized Citrus Press. That thing is like, the Cadillac of citrus juicers. It's supposed to be so efficient at extracting the juice that you end up with a totally cleaned out peel that is all prepped and ready to use as a bowl for some frozen fruit sorbet. I'm not going to do THAT today, but I AM going to try my new juicer (wooohooooo!) today and then I'll be sure to report back.

Geeking out in Napa

I took some video of the Robert Mondavi winery last week when we took a tour there, so here it is...the tour guide geeking out about wine. It was a great tour if you are interested in wine or even if you just like somewhat sciencey and historical stuff...

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Mondavi may not have my favorite wines, but it's a great piece of Napa/California wine history and this was definitely a tour I think you could take over and over and it would be different and interesting every time. I especially want to go back around August when we could taste grapes right off the vine!

Halloween part 2

My mom just found this picture of the cape (and tunic) that I made when I was 15.

So, I'm sewing my cape for Halloween this year (the fancy cape with the hood and lining and trim and such) and trying to make a dress to go with and remembering the dress I made for my costume the year before that had 18 pieces that had to be cut out and sew together (and then the stitches ripped out and resized, etc) and I think of the time, thought and expense of putting a costume together and I start thinking to myself, "why do I go to all this effort?"

I KNOW that pretty much everyone else at the party is going to go to the Spirit Store the day before or soemthing, and they are going to pick out a $10 "sexy cat", "sexy witch" or "sexy devil girl" one-size-fits-all generic Halloween outfit and that's that. I have to question why *I* can't do that. Why, why, why? But I can't. The idea of picking out a costume like that is just totally...icky...to me. I can't do it. I won't. No matter how little effort other people might be making, the idea of wearing one of those mass-produced, cheap generic costumes is completely anathema to me.

So this begs a few questions. The first is...why do these people run to the spirit store and grab a cheap, generic costume? Why are they content with that? That's a bit complicated I'm sure. You can't lump everyone in together except in perhaps the most general way. Maybe a better question is, "is it them, or is it their expectations of the party?" Is it the people that I know, or is our party just not fabulous enough?

Maybe it's a little of all of those things.

The other question is "why do I have this need to put so much effort into a costume?" And I suppose the answer is that I don't like to do anything halfway. This sometimes leads to not completing things or to miserable failure, and it sometimes leads to spectacular success, and sometimes it leads me to having a costume that looks really out of place.

My bf and I talked about it, and for us the solution is "have a more fabulous party". So that's what we're going to do. A fabulous party, with plenty of advance notice, an emphasis on dressing to impress, an expanded guest list that will hopefully include plenty of people who are already predisposed to put effort into an original costume, written invitations, and perhaps a costume contest.

We've already invited some people...I hope 11 months is enough time for them to prepare.

halloween

 Well, Halloween has come and gone, my month of yoga has come and gone and somehow the blog fell by the wayside. I was just so wrapped up in preparing for Halloween and then preparing/hosting out of town company that I got wayyyyyy sidetracked.

I didn't do yoga for the last week of October. It's funny, when I told my bf about my "31 day yoga challenge" he was like "why 31 days? Why not 3100 days or 31 years or something?" Hey, baby steps...I think that's a GREAT idea, especially after the yoga I did do, but it would be great to finish 31 days first. In the midst of working on my cape, I would be trying to do yoga so late at night (and for me that's pretty damn late) that I'd be falling asleep in the middle of a pose...and they aren't that comfortable!

I'm back to doing yoga now though...it feels so great and even three weeks of it definitely made me more flexible. I'm a little stiffer from my little break, but I can now do saddle pose without a bolster pillow, so I think that's pretty awesome! If I have some new yoga news to report, I'll be sure and do so.

 

So meanwhile I was sew, sew, sewing with several seasons of "Project Runway" to inspire me and keep me company. I don't know why a darned cape should take so long...part of it was the cutting out of the pieces which were too big to properly fit on the table I was cutting them on. Then there was the part where I put the two pattern pieces together wrong (two parts were pinned together and then were cut out of one piece of fabric) and cut them out. When I discovered one piece had been upsidedown when I was cutting (perhaps not the best idea to cut pieces out at 3am) I was so distraught I immediately went to bed.

Going to bed wasn't such a bad thing to do. I am reminded of a cape I made oh-so-many Halloweens ago when I was 15. I didn't really know how to sew...we had home ec. in middle school but although I aced  the cooking part I totally flunked the sewing part...and I was in my mom's basement trying to use her sewing machine to make a cape and I didn't have a pattern so I'd basically just cut out some big semi-circles that had a small part cut out for the neck and I needed to sew them together and then hem the whole thing. Somehow it all just seemed soooo beyond me and I remember crying in frustration. 

So here I was again, still not really any kind of expert sewer, trying to sew a cape, but this time with a lining and a hood and some trim and a clasp...and cutting the damn thing out of the huge piece of fabric (of which the fabric store had no more...and I actually checked several stores around town, nobody had it) totally wrong...and I didn't cry! Pretty good, if you ask me! After making sure I couldn't replace the fabric, I ended up cutting the big pieces back into two halves (like the way the pattern would be if you didn't pin it together) and flipping half of it. I was afraid it would be ugly, but in the end I think that new seam I created actually made the cape look BETTER. 

  

So I managed to assemble the whole thing, put cute little heart trim around it, sew a decorative border for the hem (little flower stitch) and the fox clasps I ordered

arrived in the nick of time, so I somehow managed to sew them on unevenly but what-ev. The petticoat and the wig actually showed up later the same day I was accusing the mailman of dastardly deeds in my blog, I whipped up a simple white peasant shirt (of which the elastic in the neckline broke during the Halloween party) and ended up forgetting about the dress (although all the pieces were cut out) and just wearing the peasant blouse with a black skirt, petticoat, white stockings and chinese style mary jane shoes. Oh, and the wig which I braided and I think it looked very cute but I didn't have a camera with me and nobody has sent me any pics yet!!!

I really think my bf and I had the best costumes by far at the party.

Karaoke didn't go quite so well...I ordered two Halloween karaoke cds and a large set (hundreds of songs) of non-holiday karaoke cds but NONE of them arrived in time, so my bf went to target and he picked out a cd of Frank Sinatra and his 15 yr old daughter picked out two more cds which contained mostly music I'd never heard of, and my bf was practically the only one who sang karaoke that night (he has a great voice for Sintra stuff)...BUT we have about 700 songs now including "Me Gustas Tu", so we are way over-prepared to have another karaoke holiday party.

Hot Nude Yoga!

You know, they have nude yoga classes in San Francisco. That probably won't surprise you. Probably won't surprise you either, if I tell you they are for gay men only. But did you know...they have nude yoga classes right here in sleepy Redwood City?!?!?!? Neither did I, until today. I asked my bf if he wanted to go, but much to my relief he said "no". Still, it's nice to know there is a comprehensive yoga studio just two miles from where I live, and I'm thinking of taking some private (clothed!!!) lessons there because the place sounds awesome...like they really put the emphasis on stretching and have even worked with olympic swim champions! I could have the same guy stand on my lower back while I'm in downward dog as Dara Torres!

I've missed a few days of yoga, though. After doing kettlebells, my back felt a bit hinky or something. Who knows, perhaps doing yoga would have been the best thing for it, maybe I should have at least tried. The thing is, I was kind of upset about my websites breaking after being transfered by my host to a new server. I am very fortunate I had someone helping me set everything up on a brand new virtual dedicated server where *I* get to set ALL the permissions so this can't happen again...and finally last night everything was back to normal and I'm 100% back in bidness, but meanwhile I was in a sort of denial about it or something and I didn't do much of anything for several days besides play Puzzle Quest (which is totally addictive anyway, it's like Bejeweled with a purpose.) I just didn't want to have to deal with anything, and I wasn't sleeping right, either.

Everything is pretty much back to normal now, though, not just my sites but me too. After I finish this blog post I'll be doing my yoga and I also watched most of the rest of Paul Grilley's Anatomy for Yoga dvd earlier AND read a few yoga magazine articles.

In other news...my bf and I went to this very cool movie theater in Menlo Park so we could see the only movie out right now that actually has a decent review rating (Rachel Getting Married) and guess what? They had vegan cookies! So that place rocks although the seats are not that comfortable and the hand-held cameras used in the movie made us both kind of queasy.

And...I contacted the eBay seller I bought the wig from for Halloween and they gave me the DELIVERY CONFIRMATION NUMBER for my package. According to the post office they left me a delivery notice on October 10th and then they actually delivered the package to me on October 22nd. Well excuse me but they did nothing of the sort! It's bizarre. First it's weird because LAST YEAR I didn't get the wig I ordered either, and second I don't understand why the postal carriers keep lying and saying I wasn't home to accept delivery of packages when I was, and third...where the heck did they deliver the package to???? The seller said they will send me a new one for shipping plus 15% the price I originally paid for the wig, so when the post office calls me back on Monday that's what I may end up doing. I should get the new one by Thursday in that case. Well, at least the postal carrier should. Maybe he's wearing it....geez I hope he doesn't steal my petticoat, too!

Did you know?

"Both the teetotaller (le buveur d'eau, or water drinker) and the drunkard (le soûlard) have traditionally been criticized for their extreme habits: the wine drinker, meanwhile, has been praised as a model of moderation. Even into the twentieth century, doctors administered wine to their patients to fight alcoholism."

From Wine Politics; How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink by Tyler Colman