Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

First, thanks to everyone who's been sending me little stories about their yurt experiences! It's definitely helping convince me that this is a good idea.

This morning, after doing a little sculpting, Nefarious and I went to High Park and after playing for an hour or two we went for a walk up through the forest and saw tons of beautiful trilliums and caught a toad, which she got to hold and was quite pleased when it peed on me instead of her (no camera on that trip unfortunately). After lunch I thought I'd start a project that had recently been proposed to me — organizing my books by subject — which is entirely more work than I'd expected.

I'd say I'm about 10% done. What you see above is only about a quarter of what I need to organize… So many categories of books: cookbooks, food theory, farming, gardening, home construction, primitive skills, survivalism, gun smithing, religion, philosophy, math, computers, homosexuality, automotive, Scandinavian fiction, body modification, politics, cults and communes, indigenous cultures, military history, and so many other piles. It's really fun actually because I'm rediscovering a lot of things I'd forgotten I had.

I've been cooking a lot more (so it's probably good that I now have my zillion cookbooks — almost all vegan incidentally — sorted out in one place). I'm kind of rusty because Jon did most of the cooking for the last year and a half, but it's fun doing it again. Supper was simple but given how quickly it was devoured, also quite successful I think.

Just a nice veggie and nut stirfry with chicken and brown rice in a lemon-ginger sauce (I'll switch back to primarily vegan in three weeks when Nefarious is in California for the summer). My hillbilly drink isn't moonshine or urine, it's just maple syrup and lemon, my favorite way of making lemonade. Desert was vanilla-mango frozen yogurt with mandarin oranges and a half a brownie. Nothing particularly exciting but it was yummy…

I found a book on pain management that has lots of information on nerve blocks. If anyone reading this is a doctor, feel free to give me a good reason why I shouldn't inject acid or alcohol or something into the nerves to try and kill the connections permanently. I hate feeling nothing, but I'd really rather feel nothing than constant pain, and I hate taking painkillers because then I have to take stimulants at the same time to keep myself conscious and I just don't think that's healthy.

Other than that, I either have incredibly annoying new neighbors or they have incredibly annoying guests for the long weekend. They've been spending every night until about 11 PM screaming their heads off on their balcony, and because of the holiday, fireworks go off within fifty feet of our house every fifteen minutes all night long, so neither Nefarious or I have gotten any sleep at all the last couple days, and definitely not tonight either. It seems sort of insane to be launching fireworks in the tiny back yards of a dense neighborhood, but given the hell I've raised with fireworks, I suppose I can't complain too much.

I can't wait to get out of the city.

Tomorrow I'm making an underwater video camera enclosure out of PVC for Jon and Clive to take on their fishing trip next week, and maybe I'll do some underwater test filming in Phil's pool or something (I'll post pictures of it; it's super simple). Hopefully it doesn't drown my sister's DV camera!