Hmm… Let me try and remember what this is. I think the marinated part (which sat for about an hour) is cubed chicken, juice of one fresh lime, some lemon juice, some seaweed, fresh chopped garlic and ginger, some chili, some dried sweet pepper, red onion, sea salt, red peppercorn, chives, and some leftover soya-peanut sauce I had, and then topped off with a little blueberry juice. It's cooked with some shitake mushrooms, fresh sunflower sprouts (yay for Caitlin working at a sprout place part time and bringing me bags of the stuff), and broccoli, over a microwave spanish and lentil rice that was definitely the weak point of the dish. The chicken was a little overcooked because it took longer to reduce everything than I expected, but the sauce was really amazing…
I am so full right now!
Oh yeah, and I got this kind of funmail comment to ModBlog. I don't print this kind of stuff when it's posted, especially from anonymous email accounts, because I don't want to get sued (true or not) — but I thought it was funny because it could be about, oh, about a zillion different tattoo artists…
******* **** is a a dirty, womanizing, immoral fuck who travels from shop to shop in search of new and intersting women to piss off. ******* **** has no work ethic. He will attempt to stick his pathetic little penis in everything that squats to pee that happens to cross his path. ******* **** is a mannerless slob and the river of lies that flows from his mouth is endless. ******* **** will ruin your shops reputation just by being his worthless self. I feel sorry for the fool who believes a single word that idiot has to say. Hell tell you hes fucked every model and rubbed elbows with every big wig in the industry from here to the end of the earth but its all lies. Fuck ******* ****! ******* **** is a liar, a thief, and bastard. I wont bash his quality of his work, but i will say that if hes telling you about an original piece he did, chances are hes tattooed that same piece on a dozen other people. ******* **** doesnt care about proper sterilization, professionalism, or what you may want for a tattoo. He is only comcerned about his ideas and his penis. Fuck ******* ****!
Yeah, fuck that guy!
We went for a walk to get a toothbrush (got one of the ones that play songs while you brush via vibration — it's actually really neat), and were going to pick up chicken for fajitas but while we were in the fresh meat aisle Nefarious told me that the tilapia tacos were so good that she wanted those again, so that's what we did and it was quite successfully and quickly downed.
She painted her room sign as well. It's not quite done yet but you can see how it's turning out… It's kind of strange looking, but at the same time, really cool. There are some
cheap 3d scanners out there that I could do wonders with but they're still out of my price range — if anyone reading this happens to have one and feels like letting me come and scan my face I'd be thrilled.
Finally, since people ask me all the time what the carving unit is, it's a
CarveWright unit and so far I'm totally sold on it, even though it's pretty simple and has some limitations in what it can do… I definitely recommend it so far.
That's a picture of it in action, making my first attempt at a picture frame (about half way done that panel). Anyway… powering down the computer for the day now.
Yay, Roo fixed the RAID-5 array which failed in one of our archive boxes here and everything seems to have rebuilt perfectly with no data loss. It's been so hot here this summer (not that Toronto's not always insanely hot and muggy in June through August) that I've been so paranoid about having irrecoverable hardware problems. So I didn't lose any of my old photos…
Jon and Nefarious arrive from the California and Hawaii excursion today… I spent today running around doing the last errands before they're back, so hopefully I didn't forget anything. In theory the plane has already landed, so it's just about time to figure out what yummy thing should be cooked for supper. I'm pretty sore and swollen from all the excitement (although really, it's been less than a week since I was hacked to bits, so it's amazing that I'm up and about at all), but really I'm so happy that it kind of overrules all of that anyway. Woo woo!
Anyway… Other than that I read some very bad news today about a few old friends getting in trouble over a body modification procedure gone wrong — a castration in this case, in which bleeding could not be adequately controlled. It sucks because they're nice people and don't deserve to be hassled by the police and have their lives ripped apart over completely consensual and sane activities in which no one was ultimately long-term injured.
Nefarious has a bunch of old baby toys that I was going to donate to Goodwill but she asked if she could keep them… but wanted to take them apart. I think curiosity runs in the family or something, because I loved taking apart stuff as a kid. Although I suppose all kids like that sort of thing. Anyway, she dismantled (all on her own — all I did was loosen the tighter screws) a little telephone-thing that sings songs and counts in various languages and makes animal sounds. The plan is to now transplant the electronics and switches into old broken dolls and create new toys — circuit bending for kids!
My brother called me up this morning and asked if she could come visit for a couple days and hang out with her cousins who are about the same age. I was like (
insert sad voice here) “…but she just got here last night…,” but when I asked her if she wanted to she was really excited about it and really wanted to go, and since this is the last opportunity to see them this summer and they hardly get to see each other as is, so I agreed… Hopefully all the traveling doesn't put too much strain on her but at least she'll be with a handful of experienced parents if it pushes her under the (sweltering) weather; but I'm sure it'll be tons of fun either way.
It also gives me the opportunity to wrap up another week in advance of ModBlog stuff, which will mean that most of my “must-do” day-to-day tasks will be done until the end of the month (when school starts), which is awesome because then I'll have tons and tons of time to do stuff with her without having to stress about squeezing too much work into the cracks — among other things, they've finally reopened the dinosaur exhibits at the ROM, which I've missed so much.
Well, today I admit I'm just going to take off and relax though — even though my surgery was only one week ago, I managed to walk over two kilometers today! I'm a little sore, but really, it's not bad at all. It's quite amazing how quickly this is healing. Really amazing. Anyway, closing my computer now!
This is my latest carving with the router (about two hours of work, cut into a 3/4″ red oak board)… I may use plastic wood to change a few details in the face (the nose, which looks good in this picture, looks weird in real life) but I'm not sure yet, and the lettering didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, but all in all, it's not bad for my very first sign project. I'd love to have a 3D-scanner to augment what I can do. Anyway, later today, after her nap, we'll probably paint it and hang it up on her door…
Once I get the hang of it, I will start doing commission pieces, because I really, really want to pay this tool off and buy a bigger one. This one can do some really wild stuff, but if I get the bigger one (which is about $10k, versus $2k for this one), then I can do things like carve
boats and car bodies and crazy no-limits stuff like that!
Well, I'm going to take advantage of naptime and have a bath!