1) Create a graphic (200 x 200 max size) to represent your personal "candy". It should have your username on it, but otherwise can feature whatever you want. Make it something special since it's self-representative.

2) Make a post with the subject "trick or treat?". Put your "candy" somewhere in it, and be sure to repost these instructions.

3) Then, go around other people's LJs and reply to them with either "trick" or "treat". If you reply with "trick", they will give you an LJ dare that you have to perform before taking their candy. If you're too wimpy for that, simply say "treat" and take their candy.

4) List all your collected candies in your original "trick or treat?" post to show off your collection, being sure not to direct-link! (or not ... w/e!)

We had the second power out of the season last night. It wasn't that bad, except that, being from winds and not rain I wasn't expecting it and thus hadn't dug out my little decorative lanterns yet. Everything else was where it was supposed to be, candles, flashlights, matches, 5 gallon water drums. But the big kerosene lantern needs a new chimney, and I don't have any kerosene for it anyway, nasty stuff that it is to store. Sooooo last night was very, very boring. Candles don't provide enough light for me to do anything by, so I sat around and sent rambling texts to sleeping people until my thumbs were sore. Don't know how I would have lived in ye olde days. What I really need is a REAL lantern for candles. The kind that has mirrors inside it and makes the light bright and dispersed but not so bright it gives you vision spots like a candle. Too bad I can't wander down to Ye Olde General Store to pick one up. Guess I will have to consult google.

Oh, and some lady hit my sister's car when it was parked in the parking lot, I guess proving that my family has terrible automotive luck, and I should probably not lend any cars to them, ever. She also got what had to be the WEIRDEST note ever on her car...when it was parked in the lot of the school Halloween carnival they took Sammy to. It was like an entire page of completely insane rambling and archaic words and terrible grammar that made no sense to tell her that her car was parked 'improperly', when it was right where the attendant had pointed them to. In amongst a whole row of parked cars. None of which had notes. I'm almost tempted to think it was a RL troll of some kind. It really...boggled the mind to think anyone would have written that seriously.

It's very weird the things you remember when you're dreaming. Last night I had a dream that I was in the middle of a tropical ocean. I stepped out of a hut that was on stilts out there in the water (full of gay male artists for some reason) into my rowboat, and noticed that HORROR I hadn't shaved my legs lately, and my legs were all winter-pale to boot. Now in my head, I knew this was because in my normal home, it was winter, I'm wearing pants, so I've been lazy about shaving. So I start getting all pissed off at myself. Damnit self you lazy hooker! If only you'd bothered to shave last night when you were in the shower you wouldn't be in this predicament. You shouldn't let yourself go, you never know when you'll end up in the middle of the tropics mysteriously in some shorts! Now they've all seen your legs and they're probably judging you, and what's worse is you're heading back to a cruise ship and then EVERYBODY will see you there. God knows where you'll find a razor there. DAMNIT IF ONLY YOU HAD JUST SHAVED. But somehow, I wasn't quite recognizing this was a dream, even though I had memory of what I'd done the night before. There was just that small logic gap there.

In other news, my life is boring. It's only been raining one day and already I'm feeling antsy being indoors. I managed half an hour of antique window shopping before heading to the nursery and discovering they were out of all three garlic varieties I wanted. Somehow, in the space of a week and a half I've managed to go from 'but what can I plant now? It's fall and I'm whiny, I don't think there's anything much to put in' to 'HOLY CRAP HOW CAN I SHOVE EVERYTHING IN IN ONE MONTH!' If I'm productive (ha, ha) I could put in garlic, onions and sweet peas, and do a short crop of mustard, pak choy, collards, spinach, lettuce and beets. I kind of have my doubts that I can get in spinach, lettuce and beets at this time and not have them just go kaput in the frost before they do anything worthwhile, but according to more experienced gardeners than me I have about 3 weeks to get them in. Can I do it? Probably not. But I'm definitely starting the garlic, onions and peas.

In other, other news it's taken me until now to get a zucchini bread recipe I liked. Sadly, I tend to be a dump and stir cook, so it's hard for me to write them down. But here it is, more or less: ( zucchini bread )

I really need to A) learn how to use my camera properly and B) take it with me places. I've spent the weekend walking all over with my sister and Sammy on Saturday, and just my sister today. My feet are tired (the toes of my right foot always get smashed) but I saw so many beautiful things. The weather now is that perfect, cold cloudy gray, where the sky looks as soft as kitten fur. The air is cold but not too cold, it looks just right and the light is just dimmed enough to make all the colors really glow. Nothing is oversaturated, all the reds and yellows just seem to glow right where they all, rustling from the dark branches and the gentle blanket they lay on the hills. Nothing drastic, just the flecks run across a canvas with a brush, highlighting the deep dark green of pines and the bright green and silver of apple and willow.

It's amazing how I can forget how neat it is to live here, and just to be able to walk around and move over a quarter mile or less and find oneself in a totally different environment. I've tromped around bogs, walked through the orchards and the vineyards, under the dappled canopy of redwoods and bay trees, open scrubby fields ringed by wild blackberries and aster. The hills take you up and down, hiding little neighborhoods and microclimates, each with their unique set of houses and gardens, and after a long time of winding around in the far back country when we finally emerged to a place where I could see part of the road right next to my house, I didn't recognize that stand of willow at all and sat there marveling at how beautiful it was. It's amazing how familiarity can hide that from you. When I finally could see around the cottonwood stand and recognized where I was the context of the scene changed, and those set of trees were suddenly ordinary instead of rarely beautiful.

And of course this is apple country, apples everywhere, apples in great heaps around the trees on the ground. I'm used to the mild apple vinegar smell in the orchards this time of year. It's impossible to get them all up, and the groundfalls have good ones mixed in and we eat them as we pass through since they are never used. Even then there are wild apples, grave apples, wild roadside berries and grapes. All season long, even if you don't have your own trees you could pretty much be good, I haven't even figured out how many varieties the graveyard has. Now that my gravs are done I've been using them for eating apples, golden delicious and braeburns I recognize, but there are more, mostly striped.

It's put me in a very tl;dr mood. You have really long thoughts when you spend hours of time walking. Last night I tl;dr'ed for so long while I was drinking my tea I never finished the post. Now, my thoughts are still a little rambly but I'm tired...tired and I still feel like I should do some baking tonight. Probably zucchini bread. I must put zucchini in everything now.

So now we're finally working our way around to the cold part of the year, those few months of weather that pass for either winter or fall around here. Some of the peppers got nipped by the cold, they were already bad when I checked them this afternoon. The ones deep within the leaves were still okay, so I picked them, taking no more chances, and twisted off the little cucumbers. The tomatoes, being tough skinned little ones designed for keeping, are still doing just fine, as are the rest of the winter things. I found a moth fighting a pincher bug out on the oak leaf litter, trying not to get eaten I guess, a scary thing which I have never seen before. I did not know pincher bugs did that. I tried to break the fight up, a really weird thing, and the moth went fluttering back under the porch, unable to get in the air, seemingly wounded, sadly right into where the spider webs are. I guess some things you can't turn back.

The little beach cuttings I took are struggling, I don't think they like it here. I harvested seeds from the seed heads and bagged them, maybe I'll try growing some that way, but they may not like it so well inland. But, those are the things you learn from trying.

We also had the first power out of the season last night/early this morning, another good signal for the season change. Last night I had been printing out some sheet music, but the printer was running out of ink so I stopped it. This morning I discovered that after the power came back it had continued its printing. But the little gods of Chaos had worked their way into the lines, so that now, while all the notes printed out nice and proper, the letters were quite rearranged. 'Je Chante Pour Passer Le Temps' had become 'Kf !Di bouf !Qbttfs!Mf!Ufn qt', a fact which was repeated at the top of every page in magenta ink, and it was now written by one Hjpwbooj!N jsbcbttj. Helpful playing suggestions were given to me, such as be!rjcjuvn, though whether this was an instruction for tempo or expression I don't know. I will do my best however, to play it with as much be!rjcjuvn as I can muster.

I can't believe it! Melons don't usually grow well here but I got some volunteers that came up with the compost, so I'd been letting them ripen, figuring I'd maaaaaybe have one or two ripen before it gets too cold. There was one big one that was way ahead of the rest, and today I went out to put a piece of wood under it so it wasn't sitting on the cold wet ground and it was gone! Before it was...just hanging over the edge of the bed, so it was resting on the ground next to it. I could see all the dirt and activity right around there, and also that my cucumber vines hanging over the edge had been molested too! Eating the lemon cucs? What is this??

Anyway, what I really want to know is how that booger got the melon underground in one night. It was...you know! A melon! Not the biggest, but way bigger than a gopher hole. I guess it must have chewed it into sections and sucked them under one at a time. I could tell by the extensive churning of the dirt it been doing lots of something there. Well I hope it likes the stinky melon smell down in its house there because it sure isn't going to keep the way a root would.

In other news, I can never remember which OTC cold/sinus medicines agree with me and which don't. I don't take them often enough to remember well I guess, because I got the wrong one. I knew some of the non-drowsy ones make me really anxious and twitchy, but this makes me...not so much want to sleep? But mellow enough to get facially acquainted with some walls. Maybe not the best choice for morning.

So- I give the computer one last check, and a 7.9 earthquake has hit Indonesia, and ANOTHER tsunami warning has been issued for Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Thailand. My earthquake sense has been on today for some reason, oddly I was waiting for one to happen over here or in Japan.

So let's see. Nature tries to burn down my state, took a breather, drown the Philippines, went after Samoa, maybe wants to tsunami the place I just ate dinner at and NOW IT WANTS MORE. NNNNNNNNNFFFFFFFFFF. This may call for a cute animal post later. I hope nothing happens.

edit: aaaaaand then the warning was canceled. YAY! Let's hope nature is done for a while now.

So during the past few weeks I have:

1. Made soap, wherein which I discovered that

A) Bay is the only plant that I get a good scent from alone
B) Making bay soap just about makes my nose bleed
C) It actually takes quite a lot of conventional scent to get the soap full of smell

2. Collected some coast buckwheat and coast daisy from the WAIT FOR IT...coast. I took cuttings from well established plants so no native plants were harmed in their coastie little homes. Hopefully at least some of them will take root. Took from 3 different buckwheat plants, each with a different flower color, height, growth pattern and leaf shape. I wish that I had brought a camera because the pictures of coast buckwheat online don't really do the ones I collected from justice. There's just so much variation.

3. Celebrated a joint birthday between my sister, her boyfriend, and my dad. They have a birthday cluster together, and then me, his kid (Sammy) and my mother all have a birthday cluster in March. Weird. Anyway, I got a present too...because my mom was still sort of working on one back from March.

I really wasn't kidding when I told tealantern she was lucky to be getting her present in the same month as her birthday. Not only that, but I put it in the mail BEFORE her actual birthday! For me this is amazing. In my family we are very lax about birthdays. This is in part because of how we are, but also because my parents belong to a church that doesn't celebrate birthdays- but practically speaking many members cheat by having 'special days' for their kids once a year so they don't feel left out. So we'd have a 'special day' party sometime around our birthday, and over the years that stretch amount has just grown more and more.

4. Made myself a bacon sandwich and then fried some breaded yellow squash in the bacon grease. Notable only because I love bacon so much, yet rarely let myself eat it.

5. Oh, and Sammy made my dad a really cute card (sort of). He's been learning about fishing, and he knows my dad likes fishing...so he made him a card with a picture of the outside of the fish on the outside of the card...and a picture of the inside of the fish on the inside. Yes, guess who's been learning about cleaning & gutting. I guess it makes sense since the fish can kind of flip open like a card once it's been cleaned. Won't he be a delight for teachers.

( picture cut )

Alright, so I know some of you are crafty people. Are any of you semi-experienced soap makers? I intend to continue googling (it's hot as the devil's griddle iron outside, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon) but I thought I'd put a few questions out there. I have fairly basic experience, I do the adding-stuff-to-bases soap making. I know (theoretically) how to make it from scratch using lye, however I am such a butterfingers that I don't dare handle lye by myself. I don't want holes burned in my skin.

I have an oatmeal, a goat's milk and a shea butter base. I also have some artificial soap scents, but I don't really want to add those. I'm not entirely I sure I want to add essential oils as I was planning on giving some to my sister, and she has sensitive skin. Some essential oils can be irritating to people's skin (if they are sensitive) so I don't want to risk that, and also, many of them are expensive and additionally my sister told me that when she last made soap she had trouble getting the oil to mix in, and was having it bead at the sides. Now, I'm pretty sure I've made some with essential oils before, but I don't remember that problem. I remember that happening when I tried to add coconut oil, though. I've used them in salt scrubs and they're fine with my skin, but I guess people are different.

Oh, materials I have are fresh lavender, lemon verbena, bay, rosemary, peppermint, lime leaves and basil. I think I probably have lemon peel somewhere. Also possibly some essential oils I've lost and don't want to look for. For things that wouldn't add to the odor but might be good for the skin, I have rose petals, chamomile and powdered clay. I also have lemon balm, but the lemon smell there comes from citronella, which people now associate with bug repellent. I guess maybe I could make a bug repellent soap?

Ah, so to sum up, questions are:

1. essential oils, any experience with them good or bad
2. do you know how to get a decent scent using fresh botanicals only- I know this is possible with a few things such as this, but I'm only guessing at how it might be done
3. can you add commercial perfume at a low temperature without the esters being destroyed
4. bay rum. Can you do your own distillation at home?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts <3

Leave me a comment and I will reply with why I like you. If I don't know you, I'll either make something up or tell you why I like your LiveJournal. You must pay for the privilege by posting a message like this one on your LiveJournal.

I think this meme has pretty much made the rounds, so most of you are already safe! So comment if you like and I'll tell you why I like you.

Lately I've been having trouble sleeping. This is not unusual, sleep and I have a very on-again, off-again relationship. But when it goes on for long enough, things start to feel very surreal. The world gets a thin, hazy feel to it as if you constantly have one foot in the real world and one in Dreamland. This makes for some very poor decision making, as dream logic doesn't always work so well in the real world. And everything has a feeling of disconnect, as if you're not really present in the places you are or the tasks you are doing.

However on the plus side, when I do sleep, my dreams are unusually vivid and solid, almost as solid if not sometimes more so than the real world is when I am awake. I'm not sure whether or not you would call it lucid dreaming, because while I'm perfectly aware that I am dreaming, I don't try to control my dreams, and I don't think it would work if I did. Rather, I just walk around in my environment, marveling at the details that my mind can come up with. The level of detail objects have and how clearly I can remember them is astonishing. The leaf on every plant is perfect. I can touch objects, they have textures, I can feel temperature changes, smell things, even feel pain.

However, the one thing my mind doesn't seem able to supply is text. If I pick up a magazine, book or even a letter inside an envelope, it is not blank, but the words inside are nonsense, and not even solid. While the rest of the dream environment is solid, the places where words are are very fuzzy, and jump around. They keep changing, like they've been thrown up by a dysfunctional word generator, kind of like those crazy spam emails. Except while it isn't just the sentences that don't make sense, it's also the words themselves. They're misspelled, but not even sensibly misspelled, if I think a word is recognizable it may still have some random letters thrown in.

The pictures inside the magazine are normal and have sharp clarity, only the places where words should be are strange. I stare at them until I get eyestrain, and try to will them into forming real sentences, but it never works. This bugs me, because I'm fascinated to see what my subconscious would write.

Words can appear in other contexts, such as in a grocery store on box labels, and I can see the prices and so forth. But I wonder if this is because my mind is rendering them as part of a picture, part of the whole object of a loaf of bread. I wonder if it somehow it takes another part of my brain to form whole sentences that my mind cannot access during REM, or if it's just some symbolic dream thing. Either way, it's very weird.

Ok, let's try this again since my last effort was eaten.

I am a bad photographer so these don't really do it justice, but here are some pics I took of a sweet pea garden I visited a while ago.

Pictures are here.

Next:
Leave me a comment and I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

Here are the questions fushimiru gave me.

1. You said you like to garden. What are you most proud of in your garden right now?
2. You also said you like to do crafts, what kinds of crafts?
3. How tall are you?
4. How'd you get into Utena?
5. And how'd you get into roleplaying too, for that matter?

( And I answer )

And finally, for those of you I rp with, (late I know, but how often do I post?)
The How's My Driving? Meme

it seems I have received a promotion in life, except it's not one where I get any money or anything fun like that. No, apparently I have crossed some magical line of 'enough time spent outside in the garden', and have received a promotion from the local birds, moving me from the status of 'icky, potentially skeery thing, best avoided' to 'large, neutral animal, means no harm.' The same lofty status cows enjoy, in other words.

What this means functionally, is that they've stopped avoiding me. Normally, I kind of like looking at birds, so it's pleasant when I can see one up close. Well, now that they aren't hopping away from me, it's actually kind of weird. Because birds are three dimensional creatures, they're now also okay with all the space around my head. The first few times I got these low flyovers I thought they were dive-bombing me, but they weren't. They just aren't avoiding me anymore, so if I'm next to their line of flight, they don't change it. When I'm doing something under a low branched tree, they'll just do the flyover thing right above my head and chill out on a branch four or five feet from my head while I do what ever I'm doing.

Yesterday, when I was picking raspberries a female hummingbird lighted right above my head on the piece of fence supporting the berries. I looked up, and she looked down at me, cocking her head, only a few feet from mine, and then just went about her business preening herself and acting like I wasn't the least bit concerning to her. They do this on the porch, too. They land on the railing so close it's a little surprising for some reason. I have a sense of what distance I'm used to having with these birds, and now suddenly it's getting all violated. Mostly by the jays, starlings and hummingbirds. I don't dislike it, it's just really odd somehow. Like our space-violating roles have been reversed.

I told this to my mom, who I keep asking for gardening advice. She seemed totally nonplussed. 'Have they started landing on you yet?' she asked. LANDING ON ME??? THEY DO THAT??? I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF THIS. But she seemed to think it was normal. 'Oh yeah, hummingbirds will,' she says. 'Right on your head. Hummingbirds and jays.'

Sometimes I wonder about what my mom thinks is normal.

So I woke up this morning to discover that one of my pigeons had been eaten in the night. It was a bobcat. It stuck its paw right into the cage, pulled her up against the side and shredded her, pulling the pieces through a little bit at a time. At least that's what I figure.

As far as I'm concerned, this has signed the death warrant on said cat. Although the easiest solution would be to get animal control to do it, and I don't know if they catch and release them somewhere else, or what. IF anyone can get them to come down here. They're not...the most proactive.  But I'm determined to be rid of it one way or the other. If I thought I could safely lay out poison for it, I'd do it.

( tl;dr, basically I am pissed )

Give me a character I play and I will give you a few facts about them according to my own personal canon. This can range from their birthday, favourite color or even their earliest memory up to what they had last night for dinner.

I'll do one further and add that you can ask questions. Not promising I'll know the answer, but you can ask.

Since I am so bad at dealing with my giant mess of pics, rather then trying to deal with the backlog I'll just put up a few I took of a crashed car that's slowly rusting back to nature. I dunno why, but after happening across it I was quite charmed by it in a weird way. It really isn't that far from me, but it's on a part of a road I don't think I've ever taken before.

Although you cannot see it from the picture, the car is only a tiny bit up from the road, but on a rather steep slope. The road itself is rather precarious, narrow enough to be a single normal lane, but expected to pass for two with no attempt to divide it. It is a very steep slope- uphill and down, and it's all blind curves all over the place, hence the reason it's no favorite of mine. You just have to drive carefully and do your best to squeeze over to the side when you see someone coming. Although it's supposed to be illegal to leave cars abandoned, clearly it would have been difficult to tow it and probably not very sensible. It would have been a large undertaking that would have required blocking the road off and even then I'm not sure it would have been a good idea to try a tow truck on that road and all.

So anyway, people have let it sit there, right where it crashed into the tree however many years ago. Though the angles of the pictures make it less clear, it looks like it was a Beetle. Redwood sorrel was growing inside it, and there is some half smashed bottle that appears to be hanging from the ceiling. I don't understand its purpose there. Was it alcohol? Why hang it up like that? Was this some decades old teenage fad? The glove compartment was also left open, which I also found intriguing. Did it fly open in the crash? Did the lock decay with time?

I would have liked to investigate it further but the parking spot was not ideal, and I didn't really want to disturb it further with my footprints.

( pics )

I'm so lazy and slow, for you RPers, here's
The How's My Driving? Meme Finally.