The Dreamwidth Account

I've purchased a new computer, and I'm currently in the throes of setting everything up. The new machine has Windows 11, which means it's throwing me all these "suggestions" about using Microsoft this and that for everything and why don't I have all my files stored to the cloud (how about "no"?). Fortunately I am well-practiced at not listening to the silly things Microsoft is suggesting.

So I'm busy downloading all the software I need to re-install (or pulling it off my plug-in hard drive, as in the case of Libre Office and Scrivener - tried downloading the latest update of Libre Office and got failures three times running, at which point I'm like "okay, done, pass the older version I know worked").

The eventual aim of the new machine is I'm going to be using it for gaming, particularly FFXIV (downloading it just in time to have the next patch hit on Tuesday... I must be a masochist). But in the meantime, I'm busy re-installing all the stuff I used to use, and getting this new machine set up to suit my purposes. Fortunately, I took a backup of my bookmarks before I changed over to the new machine, so I'm going to be able to just pull those off the list as needed (and dig through the previous backup for older bits of fanfic that I want to re-read). Maybe one day I will get around to ensuring that all my bookmarks across all my versions of Firefox synch with each other... but today is not that day.

Back to the data mines...

One of the problems that comes with having a serious tea habit like mine is tea tends to leave tannin stains on the mugs I use. Some mugs are worse for this than others (the T2 mug with lid and infuser set I use at work is terrible for this, going deep brown inside about the length of a week; also the mugs I got from Effin Birds are pretty bad for it as well) but generally anything you use to drink tea on a regular basis is going to get tannin stains. This is particularly a problem if you tend to forget about your cup of tea and let it get cold.

Now, normally tannin stains will come off with a bit of hot water, dish-washing detergent and scrubbing, but the thing about scrubbing is over time it damages the glaze on the inside of the mug, and it makes it harder to remove the staining. Dishwashers don't do much of a job at removing the stains either. However, I have discovered one thing which works like magic to remove tannin staining, without damaging the interior glaze of the mug, or requiring a lot of effort when you're low on spoons.

It's grated bar soap, or soap flakes, if you can find them. Soap flakes are sometimes sold in the laundry aisle of supermarkets, as special care for woollen items, but it's been a long time since I last saw them (it was the "Lux" brand at the time). What I tend to use is the tail ends of bars of ordinary old bar soap, grated up on a standard cheese grater. It's best to use some kind of protection over your nose and mouth when doing the grating, since soap dust tends to make people sneeze. Put the grated soap into a lidded container (again, soap dust is a sneeze hazard, you will need the lid).

When you need to clean a mug or teacup with tannin stains, put two teaspoons of grated soap into the bottom of the mug, and fill to the top with boiling water. Stir to dissolve the soap, and then leave it to grow cold and solidify. The soap jelly tends to contract as it solidifies, so you may want to top up with some more boiling water as this happens. Once the soap jelly has solidified, tip it out, and you'll find most of the tannin comes out with the jelly, and the rest can be wiped off easily with a dishcloth and some hot water. I tend to use the jelly as a detergent for whatever dishes we have handy at the time and do a small load whenever I'm cleaning a mug (and I'll start the mugs going when I'm getting my first cups of tea for the day).

This mainly works by the application of a long soaking time (you're leaving it to sit for long enough to cool down from boiling to cold, after all), but also because bar soap has a different chemical composition to detergents. This also means grated bar soap or soap jelly is very effective for cleaning things like stainless steel (if you have a stainless steel sink, you'll notice it comes up a bit more shiny after you've done a load of dishes with soap jelly as the surfactant). I tend to use this to clean my glass teapots as well - they have stainless steel infusion baskets of a very fine wire mesh, which can get very clogged with tannin particles - in that case, put two or three teaspoons of grated soap or soap flakes into the infusion basket, fill the teapot with boiling water, leave to cool, and you'll be able to clean most of the tannin off in no time and restore the infusion basket to "just like new" condition. Same thing works for a wire-mesh tea-strainer that's become clogged, although in that case you will need to give it a bit of a scrub with an old toothbrush or something similar to remove the tannin build-up from the mesh.

I find this a very low-spoons method of cleaning things, and I enjoy the near-magical transformation of my mugs from dingy brown to shining white again.

So, I've been on annual leave for the past couple of weeks (today is the last day of my official leave; I'm also dropping down to 3 days a week at work, because the university semester starts on Monday, I have one day a week of uni, and my brain can handle four days a week "on" and no more). I've mostly been staying at home, not because of any lockdowns or anything like that (I'm in Western Australia, we're one of the few states which is letting people move around at present), but because frankly, I spent four months (from late February through June) doing four days a week at work plus one day a week at uni, and I'm frankly knackered.

However, I have slowly been shifting various things off my list of "things to do while I'm on leave". I started with a list of fourteen items, this is now down to nine, which may not seem much, but given this list has slowly been building for the past four months as I haven't had any "errand" space on my calendar, I'm pretty pleased I've managed to at least deal with some of them.

For one thing, I managed to book and attend a couple of necessary medical appointments. One was for a mammogram (I turned fifty this year, I get to have my tits squished by a machine every two years for the rest of my life, yay). The other was to follow up on a blood test I had done back in March (I got a letter from the Dr's office saying "your doctor wants to discuss your test results with you" at the end of June, and I was like... well, it can't be that important given it's taken 'em three months to get back to me about it), which I did this morning. Turns out I'm fine in every way (no diabetes, no kidney or liver problems, no issues with red or white blood cell counts or platelet counts, cholesterol is great, thyroid hormone levels are being replaced adequately by the thyroid supplement I'm taking, and I don't have PCOS) except that my iron levels are low. So I'm on iron supplements for the next four months (yay!) and we get to find out whether this works to make my system behave itself.

The other thing I've accomplished was taking a bunch of stuff to the nearest tailors for adjustments. I've had a pair of carpenter pants knocking around in my wardrobe for at least the past five or six years waiting to have their hems taken up, as well as needing a buttonhole re-sewn on one of my pairs of work pants, and the hem re-sewn on another pair. The thing which actually prompted me to do this was getting delivery of a new cardigan (shawl collar, long length, pockets) where the pockets were sewn up using a very fine stitch, and since I own neither a stitch ripper nor a magnifying glass (and my bifocals don't give me a powerful enough magnification to handle unpicking things by hand) I decided to pay someone to unpick them for me. So, whole heaps of long-delayed mending and adjustments done, and I now have two extra pairs of work pants that I didn't have before I went on leave. So that's good, anyway.

Aside from that I've mostly been noodling around the internet, reading Tumblr and occasionally glancing at Twitter, and mostly playing games on the PS4.

Meme snagged from muccamukk

This is very much "Disc One: All My Greatest Hits"[1] here

1. The popular, catchy one: Rainy Day in Radiant Garden (Kingdom Hearts-verse, Leon/Cloud) - This one is the one which has the most hits on my stats on AO3, so I think it probably fits the bill. More "slice of life" than actual slash.

2. The obscure early one no one bought at the time: Mutants (X-Men) - A look at the sorts of mutations which don't grant superpowers, and the ways people try to survive them.

3. The "experimental" one, written when you were possibly on some substance: Paying the Price - Prologues 1 and 2 (Pirates of the Caribbean). This was a bit of an experiment in writing the same story two ways, and trying to get working on a bit of PWP (this was all the plot, the porn was going to come later). The PWP didn't materialised, and eventually I published these two prologues rather than having them knock around on my hard drive forever and a fortnight.

4. The sluashy one: Purity: A Smutfic in Four Acts (FF7). I don't usually write explicit stuff, mostly because I'm just not that good at getting into the right frame of mind for things. This is one of the rare exceptions to the rule, and is another of the most popular pieces I've written.

5. The brash, loud one, mid album: Bad Jokes (LOTR) - On the road with the Fellowship, as a couple of the nine walkers start swapping bad jokes to keep their spirits up.

6. The one born of your depressive introspection: Mary Mordor Sue (LOTR). This one could fit in about three categories, but I'll put it here, because it was written when I was in a rather bad depressive spot.

7. The bitter one about your ex/former manager/cat: Nesa Conway's Notes for New Staff (FF7 Crisis Core) - this one counts mainly because when I wrote it I was bitter about not having been employed for about a decade.

8. The one only you like, you insular weirdo: Do Not Go Gently - A crossover between "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "El Mariachi". I liked the idea of bringing Jack Sparrow forward into the present-day world,

9. The genre-hopping crossover hit: A Laundry-Verse A to Z (Laundryverse) - Crossing over Charles Stross's "Laundryverse" series with kids A to Z books. Sparked by a comment thread on his blog - someone else had the idea, I just grabbed the ball and ran with it.

10. The one where you tried to be "modern": Remediation (FF7, FF7: Crisis Core) - Because I was trying something experimental when writing for uni, and I was able to get away with writing fanfic as assessable material. Aka the one where the author notes are longer than the fic and have their own separate chapter.

11. The anthemic final track: Coffee Habit (FF7, Cloud/Zack) - the Coffee Shop AU fic, because why the hell, I had to write one.

[this is something I added myself] 12. The secret bonus track: (From the FF7 Anonymous Kink Meme)

[1] Reference is to a track by Barenaked Ladies, "My New Box Set"

Because it's That Time Of The Year (the anniversary of The Day Everything Went Pear-Shaped Back In 2001) and a lot of people, whether they're aware of it or not, are probably feeling niggly, bad-tempered, and finding their brains are finding them a lot of things to get miserable about for some reason, I figure I'll do a short post of Unicorn Chasers - the sorts of things on the internet that can cheer you up.

My current one is the series Under The Wing of A Nibel Dragon by Gothams_Only_Wolf over on AO3. This is a gorgeous series which is set approximately 15 years before the start of standard Final Fantasy VII canon, where an 11 year old Sephiroth gets what is turning out to be the best fix-it in the history of the fandom. It contains a five-year-old Cloud Strife who is as cute as a button, a Vincent Valentine who wakes up fifteen years early, and a lot of other characters, some new, some recognisable.

Waiting for the Great Leap Forward is another thing I've been using to deal with my current case of the crankies. Mostly for the line about "Dr Robert Oppenheimer's optimism fell at the first hurdle" - this is a wonderful song about what it feels like to be down here at the sharp end of life, rather than up at the top where the decisions are made. Billy Bragg gets it, I think.

I will also recommend Scandinavia and the World which is a beautiful comic by Humon, full of mostly kind-hearted humour about the ways that various countries are perceived to behave, both internally and externally. Humon is a Dane, who has lived in England for a while, and a lot of the comics focus on the interplay between Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, but there's also visits by a lot of other nations as well.

So, what does everyone else use as a unicorn chaser? Share some links in the comments!

I've been cooking pretty much since I could see over the stove. My mother started teaching me how to bake when my age was still in single digits - making Queen Cakes and Cornflour Cakes from the recipes in her "Golden Wattle" cookbook, and learning how to measure in ounces and pounds on the fly (an ounce was roughly a tablespoon; an ounce of sugar occupied less space than an ounce of flour). By the time I was about ten, I was cooking meals for my family, at first on the weekends (and sometimes there were some rather spectacular mishaps there) and then during the week. By the time I was in high school, cooking dinner for the family was one of my expected chores.

One thing I've learned about cooking is you never really stop learning how to cook.

I enjoy cooking. It's fun, taking all these raw ingredients, combining them, mixing things together, adding heat and motion and bits of this and that, and creating something delicious at the other end. Even the occasional flops are fun, because the interesting bit then is sitting down and figuring out what went wrong. Cooking, as the saying goes, is science for hungry people. It's an art, and it's a craft at the same time.

So, in the interests of sharing with the class, a few tips I've discovered along the way.

1) The first time you prepare a recipe, it's a fifty-fifty chance you'll get a horrendous mess, even if you do your best and read all the instructions.

2) The photos in cookbooks are carefully staged. Real food is messy, and more or less brown.

3) To cream butter and sugar for cakes successfully, it helps to have the butter at room temperature. Chop it small, and if all else fails, run some hot water into the sink and sit the bowl in that until the butter softens enough to be malleable.

4) Getting a recipe to the point where everything is effortless is something which requires practice. It isn't going to happen the first time you cook something, or even the second. Instead, you're going to need to cook it at least four or five times, and learn from the mistakes you make along the way each time.

5) TV cooks start with everything carefully measured, everything carefully laid out, and with at least two off-siders preparing things around the edges as well as doing the washing up afterwards. Then they do everything multiple times, with multiple takes, in order to produce one photogenic version of the dish in question.

Restaurant chefs have a huge supply of off-siders doing preparation, and being delegated the more basic steps in the preparation and also monitoring the clean-up. Plus, of course, they produce a very limited menu, which is often focussed on being entirely too photogenic for its own good.

Home cooks, by contrast, get one try to produce something edible, and the vast majority of household kitchens aren't designed to have more than one person at a time in there. Plus it's very much "rinse as you go" as far as the washing up side of things goes. Learn to live with the fact you're not going to get TV or Restaurant results on a regular basis, and figure out a couple of dishes which don't require much effort to look fancy. Pasta bakes and lasagnes do pretty well in this department, as far as I'm concerned, because a decent layer of melted grated cheese and/or white sauce covers a multitude of sins. My mother's go-to "fancy" dish was salmon mornay baked up with cornflake crumbs on top, decorated with tomato slices and cheese, and served with pasta.

6) There are some dishes which quite literally cannot be prepared without getting the stove messy. Fried rice is one of these for me.

7) Meat stews default to brown. Tomato dishes default to red. Curries tend to go either brown or yellow, depending on the degree of turmeric in the mix.

8) The more you read recipe books, and the longer you spend cooking, the more adept you get at being able to tell what can be dropped from the recipe, what can be substituted for something cheaper or more readily available, and which bits of the recipe are the essential bits.

9) Every experienced cook will have at least one or two recipes in their repertoire which are basically about using up bits and pieces of left over this and that, and where consequently the "recipe" consists mainly of two or three things which are essential, and a long list of things which can be added and subtracted as available.

10) Soups and casseroles are very forgiving and basically consist of variations around a single core formula. (Soups start with a stock, then you add vegetables and/or meat, and cook until done. Puree if it's supposed to be a smooth soup, otherwise pass the ladle. Casseroles start by browning the meat, adding the slow-to-cook vegetables and appropriate seasoning, adding a liquid component, and then cooking slowly until everything has cooked through). Once you know the core formula, and a few basic flavour combinations, you can start coming up with a lot of variations on a theme.

11) The best accessory for any kitchen is someone who will eat what you produce, preferably with every evidence of enjoyment.

12) You don't need all the fancy gizmos and gadgets most of the time. You can get away with a couple of saucepans, a decent frying pan, a couple of good knives and some serving spoons. If you're going to be using a gizmo or gadget more than once or twice a year, it's possibly an investment, but if not, take time out to go through your gadget drawer every so often, and weed out the ones which aren't paying their way. (To be honest, the only one I've found even vaguely irreplaceable is a citrus zester - and even there, the small side of the grater will do as a substitute, even if it is more fiddly to clean).

13) This one isn't necessarily confined to the kitchen, but the kitchen is where I learned it, so I'll put it here: if you wind up throwing it out without using it, you threw your money into the bin. (This is testament to years of learning the sad truth of "economising" by buying bulk quantities of things I use very rarely, if at all).

Anyone got anything else to add to the list?

There's lots of things I could be talking about here. I'm going to talk about the plants I've purchased for the garden.

( Gardening under the fold )

Just to bring people up to speed on what's happening in my life and what I've been up to.

The good news:

1) I have a new smartphone! I've been saving up for this for most of the last couple of years, and the Telstra shop had a fortuitous sale. My old mobile phone was a little Nokia handset which had been a bit dodgy from the word go - one of its little quirks was that whenever I used it for phone calls, the "6" key somehow kept being pressed. No, I don't know how. Either way, calls were constantly interrupted by beeping and at the end of the call I'd have a page of 6's to delete. Plus it only had text entry from the keypad, which meant it was slow and fiddly to use, and meant I didn't really get much use out of the non-phone functions.

My new phone is a Samsung Galaxy Trend, and it seems to be a lot closer to what I was actually wanting (which was a replacement for my old Palm m515 which could also make phone calls). Certainly it's far easier to use the calendar, note-taking and contacts features than it was on the Nokia. I don't think I'm likely to be using the web-based features of it all that much, though - while I'm at home, I'll use my computer for web browsing, and while I'm out, I'll either be driving, or if I'm on public transport, I'll be working on crochet.

2) I've started to work seriously on improving my performance as a housekeeper. I'm using a combination of Chorewars (to track what I've done, and how much I've "earned" for it - at a rate of 10c per chore) and Habit RPG (to keep up with the weekly and monthly chores and try to keep me up to a couple of daily targets). I'm trying to do 20 "chores" per day on weekdays, and 15 per day on weekends (which, at 10c per chore, means I'd be earning about $13 per week for the housework. Given that by setting my own pace previously I was averaging about $10 per 8 days, this means I'll be saving up for things off my wishlist a bit faster than I was before).

The not-so-good news:

1) Himself was home earlier in the week with a nasty cold/cough combination which I appear to have caught off him. Woke up this morning with a scratchy sore throat, and I'm feeling a bit flattened and dull. Hopefully it will burn through in the next couple of days. In the meantime, lots of peppermint tea, and maybe some lemon and honey later on. Oh, and lots of feeling very sorry for myself, always an essential part of being unwell.

(Because I like this one and want to share it with people).

Take a mug, and put in two generous teaspoons of Nutella or equivalent choc-hazelnut spread. Add milk (I use full cream milk, because if I'm going to have an indulgence, it's going to be an indulgence, godsdamnit!) to the point where it just covers the spread at the bottom of the mug (so your mug is going to be at most 1/4 full).

Stir until smooth. Add more cold milk to the halfway mark. Stir again until combined. Now fill the mug to the top and stir again. You'll probably have small lumps of chocolate-hazelnut spread here and there, and you'll almost certainly have some smears of it along the edges of the mug as well as all the stuff which was on the spoon which hasn't combined into things. Don't worry.

Put the mug into the microwave, and heat on high for 1 minute. Take it out and stir again - this time, stir until all the chocolate hazelnut spread on the spoon melts and dissolves into the milk.

Put the mug back into the microwave and heat on high for another minute. Stir again to combine, and drink. If you're really feeling indulgent, and have the appropriate bits and pieces, you can top it with whipped cream and maybe some drinking chocolate dusted on top, but it's lovely just the way it is now. Enjoy.

(If you don't have a microwave, you can probably make it on the stovetop, but you'll need to watch it like a hawk - milk tends to scorch easily.)