Everything I’ve attempted writing since Monday hasn’t come out right.

Including this.

Sometimes I can’t stop writing and I’m constantly thinking about how I’ll word things, but this week is not like that. I hate these slumps. It takes me 10 minutes to form a sentence and it’s still not right.

Yup, just staring at the screen now.

It’s not like I don’t have stuff I want to write down, it just that my ideas aren’t making it from brain to computer. The words aren’t coming, and once they do they aren’t organized properly. I don’t want to post such unorganized junk online.

Can’t focus, playing with a staple remover now.

I’m going to take a walk.

I’m having a long day.

I want to go home and snuggle now!

I didn’t mention it when I wrote my journal entry yesterday, but we did end up going to Michael’s uncle’s gallery opening on Friday in Quakertown. It was great, he’s an amazing sculptor, even offering classes in his workshop now. There was a squirrel sculpture that I was quite fond of, with a price tag of $225, considering it if no one else buys it, but there really are other things we should be spending our money on right now %) I met a few more of Michael’s relatives, and we left after about 45 minutes.

On the way home we picked up a spinach pizza from Moccias, and for the first time they screwed it up. I ordered a “spinach pizza” and I was confident that they’d know that was a white pizza, since it lists “spinach pizza” as a white pizza on their menu. Alas, someone in the chain of ordering and making our pizza must have been new or clueless and made it with red sauce. Yuck! I was pretty disappointed when we got home and opened the box. Luckily it wasn’t as bad as I expected, not nearly as bad as when other pizzerias have screwed up the same order in the same way.

We both went to bed fairly early that night, had to get up early for drum making!

Saturday was detailed in the last entry.

Sunday was our no plans day, good thing since I didn’t sleep well Saturday night. I spent the morning getting caught up on website stuff and email, it was a good feeling to get that out of the way, I got so behind on everything this week. I still haven’t touched mailing lists, some of which I haven’t had a chance to catch up on in 2+ weeks, but that’s ok.

Around 2pm we were showered and ready to leave the house. We went up to Collegeville to pick up some Sake in case we did decided to make our own sushi.

We then headed to Skippack to drop by Dreamcatcher to pick up some white sage, but when we got there they were having “Skippack Day.” This would have been fun, lots of shops having sales, lots of tents on the road selling all sorts of neat things, but there were just too many people, it would have been difficult to get a parking space without paying for one (paying for parking in Skippack? madness!).

So we drove past that all and headed to the North Wales Whole Foods market. Mmm Whole Foods. We got a bunch of stuff we needed, they even had small bundles of white sage. And my carrot cake, yum!

And then it was off to Assi Plaza to check out fish for the sushi possibility. Unfortunately this didn’t quite work out. I think we need to do some more research before doing the sushi at home thing. We’re familiar with what sushi fishes are eaten cooked and what ones are raw, but nothing was coming together for us while we were at the store. I’d rather have things feel right and make sure we’re doing the right thing before we eat raw animals.

By the time we left Assi Plaza I was feeling tired. Michael suggested a few places we could go to eat out, but I just wanted to go home. This is very strange for me, I love eating out. When we got home Michael suggested getting a chicken cheesesteak stromboli. Yeah! So he went out and got one from Chiaros in Green Lane. It was a good dinner, we watched some MST3K while eating and spent the rest of the evening relaxing, and eating carrot cake.

Great weekend. Tonight we’re planning on going to the all genders sweat lodge, perhaps we’ll bring our new drums.

Yesterday was an absolutely amazing day, we got to make our own frame drums!

I had some doubts going into this about how good a drum I could make. I don’t see myself as a very musical person, and for most of my life drums were foreign things that other people used and made, not me. I saw making a drum as a great challenge and was happy to tell myself “nothing to be ashamed of if your drum doesn’t turn out, it’s the first!”

Then on Thursday night we journeyed for our drums. I met with a color-changing snail in the lower world who told me that I just needed to relax and my drum would be fine. Good advice. Whenever undertaking something like this I tend to be an obsessive perfectionist, which is no good – I get worked up about things if they’re not perfect and I have a miserable time with it. This time would be different, I’d do my best and not worry about the details. Have fun, work hard, and come out with whatever I come out with.

The results? Absolutely stunning.

Our drums this morning. They are still not entirely dry in all the corners and thick bits, so we can’t take them out and play them, but already we get an amazingly good sound when we test them. Aren’t they beautiful? Mine’s the one on the left. I can hardly believe I made something so beautiful, I’m absolutely thrilled!

The back of our drums this morning.

It was a beautiful day for making drums, warm out, sunny, perfect! Some people worked inside the garage, and some just outside (garage door was open so it was one big space really).

The elk skins when we pulled them out of the water they were soaking in for 2 days. I really couldn’t believe how floppy it was, like a thin piece of rubber, the skins were so hard and thin when we put them in the bucket on thursday.

The first step is punching holes in it for the sinew (also soaked and floppy) to go through. The skins aren’t hard, but they are somewhat thick and it’s skin so it has the tough qualities of skin.

Stringing the sinew the first time, this is just to get a basic shape in place and stablize it so it can be tightened.

This is the first stringing of our drums. After it’s strung you go around a few times to smooth everything out, tighten it, smooth, tighten. It’s hard work, and many of us had trouble with the sinew breaking if we pulled to hard. Finding what was too tight and not tight enough wasn’t easy.

This is after going around a few times tightening, you can see that it really starts taking shape when compared to the previous photo.

Eventually our drums were finished being pulled, smoothed and tightened and we put them outside on the wood pile to dry. All of this took us from about 10:30am until 1pm, when we took a break for lunch.

After lunch it was time to make the beaters. This is harder than it looks! We spent about 2 hours working on them.

We were finished around 4. My hands were sore from everything I’d done with them, but I was exhilarated. My drum is beautiful! I actually made a wonderful, beautiful musical thing and didn’t beat myself up over it! It’s so perfect!

[EDIT]I just received the group picture from Jim Frank of us with our drums, photo by Jim Frank:

After the drum-making I was way too pumped to just go home. I was so excited about the drums and how well this whole sm thing is going that I told Michael I wanted to go out. We came home and dropped in IRC to see if anyone was around and wanted to see Serenity with us, but alas, no one was. So we went on a date to the movies, just the two of us. We ate at Max & Ermas, where the food was good and service was excellent, the wait to get a seat was bad but we called ahead so we missed most of it.

We got to the theater for the 7:55 showing, I was pretty excited. I avoided everything that talked about the movie, didn’t even watch the trailers because I wanted to be entirely surprised, all I knew about the flim was that my friends who had gone to see the preview shows said it was awesome (and I had the unfortunate luck of reading a journal entry yesterday morning that mentioned something about it, d’oh).

The film was amazing! I admit I was somewhat skeptical that a movie based off of a TV show (even a great TV show) would be good. But it was, one of my favorite movies this year, and it’s been a good year for movies!

Today we might make sushi and have some carrot cake. We haven’t made any solid plans, I want today to be a relaxing day. Too much “we have to be at $place by $time” this week.

I had a good day yesterday.

When I came into work there was a confetti explosion on my desk, and my boss had left a card and a gift, aww! How sweet! The gift was a very nice cat picture frame (I have a half dozen pictures of Caligula hanging around my cubicle). I got cards from a few other co-workers, overwhelmingly cat-themed – oh dear, am I that cat lady? Another co-worker has a husband who works for one of the big pharmaceutical companies in the area and she’s always giving everyone company advertising stuff – pens, pads of paper, tissues, lotion and the most fun one yet, a pedometer! She gave me one of the pedometers because she “knows how much I like gadgets” *glee* She also gave me another picture frame (I’ll put a picture of Michael in that one) and a candle. So nice!

At lunch my boss took me and the other woman in our department out for lunch at Applebees to celebrate my birthday, it was yummy.

After work Michael made dinner and then we headed down to Malvern for the Shamanic drum circle. On the way down we stopped for gas and I got out of the car to pull a leaf out that was stuck to a windshield wiper since we left the house. For some reason I didn’t just toss it aside, I kept it and decided to bring it with us to Malvern.

The drum circle was interesting, there were a lot of new people, and only 4 of us were there because we needed to do the drum making too. I had a nice time, when we finally got to pick out the elk skins for our drums it was about 9pm, we put them all in a large bucket of water and them Jim asked if we had any herbs or anything we wanted to put in. We didn’t have anything… except that leaf! So I went to the car and looked on the ground to find where I had tossed that leaf, I found it and put it in the water with the drum skins.

We got home around 10pm. I was tired, but took a few minutes to check my email and drop into IRC. I went to bed soon after.

I’m still tired. This morning I didn’t want to get out of bed, less than usual sleep and the fact that it was so cold outside of the snuggly covers of the bed made getting up difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the cold, it’s a very refreshing feeling after this summer. It just makes getting out of bed much less appealing. And it was colder than I thought, 41F outside when I got up, and we had the windows open! No wonder Caligula invaded our bed last night! (Wow, “Caligula invaded our bed” sounds really freaky o_o we’ll have to name our next cat “Fluffy” or something with less perverted associations).

And now it’s Friday. I’m wearing the pedometer, it’s fun, counting all my steps. The only problem is that it talks o_o Talks when I set it, talks if I hit a button on the side. I’ve managed to hit it twice today, d’oh. But so far I’ve walked .79 mile, woo! I can see this silly thing becoming quite an addiction – creating websites! graphs! fun statistics about how much I walk on workdays and weekends! Or, more likely, the novelty will wear off by tomorrow and I’ll let it die.

It’s beautiful out, I’m going for a walk now.

[EDIT] Of course I go for said walk, it’s so nice out, and the pedometer falls off and hits the ground. It didn’t hit that hard, I don’t think much of it, put it back on. About 20 minutes later I look at it and realize it hasn’t changed at all. It’s broken! Arrg! Stupid cheap thing! Oh well.

Today is my birthday! %D YAY!!! I’m 24 now.

And happy birthday to and too!

I love carrot cake. More than chocolate cake. More than pie, more than ice cream, more than brownies more than just about every dessert I’ve ever had, those few desserts that surpassed the carrot cake in deliciousness were exceptional occasions and not repeated.

I think just about everyone I know in real life knows I love carrot cake.

So guess what I’ve eaten every day since Sunday?

Carrot cake!

Birthday week is always the most yummie. Not only do I get my favorite cake, I get to try different kinds from different places. Sunday (and leftovers Monday) was a fairly basic cake from a grocery store, not terribly elaborate (baked in a bread pan), not too much frosting, but also not too many nuts. A pretty good cake! This was from Michael’s mother.

Tuesday at work they ordered a half chocolate and half carrot cake from Clemens. That carrot cake was really good, nicely decorated for the two of us in the office with September birthdays, lots of yummie cream cheese frosting – especially on the corner piece I got. I was forced to bring some home ;) so I’ll be enjoying some this evening as well.

But not all carrot cakes were created equal, and although I’ve never met one that I didn’t like, there are characteristics that make some yummier than others.

Carrot cake has some key tasty ingredients:

Carrots
Spices
Nuts
Cream Cheese frosting
(some even have raisins)

My favorite arrangement of these is:

Lots of carrotness
Not so much spiciness
coconuts rather than walnuts (This is difficult to find, I don’t actually like walnuts, but I can handle them in carrot cake)
Good amount of frosting, but not too much

And so, the top 3 carrot cakes in this area come from the following places:

Woodside Inn, Schwenksville – This is 2 miles from my house, they’re pricey and their dinners are nothing to write home about. But oh, my, god, the carrot cake there is the best ever! (chocolate cake is very very good as well) They meet all my perfect carrot cake requirements! They do make them special order for people to pick up, but I’ve never looked into it. I should, it would make the most perfect wedding cake.

Whole Foods Market, North Wales – They make the most amazing desserts, so when I’m done filling up my cart with whole grain pasta and healthy fake meat sausages I can splurge on dessert? I guess so! I convinced Michael to pick up a carrot cake from there once, and we’ve been hooked ever since. I’m happiest when we’re able to get our hands on one without a coating of walnuts on the frosting (that’s a bit much, I end up trying to take them of), but it’s always good stuff and the normal size is 10″ – good size for just two of us.

Dutch Oven Bakery, Limerick – This is a wonderful, dense cake. I couldn’t believe how heavy the box was when we bought one. But oh how yummie it is! I guess the density is the reason we generally don’t go with this cake, it’s so filling and not so good to bring home for just the two of us. We usually enjoy this with other carrot cake loving friends. Besides, if I go to this bakery for a carrot cake I know I’ll end up leaving with a few danishes and chocolate chip cookies too.

Nice, I just wrote a whole entry about cake. I’m such a girl.

We’ve been busier than usual lately.

Tonight I think I’m going to finally take some time to clean the Rav4. Poor R4 hasn’t had a bath in over a month, and it’s been a few months since he’s been completely vacuumed and cleaned inside. It’ll be nice to do that while the weather is still nice.

Tomorrow we need to hit the grocery store, then relax for the rest of the evening!

Thursday (my birthday!) we’re going down to the Malvern Sweat Lodge to soak the skins for the drums we’re making and participate in a Shamanic Journey group.

Friday night we’re headed over to a show for Michael’s uncle, he’s a sculptor (website) and we’re excited to show up and show our support, his stuff is great.

Saturday we’re heading back down to Malvern for the actual building of the drums.

Sunday we are thinking about going to Assi plaza and getting fresh fish to make sushi at home. This will be my big birthday present! It should be fun. And if it doesn’t work out we’re going out for pizza. I win both ways! Mmm sushi…

I’d really like to see Corpse Bride and Serenity sometime soon, but I don’t see it happening for another few weeks, next Friday is most certainly reserved for Wallace and Gromit and more than one movie in a weekend is a bit much (especially for my wallet! Freaking $9-something per ticket…).

I am having way too much fun with this. “discovered” it this afternoon.

hour:~# apt-cache show oneko
Package: oneko
Priority: optional
Section: games
Installed-Size: 156
Maintainer: Steve Dunham
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.2.sakura.6-1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.5-13), xlibs (>> 4.1.0)
Filename: pool/main/o/oneko/oneko_1.2.sakura.6-1_i386.deb
Size: 34762
MD5sum: 685372cbafab3248b8eb654f82ae057f
Description: a cat chases the cursor (now a mouse) around the screen
A cat (neko) chases the cursor (now a mouse) around the screen while
you work. Alternatively, a dog chases a bone.
Tag: game::toys, interface::x11, use::gameplaying, x11::application

Awww! And now you get screenshots.

oneko kitty running over irssi

oneko kitty sleeping

I’m running it as: oneko -tora -bg grey

…when you’re using IE and have no form of adblock.

Do people just get used to the constant barrage of popups and advertisements?

It makes me crazy.