dragonlady7

My sister gave me a recipe to make my own yogurt literally years ago, and I have been intending to do it for that long. I finally had the combo of enough milk, and a tiny bit left in the bottom of a container of really good yogurt, and an opportune time and the inclination. It’s hard to get a perfect storm like that, y'know?

Of course, I couldn’t find the recipe, which I’d written on a piece of paper in… a notebook? Loose? Where did I… well, it’s not a recipe so much as a set of instructions, and since they’re simple, how hard could it be to just do?

They were a set of instructions given her by one of her housemates at Eco House at Cornell, a young… now I forget whether it was a man or woman, and whether he or she was named Ding or Deng. So I can’t credit him or her properly, but I can credit my sister, who is an organic vegetable and egg-and-meat-chicken farmer in rural Illinois now. She, however, does *not* make her own yogurt, or cheese, which she used to do when she was a field biology intern, because apparently rural Illinois is lacking in a source of good, reasonably fresh milk.

But I live in NY State and we have perfectly good milk in the grocery store. I used whole milk, and don’t know if it’d work with other kinds– probably, but I don’t consider most of that stuff actual “milk”– if you’re afraid of milk fat, which is really good for you, maybe you should just drink water!

So here’s Ding/Deng’s recipe, via my sister Ann, as well as I could remember it, which I’m only sharing since it seems to have worked. (It moved, looked, and tasted like yogurt when I put it away just now, so it’s probably yogurt.)

Take about a cup, maybe two depending how big your container is, of whole milk. It’s fine to do this with milk that’s nearing or passing its expiration date; it’s trying to become yogurt anyway. Put it in a saucepan and bring it to a boil for a little while– I forget what the recipe said, so I just got it to that stage where it’s trying to climb out, and then stood there and stirred it with a rubber spatula for a few minutes while I was also getting dinner ready, adjusting the heat sometimes so it didn’t actually climb out of the pan. The original directions said something here about “marshmallow stage”, which is probably what happens to milk when you boil it for the right amount of time. So I stirred it, and it was fluffy, and seemed to be kind of thickening a little.

Then I turned the heat off, gave it a good stir, and set it aside to cool. I remember this next bit pretty definitely: you have to wait until it is, and this is a quote from Ding/Deng (I’m pretty sure he was male, and also pretty sure it didn’t matter much), who my sister had always considered pretty asexual, “until it is cool enough to touch with your breast”. Which is a really vivid way to describe a temperature. I just let it sit until I was done making dinner.

Put it into some kind of bowl or container you can cover a little bit loosely, and stir in a small amount of yogurt you already have. I used like half a cup, because I had more left than I thought; I think you can do it with a lot less, proportionally, than that.

I should mention that since I’ve done a little brewing, I have powdered sanitizer on hand, and since I was rebottling cordials at the same time, I washed the yogurt stuff in the sanitizer too. Any fermentation process is liable to contamination, so I figured I’d minimize it, especially since I recently had a brush with MRSA and am paranoid about sanitation now.

Anyway, mix your proto-yogurt all up, and stick it in your covered bowl, and put it someplace warm. The top of the fridge is a good one, or the inside of your gas oven if you have a pilot light. I had just baked squash for dinner, so the oven was cooling, but still warm– once it was a temperature I figured I could live inside, I put the bowl in there. (It was covered loosely with plastic wrap, so I figured, if it’s cool enough that the plastic wrap won’t melt, we’ll be golden.)

I left it there overnight; I think it’s supposed to be 12 hours, but maybe 24, but I also think it’s not real precise. I could let it ferment a pretty short time because I only had a cup of new yogurt plus half a cup of old yogurt, so it was like cheater proto-yogurt.

Then I scraped it into a plastic (sanitized!) container to put into the fridge– the original yogurt container my original yogurt had been in, as it happens. My little sister usually used mason jars for most of this stuff. And voila! You have yogurt.

Our coach is a very passionate, very Canadian young woman. This is my sixth season skating with her.

My team is made up of some hilarious women, as well as the other adjectives you’d expect– driven, focused, talented, athletic, etc.– all of that shit is nice, but when you’re talking about people you see for two or three hours two or three times a week for about nine or ten months a year, those fuckers better have some winning goddamn personalities. And my Knockouts, oh they do.

Supernova had us doing a drill, two at a time, reacting to a whistle blast. “When I blow the whistle,” she yelled, “I want every one of you to shout out a word, a word that symbolizes something you want to be better at this season! Really visualize it, and yell it really loud, and then do it!”

She blew the whistle, and twenty women shouted, and two women took off sprinting, as the drill required. Into the silence, Sour Grapes said, “I heard somebody yell blowjobs.”

I just have to pause here to have a minor tirade.

This morning on my FB feed there was someone telling some bizarre story about watching midget porn. Then my boyfriend read me this story. Gordon Ramsay Porn Dwarf Double Eaten By Badgers. Now, I wrote a whole paper in college about how sudden, shocking tone shifts make things inherently funny; my paper dealt with the shocking violence in the Irish epic Tain bo Cuiliagne, and how it was played up for humor with abrupt language. This is not new; I am not writing here about how terrible it is that people would laugh about someone’s horrible death. It’s nearly impossible not to play up someone dying in such an unexpected way as funny; eaten by badgers is not exactly a common way to go.

And as it happens, it was utter fiction– there is no such porn star, and he was not eaten by badgers, or dragged into a badger den to be eaten after his suicide or accidental death, or anything like that.

But I just wanted to have a little tirade: midgets are not funny. Dwarves are not funny. Little people are not funny. There is nothing inherently funny about an adult who is of tiny stature. I got so angry watching Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring because of the ceaseless jokes at Gimli’s expense. There is not a single joke in the entirety of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle based on Gimli’s stature– OK, there is ONE SINGLE joke, made by Eomer near the beginning of The Two Towers, and it is the more shocking (and, I’ll admit, funny) because it is the only one. (They used it in the movie but it wasn’t nearly as well-presented, mostly because their version of Eomer, hot as he was, was a hulking mouthbreather of a brooding manchild, not for want of acting by our dear Karl Urban– ach, his eyebrows alone– but I digress.)

So, I just wanted to put that out there. It’s one of the few things that many of my otherwise sensitive friends still seem to think it’s OK to be “politically incorrect” about. It’s not funny and it makes my teeth hurt whenever people do it. I’m a person of normal stature, perhaps even above average in height; everyone in my family for generations has been tall. And that makes it even less OK for us to joke about it. So we don’t!

Stoppit with the midget jokes already, people. Especially midget porn jokes. Really. Ugh.

Now my fever has spiked up over 100 and I’m covered in a rash that looks like heat rash, but is head to toe. I called my doctor’s office as soon as I spotted it but they’d just closed for the night. My next option is the emergency room. I felt really awful for a bit, but I’m not so bad now after a handful of ibuprofen; however, the rash is getting way more dense. My stupid boyfriend just read the Wikipedia article about MRSA (did I mention on here that I’m on antibiotics for MRSA from that infected blister in my finger? Ugh!) and how it can go systemic sometimes and give you a rash that looks like pimples. This doesn’t look like pimples, but the rest of the symptoms he described were so so so horrifying that I’m utterly terrified now.

(I’m seven days into a ten-day course of antibiotics for MRSA, big ol’ horse pill antibiotics, so it’s even odds as to whether this is MRSA-related or antibiotic-reaction-related. I had BETTER NOT be allergic to the only antibiotic that kills MRSA!!!)

So… do I spend my Friday night in the emergency room, or do I spend it with an ice pack and ice water comfortably on the couch, covered in spots?

Uggggghhhhhhhhh. Well, at least I have health insurance; this last month would have killed me, without it.

Also we just found out that my dear, darling uncle has lung cancer. My cantankerous godfather, who doesn’t take care of himself, who I’ve never spent as much time with as I’ve meant to, who I identify with immensely among all our family. I’m feeling a little rough tonight.

We got a note stuck in our door from the town that they’d be shutting our water off at 7am today for sewer line work. So last night I took my shower early, and filled up a whole bunch of water bottles, and the coffee pot, so we’d be ready for this morning.

6:45 am I woke with a rumble in my gut and thought, “FUCK! The toilet needs water to flush!”

So I ran and grabbed a 5-gallon bucket from the basement, put it in the bathtub, and filled it with water. Here’s a little tip, which my boyfriend didn’t know. When the water is shut off (as, apparently, happened a lot when I was a kid, since I remember doing this rather a lot), you can flush your toilet by dumping in about half a gallon of liquid. You’ve probably done this by accident before. It’s just how flushing works, so it’s no big deal to do. That’s how you can make power outages and water shut-offs a lot less gross. When I was a kid we had rain barrels to collect from downspouts, for the garden, which meant that unless it was winter, we’d always have a ready source of water for things like that.

I’m just rather proud of myself for remembering it in time this morning.

GPOY BIRTHDAY EVE

I will be 32 tomorrow. I was ignoring my computer and discussing how wasps and bees and ants are classified with my boyfriend. We’re about to go on a Drunk Walk through the neighborhood. I’m working 9-5 tomorrow. Mmm, yeah.

Also Tumblr crashed and ate my first picture. We’re trying again. I’d never done the Take A Picture thing before and probably won’t again.

Whoop Tumblr ate another picture. Fuck you, I won’t try the Take A Picture thing again, that’s some bullshit!

NEVER MIND! This is a GPOY with no picture! After five attempts, Tumblr can’t upload a pic. Well, fuck you, this is why I don’t Tumbl. Especially when drunk.

Yup, it wouldn’t let me do this without a pic, but wouldn’t upload one, so it’s a picture I took instead. Could you suck any more than you do? Probably not.

In my No Shit, There I Was chronicles of Pennsic, let me just share this story.

I savagely beat a man with an eight-inch blue rubber dildo. I was in my own common area (which, in local etiquette, amounts to my own living room), wearing what for me was sensible Swamp attire– a lace half-shirt and gold glitter booty shorts– and he looked me up and down, said something patronizing and offensive, and proceeded to talk through me at the man next to me. I tried to be light-hearted as I challenged him on this, but he responded to my impertinence by trying to put me in my place. I let him know I was offended, and he responded even more forcefully that I had no right to speak to him in this way. So I threw my drink (water) in his face, grabbed the dildo from the bar (where it was an ornament), and proceeded to chase him out of MY camp, thwacking him repeatedly with the implement. He later came back protesting to the (male) bartender that I’d had no right to throw him out (his attitude was very much “but she was just a piece of ass, how dare she speak to me thus?”) , and the bartender and several other of my campmates promptly chased him out. Much to my gratification. I’m wondering what the odds are of him ever telling his buddies that story.

(Here is a photo of the dildo in question, adorning the bottom of a mug.)

Rolled into Pennsic Saturday morning. Setup was pretty smooth. For anyone who doesnt know, there’s plenty of info online probably easier to find than me trying to explain it, but suffice to say there’s kind of a Renn Fest meets Burning Man situation though it’s really not much like either of those things. I’m here for both weeks so I’m pretty damn excited about that.
Last night I got embarrassingly hammered and wound up nearly passed-out on my camp’s ditch bridge puking in the rain at 5 am. So I think I’m no drinking tonight…. So I figured I’d update the Internet a little.