dragonlady7

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fabledshadow https://fabledshadow.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “replies on misc, whining edition” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/625878110659854336/replies-on-misc-whining-edition

Ok the bit about the air mattress- we definitely used part of one stretched over wire panels as the shelter for a hog pen one time and the neighbors are like …what kind of white trash are you? And we’re like THE RECYCLING KIND

1) that is excellent and yeah they’re like, super heavy duty plastic, why not??? 2) listen bruh we ain’t (just) poor we’re eco-conscious, and 3) what I made out of the air mattress was a waterproof cover for my bed for when the rain came in the roof hole of the yurt, because it was exactly the size of my bed and if I used a regular tarp then that was an invitation for the mice to come have a party in it but the air mattress was heavy and flat enough that the mice did not feel enticed to crawl under it.

Aw I just go sad because I remembered one of the things that burned up in the yurt was this totally sick velvety-polyester heavy as fuck blanket I had, king-sized, royal blue, with a sick picture of a winged unicorn rearing up in front of a full moon on it. it was rad as hell, MM gave it to me and I loved it but it was too heavy for my bed at home (and also, sigh, not to my dude’s aesthetic taste and it’s his bedroom too so, fine) so it was in the yurt where I actually needed that kind of firepower. I’m so bummed that blanket’s not in my life anymore, it was rad as fuck.

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fabledshadow replied to your photo “Chita yelled at this sunbeam until it got into the chair for her. Very…”

Once Chita is done with her nap will you please tell her that I love her?

LOL I don’t know if she’ll ever be done, she’s going on five hours now in the same spot though the sun long since abandoned her. 

I have gone and Kissed Her Little Head, though. So that she Knows. (She is an old lady. Her naps are long and thorough. Also she ran around like a weirdo for an hour this morning so she’s got a lot to rest up from.)

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fabledshadow replied to your photo “It worked! My first sourdough loaf was against all indications a…”

Yay bread! Isn’t it satisfying?

It should NOT have worked.

I started with this recipe [https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/best-ever-sourdough-oatmeal-bread-zbcz1311] and I used some slightly soured milk for it because that’s what I had, and so I scalded the milk so that whatever was growing in it and making it sour wouldn’t take over the sourdough. Which I thought, is a technique I’ve used elsewhere, should be fine, why would it matter? you can use whatever liquid, right? Let it cool, dumped it in, made the dough. 
Supposed to be a “loose dough”, it was dry almost to the point of crumbs even though I’d used more milk than the recipe said. I was dubious, but thought, well, sometimes as things sit they loosen up? So I let it rise on the counter for an hour, and then kneaded it in a bowl and added more water because it was so dry, and then let it rise in a bowl for four more hours and then put it in the fridge because I wasn’t ready to bake it? and then took it out in the morning and it was SO DRY. I put it into two loaf pans by holding it between my hands and snapping it in half, and i was like, THIS IS TOO DRY. So I put it back into the bowl and literally held it under the tap to drip more and more water in, probably like a cup of water? it was a lot. I was fed up.

I let it rise for another two hours, then divided it again and slopped it into the two greased loaf pans and was like this is absolutely not going to work at all.

But I baked it, because I was fed up. At this point, the dough’s been going for like. 48 hours. It’s a disaster. It’s not going to work.

And I baked it and it’s fine. It’s just… it’s fine. The oats are gone, it’s kind of dense but not hard. And it is, boy, it is intensely sour, for a bread. 

So! It worked! But should not have! Next time I will try to follow the recipe more faithfully!

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fabledshadow replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your…”

This is a Serious Topic and all i could think reading that last paragraph is “the paper’s gone to a Better Place”

By which i mean to say i’m in the camp of ‘make friends/allies locally and source as much as you can there because shit is going to hit the fan and thinking on a nationwide scale is going to be unneeded soon’ so like …i’ll just be over here in my Oscar the Grouch trashcan lol

LOL, old paper is happier as soil, surely?

I also plan to do some papermaking, so I have actually been hoarding paper to recycle myself. (I want to make paper with the waste from flax processing but without a Hollander beater I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I just met the person who owns the old mill on the stream by the farm and I want to ask him about setting up a tiny water wheel in his millrace so I can make hydropowered drop hammers. That’s probably a bit of a pipe dream, though.)

But like… I mean, I’m becoming a big advocate of coming up with local sources for your food web etc., and you’re not wrong, if shit hits the fan you’re better off the shorter your supply chain is.

But I’m really trying to be hopeful about it, and positive, and my point is, paying closer attention to possible local sources for your life needs can only have a good impact. The Troy Farmer’s Market just won a big award, it’s about 20 years old and the city has transformed around it and partly because of it, it’s such a huge focal point for the community– and I want that, but more inclusive, I want American cities to be able to have inclusive local cultures, and I don’t know how to do it but I know part of it is not just blindly buying eggs from Wal-Mart that come from mistreated chickens tended by human trafficking victims halfway across the country because that’s the cheapest price you can get. That’s not how to eat, that’s not how to have a human society, that’s not how to care for yourself or your people. 

Knowing where your garbage goes, knowing where your food comes from– that’s my point. And even more positively, it’s just nice to be in tune with your countryside, you know? What’s in season right now? Who has autumn blueberries, what a treat! You appreciate stuff more when it’s in tune with your environment, I think. Local flowers, not hot-house, are so much more beautiful, and incidentally you’re not endangering the health of Colombian flower workers and spewing carbon into the air from having tropical flowers flown to you. Like, it’s layers, here.

If your guiding principle on food shopping is not “who can give this to me for the absolute cheapest price”, but is rather “what is this, where did it come from, and did everyone handling it make a living in the process? did it live well and did it die well? was it produced sustainably?” then there’s a lot less incentive for the cost-cutting self-inspection bullshit that gives you human fingers in the sausage and so on.

And yes, if there’s any kind of destabilization, living somewhere where there’s a robust local food web is going to put you in a lot better position for, like, continued survival, than living somewhere that only has imported food. I’m definitely not not thinking about that.

Also, as an aside, I keep commenting on people’s “time to go vegetarian!” posts to harp on about how vegetable markets aren’t any more sustainable, but I should point out for the record that I ate a vegetarian dinner last night and am not actually some kind of meat fiend. (Tomato soup, all from stuff from the farm. It was super nice.) I do think Americans eat more meat than they need to, and that meat ought to be an expensive thing you build meals around and sometimes do without rather than the bulk staple so many American diets treat it as. (I’m relying on one half of a chicken for all my meat needs this week. It’s plenty, for two people!) But just discarding meat from the diet without giving any thought to the whole system is not going to solve any of our larger problems, so. Lettuce listeria will make you just as miserable as the e. coli in uninspected pork. And the horrible things Driscoll’s workers go through do nothing to convince me that berries are somehow more virtuous than chicken! I’m super tired of “meatless mondays” level of zero-introspection into the foodweb, is all. Demonizing a foodstuff instead of investigating the whole system isn’t going to help one tiny bit at all.

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fabledshadow replied to your post “gdocs grammar check”

Can i squee a minute about you writing good omens fic ����

Ha, I’m trying. It’s not going… rapidly. 

“It’s all right,” Aziraphale said. “I’m not here to thwart your wiles anymore.”

“You think these are my wiles?” Crowley asked, a bit frazzled. He was too big for his own skin, on the edge of something, he wasn’t sure what, and it was maddening. 

“You’ve never really used your wiles on me,” Aziraphale said. 

Indignation gave Crowley something to hold onto, and he sputtered with it for a moment. “Why– yes I have! I tempt you all the time, angel.”

“You do,” Aziraphale said, with a saucy little eyebrow quirk. “But I meant, on purpose, dear.”

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fabledshadow replied to your post “ok so a travel advisory is in place for all of the city of buffalo,…”

Please be super careful! Best travel wishes!

Thanks! Ha, I cheated. I texted with a coworker who lives nearby and he was like “oh i’m going in too” and so I hiked out to the main road and across it, and then waited and he picked me up. So that was easy.

I walked about a tenth of a mile, in the road because the sidewalks were impassable, and oh my gosh. Nobody’s taking today off– either they’re peons who don’t get paid days off so it’s work or don’t pay rent, OR they’re important and so can’t take a day off at the drop of a hat, and as a consequence everyone is on the road except the school buses. 

So I got that far, and stood in a rut next to the road feeling the inside of my nose freeze, and thought, “well, I could make it the rest of the way, but I’d be miserable and might get hit by a car,” and had time to be glad I hadn’t refused my coworker’s offer before he showed up. 

The roads aren’t bad– it’s not slick snow, not heavy or wet or anything, it’s pretty powdery. But there’s a foot of it, and it’s in the way, and we’re going to get heavy wind all day.

So we’ll see what happens. The coworker is also the store manager and said he told everyone else not to come in, it’s just him and another long-time employee who lives very close. They figure they can handle it. So I’m here for the whole online department, and they’re here for the rest, and probably there won’t be a lot to do, but I’m getting paid twenty-five cents above minimum to be here so I’m gonna be here. *shrug*
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