rivka

I like drinking wine, but I'm certainly no expert. I don't, for example, know how to talk about wine using the kinds of terms you see in tasting notes (for example, "A medium ruby starting to show some brick at the edges. A clean but modest nose of dark stone fruits and violets. The tannins are smooth and melting away. Blackberries and plums; rose petals. Lovely but starting to fade." Huh?).

So I'm intrigued by these instructions for how to develop a sense of different aromas a wine can have. It explains how to make "standards" to illustrate specific scents - combining a neutral wine (like the kind that comes in a box) with bits of different flavorings. For example:

Asparagus (several drops of brine of canned asparagus)
Bell Pepper (tiny piece of bell pepper - don't leave in too long)
Vanilla (drop of vanilla extract)
Butter (drop of butter extract)
Clove (one clove, don't leave in too long)

He recommends that you get some broadly different wines to taste, and then use the "standards" as a reference to try and identify the different aromas present in the wines.

It seems like a lot of work to set up the standards, but I also think it could be fun. Might be a good idea for a party.

Last night was the Baltimore Folk Music Society's annual Playford Ball - my third since I've been doing English Country Dancing. It was a lovely, lovely evening. I think there were around 100 people there, which meant plenty of room to dance - last year the sets were so squashed together that movement was unpleasantly constricted. This year we still had three longways sets across the hall, but the individual dancers were able to spread widely enough apart that, for example, if the dance called for backing up you could back up through the line behind you, instead of coming up short against a wall of backs.

I love watching an entire hall full of people who know how to dance well, all moving in precisely the same patterns at precisely the same time. Each individual dancer has their own flourishes and puts their own stamp of personality on the patterns, but at the same time you have a hundred people dodging and weaving in such perfect synchrony that everyone is in exactly the right place and no one even bumps elbows. It's gorgeous.

I got to dance with curiousangel and wcg (who rose from his sickbed, brave man, although you couldn't tell it from watching him dance), and - yay! - with helygen, who came down for the weekend to attend the ball. She made quite an impression on the men present, in a simple and elegant dress wcg made for her.

The band - a group from Philadelphia and New Jersey called "Hold the Mustard" - was excellent at building and sustaining the energy of the crowd. Their bluesy interpretation of Smithy Hill (link is to an mp3, but not of "Hold the Mustard") sounded like it came right out of an after-hours lounge, and led to some pretty ridiculous, and yet fun, strutting and sauntering in the set I was in.

The food was excellent - little morsels of potato and herb-filled puff pastry, mini quiches, savory little meatballs, seven or eight kinds of gourmet cheeses, cold asparagus spears, zucchini, and bell pepper strips with two different dips, fancy breads cut into ornate shapes, mini cheesecakes topped with glazed fruit, rich little chocolate desserts. It was almost enough to make me forgive the woman in charge of the kitchen for being snippy about letting anyone in during afternoon ball practice. (This was a vast, uncramped kitchen, capable of handling eight or ten kitchen workers without anyone being tripped over, and there were only two people preparing food in it. But she was still mortally offended when I entered to get some water, because I was allergic to the only drink being served, and then again when curiousangel entered to get an ice pack for my injured ankle.)

The only thing that marred the evening for me was that someone criticized my dress. She was wearing a gorgeous concoction of embroidered white silk, and as I was asking about it she turned up her nose at mine because I wasn't wearing a bum roll or paniers beneath it. I explained that my dress was a copy of a specific 18th century gown that hadn't been worn with figure enhancers, and she treated me to a condescending little lecture about how wrong I was to think that 18th century dresses were ever worn without them, and how I had probably relied on an ignorant, inaccurate source for my pattern.

Probably everyone who's ever been in the SCA is laughing and rolling their eyes right now, but my feelings were genuinely hurt. In the first place, she was just wrong about the style of my gown - but even if she hadn't been, it's not like the Playford Ball is supposed to be about historical accuracy in dress. People were wearing anything from modern formalwear to sweeping gypsy/hippie dresses to African robes to, yes, reproductions of 18th and early 19th century clothing. People wear whatever they think is festive. It's supposed to be about dancing and fellowship. I have no idea why she thought it was appropriate to go out of her way to put me down.

curiousangel suggested that I accidentally spill my glass of cranberry punch over her white silk gown, but I restrained myself. Later on, when we were in the same set, she kept trying to make eye contact and smiling broadly at me. I don't know whether she thought our conversation had been friendly, or what.

I'm trying to decide whether or not to do nanowrimo this year. Last November, when so many of my friends were writing, I really wished that I were part of it. This year, it looks as though even more of my friends are going to be writing. I want to be part of it.

But at the same time, it doesn't seem fair to the people in my life to have me take on another huge, time-consuming project so soon after I've finished my dissertation. I know that I was essentially an absent partner for several months - and not too great a friend, either. curiousangel did almost all the housework, and he put up with my neuroses as well. I can't ask him to do that again, and yet I can't promise that nanowrimo wouldn't consume my life.

I told therealjae that I'd work on a West Wing fanfic story in time for the Jeds deadline. I'm also working on setting up a weblog that's less journally and more commentary-oriented. Those two writing projects are probably enough. Right?

This evening I planted some flossflowers and some impatiens in our living room window box. Our landlords brought them over, along with some hostas for our courtyard. I'm a little dubious about the hostas - they're transplanted from the landlords' new yard, and they look kinda weedy - but the window box looks amazing.

Today I also did some brainstorming for the West Wing fanfic story I've been promising to write once the dissertation was out of the way. It's supposed to build off the same general concept as the vignette I wrote for therealjae's Secrets Vignette Challenge. I have a central conflict, I even have the vague germ of a plot... but as I played around with ideas, I realized that I just have no idea how to write fiction. How does an idea turn into an orderly set of scenes? No clue whatsoever.

Cross Stitch Collectibles has finally made a pattern for my favorite M.C. Escher picture.

Must. Finish. Current. Project. First.
Must. Finish. Current. Project. First.
Must...

Updated to add: Oh my God. Tell me I would have to be insane to do this one.

Thanks to the powerful guidance of wcg, I have achieved a sushi sundress. This is my first real sewing project - I did some scut work on the ball dress Bill made me last spring, but for this one I did most of the sewing myself. Yay! It's a sushi sundress! Now I have everything I need to be happy.
( see for yourself! )

Home again today because of snow. I probably could've gotten in to work, but I called my boss around 8am and she thought it would be better to stay home. Her son's school is closed, which would've meant canceling our 10am meeting even if I had gone in - and she pointed out that patients are unlikely to slog through the snow to be research subjects. I have to agree. So I'm here at home, working intermittently on a research proposal, IMing with therealjae, and generally relaxing.

fourgates is visiting. He, mittelschmertz, and I wandered Baltimore for a while on Saturday - had brunch at the Paper Moon, visited the American Visionary Arts Museum, which turned out to have a depressing major exhibit of drug art, stopped for coffee at Ze Mean Bean, which was depressingly out of chai, and - despite the daunting cold - climbed Federal Hill for the harbor views. Stupendous dinner at Sushi King: the highlights were a white seaweed roll with four different kinds of fish, and something they were calling "Pretty in Red Roll," which had king crab and avocado inside, maguro tuna on the outside, a ribbon of spicy sauce, and a ribbon of creamy pale green sauce lightly laced with wasabi. It was as beautiful as it was delicious. (Okay, maybe nothing could be as beautiful as that roll was delicious. Wow.)

fourgates wanted to try our church, so when mittelschmertz dropped him off at my place on Sunday morning we attempted to go tearing off downtown, despite the falling snow. We didn't get very far before we discovered, via an enormous traffic jam, that the roads were treacherous. So we turned around instead, had breakfast at Frank's Diner (mmmm, marble cake), and went to my pistol range to put holes in paper for a while. I hadn't been to the range in forever, so it was nice to see that the owner remembered me. "She's a serious shooter," he said to someone, gesturing at me. "But she doesn't know that she is." Hmmm. (He might've just been trying to get me to renew my membership for another year. But we had a lot of fun, so I suppose that I might.)

Back at the apartment, we had a quiet afternoon and evening filled with talking, cuddling, West Wing videos, and kabobs. And today we're mostly snowed in, except that after I was excused from trying to drive downtown, fourgates took my car and headed downtown himself for an interview which might lead to a job in Baltimore. Other than that, and my research proposal thingy, no plans for today. That's a nice quality in a day, sometimes.

Updated to add: Still no cold, four days after curiousangel came down with a terrible one. Go, vitamin C!

New Year's Eve and New Year's Day went beautifully.
( New Year's Eve )
( New Year's Day )
( two New Year's Eve pictures )

Inspired by annaoj, I too am going to have sushi clothing!

Bill's going to help me copy the shape of a dress I already own, in this fabric. Yaaay!

...and an ordinary, if pleasant, weekend. Except that I really missed therealjae, who's been busy all weekend. I get lonely when she's not around in IM.

wcg came over at noon on Saturday to go hiking with me in Patapsco Valley State Park. We took the Cascade Trail, a 2.2-mile loop that climbs a steep ridge and meanders through the woods for a while, crossing and re-crossing a pretty little stream. There's not much cascade to speak of, after the drought we've been having, but it was a lovely day for hiking. Afterward we had lunch and went shopping for hiking boots for me, although I didn't buy them right away because I'd forgotten my wallet. I had fun looking at the camping gear in the sporting goods store - I love ingenious little folding implements and so forth. (It was probably just as well that I didn't have my wallet, in retrospect.) Bill and I discovered that we'd once owned matching Coleman mess kits, his with the Boy Scout logo and mine with the Girl Scout logo.

A really good dinner, Saturday night. I marinated some boneless chicken breasts in a mixture of olive oil, lemon juice, dijon mustard, thyme, salt and pepper, and copious amounts of minced garlic, and cooked them on the outdoor grill. While they were grilling, I thinned the remaining marinade with chicken broth and boiled it down into an intensely piquant sauce. We also had corn on the cob, steamed broccoli, rosemary-olive oil bread with butter, and one of my favorite local beers.

Bill went home Sunday morning. I went into Misha's and my bedroom intending to cuddle him for just a minute and then shower, and ended up getting two more hours of sleep. We dragged ourselves out of bed around noon (church? Oh yeah, I remember something about how we used to go to church), went back to the sporting goods store for a shoe-buying spree (I got the hiking boots, he got sneakers and water shoes), hit the mall for haircuts (aaahhhhh, short hair), and went out to Centennial Park to end the afternoon in a kayak. Misha had taken a course in kayaking basics there, and wanted to show me some of the strokes he'd learned. There's not much to the lake there, at Centennial Park, but it was nice to be out on the water anyway.

Home. Staring blankly at our computer screens. Playing catch-up in rasseff and alt.poly, vaguely wondering when the last time was that I felt moved to post. A West Wing episode. A seriously mismatched ballgame, allowing me to direct most of my attention to my cross stitch work in progress. Three hands of Chez Geek, which was more fun than I expected it to be, and would probably be even more fun with more than two players.

All in all, a pleasant weekend. I felt kind of lonely, at times, but that wasn't the fault of the men in my life, who went out of their ways to entertain me. For some reason, I just felt at loose ends.

Now, a shortened work week. Wednesday afternoon, we fly to Edmonton. Yay!