Posted by: tesserewhon on: October 4, 2010
1. Cook a dish with each cut of beef, pork, and chicken. Really know the animal I’m eating.
2. Ride my bike to Homestead Farm and back.
3. Actually finish the International Reading Challenge
4. Actually win NaNoWriMo
5. Write 500 words a day for a year.
6. Screenprint a shirt.
7. Bleach print a shirt.
8. Create a shirt design and submit it to threadless.
9. Write a short story and submit it to a scifi or fantasy zine.
10. Make early morning bike riding a part of my routine.
11. Take up yoga.
12. Learn and memorize a song a month.
13. Visit friends in Boston.
14. Visit friends in Seattle.
15. Get my driver’s license.
16. Visit a speakeasy.
17. Fulfill the 24 hour comic book challenge.
18. Cook a dish with ox or goat.
19. Bake a patisserie-worthy cake.
20. Invent a new cupcake.
21. Build a yearbook for the kids.
22. Write a blog post a day for a year.
23. Finish a crochet project.
24. Learn fiddle.
25. Learn enough music theory to compose a piece for a string quartet.
Posted by: tesserewhon on: September 14, 2010
Okay, so I lied. Not so much beauty. But definitely a mess. Kitchen’s covered in sugar, flour, and butter. And I’m planning on piling on even more.
I absolutely love having the house to myself. Cracked the windows wide open, got up early and blasted my country playlist, and generally started off the day right. With the breeze rolling through the curtains and rustling the turning leaves outside, I’ve been having a day that feels like this:

Source: Irvine Housing Blog
And this
Source: Cottage Dreamers
Just plopped an Angel Food Cake in the oven, put the base custard for a Cinnamon Ice Cream and the base puree for a White Peach Sorbet in the fridge, and need to get started on job applications and crafting swaps. Z was awesome and forwarded me some job opportunities while finding them for her mom’s cousin’s daughter or some relative or other. Also, I have got to turn in at least a page of mermaid story by Thursday. I don’t know if this story will ever finish? I’m willing to keep going ’til at least November when I’m going to give NaNoWriMo a serious shot.
Source: NaNoWriMo
This past weekend was also jam-packed. Friday I headed over to Takoma Park early to wander around and observe six strangers for my People Watching Story swap. It was glorious weather, and I sat right across from a hip, new pizza place that looked like it was managed by an actual Italian (slim fitted gray shirt, tanned skin, and a way of gesturing with his hands), after wandering around the artisan and thift stores clustered around the Takoma Park metro station. Met up with Steve-o and Ben on their way in, played Masons with Steve, the kid, and someone else, then (finally) Pirates’ Cove with Adam, Chris, and the kid whose uncle brings him. The kid was awesome and hilarious.
Saturday was the Chinatown Arts on Foot, Good Stuff Eatery, I Was Pottytrained at Gunpoint art opening, and S’s pit stop at Taco Bell.
Source: revert to plan b
Sunday was Z’s place to hang out. We stopped into a small cafe on our way to KFC, and ate cake there instead. Then her bf and his friend showed up for a rousing one round of a deck-building game before I had to jet to catch the train home. Delays weren’t too bad cuz I had E-dawg to chat with, and I caught up with W, who’ll be back in town this weekend to recuperate before jetting back to Seattle.
Here, have an a capella version of the song which this post’s title is from. Nickel Creek’s Beauty and the Mess.
Posted by: tesserewhon on: August 31, 2010
The year comes to an end, and the seasons fall slowly into each other, summer dying into fall into winter. Brilliant hues of earth are stripped bare and laid open to the elements. The shadows come to reign during cold nights, birthing tales of unseelie and demons and human evil but also magic and wonder and human courage, leading us through the dark and twisted evenings until the sun finds us again.
Clockwise from Top Left Corner
1. Deviant Art: “Misinformed” by GunnerRomantic
2. Deviant Art: “ATC: Snow Queen” by Reneenault
3. Deviant Art: “Queen Titania” by bluefooted
4. Deviant Art: “Snow White and the Woodsman” by stabstabstab
5. Deviant Art: “Desire” by bluefooted
6. Deviant Art: “St. Alia of the Knife” by bluefooted
7. Deviant Art: “The Dark” by sandara
8. Deviant Art: “I caught you, my star” by whitepearlvoice376
9. Edmund Dulac: The Snow Queen
Posted by: tesserewhon on: August 31, 2010
Clockwise from Top Left Corner
1. Swagger 360: Swagger Rule 33
2. Deviant Art: “Yellow Background” by ~somefield
3. James Jean: Batgirl Issue #45 Cover
4. io9: Mystery Science Theater’s Time Walker
5. Deviant Art: “Terra 2″ by *shideh
Posted by: tesserewhon on: August 30, 2010
Clockwise from Top Left Corner
1. Bright Star: Fanny Sits in Field of Flowers
2. CIT Jet Propulsion Lab: Unicorn’s Rose Nebula
3. Martha Stewart: Paper Flower Pom-poms
4. Deviant Art: “Goldie Doesn’t Like the Bears” by *AngryBird
5. io9: Norway’s Massive Troll Cover-up Exposed!
Posted by: tesserewhon on: August 24, 2010
For someone with no job and no real social life to speak of, I’ve been pretty darn busy these last several days. On my To Do List are various Swapbot commitments, planning a surprise birthday party for a friend, and writing and reviewing a couple of mermaid stories for my writing circle. All interspersed with helping my brother move his stuff and meeting with friends from out of town.
I’ve also finished two of the books I checked out of the library. Elfland by Freda Warrington.

Source: Macmillan
I really wish I had enjoyed this book more than I had. It had all the elements that I would normally glom onto, including a wonderfully skilled and detailed worldbuilding, a slew of potentially interesting characters, mythic elements woven together with faerie elements, and gorgeous imagery. My issue throughout the entire book seemed to be that I was about ten years too late. When I was 12 or 13 I would have eaten this stuff up with a spoon. Really special girl descended from a race of elves, falls for the bad boy, and saves the day. There’s drama, angst, sex, love, elves, magic, and some intrigue. Totally my thing.
But the really special girl(a.k.a. the Heroine) came off to me as incredibly entitled and unpleasant. The way she treated her best friends smacked of selfishness to me and you know, the rest of the characters weren’t much better. Everyone was caught up in his or her own problems to the point of destruction, either their own or others’. Which I could see as the point of the book, if everything hadn’t miraculously resolved in the end with the most self-absorbed characters being vindicated and becoming the heroes of the story.
I thought I’d really enjoy it, since Charles de Lint is one of my absolutely favorite authors ever, and I didn’t think he’d ever steer me wrong, but I just had too many issues with the characters. I suppose I want my protagonists to be people whose heroism comes from their inner goodness rather than annoying, selfish people who happen to be the center of the story. And this is really bothering me because usually I love flawed heroes (I mean, c’mon, BSG, anyone?) but this book just really didn’t do it for me. I think I’ll give it another read-through, see if I can parse out exactly why this book rubbed me the wrong way.
Next up was A Proper Education for Girls by Elaine diRollo.

Source: Library Thing
This one I enjoyed immensely, even if it did seem a bit disjointed and incomplete for some reason. That might just be because I wanted the book to continue. It’s the story of two sisters, raised by a stern and eccentric father, who free themselves and find love and life in each other. This one hit all of my weak spots for brave, independent, eccentric women breaking free of an oppressive patriarchal environment. There were love interests but no lasting interest in love other than their love for each other. This is the kind of strength and loyalty that I think makes the idea of Supernatural so popular. That you have someone who so completely loves you and is loyal to you and with whom you can ride through life knowing he/she has got your back. It’s definitely an odd duck of a book that explores Victorian notions of sensibility, ethnicity, feminism, and sexuality with solid prose and a hopping plot. I finished it in one day, whereas Elfland had taken me weeks since I kept getting bored with it or exasperated.
It’s really weird how that happened. Usually I have no patience for just fiction because it’s just not enough. I want magic and wonder and adventure but weirdly enough, the second book delivered more of that than the first. It was enough to step through history with the diRollo’s protagonists rather than step through a whole new world with Warrington’s characters.