scordatura (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scordatura) wrote2020-05-11 07:17 pm
scordatura) wrote2020-05-11 07:17 pm
Entry tags:
April Update
Hello, friends, it is... mid-May, WHOOPS, ONE OF THESE DAYS I'LL FIGURE TIMING OUT, which means it is time to update y'all on what I've been up to for the past month! Things are still, uh, Happening in the world, so it's still been a weird month -- but I've been plugging away on much of the things I've been wanting to work on, and I like to mark my progress on them, and I hope y'all enjoy hearing about it, too!
Writing
Gay Werewolves: 126,678 words (+7.8k), 124 pages into draft #1, about halfway through Chapter 13.
CMRN #2: 73,099 words (+1k), about three-quarters through Chapter 11. (At least in theory! BOY have I not been progressing on this much.)
Further projects. Very much nothing on this front, sadly -- I've been bad enough at forming daily writing routines for my above two projects to begin with, which is extremely something I want to get more serious about!! I'm calling it right now: I am dedicating June* to forming better writing routines, period. I'm not going to set specific goals as to what this means, because I think the perfect is the enemy of the good (and I know myself well enough to know that if I say, for example, I'm going to write every day, I'll get super discouraged if I miss a day or two and less motivated to keep going), but I'm committing to making it happen one way or another! It's going to happen, friends!!
* This originally said May, but then my laptop broke very early in the month, which means I'm unable to move it, which means I'm away from it whenever I want to spend time flopping on the couch, which really cuts down on writing time, ugh... so JUNE IT IS, LMAO SOB.
Knitting
Friend projects: 6" (which is the length I had it before I had to rip it back last time!! so exciting!!! it's... definitely still running into issues, I hate this pattern lmao sob, BUT hopefully it will still come out nice!!) and 10" (three new inches!)
Scarf: 46" (TWENTY-EIGHT new inches, holy shit!! not sure how long I want it to be -- five feet? six feet? we'll see!!)
Bookmarks and coasters for yarn store: Happy to report that I'm done with all four of this bookmark (two in this yarn, two in this!) and two of this one (in just No. 4)!! I also made one version of this coaster in No. 4, but it's definitely too small, so I'm trying again, as well as making this one with both yarns held together; the effect is this gorgeous marbled emerald green, shot through with teal and yellow and orange-gold and OH it's going to be so goddamn gorgeous, I'm utterly excited to share the finished product.
Mystery shawl: This is a new project!! I don't know what it was that first made me think about doing a mystery knitalong, but I impulsively searched for one, and stumbled across this, the only presently occurring one at the time that was free! And since I didn't know how much I could participate, and wanted to just use some stash yarn at random, I certainly didn't want to pay for it... so I decided to give it a shot! I dug out some half-wool half-acrylic and 75%-acrylic 25%-mohair Slovenian yarn from the '80s that my aunt sent me when I first started knitting (I can't find any information about it since it's, you know, 30 years old and also SLOVENIAN, so I figured a mystery one-off project was the perfect use for it), and I was good to go!
And honestly, it's been so much fun-- I'm very excited for how it's turning out (got a nice black base with some beautiful purple stripes!!), and it's certainly not perfect, but it looks really cool and I think it'll be lovely and cozy. And I'm thinking if I don't like the final product, I can always pass it onto someone else, and it'll have been a fun experience!! So I'm really happy with it, and so very excited to finish it up SOON, YAY.
Cooking/Baking
Cooking: I made a couple old favorite meals last month -- and one new one, spaghetti pangrattato, aka "what happens when I go 'hm, we have a lot of breadcrumbs we probably will take years to use up, what can I actually use them for?'" And then I found this, and it seemed too simple to be believed, and then it was SO FUCKING DELICIOUS, OH MY GOD, I TRULY CAN'T BELIEVE HOW WELL IT TURNED OUT. We didn't have garlic, so I ended up using an onion instead, and I seasoned it with garlic salt, rosemary, thyme, and paprika; otherwise, I followed the recipe mostly to the letter, minus capers and parsley at the end. And it was DELICIOUS -- all the delicious heartiness of fried food, but without any of the heaviness that accompanies it, crispy and tasty and so, SO satisfying, even without the fried egg!! And the fried egg absolutely, intensely elevates it, and is incredibly worth adding. And the best part: I doubled it, so one pack of spaghetti and one cup of breadcrumbs (plus half an onion, spices, and two tablespoons of oil) fed the two of us for FOUR MEALS, with breadcrumb filling left over even after we ate all the spaghetti!! HOW AMAZING IS THAT. Absolutely, absolutely making this again -- cheap and simple and delicious all out of proportion to the first two things.
Baking: I made two new desserts last month: rice pudding, which I made twice (once scaled down by half, with vanilla coconut milk, and another time as a full recipe, with brown sugar and dairy milk), and both times it turned out EXTREMELY delicious, turns out I love rice pudding!! I never doubted it!!, and brownies, which I made primarily because I accidentally got a bunch of cake flour and I wanted to make a recipe that specifically called for it; they ended up with a super interesting almost meringue-like top crust and then a nice, soft, very flat body -- definitely not my favorite brownies I've ever made by a long shot, but a very tasty new attempt! So both of these turned out very well, and I'm excited to see what I crave and want to whip up this month!!
Yeast-based: OH BOY, LAST MONTH I MADE SOME HUGE STRIDES ON THIS FRONT. The biggest news of all was baby's first sourdough starter -- helped along by the yeast found on a few raisins! I learned a lot during this process: namely, that you need a roughly equal weight of flour and water for a starter (which is not the same as equal measurements) and that sometimes even a little less water than that is just fine, that wrapping my jar in a tea cozy (or oven mitt) helps it stay warm, and that you can feed an already-live started unbleached flour, but shouldn't do it to one still developing. It took eight days, but my little yeast son -- christened Brad, for Brad Bonappetit -- is now living in the fridge, absolutely thriving in his new home, bubbly and well.
And once I realized you could make recipes with sourdough discard rather than just throwing it out, I went full-in -- my favorite recipe so far has been pretzels, which I wish I hadn't made with the sugar version of the topping, but otherwise turned out PERFECTLY, so soft and chewy with just a hint of tang! I also adored the popovers, though I ALSO wish I hadn't filled them all the way to the top and they were a nightmare to take out of the tins -- but otherwise a perfect popover, and one I'm definitely looking forward to revisiting! I liked the biscuits I made least, though they were also pretty good -- they turned out a little too crisp for my taste, though, so I probably won't revisit them. But I'm excited to try more of these recipes, as well as more bread with the fed starter!!
Languages
Duolingo: I'm still plugging away at both French and Italian, but I've really let both German and Russian fall by the wayside; I think I set way too ambitious goals for myself, which have discouraged me from trying at all, so I think I need to start way smaller -- doing one day of each once a week, for example, or something similar. So this is definitely going to be something I come back to soon!
Serbian: I discovered that I still had my Serbian copy of Good Omens, so I might try coming back to this, especially since it's looking very unlikely that I'll see my family soon or be back in Serbia anytime soon! So stay tuned for more updates on this front!
Academic/Professional Goals
Work: Figured I might as well use this as a spot to talk loosely about my work accomplishments -- we've finally got the first two datasets (out of six, I think) that we're analyzing for my primary project, which is very exciting, so the bulk of my work for the foreseeable future is just going to be on them! I'm excited to see how it all goes, since this was basically what I was hired to do and it's taken SO MANY MONTHS to get me here, ha. As of the end of the month, we were pretty much getting started on a framework for analysis, not yet getting to any of the actual coding, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how that progresses!
Dissertation: I've got two hypotheses left to run, and they're (of course!) the two most complicated -- but I'm making progress, and once I finish running the data, I can start PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER AND WRITING, which is super overwhelming but!! it is the very last step!!! aaaaaa!!!
Personal/Interpersonal Goals
Writing letters to friends: Still nothing on this front, since too much else has been going on, but I DID remember that I have postcards, so that might be a fun way to ease into doing something like this?? Hopefully I can write at least a couple next month!!
Personal life newsletter: I still really want to do this sometime -- weirdly, quarantine has made me want to do it more even though I'm doing less, just because it means I kind of have more space to talk about the things I would want to talk about?? But it's still not the right time, so... maybe next month?? Maybe sometime later?? WHOMST KNOWS, HONESTLY.
Writing
Gay Werewolves: 126,678 words (+7.8k), 124 pages into draft #1, about halfway through Chapter 13.
CMRN #2: 73,099 words (+1k), about three-quarters through Chapter 11. (At least in theory! BOY have I not been progressing on this much.)
Further projects. Very much nothing on this front, sadly -- I've been bad enough at forming daily writing routines for my above two projects to begin with, which is extremely something I want to get more serious about!! I'm calling it right now: I am dedicating June* to forming better writing routines, period. I'm not going to set specific goals as to what this means, because I think the perfect is the enemy of the good (and I know myself well enough to know that if I say, for example, I'm going to write every day, I'll get super discouraged if I miss a day or two and less motivated to keep going), but I'm committing to making it happen one way or another! It's going to happen, friends!!
* This originally said May, but then my laptop broke very early in the month, which means I'm unable to move it, which means I'm away from it whenever I want to spend time flopping on the couch, which really cuts down on writing time, ugh... so JUNE IT IS, LMAO SOB.
Knitting
Friend projects: 6" (which is the length I had it before I had to rip it back last time!! so exciting!!! it's... definitely still running into issues, I hate this pattern lmao sob, BUT hopefully it will still come out nice!!) and 10" (three new inches!)
Scarf: 46" (TWENTY-EIGHT new inches, holy shit!! not sure how long I want it to be -- five feet? six feet? we'll see!!)
Bookmarks and coasters for yarn store: Happy to report that I'm done with all four of this bookmark (two in this yarn, two in this!) and two of this one (in just No. 4)!! I also made one version of this coaster in No. 4, but it's definitely too small, so I'm trying again, as well as making this one with both yarns held together; the effect is this gorgeous marbled emerald green, shot through with teal and yellow and orange-gold and OH it's going to be so goddamn gorgeous, I'm utterly excited to share the finished product.
Mystery shawl: This is a new project!! I don't know what it was that first made me think about doing a mystery knitalong, but I impulsively searched for one, and stumbled across this, the only presently occurring one at the time that was free! And since I didn't know how much I could participate, and wanted to just use some stash yarn at random, I certainly didn't want to pay for it... so I decided to give it a shot! I dug out some half-wool half-acrylic and 75%-acrylic 25%-mohair Slovenian yarn from the '80s that my aunt sent me when I first started knitting (I can't find any information about it since it's, you know, 30 years old and also SLOVENIAN, so I figured a mystery one-off project was the perfect use for it), and I was good to go!
And honestly, it's been so much fun-- I'm very excited for how it's turning out (got a nice black base with some beautiful purple stripes!!), and it's certainly not perfect, but it looks really cool and I think it'll be lovely and cozy. And I'm thinking if I don't like the final product, I can always pass it onto someone else, and it'll have been a fun experience!! So I'm really happy with it, and so very excited to finish it up SOON, YAY.
Cooking/Baking
Cooking: I made a couple old favorite meals last month -- and one new one, spaghetti pangrattato, aka "what happens when I go 'hm, we have a lot of breadcrumbs we probably will take years to use up, what can I actually use them for?'" And then I found this, and it seemed too simple to be believed, and then it was SO FUCKING DELICIOUS, OH MY GOD, I TRULY CAN'T BELIEVE HOW WELL IT TURNED OUT. We didn't have garlic, so I ended up using an onion instead, and I seasoned it with garlic salt, rosemary, thyme, and paprika; otherwise, I followed the recipe mostly to the letter, minus capers and parsley at the end. And it was DELICIOUS -- all the delicious heartiness of fried food, but without any of the heaviness that accompanies it, crispy and tasty and so, SO satisfying, even without the fried egg!! And the fried egg absolutely, intensely elevates it, and is incredibly worth adding. And the best part: I doubled it, so one pack of spaghetti and one cup of breadcrumbs (plus half an onion, spices, and two tablespoons of oil) fed the two of us for FOUR MEALS, with breadcrumb filling left over even after we ate all the spaghetti!! HOW AMAZING IS THAT. Absolutely, absolutely making this again -- cheap and simple and delicious all out of proportion to the first two things.
Baking: I made two new desserts last month: rice pudding, which I made twice (once scaled down by half, with vanilla coconut milk, and another time as a full recipe, with brown sugar and dairy milk), and both times it turned out EXTREMELY delicious, turns out I love rice pudding!! I never doubted it!!, and brownies, which I made primarily because I accidentally got a bunch of cake flour and I wanted to make a recipe that specifically called for it; they ended up with a super interesting almost meringue-like top crust and then a nice, soft, very flat body -- definitely not my favorite brownies I've ever made by a long shot, but a very tasty new attempt! So both of these turned out very well, and I'm excited to see what I crave and want to whip up this month!!
Yeast-based: OH BOY, LAST MONTH I MADE SOME HUGE STRIDES ON THIS FRONT. The biggest news of all was baby's first sourdough starter -- helped along by the yeast found on a few raisins! I learned a lot during this process: namely, that you need a roughly equal weight of flour and water for a starter (which is not the same as equal measurements) and that sometimes even a little less water than that is just fine, that wrapping my jar in a tea cozy (or oven mitt) helps it stay warm, and that you can feed an already-live started unbleached flour, but shouldn't do it to one still developing. It took eight days, but my little yeast son -- christened Brad, for Brad Bonappetit -- is now living in the fridge, absolutely thriving in his new home, bubbly and well.
And once I realized you could make recipes with sourdough discard rather than just throwing it out, I went full-in -- my favorite recipe so far has been pretzels, which I wish I hadn't made with the sugar version of the topping, but otherwise turned out PERFECTLY, so soft and chewy with just a hint of tang! I also adored the popovers, though I ALSO wish I hadn't filled them all the way to the top and they were a nightmare to take out of the tins -- but otherwise a perfect popover, and one I'm definitely looking forward to revisiting! I liked the biscuits I made least, though they were also pretty good -- they turned out a little too crisp for my taste, though, so I probably won't revisit them. But I'm excited to try more of these recipes, as well as more bread with the fed starter!!
Languages
Duolingo: I'm still plugging away at both French and Italian, but I've really let both German and Russian fall by the wayside; I think I set way too ambitious goals for myself, which have discouraged me from trying at all, so I think I need to start way smaller -- doing one day of each once a week, for example, or something similar. So this is definitely going to be something I come back to soon!
Serbian: I discovered that I still had my Serbian copy of Good Omens, so I might try coming back to this, especially since it's looking very unlikely that I'll see my family soon or be back in Serbia anytime soon! So stay tuned for more updates on this front!
Academic/Professional Goals
Work: Figured I might as well use this as a spot to talk loosely about my work accomplishments -- we've finally got the first two datasets (out of six, I think) that we're analyzing for my primary project, which is very exciting, so the bulk of my work for the foreseeable future is just going to be on them! I'm excited to see how it all goes, since this was basically what I was hired to do and it's taken SO MANY MONTHS to get me here, ha. As of the end of the month, we were pretty much getting started on a framework for analysis, not yet getting to any of the actual coding, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how that progresses!
Dissertation: I've got two hypotheses left to run, and they're (of course!) the two most complicated -- but I'm making progress, and once I finish running the data, I can start PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER AND WRITING, which is super overwhelming but!! it is the very last step!!! aaaaaa!!!
Personal/Interpersonal Goals
Writing letters to friends: Still nothing on this front, since too much else has been going on, but I DID remember that I have postcards, so that might be a fun way to ease into doing something like this?? Hopefully I can write at least a couple next month!!
Personal life newsletter: I still really want to do this sometime -- weirdly, quarantine has made me want to do it more even though I'm doing less, just because it means I kind of have more space to talk about the things I would want to talk about?? But it's still not the right time, so... maybe next month?? Maybe sometime later?? WHOMST KNOWS, HONESTLY.