freyakitten

It is now the season of Leaving Anonymous Bags Of Zucchini At Your Neighbour's Door. So I'm looking for everyone's favourite recipes involving zucchini - please respond with a link or a short description of the method :D

I will start with this AWESOME recipe for zucchini muffins (I made a batch (twelve of the large-size-muffin-tin muffins) last night, and there may not be any left when I get home...) http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/zucchini_muffins/

While I remember, thankyou to whoever anonymously boughted me a present :D

I have just had the BEST TIME EVAR (with the exclusion of dancing tiems), at a jewellery making class. We have five more weeks (doing some of the basics of making stuff out of metal sheet), and it is so very very very cool.

Even if I break more saw blades than almost anyone else :P

I has done some planting (after dance stuff and instead of more dance stuff). But I can't decide which pot to put my Silver Blob in :( Maybe I will leave him in that pot until inspiration strikes - the pot I already had that would be perfect for him is even more perfect for the cascading succulent which badly needs potting on.

Livejournal says it has been four weeks since I updated. This is probably not going to be much of an update of what has been going on, except to say that Dancemania was fun, my sleeping holiday is fun, and Stomp this weekend will be fun.

I had to write down this morning's dream before I lost it; this is the reason for the post. I had roused at some point and then gone back to sleep. Wherein I dream of the twins; the twins waver in age from two to six depending on how I'm looking at them at the time. They are androgynous, with short-cropped milky blonde hair. They may or may not be mine; the recurring dreams are inconsistent on this point, but I am certainly generally taking care of them for the day. Sometimes there is both of them, sometimes I have lost one and I spend time thinking that I really should be more stressed than I am about having lost one of them. But they are very definitely twins, this is a central point to their self-identity. Even if there is only one, that one is still, always and forever, a twin.

This morning's dream involved soothing them for some reason and putting them to bed in an altered my-parents-family-room. With Clannad playing. On the record player. Which was b0rken. And stressing me out (this is the point at which one of the twins disappeared, and I started getting stressed about not being stressed that one of them had wandered off). Because I was trying to make it play, but the record (floppy and far thinner than an actual one) was too big for the player and was getting caught. Dad eventually came in and fixed it for me (apparently it had been stored improperly) and we got to hear Clannad's "Almost Seems Too Late To Turn" but with one of the gentlemen of the band doing a reading (with visuals like a music video down the hallway) instead of an intro for the music. It was a cool reading, I wish I could remember it.

So I woke up with an earworm. I have tried to dislodge it but it is not moving :P

There is an event for which I am going to be dressing up as Tonks :P Theme for the event is 'Superheroes and Villains' and there is just no such thing as an easily recognisable female outfit fitting the theme that doesn't require me to wear something incompatible with dancing all night - my options are mostly wigs, pvc, or pleather. So there's a group of us going Harry Potter themed, and I grabbed Tonks. I have a trenchcoat I can pretend is the right shape with the right collar, whether I choose the black coat or the maroon coat outfit, and the rest is fairly easy - I need to acquire danceable combat boots and fingerless bike gloves, but those should be fairly easy. But the hair, oh the hair...

So I've been searching for hair stuff. The Manic Panic DyeHard stuff in Electric Flamingo would do what I want, but I find myself with a yearning for hypercolour hair... So I turn to my friendslist. It should be available in a gel or similar, but I can't find a commercially available product, just the patents. And I'm not confident mixing the stuff from what pigments I have seen, as they seem to need high temperatures to activate the hypercolourness.

I just want to walk into the venue and have my hair change colour :P If it's available, that is - the Manic Panic Dyehard stuff is so I'll order some in case I can't find hypercolour stuff (also so I can consult with my hairdresser on the best things I can do to support my hair under the gel).

Also, feel free to post your favourite links to pictures, I'm having issues finding one with enough detail of the pants (in either costume, maroon or black coat) to fake them, and I'm going to need to as that coat WILL be coming off while dancing ... :P

One of the blogs I read posted a discussion today on how one cannot have a 'perfect' marriage by societies standards due to said standards being incompatible with Life (and self-contradictory).

Which got me thinking that maybe I should define for myself what a 'good marriage' involves. If anyone wants me to clarify something so that discussion can occur, please ask - my personal definitions of words and phrases and what they actually mean to me are no doubt different to yours :D Oh, and this list is in no particular order of priority.

1) Respect for self and respect for all persons involved
2) Communication
3) Shared goals (whether these be large or small goals doesn't matter)
4) The capacity to allow for change - NOT wanting to freeze each other and/or the world in amber or ice
5) The willingness to work together to make the relationship in question better
6) Shared values (not shared beliefs, nor shared opinions, but shared values)
7) Not being clones of each other

I reserve the right to add to this list as things continue to percolate through my brain, but you'll note that love and sex are not on this list, nor will they ever be. IMO a 'successful' marriage does not need romantic love, nor does it need to have a physical component. One would hope that one has enough respect for oneself to acknowledge those needs and be able to communicate those needs and thus get them seen to however that may happen. But they are not, of themselves, a necessary component. Nice to have, yes. Necessary? No.

Read in http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/ash/1182084422.html (thanks, lupabitch), which is a series of responses to someone's less-than-flattering list of requirements in prospective dates:

"• Understands that you can’t choose your family you can only choose your friends

Also, you can pick your nose and you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose"

There are itty bitty beetroot and rainbow chard and chervil seedlings popping up self-seeded in my garden :D And the spring onion seedlings I put in two weeks ago (not seeds; I'm sure < a href=http://www.macbird.com.au/store/product.asp?pID=14825&cID=62>these are available, but I was lazy and picked up the seedlings which were at the place in the Central Markets) are doing well. The shallots I put in (from stock I bought a year or two back; they'd been slowly multiplying in one corner, and I dug them up to separate them and dig over that bed properly when they died down at the end of the season. Planted the surviving bulbs (can't remember how many, but it was between a dozen and twenty) to see if I could get more this year; I'll use these for seedstock for next year, and then maybe I'll have enough to eat some) haven't responded yet, but it's early days for them.

In the decorative part of the garden (one of the bits I haven't converted yet) we have flowering irises. In the herb patch we have mint desperately trying to get away from the oregano before it gets smothered. The patch where I failed to dig up the potatoes at the right time has resprouted; I should probably add more mulch to that (add to to-do list).

In the front yard, the jonquils, freesias, and alstroemerias (the photo at the top of the old-fashioned variety called New Zealand Christmas Bells, not the normal large ones found more frequently these days - I can't remember if I have the red and green variety as actually pictured, or the other old-fashioned cultivar Dad has, which is a pink one) are sprouting but not yet flowering. The roses have begun their winter flourishing, along with the thryptomene and camellias, and the wallflowers I planted the year we moved in are flowering.

I have just remembered there is roast pork crackling in the fridge. YAY!

It will go very well in my stomach with the chocolate icecream already there.