Twas the Night Before NaNoWriMo

31 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Backyard, NaNoWriMo, Writing

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween

Today's forecast showing snow later in the week!

Today is October 31. Over the past few weeks we have done a bunch of work out in the backyard, getting things ready for winter. The patio furniture is all tucked away, either in the shed or stashed under the gazebo where it should be protected for the winter. The greenhouse is stuffed full of plants and the heaters are chugging away keeping everything warm. The pool is winterized and dozing beneath its heavy blue cover. The forecast calls for possible snow, even here in the valley, by the end of the week.

NaNoWriMo Logo This also means that the start of NaNoWriMo is just one day away!

Yikes!

Did I really say I was going to do NaNoWriMo this year?

Am I ready?

I’ve made a few notes and done a little brainstorming.

Here is an example of a mind map I created a while ago while brainstorming:

Brainstorming

I started out with a few key ideas for the story and just jotted down everything I thought of from that…looking over it now, I’m not sure how useful these ideas will be for the actual plot.

I still haven’t settled on a name for my main character, although I do have a few ideas in mind. I’ll need to just pick one and plan on doing a big find/replace later.

I’ve also set up a project in Scrivener, which is the software I’m using to plan and write my novel. I’ve been using Scrivener to plan and write some of my longer blog posts and it is great for organizing thoughts. You can chunk up the writing into small topics and rearrange them using a corkboard view.

It also has a spot for storing research and ideas, so over the last month I’ve been adding my ideas in as they come up, so they’re all in one place when it is time to write.

I like sometimes writing by hand (even though I have awful handwriting), so I also scan my handwritten notes into the computer and drag them into the Scrivener project as well.

Project Targets

It also has a nifty “targets” feature, which I’ve already set up with a target of 50,000 words by the end of November. This automatically calculates the number of words I need to write per day to make the goal.

That’s about it on my current progress. Tomorrow I actually need to sit down and start writing and see what happens!

DIY Chile Roasting!

29 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Cooking, Food Blogging

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Chile Peppers, Pizza

Back in early September, we bought a bag of roasted green chiles at the Clark Fork Market. This was Renee’s idea, as she used to get roasted chiles all the time when she lived in New Mexico. I remember the peppers smelled great in my backpack on the bike ride home. We peeled and froze them. Then over the next month or so we thawed them out in small batches and used them on pizza. Pepperoni, mushroom, and green chile pizza is delicious! Green chiles are also great on hamburgers.

Once I saw how quickly we flew through that one-pound bag, we realized we needed to stock up on more. But every time we went to the market, the pepper-roasting people weren’t there.

Last weekend was the last market of the year, and again we didn’t see the people with the roasted peppers. So we decided this called for a do-it-yourself project. We bought a huge pile of fresh green chiles and then came home, determined to learn how to roast them ourselves.

Getting Ready

Drawer Stuffed full of peppers!

We didn’t have time to work on this at all the weekend we bought them, so the peppers sat in the crisper drawer in the fridge all week. They pretty much took up the entire drawer! So today I knew I had to get this task done. Renee had to work on a different house project (I’ll probably write a post about that too), so it was all on me this time.

I did a few quick Google searches and found a few useful pages with detailed instructions:

My roasting station - the grill, a pot for the finished peppers, and my colander full of washed peppers ready to go

After reading up, I fired up our big gas grill, gathered up a few supplies and got started.

The first step was to wash the chiles. I did them in batches, so I loaded up the sink with peppers, washed them well, then filled up my colander.

Washing the first batch

On the Grill

Next I put the first batch on the hot grill. The peppers were big enough that there was no danger of them falling through the grate, so I just placed them right on the grate. I started with just a few the first time so that I could get the hang of it. It was also good to have plenty of room to turn and move them around.

First few peppers on the grill!

I used tongs to turn the chiles several times to roast them evenly. The goal is to get them nicely charred on all sides. This picture shows just the very early stages of this — these peppers still have quite a ways to go.

The chiles are just starting to char - they have a ways to go yet

As I went through the batches of peppers, I figured out that it worked best to initially place all the peppers with their stems pointing in the same direction. Then, as I turned them sideways, I also flipped them end-to-end so both ends cooked evenly.

Off the Grill / Steaming

Once a batch of peppers was nicely charred, I took them off and put them in a large pot with a lid. The purpose of this is to let them steam a bit, which is supposed to further soften the peppers and make them easier to peel. Since I roasted the peppers in batches, but only wanted to use one pot, I decided to wrap each batch in foil. They are supposed to steam for at least 15 minutes, although my later batches were probably in much longer than that.

First few peppers are ready to steam

According to the articles I found, you could also use paper bags to steam the peppers.

The peppers smelled especially great every time I opened the pot to add another batch.

Peeling

Once the first batch had steamed for a good 15 minutes, I started working on peeling off the charred skins. At this point I was doing three things at once: peeling peppers, watching the peppers still on the grill, and running back into the house to gather and wash the next batch to get it ready for the grill.

Getting started on the peeling

Peeling was probably the most time-consuming part of this process. It seemed that the larger peppers were the easiest to peel.

My outdoor peeling station. We should probably take that umbrella in before it snows

I had intended to take all the peppers into the house to peel when I was done with the grill, but it was such a beautiful fall day out today that I decided to just do the peeling outside.

Once I finished roasting the last batch, all that was left was peeling…and peeling…and peeling.

Packaging Up for Freezer

When we bought that one-pound bag at the market, I just froze the whole bag. This was a little inconvenient when I wanted to actually use some of the peppers since I had to hack chunks of frozen pepper off each time. So this time I decided to make individual packets to freeze, each one about the size I would need for a recipe.

So I separated the chiles into 10 little snack bags, then put the whole set into one large freezer bag.

Peppers all bagged up

Ready for the freezer!

Pizza for Dinner!

After smelling all these wonderful chiles all day, we had test them out with a pepperoni, mushroom, and chile pizza!

Dinner time! The roasting was a success!

Overall I was really happy with the way this “DIY” project turned out. It was definitely a fun way to spend a fall afternoon, and the results tasted great!

Cricket and Darwin’s Dance

27 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Dogs

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

dogs playing, labrador retriever, rat terriers

Cricket is an eleven-year old rat terrier / chihuahua mix. While she is still very spunky and active (and she loves to hike!), she isn’t usually very playful with the big dogs. She does like the role of the “play police” when the other dogs play though; she likes to run over and bark at them.

But every so often, she gets in a frisky mood and likes to play with Darwin, the youngest dog in our pack. This is always amusing to watch because they are so strange when they play with each other. Darwin likes to play very rough with the other big dogs (see this video from last May for example).

But with Cricket, he takes a completely different approach. It seems to involve licking her head a lot to get her attention, but he does seem to understand that playing with a small dog is a totally different thing than playing with someone his own size.

It cracks me up when she gets up on her hind legs so that she can bop him in the head with her paws. Sometimes she uses the sofa for some extra height.

I was actually able to catch just a bit of it on video today. This is very rare, as they usually stop the instant I pull out the camera, but for some reason today they actually kept going for a minute or so.

If for some reason it doesn’t play correctly within the post, click here to view it on YouTube.

A few more pictures from a few days ago…

Answer: I Have No Idea! Question: Why?

24 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Rants, Television

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Tags

game shows

So this is just sort of a silly rant type post today. Something has always sort of bothered me — what is the deal with “answer in the form of a question” on Jeopardy?

I mean, I know how it works, but I’ve always found it kind of silly. Many times the “clues” are not really answers to the “questions.” At least they aren’t the answers I would give to those questions.

For example, if someone asked me “What is Denmark?” my first response would be “a Scandinavian country in Europe.” For a more detailed answer, maybe I would pull up facts about the country, like its population, geography, type of government, and so on. The sort of info you might see in the first few paragraphs of an encyclopedia entry labeled “Denmark.” Maybe like the info here.

My answer would not be:

a country whose exports to the Middle East went down 15% in 2006, as a result of caricatures of Muhammad.

But look at the clue of the day for October 19, 2011 (you can see the “clue of the day” for the last few days here:

Clue: This country’s exports to the middle east were down 15% in 2006, backlash from caricatures of Muhammad

Correct Response: What is Denmark?

I mean yes, that is an interesting fact about Denmark, and maybe it is something that would be buried a few paragraphs down in that encyclopedia entry (although as of today, it is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article), but this is not the definition of Denmark. This is just not the answer to “what is Denmark.”

Just for the heck of it, I did some poking around online and ran across the Wikipedia article on Jeopardy. It mentions how Merv Griffin originally came up with the idea for the show and the answer in the form of a question thing and a sample question his wife came up with:

She fired a couple of answers to me: “5,280” – and the question of course was “How many feet in a mile?”.

Now that one actually makes sense!

Anyway, I admit this is a sort of silly rant. I’m probably taking the question/answer thing a bit too literally. But still. Sticking the words “what is” or “who is” in front of an answer doesn’t really make it a question.

The Indoor Pond

22 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Backyard

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Building Projects, Gardening, Plants, Ponds

The pond this fall

A bird's eye view of the pond when Renee was painting

One of my favorite features in our backyard is our cool pond. Renee built it years ago (she dug it out by hand!) before I met her. We have a cool little bridge that goes across it, and lots of plants and fish. We mostly just put varieties of goldfish in there, although we’ve lost a few here and there (several to a heron this past summer! Dang heron!)

Pond in springtime

We also have a really nice variety of plants in there — lilies (the lily pads always make me think that we should have a few frogs), parrot’s feather, water celery, and many more. I think I drive Renee a little nuts sometimes because I’m always forgetting the names of the plants and asking her what they are — usually when her mind is busy on some project or another so she can’t remember.

One of my favorite pictures of our lilies

Anyway, the fish can actually hunker down and live through the winter as long as we keep the water filter running. The top of the pond freezes up, and long icicles form around the filter / waterfall, but the pond is deep enough that the fish can semi-hibernate and make it through the winter. We do have to keep the water level up; I find it a little odd to be out there with the hose topping it off in the middle of January!

Lily pads and fish

The plants, on the other hand, cannot survive the winter. In past years, Renee just bought new ones every spring to restock it. This year in particular we ordered a few varieties online because PetSmart stopped stocking them. Several of these plants are tropical or semi-tropical, so they don’t much care for Montana winters.

Last Year: Saved a Few Plants

Last year, we came up with a plan to save some of our pond plants over the winter in the greenhouse area. This is the little extra room back behind the cats’ apartment that has semi-transparent roofing and walls to let in lots of light.

It was a fairly simple setup: two large plastic tubs (one taller than the other) full of water in the greenhouse area. But the water needs to circulate, since sitting in stagnant water would not be good for the plants.

So one chilly evening we ran around to a couple different stores, describing what we were looking for. I should say, Renee described what we were looking for, because she already had a picture in her head of how to set this up. I was just sort of along for the ride. It took trips to both Home Depot and then Quality Supply to find the right-sized pipe fitting.

Lily pads hanging in there in a makeshift winter home

We drilled a hole in the larger tub and installed the fitting so that it sort of stuck out over the smaller tub. Then we filled the tubs up with water and used a small pump to send water from the smaller tub back to the larger tub. So the water in the larger tub would drain out into the smaller, then flow back in via the pump. As long as we kept the water levels up, we had a nice little waterfall keeping the water circulating.

This mostly worked, and in the springtime we moved the plants back into the pond. Not all of them made it, so we still needed to buy more, but at least some of them did survive the winter.

Problems

We did run into a few problems with this solution.

Cheap Plastic Storage Tubs are Not Meant to Store Water!

For one, the plastic tubs were not designed to withstand the weight of many gallons of water. The larger tub started to bow out, which over time might have sent water sloshing over the sides. Renee fixed this in a temporary fashion with some scrap wood; she built a sort of rough frame around it to hold it in its original shape.

Frozen Plants!

Cold!!

Our other problem happened on November 22. That night, we had cold, cold weather with blizzard-like winds. The next day the weather forecast was for more cold (a high of 8). When we checked on the plants, the water in the tub was all frozen up.

We got a small portable heater to warm up the greenhouse (similar to the one we use in the cats’ apartment). This thawed out the frozen water. Some of the plants didn’t make it, but most of the lilies and some of the parrot’s feather did survive.

This Year’s Goals: Save Even More!

So this year, we wanted to improve on this and hopefully save more of the pond plants and some of the other non-water plants. We already had the heater ready to go, and we had cleared a lot of stuff out of the greenhouse area while working on the cat’s room before. The greenhouse also had the same new roof that the cats have. We had planned on this by using the semi-transparent skylight panels over nearly the entire greenhouse. The panels made it nice and bright in there.

The Solution

The indoor pond in progress

So this year, Renee took indoor pond to the next level and built a great winter home for the pond plants. She used more scrap lumber (although she did have to buy a few 2×8’s) and constructed a nice big wooden box. The box is sized to just fit on the counter in the greenhouse room. In fact, we had to get an extension cord with a flat plug on it to plug in the water filter; she didn’t leave enough room to allow a normal plug to stick out.

The next question is, how do you make a wooden box watertight? This part was simpler than I imagined. She used a large sheet of pond liner material. This material feels sort of like heavy inner tube material. It is the same material you use when you actually construct an outdoor pond.

She also added a shelf in the box to elevate some of the plants that prefer shallower water.

She setup the filter within the large box so it draws water to one end, sends it back in a hose, and re-enters the box at the other end.

Parrot's Feather

The shallow box of water plants

Once she started filling this with plants, she realized she needed even more room. So she built a second box for the other counter in the room (the counters form an “L” shape). This one is also a bit shallower. We still need to put in a second filter to circulate the water in this one as well.

Geraniums soaking in the heat

It is now a little crowded in the room, because we have some non-water plants temporarily hanging out on the floor. The second room of the greenhouse is also currently crammed full of plants.

More non-water plants taking up all the room!

But, overall, the end result is much nicer than last year. It reminds me a bit of the displays we’ve seen at the pond supply store here in town where we’ve bought plants before. So far, the pond plants look happy in their winter digs. Hopefully this year, more of the plants will survive for “transplanting” back into the pond in the springtime.

Video of the Tree Coming Down

20 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Backyard

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Trees

I have a few thoughts on some longer posts to write, but my brain is currently a little tired. So instead, here is a video of the tree across the alley being removed yesterday (as shown in my photo of the day).

There is a little bit of commentary here and there since Renee has experience with working way up high like that (she worked as a lineman for the phone company in the past, and has been way up on telephone poles before).

The lack of the tree isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The sky doesn’t look quite as empty as I expected, at least so far since the other tree back there still has a view. I’m wondering how it is for our neighbors, though, to lose such a huge tree in their yard. They probably lost a significant source of summertime shade.

I couldn’t find any really good pictures of this tree from before this day. This was from earlier in the day, when they were still working out of the bucket truck:

The tree before it came down

It really was a huge tree.

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Photo of the Day: Dogs at the Window

20 Thursday Oct 2011

Tags

Poodles, rat terriers

DSC_0002, a photo by SaraS on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Abby, Sirus, and Cricket keeping an eye out on things outside.

Posted by SaraS | Filed under Dogs, Photo of the Day, Photography

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Photo of the Day: Farewell Tree

19 Wednesday Oct 2011

Tags

Trees

DSC_0017 – Version 2, a photo by SaraS on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
The people across the alley had to take down this big, tall ponderosa pine due to utility issues. So I had to listen to a chain saw for much of the day. Sad to see the tree come down.

This part looked pretty scary since the guy is up too high to use the bucket truck. Renee shot some video of this (and him taking off the very top of the tree), but I haven’t had time to really look at it yet.

Posted by SaraS | Filed under Photo of the Day, Photography

≈ 2 Comments

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