Thursday, June 26, 2008

I hate cross stitch

...but I enjoy having a grid to work on. Cross stitch fabric is a good medium for exactly two things, as far as I am concerned:

1) pixel art
2) visual representations of code

Binary, for example.



This makes me a nerd. -_-;
And if you can read that, you're a nerd too. Let's be friends!

Thursday, June 19, 2008

さああああぁぁぁぁ〜



この変なやつ、何物が分からない。。。ですが、ポストしたいんです。^^;
Kirin様もBunBun様も、メール返事をまだ送っていなかった、ごめん浅い!すぐ送ります!

I have no idea what this little thing is, but the evil glare compelled me to put it up. Also, I wanted an excuse to post something. ^^; I have been really lazy about responding to people lately, so I'm sorry if you've mailed or messaged me and are waiting on a reply. m(-_-)m

Happy Friday, Happy Solstice, Happy Water-on-Mars Night! Back soon.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Elefante

Happy Fathers' Day to you and yours -- お父さんの日、おめでとうございます!

After a long drought, here's a new softie pattern to play with... very easy this time, just one step up from the egg pattern.



It's a 2-d stuffie, so if you just increase the pattern size, you can make an elephant pillow. (Might be a good gift for a Republican friend, かな〜?)

In other news, I've got to scrape together my ol' coding skills and redesign this blog. I've outgrown the Blogger templates. :(

Pe-shoooo. -_-;

Friday, June 13, 2008

Food Imitating Food

My sister wanted a nifty cake for her birthday this year. In the past, we'd made a scratch version of the famous Katamari Damacy cake, but I wasn't willing to go through that kind of madness again, so we settled on a design that would be easier to bake. Or so we thought.

Behold, the terror that is.... Ramen Cake.





In retrospect, this was a bad idea. The bulk of the cake was too thick to bake properly in our pan of choice (actually a steel mixing bowl), so we tried doing it in two parts by sinking a smaller metal bowl into the cake, then baking a smaller cake in that bowl later to plug the hole in the larger cake. Didn't work, though. Somewhere along the line of baking, observing, repositioning, and "emergency improvisations," there were roughly equivalent amounts of unbaked cake in and out of the oven. Three rocks and one ceramic shishi figurine also became covered in half-cooked cake batter in a series of events that I refuse to relate to the public. Suffice it to say, baking this bastard was hell.

Frosting wasn't much fun either. If you're going to make an artsy cake that depends largely on the stiffness of your icing, for god's sake, don't use store-bought "fluffy" whipped can frosting. We had to move the cake and it's decoratives in and out of the freezer in carefully orchestrated shifts to avoid a meltdown.

In any case, we ended up with a cake that looked vaguely like a bowl of ramen. I think if we'd put it in a real bowl, it might have been pretty believable. The noodles came out right, and the kamaboko (fish cakes), while, oversized, are pretty close. Kid had her party, teenage appetites abounded, and the saga of Ramen Cake came to a sticky end.

As for my birthday, taiyaki will do nicely. As long as I don't have to make them.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

We Have a New Birdfeeder

...with anti-squirrel technology.



(Still can't stop the damn raccoon, though.)

New post coming up later. ^_^ 少々お待ち下さい〜

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Door Into Summer

It's the first day of summer, so says I. Here's proof:


A baby cardinal, perched on the roof of my (very dirty) car.


As you can tell by the closeup, he didn't even flinch when I put the camera right in his little face. Close inspection revealed that there was no nest in the tree overhead. There were, however, a mated pair of two very noisy adult cardinals perched on the mailbox. I put two and two together and decided this little guy wasn't a gravity case, but rather right in the middle of flight training. It doesn't take more than a couple of hours for most songbirds of this size to test their wings out of the nest, so actually coming across the event is pretty lucky.

Sure enough, as soon as I backed off, the adults give us a low fly-by, and the kid flaps his cute little butt right off the car and 20 feet through the air, into the yard for a 3-point landing.

Welcome to the neighborhood, little guy. Feeder's out back, refill is on Sundays.

Have a good summer!