sir cuss boot camp

We had a casual craft night tonight and I sewed the "backdrop" of our bm theme camp. I think it came out good. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but you can tell how wide it is. And it goes up into two points, but those parts were folded back.

I'm really excited about this year's burn. I think it's going to be fun and good.

I've had these really weird ridges in both of my thumb nails and they would grow out over time. They seemed to appear in the same frequency, every couple months or so. I think I figured out what they were. I was about to push my cuticles back a couple weeks ago and it occurred to me that this would be about the time that the ridge would start. So I didn't push my cuticles back at all at that time. And the last ridges are about to grow out. It's pretty weird and shocking to me that I was hurting myself so much and not noticing.

Burn, Baby Burn

My life "theme" has recently changed. It used to be "If it doesn't burn, it's not food." My current theme is "Food is a vehicle for hot sauce."

I love hot, spicy things. I eat some form of very hot spice around twice a day. I've gotten to the point where I use hot sauce like other people use oil and vinegar on salads or ketchup on eggs. Most of it's just not that hot any more.

We were in the city last weekend and we walked by a local grocery store. Why not buy some groceries here? (as opposed to getting back to the east bay and doing it.) So we did. And they had new hot sauces! So I bought four new bottles, and two of them are very hot! I love that.

I'm really enjoying learning about the various spicy peppers. Each one affects your mouth in a different way. Some will slowly ramp up to their peak of hotness, others will be very very hot quickly and fade away just as quick, others will only affect the tip of your tongue, while others still will only affect the back of your mouth. Yum.

Yesterday I finally got around to bottling my new beer. I'm very excited to drink it. I realized that I get so excited when I brew beer that I have historically felt the need to use hops in all the phases of brewing. And I think for my beer tastes now, it's not such a good fit. This might explain my lack of home brewing recently. But this beer only has finishing hops and has lots of blueberries. I'm guessing it's going to have only a slightly more complicated taste that bud, or something along those lines. And that might just be perfect for me now.

Oh, and as a side (for those of you who may be following this blog) I've lost 15 lbs since starting these CRON angled food changes during tax season. It's very exciting. (And I really haven't had a headache in many, many months too - thankfully.) 8 more to go and I'm done.

If only I'd known..

We recently discovered that there is, in fact, a pretty easy way to get across the bay after bart stops running. We tried it on Saturday night, and it was an astounding success.

There's a bus that runs around every hour, on the hour. It sweeps through the downtown market street corridor and heads across the bridge. Conveniently for us, it goes down telegraph and has a stop one block from our house. It's beautiful.

In other news, I finally got to meet Molly (and catch up with Kirsta and Bill). Molly is still "minus 2 weeks old." She was born almost 2 months early. Whoa. She's so cute and she looks great!

This weekend was busy, busy in a good way. I'm starting to notice the pressure for burning man preparations. I have lots of projects that I want to complete before then, but not so much time to really work on them. In the end, the most important will get finished and I won't even care that the rest got dropped. 34 days until the man burns, and about 27 before I pack and leave. Yikes.

Crafty Weekend

This past weekend I brewed a blueberry IPA with only a finishing hops. I realized during the Anchor Brewery tour that when I homebrew, I use too many hops for my tastes. That's pretty silly. So this time I refrained from using hops much and used a blueberry extract instead. I love the smell of hops, especially when I'm brewing. I don't much like to drink hoppy beer though. Perhaps the Moss Street Brewery is being resurrected?

I also started making costumes for our Circus Cafe Burning Man theme camp. I have this really fun tutu made out of a variety of colors. And I have so many more ideas of things to make.

I've had a really hard time motivating to work this week. I wonder why that is. I still love my co-workers, but I just don't really want to work much. I suppose to be more specific, you could say that I'm no longer "obsessed" with work. I'm enjoying my summer.

Oh, yeah, Yar - I have appropriated your sweatshirt. It's very warm! You better come over and visit soon if you expect to get it back.

Summer of Crafts

This past weekend I went up north to the Oregon Country Fair. If you haven't heard about it, it's probably not what you're thinking. Basically it's the best and most creative artists that you've ever seen together in one place. Everything there had to be hand made in the USA. Most people camp out for the weekend and there was tons of music and good food. Like my favorite, vegan cupcakes. Many people wear costumes and paint their faces and bodies. The vast majority of food was whole food - not deep fried or processed in any way. And there was 20 some odd stages with music. There are around 40 thousand folks that come through there during the three day weekend and most everything you buy is in corn cups, or compostable plates. They even give you metal silverware that you drop back in a bucket that gets washed and given out the next day. It's like a mellower Burning Man in the woods. Very cool.

A week or so before that we went up north to Methow Valley for a wedding. That area of the country is what I'm guessing Lake Tahoe was like 30 years ago. It was remote, beautiful and cheap. We went white water rafting with a little over 30 people the day before the wedding and stayed in this way cute place. Fantastic.
And now I'm getting ready for Burning Man. It's my next trip of the year. I have quite a bit of work to do on my LED hoola hoop. And I have a bunch of ideas for some costume components that I want to make for this year also.