miles per hour

 life has been moving by fast, juggling two jobs and taking little girl back and forth to college - trying to keep up with all of that, clean the house a little, and keep the fridge and animal feeds stocked etc etc.

I've been sewing a few things, as well, often late at night when I wake up (sometimes by act of cat - Kiki has appointed herself my personal shadow most of the time, even as I type this she is sleeping half draped across the keyboard and I often have to 'fight' her for use of my hand on the mouse)

 

 will try to come up for air again sooner than last time

also had to change my phone over, because I broke the edge of my old one and it was getting critical (starting to swell) and that was a huge mental task there right up until it was done  - that also means my duolingo is now back to only the 'old one' that I have had for nine years - and I'm mostly doing French on it, with a little Japanese  

Twenty years, now and then, KnitOwl Toys

 

  

 

Someone whose mom bought a KnitOwl handsewn toy twenty years ago contacted me today with a picture of the much-loved kangaroo and it's tiny joey, intact after many washings and adventures.  It was heartwarming - and I remember many times when our own daughter E lost her own kangaroo's baby joey and we had to go looking for it among all the toys before she could sleep at night.   The fabric had originally come from a men's cotton shirt - and I had chosen it at a thrift store to make some quilts with.  The entire toy except for one seam was made with tiny stitches with a hand sewing needle and hand quilting thread, from my original hand drafted pattern.  The joey stood only 2.5 inches tall.

 

I think sometimes about making some more toys - and putting them up, but as I told her, life gets in the way and I am always off to do something else.  Even last week, I was wondering about making another one of the dinosaur world type toys I had sent to another friend's daughter - or the forest rabbit log toy that E had (and we spent some time with that bunny getting lost, as well, as it was supposed to live in the log *ha* and it had some leaves for food etc.)

 

 

Most of all, it was nice to hear that it had been loved, and brought joy to a child - which was the entire point of making them in the first place.  I tried to - through some sort of Velveteen Rabbit magic - put some sort of personality and happy feeling into every one hoping it would carry through in some way.

 

Thank you for sharing your memories with me, and letting me see that the craftsmanship really did hold up very well over the years.

 

Marie at KnitOwl Toys (formerly MarieMeyer.etsy.com) 

  

Minetest Mineclonia house with kelp garden

 

 In the Mineclonia version of Minetest, kelp can be grown on sand or gravel in water - not dirt - and the deeper you make the pool the taller it can grow.  When harvested, you must pull the entire strand and collect the extra, then replant.  Here are some kelp gardens built beside houses by the sea - each of them able to produce kelp, which can be dried in a furnace and used as a food source.  Once you find the other type of soybeans in the game (the brown ones, not the green ones) you can make baked tofu, and use the kelp with that to make other food.  This is part of the vegetarian plant based foods mod.

 

You can also find, as part of the Italian foods mod, these little Italian village gardens in some places in the world - it took me a long time to find one - but they have basil and the 'other' type of tomatoes that can be made into tomato sauce and is used to make pizza and lasagna foods.

 This shows what the basil and the other type of tomatoes looks like in your inventory.

Also, really weird thing - the blueberries, not in those gardens but just growing out in the world, can be made into lapis lazuli.  No explanation why.  Put a blueberry on your crafting board and it turns into a shard of lapis lazuli.  Put nine shards together and they become a block.  I haven't found it anywhere in the mining, and only found this by complete accident.  The lapis lazuli shards can also be used for making blue dye. 

Mineclonia Minetest with Bees and Wine Mod

 There is a lot to poke around with on this combination - and not all of it actually works.  That makes me wonder more, and keep trying things.  This is writing down some of the things that made me scratch my head to figure them out. 

 I had found out how to make cider, sparkling cider, wheat beer, barley beer, rum and coffee liquer.  I had not yet figured out how to get honey, or how to make it into mead.  I also have, for all it being named 'wine' not found grapes yet anywhere in the world - but I'd like to, and try that out.  It says there is corn, too - and tomatoes, haven't found either of those yet, either.  I've got a little pillager problem on both sides North and South of me in this map but have been cautiously expanding my territory East and West - and now I'm edging North again at one spot to see if I can make it across the sea.  Monsters are on, so I'm having to make safe places and carry enough materials to quickly make a basic house.

A bigger, fancier house - I wouldn't do those stairstep roof quite like that again - it was difficult - and with the 'get comfortable' mod on, it makes it even more difficult to make the stairstep roofs that I do like, like in the below picture.  But, not impossible.  I have just had to use a lot of dirt scaffolding and then break it back out from the inside.

 One of the biggest problems with this combination and survival is that there are two of many things, sugars - one from sugarcane and one from stevia, different flours and uses of wheat, not all that work quite like they should and do in the Asuna mods .. and there are also two honeycombs.  One honeycomb is gotten by shearing a hive (smoke it first and you won't get hit damage, otherwise, take the hit damage) and the other is gotten by catching three bees in a jar and putting them together in a small 'r' formation on the crafting grid.  Both of those make hives by putting three honeycombs across in the center and planks above and below - but they make DIFFERENT hives.

 The hive on the left is made with the hive shearing method.  This is also the type of honeycomb you get out of shearing wild hives.  The hive on the right is made by putting three honeycombs from the 'bee in a jar' method.  And then you have to catch more bees in jars to put them into that hive.  Bee in a jar does not work in the left hive... but it still makes more honey and acts just like a wild hive.

Now, when it comes to making something out of the honeycombs besides hives - you can use the wild type honeycomb in a crafting grid with a piece of string above it to make a candle.  And then you can set the candle somewhere and light it with a flint and steel.  It also makes honeycomb blocks with foursquare, but they are just a building material. I'd really like to see that be more useful, and possibly the honeycomb itself be a foodstuff.

As far as I've seen you can't use either honeycomb as sugar, and neither can be eaten. 

Only the wild bee type honeycomb shows up in your inventory when you are in the fermenting barrel mode from the wine, but I haven't found a recipe with it yet to make mead.  However, the hive on the right (the one from the honeycomb gotten from bee jars) when full can be emptied with a glass bottle, to get a bottle of honey.  That bottled honey can be placed in the below recipe of one drinking glass and one bottle of honey to make honey-mead in the fermenting barrel!  It seemed like it took forever to get that to work out!

honey mead recipe in luanti mineclonia minetest

coffee liquer / liquor recipe in luanti mineclonia minetest

make the glass of rum (bottom left corner) by fermenting sugarcane in the top right and bottom left corners with the empty drinking glasses, and then ferment the rum with the coffee beans

Also discovered : You can dry kelp in the furnace and it becomes a food source. 

I have the 'plant based foods' mod as well - and for some silly reason it does not let the soybeans from the farming redo be made into plant milk - but it will let rice (not the one that grows on silt, but the one obtained from punching grass for random seeds) be made into plant milk.  You place the water filled bucket in the top left corner of the crafting table, and then fill all but the bottom two right squares with uncooked rice.  It turns into a bucket of plant milk.  You can then place the bucket of plant milk in the furnace and it becomes tofu.  But why aren't the soybeans worked into this, since that is the actual way you make tofu?  Make that make sense!  But the tofu can be eaten.  In these mods also cow's milk in a bucket can be put in the furnace to make edible mozzarella cheese.  All of those are correct in giving you back your empty iron bucket.  BUT - beware of the ice cream recipe, because it takes a bucket of milk but does not give you your bucket back.  That's expensive ice cream!

 

Toor dal yellow split peas

Yellow split peas - 'toor dal' if you go by labels - serves 2 to 3 - 1 cup washed peas, 3 cups water, 1/2 tsp curry powder, salt, bit olive oil, bring to boil then stir, turn on low until peas are soft, add raw carrot, chopped garlic cloves, powdered ginger, cumin, black pepper and salt more to taste - I added a bit of ginger paste and a bit of a curry sauce brick, zucchini, green onions, regular onions, chopped sorrel from my garden - let simmer until everything is cooked through and broth has become less soup and more sauce - pour into glass jar to cool - cook rice to nice and fluffy, make two omelets, reheat and pour split peas onto rice - serve up

 It's what is for dinner tonight.

Mark said he would reheat some of the meatballs that he and Esme made on Saturday - and we could split a pack between all of us with him having some rice.

 

I also learned you can chop up peeled garlic and put it in the freezer - did that today with two heads of garlic that I've been worrying about if they were going to go bad and wondered if they would be bad already when I came to get some for this recipe.  I'm in 'do something is better than nothing' mode.  This bag of yellow split peas and a box of oolong tea were the things I had ordered last month to count as my mother's day - and even though they together cost about ten dollars, my anxiety could still let things get away with me about losing this job to the fire - and having to figure out how to get things right again within a month or so.

But, using it in a good way, using resources on hand in good ways and saving little things and organizing and cleaning can take you a little further towards 'it could be worse and we'll work to make it better'  I will probably feel different in a few more weeks - but I know I can only do what I can do, and some of that is more useful than others, but all of it is better than staring into space / into a screen doing nothing.
 

 

 

Gray, Green and Orange

 Meet Kiki, a little gray striped cat that came from my office workplace.  There was a fire there, and I took her home with me, even though at first I wasn't going to take her home, because she had recently had kittens.  I was going to feed her for a week as she was very skinny and maybe we would have figured out where her kittens were by that point and been able to do something for all of them. It came down to it, I picked her up and put her in my car, thinking I'd bring her back when they gave the all-clear, but that didn't happen, and at least I know in taking her with me she wasn't in the building or wandering hurt if she had been injured trying to find her babies.  She's looked for them in a few boxes here, we think, or just very curious.  She is spending most of her time standing next to me or sleeping on the towels.

She is maybe a year and a half old, very talkative but so far is very leery of all of our other animals and holed up in our bathroom.  She had an hour or so of me driving her around the day I took her home - and then she saw Charlotte, and freaked out and bit me.  That finger is healing up, but it was a bit of a nasty bite and I felt dumb for 1.) grabbing a cat when everyone else was more worried about the fire* and 2.) showing her to my dog first thing getting out of the car after she had traumatic ride and without her kittens etc etc.  So, the bite wasn't her fault.  I should have been smarter and went in the house and found a little cage or carrier - because she really did let me handle her a lot and walk with her under my arm all the way across the building even though she was worried - she didn't bite me until she saw the dog and I wasn't going to let her get away from it. (*honestly, I was worried about the fire, too - but full grown adults have legs and sense and we were all getting ourselves out of there it looked like - the cat needed someone to take care of her)

So there is the gray, and then after I've been home from the postal route and we did a small amount of necessary shopping - I've been harvesting greens in the garden and cutting up carrots for meals for the next week.  It won't be until tomorrow, Monday, that I'll find out too much.  I have some leave from the post office as well, and can pick up a few hours here and there with routes that need to be covered - and I've been trying hard to keep our budget better the past few months so that we would have emergency savings - I thought for the little car which was still at the mechanic and now I'm afraid to even ask - but I guess for this 'what is happening' time we are going to have - whether I get a new job or still have some things I can do for this one with data and records or don't know...  I have to talk to someone tomorrow about that.

mixed greens, lettuces, kale, dandelions, sorrel, beet greens - it will all be chopped up fine and put into a freezer bag and tossed into rice dishes and soups as needed.  The carrots are prepared three ways - ribboned, chopped up bits (that couldn't be ribboned) and then some of both cooked down and put in a jar with rosemary and other herbs for use over the next two days.  That way, the rest of the fresh bag of carrots can get used up but I still have the frozen carrot to fall back on after it's gone - and sometimes it has taken me so long to use the bag up I wish I had frozen some at the start.

The little cat had an extensive 'conversation' with me about why was I doing things with carrots when she knows I could be doing something with a food that cats like - why don't I do that?  We've also had to talk about countertops and the stove - and her main question is 'why?'  She was probably raised as a kitten in a house - because she understands a lot, is very friendly and talkative - but she was thrown out as a stray at some point, perhaps when she got pregnant, and that is how she ended up near our work coming in the building and asking for food.  I told Mark she speaks 'calico', much like Minion's daughter Callie did, even Salamander and Willowpede spoke 'calico' very loudly and responding back to you when you talk to them.  Minion speaks some of it and was meowing a little and blurting at Kiki when she came closer to her this morning, she sniffed her head and a tiny sniff at her belly (where she had been nursing kittens and still has milk) and then they both hissed at each other and separated back into other rooms.  Loki and Lyffan don't say much at all - hardly a squeak usually unless the goat steps on them or they really need to say something (and Loki is usually a high pitched flat tone when he does that universally means 'I need something' but doesn't say what - we have to guess) but he made a full throated growl at Kiki when he realized this morning that she was not his sister Lyffan, and smelled different.  Yesterday, I think he barely noticed.  We've mentioned before he might be near-sighted *ha* and I told Esme first time I saw this cat it looked like Lyffan but 'not square, with a tail' - they are both small gray things.

A lot of this is busywork in a way, but useful as well.  Doing laundry, preparing vegetables, cleaning some things, taking care of this cat (and my finger) etc.  Oh, and it's also Mother's Day.  I had bought a box of tea last week for myself and called it Mother's Day - and Mark and I got a flat of cinnamon rolls for Irene when we bought the milk and meat etc.

Now it's wait until tomorrow and call and find out what to do next.