chefjenny

First, the neat stuff: I posted a re-done splash page for the comic (see it here!). While it's easy to focus on its imperfections, I prefer to look at page 1 and then page 2, and marvel at how much better I've gotten. So that's a bit of a victory for me.

Secondly, I'm back to considering what I'm going to do about my weight. On the one hand, I'm not unhealthy by any means--my heart is strong, my blood pressure is good (even on the low side of good, in fact), I don't generally suffer from being overweight. Nonetheless, I don't like the size I'm at. I want to be slimmer, I want to be stronger, and I want to have even more energy, especially since we're trying to have kids.

( But of course, it's not that easy... )
Well, there's other problems to solve here, and logically I know I should just make itty bitty changes and let it all come together slowly.  But it's such a  bleak future when all I have to look forward to is being hard on myself without anyone else that understands what I'm trying to do.

Mreh.  Ok, well, back to the first paragraph, at least in other areas of my life I'm making fun and easy progress :)

So, I confess: facebook has replaced a lot of my livejournaling. I feel like a lot of the time a short status update seems to convey more than a long, rambling post about what's going on in my life. However, there are times when a longer journal post must be made. We can consider this something of a quarterly report, then.

I've started getting seed and plant catalogs in the mail (tis the season for it). I am delighted that going into the heart of winter I can be looking forward to spring. This year we're tearing out even more grass from the backyard to expand our veggie plot. I have open, in front of me right now, a catalog from white flower farm, my gaze resting on a beautiful photo spread of heirloom tomatoes. I do plan to grow many plants from seed this year, as well, as that was quite successful last year. I've already conscripted Phil to help expand the garden--we'll see if he feels like digging is a better replacement for mowing, though.

Our business grows slowly at this point. A lot of what we're up to right now is jiggling fiddly bits. We're still improving the website design, incorporating logos and color. We've set up a posting schedule for our development blog (www.level30yinzer.com/blog), so that will update regularly on Mondays. Phil is trying to keep a solid writing schedule, which is mostly successful (and mostly interrupted by holiday revels, which we are thankful are over now). We still plan to launch mid-May, but we're considering looking to hire some freelancers before then to help with product launch. We have a lot of fun ideas, but it turns out turning ideas into actual stuff takes *gasp* work. Still, it's work we're mostly delighted to do. Especially since we set up the sweet home office.

Mostly, my position with this business is of the organizational type--setting up infrastructure, web access, design standards, editing, etc. But I do have one creative contribution: I plan on drawing a web-comic based on a proposed DnD game Phil intends to run. I know, writing a webcomic based on fantasy games is a total trope, but it's more about having fun for me, and having possibly another way to draw people to our site. I'm enamoured of all the characters and cast planned, and the first story arc has shaped up to be a fun and compelling piece of work.

However, a large part of that plan hangs on me learning to draw. If you visit our splash page for the comic currently (www.level30yinzer.com/comic) you'll see some very mediocre art. Part of the reason that's there was to test the comic publishing system, but part of it also is simply a learning curve. I'm thrilled to report that I've definitely made significant progress, with the help of programs like GIMP and a whole lot of google image searches for reference, and I feel like I'm finally reaching a decent standard of drawing that's worth putting up on the website. We have a great story, and I'm glad we won't have to entirely use the great story as a crutch for poor art.

Webcomics are a lot of work (again, thoroughly enjoyable work), so while I tentatively hope for a twice-a-week updating schedule with that, it's going to depend wholly on whether or not I even have time to produce two comics a week. That's a big "we'll see," at this point.

All right, so there you have my current projects in a nutshell: business planning, comic planning, and garden planning. I hope everyone else has as much fun this year as I plan to.

So, our blog is up and running for real-real (www.level30yinzer.com/blog). Here's an excerpt from our most recent post:

Well, we just had an excellent chat with Yax of dungeonmastering.com, and if we do say so ourselves (and you know we do), things are shaping up rather well. You see, about a month ago we signed up for a course called Gamer Lifestyle, which is produced by Yax and Jonn (of RolePlayingTips.com). The course so far has been informative and well-organized, and absolutely full of relevant and helpful information. Part of the package was a phone session with Yax to review our plans and ideas, and to help refine our direction. It was a smashing success!

Visit The Blog to read more

On the whole, things are heading in a very very positive direction. Tomorrow we're going shopping for office furniture, so we can turn this cold corner I'm in right now into a proper home office. Very exciting times :)

So I think I'm a feeling a little bummy today. I'm uninterested in the internet in general, and trying to make time go by at work, but I feel so laconic that I wish I could just curl up somewhere and watch paint dry. That's about my level of excitement today.

Phil has been doing really well since he got fired. He's writing now, and he gets to be a freelance writer full-time, the lucky bastard. We're trying to set up our website, and we're working on turning our venture into a not-for-profit organization. If we ever make money beyond the bills it incurs, we're thinking of donating to a charity, rotated on a quarterly basis. We're much more enthusiastic about the idea when presented this way.

I mean, there's nothing really wrong with life right now. I have no major source of stress, no particular huge upsetting life changes. I just feel so *big sigh* meh.

I'm sure I'll bounce out of this, and I'm sure it's largely hormonal, too. But mreh mreh mreh.

So learning to draw requires a lot of practice.  Currently I'm tracing hands, drawing hands free-style, looking at hands in magazines and trying to draw how they're posed, looking at hands in other comics and trying to re-create them, and generally focusing on how hands are proportioned.

Because hands are hard to draw.

As I sit here, drawing a toothpaste ad because the model in it is holding a toothbrush, it occurs to me:  I do this because I am bored at work.  My job doesn't seem to take up as much time or cause me as much trouble as some of my co-workers, so I find myself with a lot of time on my hands.  So, now I feel like I'm actually being paid to teach myself to draw.  Which is neat, but evil at the same time.

Also, I made sausage stuffed apples last night for dinner, and OH MY GOD SO GOOD.  Hollowed out apples filled with spiced sausage cooked with apple, onion, and greens, and baked for about 40 minutes.  I totally would have eaten wayyyy too much if I hadn't had somewhere I needed to be after dinner.  But still, om nom nom indeed.

Okay, so, I've been working on our website for our business/publishing plan, and some days it's delightful, and other days it's wholly an uphill battle.  Today is an in-between day; I'm fighting with documentation that isn't completely clear to me, and it's discouraging.  However, on the whole, things are moving along well enough.  I wish I had more time in the day to work on it, but my real job (curses!) keeps getting in the way.

I now have a splash page I'm pleased with - www.level30yinzer.com - and the blog is not bad, although I didn't design that part.  Thanks to wordpress for helping there.  Comicpress is what I'm fighting today, but hopefully that setup will be nice for the webcomic plans we have.  After that it's designing the landing pages for About, Main, and Donate, and then...

well, I get ahead of myself.  One thing at a time.  At the very least, we now have a nice splash page.  Everything it links to is more or less absurd placeholders, but I feel I'm on the right track.

So I've been fiddling around with drawing figures lately - mostly in pursuit of drawing characters from the various DnD games I play in - and was getting frustrated at my inability to draw something the same way twice.  Basically, my proportions were consistently inconsistent, and I was getting annoyed.  So, I googled it. 

Webcomics, that is.  I know one of the webcomic artists I like had published a book, and I ended up poking around in his information, finding other webcomic artists and forums, and found a discussion on something absurdly simple:  using a stick figure to pose your figures before filling in the details.

Suddenly, voila, I'm sketching things easily, finding it easy to get the proportions right, filling in the details after the fact, and rather than spending hours on trying to get a figure's legs to even up right, I've now sketched two figures in twenty minutes.

I still can't draw hands for shit.  This is is not uncommon, but I've found an "artistic" way around it (and no, it's not perpetually hiding them behind something else).  Feet are not my forte either for much the same reason, but shoes are not impossible.  It's unlikely that I'm ever going to be rich and famous doing this (but then again, who is?).  But suddenly finding a task easy that was absolutely grueling before?  It's like magic.  Crazy, pixie magic.

Still working on good-looking hair, though.  That's hit or miss.  Hmm, google... perhaps you can help some more...

1) So I  picked up a book on Flash (ah-ahh) and have been reading through it in another attempt to teach myself to use the program.  I've been long frustrated by it because the graphic design part isn't inherently intuitive for me; mind you, I'm essentially graduating from MS Paint to this, so there's a large learning curve to work through.  The book so far has been super helpful and I'm delighted to find myself much more capable of creating very nifty graphics easily, which is what Flash promises.  My tendency to get ahead of myself still trips me up sometimes, but I'm about a third of the way through this beginner's book and feeling fairly confident.  So there's that.

2) DnD has been a lot of fun.  I don't post about it often, but I really enjoy running a game.  Every game I run, I get significantly better at being a D.M, and now find myself subscribing to gaming blogs that are enumerating ideas and skills that I already figured out on my own, so that makes me feel pretty good about myself.  I did a silly thing and began my first trip into the world of the D.M. with a homebrew campaign, but so far it's going swimmingly.  I have my players to thank for a lot of that, though - they've been a great help in terms of world-building, and it's become this awesomely cooperative experience.  I really enjoy it.

3) I also took to redecorating my cubicle.  I found some awesome textured paper in the discount bin at Ikea, and have been pilfering cardboard boxes (mostly empty copy paper boxes), breaking them down and wrapping them to form this fantastic bright, poppy panels I can overlay on my drab, horrible gray walls.  Today I think I'm going to make a template for the face of my filing cabinet drawers, and bring it home to cut out leftover fabric so I can upholster my cabinets.  I'm thinking I have this absurd black shaggy fur stuff leftover from some cosplay that would be fantastic.  Additionally, I have mounds of colorful polyester yarn that is being transformed into delightful string art strewn about my desk.  I've done one of those nifty photo walls by pinning colorful string along the wall in crazy random patterns, and then tucking my favorite photos into it.  It looks amazing. 

4)  Scribblenauts!  The game is a lot of fun, but sometimes it is very vexing as well.  For example, there's a level with a tornado blocking my path, and I have no idea how to get rid of the tornado.  Or walk through it.  Or otherwise find my way past it.  So I wobble back and forth on the game.  On the one hand, it's fun solving many problems simply by setting everything on fire, but on the other hand there are tornados that refuse to be set on fire to deal with also.

5)  I'm dabbling with writing again.  Mostly as an excersize to while away some down time at work, but it's really satisfying to do.  I'm working on a short story right now that I've actually decided I pretty much hate, but that's ok.  I might change my mind tomorrow.  I might decide to throw it in a bin and not look at it for a year.  Either way it's been great to stretch my writing muscles, so long disused.

6) I actually started seeing a therapist about a month ago.  It's very strange to pay someone to listen to me talk about myself - I talk about myself all the time to people for absolutely free.  But I am seeing positive improvement in some respects, especially with the anxiety bits, so it's definitely making a difference.  In additional funny news, apparently my health insurance covers 60 visits per year.  60!!  That tells you how stressful my job can be, when they already account for how much therapy you'll need to deal with it.

7)  Financially, things are tighter than I would like.  But feasible with the status quo.  We're looking to make some changes in our direction in terms of work/jobs, but those are a ways off as we have a lot of prep to do for such things.  In the meantime, things aren't impossible, but I get the feeling the coming months will not be easy, either.

I could probably keep writing bullets about where I am in life right now, but I think I should empty out this gun here.  There will always be more later to write about, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

So I just had a looksie at the quick youtube video found here, and I really enjoyed it.  It also made me want to buy the book.  But not only buy this book, but to start collecting cookbooks in general.  I've never been that interested in cookbooks apart from the one everyone really needs - the cookbook that has the basic idea for pretty much any recipe you might want to make, and then my style is usually to learn the basics, and just make the rest up as I go along. 

So I find it odd that not only do I want that book, but that I have a desire to collect cook books in general now.  Maybe it's because I'm reading more food blogs that i am becoming more interested in reading about food in general.  Maybe it's because I now understand food as more than art and flair, but also as culture, and want to know more about other's culture of food. 

It's also not just any cookbook I find, I want.  There are a lot of cheap, flashy recipe collections that are little more than an excuse to print a bunch of food-porn photos.  While those luscious shots of food are very appealing, the books themselves tell a person very little.  I want books like the one mentioned above - books that care, if that makes any sense at all.  

It's hard to pinpoint what would make a good cookbook for me.  But the idea of having a shelf full of really good books is very appealing.

I love it.  I have a shelf full  of jars in the basement now, with such exotic things as apple butter and amaretto cherries, fennel and red cabbage kraut, blueberries by the half-pint in jam and sauce form.  I'm making more apples today - I'm hoping they hold shape enough to become pie apples, and if not, then cinnamon apple sauce it is. 

I just ate the last two pickled mushrooms out of the jar in the fridge - I must remember next year to clean out the mushroom guy at the market, these were fantastic for pickling.

On the whole, canning has been a great success.  Of course I didn't can as much as I dreamed of, and I threw out a fair share of veggies that went off before I could get around to processing them, but my technique and confidence will increase, and on the whole I look forward to another "fruitful" summer.  

All those jars in the basement... they give me a deep satisfaction.  I look at them and go "Look, I have provided for my family for the winter."  I'm surprised by that - it's not like I can't go to the grocery and buy food when I want it.  But I guess it's like a bank of food - I don't have to worry about acquiring food, it's right there, all safe and sealed and ready for lean times.  It strikes a really primal chord within me.


And as an only semi-related side note, confusing your masa corn flour for your wheat flour leads to some very interesting crepes.  Not bad, just decidedly distinct from a normal crepe.  Still kinda good with mascarpone, apple butter, and drizzled honey ~_o 

This is what I love about cooking:  I made Paella last night, a dish that has the potential to be pricey.  The list of ingredients includes shrimp, mussels, scallops, chicken, and sausage, and that's just the protein.  I was feeding six people last night.  I made enough that five of them got a second serving.  There was still enough left over to fill five lunch containers.  That's 16 servings.  My total ingredients cost was something like $50, a price to wince at initially for just a Friday night, but that means at a cost per meal it was about $3.13. 

$3.13!  I've worked the restaurant business, and I've gotten some learnin' about it in that fancy education place, and I know that the markup on a meal in a restaurant is many more times the food cost.  It has to be for the restaurant to turn a profit.  The restaurants that make the most profit are those with the cheapest food costs (eg a larger markup margin).  The couple most profitable food businesses to run?  An egg and bacon place (breakfast diner) or a hot dog cart.  But even though my learnin' has taught me these things, I still get a little giddy when I make something that would have cost $18 per person for $3.13 a serving.

And in less impressive "news:"  While I still don't find my job thrilling, I'm less inclined to up and quit.  Our plans right now are to upsize and move in with Don and Samantha, form a sort of superclan or bitty village (yes I know I am straying into potentially bizarre territory, but we're pretty sure it will work), and these plans would be a lot better supported by steady, reliable work, the kind of work I do now.  So I will still pay off my house, and then roll around in all my extra cash, and whenever work gets to me again, I will remember that I can up and quit whenever I want to.

So yes, I have waffled on my risky decision to become Chef Jenny.  I will probably do this many times as life progresses.

So, the appraiser said our house is probably still in the same range it was before, which means we won't be refinancing.  In my typical style, I got too excited too soon.  But it's not the end of the world - we're fine, financially, I had just hope for a bit of a windfall.  Nonetheless, the week is still up - between winning the canning supplies and Pink Floyd, I'm pretty pleased with life at the moment.

The pickles turned out great.  Samantha and I put together a few other projects yesterday, too - we made pesto with the fresh basil we got (substituting almonds for pine nuts, cuz that's what I had), and it was fantastic.  We also shredded cabbage and fennel and put that in my picklin' buckets I bought, with the hopes of achieving sauerkraut in a couple weeks.  It's looking good so far.  I also have carrots I think I will turn into pickled curry carrots, and a zuchinni I plan to pickle as well.

The blueberries I bought are far too tart for beer, but will make excellent blueberry-hibiscus jam.  I did, however, order the kegging system, and when that arrives I do believe I'll be trying my hand at a pecan ale.  It sounds delectably late-summery to me.

Ok, so the real reason I felt compelled to post:  I have a tentative plan to pay off my house and car, and then quit my job.  Without the mortgage and car payment, Phil easily makes enough money to support us.  While the idea of being a stay-at-home mom is somewhat appealing, I think I might actually pursue something I'd really enjoy doing. 

You see, I've been cooking for Don and Samantha as a work exchange - they do my laundry, watch my dog during the day, give Phil a lift to work, and we give them a little cash and mostly I make their dinner on weeknights, keep their fridge and cookery stuff organized, etc and so forth.  And I love it.  I am never more comfortable and happy than when I'm doing this.

So, although contemplating giving up a stable job makes my stomach do flips, I might actually man up and take risk in order to do something that actually makes me happy.  I might actually fit the title of this livejournal - Chef Jenny.

Yesterday, we were in the car and Is Anybody Out There came on the radio.  I made Phil sit and listen to it, because I wanted to hear the whole thing.  I love Pink Floyd's The Wall, and unfortunately my last copy of it was scratched beyond repair, so when i converted to digital music it didn't come with.  I told Phil that I'd gone to buy it a few times, but it's an expensive album even digitally, so I hadn't gotten another copy yet.

This morning, Phil presents me with a clean, digital copy of The Wall.  The first song he plays to show me is Goodbye, Blue Sky which is possibly my favorite song on my favorite album.  I'm listening to the album now, and have been all morning, and I'm so happy I'm misting up a little.  I have such a very nice husband.

Phil and I were at a farmer's market on Saturday, where they were hosting a canning demonstration.  We bought a jar of bread and butter pickles, which entered us into a raffle to win canning supplies.  Lo and behold, we actually won (thus defusing my usual cry of "I never win anything!").  I'm actually super-excited, because I had been considering taking up canning this year.  From what I gather from all the food blogs I read, it's gaining in popularity, which means I had been reading a lot about it already.  And those bread and butter pickles were amazing - like pickle candy.  Keep in mind, until I had those, I would have told you I hate bread and butter pickles.  But these - I couldn't stop eating them!

So, I am now in possession of 3 books on canning/freezing/pickling, a flat of jars and lids, some grippy funnelly stick things to help in processing, and... uh, a cd of piano pieces that are supposedly agricultural in nature somehow.  Ok that last one kind of threw me, but all the other stuff is awesome.  Oh, and a certificate worth $25 at the market the next time I'm there.

Last night, I began the experiment.  I am currently attempting to pickle the yellow cucumbers and red onion I bought at the market on Saturday, to be canned on Wednesday with the mild hot peppers I also bought.

The one thing I'm missing from Ultimate Pickling Experience is a nice, big, heavy crock to put veggies into for pickling/fermenting purposes.  So, oh no, I have to go play the shopping game ^_^

I am contemplating taking down the raised bed in my backyard, and erecting a greenhouse on that spot instead.  The styles I like that are pre-fab cost about $700, which is not my idea of affordable :/  Theoretically I could build one out of PVC and plastic and stuff for far less, but it would also be far less pretty.  Harrumph.

Phew.  Atlantis resort is not cheap.  Not that I'm spectacularly surprised by that, given what I saw for the day, but wow.  Just for the rooms, it'll probably cost a grand more than our entire vacation cost this time.  And of course that doesn't include food, transportation, entertainment beyond the waterpark, etc.

Good thing I don't plan to try this for three or four years.  Maybe somewhere I'll learn how to save up money so we can afford it :)

EDIT:  I forgot we were planning for a vacation a few days short next time.  Knocking off some days made this a much more affordable vacation suddenly...